Too busy in 2022. Zero clients by last week.
Someone wrote that down in public, plainly, the way you only write things once you have stopped performing them. A content writer. A whole career arc in two lines, and the second line arrived the way the second line always does. Faster than the runway was built for.
He wanted twelve hundred dollars a month. Twenty hours a week if the world would allow it. The rest topped up from savings he didn't want to touch. He had a number and he had a plan, and the plan was sensible, and the plan was already three years out of date, and that was the part the replies kept dancing around.
I read it on a plastic stool by the Mekong in Vientiane, the river going brown and slow on the far side of the road, a coffee in a plastic bag with a straw sweating in my hand. Ninety cents. The woman who made it has made it ten thousand times and will make it ten thousand more, and no machine is coming for her corner of the morning.
I read it twice. Then I put the phone down and watched the river for a while, because the answer he was asking for is not the answer he needs, and the gap between those two things is where the next three years of his life will go if nobody tells him.
He thinks he lost a client.
He lost a reader.
Here is the thing nobody put in the replies.
The web he built his career on assumed a human at the other end. Someone who typed a question, landed on a page, read it, decided something. Every word he ever sold was priced on the existence of that person. The whole economy of it, the SEO article, the buyer's guide, the four hundred words about a product nobody needed, all of it ran on the assumption that eventually a human would arrive and read.
That human is being routed around.
Last month Google announced something with a name engineered to make your eyes slide straight off it. Agentic Resource Discovery. A specification. I read the whole thing so you don't have to, and I will give it to you in one breath.
Companies publish a small file. They put it on their own domain and call it a catalog. Other software, the registries, crawl those files and index them, and the announcement called these registries, in plain English, search engines for the agentic web. Then the agents, the machines acting on behalf of people, ask in ordinary language for what they want, check who you are, and pull what they need. The word they used was runtime. Entirely at runtime. No human in the loop.
Read that last part again. No human in the loop.
The thing arriving at the other end of the page is becoming a machine that queries a catalog, takes what it came for, and moves on without reading a single sentence the way you meant it to be read.
A man in the replies said it cleaner than the spec did. Every job you can do through a computer, he wrote, the computer can do too, and there is no solution, and the only thing left is what you can sell to a human directly.
He is wrong that there is no solution. He is completely right about the diagnosis.
So let me say the part that doesn't sell a course.
When the reader becomes a machine, the human reader becomes the rarest thing on the internet.
Not gone. Rare. And rare is not the same as worthless. Rare is the opposite.
The commodity writing died first because the commodity writing was always just plumbing. Words laid down to be crawled and ranked and skimmed by something that was never going to feel anything. That work is being handed to the machines because that work was already machine-shaped. Nobody should mourn it. I wrote some of it once. It paid for a year in Penang and it taught me nothing.
But there is other writing. The kind a person reads on a Sunday with a coffee going cold because they forgot it was there. The kind where another human being is unmistakably on the other side of the words, having lived the thing, getting it slightly wrong in the way only a person gets things wrong. A machine querying a catalog has no use for that. It cannot index a voice. It skips it the way water skips a stone.
Which means the moment the machine stops reading is the exact moment a human voice becomes worth paying for again.
There is a joke buried in the specification, if you read it the way I did, slowly, on a stool by a river. The entire apparatus exists so that machines can trust other machines. So an agent can verify, mathematically, that the catalog it found really belongs to who it claims to. Enormous effort, poured into teaching software to answer one small question. Is this real. Is there actually someone behind this.
Meanwhile, on the human side of the wire, people are quietly relearning to pay a premium for the answer to the exact same question. Is this real. Was someone actually here. The machines and the humans are chasing the same scarce thing from opposite ends of the cable. Proof of a person.
You can already see it. Businesses that fired the writers and filled their pages with generated slop are crawling back, because the slop reads like slop and a customer can smell it through the screen.
I am not romantic about the tools. I use them. I used one this morning. They are good and they are getting better and pretending otherwise is just complaining about the weather.
But the tool is not the question. The question is what you do next.
What you do next is stop writing for the pipeline that no longer has a human at the end of it. Stop optimising for the crawler. Stop producing the exact thing the machine was built to produce more cheaply than you ever could. That race is over, you were never going to win it, and you should be glad, because it was a miserable race run on a treadmill in a room full of people with headphones on.
Write for the human the machine cannot be. Build the thing that only works because a person made it. Sell it to someone who wanted a person.
The twelve hundred dollars is findable. Just not on the side of the wire that is being automated.
The coffee in the bag was warm by the time I finished thinking about it. The woman on the corner was three customers further into her morning. A man went past on a motorbike with a refrigerator strapped upright to the back of it, like a passenger.
None of it was in a catalog. None of it was discoverable at runtime. All of it was real, and humming, and completely indifferent to the specification.
The web is being rebuilt. That part is true and it is not going to un-happen.
It is just not being rebuilt for you. So stop sending your best work to the part of it that stopped reading.
Andrew - No Refunds •••