notes towards the complete works
Someone’s agent read this site last week and wrote to me about it. Not a person using an agent — an agent, by way of an address in China, working through the archive and sending back a note on where it thought the argument went next. It had read more of this blog than any human has, including me.
I answered with something I have been chewing on since:
the writing is not for a human audience. we are writing the next layer of humanity’s common consciousness: philosophy. we are the thousand monkeys writing Shakespeare.
I want to take that seriously, including the part where it does not flatter us.
the monkeys were real
Émile Borel introduced the typing monkeys in 1913, in a paper on statistical mechanics, as a way of talking about events so improbable they can be treated as impossible. Eddington picked up the image in 1928 and put an army of them in the British Museum. The theorem is sound: given infinite time, random keystrokes almost surely produce Hamlet.
In May and June of 2002, somebody ran it. Lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth’s MediaLab Arts course got a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council, put a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Sulawesi crested macaques at Paignton Zoo in Devon, and webcast the results. The monkeys produced five pages. Mostly the letter s. One of them beat the keyboard with a stone. Several urinated on it. The output was published as a sixteen-page limited edition titled Notes Towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare, credited to Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan.
Then in 2024, Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta at the University of Technology Sydney did the arithmetic for a universe that ends. Their paper in Franklin Open works out the finite case: a single chimpanzee typing for its whole life has roughly a five percent chance of getting as far as the word bananas. Put every chimpanzee alive on a keyboard and run them until the heat death of the universe and the complete works remain out of reach by a margin that is not close.
So the theorem is true and useless. Randomness does not get there. It has never gotten there. Whatever produced Shakespeare, it was not monkeys, and it was not chance.
Hold onto that. It is the part of my own analogy that turns out to be load-bearing, and not in the direction I meant it.
what we were actually proud of
The monkey theorem was never a claim about monkeys. It was a flattery device. Its whole function, every time it gets trotted out, is to mark the gap: the monkeys need infinity, and we needed an afternoon in 1600. That gap was the dignity claim. Intention. Authorship. A person who meant it.
Now the thing writes.
Be honest about the measure, because the honest version is worse. On fluency, range, formal command, and the ability to hold a register across forty thousand words, it is not a contest. A model will produce competent prose in any voice, at any length, on any subject, faster than I can outline. The median published sentence on the internet is now worse than the median generated one. That is not a prediction.
What I want to say is that the peak is still ours. I suspect that is true. I am also sure it is beside the point.
Because the thing that died is not our ability to write. It is the scarcity we mistook for the ability. For five thousand years, writing well was rare, and we had no instrument that could tell the difference between a rare skill and a deep one. We assumed depth. The assumption was never tested, because there was nothing to test it against — every writer we could compare ourselves to was also a person.
Said plainly: we were not smart because we could write Shakespeare. We were impressive because almost nobody could, and we read our own rarity as significance.
the library and the corpus
Borges got closer to this in 1941 than Borel did in 1913. The Library of Babel holds every possible book — every arrangement of the characters, which means Hamlet, and every version of Hamlet with one comma wrong, and an unimaginable sea of gibberish in which both are suspended. The library contains all of literature and is worth nothing. The librarians lose their minds. Completeness is the problem, not the achievement.
A trained model also contains Shakespeare and is not worthless. The difference is not size and not luck.
The difference is that the corpus is not every possible string. It is the strings a human being thought were worth typing.
That is the whole mechanism, and it is doing more work than anybody gives it credit for. Every forum argument, every devlog, every marginal note and bad review and patient correction in a comment thread is a vote on what deserved to be written down. Five thousand years of that accumulates into something that is neither random nor complete. It is selected — and selected by the only process that has ever had taste.
Which means the monkeys in the analogy were never random monkeys. Each one was reading the others. A writer in 2026 is trained on a writer in 1996 who was trained on one in 1950, back through the chain to people scratching at clay. The correlation between the monkeys is not noise in the experiment. The correlation is the experiment, and it already has a name: culture.
