The New Yorker Notices the Collapse of the Humanities on Campus

Having recently noted for myself the surge in STEM majors as enrollment in the humanities collapses, and wondered why we were not hearing more about either phenomenon, Nathan Heller's "The End of the English Major" caught my eye.

Alas, Heller's piece reminded me of much that I had to say about the quality of the coverage rendered by the mainstream media a while back. Here as elsewhere the journalist offers a few factoids, and comment culled from others presumed to have an understanding of the matter, with some interesting bits possibly to be found in the mass, but the whole less than the sum of its parts, many of which were not impressive to begin with. Too much of it consists of the writer recounting his wandering about the Harvard campus getting quotes from students and faculty of whom we are supposed to be in awe because "HARVARD, HARVARD, HARVARD!" ("[G]olden kids from Harvard," he calls the students. "Basic employability is assured by the diploma: even a Harvard graduate who majors in somersaults will be able to find some kind of job to pay the bills," Heller writes. Alas, not how it works, but that he says so is very telling about the level of thought to be found here.) Then after this he dutifully endeavors to force the bits all into the "brisk, forward-looking, optimistic" view to which our journalism, as so much else, is so unfortunately addicted. The result is that instead of a better sense of "What it all means" there was a rain of details of uncertain meaning and often no meaning at all, a good deal of obnoxious, shamelessly name-dropping elitism in its particularly grating "Cult of the Good School" form (HARVARDHARVARDHARVARDHARVARD!), and ultimate complacency, that left me persuaded that I wasted my time bothering with the thing.

The "Enshittification" of Innovation

Cory Doctorow recently wrote of "enshittification," a term that seems to be catching on. (I have since seen it used in such publications as The Financial Times.) It denotes a cycle of business activity in which businesses are "good to their users" at the outset, gain a consumer base which cannot easily depart because of "network effects" and "switching costs," and then exploit that "captive" consumer --successfully for at least a time, though with (at least if the market works) the abuse of the consumer catching up with and ultimately costing said businesses.

It is, of course, to be expected that with business following such a trajectory technological "innovation" will reflect the imperative--that companies will mainly think about how to more fully profit from abusing the consumer rather than set about that more difficult task of inducing them to use their service by producing things they would actually want to buy. And it would seem that the great wave of techno-hype of the '10s was exemplary of that. Consider what a buzzword "Big Data" became. Of course, one could envision the collection and analysis of data on a revolutionary scale with revolutionary thoroughness yielding something significant. However, I remember that the analysts of these matter often talked about Big Data as some great boon to advertising specifically--talked about it breathlessly, and not only in the pages of some trade journal but more general publications, as if people generally were supposed to be excited about advertising efforts being refined, and individually targeted to them.

Of course the great majority of people would not be excited about such a prospect. They do not want more collection and sifting of their personal data for the sake of more individualized advertising online. What they want is for Big Business to leave their data alone, and a better Ad-blocker so that ads will never be forced on them again. But one would never have guessed that from the coverage of these matters. (Consider, for instance, this New York Times piece, with its few cursory references to "privacy advocates" in an overwhelmingly enthusiastic item.)

The enshittification imperative, in confirmation of the view of the press as the "stenographers of power," was absolutely taken for granted, and ultimately successful here, advertising today indeed individually targeted in this manner. (Thus when you look at your browser's privacy and security settings you are likely to see the higher setting come with a "warning" that the advertising you see will be less individualized for you--as if this were a bad thing!)

Thinking over the fact I find myself again recalling the disappointing record of "innovation" in recent decades. Along with the way that, for example, investors' love affair with tech was never the same after the "dot-com" crash, or the prevalence of short-termism in company decision-making and the preference of business for "sustaining" innovation over the "disruptive" kinds that people selling fantasies about gales of creative destruction love talking about, the fact that enshittification may absorb so much R & D effort may be a reason why technological progress has been so grindingly slow.

Notes on the 95th Academy Awards

I will be blunt--I haven't bothered to even try to look at the Oscar ceremony in more years than I will bother to bespeak (given that it would, of course, indicate just how old I am getting to be). Why bother, after all, when no real-life Oscar ceremony is anywhere near as entertaining as, for instance, the last act of the last of the Brooks-ZAZ wave of gag comedies that was actually funny, The Naked Gun 33 1/3rd?

Still, I do tend to check out the list of wins and losses the next day--and of course, check out film critic David Walsh's annual reportage on the event, the principal theme of which is usually the pretension, backwardness, hypocrisy and sheer stupidity of the Academy, Hollywood and the cultural elite of which they are a part (again, with this criticism usually more illuminating and entertaining than anything the ceremony offers--with Mr. Walsh not disappointing this year).

