why are tech people writing?

A New York Times reporter called it "the Silicon Valley-fication of writing." Everyone in tech has Substack. X launched Articles. Founders are raising on investment memos alone. And I can't stop thinking about why.

A lot of this writing is uninteresting. Some of it is transactional. The "thought leader VC" is now a recognized category. One firm built an entire media operation (you know which one). The founders followed. A ghostwriting industry emerged to write launch essays and run X accounts. Some of it is performance. You've heard it before: taste is now the only moat. Writing proves you have it. It is often in the Paul Graham dialect – short sentences, plain vocabulary, probably numbered. It is taste signaling; a type of personal branding.

But beneath the opportunism, something else is happening. There is a real rise of tech people writing – not to signal, not to fundraise, but to reckon with what AI is doing to them.

What is interesting is power. There has never been more power in tech than there is today. And powerful people have always reached for writing. Politicians have speeches, religious cults have manifestos and, now, tech people have articles. And they use it the same way.

The first use is coordination. Not persuasion, but coordination. The Communist Manifesto didn't convert the bourgeoisie. What it did was organize people who already felt something but lacked the language to articulate it. When Andreessen writes, he makes a worldview feel inevitable and shapes the landscape. Investors fund the categories he names. Founders copy his language in pitch decks. His writing creates the reality it describes by coordinating the people with the capital to make it real.

It's happening in AI discourse too. Everyone – even tech people – feels uncomfortable about what is going on. Matt Shumer's "Something Big Is Happening" went viral on X because it named a private anxiety and made it collective.

The second use is narrative. Unlike coordination, it doesn't need an existing feeling to work. The logic is: words shape belief, belief shapes action, action shapes reality. Dario Amodei's "Machines of Loving Grace" understood this; a vision of AI as altruism, with disease eliminated, poverty reduced, scientific progress accelerated. It is emotionally compelling writing, coming straight from the person building the technology. Dario writes because whoever defines the narrative controls the outcome.

A policymaker who reads his essay doesn't treat it as an argument to be evaluated but as a prior. It becomes what they think. When they imagine what AI could be, they imagine it in his terms. When they write legislation, they're operating inside his narrative without knowing it. That's what writing as power produces at the highest level. Not readers. Not even money. But the closing of the distance between what is written and what becomes real.

But beneath the performance and the power plays, something else is happening. And this is where I think most tech writers actually fit in.

AI didn't just automate tasks; it automated judgment and reasoning. That feels strangely personal. Writing about what is happening helps people make sense of it.

But after they write long enough about the external, they stop asking what AI is doing to the world and start asking what it's doing to them.

In America, what you do is who you are. That identity is now eroding. When it erodes, something else surfaces: a desire to make something where every thought traces back entirely to you. Not to prove anything. Just because the alternative is not knowing what you actually think.

Here, writing is more than creative expression. At its core, it is a proof of life.

I think therefore I am – Descartes

But so does the model, and it thinks faster and often better, and this quote starts to feel less like a foundation and more like a question. Thinking was meant to be the one thing you couldn't take from a person.

So why writing? Because writing is thinking.

AI can produce text but it cannot write an essay. An essay is thinking made visible; it starts somewhere, disagrees with itself, develops, arrives somewhere the writer didn't expect. AI begins already knowing where it ends. It has no genuine uncertainty, no moment where the argument turns on itself because the writer followed a thought somewhere unexpected.

This is why I write.

It's how I think, figure out what I believe, and develop my identity. The woman from the Times thinks tech people use writing as a mental gym, a way to optimize themselves. I think most tech people are writing because they're not sure what's left of them if they don't.

The Silicon Valley-fication of writing isn't just a cultural moment. It's a distress signal.