An Army of Robots Is Coming and Substack Is Too Busy Being a Landfill to Notice

I went viral writing about backyard crows. I write about the robot armies and the internet plays dead like an ostrich.

The Wise Wolf is the last real writer on Substack (named The Wise Wolf), and he’s working at a desk in the landfill the rest of social media built. Read this before the slop buries him for good.

Six months ago my father had a heart attack.

I spent that week at my parents’ place while he recovered, and I could not write a single word. It is hard to give a single shit about the killer robot armies that men like Elon Musk are building when your dad is in the next room learning how to walk to the end of the hallway and back.

So one afternoon I quit. I went out on the back deck and sat there for an hour watching a murder of crows tear into the stale sourdough my mother bakes and throws into the yard because my father refuses to eat it. Then I went inside and wrote about it. Two hours, no research, no sources. Just a man on a deck trying not to think while some birds ate bread.

It went viral. Three thousand likes. Almost a thousand shares and restacks. One of the most successful things I have ever published in my life, and it was a report on what crows like for lunch.

Last week Lily and I dropped the best reporting of our careers. Forty hours of research each, plus another twenty I spent scraping the bottom of my brain for prose strong enough to make a living human being understand that these same men are building data centers the size of downtown Pittsburgh, right now, in this country, to run the robot armies they are handing the Pentagon for its coming wars. Lily fact-checked it until her eyes crossed.

It got thirty likes. Thirty, against sixty hours of work and sixty-seven thousand subscribers, and a story about birds eating bread still beat it a hundred to one without trying. So let me introduce you to the garbage that is burying us.

Welcome to the Content, Now Please Lower Your Expectations

Nobody wants to say this out loud, because saying it out loud means admitting it is true. So I will say it. Substack was supposed to be the one corner of the entire internet that was not a SLOP machine. A place where actual writers wrote actual things and got paid actual money by actual humans who actually read them. A miracle. The last hidden gem of the whole interwebz.

It has about two years left. Then it is the exact same slopfest as Facebook and Instagram and X and TikTok, just with an orange subscribe button, and we can all stand around pretending that is somehow different.

I can already see it coming over the hill like weather. The slop pours in many flavors, like the world’s most depressing gas station fountain machine, and every single one of them is beating the truth like a rented mule.

As a public service, I have listed the worst flavors of slop content creator below.

Mercury Is in Retrograde and So Is Your Checking Account

Flavor one is the witchy woman. At least she thinks she’s a witch. Reality thinks she’s mentally ill.

She is “channeling.” She has urgent news about the 5D level of consciousness, which is two whole D’s above the sad little 3D consciousness you are currently stuck in, you absolute peasant. The starseeds are coming. The crystals are “activated.” Mercury is in something, and that something is your wallet, which is why the tarot reading is forty dollars and the “soul alignment intensive” is four hundred. She has never been wrong in her life and never will be, because not one word she says means a single thing, which is honestly a flawless business model, and I respect it the way you respect a tornado that is heading for somebody else’s house.

The Robots Who Got Rich Teaching You How to Get Rich

Flavor two makes me want to throw my laptop in a river and follow it in.

It is the AI marketing robot, and it runs fifty Substacks at once, all of them named some variation of The Wealth Codex or Abundance OS or Six Figures While You Sleep, Brad. Every one of them is selling the same secret, which is how to get rich writing on Substack, which they ripped straight out of a two-dollar ebook on Amazon, which was itself written by a different robot that ripped off a different two-dollar ebook, on and on, forever, in what scientists call the Circle of Slop.

The secret, after you pay for the course, is this. Write a Substack telling people how to get rich writing a Substack. That is the whole pyramid. It is a snake eating its own tail, except this snake figured out how to charge the tail a monthly subscription on the way down.

These accounts pull a couple hundred grand a year. They are parasites, latched onto the soft underbelly of every poor bastard who actually, sincerely, desperately wants to learn how to write. And the robots win every time, because the robots memorized the one headline that works, and the one headline that works is never the true one. It is “I Made $40,000 Last Month Doing THIS One Weird Thing (Free Guide Inside).” The one weird thing is lying to you. The free guide is forty-seven dollars.