This year such thoughts as I have had about the ceremony have to do mainly with the movie that swept the awards, Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAAO from here on out so I don't have to keep writing out the full title)--picking up Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and three of the four acting prizes (a near-perfect sweep save for Brendan Fraser's win for The Whale). At a glance EEAAO seems an unlikely contender for such an award, given that it not only has a sci-fi premise, and that of the more head-spinning variety, but, in even more pointed contrast with such prior sci-fi-tinged Oscar darlings as Michel Gondry's The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) or Spike Jonze's Her (2014) or Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water (2017) it has a conventional action-adventure premise (however unconventionally realized in respects).

For all that I still suspected it had the best shot at the key prizes. After all, it was the most popular of the movies not included as sops to the broader public which everyone knows cannot win much outside the technical categories (Top Gun 2, Avatar 2) in a moment in which popularity counts for even more than usual--with the film industry more than usually anxious about its survival after three financially catastrophic years, with the franchises so long carrying it looking ever more creaky, with the Academy in particular fearful of a declining relevance that has only got worse in the decade since I took up the theme a decade ago. The movie ticked off a fair number of the "wokeness" boxes. (Not every one of them, of course--the "status politics" of identity are by definition very zero-sum, and sheer mathematics makes it impossible to please everyone all the time, but all the same, it scored a lot of points this way.) The same factor makes it unlikely that a movie with a less than wholeheartedly cheerleading attitude toward #MeToo (hobbling at least one competitor). And there is the other kind of politics, where, for all of the culture war hyperbole, a Hollywood that has pretty much always tended to be "safe" and conservative on most of the issues that mean something in actual people's lives is ever more "safe" and conservative--such that a foreign-language adaptation of an "anti-war" classic depicting the horrors of trench-and-artillery barrage warfare in the fields of northern Europe during a world war seems a very unlikely Best Picture winner these days (ruling out what many seem to have regarded as its worthiest rival, relegated instead to the far less prestigious Best Foreign Language Feature category).

There also seems to have been a certain genuine affection and respect for the movie from even those who are not martial arts-loving "lowbrows," something a Best Picture winner ought to have, of course--though this kind of thing usually seems to come in last for consideration. Alas, such is Hollywood life in March 2023.

"The Irrelevance of Oscar Night?" Revisited

This year's Oscars had me looking back at a piece I wrote in 2012 about the ceremony's declining relevancy in the wake of that year's particular ceremony. I have since had occasion to question that critical comment. (David Walsh, who was himself no great fan of the 2012 Oscars, made an interesting case about the overstatement, and dubious motives, behind much of the criticism in the media after the March 2012 awards show.) Still, I do stand by what I had to say about the ceremony generally--its overlong and (as Ludlum might have had it) "robotic pavane"-like character, its being only one of an ever-growing host of awards shows, the gap between the kinds of movies that principally win Oscars and the ones "people actually see," etc.--as well as those more specific matters I discussed at length, namely the waning of the romance of cinema, the "cult" of the film star, and the centrality of Hollywood within the entertainment-media world, all of which seems to me even truer of the present moment than of a decade ago.

Certainly the decline of the theatrical experience's importance for the film-viewer has continued unabated. People still went to the movies about four times a year on average just before the pandemic, and I think that moviegoing is well along the course of recovering toward that level. Still, more than ever what people see when they go to the theater are the giant, flashy blockbusters--the movies that, as John Milius put it, offer a "cheap amusement park ride." The experience of character and narrative, their particular pleasures--the emotionally resonant experiences that become the stuff of romance and nostalgia--ever less have a locus here. Instead, when people do experience them it is ever more the case that they do so while looking at a small screen, which has ever more been the place to go for "serious drama," and just about anything else but the superhero-type fare.

So has it also gone with the cult of the film star whose decline I thought was an important factor here. Back in 2012 people were just noticing the failure of new stars to emerge. In 2023 the fact has long been taken for granted. Indeed, considering the list of most searched-for celebrities I am struck by how the figures of an earlier era retain a fascination for the Internet-using public completely overshadowing that of any newer celebrity. For example, Megan Fox's "it girl" status seemed unremarkable in the late '00s--indeed, the phenomenon was not only familiar and expected, but her time as such relatively short, due to a very hard fall as Hollywood and its courtiers and claqueurs in the entertainment press retaliated for her daring to speak ill of a major director when the "sacred" publicity rituals in which she was a participant called for flattering banalities--but there has been nothing like that run since. And indeed, if she would be very unlikely to make any list of the biggest stars in the world "Megan Fox" remains in the 200 top keyword searches at last check--and Megan Fox, in the ranking of searched-for celebrities, behind only Kim Kardashian, Carmen Electra, Jessica Alba, Jennifer Aniston, Lindsay Lohan, Jessica Simpson and Scarlett Johansson, among whom only Johansson would seem to owe much of the attention she gets to any films she has appeared in lately (and those, largely an extension of her having established herself in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Black Widow way back in 2010). Meanwhile the absence of any newer personality in "the club" is conspicuous in what is very much a sign of the times.

