A forgotten tale of a tramp printer down on his luck.

Before chatbots and content farms, the penny press was generating slop at industrial scale. What the nineteenth century can teach us about today’s AI crisis — and what might come next.

We tend to think of the “infinite scroll” as a by-product of the smartphone era. But its roots stretch deep into the nineteenth century—a period that has a lot to teach us about today’s attention economy and the rise of LLMs.