The Automation of Rejection

In that truest portrait yet of the struggles of the aspiring writer, Jack London's Martin Eden, the eponymous protagonist, in the course of receiving one form rejection letter after another, begins to wonder if he is dealing not with human-staffed organizations, but with a machine that returns form rejections for submissions in exactly the same manner that a vending machine would give a stick of gum in return for a coin.

If there is any difference between that experience and the writer's experience of today it is that, especially these last few years, the process probably has become genuinely more automated--and continues to become more so all the time. For many years it has been common for writers to submit work to publishers through online forms.

Given what we know about how employers automate the sifting of job-hunters' résumés to weed out much before there is call for any human to look at anything, and indeed job interviews now seem to be handled by artificial intelligence it is very, very easy to picture publishers turning over the low-priority work of dealing with the slush pile that turns the interns who deal with it into nasty little trolls pouring forth their abuse on aspiring writers in publications whose editors ought to know better (Salon, Guardian) over to algorithms and chatbots--which then dutifully arrange the dispatch of yet another copy of that e-mail saying "Please excuse the impersonal nature of this reply . . ."