And of course, it is ever less the case that anyone can pretend that Hollywood is the center of the entertainment universe--with China overtaking the U.S. as the world's biggest film market, and that market's ticket sales largely reaped by China's own productions (as the country's own industry finds itself in a position to back full-blown blockbuster-type fare); with the "Korean wave" going from strength to strength (Korean films routinely beating out Hollywood's biggest in its own considerable home market and scoring overseas); with the Indian film industry booming (as "Tollywood" joins Bollywood, the country big enough for two Hollywoods!); with even in the U.S. films based on popular anime series' reliable enough earners to get significant releases (Demon Slayer taking in $50 million in the U.S. itself amidst the pandemic as homegrown American blockbusters struggled to make as much!); among much, much else going on in just the cinematic world. Meanwhile in the streaming age the number of channels explodes toward infinity, with those international presences counting for just as much here, with Korea's Squid Game becoming Netflix's biggest hit ever, as much of the world binges on Turkish soap opera--all as streaming companies owned by non-Hollywood firms like Netflix and Apple play an ever-bigger role in financing TV and movies at home and abroad. The result is that, even more than a decade ago, Hollywood seems an ever-smaller part of the total scene, and, if every now and then it recognizes that other countries make movies too (as when it awarded Parasite Best Picture in 2020), ever more provincial in its attitude--a principally national, traditional industry awards show in an ever-more globalized and variegated scene.

Still, it seems to me that this does not by any means exhaust the issue, with the politics of our time possibly mattering more now than they did in 2012. Again, popular culture has always been politicized--and in spite of the peddling of a nostalgia that, in contrast with that of cherished memories of movie magic in the theater, is undeniably pernicious, there has never been a time, at least in the memory of anyone living, when this or any other major society on the surface of the planet was not polarized. However, those conflicts would seem to have gained a sharper edge, with the U.S. no exception, and in such a way as to alienate many from the movie industry. Given the media's ever-attentiveness toward the lamentations of the right what we are most likely to hear of is right-wing disgust with Hollywood "wokeness," but it is the case that other elements are at work, like a broader reaction against an elite--certainly to go by the reaction to the "discovery," or rather the umpteenth rediscovery, of Hollywood nepotism by the apparently profoundly clueless users of social media. Indeed, shocked by their shock I found myself remembering David Graeber's suggestion in his book of a few years ago that a good deal of the hostility toward the "coastal elite" from working people was, apart from the way in which they looked down on them "as knuckle-dragging cavemen," the way in which they monopolized any opportunity to make a living while "pursuing any other sort of value" besides pure money-making for themselves and their offspring, with Graeber singling out Hollywood for particular criticism. As he remarked, one is unlikely to find among "the lead actors of a major motion picture nowadays" anyone who "can't boast at least two generations of Hollywood actors, writers, producers, and directors in their family tree." Indeed, "the film industry has come to be dominated by an in-marrying caste." The results of that--which I dare say extend to the artistic output of an American film and television industry testifying to their being profoundly out of touch with, and even disdainful, of the broader population ("I can't pretend to be somebody who makes $25,000 a year" said an Oscar winner whose job is literally all about pretending)--should not be lightly discounted.

