The fifth installment of Dominic Chen’s series Fermentation and Generation: The “Beast Paths” — An Alternative to Information Technology, titled “Resisting the Bullet Point,” has been published in the web magazine Plain living, high thinking.
This article traces the full-scale start of dogfooding Pickles, describing the iterative process of adjusting prompts while reading AI-generated responses delivered each morning. Taking as its point of departure the “dry, bullet-point-laden reports” produced by the initial prompts, the piece interrogates the underlying logic of generative AI that equates clarity with frictionlessness. Rather than asking AI to deliver “correct answers,” the prompts are rewritten from the ground up to introduce productive friction—through the framing of an exchange of letters and a shift toward evocative, non-assertive prose that unsettles memory and invites reflection. The article marks a concrete turning point in exploring how to design circuits of language that cannot be reduced to bullet points.
Fifth article:
