The Stories Are Still Ours

In 1984, Gore Vidal declared the word processor was erasing literature. He was one of the finest writers of his generation. He was also wrong.

Paul Kingsnorth is one of the finest essayists writing today. His prose is beautiful. His convictions run deep. And his recent manifesto, “Writers Against AI,”^[1] is the most eloquent argument I’ve read for why writers like me are betraying the craft.

He’s wrong. But he’s wrong in a way worth taking seriously.

Because Kingsnorth isn’t raising new concerns. He’s raising very old ones. And that history—the history of what happens when gifted people refuse new tools on principle—is exactly what we need to examine.

Let me take you back to the 1980s.

Gore Vidal, one of America’s most celebrated literary voices, declared in 1984 that “the word processor is erasing literature.”^[2] His concern wasn’t trivial. He believed the ease of editing would seduce writers into overwriting, that revision would become effortless and therefore meaningless, that the hard-won discipline of putting permanent words on a page would dissolve into infinite revision and tinkering.

He wasn’t alone. Many of the most prestigious literary writers of that era resisted word processing for years, some for decades. Writers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1980s were so worried about being associated with automation that they would doctor their printouts, adding handwritten annotations to manuscripts generated on computers, just to make their work look more “real.” The fear was that clean copy looked like a typist’s work, not a genius’s.

They were drawing a line. Just like Kingsnorth.

Was Gore Vidal right? Did the word processor erase literature? Did the writers who embraced computers produce lesser work than those who clung to their typewriters?

You know the answer.

Go back further. When the typewriter first appeared in the 1870s, many writers treated it with deep suspicion. The machine felt industrial, mechanical, too far from the intimacy of pen on paper. Mark Twain, characteristically ahead of his time, became one of the first authors to submit a typewritten manuscript to a publisher. Most of his contemporaries thought he was lowering himself.

They were drawing a line too.

Go further still. When Gutenberg’s printing press began mass-producing books in the 1450s, the scribes of Europe were appalled. Books hand-copied by monks carried a sanctity that seemed irreducible. A machine-printed book felt cheap. Degraded. How could something produced identically, in quantity, by a press, carry the same weight as a manuscript written by a human hand?

They drew a line too.

Every single one of those lines was eventually crossed. Every single one of these technologies—printing press, typewriter, word processor—was resisted by the most thoughtful, most principled people of their age. And every single technology went on to expand the reach of human stories, not diminish them.

The Luddites Had a Point. It Still Didn’t Save Them.

To be fair to Kingsnorth, there’s a genuine tradition of principled technological refusal. The Luddites weren’t simply irrational. They were skilled English textile workers in the early 1800s who watched mechanized looms threaten not just their jobs but their entire way of life, a culture of craft, autonomy, and mutual obligation between worker and merchant that had sustained their communities for generations.

They smashed machines. They organized. They wrote manifestos not entirely unlike Kingsnorth’s. The British government deployed 12,000 troops—more soldiers than the Duke of Wellington had taken into Portugal—to suppress them. Dozens were hanged. Others were transported to penal colonies in Australia.

By 1813, the movement had collapsed. Industrialization continued without them.

I don’t say this to be cruel. Their grievances were real. The factory system did degrade their working conditions. Many of them did fall into poverty. History has been too quick to dismiss their concerns. But their refusal did not stop the machines. It did not preserve their craft. The world they tried to defend disappeared anyway.

The Amish offer a gentler version of this same story. They are genuinely admirable people, communities of remarkable cohesion, intentionality, and faith. They have chosen, carefully and communally, to stop adopting new technologies at certain historical moments. That choice has costs. It limits their economic participation, their educational opportunities, their medical options. They accept those limits as the price of their values.

That’s a coherent position. But it’s also a minority position by definition. Most of us can’t opt out of the world the way the Amish can, especially those of us who run businesses, lead organizations, and try to compete in a global economy. Principled non-adoption carries a price that most people are not willing and probably should not be willing to pay.