Will There Be a Star Wars Movie in 2023? Probably Not

Ever since Solo: A Star Wars Story flopped back in 2018 the only Star Wars film to make it to the big screen has been The Rise of Skywalker--a reflection of how that financial catastrophe forced a Big Rethink of the earlier glib notion of making Star Wars into a Marvel-like movie machine (which, if matching Marvel, might have had a dozen movies out by now instead, even with the pandemic and everything else happening). Very early on I--and I would imagine, pretty much everyone not taking a paycheck from the ever-more claqueur-like entertainment press--got into the habit of taking the report of every upcoming new Star Wars film with the proverbial grain of salt. So did it go for the recent reports of as many as four Star Wars movies recently in the works, two of which projects seem to have been officially confirmed defunct this week (Patty Jenkins' Rogue Squadron, along with another production being overseen by the now-departed Kevin Feige). That still leaves the movies by Taika Waititi (you know, the guy you can thank for Thor 4), and the Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy movie supposed to be scripted by Damon Lindelof and Justin Britt-Gibson. I cannot rule out that those movies will still happen--but I do not think that Waititi's movie, if it gets made, will be out by December this year as earlier reported, while even if everything goes right for the Obaid-Chinoy movie I see no sign it will come out by then either. The result is that there will probably not be a Star Wars film out until 2024--if then. In the meantime Star Wars will remain very active indeed on the small screen, which may, in spite of the continued commitment to theatrical release in the wake of their experiments with the alternatives underlining that there is simply no substitute for a $20 ticket, continue to increasingly be the franchise's principal and natural home, just as it has ever been for the other big "Star" franchise, Star Trek.

Yes Seth Rogen, Negative Reviews are Hurtful

Alas, in the media universe the most banal remark of a famous person is treated as so earth-shaking as to be worthy of headlines.

One can count as one of this week's examples of such banality-that-makes-the-headlines-because-a-famous-person-said-it (carried in Variety, and Vanity Fair, and on the Google News aggregator's "front page!") Seth Rogen's remark that "negative reviews" can be "devastating" for an artist, some of whom "never recover."

This should not be news to anybody--while the same goes for this: if rich and famous celebrities, with their wealth and their prestige and their careers and all they bring can suffer so much, just how much worse is it when negative reviews are directed against people who have none of those supports? Against, for example, those who are just at the beginning of their careers? Those who after much trying and trying--maybe decades of trying--find themselves still at "square one" in those careers, or as close to it as makes no difference (like "one of those actors who's 45 years old, with a tenuous grasp of their own reality, and not really working much")? Or who, managing to get something out there, still at a stage where not only their ego but their prospects of ever making a living through their craft are very vulnerable to criticism, go out and get treated brutally--with the brutality the worse because the critic, who ordinarily acts the part of shameless claqueur, and probably feels degraded doing it, made full use of the chance to indulge their meanness at the expense of someone who could not hit back, absolutely living down to the "Tin Rule?"

Also something that should be news to no one is that being ignored can be more painful than being insulted. How much more painful, then, is it for those who have none of those supports, and are being ignored? Who experience that particular combination of being negatively reviewed and ignored that is, for example, the form rejection letter--such as, for example, writers routinely "collect" hundreds, even thousands of, before publication, if they ever attain that goal?*

That no one thinks of all that--that no one ever addresses that properly--is just another dimension of the same collective stupidity that makes the most banal celebrity remark a headline-maker and anything and everything said by persons not "in the club" has to say unworthy of anyone's attention.

*The only really satisfying treatment of what that side of the "writing life" is like I have ever encountered is to be found in Jack London's Martin Eden--tellingly published over a century ago. By contrast more recent content just gives us those stupid scenes where the writer sits autographing copies for fawning fans in a bookshop.

The Decline of Book Blogging: The Other Side of the Issue

Recently writing about the decline of book blogging my first thought was of the process of "enshittification"--with search engines demoting such blogs in the search rankings, making them harder to find.

Of course, as a reader of this blog (thank you for being one) pointed out, this is just one side of the matter. The other side is what happened when those bloggers, being harder to find, got less traffic (with, as must also be acknowledged, the shift to social media also drawing away readers).

For bloggers--who, depending on the case, may be putting in a lot of time and even money they can ill afford into their blogs--readership matters. This is the case even when the blog is purely a matter of enthusiasm for their subject matter, and the desire to share their interest with others who also have the same interest. It is even more the case for those for whom the blog may be a key tool of publicity for some other effort of theirs (if they are, for example, an author), or even an important source of income in itself. Having their audience choked off that way means they have less reason to blog--especially if the economic side of the issue forces them to adjust their allotment of their resources.

I don't think we have far to go in looking for evidence of the consequences. Consider the number of blogs you have probably run into over the years where posting petered out, or even fell off altogether. For my part I have noticed this happening even on the sites of well-known authors who once blogged prolifically. I wondered where they went--and then, bumping into them on Twitter, found that here they are. All day, doing this, instead of that. (Indeed, they seem to spend so much time online that I wonder how it is they get anything else done--and wonder if perhaps they don't in some cases. Certainly I got less done when I used Twitter.)

So far as I know no one has endeavored to produce any comprehensive estimates. But I would not be at all surprised to find that the number of blogs which are online, especially blogs which are active, has declined--and so too the numbers of people trying to start blogs in a social media-dominated scene where the hopes of finding an audience by way of blogging may have diminished greatly.

