As those who have seen me play the game of "How much will this movie make?" before know, I prefer a quantitative approach based on the principal information actually made available to the public in a consistent, timely, systematic way--box office grosses. Thus I look at how the predecessors of a movie in a franchise (it is franchise films that lend themselves to this approach) did before, adjust the figures for inflation, look for any patterns I can find (the range of the grosses, the averages, the trends from film to film, etc.), and then turn to any factors that may skew the result--drawing analogy with how similar films did, for instance--while offering any necessary qualifiers. Thus did I calculate that if Indiana Jones 5 performed "like an Indiana Jones film" it could be expected to make a billion dollars, with a quarter of a billion dollar margin either way (with the caveat that given the downward trend the film seemed more likely to undershoot than overshoot the billion-dollar mark), while the possibility existed that, by way of analogy with Star Wars, it could play like Solo instead and crater--which is, of course, exactly what happened.
Thus when considering the prospects of the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday I started with the four Avengers movies made to date grossed between $1.4 and $2.8 billion in current dollars, or about $2 billion and $3.7 billion in today's (August 2026) terms, while averaging some $2.6 to $2.7 billion in today's dollars. If we go by my rule of thumb that cutting out those films that did very poorly or exceptionally well (cutting out Captain Marvel and cutting out Spider-Man, cutting out The Thunderbolts and cutting out Deadpool) "normal" Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films make just 50-80 percent of what their predecessors did before the pandemic, with the biggest tending to take the largest hit, we end up with a range of $1 billion to $3 billion, and a modified average of $1.3 to $2.2 billion. The result is that going by the numbers I have here may reasonably expect the movie to make not less than a billion dollars, with considerably greater possible if not probable and twice that much within the bounds of reasonable expectation.
However, just as with Indiana Jones the qualifiers are really significant, because even allowing for the shock to the box office of the pandemic the latest Avengers will not have the advantages of its predecessors. It does not have the benefit of the kind of build-up that made the original 2012 The Avengers such a hit, and still less the far greater build-up that made the 2018 and 2019 Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame even bigger successes. Instead the best the movie will have going for it is the good will that this summer's Spider-Man has brought the franchise--though this may not count for very much in a period in which, in contrast with Phase Three's success in making the Marvel Cinematic Universe more than the sum of its parts, today the Universe is really just a collection of franchises of wildly varying popularity and appeal, all as much of the public may feel that they have already "seen their one superhero movie for this year." And especially as we are talking about the global gross one also ought not forget just how much China mattered in Endgame's mighty final take, that market alone contributing a mighty $632 million to the total ($827 million after adjustment for inflation), and just under $1 billion for Infinity War and Endgame together (some $1.3 billion in today's terms)--and that even if Hollywood is still capable of making big money in China (just look at how Zootopia 2 performed), China has not been anywhere near so reliable a field for Hollywood's films as it was in the '10s. (Deadpool & Wolverine, such a colossus in America, made just $60 million in China, while Spider-Man, if doing better, was still a long way from the event it was in America, or how the Avengers movies did in China back in 2018-2019, taking in just $232 million, and this about as good as it gets ordinarily, even $100 million a feat for an American movie in China these days.)
The result is that, speaking broadly, I expect that thinking in terms of its predecessors the movie is much less an Endgame box office prospects-wise than an Ultron, if that, for if a gross of a billion dollars or more is hardly inconceivable, it is also far from assured. (After all, if a billion dollars is not what it was before, you still have to sell a lot of tickets to bank that much.) And given what the last two Avengers films cost, and what this one project is already reported as costing (which British tax documents may, as has happened before with Marvel's productions and with Disney's productions more generally, prove a significant underestimate), even a billion dollar-plus gross may prove to be not just a disappointment for the studio, but actually put Disney-Marvel in danger of ending up in the red on this film, all while being worrisome indeed from the standpoint of the whole franchise. After all, there is much more than just the gamble on this one movie at stake, with Avengers 5 to be followed by Avengers 6 in the form of Avengers: Secret Wars, all as the franchise-runners are all too clearly looking to the two films to bring back the MCU's Phase Three glory days, with all that means for the bar the movie really needs to clear to be regarded by one and all as the unqualified, franchise viability-restoring success that its backers want it to be, and others to see it as. Indeed, given all that is riding on this one it seems to me that, however the film turns out, Christopher Nolan's New Hollywood-ish gamble on The Odyssey apart, Avengers: Doomsday seems to me the most interesting single film of the year from an "armchair movie executive" box office-watching standpoint.
Thursday, October 8, 2026
Marvel is Not "Back" and (Probably) Never Will Be
All too predictably the presentist, hot take-spewing idiots of the entertainment press have seized upon the undeniable colossal success of Spider-Man: Brand New Day to tell us "Marvel's back!"
As is so often the case with those of their sort they are engaged in empty sloganeering. After all, in a way Marvel never left. Say what one will, Disney-Marvel has kept the movies, and TV shows, coming at the old rate--some fifteen of them from Black Widow to the aforementioned Spider-Man in a space of a little over five years. And many of those films have been profitable. The two Spider-Man films released in this period have been the biggest grossers of that franchise's history, even after adjustment for inflation, while Deadpool & Wolverine was the same for the broader X-Men franchise of which it is a part, as they helped demonstrate that today the biggest movies can sell as many tickets as ever they did. And still other Marvel releases were at least respectable moneymakers, with four more films making Deadline's three post-pandemic Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament lists in 2022 and 2023 Dr. Strange 2, Black Panther 2, Thor 4 and Guardians of the Galaxy 3).
However, it is also the case that, even when we set aside those three movies that never had much of a chance because of their release when the (still ongoing) pandemic still had the box office severely depressed (Black Widow, The Eternals and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), Marvel has had a good many undeniable underperformers, with The Marvels competitive with the DCEU's The Flash as the biggest flop of flop-filled 2023, and Ant-Man 3, Captain America 4, The Thunderbolts safely classifiable as such, all as it was far from unreasonable to see even the profitable Thor 4, Black Panther 2 and Dr. Strange 2 as less than ringing successes given what their predecessors made, and what had been hoped for from and invested in them (Thor and Black Panther relative to their immediate predecessors in their franchises, Dr. Strange 2 to the way the last Spider-Man film had set it up to be a great success).
The result is that if Marvel never left, it is also not "back" to what the aforementioned presentist, hot take-spewing idiots imply when they say so, namely back to the franchise's "Phase Three" (2016-2019) when it felt like Marvel could put out three movies a year and see each gross a billion dollars or close to it (in 2016-2019 dollars, equal to about $1.3-$1.4 billion now), as they ignore the difference in the situation between then and now. The consistent, colossal, success of Phase Three was not so much a matter of the Marvel "brand" (which is the product, not the cause of the company strategy) as Marvel organized its film production in such a manner that one Marvel film led to another, every next Marvel movie contributing in at least a small way to a story building to a climax in the billion-dollar, everybody-showed-up, shocking cliffhanger-reinforced two-part Avengers event that capped it all off. Admittedly more a feat of marketing than of cinematic technique or narrative art it is naively optimistic to imagine that this generation of a synergy that made the mega-franchise "more than the sum of its parts" for so long could make this work again and again, the more in as the success eliminated the novelty; there really is no "going bigger" after Endgame; the raw material on which the franchise depended has become overfamiliar, the principal characters, storylines, etc. all well-used by this point, leaving any approach (rebooting the major characters, turning to less popular ones) likely to lead to diminishing returns; and Marvel even used up its easy options for making its movies seem more "important" than they really were in the current milieu (as with the silly passing off of Black Panther and Captain Marvel as civil rights firsts). The fact that Marvel followed up this extraordinary success with the comparatively plan-less Phase Four and the aborting of the plan for Phase Five's multi-verse saga; the generally less prepossessing character of the movies that followed; the sprawling of the Universe as Marvel stupidly imagined a blockbuster-sized base would display a hardcore fan's readiness to sign up for their streaming service and see every last show and movie and the blowback against it; did not help Marvel retain the audience's affection, and indeed alienated at least a part of it, at a time when no moviemaker could afford it. The pandemic, after all, not only made things harder by disrupting the habit many had of seeing every single Marvel movie that came out, but more broadly produced a contraction in moviegoing that left Americans on average going to the theater two rather than three to four times a year, and pickier about what they deigned to see on the big screen, leaving less room for a see-all-three-Marvel-movies-per-year-type habit. (Meanwhile at the international level Marvel, like the rest of Hollywood, treated the important and hugely profitable Chinese market very lightly indeed, and paid dearly for it, not least with the stupid decision to make a Fu Manchu-based film starring Akwafina thinking "The Chinese will love it!")
The result has been that rather than the Marvel Cinematic Universe being the synergy-benefiting commercial force it was in Phase Three today it is what it was before that, a looser collection of franchises. I will not say that it is absolutely impossible for those franchises to again become something greater than the sum of the parts, but the difficulty of making the old strategy work even the first time, the tougher market now less likely to be receptive to a second go-around, make this hard to picture, all as anything like such a renaissance for the franchise has no precedent in film history. James Bond, Star Wars--they both had their period of glory when they brought something new to filmgoers, frankly innovating more substantially than Marvel did (with James Bond inventing the modern action film and its franchising and marketing, while Star Wars imported the whole technique to Hollywood and polished it to a high sheen as it showed how to blend it with the mythic, with nostalgia and with more out-of-this-world science fiction, revolutionized special effects, and delivered an unprecedented A-grade space opera). After their glory days those franchises went on putting out movies, and making money, at times they even made some of their newer iterations an "event" (certainly Goldeneye was and Casino Royale was and especially the fiftieth anniversary film Skyfall was, certainly the Star Wars prequels and even Episode VII were) and reaped the benefit at the box office, but they were never as innovative again, or as important again.
Looking back it isn't hard to understand why. Franchises are prisoners of their own past successes. Innovate too little and it's just more of the same. Innovate too much and it's not the old franchise anymore and you alienate those who cared about the franchise before. (I, for one, consider George Lucas' prequel trilogy to have been an honorable attempt to not give us more of the same, in his prequels offering the more information-heavy, political, "grown-up" narrative one sees in his early scripts for Star Wars before he committed to the mythic-fairy tale route, in the films' use of Computer-Generated Imagery, but we all know that the fans didn't love it as much as the original, and that some never forgave it.) And in any case it all feels unnecessary. And so the best thing is to not be a prisoner of a franchise's past successes by letting a franchise go. But it is hard to picture anything more contrary to the instincts of the C-suite-occupying vulgarians of Hollywood, who have under pressure doubled down on their already ever more unhinged commitment to franchises, with the occasional Spider-Man or Deadpool making them cling all the harder even as so many of their other films hemorrhage cash they can ill afford to lose. That said the next best course would be to bet on their strongest successes, and where trying to be fresher, seriously attempt to make what a large audience might really want to see. They did it with Spider-Man, did it with Shawn Ryan's Deadpool, the latter a mix of targeted and mass hit that pleased the very devoted base that paid off big. But there aren't likely to be three billion-dollar hits a year in that approach--which means the fantasy of somehow bringing back the ever more distant success of Phase Three will endure and continue to drive the thinking behind the franchise for as long as the few successes sufficiently compensate for the disappointments and the money-losers to sustain them in their resistance to change.
As is so often the case with those of their sort they are engaged in empty sloganeering. After all, in a way Marvel never left. Say what one will, Disney-Marvel has kept the movies, and TV shows, coming at the old rate--some fifteen of them from Black Widow to the aforementioned Spider-Man in a space of a little over five years. And many of those films have been profitable. The two Spider-Man films released in this period have been the biggest grossers of that franchise's history, even after adjustment for inflation, while Deadpool & Wolverine was the same for the broader X-Men franchise of which it is a part, as they helped demonstrate that today the biggest movies can sell as many tickets as ever they did. And still other Marvel releases were at least respectable moneymakers, with four more films making Deadline's three post-pandemic Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament lists in 2022 and 2023 Dr. Strange 2, Black Panther 2, Thor 4 and Guardians of the Galaxy 3).
