Mitch's Blog

Present-day noir is tired because it uses the esthetics of classic noir without the philosophy, she says.

“What I love about noir is the cynicism. The bleakness. The awareness that corruption is everywhere, and everyone is complicit to some degree. That violence is not something that happens to other people, but rather a key feature of the system that we all support. These notions are pretty perfect for the time we’re living through, a time of incredible corruption, blatant state-sponsored violence, and worsening levels of inequality and plutocracy.

“But… I don’t know anyone who dresses in 1940s clothes. I also don’t know any femme fatales, or dames with legs that go on for days – which sounds like something you might want to get a doctor to look at. There aren’t really any private detectives in fedoras and trench coats walking around either, and almost nobody I know smokes these days. The world is in color!”

Cory Doctorow has written about this elsewhere (I cant find the link.) The original noir novelists, writing in the 1930s, wrote about veterans who were shell-shocked from hard combat during World War I, hoped after the war to rediscover the innocence of their childhood homes, but instead found their city to be corrupt and perverted. So these antiheroes became private eyes or criminals — outlaws.

What you have to overlook when reading classic noir today (Cory says) is that much of what disgusted the noir protagonists was women’s liberation, racial equality — particularly interracial sexual relations — and homosexuality.

However, stripped of the bigotry, the central spirit of noir is sound and still relevant today. Raymond Chandler summed it up:

“… down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor–by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

“He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.

“The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”

I think I agree with Charlie Jane. Original noir, like “The Maltese Fountain” and “Double Indemnity,” is classic and timeless and very watchable today. But I did not care for the recent “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” episode filmed in black-and-white. And while I suppose we’ll watch “Spider-Noir” eventually, I’m in no rush.

Teddy (T.M.) Brown

“Sometimes, I think we as writers overestimate how much people care about the quality of writing outside of specific venues like fiction, criticism, and narrative journalism. But the balance of written words produced in the world are not valued for their quality, but rather for their existence. White papers, product copy, SEO blog posts—these are all hypercommercialized pieces of writing meant to one serve specific end purpose: buy this and not that. This is writing as a product and a large portion of that taxomony is, also, already being created by writers using LLMs. The same, to Joe’s point, will start happening to the little quotidian notes we have to send back and forth as part of daily life, the confirmation emails, the thank you notes, the scheduling and rescheduling. I cannot imagine using AI to do any of that, but I also think that a whole mass of people would rather click a button to tell their colleague they’re running 5 minutes late or cancel a reservation at a restaurant. Writing is extremely important to me; that does not mean it is important to everyone.”

…

“Here’s something that I think more professional novelists, journalists, and critics should understand: the vast majority of people who write in a commercial capacity are already using LLMs to help them write both because they’re being told to by management and because it’s a really fast way to turnaround a draft. It’s happening to content teams at tech firms, it’s happening to freelancers working as contractors, it’s happening to large corporate marketing teams who need to churn out copy. This doesn’t mean people just slamming a prompt into Claude and shipping it, but rather that they’re using AI programs to produce the bulk of the work and editing down from there which has become one of the major responsibilities of corporate writers in 2026. I’d argue this is what people should actually be worried about, rather than the glut of shitty stories and novels emerging from people who have no interest in writing to begin with.”

This sort of work has allowed many writers to make a decent living and if it vanishes, those careers go with it.

In the comments, John Warner responds:

“I think what we’re looking at is a shift from needing what I’d call ‘writers’ to ‘automation-assisted text producers.’ The categories of artifacts you discuss lend themselves to automation-assistance in various ways and at various levels. The fact that they’re judged on their ultimate utility to the end audience makes it relatively straightforward to judge whether or not the automation is harming the final product.

“I would argue that the best automation-assisted text producers are likely to have strong writing practices and so if you want to become one of those people you should still learn to write, but the bigger question is whether or not the people commissioning this work will continue to pay for human involvement.”

Anders: “‘Monoculture’ is what it sounds like: the notion of a culture where everyone is obsessing about the same pieces of culture. In my piece about the mistakes people made when they tried to copy Game of Thrones, I mentioned the notion that Thrones was the last TV show that absolutely everyone watched and talked about. Pundits and culture writers have written endlessly about how tragic it is that monoculture no longer exists, meaning that everyone likes different stuff.”

She makes four points:

“1. We still kind of have a monoculture.

“2. We never really did have a monoculture in the way that some people seem to think we did.

“3. The notion of a monoculture feels oppressive and shitty

“4. You can’t separate this notion from questions around representation and assimilation.”

Journalist Jeremy Stern profiles Zuckerberg in depth.
colossus.com/article/m…

The Roman Emperor Augustus is a hero to Zuckerberg, who says Augustus ushered in two centuries of peace.

Many American men are fascinated by the Roman Empire; Zuckerberg may be the only one with the power to do something with that fascination.