Anti-Mimesis

Every established rubric eventually selects for things that look like the thing rather than things that are the thing. A filter that works attracts optimisation; optimisation against a fixed target produces good imitations of the target. The signal becomes noise. This is a property of rubrics, not a failure of any specific one.

The usual response is to make the rubric harder to game. That is the rubric defending itself. It works for a while, then doesn't.

The other response is to do work the rubric can't see. Not harder-to-fake on the existing criteria — operating on different criteria entirely. The work is judged by people who walked in for reasons the rubric did not produce.

This used to be a niche move because imitation was expensive. In 2026 imitation is essentially free; every surface property of any work — voice, structure, format, length, references, tone — can be reproduced cheaply by a model. The moats that survive are the ones that aren't surface properties.

What doesn't get cheaper is position: the specific vantage point built from a specific trajectory of decisions and failures. Position cannot be imitated because imitating it means having lived a different life. Work done from a non-trivial position is anti-mimetic by construction; the discourse can't evaluate it on its current terms because the position generated criteria the discourse hasn't priced in yet.

The cost of operating this way is accepting low scores on the standard metrics — follower counts, engagement, leaderboard placement, citation density. The compensation is that the score is not the thing. Position is. Position cannot be granted or revoked by any rubric, because the rubric is downstream of it.