However, it is also the case that, even when we set aside those three movies that never had much of a chance because of their release when the (still ongoing) pandemic still had the box office severely depressed (Black Widow, The Eternals and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), Marvel has had a good many undeniable underperformers, with The Marvels competitive with the DCEU's The Flash as the biggest flop of flop-filled 2023, and Ant-Man 3, Captain America 4, The Thunderbolts safely classifiable as such, all as it was far from unreasonable to see even the profitable Thor 4, Black Panther 2 and Dr. Strange 2 as less than ringing successes given what their predecessors made, and what had been hoped for from and invested in them (Thor and Black Panther relative to their immediate predecessors in their franchises, Dr. Strange 2 to the way the last Spider-Man film had set it up to be a great success).
The result is that if Marvel never left, it is also not "back" to what the aforementioned presentist, hot take-spewing idiots imply when they say so, namely back to the franchise's "Phase Three" (2016-2019) when it felt like Marvel could put out three movies a year and see each gross a billion dollars or close to it (in 2016-2019 dollars, equal to about $1.3-$1.4 billion now), as they ignore the difference in the situation between then and now. The consistent, colossal, success of Phase Three was not so much a matter of the Marvel "brand" (which is the product, not the cause of the company strategy) as Marvel organized its film production in such a manner that one Marvel film led to another, every next Marvel movie contributing in at least a small way to a story building to a climax in the billion-dollar, everybody-showed-up, shocking cliffhanger-reinforced two-part Avengers event that capped it all off. Admittedly more a feat of marketing than of cinematic technique or narrative art it is naively optimistic to imagine that this generation of a synergy that made the mega-franchise "more than the sum of its parts" for so long could make this work again and again, the more in as the success eliminated the novelty; there really is no "going bigger" after Endgame; the raw material on which the franchise depended has become overfamiliar, the principal characters, storylines, etc. all well-used by this point, leaving any approach (rebooting the major characters, turning to less popular ones) likely to lead to diminishing returns; and Marvel even used up its easy options for making its movies seem more "important" than they really were in the current milieu (as with the silly passing off of Black Panther and Captain Marvel as civil rights firsts). The fact that Marvel followed up this extraordinary success with the comparatively plan-less Phase Four and the aborting of the plan for Phase Five's multi-verse saga; the generally less prepossessing character of the movies that followed; the sprawling of the Universe as Marvel stupidly imagined a blockbuster-sized base would display a hardcore fan's readiness to sign up for their streaming service and see every last show and movie and the blowback against it; did not help Marvel retain the audience's affection, and indeed alienated at least a part of it, at a time when no moviemaker could afford it. The pandemic, after all, not only made things harder by disrupting the habit many had of seeing every single Marvel movie that came out, but more broadly produced a contraction in moviegoing that left Americans on average going to the theater two rather than three to four times a year, and pickier about what they deigned to see on the big screen, leaving less room for a see-all-three-Marvel-movies-per-year-type habit. (Meanwhile at the international level Marvel, like the rest of Hollywood, treated the important and hugely profitable Chinese market very lightly indeed, and paid dearly for it, not least with the stupid decision to make a Fu Manchu-based film starring Akwafina thinking "The Chinese will love it!")
The 2026 Summer Movie Season: An Honest Analysis
Back in August I had something to say of the bullishness of the entertainment press' crowing over the box office receipts as it looked forward to Hollywood's first "$10 billion year" (i.e. first $10 billion theatrical gross) since before the pandemic--apparently oblivious to how a near-decade of inflation have meant that these days $10 billion ain't what it was pre-pandemic, and is in fact not much better than the fairly lousy gross of 2023 when we adjust for it, what was disappointing then being passed off as "aspirational" and an achievement now through the magic of innumeracy. The crowing is if anything louder now, as the end-of-summer retrospectives show us--such that here I am offering my own reading, in which I appraise the summer of 2026 as really no better than what we saw the three preceding summers.
Let us start with the summer that the very "presentist" idiots of the professional commentariat are most likely to reach for as the first point of comparison--the immediately preceding summer of 2025, a disappointing summer season in a disappointing box office year. I fully admit that, even when we account for the first-of-May to Labor Day weekend period being a whole week longer in 2026 than in 2025 because of a relatively late Labor Day (September 7 rather than September 1) by limiting ourselves to the 123-day, first-to-eighteenth weekend between that May start of the season and the last weekend beginning in August, there is a significant gap in the gross between one season and the other. Specifically 2026 came away with a healthy extra near-billion dollars ($4.58 billion versus the prior year's $3.6 billion) between the first May weekend, and the last weekend beginning in August. The problem with making so much of this as the commentariat is doing is that this was a matter of the late summer season having a boost from two immense outliers of a kind one ordinarily can't count on in a single movie season, or single year, as a close reading of the figures shows. Between the first weekend of the summer at the start of May, and the week immediately preceding the third weekend of July, the 2025 and 2026 seasons were nearly tied--2026 merely matching the lousy equivalent stretch of 2025 in real terms, with $2.56 billion in the till, versus the prior year's $2.45 billion, the 4 percent advantage all but wiped out by the near 4 (3.5) percent inflation of the prior twelve month period. Admittedly when we look at the monthly figures we see that 2026 did have a better May, and a better June, than 2025 did, but, reflecting the way that films like the new Star Wars movie and Masters of the Universe movie disappointed badly, they were not so much better that the weak early-to-mid July period, in which the "underperformance" of Supergirl, the live-action remake of Moana and the latest Minions sufficed to even things out. It was only when The Odyssey came along in that third weekend of the month, and Spider-Man arrived in its last, that business picked up--with those two movies accounting for virtually all the increased business, accounting as the two of them did for three-quarters of the total box office receipts of the period.
Approaching the matter another way consider the top ten films of the two seasons. The top ten films of the summer of 2025 together grossed $2.49 billion; in 2026 $3.22 billion at the point in time discussed here; making for a rough $730 million gap. However, in 2025 the two top earners took in some $780 million, but in 2026 about $1.46 billion, a $680 million difference coming to over 93 percent of the gap. Remove them from the picture and the next eight films in line each collectively made about the same amount of money, with the advantage of the films of 2026 so slight (just $1.764 billion as against $1.717 billion) that, again, the gross in 2026 turns out to have actually run a little behind that of 2025 when we adjust for inflation. Once more, considering the matter this way shows that those top two films, The Odyssey and Spider-Man, made all the difference.
In the way that in 2026 two late July releases saved a flagging box office those who can think more than one year back will also remember 2023, when once more a weak summer season in which franchise film after franchise film underperformed two late July releases--a dark, adult, R-rated Christopher Nolan film that somehow made unlikely blockbuster material a popular hit (remember Oppenheimer?), and a lighter, brightly colored, PG-13 film that made even more money--came to the box office's rescue. One may see an echo of 2024 as well in the late July release of a Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero film that people really wanted to see coming to the rescue of that less than stellar summer season (Deadpool & Wolverine). And taking all four years together one, again, sees that however much the biggest hits may make as much money as ever they did, they also underline the fact that this is not a matter of any broad-based resurgence of film performance, or the moviegoing that would enable it, but of the kind of rare events that cannot be reliably manufactured and thus counted upon coming together in a rare close proximity and giving a sagging box office a lift.
Once again: due to changes in habits wrought by hard times from the "Great Recession" forward, the escalation of the small screen's competition with the big by streaming, and the lingering disruptions of a mass-killing, mass-disabling, still-ongoing pandemic that the media are exceedingly eager for everyone to forget (maybe that theater you used to go to isn't around anymore, and there isn't another anywhere near so convenient close by), people go to the movies less than they used to--per capita ticket sales in North America two a year rather than the three to four a year they had been before the pandemic. As this greater reticence about the proverbial night at the movies suggests, people are choosier filmgoers, passing on many a movie that just a few years ago they would have casually gone to see--with big-budget franchise films that depended on sucking in more casual viewers to hit their highs in particular suffering. The result is a smaller market with tighter competition, such that if you want the public to devote one of their (again, we are averaging) two trips to the theater this year to your film you had better make something that excites them in a Gotta See It Now way. This doesn't have to mean high art or great innovation (certainly It Ends With Us wasn't, certainly the video game-based hits of recent years haven't been), or even rule out more classically blockbuster-type franchise films of the superhero or any other type (Spider-Man, again, was a case of a franchise film that did excite them), but it does mean that Hollywood will do a lot better targeting its hits in line with the detectable existence of genuine public enthusiasm (and keeping a close watch on the bottom line as they do so) than cranking out high-cost franchise films nobody asked for in the expectation that "everyone" will show up and then WHINING WHEN THEY DON'T (as the difference between, for example, Brand New Day and the profoundly ill-conceived $200 million rendition of He-Man we just got shows).
Of course, that is not the narrative the Hollywood executives want promulgated, and which their courtiers in the entertainment press are promulgating, as instead they cling pathetically to the delusion that the market is "recovering" to what it had been before the pandemic, an euphemism for the studios being able to go back to assembly-line production of crapola the way Bob Iger's Disney exemplified in the days before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19, as they scrape the bottom of the barrel for any old thing they can remake, reboot, spin-off, sequel, prequel. Thus does it seem that we can now look forward to a ready-to-retire Tom Cruise in yet another retread of a movie from the days when he specialized in playing the arrogant young jackass, Days of Thunder, Part 2--my two cents on which notion you can of course read here.
Let us start with the summer that the very "presentist" idiots of the professional commentariat are most likely to reach for as the first point of comparison--the immediately preceding summer of 2025, a disappointing summer season in a disappointing box office year. I fully admit that, even when we account for the first-of-May to Labor Day weekend period being a whole week longer in 2026 than in 2025 because of a relatively late Labor Day (September 7 rather than September 1) by limiting ourselves to the 123-day, first-to-eighteenth weekend between that May start of the season and the last weekend beginning in August, there is a significant gap in the gross between one season and the other. Specifically 2026 came away with a healthy extra near-billion dollars ($4.58 billion versus the prior year's $3.6 billion) between the first May weekend, and the last weekend beginning in August. The problem with making so much of this as the commentariat is doing is that this was a matter of the late summer season having a boost from two immense outliers of a kind one ordinarily can't count on in a single movie season, or single year, as a close reading of the figures shows. Between the first weekend of the summer at the start of May, and the week immediately preceding the third weekend of July, the 2025 and 2026 seasons were nearly tied--2026 merely matching the lousy equivalent stretch of 2025 in real terms, with $2.56 billion in the till, versus the prior year's $2.45 billion, the 4 percent advantage all but wiped out by the near 4 (3.5) percent inflation of the prior twelve month period. Admittedly when we look at the monthly figures we see that 2026 did have a better May, and a better June, than 2025 did, but, reflecting the way that films like the new Star Wars movie and Masters of the Universe movie disappointed badly, they were not so much better that the weak early-to-mid July period, in which the "underperformance" of Supergirl, the live-action remake of Moana and the latest Minions sufficed to even things out. It was only when The Odyssey came along in that third weekend of the month, and Spider-Man arrived in its last, that business picked up--with those two movies accounting for virtually all the increased business, accounting as the two of them did for three-quarters of the total box office receipts of the period.
Approaching the matter another way consider the top ten films of the two seasons. The top ten films of the summer of 2025 together grossed $2.49 billion; in 2026 $3.22 billion at the point in time discussed here; making for a rough $730 million gap. However, in 2025 the two top earners took in some $780 million, but in 2026 about $1.46 billion, a $680 million difference coming to over 93 percent of the gap. Remove them from the picture and the next eight films in line each collectively made about the same amount of money, with the advantage of the films of 2026 so slight (just $1.764 billion as against $1.717 billion) that, again, the gross in 2026 turns out to have actually run a little behind that of 2025 when we adjust for inflation. Once more, considering the matter this way shows that those top two films, The Odyssey and Spider-Man, made all the difference.
In the way that in 2026 two late July releases saved a flagging box office those who can think more than one year back will also remember 2023, when once more a weak summer season in which franchise film after franchise film underperformed two late July releases--a dark, adult, R-rated Christopher Nolan film that somehow made unlikely blockbuster material a popular hit (remember Oppenheimer?), and a lighter, brightly colored, PG-13 film that made even more money--came to the box office's rescue. One may see an echo of 2024 as well in the late July release of a Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero film that people really wanted to see coming to the rescue of that less than stellar summer season (Deadpool & Wolverine). And taking all four years together one, again, sees that however much the biggest hits may make as much money as ever they did, they also underline the fact that this is not a matter of any broad-based resurgence of film performance, or the moviegoing that would enable it, but of the kind of rare events that cannot be reliably manufactured and thus counted upon coming together in a rare close proximity and giving a sagging box office a lift.
