The Four Horsemen — and an Em Dash?
While the world frets over AI killing off jobs, democracy, or civilisation as we know it, the first actual fatality was far smaller and more stylish: the em dash — murdered in cold type by shame and suspicion.
Not your job. Not your dignity. Not even your tenuous grasp of reality.
Just a bit of typography, too smug by half, wiped off the literary map by the creeping unease that maybe, just maybe, you didn’t write that paragraph yourself.
Because let’s be honest: the em dash had a tone. A vibe. A kind of literary toss of the fringe that said, I know what I’m doing here. Which is precisely the problem.
That confidence — that rhythm — now reads like a dead giveaway. An AI tell. A fingerprint left at the scene of a perfectly structured sentence. It’s become suspiciously competent. And that, in this weird purgatory of tech adoption and moral panic, is deeply unfashionable.
We’re not in the golden age of AI. We’re in the shame spiral.
This is the guilt-and-denial phase of technological adoption — where everyone’s using it, and everyone’s pretending they’re not. It’s a bit like teenage fumbling under the doona. Clumsy, furtive, and immediately followed by a sudden, guilty compulsion to tidy everything up.
Hence the em dash has to go. It’s too clean. It’s too composed. It knows what it’s doing. And right now, nobody wants to look like they know what they’re doing, lest they be accused of having a GPT ghostwriter in their corner.
So we scrub. We sterilise. We type like we’re wearing mittens. Short sentences. Full stops. A hesitant stammer of prose that sounds reliably human — that is to say, a little shit.
We’ve entered the era of anti-style. Not writing, but camouflage. Because God forbid we come off polished. God forbid we sound… assisted.
And here’s the cruel irony: AI has improved the average punter’s writing out of sight. We’re not talking about turning poets into prophets. Just the average marketing manager, school principal, CEO — the kind of people who used to write emails like spilled alphabet soup. Who once thought “please don’t hesitate to reach out should you have any queries” was how real humans talk.
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