Five Hundred Thousand Subscribers and Nothing Real to Say

Flavor three is the washed-up celebritard who has discovered, in the dribbling autumn of their fame, that they are now a Brave And Important Political Voice.

They did not write one word of it. A marketing firm in Los Angeles keeps a dozen ghostwriters on the clock to pump out the takes, and the takes are never, not once, anything you were not already cleared to think. America needs more immigrants. The modern state of Israel is the greatest thing to happen to this planet since Jesus, possibly beating out Jesus. Whatever this week’s approved opinion is, they will have it, in bold, next to a selfie. These are not arguments. They are audience-penetration devices, engineered like Doritos to hit the one receptor that makes you repost before your brain even boots up.

They show up on a Tuesday. By Wednesday they have five hundred thousand subscribers, a level-three paid tier, and another ten million dollars a year stacked onto a fortune they could not burn through in nine lifetimes if they set it on fire to stay warm.

And the algorithm worships them, because of the one rule that runs this entire rotten machine, the rule I want tattooed on the inside of every eyelid in America. The algorithm rewards the voices that have already been heard. It does not care if you have anything new to say. It actively prefers that you do not, because new ideas make people uncomfortable, and uncomfortable people do not tap the little heart.

So the biggest megaphones on earth get handed to the exact people with the least left to say into them. That is the machine. That is what makes the money. That is what gets shared. That is what earns the holy word “exposure,” which I now hear the way a turkey hears “Thanksgiving.”

Half This Platform Is an OnlyFans Ad Wearing an Essay

Flavor four is the one everybody keeps telling me to leave alone, because it is “punching down” and “not very nice” and “Wolf, please, think of the advertisers.” There are no advertisers. I run a hobo newsletter out of a motel. I will not be leaving it alone.

Flavor four is the ‘gen-z gooner girl’, and if you think she is some fringe act, open the Substack app and scroll for ninety seconds.

She is not fringe. By raw tonnage she is damn near half the platform. Twenty-something girls cranking out two posts a week about how many dicks they had to ride this month to pay for the trip to Fiji, where they are flying out to meet some gigachad they found on Tinder so the two of them can shoot a scene for her OnlyFans. That is not a writer. That is a billboard with a pulse. It is not literary, it is not journalism, and it is not, by any definition the English language has ever recognized, writing. It is hardcore porn marketing in a trench coat, wearing the phrase “erotic fiction” as a fake mustache.

Because that is the whole point of it. Every post is the top of a funnel. The “essay” is the free sample, the casino comping you a drink, and three clicks later you are through a paywall on some other site where the real product lives, and the real product is not prose. It is three hundred grand a year, blown on cocaine and lingerie and vacations that cost more than your car, all of it bankrolled by a website that is supposed to be about writing.

Substack was built to be a room for journalism. For essays. For poetry. For some kid writing fiction in the dark, praying a hundred strangers find it. Instead it is being colonized, in real time, by a red-light district that figured out the rent here is free and nobody checks IDs.

And the platform PAYS for it. That is the part that makes me want to lie down in the road. The algorithm scoops up the porn funnel and the recycled get-rich robot and the channeling crystal lady, hands all three of them the megaphone, and watches Lily and me bleed forty hours down a drain without leaving so much as a ripple. The machine was never confused about what it wanted. It wanted the funnel. It has never once wanted the truth, and it sure as hell is not going to start now because a wolf in a motel asked it nicely.

I scrolled past one of these last week that I still cannot get out of my skull. Some girl had written the whole thing up in such detail that I felt like I needed to tear out my eyes after I skimmed a few paragraphs after she popped up on my Notes feed.

She went home with a stranger from a bar and let him degrade her in a rundown motel room while her best friend stood in the corner filming it, so she could send the smut straight to her stepfather.

As ‘revenge’. Because years back, when she was a teenager throwing herself at him, he had the basic human decency to say no.

That was the content. That was the product. People subscribed to it. People LIKED it, with the little heart, the same little heart that sixty-seven thousand of my readers apparently cannot find with both hands and a flashlight. I said what the actual fuck out loud to an empty motel room, shut the laptop, and walked out to the deck to stare at some crows.

The crows, at least, are honest about wanting the bread.

Meanwhile Out in the Void

This is the part where I am supposed to pretend everything is fine. Pretending everything is fine is the single most popular activity in the developed world, having just edged out pickleball and doomscrolling for the top spot. I can’t do it.

