A Few Words, About The Economy

The inflation of language and its damage to the currency of attention.

There are rising fears of inflation. Extraordinary artificial events dilute the proposition of value for money, and we pay more to get the same. If we’re lucky, since quality suffers in this process. And if currency production rises, the now abundant money buys even less than it did before.

Yes, we’re talking about the inflation of words, and the currency of attention and learning.

Words were already abundant in these digital times, and now generative Artificial Intelligence spews them out. One damn thing after another bids for our attention. We’re evolving an economy of hyper consumption in an attempt to sustain value. But as we multitask, trying to produce more attention, glancing at alerts while a text buzzes on the phone we read, we further depreciate the currency of attention. The words are weaker, worth less, and can’t hold us the way they once did.

I was thinking about the economy of words and their relation to higher-value attention while writing a recent post about the killing neighborhoods of our American Revolution. There I mentioned how I like novels where small conversations and observations accumulate to create a force of History. The best do so with a remarkable high-value density of language, that is often little like real speech, but is somehow true.

Hilary Mantel sustains this density for over 1,914 pages about Thomas Cromwell, starting with Wolf Hall. Another book of hers, The Giant, O’Brien, opens with a fine example of high-value compression:

“Bring in the cows now. Time to shut up for the night.”

There came three cows, breathing in the near-near-dark: swishing with the tips of their tails, their bones showing though hide. They set down their hooves among the men, jostling. Flames from the fire danced in their eyes. Through the open door, the moon sailed against the mountain.

“Or O’Shea will have them away over the hill,” Connor said. Connor was their host. “Three cows my grandfather had of his grandfather. Never a night goes by that he doesn’t look to get the debt paid.”

“An old quarrel,” Claffey said. “They’re the best.”

Pybus spat. “O’Shea, he’d grudge you the earache. If you’d a boil he’d grudge it you. His soul is as narrow as a needle.”

“Look now, Connor,” the Giant said. His tone was interested. “What’d you do if you had four cows?”

“I can only dream of it,” Connor said.

“But for house-room?”

Connor shrugged. “They’d have to come in just the same.”

“What if you’d six cows?”

“The men would be further off the fire,” Claffey said.

“What if you’d ten cows?”

“The cows would come in and the men would squat outside,” said Pybus.

Connor nodded. “That’s true.”

The Giant laughed. “A fine host you are. The men would squat outside!”

“We’d be safe enough out there,” Claffey said. “O’Shea may want interest on the debt, but he’d never steal away a tribe of men.”

“Such as we are,” said Pybus.

Said Jankin, “What’s interest?”

“I could never get ten cows,” Connor said. “You are right, Charles O’Brien. The walls would not hold them.”

“Well, you see,” the Giant said. “There’s the limit to your ambition. And all because of some maul-and-bawl in your grandfather’s time.”

My god, all that in 292 words. Fewer characters than you can put in six tweets. Yet we learn that it’s evening, likely at a farm in the country, likely in the country of Ireland, and that there are grudges that span generations, and at least four men stay under the sufferance of a host. There is a fire where thin cows draw warmth ahead of humans. The one called the Giant is a curious observer of the human condition, and he poses a problem for his host, and us, to consider. The host, Connor, is both poor and pinch-minded. The moon sails against the mountain, an image that makes little sense yet fits perfectly.

A certified banger.

And will the door be shut?

For comparison, I plugged the paragraph above as a prompt into a gen AI service. It gave me 715 words, an inflation of 140%, with far less net value. There is no dialogue here, either, even though people are their most human and interesting when talking to each other.

Google Gemini writes fiction, with a prompt from my paragraph above. The cows don’t even get to come inside. Spoiler: The giant is actually a very tall person.

It’s not that the machine isn’t trying the best it’s programmed to do. It is still software, not intelligence, with no insight of how to make words do many things at once. Scanning a million texts gives no sense of how pacing and the sound of words in our heads affect human understanding. The software has been trained in all sorts of language, a hyperinflation of texts, and makes abundant patterns that get somewhat at the prompt’s request. When there is a flavor, it is thin and tired from familiarity - the sky paints the clouds, using too many words. Oh.

It’s fair to point out that this is still a technical wonder. It’s also fair to realize that this software creates an inflation of words - you could die of exhaustion slogging through all the adjectives- and a cheapening of meaning. In this age of machine wonders, authentic human wonder has become the scarce commodity.

Mantel and other great writers encode their language far more effectively, drawing us into their imagined worlds with language and actions that spark our own imaginations. They program us, with art and concision. Besides O’Brien, Pybus is deductive and judging of his tribe, Claffey is observant, Jankin is dull, Connor is locked in his ways. The narrator sees an enchanted world where the moon goes sailing. In fewer than 300 words you start to know them all, and want to know more.

There is talent and technique here. One of the most delightful techniques, and one of the hardest to learn, is to say things which don’t make literal sense, yet resonate in unfamiliar ways that fit the mood. The moon is a ship. A soul is needle-like. Hooves of cows settle among men.

Life itself offers this language at times. I was once in the observation car of a cross-country train with a young jerk who was trying to impress a girl. At the time America was being humiliated by a lesser nation. The kid was excited by the idea of joining the military, getting very heavily armed, and parachuting into a foreign capital on a suicide mission, guns blazing as he drifted towards the enemy. Detailing his heroic scenario for her, he began, “Here’s my most famous fantasy…”

Some incidental memories last decades. “Famous” was perfect.

Non-obvious description figures in all kinds of great fiction. Much of Ford Madox’s Ford’s novel The Good Soldier is encapsulated in one character’s observation,

“Edward has been dead only ten days and yet there are rabbits on the lawn.”

Which is crazy, except that in a novel about a vanishing world and people’s tragically foolish expectations, it is perfect. Not to mention, thanks especially to the “yet,” pretty funny.

The supposedly no-nonsense Elmore Leonard does similar things by changing gears. Take this moment in Killshot, when a hitman decides he’s tired of his idiot accomplice.

You're alive, Armand thought, watching Richie take a swig of beer, his fist wrapped around the neck of the bottle. But you don't have to be. He noticed Richie was chewing gum with his beer.

Not only do we learn that Richie is marked, we see inside Armand, and how he notices something else to hate about Richie once he decides to kill him. Richie is chewing gum while drinking his beer, which gets many of us a little bit on Armand’s side. Plus, there’s a fist around the bottle, not a hand. Nice.

These are all good examples of deflationary writing - lots of value for few words. It’s not just that I need less currency of attention. It’s that I get so much more of the world for my money, not least because these words stimulate my imagination.

These are easy-seeming acts of compression that are really hard to do. Sorry to say, the current rage for mass-produced communications has spawned an economy of reward from low-value clicks, so that now even recipes have 2000 words of preamble. You need more attention to amass even a fraction of former rewards.

Luckily, we still have an abundance of good writing models, there for the reading. In today’s inflationary, click-oriented, jittery attention economy, they may not pay as well as in the past. In the short term, they may be written less for money than for love. In the long term, though, could there be a more durable value?

If you wish to share some of your favorite compressed lines, unusual metaphors or strange observations, please put them in the comments.