Once again: due to changes in habits wrought by hard times from the "Great Recession" forward, the escalation of the small screen's competition with the big by streaming, and the lingering disruptions of a mass-killing, mass-disabling, still-ongoing pandemic that the media are exceedingly eager for everyone to forget (maybe that theater you used to go to isn't around anymore, and there isn't another anywhere near so convenient close by), people go to the movies less than they used to--per capita ticket sales in North America two a year rather than the three to four a year they had been before the pandemic. As this greater reticence about the proverbial night at the movies suggests, people are choosier filmgoers, passing on many a movie that just a few years ago they would have casually gone to see--with big-budget franchise films that depended on sucking in more casual viewers to hit their highs in particular suffering. The result is a smaller market with tighter competition, such that if you want the public to devote one of their (again, we are averaging) two trips to the theater this year to your film you had better make something that excites them in a Gotta See It Now way. This doesn't have to mean high art or great innovation (certainly It Ends With Us wasn't, certainly the video game-based hits of recent years haven't been), or even rule out more classically blockbuster-type franchise films of the superhero or any other type (Spider-Man, again, was a case of a franchise film that did excite them), but it does mean that Hollywood will do a lot better targeting its hits in line with the detectable existence of genuine public enthusiasm (and keeping a close watch on the bottom line as they do so) than cranking out high-cost franchise films nobody asked for in the expectation that "everyone" will show up and then WHINING WHEN THEY DON'T (as the difference between, for example, Brand New Day and the profoundly ill-conceived $200 million rendition of He-Man we just got shows).
Of course, that is not the narrative the Hollywood executives want promulgated, and which their courtiers in the entertainment press are promulgating, as instead they cling pathetically to the delusion that the market is "recovering" to what it had been before the pandemic, an euphemism for the studios being able to go back to assembly-line production of crapola the way Bob Iger's Disney exemplified in the days before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19, as they scrape the bottom of the barrel for any old thing they can remake, reboot, spin-off, sequel, prequel. Thus does it seem that we can now look forward to a ready-to-retire Tom Cruise in yet another retread of a movie from the days when he specialized in playing the arrogant young jackass, Days of Thunder, Part 2--my two cents on which notion you can of course read here.
The Word "Smart": A Few Thoughts
The usage of the word "smart" has long seemed to me unsatisfactory as a descriptor of the powers of an individual human mind. If "smart" seems to be defined in the dictionaries I have checked as a synonym for "intelligent," people seem to use it rather less precisely than they do "intelligence" and its derivatives, often also using it to refer to "knowledge" or "skills"--obviously a different matter than "intelligence." Even the most intelligent person, after all, does not know what they have not learned. One may imagine that they would, all other things being equal, learn the knowledge or skill at issue more quickly and master it more fully if given the chance than someone who is less "intelligent," but the point is that not given the chance they simply do not have that knowledge or those skills. They are no less intelligent for that. But they may be considered less "smart" for that, a view which bespeaks considerable muddle regarding the concept of "smartness" generally, which seems to me to be compounded by the lower-level muddle characteristic of our speaking of those things which make up "smartness." (Consider our debates about "generative artificial intelligence," and the skeptic's charge that all it does is gather material from its surroundings and slice and dice and recombine it to give us what it does. Are we really so sure that this isn't exactly what humans do when they "create?")
Making matters worse is the way in which intelligence and smartness and the rest, quite frankly, for all the pretenses of modernity and science, of standardized testing and technocracy, is generally understood by the layperson in those terms Thorstein Veblen would have characterized as barbaric--as a matter of personal prowess and force, with reference to said prowess, said force, supposed to explain everything else. The imprecision, and invidiousness, of the use of the word "smart" in particular are all too consistent with this, and consistent too with what is inseparable from all of them, the constant, strident, use of claims to superior intelligence as a justification for inequality--in our time extreme, ever-increasing, ever-more brutal inequality favoring an elite second to none in all of human history for its stupidity, viciousness, gracelessness. Altogether that muddle and barbarism, that conformism and meanness, make the use of the word "smart," like so much else, all too redolent of exploitation of the the stupid person's grasp of the concept of intelligence for the vicious ends of those intent on upholding the status quo in our time.
Making matters worse is the way in which intelligence and smartness and the rest, quite frankly, for all the pretenses of modernity and science, of standardized testing and technocracy, is generally understood by the layperson in those terms Thorstein Veblen would have characterized as barbaric--as a matter of personal prowess and force, with reference to said prowess, said force, supposed to explain everything else. The imprecision, and invidiousness, of the use of the word "smart" in particular are all too consistent with this, and consistent too with what is inseparable from all of them, the constant, strident, use of claims to superior intelligence as a justification for inequality--in our time extreme, ever-increasing, ever-more brutal inequality favoring an elite second to none in all of human history for its stupidity, viciousness, gracelessness. Altogether that muddle and barbarism, that conformism and meanness, make the use of the word "smart," like so much else, all too redolent of exploitation of the the stupid person's grasp of the concept of intelligence for the vicious ends of those intent on upholding the status quo in our time.
The Intellectual Faces a Totalitarian State
The writings Victor Klemperer produced during his time under the Third Reich would seem to today be unjustly, and not at all innocently, neglected. Still, those who do remember them recall them as a portrait of life in Nazi Germany such as few had, the perspective of a German Jew who, because of various personal circumstances, if deprived of his home, job and career, forced to wear a yellow star, perform forced labor in a factory and live in segregated quarters while subject to controls, harassment and abuse of many kinds did not leave the country, go into Anne Frank-style hiding, or put into a concentration camp but rather, and accordingly had a chance to observe "ordinary" German life in Dresden until the city's aerial destruction, and then outside it all the way down to V-E Day. Keeping a diary through it all (I Will Bear Witness), he also, reflecting a sensitivity to language such as all too few members of his profession (professor of language and literature) have, he recorded along with his experiences numerous observations of and reflections on the evolution--or rather, devolution--of the German language as seen in official usage and everyday life under Nazi rule.
Of course, in doing so Klemperer wrote of the saturation of the German language with nationalistic, racist, Anti-Semitic, militaristic reference and evocation. More subtly he remarked the tendency of the Nazis, for all their reactionary romanticism of the past, and their idealization of soil, tradition, the rural world, to technological language consistent with a vision of the country as a great machine under their control. More subtle still was perhaps the most striking theme of his analysis, the way in which the Third Reich's language endeavored to stultify the critical faculties, and in doing a thorough job of that, stultify the intellect more generally. Hence the Nazi exaltation of the physical over the mental, and feeling over thinking, not least in its redefinition of heroism. As Klemperer observes the Nazis seemed to cast aside the idea of the hero as someone who did something for others in their fixation on remarkable physical deeds, a tendency exemplified for him by their cult of sports and the sports hero, and especially the race car driver--hardly an image of self-sacrifice for a common good! It was evident, too, in their exaltation of "faith," a word Klemperer seems to have got really sick of hearing, especially given that the faith so many spoke of was faith in the Fuhrer (the faith in whom really could seem religious given Hitler's quasi-secular deliberate imitation of the language, rituals, symbols, archetypes of the Christian faith to exploit the religious feeling of the believing part of the German public on behalf of the party, its state, its ideology, its causes), while they made "fanaticism" into a virtue, evident not just in the propensity for physicality over intellect and faith over cognition, but also the propensity for bombastic language, characterized by superlatives, evident in how every deed of the Leader was "historic"; by an obsession with "breaking records"; by a penchant for little-understood foreign words that impress the ignorant more than their entirely adequate, well-understood native equivalents ever could have.
Klemperer was also highly sensitive to how even the critically-minded, immersed in the toxic atmosphere created by this corruption of the language, the culture, could find themselves touched by its insidious influence. While it is a cliché of anti-intellectualism that the intellectual lives "in an ivory tower," or "up in the clouds," Klemperer tells us that in fact "a part of every intellectual’s soul belongs to the people," with all the vulnerability that goes with that. In spite of his "awareness of being lied to," and his "critical attentiveness," he knows that "at some point the printed lie will get the better of me when it attacks from all sides and is queried by fewer and fewer around me and finally by no one at all."
As one whom life disabused of many a foolish illusion, he saw all too clearly that intellectual life and the broader public need each other--a lesson those who see any positive role for the life of the mind would do well to heed. Say what one will, those whose principal talent, task, contribution to society is in thinking can hardly make that contribution very well for very long without the interest and support from those who are not intellectuals of the same type themselves, or even intellectuals in any conventional sense, but can nonetheless appreciate what they do--all as that in turn means that the intellectual has a duty to society more broadly, not least in helping others see and understand the world around them. Alas, it is a lesson that the enemies of both intellectuals and the general public have heeded better than they, doing all they can to alienate intellectuals and the general public from each other, with one obvious result in a society where those who actually hold power persuade much of the public that the elite consists not of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, of Big Oil and Big Media, of the health care-industrial complex and the military-industrial complex and the tech-industrial complex, of billionaires and their Beltway fixers and the Yes-I-Knew-Jeffrey-Epstein-But-I-Had-No-Idea-What-All-Those-Girls-Were-Doing-There-Honest club, but college professors barely making ends meet, or simply people who whatever their occupation happen to "like books"--and at the same time convincing the professors that the working people with whom they have so much more in common than is generally acknowledged are a pack of Know-Nothing hardhats whose instincts naturally put them on the side of their persecutors, such that the intellectuals' warnings about the danger to them both go ignored, and the isolated intellectual themselves all too often succumbs to the lies of the powerful.
Of course, in doing so Klemperer wrote of the saturation of the German language with nationalistic, racist, Anti-Semitic, militaristic reference and evocation. More subtly he remarked the tendency of the Nazis, for all their reactionary romanticism of the past, and their idealization of soil, tradition, the rural world, to technological language consistent with a vision of the country as a great machine under their control. More subtle still was perhaps the most striking theme of his analysis, the way in which the Third Reich's language endeavored to stultify the critical faculties, and in doing a thorough job of that, stultify the intellect more generally. Hence the Nazi exaltation of the physical over the mental, and feeling over thinking, not least in its redefinition of heroism. As Klemperer observes the Nazis seemed to cast aside the idea of the hero as someone who did something for others in their fixation on remarkable physical deeds, a tendency exemplified for him by their cult of sports and the sports hero, and especially the race car driver--hardly an image of self-sacrifice for a common good! It was evident, too, in their exaltation of "faith," a word Klemperer seems to have got really sick of hearing, especially given that the faith so many spoke of was faith in the Fuhrer (the faith in whom really could seem religious given Hitler's quasi-secular deliberate imitation of the language, rituals, symbols, archetypes of the Christian faith to exploit the religious feeling of the believing part of the German public on behalf of the party, its state, its ideology, its causes), while they made "fanaticism" into a virtue, evident not just in the propensity for physicality over intellect and faith over cognition, but also the propensity for bombastic language, characterized by superlatives, evident in how every deed of the Leader was "historic"; by an obsession with "breaking records"; by a penchant for little-understood foreign words that impress the ignorant more than their entirely adequate, well-understood native equivalents ever could have.
Klemperer was also highly sensitive to how even the critically-minded, immersed in the toxic atmosphere created by this corruption of the language, the culture, could find themselves touched by its insidious influence. While it is a cliché of anti-intellectualism that the intellectual lives "in an ivory tower," or "up in the clouds," Klemperer tells us that in fact "a part of every intellectual’s soul belongs to the people," with all the vulnerability that goes with that. In spite of his "awareness of being lied to," and his "critical attentiveness," he knows that "at some point the printed lie will get the better of me when it attacks from all sides and is queried by fewer and fewer around me and finally by no one at all."
As one whom life disabused of many a foolish illusion, he saw all too clearly that intellectual life and the broader public need each other--a lesson those who see any positive role for the life of the mind would do well to heed. Say what one will, those whose principal talent, task, contribution to society is in thinking can hardly make that contribution very well for very long without the interest and support from those who are not intellectuals of the same type themselves, or even intellectuals in any conventional sense, but can nonetheless appreciate what they do--all as that in turn means that the intellectual has a duty to society more broadly, not least in helping others see and understand the world around them. Alas, it is a lesson that the enemies of both intellectuals and the general public have heeded better than they, doing all they can to alienate intellectuals and the general public from each other, with one obvious result in a society where those who actually hold power persuade much of the public that the elite consists not of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, of Big Oil and Big Media, of the health care-industrial complex and the military-industrial complex and the tech-industrial complex, of billionaires and their Beltway fixers and the Yes-I-Knew-Jeffrey-Epstein-But-I-Had-No-Idea-What-All-Those-Girls-Were-Doing-There-Honest club, but college professors barely making ends meet, or simply people who whatever their occupation happen to "like books"--and at the same time convincing the professors that the working people with whom they have so much more in common than is generally acknowledged are a pack of Know-Nothing hardhats whose instincts naturally put them on the side of their persecutors, such that the intellectuals' warnings about the danger to them both go ignored, and the isolated intellectual themselves all too often succumbs to the lies of the powerful.
