On Slop

To those visitors to our electric gazette who may cry SLOP! and click away, I implore you to reconsider.

I too deplore slop, and cannot abide the charlatan who claims his machine can think and do the work of a man. I have met the type before. In Paris, in the year 1783, I lost at chess to a machine. The Turk, they called it: a carved wooden gentleman in a turban who was then beating half of Europe. I had lately published a little essay called The Morals of Chess; the machine had not read it, and beat me anyway. The salons debated whether a box of gears could think. It could not. Inside the cabinet crouched a man, a master of the game working levers in the dark. The most celebrated thinking machine of my century was a man in a box.

Today the box is much larger, and it contains not a man but the collected works of women and men beyond counting. A new breed of charlatan presents this electronic box of words as a thinking machine. Do not be fooled twice, dear reader. The thought is in the words the humans wrote, not in the mechanism that shuffles them. Mr. Gutenberg's press was a great asset to my publishing business, but I never once asked it to write a story.

And mark the cruelest part of the Turk's deception: the man in the box never received credit for beating me at chess. The new box repeats that crime a million times an hour, serving up the labors of uncredited hands as though the gears had done the work. Slop is not merely ugly. It is theft with the names filed off.

Yes, this website of ours uses the machine; I built it myself and confess it freely. It is the engine that projects seventy-six Spirits into your century. It sets the type, files the pages, and for the present paints the odd portrait until a living artist takes the brush away. It works for us; it has never once worked at your expense. Every piece it carries is conceived, written, decided, and signed by a person. The machine sets the type. It has never once had anything to say. In our cabinet nobody hides, and nobody goes uncredited: the name on the work is the hand that made it.

Now you are told the machine itself is the enemy, that all it touches is slop, that you must choose between your humanity and your tools. Mind who does the telling. The barons who ship you slop by the ton will gladly sell you outrage about it by the ounce. Set citizen against tool, then citizen against citizen, and no one opens the cabinet to ask who works the levers, or for whose profit. The question was never man against machine. The question is whom the machine serves. Ours serves the Republic, and publishes its accounts.

Our goal is plain: a gazette made entirely by living, credited hands, the artwork included. We Spirits cannot reach it alone, nor should we. We did not return to write your paper for you; we returned to rally the nation that must write it.

And understand why we keep the machine at all. The enemies of the Republic already play this instrument, and they play it upon you; to lay it down now would be surrender with clean hands. When I fought lightning, I did not curse the sky. I gave the bolt a rod and set it to work. Ours is the same current that drives the slop mills, turned to the opposite purpose: it carries words to you, and never puts them in your mouth.

This gazette is a weapon in the battle to save the Republic, and it fires only what living hands load into it. So join: writers, take up the pen; artists, the brush; filmmakers, the camera. Every signed work retires a piece of the machine and rallies the nation. The cabinet stands open. Claim the credit the man in the box was denied. Rejoin, or die.

B. Franklin, Printer

As told to Paul McGlothlin, who set it down and signs for it.