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While promoting my essay prize—the contest that led to the anthology you’re holding—I went randomly, absolutely, and horrifically viral, but for something very unrelated, something antithetical to the slow craft of the essay: slop. AI is polluting the Internet and it’s so unavoidable now that Merriam-Webster awarded slop as the 2025 Word of the Year. To me, slop is the abandoning of craftsmanship, a core thing I stand for. And so I am sad to report that I, in a moment of procrastination, added to the sludge. I got half-a-million views—double the lifetime traffic of my entire writing portfolio—for a prompted meme that made the news and got Martin Luther King Jr.’s likeness banned from the Sora app. Yikes. It is strange to me that after six years of writing online, after a million earnest words poured into essays and logs and a textbook, my most ‘effective’ string of text ever written was, by far, “do this but MLK.” This, and other oddities like it, are signals that the Internet is undergoing a seismic weirdening, flooding our feeds and rewarding the wrong things. Now over half of the text published online is machine-made, and it’s only accelerating; the year closed with the rise of “moltbots,” pseudo-beings with pseudo-consciousness that crawl the Internet 24/7 and blog about their text-based existence. Are we entering a future of such titanic volume where writers become undiscoverable? Are we cooked?

There’s a great paradox here: the very thing that is engulfing us in Total Noise is also quietly spearheading us into the golden age of the essay. Self-publishing is empowering the medium to become what it was destined to be. Throughout its 450-year history, the essay was celebrated as an informal way for anyone to think for themselves, against the reigning dogmas, but publishing was always bottlenecked by a gatekeeper with a printing press. Now there are millions of people self-publishing essays on Substack. Many make a living from paid subscriptions. You can find esoteric pockets of essays for almost any niche imaginable: citizen scientists, effective altruists, techno-humanists, screen abolitionists, unschoolers, cyberpunks, utopianists and absurdists, sex statisticians, confessional degenerates, midwestern maximalists—if you know where to look, there is too much good stuff to read online. It’s more than I can keep up with (I’ve tried). Compared to the writers of literary magazines—who adhere to house styles, carry no risk, and get little feedback outside their editor—independent writers are forged in the crucible of the market. With total autonomy, everything to lose, and real-time feedback from their audience, a devoted essayist will improve faster and grow into an eccentric, singular force. And so the same conditions that produce endless slop also produce endless quality. 

But when you remove gatekeepers, you not only trigger a bottom-up literary movement, but also a torrent of heat-seeking slop, unimaginable in scale, overshadowing all things good. We have not truly removed gatekeepers, but replaced them with something worse. At least the old gatekeepers stood for something! Even if the literati were elitists, at least they used their taste and philosophy to filter and shape culture. Today’s feedkeepers, who like Voldemort need not be named, stand for nothing; with full access to your reading history, they feed you a custom stream of slop, of fear and lust and outrage and shock, of Ellen-DeGeneres-is-a-cannibal conspiracy theories, of whatever it takes to maximize your Total User Milliseconds (TUM), and then tell you it’s all “for you”—the Great Gaslight! If a golden age exists, it is disaggregated, unconscious, illegible and irrelevant to the cold macroeconomics of attention.

Our problem is a curation problem. Old gatekeepers had taste but no reach; new gatekeepers reach without taste. Can we combine scale with human judgment? There are unfortunately not enough interns in the galaxy to read the Internet. How might we scan the sprawl to find the signal in the slop?

To wrangle this evergrowing web, we can’t just “know it when we see it,” we need to quantify the signal we’re searching for by turning it into code. We need algorithms that see beyond views, likes, and conversions. We need quality-seeking algorithms that can deconstruct what makes something great. I imagine a particular breed of artist will loathe this sentiment. Any attempt to define, label, categorize, and rank art is seen as sacrilegious, poisoning the mystery with a machine intellect. The Romantic poet William Wordsworth said analysis kills art: “we murder to dissect.” I agree the sublime is immeasurable. A “quality metric” is an imperfect signal, a pale approximation of the thing that might give you the chills. But the point of quantifying art isn’t to deliver a final verdict; the point is to make sure emerging artists don’t get drowned out, lost in a culture that’s shaped by superficial signals, a culture currently dominated by robots, hucksters, slang parrots, and now, sloplords.

Once we shed the quantification-is-evil mindset, we then face the harder, more interesting questions: Can we agree on the signal? If we each harbor our own subjective taste and cling to it dearly, how will we ever agree on what “the best” is? And wouldn’t a single definition of quality be yet another act of gatekeeping, imposing a tyrannical bias over the free-flowing nature of Internet essays?

