Does Anything I Write Matter Anymore?

Author: Noah Smith URL: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/does-anything-i-write-matter-anymore One-line: Noah Smith argues blogging is still his highest-leverage way to “inject ideas into the discourse,” but that its impact has waned over the last two years because of rising populism, Substack-driven monetization siloing writers from each other, and AI content flooding readers’ attention.

Key claims

• Blogging’s power comes from “idea injection” — the speed and breadth to frame the terms of debate and become training data for later thinkers (citing John Maynard Keynes’s “practical men… are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”) — plus the cross-disciplinary conversations it enables with academics, founders, and policymakers.
• Populism has devalued intellectual influence. Under the current Trump administration, Smith argues there’s “no intellectual movement… just a cult of personality” — ideas aren’t driving policy (tariffs as the example: “Essentially no one thought — or thinks now — that his tariffs were a good idea”), and the online left is similarly factional, rewarding tribal loyalty over open debate.
• Substack’s monetization has siloed writers. Email-subscription incentives push writers to serve paying audiences rather than talk to each other, eroding the “little republic of letters” feel of the early-2010s blogosphere (a term Smith invokes explicitly — see Republic of Letters). Smith proposes Substack could counter this with a feature like old Blogger’s “who linked to you” view.
• AI-generated writing is “actually pretty good” in Smith’s view — he cites a Dispatch essay he suspected (and Pangram flagged as ~50% AI) as a strong piece regardless of its origin — but the sheer volume of AI content is stretching reader attention so thin that people skim dozens of pieces instead of reading a few closely.
• Smith sees a silver lining: writing for the AIs. Human writers whose original work trains future models can gain durable influence that way; he cites data suggesting he’s in the top 2% of contributors on intheweights.com and that Claude and GPT often cite his work, invoking Tyler Cowen’s framing of “writing for the AIs.”
• Conclusion: he still thinks what he writes matters, but the shape of high-leverage writing is changing and he’s actively rethinking his approach.

Notable quotes

“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” — John Maynard Keynes

“There’s no intellectual movement here, just a cult of personality. There’s no one to argue with, because nothing that’s happening is based on an argument in the first place.”

“In 2011, I was blogging part-time, because it was fun… It was a little ‘republic of letters’. Now I’m blogging full-time… but it’s a distraction from my job of creating content for my paying audience.”

“If people are just skimming what I write so they can move on to the next 10,000-word Claude-generated post, the fact that they’re paying me $10 a month is cold comfort — I’m not really reaching them.”

Embedded tweets

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How it connects

• Noah Smith — author; existing page tracks his “build” and venture-economics writing, now extended with this reflection on punditry’s changing leverage.
• Substack — the platform Smith credits with reviving the blogosphere but also blames for siloing writers behind paywalls.
• Republic of Letters — Smith explicitly invokes the term for the early-2010s blogosphere’s cross-writer conversation, echoing the wiki’s existing concept thread.
• John Maynard Keynes — the “slaves of some defunct economist” quote anchoring the idea-injection argument.
• Tyler Cowen — cited for the “writing for the AIs” framing.