What Happened to E-Books?

Circa 2008, when the Kindle was hitting the market, the hype about e-books was enormous. Some years on, however, there was a turnabout, and expectations these days seem greatly deflated. Yes, e-books are part of the scene, and expected to remain so--but the growth in their share of the market plateaued far below what some hoped, and pretty much "everyone" expected.

What happened? A good place to start would seem to be the respective advantages of the two formats. The most obvious attraction of an e-book is the near-zero cost of producing and distributing them, permitting them to be very inexpensive indeed for the consumer--while permitting access to a great deal of entirely legal "free" content, as with samples, promotional giveaways, and anything public domain content that someone cared to put up online (for instance, all of the classics, down to the early years of the twentieth century). There is also the fact that one can download them immediately rather than await the delivery of a physical copy, while there are great advantages from the standpoint of storage and portability. If your house-room is limited, if you like to read "on the go," e-readers can be helpful that way.

Still, such readers make for more awkward reading than a printed book. The screens are smaller than a hardcover or trade paperback page, and thus carry less content, chopping up a text into smaller pieces. The reader also has a harder time searching through and backtracking using the device than they do a printed book with pages they can physically turn (the more in as, again, the text is chopped up into smaller bits). And the screen, if far superior to a computer screen here, is still harder on the eyes than paper, making it that much less conducive to prolonged reading. The result of all of the above is that people seem to absorb and retain less of what they read when reading it on a Kindle at any given level of skill--and while I think some of the disadvantage may be overcome with familiarity and judicious usage, I have to admit that even as a longtime user of e-readers I still prefer a printed book when available.

There is also the aesthetic pleasure offered by a handsomely printed physical book--how it looks on the shelf or the coffee table, with all that means for those who like to "show off." It is not exactly high-minded--but as we are talking about sales above all, this matters.

That said, all this affects some books more than others. Short, casual reads suffer less from the disadvantages of e-readers--big and demanding books more so. Those who buy books for the sake of showing off--and it is big and demanding books that people like to show off (not the page-turning pulpy potboiler but War and Peace)--also have reason to favor printed books. Moreover, given the cost of an e-reader one cannot enjoy any monetary advantage from buying e-books unless they buy a lot of the books, or enjoy a lot of free content.

The result is that one would expect e-readers to appeal to heavy readers, and especially to heavy readers who get in a lot of light, casual reading, perhaps while on the go--like someone who reads light fiction during their workday commute. I suspect, however, that the number of really heavy readers, period, is in decline; that the number of people who casually consume lots and lots of lighter fiction specifically is declining even more sharply (certainly to go by what seems to be happening with authors in many genre); and that most of those who carry a device with them, even if they would not be wholly unwilling to read, more easily incline to carry their smart phone instead, which allows and in fact privileges other activities (like gaming). I would also have expected the young to be more open to e-readers than their more print-accustomed elders, but I suspect leisure reading to be much, much less common among those born into the world of the smart phone, such that they are that much less a source of support for the technology.

And of course, there is how Big Publishing handled the phenomenon. Yes, the great virtue of the e-book is that it can cut marginal costs to nothing, and permit books to be sold very, very cheaply to the reader--but the publishers controlled pricing and used it to protect their print business, keeping e-book prices much higher than they have to be to all but eliminate the price advantage. (Indeed, e-books, ridiculously, cost more than the paperback editions of books.) At the same time there is their attitude toward "ownership" of the content. Buy a printed book and you own it. "Buy" an e-book, at that high price, and you have "access" to it akin to your access to a streaming service--with what you paid for potentially disappearing at any time. (Thus has it gone with Microsoft's Nook.)

"Innovation!" the buzzword-repeaters love to say. "Disruption!" Well, Big Business doesn't like being "disrupted," and much more often than not it keeps that from happening--the imperatives of quarterly profits triumphing over technological advance in that manner which proves the techno-libertarian pieties hollow and meaningless time and time again, all as the buzzword-repeaters remind us that they repeat because they cannot think.

Will STEM Fields Become the New "Starbucks Barista Majors?"

