One day quite soon, the sexiness of exceptional writing will surpass the allure of lithe bodies and unreasonable flexibility. The masses will become sick of the human form on Instagram and TikTok (as well as disgusted by Pornhub) – the consumer mind inured, just as hot, tasty, cheap burgers lost their luster (admittedly after quite a lot of McWarring between the big M, Burger Monarch, and Old Mr. Wendy).
As the human body becomes less desirable, human-made words will come back into fashion. GPT-3 will be the animoji (cute, but still subservient to high-res real selfies) while actual human typing and scribbling will dominate. Twitter was never about the words, it was about the message; the thought leader’s stale chips on the lunch counter, waiting for the echo chamber’s chomping. Facebook has people’s writing, but it’s mostly screeds and anti-screeds (and tearful admissions of social media addiction and imminent account deletion). Real writing already has a home on Medium, sort of. There are still literary magazines, the New Yorker, and book publishers (in addition to song lyric crafters, Spotify-distributed). But writing in its flowery or Hemmingwayian sense is on its way up.
Everyone’s a pandemic poet or self-polishing their COVID-NOVEL. It will just take the next generation of social media platforms to really take the writing explosion to the next level: Wordstagram, ScribTok, WriteBook, and probably a terribly launched Google product called GoogleWriterPlusPlus (promising to autocorrect all your language to match the average style of your emails, not to mention automatically posting your drafts to LinkedIn ads without your permission).
And poetry will be the sweaty training grounds for those that want to get to writing’s spiritual core. Rooms heated to 103.8 degrees Fahrenheit will be full of forearm tights, high-end sustainably non-slip rubber pens, and waterproof notebook pages as the aspirational youth listen to chanting demi-gurus urging them to channel their inner fire to call upon the soul-words, whether they rhyme or not (remember, never judge the dissonance inside you, my flock). Peloton will release an iPad-like contraption with a live trainer (they’ll only employ 20 of them for all 300,000 of their hot-handed poetry-serious customers) shouting and then whispering admonitions to take more risks and get ready to climb this next word-mountain! The hardcore poetry-obsessed will all drop out of the traditional workforce and start their own studios.
The movement will create a few more Shakespeares, but mostly semi-Emersonian ramblers about the oneness of everything in between micro-doses. Circles, to be sure. But the quality of writing will surge. The capacity of all writers, provably improved by work with poetry, will be grandly capacitated. Work emails and Slack messages will take on a quality not seen since Bartleby the Scrivener‘s predecessor. A new breed of literary agents will pop up, echoing the rise of the Influencer Marketing Specialist. Advertisers will take their pound of flesh, and debates will rage about the appropriateness of ad-supported poems and short-fiction (is this piece art or is it consumer capitalism inception??); GPT-4 will be able to tell you for sure. Get ready for:
I love my body Don't you? Fly with me Or send a drone To grab a meatless wonder Straight from Wendy A three dollar non-burger With everything you love And none of the creature discomfort Click here to explore the trove
Roman Ryan 