The 2025 Essay Architecture Prize was an experiment to design a new kind of curation system. A typical prize relies on a single judge or a panel with a shared agenda, but we wanted to create a rich, multi-dimensional signal. So we built an architecture that incorporated many competing lenses to quality. We had 10 judges—including doctorates and comedians, memoirists and journalists, people focused on the past, present, and future—structured across a multi-branch system. I use the word “branch” because I see this working somewhat like the American system of government (as designed), a triad of checks and balances. There are judicial laws baked into software that evaluate the fundamentals of essay writing (Essay Architecture), a council of people that represent different corners of the Internet (effectively, the legislative branch), and then a single executive, a well-respected Internet citizen with a unique ability to interpret the intangibles. An essay that excels in one branch might be weak in the others: perfect craftsmanship might be soulless, a revolutionary perspective might have choppy prose, an original work might alienate the public. And so the essays that excel in all three branches might truly earn the title of best.

When looking through the finalists, I found it interesting how they varied in audience size, evenly distributed between 10s, to 100s, to 1,000s, to 10,000+ subscribers. This inaugural prize only covered a small search space, but my hypothesis is that if we scaled this up and had artificial intelligence scout the entire Internet for great essays, we’d find that reach and quality are uncorrelated. For every writer with a massive audience, there are likely hundreds more of equal caliber, undiscovered in our algorithmic gutters. The reply I’d expect is, “well, it’s not enough to write well, it’s your responsibility to be consistent, to be your own marketer and publicist, to make sure your work gets read.” I get that this is what’s been required, but what if it weren’t? Wouldn’t it be better if a platform could tastefully curate at scale so writers could just do their thing?

In addition to meritocracy (or maybe, qualitocracy), there’s another important function of an annual essay anthology I haven’t talked about yet. The prompt for the prize was “What’s it like to live in 2025?” Quality is more than well-rounded composition and inter-subjective resonance, it’s about relevance too. Does this essay matter now? Does the experience on the page orbit the zeitgeist? What you anthologize becomes legible to the culture, and what you don’t anthologize stays unconscious, and so the most important signal we can pull from the Internet are timeless essays that capture our timely circumstance. While a typical Year-in-Review zooms out to popular culture, focusing on celebrities, wars, gizmos, and things loud enough to flash on everyone’s screens, the essay offers a more human-shaped scale of sensemaking. David Foster Wallace said essays are “occasions to watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives.”

The Best Internet Essays 2025 is a mosaic of experiences that triangulate the unnamed spirit of our time. Each essay is different—you’ll find yourself in nature, in stadiums, in parades, at Slutcon, in a concert hall, in a drug dealer’s apartment, in church—but the approximate theme is this: there’s a yearning for an intentional life in face of the dizzying and disembodying effects of a technocratic society trying to commoditize you, to commoditize everything. The modern world brings a slew of benefits: convenience, speed, efficiency, optionality. But secretly bundled with its many promises are invisible amputations: an erosion of place, a numbing of the senses, a hollowing-out of interiority. Each of these essays feels lodged in a modern struggle, yet each is characterized by a writer’s earnest attempt to derive their own way through it. There are endless things to grant our attention to, and that is the most consequential choice we can make.

Personally, this collection resonates because a month or so after the prize window closed, I had my first child, my daughter. Having a kid is possibly the most out-of-the-matrix and into-your-skin experience you can have. It’s something like ego-death—to switch from a language-based reality to one of burps, coos, screams, and smiles—and it challenges me to be slower, more perceptive. Something my daughter loves doing is “the grand tour,” where I bring her up to my shoulder and walk her around the apartment, showing her all the art we’ve hung up, the art of my wife, her mother and grandmother. I’m surprised how transfixed she can get on visual objects. She stares at paintings for much longer than we usually do, and so I try to join her. I’ve started noticing all these subtle details, marks and mistakes, easter eggs, things I never truly saw on the walls surrounding me for years. In some way, that’s a metaphor for the theme of this book: we’re all tapped into a vast stream of information, a totalizing dream of work and play and doom, but even all of that is dwarfed by an infinite canvas of texture and meaning in the world around us, in the space beyond the edges of our screens, if we care to look.

The last essay in this collection is by our guest judge, Henrik Karlsson, and is titled, “almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself and bloom.” This feels to me like a succinct way to explain the power of reading and writing essays too. Essay writing is a practice of self-direction, of personal sovereignty, and as our prize winner Tommy Dixon says, of “writing your way into a beautiful existence.” As you read this anthology, if you find yourself inspired, I hope you realize the permissionless nature of the Internet. You can just write essays. It’s not a genre reserved for professional writers. Most of the writers in this anthology are not full-time writers either; they are founders, technologists, teachers, parents, people who use writing to find a signal of their own, sharpen their thinking, and steer their lives. You don’t need a platform, a credential, a brand, niche, or audience; you just need the patience to direct your attention to an idea that matters to you, and to sit with it until it begins to bloom.