Eddie Izzard had it right about flags. You know the bit:
“We [the British Empire] stole countries with the cunning use of flags. Just sail around the world and stick a flag in. ‘I claim India for Britain!’ They’re going ‘You can’t claim us, we live here! Five hundred million of us!’ ‘Do you have a flag?’ ‘No…’ ‘Well, if you don’t have a flag, then you can’t have a country. Those are the rules… that I just made up!’”
The beautiful thing about Izzard’s routine is how she captures the sheer brazenness of it: five hundred million people, living their lives, building civilizations, creating art and literature and philosophy, and some guy with a boat shows up and goes, “Sorry, no flag. Doesn’t count.” The audacity is so complete it becomes comedy.
But the real genius is in that last line: “Those are the rules… that I just made up!” Because that’s exactly how it worked. There’s no cosmic law that says flags equal countries. There’s no natural principle that textile technology determines sovereignty. Someone just decided that’s how it works, and then acted like it was written in stone.
It’s the perfect distillation of colonial logic: make up arbitrary standards that you happen to meet, then demand everyone else prove their legitimacy according to your brand-new criteria. The flag isn’t evidence of anything except the flag-planter’s conviction that he, she, or they get to decide what counts as evidence.
Foucault would recognize this immediately: power doesn’t just repress or exclude, it produces reality. It creates the categories by which everything else gets measured. The colonial administrator doesn’t just steal land; he manufactures the entire conceptual apparatus that makes the theft appear legitimate. The flag becomes a technology of truth production, generating the very criteria that justify its own authority.
And now the writing world has discovered flags.
Every week, another essay plants itself in the digital soil: “Why I Don’t Use AI,” “My Authentic Writing Process,” “The Death of Human Creativity.” Each one a small territorial claim, a declaration that this patch of moral high ground belongs to the author and everyone else is trespassing. The flag reads: I FIGURED OUT THE RIGHT WAY TO MAKE WORDS. YOU’RE WELCOME, PEASANTS.
Do you have a flag for your writing process? Because if you don’t have a flag, well, you can’t have authentic creativity. Those are the rules. We just made them up, but they’re the fucking rules.
The audacity is breathtaking when you step back and look at it. Some person with a shitty Substack and strong opinions about Google Docs decides they’re the Minister of Legitimate Expression. They’ve discovered the One True Way to arrange sentences, and now everyone else needs to fall in line or forfeit their claim to real artistry. It’s like watching someone plant a flag on oxygen and charge rent for breathing.
Who the fuck appointed you the customs agent of consciousness?
Borges understood something crucial about maps and territories. In his famous On Exactitude in Science, the cartographers of the Empire became so obsessed with precision that they created a map the exact size of the territory itself. When the Empire declined, the map was abandoned, left to decay in the desert, tattered fragments clinging to the real landscape like discarded skin.
The AI discourse has become our imperial cartography project. Writers who discovered moral clarity about machine learning sometime last month are now issuing maps of consciousness, creativity, and human worth that claim perfect correspondence with the territory of genuine expression. “Real writers don’t use AI,” they declare, planting their flag firmly in the soil of their own anxiety. Never mind that they use spell-check, grammar software, search engines, and word processors. Never mind that they’ve been collaborating with technology their entire careers. This particular collaboration crosses a line they just drew with a fucking crayon.
The map is not the territory, but these cartographers have confused their sketch with the landscape. They’ve created elaborate taxonomies of legitimate creativity, detailed classifications of authentic expression, precise boundaries between human and artificial consciousness. The map grows more detailed, more comprehensive, more convinced of its own accuracy. Meanwhile, the territory continues to shift beneath their feet, indifferent to their measurements.
Do you have a flag for tool purity? Because if you don’t have a flag, well, you can’t have genuine authorship. Those are the rules. We just made them up last Tuesday while panicking about our relevance, but they’re the rules.
What Foucault revealed about disciplinary power applies perfectly to these newly minted authorities of expression: they don’t just tell you what you can’t do, they create the entire field of possibility within which action becomes thinkable. The process purists don’t simply forbid certain techniques; they manufacture the complete conceptual framework that makes their prohibitions appear natural, inevitable, obviously correct.
They’ve figured out the correct relationship with inspiration, the proper way to draft, the authentic method of revision. “Real writers write by hand,” they announce, ignoring the fact that they’re publishing this insight on Medium via MacBook. “Real writers don’t edit while they draft,” they proclaim, having just discovered a technique that works for them and decided it must be universal law.
These flag-planters treat their personal neuroses like philosophical breakthroughs. They’ve found a routine that manages their particular brand of creative anxiety, and suddenly everyone else is doing creativity wrong. Your process is invalid. Your tools are suspect. Your approach to revision reveals your fundamental unworthiness as a human being capable of arranging words.
The disciplinary apparatus operates through what Foucault called “normalization”: the establishment of norms that appear neutral but actually encode specific relations of power. The “authentic writing process” becomes a disciplinary technology that sorts legitimate creators from imposters, real artists from pretenders. The examination is continuous, the surveillance internalized, the standards arbitrary but presented as natural law.
