AMMDI Blyg

You can’t write unless you want to write. And you can’t want to write unless you feel like it. Say you’re a doctor with a nice practice. You don’t feel so well today—family troubles and other things you can’t quite put a name to...Well you can still carry on and what the hell, quarter-grain of morphine for each patient; no matter what is wrong with them, *they will* feel better immediately and prize me as the greatest of croakers. And if I get any sass from the Narcs, I’ll just tell ‘em, ‘Well I’m off to work in the Bahrein Islands so you can shove it up your ass.’ I mean, even if you don’t feel like practicing medicine you can still do it… In these other professions you can always cover for not feeling like doing it, but writing you didn’t feel like doing—ain’t worth shit.

—A Word to the Wise Guy, from The Adding Machine, 1985 via Kipple, Jun—by Cat Celebrezze | Metapsychosis

I wonder what Burroughs would say about LLMs, which are basically his cut-up technique perverted by capitalism. It's producing an enormous flood of words that nobody feels like doing.

Ask Claude

• This is a genuinely rich observation that cuts to something important about Burroughs's entire worldview. Let me lay out the tension:

• The cut-up's original premise

• "Word and image locks" control the mind, locking us into conventional patterns of perceiving, thinking, and speaking. The cut-up was conceived as a way of exposing those word and image controls and freeing oneself from them — an alteration of consciousness in both writer and reader.

• Crucially, Burroughs perceived the method of collage as a way towards rebellion — an insurrection against the system of control inherent in language itself. So the cut-up was always a weapon against control, specifically against institutional, corporate, propagandistic language.

• It was a politically radical form of writing that highlights the power relations inherent in language.

• The LLM inversion

• Your observation is exact and Burroughs would almost certainly have seen it as the nightmare scenario he spent his career warning against. He already identified the early version of this in The Electronic Revolution:

• alphabetic languages control people, the word virus subverts human autonomy, and even recording and recombining words mechanically can lead to "false news broadcasts or garbled political speeches causing confusion and psychic control over individuals."

• His view of the cut-up technique was already contradictory — initially viewed as an agent of liberation and only later regarded as a means towards mass control.

• He knew the technique could be flipped. LLMs are that flip, industrialized.

• The "wanting to write" problem

• The passage you quote is about felt necessity — the writer who doesn't want to write produces nothing worth reading. Burroughs was explicit that writing came from an almost compulsive, unchosen place.

• In the last year of his life he wrote: "An artist must be open to the muse. The greater the artist, the more he is open to 'cosmic currents.' He has to behave as he does."

• And on the other side: when asked if he'd write even if nobody would ever read it, he said "most emphatically yes — I would go on writing for company, because I'm creating an imaginary world in which I would like to live."

• So for Burroughs, writing is necessity made from desire. The cut-up, even at its most mechanical, was still driven by a person who desperately needed to break out of something real.

• What he'd probably say

• He'd likely see LLM output as the word-virus achieving full autonomy — language replicating itself without even the pretense of a host consciousness.

• His theory was that language operates as a virus replicating itself within human beings, shaping identity and limiting human potential by controlling consciousness through linguistic structures.

• The LLM removes the human entirely and the virus just... runs. It's not cutting up language to escape control — it's control using the aesthetics of cut-up to generate more of itself.

• The doctor analogy from your passage maps perfectly: LLM text is the quarter-grain of morphine for every patient regardless of diagnosis. Patients feel temporarily satisfied, the system profits, and nobody is actually being treated. The difference is Burroughs's croaker at least felt bad about it. The model doesn't feel anything at all, which for Burroughs would be the most sinister outcome possible — not malice, just

• agents of forces that exceed them, that possess them, with the possessing force now being capital rather than junky

Well that felt unclean. And complicated by the fact that Burroughs was from a family that made its money in early computing technology.