What is writing?

In 2023 Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, a verdict that stemmed from his involvement in the collapse of the cryptocurrency platform FTX. During the trial, it was revealed that Bankman-Fried had diverted investors’ money from FTX to another company he owned, Alameda Research, which incurred a series of significant financial losses. Billions of dollars disappeared into thin air, and Bankman-Fried now sits in federal prison. 

I’m not primarily interested in Bankman-Fried’s crimes, or his stunning rise and fall as a crypto-entrepreneur. I’m more interested in his reading habits – or rather, what his reading habits reveal about our relationship to writing. 

In a puff-piece originally posted on Sequoia Capital’s website, but since removed, journalist Adam Fisher sat down to interview Bankman-Fried, shortly before FTX entered a liquidity crisis that would precipitate its demise. Fisher tells Bankman-Fried he became a writer because he is ‘addicted to reading’. Bankman-Fried is unimpressed: 

‘Oh yeah?’, says [Bankman-Fried]. ‘I would never read a book…I’m very sceptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that…I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blogpost’. 

For Bankman-Fried, the only prose worth reading is the kind found on the internet: short, crisp, informative passages of text. Writing that’s scrollable, writing that responds to the flick of a finger on an aluminosilicate screen; easily digestible, instantly forgettable. And books? What a waste of time and effort. Dude, you fucked up. 

A six-paragraph blogpost is ‘content’. Not literature, not journalism, not scholarship, but text that exists primarily to generate clicks and pageviews on a website. As Joe Moran (2024: 383) says, ‘content is what words have become in the age of big data’ – words that are really just numbers, ones and zeroes in pursuit of internet traffic.

Content can be a post on Substack, LinkedIn, or any other social media site. Content can be an AI-generated article about growing hydrangeas, cooking goulash, or learning Esperanto. It can even be a blog like this one, hosted on Google servers and monetized with AdSense. Unlike other kinds of prose, content doesn’t invite us to slow down and reflect; it drives us to engage at accelerating speeds. 

The act of reading, for Bankman-Fried, is the equivalent of an algorithm that has been programmed to scrape the internet for information. It lets him absorb content that’s directed towards some useful purpose – say, how to evade restrictions on cryptocurrency trading (relocate your company to the Bahamas), or how to impress potential investors (play League of Legends during a conference call). Presumably the idea of reading for personal growth and self-cultivation is something that never occurred to the MIT-educated entrepreneur. 

But Bankman-Fried doesn’t just misunderstand the point of reading. He also fails to grasp the point of writing. He sees writing as a means to convey facts, a mode of communication that may one day be replaced by something altogether more efficient, such as wifi-enabled brain transmissions. Writing shouldn’t wander, or make us wonder. For Bankman-Fried, the best kind of writing takes the form of convenient pellets of data. 

This is an impoverished understanding of what writing is – and what it can do. We write because we want to communicate ideas, but also because we want to find out what ideas might be rattling around in our head in the first place. Writing is an inner voyage of discovery, one that’s often arduous and slow-moving. But persist and you’ll articulate thoughts you never could have imagined before you started typing. Surprise is an essential part of the writing process.

Here’s what academic research looks like. Do a lot of reading and make lots of notes. Discuss your work with colleagues, but do so without trying to impress them. Figure out what puzzles you and ask one simple question that you can answer. Now comes the empirical work: interviews, observations, whatever feels right. Make lots of notes here, too. Read, and reread, the data you have collected. Think it through and talk it over.

Then start writing.

You have everything you need in your head, because you’ve already been reading, thinking, talking, and making notes. So just start writing. Don’t try to map out everything in advance; or, if you do, prepare to redraw your map when you encounter new, unexpected territory – as you surely will. The words, as you type them, will lead you onwards. You may occasionally need to backtrack, and you’ll certainly revisit and revise whatever you have written. But trust that, with every sentence, you are moving inexorably towards your goal, a goal that will remain unknown until you stumble upon it in the course of writing. 

Whatever you are working on, remember this: we write to birth ideas, fully alive, on the page. What is writing? Writing is thinking.