To Be A Word
An alternative perspective
Your job is borderline impossible. You are a cosmic translator, a meaning-maker. You’re tasked with taking everything, in its infinite complexity, subjectivity, and ambiguity—the physical world, the interior world, the interpersonal world—and distilling it down into a series of sounds that can be understood by children and grandmothers, steelworkers and senators. You must create a sliver of overlap between every Venn diagram in existence. Turn the nonlinear, extratemporal anarchy of human experience into succinct linear coherence. Describe the indescribable.
You are a word.
Your job was hard enough when you were only spoken. Then, people started inscribing you into the material world itself—stone, papyrus, that sort of thing. That’s when shit got wild. You were now expected to do your job without context and nonverbal cues—to transcend space and time and still somehow manufacture shared meaning.
Still, you managed to mostly succeed. Sure—there were plenty of blemishes on your résumé. You spread conspiracy theories, sparked genocide, and split families. But in spite of the impossibility of your job, of all the forces conspiring against you, you also changed the course of history for the better. You inspired revolutions. You told stories. You saved lives. You solidified love. You transferred knowledge. You healed wounds. You built bridges. You built nations.
It all changed, though, with something they called artificial intelligence.
Suddenly, you were being produced at a rate beyond comprehension. But it wasn’t just the volume that changed everything; it was the fact that, for the first time, you were being created by something other than a human.
People stopped trusting you. They had been wary before, sure, but not like this. Never had you been looked at with suspicion from the start—guilty before proven innocent. And you thought your job was hard before.
This revealed something essential. Your success had always hinged on a single factor: the amount of humanity with which you had been infused. Or, to put it another way, the care and thoughtfulness with which you were used. Even when you were tasked with the impossible—describing a mother’s love, the intestinal evisceration of heartbreak, the smell after a summer rain—you managed to succeed solely because of the life a human being had injected into you. Even when you existed as a messy series of ink marks on a piece of processed tree or a smattering of pixels on a glowing screen, there was an invisible but very real energy that you carried and transmitted. Outside of space, outside of time, you created a force of meaning and connection through the humanity that animated you.
A word, you realized, is nothing without humanity; it is a neutral, colorless, valueless entity, a fallen tree in a forgotten forest.
Now, you wonder what your future holds. How does a word accomplish anything in a world where it’s distrusted by default, where it’s increasingly used as a weapon, where it’s being churned out by machines at a rate faster than the whole of history combined? How does something whose success is dependent on its humanity succeed when its means of production are inhuman?
It all comes back to the humans, of course. In the past, your failure has always been a result of their carelessness; you can’t do your job when you’re thrown around with no regard for how you’ll be received, with no love or respect for the receiver. The advent of this so-called artificial intelligence—artificial being a very telling, if unintentional, use of your power—means that deploying you without thought or care is easier and more socially acceptable than ever before. The threat is existential.
You wonder if you’re being melodramatic with the word existential (it feels so meta for a word to say the word “word”!). But it really is existential, isn’t it? If you are increasingly deployed without care, or, worse, with malicious intent, the connection between humans that you make possible disintegrates in proportion. And when the connection between humans disintegrates at scale, the threat is very much existential.
Since the emergence of these machines, you’ve seen plenty of apocalyptic signs: an abundance of slop, misinformation factories, chatbot “therapy.” Hollow simulacrums of you that are actually just the answers to big math problems.
But you’ve also seen little pockets of promise. You’ve seen the machines used to sharpen thought, to use better words, to enhance clarity and care. You’ve seen glimpses of a world in which a word’s job is easier. Rare glimpses, but unmistakable. The common denominator in these instances? Conscious, careful human intention—an understanding on their part of the weight words can have when imbued with the divine human forces of purpose, of responsibility, of love.
It is as with all of history. The window dressing changes, but the story remains the same. A new technology turns the world on its head, and humans find ways to use it for destruction and creation alike. It feels as if the latest thing, in all its mind-boggling speed and scale and superiority, will be the thing that finally ends or saves humanity. But as Ursula K. Le Guin said: "Each new tool, from the paleolithic to the neolithic, the wheel to the loom, promised to save labor, to enhance human capability, and to bring us closer to our aspirations, yet each time we found ourselves laboring still, dreaming still."
Whether they realize it or not, the humans are ultimately laboring and dreaming toward a single aspiration: connection. Through their speeches and love poems and hit pieces and research papers, their shitty advertisements and their shaky confessions, all they want is to somehow stumble closer to one another—to bridge two isolated bubbles of subjective experience and meld those bubbles in a momentary congregation of understanding that causes them to float in such a way that life feels just a bit more bearable.
Unlike any other technology in history, you, a word, can manifest this connection. You are uniquely qualified for the job, in a league of your own. But just as it was when you were only spoken, then written, then finally mass-propagated by machines using math problems, it is up to the humans to decide how successful you’ll be.
It’s a bit romantic when you think about it. It always is with humans. They think that their ever-changing world means they themselves must be changing, too. But whether their stories and interactions are being told and mediated by Aesop on the island of Samos, carved into stone, printed on fine stationery, or manufactured in server farms, the fundamental truth of humanity will never change: that connection is what they seek, and they are the only ones who can choose whether they’ll find it.
Thank you so much to
, , , , , , , , and for their generous feedback on this piece.
Not me welling up over the personification of words.
“Even when you were tasked with the impossible—describing a mother’s love, the intestinal evisceration of heartbreak, the smell after a summer rain—you managed to succeed solely because of the life a human being had injected into you. Even when you existed as a messy series of ink marks on a piece of processed tree or a smattering of pixels on a glowing screen, there was an invisible but very real energy that you carried and transmitted.”
So beautiful. One that sticks with ya, great job.
You've called the word into service of expressing something I have been feeling so strongly and didn't know how to express. You've made an eloquent argument while also being an example of words infused with humanity—an elevated, conscious, and sentient use of language. I felt the sacredness of language breathing through the spaces between these characters on the page. I'm so very grateful that the word chose you to represent its plight, pain, and heartbreak with such transparency and skill. Thank you Alex.