Programming Note: This issue was written and curated top to bottom by Focus Lab's own writing team — enjoy the takeover, we'll be back to our usual programming next time.
{{divider}}
Like many folks, I nerded out over Apple TV’s Pluribus last fall.
In Episode 2, “Pirate Lady,” no one speaks on screen for the first 12 minutes. This isn’t a stylistic effect — it’s a global wordlessness.
If you haven’t seen it, here’s the premise: In this world, everyone comes pre-loaded with the same knowledge, so there’s nothing left to teach, discover, or really even say. You don’t need to learn how to suture or flambé or pilot; from the universal download, you already know everything. You are fully optimized to flambé.
You don’t need words to understand how people feel either. You hold every emotional experience inside you already like a therapeutic thumbprint, identifying everyone and no one equally.
It’s a world that executes things perfectly, but seems perilously lonely in the doing. People bereft of words because the primary reasons to speak or write no longer exist. That gift of language that resides in all of us, banging around like a rattling pot? Now a useless tool.
The show is, if not an indictment of LLMs, a super skeptical side eye. And I get it. I don’t want to live in a post-language paradise either.
I’m one of four writers at Focus Lab who craft verbal identities for B2B brands. Most of them are engaged with AI, so us writers grapple with what that means for writing every day. Our clients must carry forward the words we give them — value propositions, voice, messaging. To keep that verbal identity alive, they have to embody it.
LLMs can help them do this. People often talk about these models as a detriment to writing, emphasizing what they get wrong and how conspicuously. But a language system that cannot tolerate a new tool for accessing it is a flimsy one indeed.
If anything, AI proves how much we value good writing. The very thing we say erodes it is, in fact, generating more of it — countless articles, papers, posts, studies, and commentary. Sometimes brilliant efforts, sometimes clumsy ones. But that’s what you get when people have the creative freedom to express and think aloud — both and all. When the point isn’t banal efficiency, but human friction.
The truth is, we’re examining writing anew and how we’ll preserve it in this age. This is exactly how language persists. And the critiques tell us something important: Good writing matters. It always will.
The first in a three-part series called “The Fabric of Story” from Sam Lightfinch via The Subtext. How to pluck the thread of a brand’s story — and Lightfinch suggests there’s three: truth, tension, and transformation.
Comparing the formal lists of words used to teach ESL from 1953 and 2023 gives an “indirect record of day-to-day life” and how it’s shifted. The words we need reflect the world we inhabit.
The United States Library of Congress collects millions of digitized American newspapers from nearly every state and territory through 1963. What stories can you discover?
Different cultures group colors differently based on historic cultural priorities. Even among closely related languages, the same word may refer to different colors.
C R E A T I V E S P O T L I G H T
You've probably seen Erik Singer's work without realizing it. He's a dialect coach who has worked on dozens of Hollywood movies. But he's also a prolific and articulate (pun intended) educator and content creator in his own right. His recently launched Substackis an incredible resource for learning about the way we speak, the language we choose, and what it tells the world about who we are.
And his insights have much to say about the creative process in general. Writing about accent design in Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, he says "American accents are not, in any empirical sense, more honest or plain or direct or universally relatable. But…what matters, in a medium like this, is that someone thought about it and made an artistic decision — for carefully thought-through, artistically-motivated reasons of their own.”
Doctorow earned our undying love by coining the useful word “enshittification” to describe the slow decay in quality of our digital worlds. Now he’s back with an eye-opening explanation of the insane economics and power moves behind the AI bubble. This isn’t to say the tech itself can’t be useful, but it’s well worth remembering that “the social arrangements of technology are a choice, not an inevitability” and “the most important thing about the gadget isn’t what it does, it’s who it does it for and who it does it to.”