Here’s what I don’t want to do: dismiss his concerns cheaply.

Kingsnorth is pointing at something real when he worries about AI-generated stories replacing human ones. There is a meaningful difference between a story that emerges from a life actually lived and one synthesized from patterns in data. A machine has no experience of grief, of failure, of the particular quality of light on a Tuesday afternoon when everything went wrong. Those things matter to stories. They are what make stories true.

He’s also right that there’s a danger in outsourcing thinking. A student who uses AI to write an essay hasn’t learned to write. A leader who delegates all judgment to a tool hasn’t learned to think. The ease of AI can become a kind of intellectual laziness dressed up as efficiency.

These are serious concerns. They deserve serious engagement, not a manifesto of refusal, but a genuine reckoning with the question of how we use these tools without being diminished by them.

But here’s what his essay never grapples with: What exactly does AI replace?

When I write, my ideas are still mine. My experience is still mine. Forty years of leading organizations, building teams, learning from failure—none of that comes from a machine. It comes from a life. And that life is what I’m bringing to the page.

AI helps me draft faster. It helps me find a phrase I couldn’t quite locate. It helps me iterate on structure and test arguments. It is a tool. Not unlike the word processor that Gore Vidal feared, or the typewriter that the scribes of the 1870s distrusted.

The writers I know who are excited about AI are not surrendering their craft. They’re the ones who always struggled against time and economics, who had more to say than their circumstances allowed them to say, and who now have an instrument that expands what they can do. That’s not betrayal. That’s what writers have always done with new tools.

Kingsnorth, incidentally, wrote his manifesto on a computer. He published it on a platform built on servers powered by electricity generated by industrial infrastructure. He promoted it on the Internet. He is not, and cannot be, free from the technological civilization he critiques. None of us can. The question has never been whether to engage with technology. It’s been which technologies, and how.

Kingsnorth ends his manifesto with a stirring image of resistance. Writers banding together. Lines being drawn. Human creativity defended against the machine.

It’s a powerful image. I understand its appeal. When something you love feels threatened, the instinct to circle the wagons is very human.

But I keep thinking about Gore Vidal in 1984. About the Iowa Workshop writers hiding their computer printouts. About the scribes watching the first printed Bibles come off Gutenberg’s press and wondering what they would do now.

What they did, most of them, was adapt. They found new ways to bring their human gifts to new tools. And the stories kept coming.

Refusal has a consistent historical outcome. It leaves you behind. It leaves your work reaching fewer people. It leaves the field to those who adapt, who may bring less wisdom and craft to the tools than you would have. For the stories Kingsnorth loves, that’s a loss, not a win.

I believe in human creativity. I believe stories matter. I believe your voice, your particular angle of vision, your hard-won understanding of the world, is irreplaceable. No machine can manufacture it.

And I use AI.

Those aren’t in conflict. They’re the same position writers have always held: use the tools available to you. Bring your humanity to them. Don’t let them replace your thinking, but don’t refuse them on principle either. Principle without pragmatism is just a more elegant form of surrender.

Kingsnorth is right that we need to ask hard questions about AI. Who benefits? What are the real costs? How do we preserve what matters about human creativity in a world where machines can produce plausible imitations of it? Those questions deserve serious answers.

A manifesto asking writers to boycott a technology that 200 million people are already using isn’t a serious answer. It’s a very eloquent gesture.

Gestures don’t protect what you love. Engagement does.

The stories worth telling, about who we are, what we’ve suffered, what we’ve learned, those are still ours. The question is whether we’ll do the work of bringing them to the world, with every tool available to us.

I intend to.

Notes

^[1] Paul Kingsnorth, “Writers Against AI,” The Abbey of Misrule, February 12, 2026 — paulkingsnorth.substack.com.

^[2] Gore Vidal, “In Love with the Adverb,” The New York Review of Books, March 29, 1984 — nybooks.com.