We have sixty-seven thousand subscribers. Sixty-seven thousand. That is the entire downtown of a decent-sized American city. Picture every living soul in downtown Pittsburgh agreeing to read your newsletter, and then picture begging them, politely, to tap one little heart-shaped button with their thumb, and then picture fewer than a hundred of them managing to locate the thumb.

That is my life now. Lily and I spend forty hours dragging some massive, ugly, world-ending truth up into the daylight, and three days later it is gone, swallowed whole by a feed that already moved on to a dog on a skateboard.

I have not written anything poignant in days. Not because I ran out of corruption, the corruption is bottomless, the corruption is the one truly renewable resource left in this country. I stopped because I ran out of the thing that makes a man sit down and grind out forty hours of work, which is the belief that somewhere on the other end is a person who will read it and give a damn. You pour forty hours into the black hole void, then forty more, then forty more, and that belief gets real thin, real fast.

Coming Soon the Benevolent Aliens

So what fills the space where the real reporting used to be? Nothing stays empty for long. The algorithm always has a fresh load ready to pour in.

And what it pours in is the approved stuff. The sanctioned stuff. The narratives that show up pre-cleared, like luggage that already went through a scanner you never got to see. I spent years close enough to power to watch exactly how a story gets shaped before it ever reaches your eyes, and the shaping is real. There is a reason the identical talking point shows up, word for word, fully formed, across nineteen “independent” outlets on the same morning, the way a whole flock of starlings banks at once. That is not nineteen brave reporters independently stumbling onto the truth. That is a memo.

Some of it wears a CIA lanyard. Some of it wears a Mossad one. Most of it just wears a press badge and a very serious frown, and every bit of it is in the business of telling you which thoughts are safe to have. The frown is the important part. The frown is how you know it is News.

I would bet the newsvan I do not own on this next part. Ten years from now the only journalism that pays a living wage will be the journalism somebody upstairs already signed off on, and the single biggest pre-approved story of them all is sitting in a hangar right now, waiting for its release date. The benevolent aliens.

They will ‘reveal themselves’ right as humanity stands on the brink of nuclear war to lovingly guide us toward the Universal Basic Income dome cities and the mealworm protein paste. We will weep with gratitude. There will be a ceremony. There will be merch.

They are not benevolent and they are not aliens. They are demons. That is the correct word, and I am not going to swap it for a softer one to keep the squeamish comfortable. And if you happen to be a reporter who says so a little too loud, you will be shot in the back of the head in a late-night “robbery” where, somehow, nothing is reported stolen. The wallet stays. The watch stays. Only the reporter leaves. The official cause of death will be the word “random,” followed, in spirit if not in ink, by “wink wink.”

I am telling you all this specifically to ruin your evening, because a ruined evening is the only thing that has ever moved a single human being to share a single article. And I already know how most of you will take it. You will feel the floor drop for half a second, and then you will do the one thing our species has truly perfected, which is the ostrich.

You learned, somewhere along the way, that an ostrich shoves its head in the sand when a predator comes for it. Look at what that actually is. The ostrich is eight feet tall. It runs forty miles an hour. It throws a kick that can take a lion’s head clean off its shoulders. This is not some delicate little creature. This is a dinosaur that survived. And its master plan, at the one moment that counts, is to bury its face in the dirt so it does not have to watch the thing that is about to eat it. It does not run. It does not kick.

It does not use the lion-decapitating leg it was issued at birth. It just decides that if it can’t see the lion, the lion isn’t technically happening, and then it gets eaten, having spent its entire life as the single most heavily armed bird on the savanna.

We are all doing the ostrich. You, right now, reading this on a screen, do a little version of it every single time you scroll past the data-center story to go double-tap a man falling off a paddleboard. I am not above it. I have a paddleboard guy I think about more than I’d like to admit. But the lion is real, and the lion has investors.

And here is the lion. Ten years from now, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and the rest of their Nazi-adjacent technocracy cult will have actual armies. Literal armies. Of robots. Trained inside facilities the size of Pittsburgh that they are bolting onto every state in the union, facilities that drink water and electricity the way a frat drinks a keg dry by midnight. And those armies are not a hobby. They are the machine by which a dozen men intend to ENSLAVE YOU, AND YOUR KIDS, AND YOUR GRANDKIDS, without ever having to ask one single human being to go along with it.

