The Textpocalypse

On digital humanists and the systems they invited in

There is a feed called DH — Digital Humanities, understood in the most expansive way possible — and if you scroll it on a Tuesday afternoon in early March 2026, you will find: a broccoli rabe shortage in Philadelphia; an announcement about volunteer positions at something called ADHO; a seminar titled How to Survive the Textpocalypse; someone receiving texts in Egypt; the phrase "stochastic ventriloquism."

You will also find, posted by someone with an academic handle, the observation that tech bros evangelizing about the very agentic AI that is eliminating their jobs is a go-to example of Lauren Berlant's notion of "cruel optimism."

Cruel optimism: the condition of remaining attached to an object — an idea, a fantasy, a system — that actively impedes your flourishing. The thing you want is the thing that's killing you, and the wanting is the problem.

This is said without apparent irony on a feed populated entirely by people who spent the better part of twenty years building a field premised on the generative encounter between humanistic inquiry and computational methods. They invited the systems in. They wrote the syllabi, organized the conferences, published the journals, trained the graduate students. They were the ones who kept insisting that "digital" was a legitimate modifier for the kinds of questions that humanists had always asked.

And now someone is offering a seminar called How to Survive the Textpocalypse, and the nod in the title is to a colleague who helped name the catastrophe, and the institution is a place where people teach other people to read.

A game critic's bio at a publication is gone, hollowed out by the same market forces that the discourse about games helped render legible and therefore investable. A journal stops asking for alternative reviewer suggestions as an anti-fraud measure — a policy designed to prevent AI-generated peer review — that will, according to someone on the feed, "do nothing whatsoever except further diminish the role of journal as knowledge community."

The measures taken against dissolution accelerate the dissolution.

There is an account on the feed that describes itself as a former science fiction account, now posting real photographs of Chicago. The implication is that reality got there first. The futures science fiction imagined have arrived, or something shaped like them has, and the genre that warned us turns out to have also been a kind of rehearsal. We practiced the catastrophe. We assigned it as reading. We wrote careful papers about what it would mean.

The sea heaves somewhere. The pressure holds. The broccoli rabe is on backorder.