The Infinite Article

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Imagine waking up in the morning and having your coffee while reading the perfect article. It was written just for you the moment you picked it up. Unlike regular articles, this one knows everything. It can tell you about all the world events you care about, the companies you’re keeping an eye on, and the thinkers whose ideas you admire. It knows your obsessions and helps you explore them more deeply. It’s even got your weird sense of humor nailed!

You might think “Isn’t this just _____?” and fill in the blank with something like Twitter, Google, Facebook, Substack, Medium, RSS, etc. But I am asking you to imagine something different.

In a world where the infinite article exists, there is not much reason to skim through lists of headlines and click in and out of isolated articles. Instead, the infinite article appears as an infinite scroll. It greets you each morning with an overview of the things you’re most likely to care about. From there you can ask it to tell you more about anything you like, and the words magically fill themselves in. When reading, you can stop any time, ask questions, and get answers! It’s like upgrading from a seat in a crowded lecture hall to having a 1:1 tutoring session.

A friend of mine described it well: “The next frontier for content recommendations is going to be AI merging content rather than users flipping between articles. Imagine an app that is a continuous article and writes itself as you read based on its understanding of your interests & your interaction with the content.”

The dream of the personalized reader is not a new dream. It goes back at least to The Diamond Age, a novel by Neal Stephenson published in 1994. And I’m sure there are even older versions, too. But today it seems like we are getting closer and closer to that dream. The question is: how close are we, really?

Last week, my friend Packy McCormick wrote about an “Enchanted Notebook” that would let you jot down an idea—say, for example, a “single-person spacecraft capable of launching 500 pounds into orbit and sustaining life for up to six months.” The notebook would automatically reverse-engineer the steps required to actually build this thing and tell you how to get started. It would be amazing if this existed, but alas, it doesn’t. So today I’m going to play the role of enchanted notebook for you, and attempt to reverse engineer a path towards creating the infinite article.

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