Consider the facts. The country is now seeing a surge in the output of STEM majors--without any sign of a commensurate increase relative to the number of places for them (especially given that it was already the case a high proportion of STEM graduates take jobs outside the lines they trained in, and routinely shift to non-STEM fields after just a few years of STEM work). Indeed, all this is happening with the country's long weak economic performance perhaps tipping into recession, but even in its absence showing little promise of any great boom in the coming years, with people working in the relevant fields most definitely affected. (Consider the jobs massacre in Big Tech even before any official onset of recession.) Meanwhile consider the unexpected way automation is working out. Automating those tasks requiring mobility and eye-hand coordination has been difficult indeed--such that we replaced "human computers," but not janitors, while if those bullish about the new wave of chatbots are right, we might see artificial intelligence replace coders before it replaces truck drivers--or Starbucks baristas. The result is that one can imagine a scenario (I am making no claims of inevitability, just presenting a possibility), that between the increasing output of STEM majors, and the possibility of a significant contraction in actual call for them, we could easily see many more of them taking for a paycheck the kind of low-wage, insecure service jobs of which the economy produces so many--in part because the "menial" activity is so tricky to automate, while, if the image was always oversold, there won't be so many humanities majors competing for the position, because there are so many fewer of those about.

Who knows? Perhaps in a few years the employee handing you your latte will be a Computer Science graduate saying to themselves "I should have majored in French poetry instead."

The Truth About My Social Media Experience as an Author

I will be blunt. I never thought much of social media. (The old MIT Technology Review cover with Buzz Aldrin's face and, below it, the words "You Promised Me Mars Colonies. Instead I Got Facebook," just barely begins to describe my longtime feeling.) But as an author I was eventually obliged to give it a try.

I found that in spite of the glib advice purveyed by idiots about how you have to get "out there" and, if you must, can achieve something giving it "just ten or fifteen minutes a day!" it is just about impossible to do more than Tweet links to items and keep one's involvement so limited as that. Social media is a real time suck--and I suspect that the heavy usage anyone trying to accomplish something through it cannot easily avoid rewires the brain in unpleasant ways that make the kind of concentration required for any prolonged or serious reading or writing harder, to the point that it should come with a label reading WARNING: PROLONGED USAGE MAY LOBOMOTIZE YOU.

I also found that in spite of the glib advice purveyed by idiots it is a very weak promotional tool. (Indeed, my observations there were the basis for my earlier item about "Why Nothing Ever Seems to Go Viral" from a while back.) I simply did not end up selling more books--while, as the experience recounted above suggests, the time spent there made me less productive in every other way.

The result was that at the very least I could not justify the time I was spending on Twitter-and in the end stopped using it, then canceled my account outright.

I see no evidence that my book sales suffered afterward. And while all things are never equal I think that I have been a healthier, happier, more productive person for giving it up. I will add that in the years since have not felt the slightest temptation to go back.

I suspect that others who similarly abandon the site can say the same.

"Social Media is Dark, and Full of Trolls"

I have to admit that during my experience of Twitter usage there were--setting aside the extremely disappointing experience with book promotion and the physical and mental toll taken by the inherently lobotomizing technology--both positive and negative experiences. I did have some pleasant, and even enriching, conversations with people I would never have otherwise met. However, I also encountered many completely disgusting people I would much prefer to have never met, with the latter more numerous than the former-and, no surprise, the scum of the Internet by just about every account running rampant on the post-Elon Musk Twitter. A new BBC report addresses just how bad the situation has become on that site--which confirms everything that those who had been pessimistic about the new management and its declared intentions feared and warned about.

Why Are People Consuming Less New Music?

Last year Ted Gioia penned an interesting piece about the declining proportion of music sales for which newly created music accounts. In considering the matter I am not so sure that, as he tells us, this is no reflection of the quality of that music. (I defer to the scientific finding that—with less timbral variety and pitch content, louder, more repetitive--it is indeed getting worse, a bombastic yet flat sameness helped along by the degree to which, as Gioia himself has had prior occasion to remark, critics have become claqueurs.)

However, I do think he is right to emphasize the way in which the industry's executives have conducted themselves--sticking with the old and familiar as they mine it for whatever additional profits they can and displaying the rankest laziness and cowardice with regard to the hard work, and risk-taking, involved in discovering and cultivating new talent, and new creations. Admittedly the Suits have always done this--as Balzac makes clear in his portrait of the utterly vile Parisian publishing king Dauriat. Yet the tendency to this behavior seems to have just gone on getting more and more extreme across the entire range of the entertainment-industrial complex, from the movies (where every one of the top ten hits at the North American box office last year was a sequel or remake), to TV (where you can barely tell what decade it is from the line-up), to fiction (where the thriller writers whose names you see on the paperback rack are Patterson, Grisham, Clancy, Cussler--just as was the case back in the twentieth century).