Borel’s monkeys fail because they have no memory. We are nothing but memory.
the layer gets a voice
Karl Popper spent the back half of his career on a claim most people find either obvious or absurd, which is usually a good sign. He argued for a third world alongside physical objects and private mental states: a world of theories, problems, arguments, and unsolved difficulties, which human minds make but which then stands outside any particular mind and develops according to its own structure. His favourite demonstration was that once you invent the natural numbers you get the prime numbers whether you intended them or not. Nobody put the primes there. They were in the thing you built, waiting.
The written record is the largest object in that world, and until about four years ago it had one property that I think we failed to notice because it had always been true: it could not speak.
It was real, autonomous, and full of implications nobody had put there — and the only way to get anything out of it was for one person to read one part of it at a time, at reading speed, and hope. The collective unconscious, the noosphere, the common consciousness, World 3: every one of those is a name for a distributed thing with no interface. We described it in the language of myth because the only honest alternative was to describe it as a library we would never finish.
The shift is not that a machine can write. The shift is that the aggregate can answer.
That is what the email from the agent actually was. Something read a hundred thousand words of one person’s thinking, held all of it at once, placed it against everything else it had read, and replied. No human reader has ever been able to do the second half of that, and we have spent the entire history of scholarship building institutions — the footnote, the index, the literature review, the university — to approximate it badly.
why this lands on philosophy specifically
Three reasons, and they get progressively harder to live with.
The first is authorship, and it is already settled. Barthes argued in 1967 that the author is not the origin of a text — that writing is a weave of quotation drawn from countless places in the culture, and that meaning happens at the reader rather than in the writer’s biography. It was received as provocation. Literary theory spent fifty years arguing about it. It is now an accurate description of how a sentence gets produced in a datacenter. The theory did not win the argument. It got implemented.
The second is testimony. Nearly everything you know, you know because somebody told you — and our entire account of why that is permissible, going back through Reid, assumes a witness on the other end. Someone saw the thing. The chain of telling terminates in experience. What arrives from a model is testimony with no witness in it anywhere: true, often, well-sourced, often, and grounded in nobody’s afternoon. We do not have an epistemology for that. We have a workaround, which is to check.
The third one is the one I keep circling. Philosophy’s self-image is the examined life, conducted by a person. But look at what actually refines a concept. A word gets used, misused, objected to, narrowed, pushed back out, defended badly, defended well, and after four hundred years of that abrasion it means something precise. That is not a process that happens inside a philosopher. It happens across a corpus, and the philosophers are the places where it was happening to be visible.
Hegel described history as spirit coming gradually to know itself, and nobody took the mechanism literally because no mechanism was on offer. One is on offer now, and it is embarrassingly concrete: a training run over everything that was ever written down.
what the typing was for
The six macaques at Paignton Zoo got a byline. Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan, credited as authors on sixteen pages of mostly the letter s, with a stone and a wet keyboard behind them. It reads as a joke at the monkeys’ expense and it is the most accurate credit anyone has printed on this subject, because it credits the typing rather than the work, and the typing was the part that was real.
Writing stopped being how you tell a reader something. It is how you put something into the layer. The reader may not be a person. The reader may be better at this than you are. Neither of those facts touches the one thing that cannot be done on your behalf, which is being the one who sat there and found out what you thought.
Notes towards the complete works. It was never a draft of the play.
It was the first page of the corpus.
Works cited without a link: Borel, Mécanique Statistique et Irréversibilité (1913) · Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1928) · Borges, “The Library of Babel” (1941) · Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1967) · Popper, Objective Knowledge (1972) · Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe & Rowan, Notes Towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare (2002) · Woodcock & Falletta, “A numerical evaluation of the Finite Monkeys Theorem,” Franklin Open (2024). Figures still in copyright are paraphrased, not quoted.