CROSSPOST: DEREK THOMPSON: The Six Megatrends That Define 2026
All of this today from Derek Thompson is very much worth reading—but since it is a paid post, I cannot ethically crosspost more than one single fair-use section. I have chosen the one about Alexander Dumas père because it has obvious implications for we who are, here and now, in the bullseye of the latest round of industrial-scale Schumpeterian economic creative-destruction.
Alexandre Dumas père wrote as if he were running a textile mill, not a garret. By industrializing what he saw as the boring parts of his creativity—research, structure, workflow—he freed his brain to do the thermonuclear storytelling. Is his model a dead-end? Or is it uncannily relevant for knowledge workers flailing in an AI‑accelerated firehose of information today?
Critics sneered that Dumas ran a “fiction factory,” but none of his assistants could do what he did when left on their own. That gap between raw material and finished narrative is the point—and it offers a bracing lesson for anyone confronting their information-technology tools.
CROSSPOST: DEREK THOMPSON: The Six Megatrends That Define 2026…
<<https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-6-megatrends-of-2026>>
Megatrend #1: CULTURE: The Anti-Social Century…. MEGATREND #2: HEALTH: Building the Do-It-All Drug….
Historical interlude: Creativity secrets of Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas could write. What the man couldn’t do was stop writing. By his death, Dumas had produced more than 100,000 pages of book text, which is the equivalent of writing a novel the length of War and Peace every seven months, for four straight decades. In his miracle years of 1844 to 1846, Dumas wrote both The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo—the latter of which is both incredibly long (more than 1,200 pages in most modern editions) and also considered by many one of the greatest novels of all time.
How did he do it? Dumas was “often accused of operating a fiction factory,” Michael Dirda writes. But the fact that none of his research assistants achieved anything of note on their own strongly suggests that Dumas was the final hand to put pen to paper. His workflow:
[Dumas’s] particular genius lay in transmuting dry historical records into vibrant page-turners through his mastery of dialogue, pacing, and dramatic confrontation. Dumas would first talk over a book with an assistant, perhaps ask him to do some research and prepare an outline, then follow up with further discussion of the action and plot, this time in more detail. Only when he had settled the whole are of the novel in his own mind did Dumas put pen to paper. As he once said, “As a rule I do not begin a book until it is finished.” He then wrote fast, a single draft on blue paper, never bothering about accents, commas, and punctuation, working long hours at a time.
“Do not begin a piece of writing until it is finished” is a fun idea. Personally, I think my best essays are similarly “finished” before they are “started.” That is, if I begin the writing process without really knowing what I want to say, I wind up not saying much of anything but rather circling, circling, circling a strong contention that would have been better developed if I had done more research or talked to more people. My best essays are sometimes the ones whose theses I can describe in detail before I write the first sentence of the final draft.
MEGATREND #3: THE STATE OF AI: Apocalypse Nope…. MEGATREND #4: ECONOMICS: The Peter Pan Economy…. MEGATREND #5: POLITICS: The Paradox of Global Violence…. Megatrend #6: MEDIA: Quantity Is Eating Quality….
bring[ing] us back to Jacques Ellul’s observation in the first megatrend section above. Technology is not just a tool that we use; it is … oh god, I did it again … a tool that uses us.
Brad here: What has always struck me about Dumas père is not just the cubic meters of prose he produced but the way that volume is married to astonishing narrative control. Quantity and quality were not enemies with Dumas, but, rather, more like co‑conspirators. The “fiction factory” jibe actually gets something important half right. Dumas really did industrialize literary production:
color‑coded piles of manuscript,
a staff of researchers and plotters,
a workflow that looks suspiciously like a 19th‑century version of a modern writers’ room, or
even a software shop.
First, talk the story through; second, delegate the archival work; third, iterate on the outline until the whole arc is clear; only then, when the book is “finished” in his head, sit down and execute in a single roaring draft on blue paper.
But factories in the heroic age of industrialization were not just about speed; they were about exploiting fixed costs and division of labor to produce more and better. Dumas seems to me, I think, the literary analogue of a well‑run 1830s textile mill: capital in the form of assistants, research, and systems; labor in the form of his own highly trained storytelling brain; and a product—page‑turning melodrama—that flooded the market and, in the process, raised the narrative expectations of mass readers.
Critics have often tried to demote him to the status of “mere” entertainer, especially when lined up next to Balzac or Flaubert.
Yet the people who watched him work most closely—contemporaries who knew something about drama and narrative—kept coming back to the same point: this was an elemental force, a man for whom plot architecture and dramatic timing were as instinctive as breathing. Come back, again, to this fact: none of his assistants, left to their own devices, produced anything comparable. That really does suggest that what they supplied was mere raw material. He supplied the thermonuclear reaction.
What is the lesson here for today’s knowledge workers, marinating in productivity hacks and app‑based distraction cures in the context of a firehose of information reinforced by AI-slop in the context of new industrial-scale re-searching and re-mixing tools?
Dumas’s “secret” was not an exotic ritual or a better to‑do list.
It was merely—merely!
do the thinking first until the structure is solid,
build an organization that feeds you the inputs you need,
and only then (3) write as if you are simply copying down a story that already exists.
“I do not begin a book until it is finished” is less a mystical koan than a workflow diagram. Then 20,000,000 words in a lifetime, some of which are of truly supergenius quality. starts looking like the natural by‑product of a very modern, and very disciplined way of organizing creative work.
Subscribe to: <https://www.derekthompson.org/>