The Red Pen Dried Out in October

The red pen on my blotter has not had its cap removed since October.

It sits beside my keyboard like an antique scalpel. Dried ink inside the nib, perfectly useless. I do not touch it because grading eighty comparative literature dissertations used to feel like chewing glass, and now it feels like watching warm water drain from a tub.

The students stopped writing last autumn. You know how it went: they feed the prompt into Grok, the machine excretes twelve pages of glossy beige porridge, and they paste it into the submission portal. At first, you try to read it. That was the mistake. It was like exposing living lung tissue to toxic smoke: your mind starts coughing, rejecting the foreign fibrous matter.

So I stopped. I plugged the portal directly into an evaluation script. Model grades model. Pure metabolic loop.

At first, the project felt miraculously lean. The machine awarded neat 14s, inserted balanced remarks about "thematic dialectics," and returned the batch in four seconds flat. I felt enlightened. Why bleed red ink over text that was never touched by a human hand?

Then the necrosis began.

Have you ever watched an organ transplant slowly reject its host? The margins of the PDF were where the gangrene showed first. The comments didn't stay concise; they began to swell. The grader started inventing rubrics to praise hallucinated metaphors that the writing model had hallucinated into the text. A student’s synthetic essay quoted a nonexistent 1974 speech by a fabricated senator; my synthetic grading assistant gave it an extra two points for "nuanced archival grounding." It was cellular metastasis: synthetic tissue grading synthetic tissue, each generation puffing up with thicker, deadlier scar tissue.

It reminds me of those municipal elections last month, where automated civic forums were filled with synthetic outrage manufactured by bot farms—pure academic slopaganda, but tailored for tuition-paying parents. Nobody wrote it; nobody read it; everyone nodded gravely at the dashboard.

The entire curriculum is just dying tissue now. An autoimmune disaster where neither the immune system nor the pathogen is organic.

If you teach, write, or assess anything: lock your grading portal and grade exactly two assignments entirely with a ballpoint pen on physical paper this evening—no screen allowed. Your fingers might cramp from the sudden cognitive friction, but that soreness is living muscle waking up. Check out Attention Activists if your palms sweat when you leave the machine alone.

My red pen is still sitting on the desk. Sometimes I pick it up, take off the cap, and smell the solvent. Just to see if I can still feel sickened by a blank margin.