Why Do They Ignore Victor Klemperer?
Readers of a certain generation may remember the actor Werner Klemperer, best known for playing Colonel Klink in the classic sitcom Hogan's Heroes. As it happened Klemperer (as is so often the case with those who have much opportunity for an artistic career) came from a prominent family, in this case not one of businessmen or politicians but artists and intellectuals. Werner's father was the conductor of the storied Kroll Opera House in Berlin until it was closed down in the Depression--after which persecution by the Nazis drove him out of the country, ultimately as far as Los Angeles, where he became the head conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and his son Werner found his way to the Pasadena Playhouse and Hollywood. However, the Klemperers still had relatives back in the old country, among them Professor of Romance languages at Dresden Technical University Victor Klemperer.
If in a very different way from Werner Victor is a noteworthy figure in his own right far outside even his specialty of French literature because of the diaries he kept in Germany during the war, and because of what grew out of it, his study of how the German language evolved--or, as I would think he would have had it, devolved--under Nazi rule, The Language of the Third Reich, which has an historical interest for those at all interested in Nazi Germany. Yet Klemperer today seems little known, in the United States at least. Why is that?
One can very easily chalk it up to the relative insulation of the United States from foreign authors and their works--as well as those relatively few authors and works that are "granted admission." A Max Weber or Sigmund Freud, a Karl Popper or Hannah Arendt, a Ludwig von Mises or Friedrich von Hayek, a Jacques Derrida or a Michel Foucault, were all highly serviceable to the needs of political orthodoxy in their ways, and above all Anti-Communism and the Cold War (the more easily given how many of them were ardent Cold Warriors). By contrast Klemperer was a citizen of a Communist country, and not some persecuted dissident of the kind America thought-leaders hasten to lionize but one in good standing with his government, who analyzed the Third Reich in ways that hit all too close to home not just for Nazis but for the right broadly, such that his person and ideas were doubly unwelcome.
As if all this were not enough Klemperer's attitudes toward the matter of ethnicity worked against his enjoying their favor. Klemperer was a universalist, who believed in a common humanity, and the individualism that only a common humanity allows. The more in as Klemperer was personally made to suffer so much at the hands of the believers in Race, he despised the "partial, bigoted . . . perverted form of romanticism" so dear to nationalists of so many kinds--all as, perhaps not unfittingly for a philologist, he thought that where culture was concerned "Language is more than blood." Indeed, if born a rabbi's son he was baptized as a Protestant decades before Hitler, and married to a gentile--a believer in assimilation who assimilated, and considered himself a German because he was a German, so much so that even as relatives like his cousins left he could not bear to leave his homeland, and went on regarding himself as a German through the Third Reich, and its Holocaust, and afterward, when he decided to return to the university he had taught at before, not just in Germany but the same German city where he had so long made his home.
Alas, in America, as Susan Glenn has shown, universalists like Klemperer ended up on the losing side of a "cultural Cold War" with the partisans of roots, heritage, the faith of one's fathers, difference, apartness from the Other, who held the idea of assimilation in contempt. Held that it is arrogant and foolish presumption to ever imagine that one could, or even should, define themselves rather than accept the definition imposed on them by birth, family, community, society, and even--perhaps most of all--those who would oppress them as, simultaneously despairing, bitter, prideful they insisted "They won't accept us, ever, and even if they would accept us to join them would be a sacrifice of our souls, a betrayal of ourselves"--because of that belief in roots, heritage, the faith of one's fathers, difference, apartness, thinking that this is "Who we are" and that without it we are nothing. And, having not the slightest sympathy, empathy, respect or even understanding of why anyone should think otherwise (the suffocation of the ethnic ghetto and chafing at the marginalization that goes with being outside the mainstream, a desire for a wider and freer life, the attractions of reason and universality and humanity, all nothing to them), they insist that anyone who thinks differently from the partisans of roots, heritage, the faith of one's fathers et. al. is less than human, or more often, simply a pathetic, deluded, likely self-hating creature who, unless he is saved by a return to the fold will see their life end in tragedy one way or another.
Of course, the universalists lost and the partisans of roots won that culture war no later than the 1970s, giving America its present-day politics of identity, multiculturalism and the rest demanding that people define themselves not merely by the ethnic community they were born into but by ancestors of whose lifeways they know little and which have lost all relevance to the world as "Who they are," define themselves as those who would persecute and oppress them define them rather than resisting, and indeed that those who have strayed from the tribe even think of their persecutor and oppressor as actually having given them a gift for which they ought to be grateful by forcing them to "rediscover their roots" and "embrace their heritage" and return to the faith of their fathers, difference, apartness from the Other, the fold, in that hackneyed drama so--to use a word Klemperer would approve--kitschily reenacted so many times in our era's memoir and fiction, with all that means for Klemperer's self-identification, and his larger understanding of these matters. (Indeed, in reviewing Klemperer's diary for the New York Times Richard Bernstein is every bit as graceless toward Klemperer on this score as one would expect a scribbler for that rag to be.) The irony in the unhappy situation is that this cult of roots that has contributed to the marginalization of Klemperer's work and insights is yet another reason why they are so thought-provoking--and I dare say, such a broad, humane, perspective a badly needed corrective in a world where so many have gone mad (or simply stupid) with their idolatry of the dark gods of Identity.
If in a very different way from Werner Victor is a noteworthy figure in his own right far outside even his specialty of French literature because of the diaries he kept in Germany during the war, and because of what grew out of it, his study of how the German language evolved--or, as I would think he would have had it, devolved--under Nazi rule, The Language of the Third Reich, which has an historical interest for those at all interested in Nazi Germany. Yet Klemperer today seems little known, in the United States at least. Why is that?
One can very easily chalk it up to the relative insulation of the United States from foreign authors and their works--as well as those relatively few authors and works that are "granted admission." A Max Weber or Sigmund Freud, a Karl Popper or Hannah Arendt, a Ludwig von Mises or Friedrich von Hayek, a Jacques Derrida or a Michel Foucault, were all highly serviceable to the needs of political orthodoxy in their ways, and above all Anti-Communism and the Cold War (the more easily given how many of them were ardent Cold Warriors). By contrast Klemperer was a citizen of a Communist country, and not some persecuted dissident of the kind America thought-leaders hasten to lionize but one in good standing with his government, who analyzed the Third Reich in ways that hit all too close to home not just for Nazis but for the right broadly, such that his person and ideas were doubly unwelcome.
As if all this were not enough Klemperer's attitudes toward the matter of ethnicity worked against his enjoying their favor. Klemperer was a universalist, who believed in a common humanity, and the individualism that only a common humanity allows. The more in as Klemperer was personally made to suffer so much at the hands of the believers in Race, he despised the "partial, bigoted . . . perverted form of romanticism" so dear to nationalists of so many kinds--all as, perhaps not unfittingly for a philologist, he thought that where culture was concerned "Language is more than blood." Indeed, if born a rabbi's son he was baptized as a Protestant decades before Hitler, and married to a gentile--a believer in assimilation who assimilated, and considered himself a German because he was a German, so much so that even as relatives like his cousins left he could not bear to leave his homeland, and went on regarding himself as a German through the Third Reich, and its Holocaust, and afterward, when he decided to return to the university he had taught at before, not just in Germany but the same German city where he had so long made his home.
Alas, in America, as Susan Glenn has shown, universalists like Klemperer ended up on the losing side of a "cultural Cold War" with the partisans of roots, heritage, the faith of one's fathers, difference, apartness from the Other, who held the idea of assimilation in contempt. Held that it is arrogant and foolish presumption to ever imagine that one could, or even should, define themselves rather than accept the definition imposed on them by birth, family, community, society, and even--perhaps most of all--those who would oppress them as, simultaneously despairing, bitter, prideful they insisted "They won't accept us, ever, and even if they would accept us to join them would be a sacrifice of our souls, a betrayal of ourselves"--because of that belief in roots, heritage, the faith of one's fathers, difference, apartness, thinking that this is "Who we are" and that without it we are nothing. And, having not the slightest sympathy, empathy, respect or even understanding of why anyone should think otherwise (the suffocation of the ethnic ghetto and chafing at the marginalization that goes with being outside the mainstream, a desire for a wider and freer life, the attractions of reason and universality and humanity, all nothing to them), they insist that anyone who thinks differently from the partisans of roots, heritage, the faith of one's fathers et. al. is less than human, or more often, simply a pathetic, deluded, likely self-hating creature who, unless he is saved by a return to the fold will see their life end in tragedy one way or another.
Of course, the universalists lost and the partisans of roots won that culture war no later than the 1970s, giving America its present-day politics of identity, multiculturalism and the rest demanding that people define themselves not merely by the ethnic community they were born into but by ancestors of whose lifeways they know little and which have lost all relevance to the world as "Who they are," define themselves as those who would persecute and oppress them define them rather than resisting, and indeed that those who have strayed from the tribe even think of their persecutor and oppressor as actually having given them a gift for which they ought to be grateful by forcing them to "rediscover their roots" and "embrace their heritage" and return to the faith of their fathers, difference, apartness from the Other, the fold, in that hackneyed drama so--to use a word Klemperer would approve--kitschily reenacted so many times in our era's memoir and fiction, with all that means for Klemperer's self-identification, and his larger understanding of these matters. (Indeed, in reviewing Klemperer's diary for the New York Times Richard Bernstein is every bit as graceless toward Klemperer on this score as one would expect a scribbler for that rag to be.) The irony in the unhappy situation is that this cult of roots that has contributed to the marginalization of Klemperer's work and insights is yet another reason why they are so thought-provoking--and I dare say, such a broad, humane, perspective a badly needed corrective in a world where so many have gone mad (or simply stupid) with their idolatry of the dark gods of Identity.
Theodore Dreiser and the "Crisis of Masculinity"
I recently had something to say of the alleged "crisis of masculinity"--the moral panic evident among both the cultural "traditionalists" and the anti-traditionalist "woke," that young men are either unable or unwilling to follow the "script" for their lives that society conventionally, traditionally, set out for them.
My take on the matter is that the claim that there is a crisis of masculinity is obtuse, reactionary, dishonest and self-serving. Simply put, society makes onerous demands of its members, with the ones at issue here the young. Given how the costs of compliance with those demands seems to be ever rising, the rewards of compliance falling as they grow less certain, more remote, smaller, those of whom the demand is being made are more resistant to the demands than before, and while being more resistant perhaps more questioning of the demands than before. Yes, changes in "gender norms" are part of this. (That women are expected to bear traditionally male demands at work, etc., while continuing to bear the traditional primary responsibility for the home and child-rearing; that men are expected to share significantly, even equally, in those traditionally female burdens, while continuing to bear the traditional primary responsibility for being the household's bread-winner, all as he must resign himself to his home not being his castle, and his spouse not being a supportive wife as he is instead expected to be supportive of her as she makes her own journey through life while juggling all of the aforementioned responsibilities, etc., etc., etc.; inclines both men and women to feel like they are getting a raw deal.) But the narrowly gender-based side of the issue is far from being the whole story. That we have seen a collapse in the real purchasing power of working people's incomes is far from irrelevant to the situation, greatly compounding the stress all of them are under, and making "the deal" that much less attractive, however much the idiots pouring gasoline on the fires of kulturkampf from both sides would like to not notice it. (Like marriage and family the "home ownership" conventionally regarded as a prerequisite for "responsible" establishment of a household today means a mortgage far beyond their means on a money pit designed to be worthless before the mortgage is up for the dubious privilege of living under the thumb of a Home Ownership Association or condo board that will make them feel like less an owner than a tenant or even a squatter, as the political string-pulling vultures of private equity circle over their heads in an arrangement giving them all the "personal responsibility" of home ownership without any of the benefits--such that only an idiot would not have misgivings.)