Do you have a flag for creative methodology? Because if you don’t have a flag, well, you can’t have legitimate artistry. Those are the rules. We just figured them out in our MFA program where we paid $60,000 to learn what other people think about books, but they’re the rules.
The craft authorities might be the most insufferable bastards of all. They’ve mastered some subset of literary technique and decided this makes them the arbiters of all expression. “Show don’t tell,” they chant, as if literature were governed by the Ten Commandments rather than context and choice. “Kill your darlings,” they implore, having just learned this phrase and eager to demonstrate their literary sophistication to anyone within earshot.
These people treat style guides like sacred texts and workshop wisdom like natural law. They’ve internalized someone else’s preferences and rebranded them as objective standards. Your voice is wrong. Your syntax is questionable. Your relationship to grammar reveals your amateur status and probably your moral character too.
Here’s where Borges’s imperial cartographers meet Foucault’s disciplinary institutions: the map becomes so detailed, so comprehensive, so convinced of its own necessity that it starts to replace the territory entirely. The craft rules proliferate until they cover every square inch of possible expression. Every sentence must be measured against the template. Every paragraph must conform to the established patterns. The creative act becomes an exercise in administrative compliance.
Do you have a flag for aesthetic judgment? Because if you don’t have a flag, well, you can’t have literary merit. Those are the rules. We just learned them from our favorite podcast about the correct way to think about sentences, but they’re the rules.
The authenticity police patrol the borders of realness with particular zeal, and they’re absolute dickheads about it. They’ve determined what constitutes genuine human expression and what counts as artificial contamination. “This doesn’t sound like you,” they announce, as if they’ve known you longer than you’ve known yourself. “This feels generated,” they declare, having appointed themselves the customs agents of consciousness.
But what they’re really doing is more insidious than simple gatekeeping. They’re creating what Foucault identified as the “subject positions” that make certain kinds of selfhood possible while foreclosing others. The “authentic writer” becomes a disciplinary category that you must either inhabit correctly or be excluded from entirely. The examination is endless: Are you human enough? Original enough? Sufficiently uncontaminated by technological assistance?
These self-proclaimed guardians of the genuine treat creativity like it’s something that can be counterfeited, as if there’s an Official Bureau of Authentic Expression issuing certificates of realness. They’ve decided that certain kinds of assistance invalidate the entire enterprise, that collaboration with machines somehow erases the human element entirely.
The beautiful absurdity is that their map of authenticity bears no resemblance to the actual territory of human expression. Real creativity has always been hybrid, collaborative, technologically mediated. [Note: I’ve written previously on this topic. Read more here: Fear is Not a Framework] The “pure” human consciousness they’re trying to protect never existed except as a bureaucratic fiction, a disciplinary fantasy designed to make their arbitrary standards appear inevitable.
Do you have a flag for human authenticity? Because if you don’t have a flag, well, you can’t have real consciousness. Those are the rules. We just intuited them from our gut feelings and our deep anxiety about being replaced by software, but they’re the rules.
The pattern is always the same: personal preference gets rebranded as universal truth, individual anxiety gets dressed up as moral imperative, and suddenly someone’s particular solution becomes everyone else’s obligation. The flag doesn’t represent the territory. The flag represents the flag-planter’s desperate need to be right about something, anything, in a world that offers very few guarantees about creative work and even fewer opportunities to feel superior to other people.
But here’s what all these flag-planting assholes miss: the territory was already occupied. People were already writing, creating, experimenting, making art with whatever tools they could find. They were doing it without manifestos, without purity tests, without colonial administrators issuing permits for legitimate expression.
The beautiful absurdity is that none of this actually affects the real work. Words still get written. Stories still get told. Ideas still find their way into the world. The flag-planters wave their banners and declare their sovereignty over domains that were never theirs to claim, while the actual business of making things with language continues around them, mostly unimpressed by the latest territorial announcements from people who think creativity needs their permission to exist.
Like Borges’s imperial map, these elaborate taxonomies of legitimate expression will eventually be abandoned in the desert, left to decay while the territory they claimed to represent continues its own life, indifferent to the measurements. The fragments of the map will cling to the landscape for a while, tattered pieces of someone else’s certainty about how things should work. Then the wind will take even those.
Do you have a flag for being creative? Because if you don’t have a flag, well, you might not be doing it correctly. Those are the rules. We just made them up this morning while drinking our third cup of French press coffee and feeling important, but they’re the rules.
Maybe the real question isn’t “Do you have a flag?” but “Who the fuck told you this territory was yours to claim?”
The answer, of course, is no one. They told themselves. They planted a flag and decided that made them the authority. Those are the rules. They just made them up, but they’re the rules.
And the beautiful thing about made-up rules? They can be unmade just as easily. Someone else can show up, pull your little flag out of the ground, and use it as kindling.
So keep your self-satisfying manifestos. Keep your purity tests. Keep your territorial pissings about the correct way to arrange words. Keep your maps that claim perfect correspondence with territories you’ve never actually explored.
The rest of us will be over here, making things.