Inside the world of cash advance apps

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

In this episode of The Gray Area, Miles Bryan interviews Daniel Kollitz about his experience being displaced from the SEO copywriting indust

Key takeaways

• Daniel Kollitz experienced direct job displacement as ChatGPT became capable of producing rote SEO-optimized content.
• Fintech 'cash advance' apps use millennial-friendly branding and 'cuddly' mascots to mask predatory subscription fees and instant deposit charges.

Main topics

• AI-driven job displacement
• Predatory fintech lending

Notable quotes

I was looking for a reason to write about the... experience of being dispossessed by AI.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a sobering look at how technological progress ca

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:07) Welcome to The Gray Area. I'm Myles Bryan, filling in for Sean. My guest is Daniel Kollitz. He's a writer, and he wrote a new piece for The Baffler about losing his freelance writing jobs to AI. Daniel paints this really vivid picture of life at the front lines of the AI economy and the millennial sheen that's now applied to old-school payday loan operations. Speaker 1 (0:38) Daniel Kolitz, thanks so much for coming on The Gray Area. Thrilled to be here. Well, we wanted to talk to you today because you wrote a new piece for The Baffler called Paid Phones, which is about two connected experiences, losing your gig, ghostwriting to AI, and becoming dependent on payday loan apps. Why did you want to write about these experiences together? Speaker 2 (1:02) Well, I mean, it kind of naturally came together Speaker 1 (1:05) because it... happened to me in that way. But I Speaker 2 (1:08) did think there was something broader there, which is this kind of squeezing out of certain kinds of white collar work and the concurrent rise of apps designed to squeeze out people who are already being squeezed. And I mean, I was looking for a reason to write about the... Speaker 2 (1:30) The experience of being dispossessed by AI because it just seemed sort of strange and unusual to be on the vanguard of displacement in that way. When Speaker 1 (1:40) you were, you know, finding yourself dependent on AI-driven payday loan app services, did you kind of have a recognition that it was a good? story that it was kind of symbolically resonant to this bigger thing or was it just like uh like things are tough right now i Speaker 2 (1:55) think like uh in a lot of these instances in the very beginning it's like man this just sucks and then uh as the absurdities mount uh i start to think of it as a writer but i think you go back and forth between finding it directly unpleasant and wishing it wasn't happening and then thinking that kind of secondary consciousness of like There's material here. There's something to Speaker 1 (2:17) work with. There's content. Speaker 2 (2:19) And yeah, I mean, I would text my friends at the time, updating them about, you know, I've always, my MO has been to talk about, play up my terrible life. Speaker 1 (2:29) And so it's been, you know, I would talk to them about it and Speaker 2 (2:33) they're like, you should write about this. And it never felt right. I mean, I didn't feel like I had the right to because it felt kind of, I don't know, Speaker 1 (2:40) presumptuous is the word Speaker 2 (2:42) or... Speaker 2 (2:45) gauche as a kind of, you know, child of the upper middle class, white collar professional to be writing about this kind of economic displacement. Obviously, I'm not the prime victim of this economy. And so I always felt a little queasy even thinking about writing about it. But at the same time, it was happening. And so... I guess I had the right to write about it. And eventually I found my way to doing it. Well, let's start Speaker 1 (3:12) where your essay starts. It opens with two great sentences. I used to ghostwrite SEO-optimized promotional web content for a living. I thought the good times would never end. Speaker 2 (3:26) That's true. It was great. It Speaker 1 (3:28) was amazing. Speaker 2 (3:29) It was the best time of my life. Late 20s, I transitioned to this kind of like... Bottom of the barrel SEO content generation, which for your audience is like search engine optimization. So you're trying to write articles that are heavy on certain keywords so that if someone is looking for a business that does a certain thing, the business you're writing about surfaces. And this is a Speaker 1 (3:52) way to kind of get Google and maybe other search engines, but mostly Google to surface the right link when someone would go to it. And this is pre. AI chatbot searches. This stuff is Speaker 2 (4:03) on the way out now, but this was a whole industry for a long time. It wasn't just SEO. I was also writing brain-dead Forbes editorials and thought leadership pieces of every kind. I speak very disparagingly of it. I wasn't grateful for the work, and it's not like these people were idiots, but it was very easy to do. I felt like I don't even know what the movie is. I couldn't even figure out what I was trying to write about. Like a famous composer who's so grateful for his divine gift. I think there was a story of Michael Jackson after a particularly impressive vocal take falling to the floor of the studio and thanking God for his talent. And I would feel that way every time I wrote about video Speaker 1 (4:44) surveillance as a