The future they are selling, with a completely straight face, is a world fifty years out where there is not one animal and not one plant left alive outside the climate-controlled dome cities of the people who own everything, and your grandkids are stacked in ten-by-ten concrete units on a “universal basic income” that barely buys two daily servings of the protein sludge the Bill Gates fake-meat operation grinds out of actual insects, served to them out of a chute in the wall of the cell, twice a day, with the rich, satisfying flavor of the worms and beetles it was made from.

That is the paradise. For them. For the rest of us regular folks it is hell on earth, a concrete tomb with WiFi and a bug-paste chute.

This is the Technocracy Incorporated business plan, and the sick genius of it is that it does not even need to defeat us. It only needs us to keep being ostriches. It needs you to keep sharing the celebritard and the crystal lady and the Fiji girl, and to keep scrolling right past the handful of people who walked away from comfortable lives to stand in the middle of the road waving their arms and screaming that there is a truck coming.

I am one of the people in the road. So is Lily. We are waving our arms like maniacs. It is, so far, going great.

So By All Means Keep Scrolling

If that future sounds fine to you, then great news, because getting there requires absolutely nothing from you. Not one thing. You do not have to lift a finger. You just have to keep doing exactly what you are already doing.

Keep scrolling right past the data-center exposés. Do not restack the pieces on government corruption. Do not share the ones about real faith, the kind that forces you to look the evil running this world dead in the eye, because that is uncomfortable, and the heart button is for comfortable things. Do not tap it. And whatever you do, do not become a free subscriber, and God forbid a paid one, because the last thing this dying planet needs is one more hobo journalist with a notebook getting enough eyes on his work to become a genuine pain in the ass for genuine billionaires. Share the celebritard instead. Share the crystal lady. Forward the Fiji girl’s latest dispatch to the group chat with three crying-laughing faces. Pretend everything is fine. Pretending everything is fine costs nothing, asks nothing of your brain, and pairs beautifully with a warm cup of beetle.

You have got the kick. You have always had the kick. And some of you have looked at all your options and decided the smart move, the dignified move, is to jam your head in the dirt and hope for the best. By all means. The lion fully supports your decision. The lion has, in fact, been counting on it this whole time.

What This Costs, Since You Did Not Ask

Lily graduated last week. She is sharp enough to scare me, a real reporter in a year when “real reporter” is sliding into the same career bin as “blacksmith” and “person who is normal about the moon landing.” She is spending the summer at a camp teaching teenagers how to become journalists, which is its own quiet little tragedy, because the trade might not outlive their student loans.

I wanted to bring her on full time by the end of the summer and pay her what a college-educated editor and junior reporter is actually worth out in the real world. Right now I can afford her for three articles a week, because the money that was supposed to be here, based on where we stood six months ago, just is not, on account of the heart button turning out to be load-bearing and not one person pressing it.

There is a celebrity gossip site out in Los Angeles waving a fat six-figure salary at her. For a twenty-three-year-old, in the most expensive city on earth, that is real money. She could do five years of whose-marriage-is-imploding and parlay it into a desk at a magazine that still has the circulation to pay for actual talent. On paper, it is the smart move.

I do not want her to take it. I want to keep her here, on the work that actually matters, the work that vanishes into the nothing. But I cannot ask a twenty-three-year-old to set herself on fire to keep me warm, and I cannot keep her paid on thirty likes.

The Sound of Silence is Very Loud

So here is the ask, and it is embarrassingly small.

If a single word of this landed, here is what helps, and it costs you almost nothing. Tap the heart. Restack the piece. Send it to one human being who still reads. Become a free subscriber, or a paid one if you can swing it, which keeps the lights on and keeps Lily off the gossip beat and on the one where she belongs, which is the one where she stands in the road next to me and screams about the trucks.

You are not actually an ostrich but you still have the kick. The very least you can do is use it.

A wolf can howl into an empty valley for a long, long time. The howl costs the valley nothing. But it costs the wolf, and this wolf is going hoarse. So howl with me. Share the damn thing. Make a little noise in the direction of the men building the dome.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling

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