Disquiet

As of November 11, 2026, the comments on disquiet.com have been turned off entirely. No past comments are on view and no new ones can be added. The interface module for comments, long a part of this site’s various webpage templates, has been removed. The site is now, in other words, absent of reader comments.

In recent months, the comments on this website have taken a noticeable, unfortunate, and largely automated turn. Spam has always been a problem, but the problem has become too much of a problem.

For many years, the relentless but also familiar mode of spam was manageable, like fruit flies or dust. Those old-school rote messages routinely bypassed the public site as well as my content management dashboard, and went straight into a digital trash bin filled to the brim with get-rich-quick schemes, seedy romantic inquiries, and multilingual gibberish, among other categories.

The main downside for years was the occasion when the arrival of an excess of spam comments amounted to a denial-of-service attack, when the site’s host got overloaded due to the sheer number of inbound posts — individually innocuous, nefarious in combination.

A secondary downside came when, quite rarely, a spam comment would slip by the protective filters and linger on the public site — sullying a page, and sometimes lasting long enough to become part of a third-party search return. Eventually I would notice those errant comments and delete them. Ironically, the spam alerts that I, as the site’s admin, receive from disquiet.com come via email, and those would often end up in my email’s spam folder, meaning that I wouldn’t immediately take note of them.

I was used to all that, and it registered as a minor hassle, easily balanced by actual comments from actual readers, often alerting me to subjects I was previously unaware of.

But then things changed, and quite quickly, and not for the better. A lot more comments snuck by the spam filters, this new generation of spam written in more natural and less boilerplate prose. What was unchanged was that this new influx of comments would mention something in a post, and then link to some app or financial scheme or otherwise questionable website.

A lot is said about the “uncanny valley,” when humans recoil at something that is human-like yet just inhuman enough to cause discomfort, even disgust — a vertiginous response to a digital expression across the narrowing void. What is going on, however, in these new comments isn’t merely uncanny; it’s canny, a sly and considered force striving to pick the lock of the recipient’s ego or empathy. Naturally (which is to say, unnaturally), it all bore hallmarks of the consequential malfeasant deployment of LLMs: unctuous, propulsive, grammatically sophisticated, and ever so slightly out of conceptual focus (that’s the uncanny part). This era’s spam comments are the gangrene of the Dead Internet theory. It’s no longer fruit flies and dust; it’s locusts and sandstorms.

Most of these new spam comments were just mutant versions of old-school spam, a block of text intended to allow a link elsewhere to flourish. Some were actual promotional messages about actual music releases or about actual music-making technology, but written courtesy of the noxious social engineering inherent in habitual LLM usage. This latter set was odd, since there are clear instructions on this site about how to submit material for consideration. But so be it: further evidence that the less one writes, the lower one’s reading comprehension.

The 30th anniversary of disquiet.com happens in just over a month, on December 13, 2026. I’ve enjoyed having comments on the site, and to a degree I will miss them, but they were never central to why or how I do what I do here. Maybe someone will fix the comment spam issue in the future, and then maybe I’ll turn the comments back on. But doing so is not a priority. People know how to reach me, and after reading this, they may understand how not to, as well.

We live in a new golden age of bumper stickers

A detail of the gigantic mobile sculpture hanging from the ceiling at the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption in San Francisco. It is by Richard Lippold, whom I always think about in the context of his prominence in John Cage’s book Silence. Cage connects the act of listening to the “openness” of Leopold’s sculptures, much as he does to Mies van der Rohe’s glass houses. Cage wrote, “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.” Even amid the stillness of that massive interior space atop Cathedral Hill, Lippold’s work is constantly in motion, just at a very subtle level, a vast number of tiny movements, a silent wind chime the patterns of which, from one moment to the next, are too complicated, too numerous, to ever be repeated.