I know the world of music journalism less well than I do those others, but unless it is very different from what prevails in those other areas (where suck-up entertainment reporters write as if they expect every last one of us to grow incontinent with enthusiasm at the announcement of each and every new remake of some classic), I applaud his readiness to criticize the industry. Noteworthy, too, is his sparing a word for what hard times it means for those musicians struggling to "make it," which struggles he acknowledges as meaning something for the culture we live in, and meriting some sympathy--a thing even rarer in our journalism. After all, certainly where print fiction is concerned we almost never see anyone with the standing of Gioia spare a thought for the creatives who have not yet made their names--the default mode instead a sniveling defense of how publishing treats them, and sneers at those who aren't "professionals" yet as worth no one's time, with the "liberal" Guardian and Salon disgracing themselves by publishing particularly nasty pieces of aspiring writer-bashing by the bitter little trolls who had once been slush pile readers. ("The shocking truth about the slush pile" declared the title of the Guardian piece. Rather it was a reminder that we are long past the day when people like Balzac or London could tell the truth about such things in fiction or nonfiction, confirming the not-at-all-shocking truth that their industry, and the media generally, like the society we live in generally, operate by what Carl Sagan called the "Tin Rule": "Suck up to those above you and abuse those below you.") If anything, Gioia's not swimming with this filthy tide merits at least as much applause as his readiness to call out his industry's insiders.

Greg Poehler and Sweden's "Celebrity Culture" (or Lack of One)

Some years ago Amy Poehler's brother Greg offered some "big thinks" about the differences between Sweden and America. They did not strike me as brilliant. But it did strike me as interesting that he thought it worth noting that the Swedes had a different view of celebrities as not "better" than anybody else.

After all, there was a time when Americans were regarded as living in an egalitarian society compared to Old World Europe--when, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville, hailing from a France where, if with a king still on the throne and the Old Regime die-hards still pretending they could turn the clock back to the days when "it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever" in their favor, it was becoming ever clearer to most that democracy was getting the upper hand.

By contrast it is now Americans like Greg who are surprised at the egalitarianism of Old World countries (even with their social democratic values in an advanced state of decay) compared to that of the New World U.S., so much so that they spell out, with surprise, that they don't think some people are "better" than everyone else.

This is not an insignificant change--and indeed says a lot about what has happened in an America where since at least the middle of the last century the spectrum of politics has run from a conservative "center" to a hard right, with the whole consistently edging rightwards over time. Indeed, the very words in which he expressed himself are telling, the Swedes (to his apparent surprise) thinking "nobody's better than anybody else." Just like the tendency to say that a person is "worth" the net value of their financial assets, that we so casually refer to people as "better" than others--not "better" at performing some particular task, or a "better" person morally, but all-around "better" by virtue of being higher up in a socioeconomic hierarchy, of how much money they have or who their parents were--bespeaks just how deeply rooted, and how unnoticed is that rooting, is the most traditionally inegalitarian view of the world in contemporary America.

For anyone remotely progressive in their politics, or even simply alert to the ideals of classical liberalism on which the United States was founded, awareness of that fact should prompt some hard thinking.

Notes on the State of Self-Publishing

How are self-published authors of fiction as a whole doing these days? I mean, in a big-picture way?

I have to admit that I don't know, and I'm not sure anyone else does either. No one's collecting the relevant data, with even anecdotal data scarcer these days than it used to be--and less accessible, thanks to what the "enshittified" search engines yield when we go looking. All we get are hucksters trying to sell self-publishing services, and elitist bullies punching down at anyone eschewing the traditional publishing route closed to 99.9 percent of us (however much said bullies and their duck-talking colleagues refuse to admit it)--but I would imagine that self-published authors, in spite of the hype, never seem to have actually met with much success as a group, are doing even worse than they were a decade ago for three reasons:

1. I suspect that people are reading less fiction than before--that other media are eating more and more into people's consumption of fiction. The smart phone seems to me a significant development here, making people able to distract them with anything else wherever they are, while actually being more conducive to TV watching or video game-playing than reading--such that it seems to me no coincidence that the Young Adult book boom went bust about the time that smart phone ownership among the young reached the point of saturation. Meanwhile the situation would only seem to have worsened since then--as people's habits changed, and younger persons, indeed, never had the chance to make a habit of reading. I suspect, too, that the pandemic and other associated stresses of recent years have left people looking for "lower hanging fruit" in their entertainment, with activities like gaming winning out over reading. (Reader that I am, I have to admit that even I often find it easier to get into some old video game, especially when tired or distracted.) And where all this is concerned it stands to reason that those writers most marginal within the market--the self-published--will take a particularly hard hit, especially when one remembers that the self-published did best in the light reading, "genre" fiction market, which depends so much on people having the habit of reading and casually consuming books as a matter of course in the way that all those entertainment alternatives make less likely.

