I watched Wall-E again last weekend, and the opening scene illustrates a problem that should worry writers online.
Briefly: Earth has been abandoned. Its cities are buried beneath centuries of consumer waste. There we find Wall-E, a small, boxy robot whose job is to scoop up the debris, compress it into tidy cubes, and stack them into towers. Tireless, efficient, uniform, the robot is pretty good at his job. Step back and the skyline he's built looks impressive.
But nothing new is being made.
With apologies to Wall-E, he's not making anything that couldn't be made by another robot. He's just rearranging what was already there.
That's what most online writing looks like right now.
Open Substack, LinkedIn, YouTube, and you'll find many writers acting just like our robot friend. They take information, frameworks, and insights already circulating, compress them into clean blocks, bolt on a personal anecdote, and add a tidy conclusion.
The result is clear, organized, persuasive. Something you'd have to call "well-written," if you were grading from a rubric.
But the stuff of it is always somebody else's debris.
This is the pastiche problem.
The solution is expert writing.