I’m reading Henry Fairlie this weekend. Bite the Hand That Feeds You – collected essays from one of the sharpest provocateurs the English language produced, and a man whose photograph on the cover alone – cigarette in hand, glasses slightly askew, typewriter lurking in the foreground like an accomplice – communicates something about the relationship between a writer and their craft that no amount of productivity guru content has ever come close to replicating.

(The typewriter is doing real work in that image. It isn’t decorative. It is the instrument through which the provocations were forged, and there is something quietly honest about having it visible – no pretence that the words simply materialised from some frictionless creative ether. They were hammered out. Key by key. Which is, when you think about it, rather the point of what follows.)

Those of you who know my influences will know that Christopher Hitchens occupies a significant position in how I approach both writing and argument. Not because Hitch was provocative – though he demonstrably was – but because his provocation was deployed with genuine intellectual scaffolding beneath it, which is a distinction that matters enormously and that most people confuse with volume. You don’t awaken someone from the torpor of collective slumber with a gentle suggestion. You use a bucket of cold water. The trick – and it is a trick, albeit requiring genuine craft – is ensuring the bucket contains substance rather than merely noise.

Fairlie understood this. Hitch understood this. Whilst in an age where we have outsourced the generation of text to systems that are, by any honest assessment, genuinely impressive at producing words whilst being fundamentally incapable of the thing that makes words matter, understanding this distinction has become rather more urgent than it was when Fairlie was bashing away at his typewriter.

the agent provocateur’s actual job, or why being uncomfortable is the point

Fairlie’s polemics were, I suspect, constructed partly for effect – closer in spirit to the work of an edgy comedian than to some earnest manifesto designed to reshape civilisation overnight. There is nothing wrong with that assessment. In fact, there is something deeply undervalued about it, because it misunderstands what the effect actually is.

Here’s the thing.

Understanding how to construct an argument – not merely to have an opinion, which is approximately as difficult as breathing and roughly as intellectually demanding – but to deploy that opinion with knowledge, precision, and persuasive architecture that forces the reader to genuinely engage rather than simply scroll past – is one of the foundational skills of anyone who wants to make a real impact on anything beyond their immediate surroundings.

I learned this in amateur debating societies, where the single most valuable lesson was not how to win an argument but how to understand the opposing position well enough to articulate its strongest case and then use that knowledge to dismantle them.

Those who cannot do this aren’t debating. They’re performing. The distinction matters because performance can be detected, dismissed, and scrolled past in approximately 0.3 seconds. Genuine argument – the kind that actually lands – requires the reader to do cognitive work. It requires friction. By comparison, spouting rhetoric – that pervasive performance that many think sits as some actual substitute for argument rather than the piss poor presentation of idiocy – is not debating at all.

Fairlie understood this instinctively. His essays don’t simply assert positions – they construct them with enough rigour and enough provocation that the reader finds themselves genuinely wrestling with the ideas rather than passively absorbing them. The discomfort is not a bug. It is, in the most literal sense, the mechanism by which thinking actually occurs.

(And yes, I recognise the recursion here – I am arguing, via essay, about why essays matter, whilst simultaneously doing the thing I’m describing. My therapist, Becky, would note this with a raised eyebrow and the observation that “Matt is doing the recursive analysis thing again.” She would be correct. The recursion never stops. Welcome.)

the cognitive friction complex™ (or a lack thereof)

We live in a moment of extraordinary and largely unexamined paradox regarding information and capability. We have, quite literally, more collective knowledge accessible through our fingertips than at any previous point in human history. Simultaneously – and this is the part that deserves rather more attention than it currently receives – the tools now available to generate text on our behalf have created an environment where the process of engaging with ideas is increasingly being outsourced to systems that, whilst impressive in throughput, cannot replicate the cognitive friction that actually changes how you think.

This matters more than most people appreciate. Considerably more.

The ability to cultivate not merely awareness of information but the capacity to use it effectively – to construct arguments, to identify the weak points in positions that appeal to us, to hold genuinely opposing views in tension without immediately dismissing them as wrong because they’re uncomfortable – is a skill that degrades with disuse. It is, in this sense, rather like physical fitness. Nobody loses the capacity to run by deciding not to run once. The degradation is gradual, imperceptible, and by the time you notice it, you’ve lost ground you didn’t know you were standing on.

Erudition – whether formally acquired or built through the kind of autodidactic discipline that involves actually sitting with difficult texts until they yield rather than asking an LLM to summarise them – isn’t a luxury. It’s infrastructure. Cognitive infrastructure, specifically, and infrastructure that societies require to function at anything beyond the level of collective reflex.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. And by “interesting” I mean “slightly existentially destabilising if you follow the thread far enough, which I obviously intend to do.”

