Creativity moves underground.

On the slow death of originality online, and why real creativity is headed somewhere algorithms can't follow.

Mar 05, 2026

Welcome to issue #057 of Unsubscribe. Twice a month, I send one essay to help you step off the default path and build a life you love, supported by work you enjoy.

The other day, I grabbed my phone, opened X, and started scrolling my feed looking for something interesting to read.

But after about 5 minutes of scrolling, there wasn’t a single piece of content that grabbed me. Then I logged into LinkedIn, checked that feed, and found it be about the same.

This is a pretty common outcome nowadays. Most of my social feeds are filled with culture wars I’m not interested in, over-exaggerated takes on the future of AI, proclamations that everyone is doomed, or some promise to cure my sleeping/fitness/health/nutritional problems in less than 5 minutes.

I very rarely find anything inspiring, motivating, or remotely interesting anymore.

I know that scrolling isn’t a great habit anyway, but I used to enjoy it. I used to spend a lot of time reading content, understanding how people got attention through words, and trying my best to mimic that on platforms like LinkedIn as I learned to write.

Once I finally had my own signature style, I felt less intimidated by (what was then) Twitter, and I finally decided to start writing there, as well, in 2021. I had a great experience meeting new people and learning a lot about marketing and business.

Five years ago, that’s what these platforms gave me. I’d go down a rabbit hole on some topic, learn more than I could ever imagine, and it would change the way I worked, lived, or thought about something.

Now I scroll, and everything is the same. AI-generated videos with no point. Political extremism without nuance or context. Race-baiting. Articles promising you can reset your entire life in 30 minutes. Carousel posts that say absolutely nothing but look incredible. And 99.9% of the comments written by bots.

There are more posts than ever, and I can point to maybe a handful that are even mildly impactful.

I yelled something like, “All of this content is terrible now!” to Jennifer the other day, and she just said, “So, stop scrolling.”

Fair point. But I don’t think the answer is to just look away.

A few weeks ago, I clicked open a newsletter from a guy I’ve been subscribed to for the last three or so years. Someone whose writing I really look forward to reading every week that it hits my inbox. This week was totally different. I read the entire piece and struggled to find his old voice. The one that sucked me in so hard when I first read his stuff. The ideas in his most recent issue were fine, the structure was clean, and the overall takeaway was…ordinary. But that voice, the thing that made me subscribe in the first place, felt like it had gone missing.

I scrolled back on his page and checked a few of the older issues to make sure I wasn’t just imagining it. I wasn’t. And listen, I don’t know for sure that he’s using AI, I don’t really care, and I’m not the AI police. But I know what their writing used to sound like, and I know what it sounds like now. And that left me feeling bummed out.

The entire surface of the internet is filling up with content that technically “exists” but doesn’t really say much.

And the scary part is that I think this trend is in its infancy.

I think real, actual creativity is going to move underground.

I think about creativity in a similar fashion to how I think about food. Fast food took over decades ago because it’s cheap, easy, and efficient. So, up until recently, most people have eaten mostly processed, factory-made stuff every day without even giving it a second thought.

But that doesn’t mean that real food has died or gone away. It just stopped competing as hard for shelf space at big box chains like Walmart.

Instead, it went elsewhere. It moved to farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture farms, and intimate private dinners with foodies who didn’t want to eat microwaved hamburgers or plastic chemical substitutes.

The people who actually care about food stopped expecting to find it the way they used to, en masse, and started having to be intentional about where to seek it out.

I think something similar is going to happen with writing, music, art, and other creative outlets. The people who make real, creative stuff are going to look at this boring landscape of AI slop and decide they don’t feel like competing. I mean, why would you? Why spend days creating an original piece of art just to watch it get buried under millions of posts, generated in 10 seconds, that perform better because an algorithm can’t tell the difference?

So they’ll go somewhere else. They’ll start and join paid communities and private memberships. They’ll create small collectives, both online and offline. These will become the places where you find new music that a human actually wrote and performed. Writing that someone actually sat with, thought about, and edited meticulously.

The price of admission will be taste rather than money.

I recognize this piece makes me sound like an old curmudgeon, but I often wonder where I’ll fit in here.

LinkedIn and X are how most people found me and started reading my content. They’re the foundation of my entire business, but now I watch them fill with mess, and I’m not sure what that means for me.

Part of me also wonders if the underground will even accept folks like me. I grew my audience using the same algorithmic machinery that I’m now criticizing. I absolutely spent time optimizing headlines, studying what performed, and playing “the game.” The fact that I did it with real ideas and writing doesn’t necessarily change the fact that I built my house on the same land that’s now being flooded.

I think my future is with people who have raised their hand and said, “I want to hear from you.” It’s with the 215,000+ people who read my essays every week because they enjoy what I’m writing about. Not because an algorithm decided it was trendy enough that week to show them. I want those people to see my best writing, enjoy it, and come back for ME. That’s my only goal nowadays.

I want to read stuff from real people who are sitting down, thinking deeply about something, and writing it in their own words for people who care enough to read it. I think that’s rare.

And what’s rare is about to become what’s valuable.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m totally wrong.

Maybe the timeline is a lot farther in the future than I think. Or maybe the platforms clean things up faster than I expect, and everything goes back to “normal.” Or maybe everyone is an AI writer in the future, and I’m just behind the times.

But I don’t think so.

I think the real creatives are already moving. They’re already going “underground.” And they’ll continue to find each other in small, quiet, private spaces.

So my question for you this week is this:

Where are you finding the best original creative art online nowadays? Stuff written or created by real humans?

Click the button below and tell me. I read every response.

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