I shouldn’t pick back up here before first acknowledging head bow hands folded and humbly that Earth Wide Moth received the John Lovas Award from Kairos last Friday evening at the 2025 Computers & Writing Conference. I learned about the award early that week, so I drove to Athens, Ga. to accept the award on Earth Wide Moth’s behalf. Striking to realize this event as punctuation, a pause EWM—dash to notice simultaneously how much and how little a two-decade-plus installation of this serial variety holds. The nomination was co-signed by sixteen or so brilliant, generous, and ever-supportive colleagues; some of them even wrote brief rationale, testimony to the value of what happens here from time to time. I’m grateful for the twenty-one years of write-living, a variation on life-living (Manning), the sorts of activation and articulation loops that, come what meandering-may, dances as moth to flame and flame to moth.
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While in Georgia, I attended a few sessions, the opening reception, the Kairos-Digital Rhetoric Collaborative karaoke event, a meeting, Saturday’s keynote by Jen Sano-Franchini, titled “What’s Critical about Critical Interface Analysis? A Recommitment to Humanistic Inquiry In the March to Hyper-Automation,” and the social gathering at Creature Comforts. I drove home on Sunday, on the road by 8 a.m. ET, 370 miles, four states, giant peach water towers and turbulent speed differentials from one lane to the other along I-85, and as I drove I kept thinking about conferences and bandwidths, about desires for disciplinary community and mutual attention. It’s not such a surprise that Computers & Writing was saturated with polemics, gestures, and questions revolving heavily around generative AI. What are we, 2.5 years on since the November 2022 release of Chat GPT?
Many have turned sharply to AI; love AI or hate AI, the polemic casts triumphalists and refusalists in sometimes-heated exchanges, though much of the time we are nevertheless grasping for context and honing definitions that eventually return us to earth.
Returning to Earth Wide Moth, I happened across an entry from a decade ago, “Overlooking,” the entire entry consisting of a quotation from Oliver Sacks’ book, A Leg to Stand On (1994). Here it is:
I thought of a dream related by Leibniz, in which he found himself at a great height overlooking the world–with provinces, towns, lakes, fields, villages, hamlets, all spread beneath him. If he wished to see a single person–a peasant tilling, an old woman washing clothes–he had only to direct and concentrate his gaze: “I needed no telescope except my attention.”
It helps to remember that dreams, though they are not the same as windows, shake up monadic tendencies. There was a time, too bad it has elapsed, when the digital opened up a comparable sense of possibility. Byung-Chul Han writes in Hyperculture about how the hypertextual world roils with “possibilit[ies] of choice” (43), its windowing refrains inviting inhabitants–hypercultural tourists–to experience the vastness of boundless opening. Yet, as Han continues, screens akin to windows, the possibilities of choice run their course, and the “Being-before-a-window” resembles “the old windowless monads” (45).
I understand why there is so much wrapped up in generative AI, its swift onset flaring as it has across every sector, informational and communicative, industrial and material. Academics are thrashing AI for its promises and pitfalls, separating out its big-tech-pushed inevitabilities and coming to terms with its consequences. Monadic routines, or call them turtles, lurk all the way down. Post-C&W 2025, though, I don’t harbor any particularly renewed perspective on AI, digitality, or the panacea of a World Brain, impressively omnipotent. Something about a cheaper (seeming) writing tutorbot who never sleeps. Something about assessment magic and administrators raising course caps because automation frees up your time. Is the hype gaining? Fading by now? Still-glinty gewgaw, I don’t know. But I have returned from the conference uneasy about the hype cycle, for in the event of swivel-necking toward AI, what are we turning away from, abandoning, suspending mid-gesture as unsuspecting mortals covered over by volcanic ash. Almost had that last slurp of ramen, almost gathered that last fleck of pollen, almost fetched today’s eggs from the nesting box, almost sighted something marvelous through the telescope, almost, almost, but for AI’s dooming and dominant gusts.