Dead Internet, Living Scribblers

Last week my son called from SCAD. "Will AI kill scribbling before I graduate?" I told him what I learned watching network TV eat itself. When everything starts sounding the same, being different becomes your superpower.

Bots now generate more web traffic than humans. AI-written articles outnumber the real thing. The public feed looks busy, but half the crowd is cardboard cutouts. The humans did not disappear, they just migrated to quieter rooms. Discord servers. Group chats. Private circles where you can still hear someone breathe between sentences.

Your Mess Is Your Moat

AI cannot fake twenty-two episodes of Lost while we tried to figure out what the smoke monster was. It cannot fake the panic halfway through Heroes when time travel logic ate our lunch. It cannot fake the Alias parking garage scramble when the actress got sick, the location fell through, and we had four hours to rebuild a sequence from scratch.

That parking garage fix made the scene better. Tighter. More claustrophobic. The pressure created the solution.

Machines do not have scar tissue from failed pilots. They do not have muscle memory from fighting through a room full of conflicting notes. They do not stare at a whiteboard covered in arrows and circles that look like a conspiracy theorist had an episode.

My ADD brain makes connections that seem unhinged until they click. Like pitching Dungeons and Dragons campaign structure for serialized TV. People thought I had lost it. Now half of streaming uses that approach.

Pattern recognition like that is earned. Not generated.

Process Over Polish

When I consult on VALORANT, I am not pulling from a manual. I am pulling from years of learning why exposition kills momentum (Heroes Season Two), how mystery works without answers (early Lost), and when silence lands harder than dialogue (every Hannibal dinner).

Remember when we killed off Isaac on Heroes and the network lost their minds? That meltdown taught me more about audience investment than any focus group ever could.

That is why documenting your real process matters. Not the LinkedIn highlight reel. The chaos. The scramble. The part where you believed the episode was broken until one idea fixed everything.

I use AI constantly. It organizes my 2 AM voice memos. It cleans up a first draft. But it cannot know why transmedia still lights me up after twenty years. It cannot feel the pressure of a late-night rewrite when a network note blows up your third act.

These tools are instruments. Like Final Draft or index cards. They help you think. They do not replace thinking.

Experience Compounds

Every failed spec I scribbled before TV taught me structure. Every cancelled show taught me audience. Every midnight rewrite taught me pressure. That accumulated knowledge is impossible to fake.

Your odd habits are part of your edge. Your obsession with Star Wars novelizations. Your tendency to pace while breaking story. Your ability to quote every Twilight Zone episode but forget where you parked. That is your creative fingerprint.

It is proof of life.

Still Breathing

My son's generation will not compete with AI on volume or speed. They will compete on being irreplaceably themselves. On taste built through failure. On instincts shaped by being in the room when everything goes sideways.

The creators winning right now are leaning into their humanity. They show receipts. They share the mess. They build trust by being actual people, not polished case studies.

Dead internet theory assumes we are passive. But scribblers have always cut through noise with story. This is just different noise.