Hey friends,

I often end up treating this newsletter like my personal journal, but with the added self-imposed requirement that I make an attempt to get out of my head and tie my thoughts back to some sort of reflection on creativity or the cultural zeitgeist at large.

Today, I actually just want to share a journal entry with you.

I journal semi-frequently. I wish I could say I was a daily journal writer– and sometimes I am– but then I’ll go a week (or a month) without making an entry and have to re-establish the habit.

Journaling is how I get out of my head and process all the thoughts rattling around or slowing me down. It’s how I tease out work challenges, personal dilemmas, fears, ambitions, and uncertainties. In my experience, just putting words and form to whatever is eating away at me makes everything feel lighter. More manageable.

My most recent journaling session had me circling the intersection of creativity, culture, and technology, and since this newsletter is typically about that intersection, it felt appropriate to share the entry here, with only minor redactions for privacy.

Relevant context before we dive in: I’m a serial dabbler with ambitions of true entrepreneurship, and I’ve been mulling over a mutual support platform for independent writers that I’m calling Typeset Co-op as a potential endeavor. With that established, enjoy reading my innermost thoughts, drafted under the assumption I would never share them.

Another Sunday, another coffee shop. This time I’m at Brewtannicals here in Richmond. I want to start by briefly capturing a newsletter idea: the philosophy of freewriting. Stream of consciousness: set a timer, write without a filter kind of writing. What is it intended to do? What makes it a staple for writing advice? Does it ever turn into meaningful, publicly shared texts? We shall unpack and see.

More than that though, I want to tease out my own thoughts on Typeset Co-op and what I’ve been piecing through there. I want to pursue it for the sake of entrepreneurship. I want to build it for the sake of growing a community that supports writers. But to build it, as it currently is in my mind, I have to use Claude. The entire goal is to embrace and celebrate the human in an age of AI, and yet I’m using AI to build the website’s bones and functionality.

Is that entirely hypocritical of me? Is it self-defeating? Would prospective writers and supporters feel differently about the project if they find out how it was built? These are the questions that give me pause and make me want to stop in my tracks, worrying about what I ought to do and if this project is even worth pursuing. I want to pursue it. I believe it would be beneficial. Yet I can’t decide if the end justifies the means.

I’m not as anti-AI as a lot of writers because I’m surrounded by it on a daily basis to the point that it has become mundane. (I’m) Desensitized, perhaps. I can see how it has potential beyond shitty LLMs to do a lot– to do good, even. That doesn’t justify the environmental impact of data centers or the theft of actual creatives’ work.

I guess what I’m currently wrestling with is that using AI to compile code doesn’t feel like a breach of developers’ dignity when most developers use AI in the workplace because it helps them move faster. Good developers still step in for manual corrections and fixes and implementations when human context and clarity– a personal touch– is still a differentiator, but it seems like the crux of writing prose is fundamentally different from that of writing code.

The act of crafting prose by hand is an endeavor into what makes us human– an unearthing of the interior. But is code fundamentally different? Are the two fields so different that it makes a difference?

I’ve dabbled in code before. Basic JavaScript and some novice Python, but code nonetheless. There is still an act of thinking through your approach and framing out what you’re trying to convey. Still a necessity to think about your audience and how something will come across to them.

And there is the rush of success– the thrill of getting a win– when you try something and it just works. Is that not, too, a creative act?

That’s where I get hung up. It would be one thing if I already had the funds to work with a developer and we could co-create the entire thing. I think about times in my career where design and engineering counterparts were able to bring my ideas to life even better than I would have on my own. Being a product manager is not what I want my entire identity to be, but it certainly lends itself to a particular dynamic that is much less fraught with uncertainty when it comes to bringing an idea to fruition.

Still, I ask myself… if I partnered with an engineer and they used AI to streamline their coding, would that change things? Is it more pure? More human than if I click the buttons and press the keys as an outsider?

So there you have it. Unedited passive voice and all. Aside from a few blatant misspellings and missing capitals on Sunday, JavaScript, and Python, I’ve preserved it as written in my journal.

Having written this out twice now, I’m still not certain where I stand. Part of me feels like there’s a “carbon footprint” element to this, where the impact of megacorporations in the AI space is so great that my individual actions are relatively meaningless. The same part of me also feels like that’s a self-serving justification.

The pragmatist in me knows that it’s virtually impossible to get funding for a business off of a concept alone, especially when the ethos of that business is not sexy in the sense of having trillion-dollar potential, and I know that the easiest way to get funding for an online-based business is to have a working product with paying customers. To do that, I have to build a product. To do that, I need funding to pay a developer… which means we’re back to the problem of needing a product in order to get funding.

Unless, that is, I build a scrappy proof of concept using AI.

I could build the proof of concept with Claude, validate its genuine potential, and then bring in a small amount of angel investment or crowdfunding to pay a developer until we have enough cash flow to be self-sustaining.

But is that some Audre Lorde tools of the master being unable to dismantle the master’s house type of shit?

I’m sure subsequent journal entries will ensue. And maybe I’ll also get around to writing about stream-of-consciousness freewriting and how it fits into the creative process. So stay tuned for either update.

Until next time,

Blake