Q. Would You Read this Book?

Week 1...

ChatGPT please write me a short book proposal for the Dictionary of Shared language. A short guide to those contested words, freedom, choice, justice etc. – demonstrating the social rather than the solipsistic meaning.

ChatGPT said:

Book Proposal: The Dictionary of Shared Language

Subtitle: Reclaiming the Words That Shape Our World

Overview

The Dictionary of Shared Language is a concise, timely, and powerful guide to the most contested words in contemporary life—terms like freedom, choice, truth, justice, security, and normal. These words shape our political speech, our private beliefs, our media discourse—yet they have become hollowed out, polarized, or privatized. We invoke them constantly, but rarely pause to ask: what do we mean? And who is included in that meaning?

This book reclaims these foundational terms not as personal slogans but as social contracts. It maps their etymologies, their manipulations, their moral weight—and asks how we might speak of freedom or truth in a way that binds us together, rather than drives us apart.

Part lexicon, part manifesto, part cultural excavation, The Dictionary of Shared Language is a short, beautiful, and necessary intervention in a time when language itself is under siege.

Graphics by ChatGPT

Purpose and Audience

This book is for readers who feel that something has gone wrong in how we speak to each other—and want tools to begin repairing it. It will appeal to:

• Civic-minded citizens and educators

• Cultural critics and journalists

• Young people disillusioned by politics but hungry for meaning

• Readers of George Orwell, Rebecca Solnit, Lewis Hyde, Mary Beard, and Zadie Smith

It can live on the shelf beside On Tyranny, The Elements of Eloquence, Hope in the Dark, and The Words That Made Us—but it will be briefer, more poetic, and more radical in its refusal to cede language to cynicism.

Structure

Each entry (200–600 words) takes a single word—freedom, choice, truth, patriot, future, normal, etc.—and unpacks:

• Its historical and rhetorical usage

• How it has been weaponized or hollowed out

• What a social meaning might look like, grounded in solidarity, responsibility, and interdependence

There are no strict alphabetical rules. Words echo, spiral, contradict. Cross-references abound. The structure itself will suggest that language is relational, not linear.

Sample entries might include:

• Freedom: From "freedom to" vs. "freedom from" to the market’s hijacking of autonomy.

• Choice: How consumer logic overtook moral agency—and how to rebuild shared responsibility.

• Truth: Beyond fact vs. lie—toward shared verification and collective trust.

• Normal: Who gets to define it? And who does it erase?

• Hope: Not optimism, not branding—a commitment to the future as a commons.

Why Now

We live in an age of language collapse. Political actors use “freedom” to justify cruelty, “truth” to peddle lies, “choice” to obscure coercion. The result isn’t just confusion—it’s a crisis of imagination. We can’t build a better world if we don’t have shared words to describe it.

The Dictionary of Shared Language is a civic, cultural, and moral intervention. It doesn’t preach consensus—but it invites coherence, humility, and rigor. In reclaiming our words, we reclaim the possibility of public life.

Author Background

Robin Hunt is a writer and reader, with deep experience across journalism, academia, and cultural theory. He is the creator of Hard Books, the maker of Ovids.

Footnote

Yesterday, after endgame Thiel, ChatGPT defined some of the problems, and it is at the fourth that this bonus Friday afternoon proposal is aimed:

1. Tech as New Religion
   Not just in the sense of AI as God, but in its rituals, high priests, and invisible dogmas. Thiel, Musk, Altman: prophets or grifters—or both?

2. Grift as Governance
   The boundary between venture and venture scam is porous. Crypto, SPACs, privatized infrastructure—mafia logic dressed in disruption's hoodie.

3. Religious Resurgence
   Not just MAGA-style reaction, but deeper: a return to authority, myth, submission. A hunger for coherence in a sea of chaos.

4. Collapse of Public Imagination
   The state is hollowed. The market is cynical. The planet is burning. Into that void rush storytellers, cults, AI, and memes, all offering meaning—or monetizing its absence.

It said of Hard Books: ‘You are showing how to live literately in the ruins. And more: how to turn the ruins into reading rooms. Hard Books aren't just a literary project. They are an act of public memory, a refusal to scroll, and a weapon against amnesia.’

Tomorrow a round up of the week and a counter-point to One to Zero.

Turning the Ruins into Reading Rooms. July 11, 2025. Graphics by ChatGPT

Robin - Friday