service Speaker 2 (4:46) in Speaker 1 (4:46) 15 minutes. I'm like, I just made $400 in 15 minutes. I was ecstatic. Well, this kind of blew my mind. First of all, who's paying for this stuff and why did it pay so well? Speaker 2 (4:58) I mean, I don't Speaker 1 (4:59) even think I Speaker 2 (4:59) was being paid particularly well for this industry. I Speaker 1 (5:02) mean, Speaker 2 (5:02) I've spoken to people before and since who are making, who are like buying apartments from this kind of work. I mean, if you're doing it like at a slightly higher sort of agency level, putting together decks or whatever, you could make $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 on a project. I mean, this stuff just wasn't priced in a sensible way, which was great. That kind of like maneuvering room, I think, allowed a lot of people to live, you know. better lives than they might otherwise have done. Speaker 1 (5:30) And, you know, what did a day during kind of peak ghostwriting, Daniel Phillips' life look like? I'm laughing, I'm so happy, it was great. You know, like. I'm thinking back on Speaker 2 (5:38) the good days. I mean, for one thing, I had enough money that I rented an office in my neighborhood. And you live in New York City. I live in New York City. It was great. I mean, it was pretty affordable. It was like, I don't know, it started maybe like 600 a month, but that would be inconceivable, you know, but I, I, uh. I would wake up at 11 or so, as I typically do. I would have a nice leisurely morning, hang out, head to my office, read for a while, check my email. I would see I had two, three, four, five of these. Speaker 2 (6:12) copywriting assignments. They would say, are you up for this? I would often not even read the brief. I would just say, yes, of course. I would just agree to whatever. And then I would write them. This would take about an hour or two. And then I would have the rest of the day to do whatever. I mean, in my case, that often was different kinds of more meaningful writing. No, my life was great. I miss it immensely. It's like Speaker 1 (6:38) the... Marxists, you know, what a communist utopia has achieved, what is a person going to do all day? What, like, fish in the afternoon? And you Speaker 2 (6:45) can see why someone would not be sympathetic to someone losing this lifestyle. But it Speaker 1 (6:49) was a good way to live. And how many years did this go on? It Speaker 2 (6:52) was just like five years or something. And then I would hang out with my friends. I mean, I'm, you know, I think I remember talking about living in a neighborhood with a lot of my friends the last time I was on this podcast. But, you know, my office was above. sort of the local cafe in the neighborhood. So I'd go downstairs, there's the gang, people are hanging out, you know, you just pop in, talk to your friend for an hour. It was kind of an ideal vision of like a quasi-Bohemian New York life. I mean, it's kind of hard to say that someone is being a kind of Bohemian when they're writing SEO. copywriting, but you know. Speaker 1 (7:31) You describe yourself as being from an upper middle class family, and we can get back to that. But for a lot of people of your ilk, of my ilk, you know. meaning and work are difficult to separate out. Like I could imagine being in your position and feeling like kind of guilt or a kind of sense that, you know, there wasn't enough sort of struggle and accomplishment in the work you're doing for money and like therefore it's not satisfying even if you have all this leisure time. How did you deal Speaker 2 (8:00) with that? Speaker 1 (8:00) I just never thought of it Speaker 2 (8:01) as my work. I mean, my work was, even if I was not at the time particularly successful at it, my work was... my real writing, my sort of like literary nonfiction or fiction pursuits. And I'd felt that way all throughout my twenties. And I felt that way in my thirties. And, uh, you know, this stuff I just viewed as stuff you did for money. I mean, I think the sense that you had or anyone had coming into the economy, even that I graduated into is that you're not going to make a living necessarily doing the things that matter to you. And so you need to make money somehow. And it seemed like this was the most amenable way. There was to make money. Speaker 1 (8:33) So you go on to write that you knew the moment Chad GPT came out in 2022, it was going to ruin your life. How did you know? And what happened? Speaker 2 (8:41) Well, even in the very early days when Chad GPT, I think people can kind of forget. I mean, it's still not great at producing prose. But honestly, now, if it comes to the kind of writing I was doing, it is quite skilled at kind of baseline business copy. In the beginning, it was still. touch and go. But even then, I was like, it's all in place to displacement, because the kind of writing I was doing was so rote, and so formulaic, and was so easy to write, because it was basically assembling the building blocks of, you know, the same kinds of sentence structures and the same kinds. I mean, every article I wrote, essentially had the same structure, which was sort of like, identifying a problem. Pitching the product as a solution for it, not mentioning the product because these were sort of like covertly promotional pieces. Explaining some historical background of the problem, then explaining in greater detail why this solution is so great. And then a kind of wrap