2. E-books have done less well than hoped circa 2010. This was partly a matter of genuinely exaggerated expectations, partly a matter of the control publishers have exerted over the pricing of such books (diminishing a key attraction they have had), and partly, again, the smart phone--which very easily defeated the e-reader in the contest to be the one electronic device people carried around (just as, for example, the tablet has suffered). Of course, this can be seen as affecting all of publishing, but it has to be remembered that given the kinds of lighter fare they offered, and the reality that 99 cent e-books and nearly cost-free giveaways were one of the few things that the self-published could do when trying to compete with traditional publishing, they suffered disproportionately, sales of the more costly print editions to which the book buyer is less easily tempted simply not rising to compensate. (And again, that the self-published were doing best in the area of lighter reading was a problem, because people were a lot more likely to do that kind of thing on an e-reader than attempt heavier reading there. Few dare read War and Peace in any format; but I suspect fewer still dare to do it on a Kindle, and fewer of those who make the attempt persist in it up to the end.)

3. The Internet just keeps becoming more completely and securely gatekept than before, diminishing the chances of the self-published to be discovered. Consider, for instance, how the self-published novelist was supposed to give readers a chance to discover their book. They could not remotely begin to compete with the Big Five where marketing budgets were concerned. Very likely they had no "industry connections." The review pages in a place like the New York Times were closed to them. But there was social media. And there were a lot of book bloggers online. Of course, as is generally the case with this kind of thing one would have to work much harder for a much smaller return--and indeed, a great many of the usual idiots promoted one-in-a-million success stories based on such endeavors as if they were some sort of reasonable plan for the many, with the usual cruel result. But it was something. And now with social media and the search engines becoming less friendly to this kind of activity, there is much less of that something--to the particular cost of the self-published author.

In short, the fact of less fiction reading, especially of the habitual, casual kind; the softness of interest in the e-book; and the gatekeeping of the scene; have kept the marginalized, marginalized, if not worsened the situation to such a degree that I suspect fewer and fewer writers are being tempted to take this route.

Of course, as I said previously these are suspicions. And so while everything put up here is presented with an invitation to the reader to comment (if, given the way the game is being reached, this piece indeed manages to reach any reader) I will specifically say here that anyone with knowledge, experience or simply opinions about the matter is invited to offer their two cents in the comments thread below.

The Revenge of "Gentlemen's History?"

Some years ago Michael Parenti coined the term "gentlemen's history" to refer to the generally self-congratulatory historiography produced by, of and for a society's elite, justifying and flattering itself and promulgating its prejudices--while shutting out everything not conducive to that. (Thus are we expected to see in a collection of pleb-hating patricians given to the most unbearably pompous oratory the height of civilization, and in the doings of "Great Men" the sole cause of everything that ever mattered.)

For most of history, gentlemen's history was the norm, and it never vanished. It is still the foundation of what most people get in school; what they are likely to see in the kind of popular history that will be seen plugged on C-SPAN's BookTV and get authors on the bestseller list. Still, it is one of the advances of the past century that historiography has grown beyond this. If the research and publishing of history, like the publishing of anything else, never really became open to all, it is less exclusively aristocratic in its authorship, and its focus. And for all its many flaws (like the hierarchy and orthodoxy that prevail in academic life, giving it at times a clerical atmosphere in the least flattering sense of the term) academic history has had something to do with that, creating opportunities for other kinds of work, of which some have made good use. Thus do we now have images of the life of the past that are not just about the 0.1 percent with the rest reduced to extras whose joys and sufferings are of no account, while also having more than reactionary homily or "patriotic" indoctrination at its worst as explanation of events.

Of course, in a period in which universities are in trouble, and the humanities in particular withering for lack of interest from students, administrators, donors, policymakers--indeed, from hostility in many cases (there's no shortage of those who would like to see the universities and colleges reduced to a purely technical-occupational training system)--this can seem in growing jeopardy. Indeed, looking at the state of hiring in the field certain ideological hacks are gloating over the decline of the humanities, and the death of academic history, among whom the author of one particularly mean-spirited piece gloated over the return of history again being the exclusive purview of aristocratic amateurs as the lower-class folks who had hoped to be historians have to go "get real jobs" as, barring a miraculous stroke of luck that elevates them to the rank of dutiful courtier to a better-born patron, they renounce the life of intellect and culture above their lowly stations, while the field is purified of any of that silly social concern.

I am certainly convinced that American higher education cannot go on as it is now--but it is my hope that the humanities will manage to endure on campus, precisely because society needs them now as much as ever it did.