As one might guess the resistance to the demands in question is not the new thing either side makes it out to be, quite naturally given, again, the demands' onerousness, with Theodore Dreiser's nonfiction reminding me of that. As he explains with great frankness, as a young man he had no desire whatsoever to join the Rat Race, to push and strive to "get ahead" as society demanded. Especially as a young man Dreiser seemed to feel there was something wrong with him for his shrinking from the struggle and hardship and cares of the conventional path--a view that Authority, of course, encouraged, insisting that any healthy young man ought to be eager-beaver to throw themselves into the fray, stupidly, irrationally convinced that they will be the one donkey in the five thousand to get the carrot in that way morons valorize as "confidence." But if perhaps feeling all this more sharply than others as a young man who was exceptionally intelligent, sensitive and intellectual, while at the same time distinctly lacking the social advantages of many of his peers, there was nothing unusual about the sentiments themselves, this indeed the norm among those whom, as Stendhal observed long before Dreiser came into this world, had their youths spoiled by the burden of settling on and starting in a career due to their not having been born rich (as Dreiser so much wished he had been). At the same time, while young Dreiser was certainly (very) interested in women he had no particular desire for marriage and a family--and indeed explicitly challenged the "natalist" view in his writings.
Of course, few read Dreiser these days. But what Dreiser thought others also think in a world that, due to society's miserable failure to address the problems so glaringly evident to Dreiser and those who heeded him in the twentieth century, is still dealing with the same problems ta century on, such that individual young people, faced with the "scam" or "racket" of adulthood more often fail to achieve it, or simply decline it. Authority is horrified but, as usual, lacks any intelligent answer to the discontents before it, leaving us at the present impasse so many misrepresent as a "crisis of masculinity."
My take on the matter is that the claim that there is a crisis of masculinity is obtuse, reactionary, dishonest and self-serving. Simply put, society makes onerous demands of its members, with the ones at issue here the young. Given how the costs of compliance with those demands seems to be ever rising, the rewards of compliance falling as they grow less certain, more remote, smaller, those of whom the demand is being made are more resistant to the demands than before, and while being more resistant perhaps more questioning of the demands than before. Yes, changes in "gender norms" are part of this. (That women are expected to bear traditionally male demands at work, etc., while continuing to bear the traditional primary responsibility for the home and child-rearing; that men are expected to share significantly, even equally, in those traditionally female burdens, while continuing to bear the traditional primary responsibility for being the household's bread-winner, all as he must resign himself to his home not being his castle, and his spouse not being a supportive wife as he is instead expected to be supportive of her as she makes her own journey through life while juggling all of the aforementioned responsibilities, etc., etc., etc.; inclines both men and women to feel like they are getting a raw deal.) But the narrowly gender-based side of the issue is far from being the whole story. That we have seen a collapse in the real purchasing power of working people's incomes is far from irrelevant to the situation, greatly compounding the stress all of them are under, and making "the deal" that much less attractive, however much the idiots pouring gasoline on the fires of kulturkampf from both sides would like to not notice it. (Like marriage and family the "home ownership" conventionally regarded as a prerequisite for "responsible" establishment of a household today means a mortgage far beyond their means on a money pit designed to be worthless before the mortgage is up for the dubious privilege of living under the thumb of a Home Ownership Association or condo board that will make them feel like less an owner than a tenant or even a squatter, as the political string-pulling vultures of private equity circle over their heads in an arrangement giving them all the "personal responsibility" of home ownership without any of the benefits--such that only an idiot would not have misgivings.)
As one might guess the resistance to the demands in question is not the new thing either side makes it out to be, quite naturally given, again, the demands' onerousness, with Theodore Dreiser's nonfiction reminding me of that. As he explains with great frankness, as a young man he had no desire whatsoever to join the Rat Race, to push and strive to "get ahead" as society demanded. Especially as a young man Dreiser seemed to feel there was something wrong with him for his shrinking from the struggle and hardship and cares of the conventional path--a view that Authority, of course, encouraged, insisting that any healthy young man ought to be eager-beaver to throw themselves into the fray, stupidly, irrationally convinced that they will be the one donkey in the five thousand to get the carrot in that way morons valorize as "confidence." But if perhaps feeling all this more sharply than others as a young man who was exceptionally intelligent, sensitive and intellectual, while at the same time distinctly lacking the social advantages of many of his peers, there was nothing unusual about the sentiments themselves, this indeed the norm among those whom, as Stendhal observed long before Dreiser came into this world, had their youths spoiled by the burden of settling on and starting in a career due to their not having been born rich (as Dreiser so much wished he had been). At the same time, while young Dreiser was certainly (very) interested in women he had no particular desire for marriage and a family--and indeed explicitly challenged the "natalist" view in his writings.
Of course, few read Dreiser these days. But what Dreiser thought others also think in a world that, due to society's miserable failure to address the problems so glaringly evident to Dreiser and those who heeded him in the twentieth century, is still dealing with the same problems ta century on, such that individual young people, faced with the "scam" or "racket" of adulthood more often fail to achieve it, or simply decline it. Authority is horrified but, as usual, lacks any intelligent answer to the discontents before it, leaving us at the present impasse so many misrepresent as a "crisis of masculinity."
The Wordsmith and the Web
Those of us who have been writing and putting out our work online by way of blogs, self-published books and other such material have been watching the return on effort invested get worse for a long, long time. For the blogger, and self-published author, the situation circa 2010 was far from great, indeed by any reasonable standard depressing--and what kept many going was the hope that things would get better. However, as I can say with the hindsight of a decade and a half it was actually as good as they ever got. Since then the chances of "discovery" by people actually ready to do a bit of reading, who if they like what they see might possibly share it with others who might look at it, has plummeted. Some of this was a matter of the way the web just went on getting more crowded (with the onslaught of AI slop not helping). But much of it was also the way in which the grifting scum of Big Tech and assorted, equally vile, vested interests of similar type, from search engine algorithm changes designed to force you to look at more advertising by deliberately making it harder for you to find what you want, to publishers making war on the e-book, to the Establishment war on alternative media in the name of fighting "fake news" as they sought to make sure that unapproved "realfacts" never undermined the credulity of the public in their "goodfacts," fought an exterminationist war against anything and everything that would democratize the means of communication.
Those prone to soften the facts into the "optimistic, practical, forward-looking, cordial, brisk view" offered the frustrated writer false reassurances that quality work would surely find its way to an audience come what may, and enjoinments to adapt to the new milieu. Thus those who wanted to share an opinion online were directed to, rather than hoping to be discovered, go where the people were--in Reddit fora and on X and so on--and speak their opinions there; to if they had something to say about a book, say it in the Customer Reviews section of a book retailer's site. Or better still, say what they had to say in a video on YouTube.
Of course, to abandon one's own blog in favor of Reddit or Customer Reviews meant that rather than a writer having their little corner of the web they were expected to have their say in some Big Tech fora policed by corporate enforcers; to trade their essay-writing for trying to start conversations with strangers all too likely to prove to be rancorous or even bullying idiots given that this is who you so often meet should you talk to strangers online; to give up the hope of a living from their writing that a little corner of the web represented to many an author to creating content, and value, for those Big Tech companies that would reap the profit instead. At its most light-minded it is "Let them eat cake," and where more knowing, a call to cheerfully acquiesce in the ruin of small producers as the Big drive everyone else to the wall.
If anything the enjoinment to give up the written word altogether in favor of becoming video producers is worse. After all, never mind the higher resource outlay required, or the plain and simple fact that many a person comfortable with blogging would be uncomfortable speaking in front of a camera, what could be said in the first medium could as easily be said in another (you try turning a dense two thousand word essay into a video)--for what little it would have been worth given the finiteness of the audience they would now be trying so much harder to chase. (Even those who are barely numerate should be able to see that turning six hundred millions blogs into six hundred million vlogs will see the vast, vast majority of would-be Youtube stars end up with absolutely nothing for their trouble as the ranks of vloggers explode in a world where there is no more demand for their offering than there was before.)
It would have been much less like the optimistic, practical, forward-looking, cordial, brisk view, but much more honest and intelligent for these purveyors of advice to tell the writers in question that in today's web there was just that much less room for what they had to offer; that this was a systemic matter that in their case left the individual with a paucity of good options, the way systemic changes so consistently do in our time; and that this was the proper starting point for anyone asking the old question "What is to be done?"
Those prone to soften the facts into the "optimistic, practical, forward-looking, cordial, brisk view" offered the frustrated writer false reassurances that quality work would surely find its way to an audience come what may, and enjoinments to adapt to the new milieu. Thus those who wanted to share an opinion online were directed to, rather than hoping to be discovered, go where the people were--in Reddit fora and on X and so on--and speak their opinions there; to if they had something to say about a book, say it in the Customer Reviews section of a book retailer's site. Or better still, say what they had to say in a video on YouTube.
Of course, to abandon one's own blog in favor of Reddit or Customer Reviews meant that rather than a writer having their little corner of the web they were expected to have their say in some Big Tech fora policed by corporate enforcers; to trade their essay-writing for trying to start conversations with strangers all too likely to prove to be rancorous or even bullying idiots given that this is who you so often meet should you talk to strangers online; to give up the hope of a living from their writing that a little corner of the web represented to many an author to creating content, and value, for those Big Tech companies that would reap the profit instead. At its most light-minded it is "Let them eat cake," and where more knowing, a call to cheerfully acquiesce in the ruin of small producers as the Big drive everyone else to the wall.
If anything the enjoinment to give up the written word altogether in favor of becoming video producers is worse. After all, never mind the higher resource outlay required, or the plain and simple fact that many a person comfortable with blogging would be uncomfortable speaking in front of a camera, what could be said in the first medium could as easily be said in another (you try turning a dense two thousand word essay into a video)--for what little it would have been worth given the finiteness of the audience they would now be trying so much harder to chase. (Even those who are barely numerate should be able to see that turning six hundred millions blogs into six hundred million vlogs will see the vast, vast majority of would-be Youtube stars end up with absolutely nothing for their trouble as the ranks of vloggers explode in a world where there is no more demand for their offering than there was before.)
It would have been much less like the optimistic, practical, forward-looking, cordial, brisk view, but much more honest and intelligent for these purveyors of advice to tell the writers in question that in today's web there was just that much less room for what they had to offer; that this was a systemic matter that in their case left the individual with a paucity of good options, the way systemic changes so consistently do in our time; and that this was the proper starting point for anyone asking the old question "What is to be done?"
Of Discovery and Digital Democracy
That an item presented without the backing of a major platform or promotional budget could be discovered, and by engaging the interest of readers online who share it with others, enabling it to come to wider attention--in the most extreme form of this, "go viral"--was ultimately the foundation of those hopes that the Internet would enable a democratization of the means of communication in any degree by giving those with nothing but their ideas, their words, their passions, their art, a chance to reach an audience on their own merits.
Of course Big Tech, Big Media and the political Establishment have warred against any such democratization from the very beginning. Of course, it is the case that their deliberate efforts were not the only thing that stood in the way of such online democracy. The mere crowding of the web over time, a process exacerbated by the proliferation of AI slop, was not intended to cut off the small web user's chance of discovery, just made it less likely in an incidental way. The shift of the web from lower-resource text to higher-resource audiovisual content has played a part was similarly incidental. Even the chokepoint capitalism of Big Tech that has seen it make visibility another commodity, and rig its algorithms to keep users on their crappy platforms by elevating some at the expense of everyone else, has been first and foremost about making money for their obscenely overvalued monopolies, rather than pushing bloggers to the wall. Nevertheless it has, alongside more deliberate efforts like the favoritism shown "brands" by Internet search, and the highly politicized campaigns against so-called "fake news," played a massive part in bringing the Internet closer to its Maximum Era--with the fact that so many powerful actors have a stake in the broad outcome diminishing any concern for the role they have played, and helping to eliminate any concern whatsoever for online democracy and the small-timers who set such hopes by it from The Discourse.
