From the Literary Golden Age to Algorithmic Wasteland

In On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche dismantles the fantasy that writers can transform themselves into entrepreneurs and save the craft through hustle. He has watched brilliant minds waste their genius on branding decks and content calendars, convinced that a marketing plan can substitute for a literary life. Everyone, he notes, now arrives armed with a social-media strategy; even legacy writers chase streaming deals. Yet the “digital ad revenue” that was supposed to be salvation barely buys groceries. This notion of self-promotion on a social media platform may work for a handful, but for most of us, this plan is all chicanery. Most  writers would earn more working part-time at Starbucks than posting their book excerpts on Instagram. 

And still writers persist, driven by an ancient question: How do you make a living by thinking? In a world where platforms shift beneath your feet, young writers must reinvent themselves with exhausting frequency—editing careers as relentlessly as they edit sentences.

Marche reminds us that postwar America once had sturdy literary institutions: robust magazines, influential newspapers, university presses, publishers willing to cultivate voices rather than chase viral heat. That era nurtured Boomer writers who could achieve cultural celebrity and economic stability. But those scaffolds have collapsed. We live among the ruins of that golden age. Institutions fray, readership declines, and the professional writer now sits on the same endangered-species list as the white rhinoceros.

With writing now fully digital, the terrain resembles a lawless frontier. The deep, contemplative reading that literature requires has been replaced by rapid-fire commentary. Instead of essays and books, the culture rewards short-form skirmishes and performative certainty. As Marche put it to Sam Harris, America’s most profitable export is now “the peddling of moral outrage.” Rage scales. Nuance suffocates.

This erosion of the writing life carries consequences beyond the page. When outrage becomes the ambient air, critical thinking dries up, public trust decays, and democratic habits atrophy. To lose serious writing isn’t merely to lose an art; it is to endanger the civic imagination that sustains a republic. The crisis of literature is not an aesthetic inconvenience—it is a political warning flare.