Interview/essay with novelist Robin Sloan arguing creators should avoid algorithmic optimization and prioritize offline, oddball work.

This is the Sublime newsletter, where we share an eclectic assortment of ideas curated in and around the Sublime universe.In case you missed it… we released our annual zine: Whoa, Vol. 2: Conversations on AI and Creativity. We’ll be releasing one conversation here each week. If you’d rather savor instead of scroll + want early access to all ten conversations, including David Perell, Oliver Burkeman, Venkatesh Rao, and Anu Atluru, grab the physical + digital zine.Get your copyThis series is made possible by Mercury: business banking that more than 200k entrepreneurs use and hands down my favorite tool for running Sublime.Running a company is hard. Mercury is one of the rare tools that makes it feel just a little bit easier.Every other banking platform makes me feel like I’m doing taxes. Mercury makes me feel like I’m building something. The interface is unbelievably intuitive, fast, and lets me handle everything in one place – banking, cards, spend management, invoicing, and more.If you’re a business owner of any type, visit mercury.com today and find out why so many of us actually love how we bank.**Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.How to describe Robin Sloan? He is the New York Times bestselling author of the scifi novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore published in 2012, and Moonbound, which arrived in 2024. But calling him a novelist misses the point.Robin is something rarer—he codes for fun, worked at Twitter at some point, prints zines on a Riso machine in his office, makes specialty olive oil, and has been experimenting with AI long before it was cool.This makes him possibly the tech world’s most literate programmer, or literature’s most technical novelist (do these words even make sense?). Either way, he has a unique vantage point that lets him see both the promise and the absurdity of the current moment.In this conversation, we c