Prophesying cultural doom has become a popular pastime online, to the point of being hackneyed. I have been guilty of it myself. My most popular post on my Substack, Cross Current, titled “There Has Been a Drought of Cultural Greatness for Most of the 21st Century So Far,” has the subhead “Human Mediocrity Will Pave the Way for AI Supremacy.” Dramatic, I know. When I say I see a speck of light in my crystal ball, this is not some manifesting hocus-pocus. I hurt my own brand by saying this, potentially losing scrollers fiending for their next fire and brimstone doom sermon.

When I was sixteen, in 1992, I wanted to be a novelist like Stephen King, only better. I wanted the literary prestige of Edgar Allen Poe. I had conceived of this idea for a novel: The River of Lost TimeM. It was about a deranged criminal who illogically stabs a little girl and dumps her body in the river. But he’s cursed; now he has to see the world through her eyes. With this shift in consciousness, he goes up the river and meets all the great figures of the past (Socrates, Shakespeare). These figures are on two opposing sides: the mind and the soul. I don’t remember much more about the idea (I wrote one page of it when I was nineteen before giving up entirely), beyond my desire to have the inevitable film adaptation play Stone Temple Pilots’ “Where the River Goes” in the closing credits.