(Stay with me.)

what an LLM actually does, and what it doesn’t

An LLM – a large language model, for those who have somehow avoided the last three years of breathless discourse on the subject – is, at its core, an extraordinarily sophisticated pattern-matching system. It has consumed vast quantities of human-generated text and learned to predict, with remarkable accuracy, what sequence of tokens is most likely to follow any given input.

This is genuinely impressive. I say this without irony or false modesty on behalf of the technology. The statistical inference involved is staggering, and the outputs are frequently useful, occasionally insightful, and – in the right hands – genuinely productive.

Here is what an LLM does not do.

It does not think. Not in the sense that Fairlie thought when constructing his provocations, or that Hitchens thought when dismantling an opponent’s position with surgical precision. It does not experience the cognitive friction of encountering an idea that genuinely challenges its existing framework – because it has no existing framework in the sense that you or I possess one. It has statistical weights. These are categorically different things, in much the same way that a photograph of a fire is categorically different from an actual fire, despite being visually recognisable as one.

(The photograph will not warm your hands. The LLM will not change your mind. Both will give you the impression of the thing whilst being, in some fundamental sense, the total absence of it.)

What an LLM produces when asked to write an essay is therefore not an essay in the sense that Fairlie wrote essays, nor the way that Hitch did, or how I do.

Instead, it is a statistically probable approximation of what an essay looks like – the textual equivalent of a very convincing forgery. Smooth, competent, occasionally even elegant. Entirely devoid of the thing that made the original worth reading in the first place. It’s technologically driven sophistry with the depth of a puddle.

The thing being: a consciousness grappling with something it found genuinely difficult, and producing language as a byproduct of that grappling.

which brings us back to the question of what reading actually does

Here is an uncomfortable observation that I have been turning over for some time, and which Fairlie’s essays have crystallised rather neatly.

When you read a genuinely provocative essay – one constructed by a mind that was actually wrestling with the ideas it presents – something happens in your own consciousness that is categorically different from what happens when you read competent but friction-free text. Your assumptions get disturbed. Your pattern-matching gets interrupted. You are forced, briefly but genuinely, to consider a perspective you hadn’t previously entertained, and the cognitive effort of doing so leaves a trace.

This is not metaphor. This is, in the most literal neurological sense, how minds change. Not through passive absorption of information – which is what scrolling, summarising, and LLM-assisted reading largely provides – but through active engagement with ideas that resist easy consumption.

Sometimes people can consider my non-dualistic thinking to be the rough equivalent of getting splinters in my arse as I sit on the fence. In reality, it’s nothing like that – it’s just having an openness to be able to let in the message of things that are being said, not only because it may make your ego feel vulnerable as new data arises, but specifically because we should seek to challenge what we think with the tools of finding what is right.

In short, to learn you have to accept the reality that you may be wrong and move on from that rather than entrenching yourself in a position. It’s deeply uncomfortable, stirs up emotion, and is prone to make you wonder what’s going on – arguably the opposite of what our increasingly intellectually soporific state offers as the easy option.

Sometimes you need a wake up call. Fairlie’s essays resist easy consumption with the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the temple. As essays, they are deliberately constructed to create an impact. The provocation isn’t decoration – it’s the mechanism of delivery. The discomfort is the point of entry telling you to wake the fuck up.

(Which raises a question that I find genuinely fascinating, and which I’ll pose here before I disappear down the rabbit hole it opens – which, knowing my brain, I absolutely will: if the value of an essay lies not in the information it contains but in the cognitive friction it generates in the reader, then what happens to that value when the reader outsources the reading to a system that experiences no friction whatsoever? The information survives. The transformation does not. And it is the transformation that was ever the point. In short, we end up with well written but pointless AI photocopies of thinking whilst thinking goes the way of the dodo)

the attention span question, handled honestly for once

The conventional narrative about attention spans runs something like this: they’re shrinking, long-form content is dying, the future belongs to thirty-second video clips and algorithmically optimised dopamine delivery systems designed by people whose own attention spans are, presumably, slightly longer than the products they’re creating.

This narrative is partially true and almost entirely beside the point.

Yes, the average attention span appears to be contracting – though one might reasonably question whether it ever existed in the unified form we nostalgically imagine, or whether we’ve simply become more honest about the distribution. The person genuinely engaged with something they care about will still read five thousand words. They always have. What’s changed isn’t human cognitive capacity but the competition for the first thirty seconds of attention before someone decides whether a piece of writing deserves the effort of genuine engagement.