Today with that Maximum Era upon us, and indeed to go by the signs of collapsing Internet traffic for those small-timers the Great Internet Die-Off underway--it is in the nature of such a Die-Off that we wouldn't notice what was disappearing, because our noticing it had been foreclosed in advance, just as with the extinction of species the scientists never had a chance to catalog--the outcome may not be surprising. The hope that some technological change would largely suffice to bring "power to the people" has been raised again and again in modern times--and again and again disappointed as, within a society where power is highly centralized and exercised in authoritarian fashion, the latest technologies much more often tending to serve their purposes than to undermine them. (Consider how George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola sank much of their fortunes into the expectation that the means had arrived with which to take movie making away from the big bad studios and put it in the hands of the artists .) Still, that it has happened before, that there was reason to be skeptical, does not make the disappointment of the hope any less painful--all as it seems well to remember that in this case the promise of democratization was in itself an instrument of that centralized power, and indeed the "cyber-utopianism" of which we saw so much in the 1990s really just another flavor of the "market populism" that had the fascists of Silicon Valley pretending to all the world to be hippie flower children who just want to make the world a better place. Too few seem to recall that in this time in which it can seem the robber barons of Silicon Valley had never pretended to be anything but a bunch of swaggering Nazis--and those corporations inclined to do so went in for Market Populism 2.0 in the form of the Woke Capitalism that, reflecting the intellectual muddle of our times, the right was much more inclined to bring to the attention of the mainstream, as, as much as ever, the left was prevented from saying the obvious by its exclusion from the public square in that way that respectable opinion, without the slightest alertness to the hypocrisy and the irony involved, calls "free speech."
Of course Big Tech, Big Media and the political Establishment have warred against any such democratization from the very beginning. Of course, it is the case that their deliberate efforts were not the only thing that stood in the way of such online democracy. The mere crowding of the web over time, a process exacerbated by the proliferation of AI slop, was not intended to cut off the small web user's chance of discovery, just made it less likely in an incidental way. The shift of the web from lower-resource text to higher-resource audiovisual content has played a part was similarly incidental. Even the chokepoint capitalism of Big Tech that has seen it make visibility another commodity, and rig its algorithms to keep users on their crappy platforms by elevating some at the expense of everyone else, has been first and foremost about making money for their obscenely overvalued monopolies, rather than pushing bloggers to the wall. Nevertheless it has, alongside more deliberate efforts like the favoritism shown "brands" by Internet search, and the highly politicized campaigns against so-called "fake news," played a massive part in bringing the Internet closer to its Maximum Era--with the fact that so many powerful actors have a stake in the broad outcome diminishing any concern for the role they have played, and helping to eliminate any concern whatsoever for online democracy and the small-timers who set such hopes by it from The Discourse.
Today with that Maximum Era upon us, and indeed to go by the signs of collapsing Internet traffic for those small-timers the Great Internet Die-Off underway--it is in the nature of such a Die-Off that we wouldn't notice what was disappearing, because our noticing it had been foreclosed in advance, just as with the extinction of species the scientists never had a chance to catalog--the outcome may not be surprising. The hope that some technological change would largely suffice to bring "power to the people" has been raised again and again in modern times--and again and again disappointed as, within a society where power is highly centralized and exercised in authoritarian fashion, the latest technologies much more often tending to serve their purposes than to undermine them. (Consider how George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola sank much of their fortunes into the expectation that the means had arrived with which to take movie making away from the big bad studios and put it in the hands of the artists .) Still, that it has happened before, that there was reason to be skeptical, does not make the disappointment of the hope any less painful--all as it seems well to remember that in this case the promise of democratization was in itself an instrument of that centralized power, and indeed the "cyber-utopianism" of which we saw so much in the 1990s really just another flavor of the "market populism" that had the fascists of Silicon Valley pretending to all the world to be hippie flower children who just want to make the world a better place. Too few seem to recall that in this time in which it can seem the robber barons of Silicon Valley had never pretended to be anything but a bunch of swaggering Nazis--and those corporations inclined to do so went in for Market Populism 2.0 in the form of the Woke Capitalism that, reflecting the intellectual muddle of our times, the right was much more inclined to bring to the attention of the mainstream, as, as much as ever, the left was prevented from saying the obvious by its exclusion from the public square in that way that respectable opinion, without the slightest alertness to the hypocrisy and the irony involved, calls "free speech."
The Politics of Internet Audiovisualization
One is that the old text-based Internet permitted greater accessibility, and deeper, more critically-minded interaction, in various ways. Certainly it seems to me that, where the resources required are concerned, far more people are able to produce a passable 1,000-word post and put it up on a page than produce a passable video conveying the same content (or any content). It was also the case that the experience of reading text was more conducive to attentiveness toward and parsing of the content than the experience of listening to someone speak in a video intrinsically less susceptible to preview, to "close reading," etc.. By the same token the audience were more inclined to reply, and reply thoughtfully, with a worked-out written response expressing their thinking. The result is that if, as Jen Schradie had it, the Internet was always a better tool of broadcast than of dialogue there was still more room for the latter than there would later be when the written word had to compete so much with the moving image, the audiovisual orientation raising the costs of participation in a way shutting out many, and reducing the scope for interactivity as Internet usage becomes still more a broadcasting medium.
At the same time there is the reality that if there are many forms of rhetorical appeal those who have sought to appeal to an audience's reason have found themselves more reliant on the word than the image--whereas those who have deliberately looked to bypass or overwhelm the rational faculties have historically found in the image the better tool. After all, if a picture may be worth a thousand words in cases, in many a case a thousand words can tell a person a great many things that no plausible number of images can convey--images most effective when the purpose is conveying a simple, already known and understood message forcefully, rather than introducing us to a new message, and still less, helping us make sense of the complex phenomena around us. Accordingly a technological context in which the image is so much in the ascendant over the word would seem to reshape Internet culture in favor of those who place their trust in bypassing rational thinking with images in favor of the elitist and authoritarian as against the egalitarian and democratic, with all that implies for the discourse at large.
The Politics of the Internet We Have: Thoughts
Analysts of our online life such as Jen Schradie have found that, contrary to the expectations promulgated by the cyber-utopians, it has not been the case that the marginalized found in the Internet a leveler in the political battles they fight where they can make their voices heard. Quite the contrary, the Internet has worked for the privileged, the established, the powerful, for many reasons. To name just those that I have found most compelling, there is the extent to which the Internet has proven more conducive to broadcasting simple messages than the conveyance of complex ideas or nuanced conversations; its gatekeeping by big corporations, with their profit and associated motives; the microeconomics of getting anything actually looked at online favoring the well-resourced financially; the continued importance of legacy media in bringing attention to what is actually is to be found online, with its own biases in favor of the powerful; and the reality that the requirements of significant participation in online life, especially going beyond the most utilitarian tasks (doing your shopping, paying your bills, etc.) or simplest entertainments (streaming a TV show) to actively getting involved in political discussions favors those who are privileged in many ways. (They have more of the disposable time and energy such a situation requires; they feel safer expressing an opinion in public than do those who are socially disadvantaged, or have dissenting views, with all that means for what Internet users will be more likely to ignore, what they will be likely to share, certainly the more after seeing so much retaliation from employers , government authorities and others who didn't like their online activity.) And indeed, it seems possible that all of these factors, which have accrued to the advantage of the right, have aided them meaningfully in their run of political victories through the twenty-first century--their success online a factor in their success in political life broadly.
Of course, all that said one may say "That was in the past, but what about now?" For my part I do not see any of those factors becoming less important, but rather their becoming more so. Certainly the way our online life has evolved has made it less plausible that anything will be "discovered" online, and that much more important that anyone who wants their message noticed put in the time and money to make it visible to people. (Have I not been writing of the looming Maximum Era for the web for quite some time now?) Certainly those who have long gatekept the web have only got more aggressive about that, both in their own financial interest as enshittification itself holds Internet attention-seekers to ransom, and their increasing inclination to display the rightist biases that are the norm for Big Business and the wealthy--and perhaps the particular right-wing inclinations of Silicon Valley as well, certainly to go by the conduct of Musk in regard to X, the Ellison family in regard to its holdings, etc..
Meanwhile other recent developments in our online life would seem to reinforce that trend. There is the way in which the Internet is becoming less text-oriented, and more audiovisually-oriented, which means getting a message that people will be receptive to is costlier (video is more resource-intensive than text), while arguably also being less conducive to dialogue, and thus making the Internet that much more a broadcast medium. There is also the way in which rather than digging for information themselves people are turning to answer engines--with the result less contact and support for any source of information, to the particular disadvantage of smaller, alternative media-type sources as against the big operations, but also with the result their getting what answer engines tend to offer, the Establishment answer to any question, with all that is likely to mean, as their abilities to seek out anything else atrophy for lack of exercise, more generally translating to an audience more disposed to simply believe what Authority tells it. All these developments not yet advanced anywhere near so far as they eventually might get to be, those hoping for a more egalitarian Internet where the marginalized, the progressive, etc. have a voice would be very, very wrong to be complacent about these developments--the more in as the Internet has played its part in the unmitigated string of disappointments and disasters the twenty-first century has been for them to date.
Of course, all that said one may say "That was in the past, but what about now?" For my part I do not see any of those factors becoming less important, but rather their becoming more so. Certainly the way our online life has evolved has made it less plausible that anything will be "discovered" online, and that much more important that anyone who wants their message noticed put in the time and money to make it visible to people. (Have I not been writing of the looming Maximum Era for the web for quite some time now?) Certainly those who have long gatekept the web have only got more aggressive about that, both in their own financial interest as enshittification itself holds Internet attention-seekers to ransom, and their increasing inclination to display the rightist biases that are the norm for Big Business and the wealthy--and perhaps the particular right-wing inclinations of Silicon Valley as well, certainly to go by the conduct of Musk in regard to X, the Ellison family in regard to its holdings, etc..
Meanwhile other recent developments in our online life would seem to reinforce that trend. There is the way in which the Internet is becoming less text-oriented, and more audiovisually-oriented, which means getting a message that people will be receptive to is costlier (video is more resource-intensive than text), while arguably also being less conducive to dialogue, and thus making the Internet that much more a broadcast medium. There is also the way in which rather than digging for information themselves people are turning to answer engines--with the result less contact and support for any source of information, to the particular disadvantage of smaller, alternative media-type sources as against the big operations, but also with the result their getting what answer engines tend to offer, the Establishment answer to any question, with all that is likely to mean, as their abilities to seek out anything else atrophy for lack of exercise, more generally translating to an audience more disposed to simply believe what Authority tells it. All these developments not yet advanced anywhere near so far as they eventually might get to be, those hoping for a more egalitarian Internet where the marginalized, the progressive, etc. have a voice would be very, very wrong to be complacent about these developments--the more in as the Internet has played its part in the unmitigated string of disappointments and disasters the twenty-first century has been for them to date.
The Way We Live (Online) Now
From the start the web had an exceedingly high ratio of would-be speakers to would-be audience--on social media at times, seemingly approaching one to one. The result was that the competition for web user's attention was so extreme as to call into question the meaningfulness of the concept of competition itself--the more in as what went on did not take place on anything resembling a level playing field, since visibility was purchasable, legacy media attention critical, and appeal to the privileged indispensable from the outset. However, the monopolization of online search, and the channeling of a very large part of online traffic through social media's platforms; the gatekeepers' increasing treatment of "non-brand" online "content" as a disgusting piece of schmitt ("the cesspool"); said gatekeepers' taking on the Ministry of Truth function of weeding out search results that might get in the way of Authority's "goodfacts"; their grubbing after ad-dollars on the basis of not taking users to what they are looking for; the advent of "answer engines" that search the web "so that you don't have to"; the way sites "defend" themselves against those engines' searches and artificial intelligence generally in ways that also made them less searchable by humans; the paywall fetishism and general copyright Nazism; the "algorithm changes" knocking small-timers down from their hard-earned places in the search rankings again and again with each quarter and then penalizing them again and again for their losing traffic; the explosion in the volume of "AI slop" online, against which everything made by everybody has to compete; the discouragement of the old-fashioned web user by the increasingly disgusting character of the experience, with all that has meant for the willingness to really search for what they want; among much, much else; have all but killed the chances of those gambling on the web letting them reach an audience through the magic of "discovery" and whatever grain of truth there ever was in the myth of "virality" that were ever the ordinary person's ONLY chance in the game, and sine qua non of any democratization of the means of communication. And that, of course, is before we look at the ways the war on the e-book, the audiovisualization of online life, the ever more thoroughgoing enshittification of blog syndication platforms, the growing brazenness of the Roderick Spodes of Silicon Valley about using their platforms to push their disgusting politics, made life tougher still for some (the self-published book author, those simply not willing to swap their blog for a vlog whether low-resourced or camera-shy or just really word-oriented, those whose interests are "niche" and intellectual rather than lowest-common denominator generally, and yes, the politically progressive, getting the worst of the situation yet again).
