No one would have believed, in the increasingly stupid years of the 21st century, that I would open my daily scroll of doom to learn that James Patterson—the literary equivalent of a haunted fax machine plugged directly into the overflow tank at a Red Bull factory—was ‘co-writing’ a thriller with MrBeast, a man-child YouTube trolligarch who gamifies human desperation for likes, filming acts of weaponised charity to unlock a giant personal loot box in the winner-takes-all game of late-stage capitalism.
I understand that my fellow writers are understandably worried the AI bots are coming to kill us all—or maybe just repurpose us as organic meat batteries to power their ever-larger language models in some kind of Matrix-adjacent chatbot hellscape—but honestly, this feels like a bigger threat to the culture of the Word. (Unless the Word is, of course, “Subscribe and smash that like button, baby!”)
Set to drop in 2026 like a brand-collab killer asteroid crammed full of expired MrBeast Lunchables, this project has already triggered an eight-figure bidding war, a Hollywood adaptation frenzy, and an extinction-level cultural crisis for those of us in the publishing grift.
To me, it feels much worse than finding all of my titles on that list of books Mark Zuckerberg stole and fed into the Meta-furnace to fire up his AI ambitions. My books were routinely pirated/stolen/liberated-from-the-copyright-gulag by normal human beings long before the Zuckerbot decided his trillion-dollar dopamine mill couldn’t survive without super-massive intellectual property theft. Discovering I’d been ripped off by a billionaire was less revelation than a simple confirmation of how stuff works for real.
The publishing industry, after all, was eating itself long before the machines came for us. Celebrity book deals were part of that. Celebrity books can be fat, delicious cash cows, but they can also turn into horrifying cows-on-fire filling entire New York publishing offices with the stench of burning flesh and quarterly losses. Remember Jada Pinkett Smith’s spiritual memoir meets trauma TED Talk? No? I didn’t think so. But I’m guessing that a lot of interns, junior editors and first-time authors do, because they rode the red ink tsunami from that stinker, or one of many just like it, out of the industry and into exciting opportunities as burrito couriers, copywriters for novelty T-shirt dropshipping empires, and bitter footnotes in the annual Paris Review ‘Publishing Is Dying Again’ think piece.
AI threatens us with infinite slop. But this celebrity-influencer industrial complex? That’s cultural necrosis, with a ring light and a promo code.
AI cuts costs, corners, jobs, and joy as it sands down the edges of creativity with its global blandifier engine. But the fact that it’s so shit is also our salvation. To tell a good story you need to be able to think and feel, and AI simply cannot. All it can do is assemble probability chains from old Usenet threads and public-domain IKEA instructions.
The more immediate threat is this zombie-publishing bullshit. The celebrity-influencer business model is a reanimated corpse, stumbling forward in an endless, brainless search for the next monetizable attention spike. It doesn’t think. It doesn’t feel. It lurches from book deal to book deal, arms outstretched, dead eyes fixed on the void where human feeling used to live.
MrBeast and MrPatterson’s thriller may break sales records. It may spawn a Netflix series. Disney may buy in and spin up a cross-media deal with the 17 Limited Liability Companies holding exploitable IP from the Saw and Hostel franchises to offer bored teenagers a haunted escape room experience with a difference; the difference being that they get murdered for real on a Twitch livestream unless they can get one million thumbs up for their unboxing video of MrBeast’s new line of DIY Existential Disappointment Kits™—now with 20% more crushing despair and a free one-month trial of YouTube Premium.
So if you’re a young writer out there wondering why your deeply personal, decade-in-the-making debut novel about grief and loss and personal growth hasn’t sold, the answer is simple: You didn’t eat 100 cockroaches on camera while speed-running James Patterson’s latest online course.
Try harder, kids.
I’ll be trying harder too. This is only your first column today. I’mma send another apres lunch with links to my latest books, which you would be 1000% correct in assuming inspired this inside-publishing rant.
If you can’t come at another column. Fair enough. You can find the books here.
The Girl Who Came In From The Cold
Or, if your hatred of Amazon burns with the fire of a thousand suns…
This is a preorder for a collection that’ll drop everywhere besides Amazon in June. I’ll explain why later.
And here was me thinking this was all a lead-in to you announcing you were co-writing a cooking-based romance thriller with Nagi Maehashi. Tentative title: Live and Let Fry.
The profound utterings of Sir Les and his predeliction for scratch mark stickers based on a kids movie belie the urine stained reality of his very existence.