(If you like my work, you’ll take the time to appreciate it. Others will bounce at just seeing the word count and that’s OK too – although I’d argue that they need to find topics that they find sufficiently interesting to keep their own attention spans healthy without implying my work is going to be for everybody. By design is explicitly isn’t, and is designed to create discomfort in much the way as my mate Tom’s gut reaction is to mushrooms albeit with less toilet based carnage)

The real question – and this is the one that actually matters – isn’t whether long-form writing will survive as a format. It’s whether the capacity to engage with it will survive in sufficient numbers to maintain the intellectual commons that civilisations actually require to function.

This isn’t abstract philosophising. This is a structural question about the cognitive infrastructure of societies.

Fairlie’s essays represent exactly the kind of material that either sharpens one’s capacity or reveals the absence. There is no middle ground with genuinely provocative writing. You either engage with the argument and find yourself thinking differently afterwards – which is to say, you find yourself changed, however slightly – or you bounce off it immediately because the cognitive infrastructure required to absorb the friction simply isn’t there.

The uncomfortable bit follows.

The capacity to absorb that friction – to sit with an argument that challenges you, to resist the impulse to dismiss it because it’s disagreeable, to actually do the work of understanding why an intelligent person might hold a position you find uncomfortable – is itself a skill. A skill that requires practice. A skill that atrophies without it.

Essays are one of the primary instruments through which that practice occurs.

the uncomfortable implication, or what fairlie actually teaches you in 2026

Here’s what reading Fairlie in 2026 actually teaches you, stripped of nostalgia for a different era of political discourse and stripped, equally, of any romanticised notion that things were better when writers bashed away at typewriters whilst smoking in black and white photographs.

(I will, unashamedly, claim my preference for one of Hitch’s favourite drinks – Johnnie Walker’s Amber Restorative – but acknowledge that as one of my role as a Gen X/millenial whereas many young people will see such a tipple as equivalent to chain smoking Marlboro in the 1970s)

Getting back to the study of essays, it teaches you that the ability to write well about something – to construct prose that forces genuine intellectual engagement rather than merely confirming what the reader already believes – is vanishingly rare, increasingly undervalued, and arguably more important now than at any previous point in history.

Not because we lack information. We are drowning in information. It’s literally everywhere and injected into your eyeballs at ever increasing speeds.

Not because we lack the tools to generate competent text. We have more of those than ever.

Because we are, as a civilisation, systematically undermining the very cognitive capacity that makes information meaningful – the capacity to be changed by it. This in particular is the Achilles heel of modern LLMs – they are architectural designed to kiss your arse so hard it may leave a mark. Essays, by contrast, tend to leave a mark of intellectual whiplash when they are deployed correctly.

Instead, we have unprecedented tools for generating text. We have, comparatively speaking, a dwindling investment in developing the human capacity to think through text rather than merely consume it. The essays of someone like Fairlie represent the product of a mind that did the latter extensively and the former with genuine craft – a mind that understood, whether consciously or instinctively, that the value of writing lies not in what it tells you but in what it does to you.

(And here, if I’m being honest – which I am, because this is a version of an essay I’m putting on my website and not LinkedIn given the whole point of this platform is that I don’t have to pretend otherwise – I should note that writing this essay has done precisely that to me. It has forced me to articulate something I’d been circling for months without quite landing on. The cognitive friction works in both directions. The writer is changed by the act of writing, and the reader is changed by the act of reading, and neither transformation is possible without genuine resistance. Without difficulty. Without the uncomfortable sensation of ideas that don’t slide smoothly into place.)

If you value that kind of intellectual friction – the productive discomfort of encountering an argument that genuinely challenges your assumptions – Bite the Hand That Feeds You is well worth your weekend. The political context is historical, certainly. The underlying skill on display – how to make someone actually think – is timeless. Although one might argue that the desire to challenge the political status quo is needed now more than ever.

That skill of writing is worth studying. Worth practising. Worth protecting from the comfortable assumption that competent text generation is the same thing as meaningful writing. It isn’t – and I’ll strongly argue it never will be.

LLM sophistry is not an essay and it isn’t designed to provoke. The difference between writing content and actually changing opinions through discomfort might be one of the more important distinctions of the next decade.

The world moves forward. How we choose to respond is in our hands.

Do me one favour, ideally before we collectively forget how to think.

Read the fucking book.