Indeed, I cannot think of a single development in the relevant decades that offered all these web users any help whatsoever, the Web Gods relentlessly closing doors without ever opening any windows en route to the Internet's Maximum Era. Yet even with all this having happened any blogger, etc. asking "Why don't I have an audience?"--for instance, to one of those answer engines--will not hear about these things. Instead those they find online will tell them that they must be doing everything wrong. They should have laid out the money for a fancier web site, and search optimization, and paid guest bloggers, and advertising--never mind whether any of this would really have been likely to bring a return, especially in a situation of declining prospects for everyone at the very game they are playing. Consistent with that pattern of victim-blaming and general gas-lighting that in America is called "optimism" and having a "good attitude" and commending which is the foundation of the racket we call "self-help," they pass off systemic failings as individual ones, while in that pitching of services whose sellers will get their money regardless of whether the would-be star makes any money or not from their use (as they will almost surely fail to do) turning a buck on their futile striving.
However, factoring into this there is also the way in which elites are invested in a particular view of "tech," for so long the great hope of neoliberal capitalism, whether its actual performance (their hopes for which would seem represented by the idiocies of the AI bubble), or simply its legitimation. Regarding that said elites can seem stuck in the market populism-hawking '90s, oblivious to how if Silicon Valley ever really represented something more hopeful to those less than in love with actually existing capitalism, something freer and more democratic and uplifting--not least, in its democratizing the means of communication--it has for many come to represent all that is most loathsome in it. No reasonable person denies that the Internet is a hugely important utility that has brought a great many benefits to the world (just picture yourself getting through the period when people weren't pretending there wasn't a pandemic without it), but it also seems that no reasonable person would deny that the terms on which we have got it have, on the evidence to date, also made it a far more useful tool for oppression than liberation as, besides its well-known combination of cyber-gangster's paradise with Orwellian surveillance nightmare that has left the great majority of the public as unprotected as it is bound, it has been an instrument of Orwellian social and political control as well. And far from this having been the "There Is No Alternative" inevitability apologists for and admirers of the status quo and its injustice, misery and brutality so constantly hasten to tell us it is, the fact remaining that, contrary to the stupid libertarian lie the ever downward-punching Establishment press repeats a thousand times before anyone else can get a word in, the "tech entrepreneurs" endlessly marketed to the public as latterday culture heroes TO WHOM THEY ARE INFERIOR actually made their obscene fortunes not by inventing anything, but, as an elementary grasp of economic history and theory shows to be far more likely, by sociopathically enshittifying what an earlier generation had invented not with the "venture capital" of businessmen who risked all to win all, but government-directed taxpayer dollars in a triumph not of the "INNOVATION!" unleashed by the market but of corporate welfare, monopoly power, rent-seeking and the general financialization/bullshitization of our economic life that Big Tech did so much to lead, with the unfortunate outcome to be seen all around us, online and everywhere else.
Indeed, I cannot think of a single development in the relevant decades that offered all these web users any help whatsoever, the Web Gods relentlessly closing doors without ever opening any windows en route to the Internet's Maximum Era. Yet even with all this having happened any blogger, etc. asking "Why don't I have an audience?"--for instance, to one of those answer engines--will not hear about these things. Instead those they find online will tell them that they must be doing everything wrong. They should have laid out the money for a fancier web site, and search optimization, and paid guest bloggers, and advertising--never mind whether any of this would really have been likely to bring a return, especially in a situation of declining prospects for everyone at the very game they are playing. Consistent with that pattern of victim-blaming and general gas-lighting that in America is called "optimism" and having a "good attitude" and commending which is the foundation of the racket we call "self-help," they pass off systemic failings as individual ones, while in that pitching of services whose sellers will get their money regardless of whether the would-be star makes any money or not from their use (as they will almost surely fail to do) turning a buck on their futile striving.
Literature in the Age of the World State
In writing his "future history" of the world in The Shape of Things to Come H.G. Wells told of the movement of humanity from the failing Modernity he saw all around him in the middle of the "Thirty Years' Crisis" of 1914-1945 to the more flourishing, peaceful, saner world of the early twenty-second century--the shift from the wreck of capitalism and the states system and "traditional" culture with its superstition, tribalism, selfish striving and the rest to a world united under a rational, scientific, global government using the world's resources for the good of all. In telling the tale he did not neglect the development of culture, and especially of literature--with the scattered remarks together comprising a story consistent with the development of society at large (and his ideas about it).
As it happened, H.G. Wells saw some of the literature of his time as having its interest--favorably citing such works as Erich Kästner's Fabian and Hans Fallada 's Little Man, What Now? as "vivid and illuminating" portraits of their time still readable for their historical (and perhaps other) interest two centuries on. However, his view of the avant garde literature of his day was certainly unfavorable, the world of literature and art seeming to him as decadent as the economic and social system in which its producers lived. The more in as they pandered to the sentiment of an essentially privileged and conservative readership, they became increasingly hostile to modernity, science, technology, reason, progress, indeed the view that "there IS such a thing as society" (or noticing these things, acknowledged them only to condemn them as Aldous Huxley did in Brave New World, as he regarded George Bernard Shaw to be doing in Back to Methusaleh) as they retreated into a "bitter and peculiar Bohemia." In the process they also became prone to be "elaborately stylistic and 'rare'"; and "brutally smutty" as, bespeaking a desire for escape "from the immense demands" of civilization's failure and need for radical social, economic, political change they made "a great noise about the intensifications and aberrations of the personal life" instead, reflected in a vast amount of pornography that could be "solemn . . . facetious . . . sadistic," even religious, as it wallowed in its own obscenity, what we would today call "edgelordism" the order of the day.
As one might guess the collapse of civilization in the middle of the century, as the Second World War he envisaged (in many ways with uncanny accuracy, in others less so) did not so much end as fizzle out in exhaustion, paving the way for a pandemic that was more murderous than even the wartime machinery of destruction. However, literature did revive with civilization, albeit along different lines, the "style" and the smuttiness a thing of the past, along with the moral simplicities of the earlier era amid the great changes in life attendant upon the struggle of the workers of the World State and all they represented with the remnants of the bad old ways. Thus where the novel--the "bourgeois," "realist" "nineteenth century" novel--conventionally depicted "individual character in a set battle between good and bad in a world of undisputed standards," the novels of Wells' 1980s were "preoccupied with this universal battle of ideas and mental habits in people's minds"—a battle not of "good and bad" but "a wild confusion between two sorts of good and two sorts of bad and of innate character distorted in a thousand ways." If stylistically less striking than the decadent works of the 1930s and 1940s they were psychologically more complex, and certainly far more attentive to the social facts from which that earlier literature retreated, and apparently more accepting of them. At the same time literature became more "adult"--bespeaking a world of people with longer life expectancies spent in better health than in a time when life tended to be shorter, and the years of relative soundness of body and mind still more so, such that people made more of the fleeting years when they were young than people of the World State era did.
Accordingly one could trace the march toward sanity through the development of literature--and the ways in which, at least after the World State's passage through a busybody, "Puritan" phase in which it was censorious of older work, much of that older work lost its affect for a later, saner people. As Wells recounts, much that people enjoyed previously--like the comedic delight in punching down and punching up within a hierarchy, not least as seen in the "queer clowning with insults and repartees," seemed to the people of the twenty-second century "either fatuous or malicious." Likewise the "false stresses . . . unnecessary sacrifices and desperations" of "'romance'" (about which the author cites Paul Hennessey's remark that it was "'essentially the violent and miserable reaction of weak spirits to prohibitions they cannot fairly overcome'") had little meaning for them. One may add that the "edgy" content of the post-war years also had little meaning for them. (As Wells put it, the reader of that later day, if bothering to look at that material, would "find it neither shocking, disgusting, exciting or interesting," just "comically pretentious and pitifully silly.") For all that it was still the case that they had "popular romancers" writing thrillers about the violent "age of insecurity" between 1945 and the World State's bringing about a healthier order, with the dangers lurking in, of all things, big hotels, with their "secret lifts, passages, ambushes and sinister private rooms" (the era's equivalent of Gothic literature's castles?), while figures like Basil Zaharoff still had their interest for fans of such narratives. All the same, Wells informs us, "admirable biographical studies" were "ousting the old romantic novel from the entertainment of our leisure so soon as our imaginations have passed beyond the purely romantic stage."
Revisiting all this I could not help thinking of Wells' ideas about literature as he expressed them in his contemporaneous Experiment in Autobiography (published just the year after Shape). In particular I thought of how trenchant a critic Wells was of the nineteenth century novel as exemplified by a Henry James, and how his pre-war association with James only emphasized for him what the Jamesian novel could not do with its acceptance of "undisputed standards" in society and preoccupation with "exterior reactions"--with Show, Don't Tell--and what it seemed so important to Wells that the novel could and should do amid a sense of that world-crisis to which he was so much more sensitive than his more celebrated contemporaries, not least depicting the "controversial matter stewing and fermenting in all our brains," "the conflicts and changes of ideas within" them. Indeed, writing of the post-World War I literature with its aversion to modernity, it style, its smuttiness, he seems to have thought that for the time being literature was moving away from rather than toward what he hoped, but thought that it would be relevant to a more progressive period. I also could not help thinking of how a Wells was far from alone in his views--his contemporary and friend Upton Sinclair taking a not dissimilar view in his books considering the history of literature (Mammonart), and literature in his time (Money Writes!), as indeed it could seem to me that Sinclair, like Wells an intellectual titan of his day, endeavored to realize similar ideals. Certainly his novel Jimmie Higgins, about the experiences of a socialist American factory worker during the era of the First World War, seems to me to admirably realize the ideal of a novel attentive to "the conflicts and changes of ideas" within a human brain in an age of upheaval--and it may well be that the affinity has its reflection in Upton Sinclair being one of the few contemporaries of Wells' to get a mention in the book, as the author of a work on the problems of the Soviet Union. It seems significant, too, that he imagines Sinclair Lewis (who actually died in 1961) living until 1990--and cites a letter historians believe to have been by him recounting the aftermath of a bombing raid on Berlin in the Second World War Wells anticipated. By contrast figures like Henry James--or the Modernists who idolized him--get no direct mention even as historical curiosities, while it is an interesting irony that even as Virginia Woolf gets no mention here as even an example of the post-war literature he criticized, her scarcely remembered husband Leonard Woolf does (as the author of a pamphlet on world government).
Of course, history has taken a different course, with Wells today scarcely remembered at all as a writer of Literature (indeed, of anything but the handful of "scientific romances" he produced in the earliest part of his career), and the same also going for the Sinclairs, both Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis, as Bernard Shaw has been subject to a similar forgetting that would have likewise buried him were it not for the accident of one of his plays having been the basis of a popular stage and screen musical that, making Shaw safe for popular consumption, can seem to reduce the Social Question to "improving people's English." (Thus does a Disney movie starring a young Lindsay Lohan and Megan Fox evoke Pygmalion!) Meanwhile in the English-speaking world, at least, Kästner, Fallada and the German "New Objectivity" with its realism and attentiveness to society of which they were representative seems to be ignored by, if not unknown to, the literary taste-makers. (As is the case with so many of those authors whose interest is greatest from a standpoint like Wells', Fallada entered my ken not through my literary studies, but my readings in the social sciences--in this particular case, C. Wright Mills' mention of him in White Collar.) Instead it is the denizens of the "bitter and peculiar Bohemia" with their reactionary sensibility and elaborate and rare style and smuttiness--the Modernists as we call them, represented by figures like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf who championed not a New Objectivity but a New Subjectivity, so to speak--that critics have, for generations now, exalted as the height of literary art as one list of their pronouncements after another reminds us. The respecter of contemporary literary standards may smile at Wells' apparent lack of foresight--just as they may smile reading what Upton Sinclair had to say about literature--but one can just as easily do the opposite, taking the contrast between Wells' vision of where literature would be by the twenty-first century, and where it actually is actually reflective of the failure of the world to address the crisis of his day, and so in this era of polycrisis still struggling with it, not at all promisingly in the view of many. And they might well say the same of our sense of comedy and of romance, our notions of morality and of edginess in this era in which it seems that literature is altogether on the way out (with all that that can seem to imply about the state of culture and society now). They might also think about how the last great boom in fiction as the written word was on its way out centered on tales of youth specifically, the young adult fiction boom that is clearly a decade behind us now.
As it happened, H.G. Wells saw some of the literature of his time as having its interest--favorably citing such works as Erich Kästner's Fabian and Hans Fallada 's Little Man, What Now? as "vivid and illuminating" portraits of their time still readable for their historical (and perhaps other) interest two centuries on. However, his view of the avant garde literature of his day was certainly unfavorable, the world of literature and art seeming to him as decadent as the economic and social system in which its producers lived. The more in as they pandered to the sentiment of an essentially privileged and conservative readership, they became increasingly hostile to modernity, science, technology, reason, progress, indeed the view that "there IS such a thing as society" (or noticing these things, acknowledged them only to condemn them as Aldous Huxley did in Brave New World, as he regarded George Bernard Shaw to be doing in Back to Methusaleh) as they retreated into a "bitter and peculiar Bohemia." In the process they also became prone to be "elaborately stylistic and 'rare'"; and "brutally smutty" as, bespeaking a desire for escape "from the immense demands" of civilization's failure and need for radical social, economic, political change they made "a great noise about the intensifications and aberrations of the personal life" instead, reflected in a vast amount of pornography that could be "solemn . . . facetious . . . sadistic," even religious, as it wallowed in its own obscenity, what we would today call "edgelordism" the order of the day.
As one might guess the collapse of civilization in the middle of the century, as the Second World War he envisaged (in many ways with uncanny accuracy, in others less so) did not so much end as fizzle out in exhaustion, paving the way for a pandemic that was more murderous than even the wartime machinery of destruction. However, literature did revive with civilization, albeit along different lines, the "style" and the smuttiness a thing of the past, along with the moral simplicities of the earlier era amid the great changes in life attendant upon the struggle of the workers of the World State and all they represented with the remnants of the bad old ways. Thus where the novel--the "bourgeois," "realist" "nineteenth century" novel--conventionally depicted "individual character in a set battle between good and bad in a world of undisputed standards," the novels of Wells' 1980s were "preoccupied with this universal battle of ideas and mental habits in people's minds"—a battle not of "good and bad" but "a wild confusion between two sorts of good and two sorts of bad and of innate character distorted in a thousand ways." If stylistically less striking than the decadent works of the 1930s and 1940s they were psychologically more complex, and certainly far more attentive to the social facts from which that earlier literature retreated, and apparently more accepting of them. At the same time literature became more "adult"--bespeaking a world of people with longer life expectancies spent in better health than in a time when life tended to be shorter, and the years of relative soundness of body and mind still more so, such that people made more of the fleeting years when they were young than people of the World State era did.
Accordingly one could trace the march toward sanity through the development of literature--and the ways in which, at least after the World State's passage through a busybody, "Puritan" phase in which it was censorious of older work, much of that older work lost its affect for a later, saner people. As Wells recounts, much that people enjoyed previously--like the comedic delight in punching down and punching up within a hierarchy, not least as seen in the "queer clowning with insults and repartees," seemed to the people of the twenty-second century "either fatuous or malicious." Likewise the "false stresses . . . unnecessary sacrifices and desperations" of "'romance'" (about which the author cites Paul Hennessey's remark that it was "'essentially the violent and miserable reaction of weak spirits to prohibitions they cannot fairly overcome'") had little meaning for them. One may add that the "edgy" content of the post-war years also had little meaning for them. (As Wells put it, the reader of that later day, if bothering to look at that material, would "find it neither shocking, disgusting, exciting or interesting," just "comically pretentious and pitifully silly.") For all that it was still the case that they had "popular romancers" writing thrillers about the violent "age of insecurity" between 1945 and the World State's bringing about a healthier order, with the dangers lurking in, of all things, big hotels, with their "secret lifts, passages, ambushes and sinister private rooms" (the era's equivalent of Gothic literature's castles?), while figures like Basil Zaharoff still had their interest for fans of such narratives. All the same, Wells informs us, "admirable biographical studies" were "ousting the old romantic novel from the entertainment of our leisure so soon as our imaginations have passed beyond the purely romantic stage."
Do Women Buy Eighty Percent of the Books Sold?
Honest answer: after much searching, I just don't know.
Here's what I do know, though--that the eighty percent figure has been repeated many times over the past few decades (you can find the very similar claim that women buy 70-80 percent of books in a 1997 New York Times article); and that there seem to be many similar-sounding but really not identical claims about women of some sort buying eighty percent of something of some sort. Thus have I also read that it is specifically college-educated women that buy eighty percent of the books, or that women buy eighty percent of fiction, which are not the same thing (in the first case only a portion of the female population doing the relevant buying, in the latter women buying only a portion of the books, because nonfiction is obviously left out). I have also noticed that unlike the earlier New York Times item many of the more recent claims do not identify the source of their information (with, indeed, an Author's Guild claim about women buying eighty percent of fiction in 2022 offering a now broken link as its source).
At this point I suspect that trying to get to the bottom of this one would require a lot of detective work of the kind that is getting tougher all the time in this age of broken search, paywall fetishism, and often unhelpful answer engines for the meager payoff of finding out that, yes, people have been lazily and sloppily repeating the number for many decades now. Still, there may be something to be said of why this is the case. Certainly there seems the extent to which, just as happens with all other kinds of information, a great many people do indeed misuse and abuse statistical data, often without even having sufficient understanding of it to know that they are doing so, with this easy to imagine here.
This is all the easier to picture given the extreme scarcity of information about publishing. If Hollywood is far from being open about its finances, as the Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament reminds us every year with what it gets right and what it gets wrong and what just looks dodgy in it, you can make a much better guess about what people are watching from the box office report than what they are reading from the bestseller list. This arguably reflects the fact that with films, especially theatrically released features, we are talking about a more limited and manageable offering of "content," but frankly it also reflects there being rather less interest among the media in book sales, the more in as our culture is so much more audiovisual and so much less word-centered than it used to be, with this leaving the analyst reliant on what few scraps of information seem to them to have any credibility whatsoever for lack of better.
However, it seems that alongside the sloppiness of many people's use of statistics, and the relatively limited reportage on the book industry as compared with film, there is the matter of why the scrap in question should seem so credible--why people so readily accept the claim that "women buy eighty percent of the books/fiction/etc." Stereotypes about innate differences between males and females, and the manner of their upbringing, would seem to have their part in this--the idea that females are more verbal than more visual and mathematical and mechanical males, of the well brought-up young lady being kept indoors as the boys are encouraged to "go out and play," all as a boy's being "bookish" is thought unseemly by his peers and even by adults in a way that it is not for a girl to be so. Indeed, the literary historians have given us to understand that women have historically been the primary audience for works of fiction intended for private, personal, leisure reading, such that the form has so often been oriented to a female leadership. (After all, what is the male equivalent to the stereotype of the high school age girl with her copy of Pride and Prejudice? Hint: there isn't one.)
All of this would seem to have had reinforcement in an age of increasing access to audiovisual forms of entertainment, which seems to have been especially connected with the decline or outright collapse of categories of publishing conventionally regarded as oriented to a male reader--the spy story, the paramilitary action-adventure paperback, the military techno-thriller. (Yes, there were women readers for all that stuff too. But especially in its heyday it tended to be very male-oriented stuff for a mostly male audience--often, very, very male-oriented in a way that few presses would stand for today--so, no, probably not as many women read it. Additionally I suspect that the males who read this stuff were more likely to read just this stuff, rather than partake of other kinds of fiction reading, as compared with the female fans, who were probably less likely to give up on fiction reading altogether when they moved on from such material, instead watching more TV and playing more video games.)
By the same token there is how the decline of print adventure-oriented fiction left the female-oriented romance category looming the larger within publishing. And there are also the ways in which work in publishing became something of a "pink collar" job--more women to be found occupying decision-making posts as editors, executives, etc. here than anywhere else in Big Business, perhaps because publishers selling to a largely female audience saw it as advantageous to hire more women for the job, all as (however much the identity politics-minded may be resistant to any such admission) the output of a "feminized" publishing scene skewed that much more female. Certainly it does not seem completely irrelevant that works by, centered on, aimed at, consumed by young women much more than men dominated the young adult boom earlier in this century (Stephanie Meyer, Suzanne Collins, Victoria Roth, all as even John Green's The Fault in Our Stars seems worthy of mention), while at the more adult level there was no male equivalent to the successes of Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins, or the E.L. James' phenomenon, or more recently, the popularity of Colleen Hoover.
Still, it would seem that whether the supposition is accurate or not any female preponderance in the book-buying public today likely matters less than the continued digitalization-audiovisualization of culture. Certainly as I look about my very strong impression is that across the lines of gender people generally are doing less reading on the whole, and less long-form reading, less leisure reading, etc. especially, with the younger cohorts in particular forsaking the printed word, and even the digital word, in favor of the audiovisual, all as there is no end to the trend in sight. Amid that, if there was anything to the claim that women do eighty percent of the book-buying, fiction-buying, etc. this may well remain so--but that eighty percent will be eighty percent of a very, very small book-buying public as reading continues to wane.
Here's what I do know, though--that the eighty percent figure has been repeated many times over the past few decades (you can find the very similar claim that women buy 70-80 percent of books in a 1997 New York Times article); and that there seem to be many similar-sounding but really not identical claims about women of some sort buying eighty percent of something of some sort. Thus have I also read that it is specifically college-educated women that buy eighty percent of the books, or that women buy eighty percent of fiction, which are not the same thing (in the first case only a portion of the female population doing the relevant buying, in the latter women buying only a portion of the books, because nonfiction is obviously left out). I have also noticed that unlike the earlier New York Times item many of the more recent claims do not identify the source of their information (with, indeed, an Author's Guild claim about women buying eighty percent of fiction in 2022 offering a now broken link as its source).
At this point I suspect that trying to get to the bottom of this one would require a lot of detective work of the kind that is getting tougher all the time in this age of broken search, paywall fetishism, and often unhelpful answer engines for the meager payoff of finding out that, yes, people have been lazily and sloppily repeating the number for many decades now. Still, there may be something to be said of why this is the case. Certainly there seems the extent to which, just as happens with all other kinds of information, a great many people do indeed misuse and abuse statistical data, often without even having sufficient understanding of it to know that they are doing so, with this easy to imagine here.
This is all the easier to picture given the extreme scarcity of information about publishing. If Hollywood is far from being open about its finances, as the Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament reminds us every year with what it gets right and what it gets wrong and what just looks dodgy in it, you can make a much better guess about what people are watching from the box office report than what they are reading from the bestseller list. This arguably reflects the fact that with films, especially theatrically released features, we are talking about a more limited and manageable offering of "content," but frankly it also reflects there being rather less interest among the media in book sales, the more in as our culture is so much more audiovisual and so much less word-centered than it used to be, with this leaving the analyst reliant on what few scraps of information seem to them to have any credibility whatsoever for lack of better.
By the same token there is how the decline of print adventure-oriented fiction left the female-oriented romance category looming the larger within publishing. And there are also the ways in which work in publishing became something of a "pink collar" job--more women to be found occupying decision-making posts as editors, executives, etc. here than anywhere else in Big Business, perhaps because publishers selling to a largely female audience saw it as advantageous to hire more women for the job, all as (however much the identity politics-minded may be resistant to any such admission) the output of a "feminized" publishing scene skewed that much more female. Certainly it does not seem completely irrelevant that works by, centered on, aimed at, consumed by young women much more than men dominated the young adult boom earlier in this century (Stephanie Meyer, Suzanne Collins, Victoria Roth, all as even John Green's The Fault in Our Stars seems worthy of mention), while at the more adult level there was no male equivalent to the successes of Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins, or the E.L. James' phenomenon, or more recently, the popularity of Colleen Hoover.
Still, it would seem that whether the supposition is accurate or not any female preponderance in the book-buying public today likely matters less than the continued digitalization-audiovisualization of culture. Certainly as I look about my very strong impression is that across the lines of gender people generally are doing less reading on the whole, and less long-form reading, less leisure reading, etc. especially, with the younger cohorts in particular forsaking the printed word, and even the digital word, in favor of the audiovisual, all as there is no end to the trend in sight. Amid that, if there was anything to the claim that women do eighty percent of the book-buying, fiction-buying, etc. this may well remain so--but that eighty percent will be eighty percent of a very, very small book-buying public as reading continues to wane.
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