"Thank You For Your Support." Wait, What Support?

When considering the "aspiring" writer's lot I think time and again of Jack London's Martin Eden--the truest depiction of that unhappy state that I have ever encountered in print--and often one particular aspect of that situation, its loneliness. This is not just a function of the fact that writing is a solitary and often isolating activity, but the way that others treat someone going about it when they have not "made it"--specifically their lack of empathy, sympathy and respect, and their sense that they have no obligation to be tactful, or even civil, about what they really think. There is, too, what all of this means if one ever does get anywhere, as Eden does--for he does "make it," becoming rich and famous, such that the multitude of people who knowing full well who he was would not have looked twice at the sight of him starving to death in the street now all want to have him over for dinner, or even marry their daughter.

So I suspect does it go online--even at the level of merely giving people an absolutely cost-less "like" or "share" on social media and those other platforms akin to it. A celebrity can get an outpouring of enthusiasm for uttering pure banality--while a nobody can scarcely hope for support no matter what they say, a mere click of the mouse that could mean a great deal in their position begrudged them. It is a testament to the shallowness of our online life--and the extreme stupidity of so many of those who people it. And experiencing it this way takes its toll. In Balzac's Lost Illusions Lucien de Rubempre, callow and ultimately ill-fated as he is, does realize some hard facts of life along the way before his final destruction, among them not only how scarce a sympathetic word or gesture can be for those who have not "succeeded" ("In the home circle, as in the world without, success is a necessity"), but the toll that even those who attain "success" are likely to pay before they get there. ("Perhaps it is impossible to attain to success until the heart is seared and callous in every most sensitive spot.")

In that there may be the tiny grain of truth in those stupid scenes of writers with supercilious looks on their faces as they autograph copies of their latest for fawning idiots--the praises cannot touch them, because if they had not long ago stopped caring what other people think they would have given it all up, perhaps as completely as Lucien does.

The Rubble of the '90s

Over the years I have written a lot about the '90s--in part because the period encouraged certain illusions which have proven destructive, and increasingly appeared destroyed themselves by contact with reality. There was the way that those singers of the information age, so long trying to persuade Americans that what was obviously deindustrialization was actually progress, almost looked credible amid the tech boom of the latter part of the decade--enough so as to profoundly distort the national dialogue about the economy for an extended and critical period. There was the way that Americans were persuaded to believe the "unipolar moment" of uncontestable full-spectrum American hyperpower might go on forever. There was the way the public was persuaded that the Internet would be an ultra-democratic cyber-utopia, as political correctness triumphed over all--so much so that, as Thomas Frank recounts, right-wing populism seemed to be assuming a new face, not only trying to persuade the people that "the market" was the common man's best friend, but appearing to embrace wokeness, while declaring the market its greatest champion.

What people think of as the elite are, as I have said again and again and will go on saying again and again, careerist mediocrities who are profoundly out of touch with reality, as they show us again and again when relied upon to lead the way. Accordingly many of them may still believe in such drivel--still, to use Paul Krugman's words, seem "stuck in some sort of time warp, in which it's always 1997"--but not all of them do so, while credulity in such silliness is the weaker the further out one gets from that overprivileged little world they inhabit.

C.P. Snow's "The Two Cultures" in 2023

The essential claim made in C.P. Snow's lecture-turned-essay on "The Two Cultures" of science and letters was that this division of intellectual life between them in the modern West has gone with mutual ignorance, incomprehension and even dislike, between those on either side of the split.

On first encountering C.P. Snow's essay I thought there was a good deal of truth to it and still do. After all, intellectual life is indeed extremely specialized, with the fact underlined by how outside their specialties even exceptionally intelligent and well-educated people often have only the most banal thoughts to offer (as they often show when accorded that kind of Public Intellectual status in which they are given a platform from which to comment on anything and everything). And all of this seems to me to have got worse rather than better with time, as their work has only become more esoteric and minute (how many scientists does it take to publish a single paper these days?), while the pursuit of an academic or research career has become a more harried thing, leaving less time or energy for "extracurriculars," which at any rate are frowned upon. (The "professions," as the root of the word suggests, are indeed priesthood-like in many ways, often living down to the unhappiest and most stultifying connotations of that term, like that disapproval of any outside interest, or indeed any ideas but the orthodoxy imposed by the hierarchs.)

This specialization may have gone so far that those in the sciences and letters alike are doing their jobs less well than they may need to be doing them--with scientists reportedly lacking sufficient grounding in philosophy to understand the scientific method on which their work depends, while, as I discovered struggling with composition textbooks, and their usually clumsy explanations of so basic a matter as "What is a thesis?" (while finding reference to the scientific method, to scientific examples, useful in redressing such weaknesses--in the classroom and in my own book) I have often wondered if the writers would not have benefited from a bit of scientific study themselves.

Still, salient as the division within intellectual life remains there is also the political framework within which that life goes on. To his credit, Snow was sensitive to that. The cultural orthodoxy is a function of the priorities of those who have power--whose concern is first, last and always the bottom line, to which they recognize science as contributing. That is not to say that they actually respect the scientific method, or the work of scientists, even just enough to care about funding scientific education and research properly, let alone make use of the best available scientific advice when making policy--just that they know there is something here they can use, much more than is the case with letters.

All of this would seem to have become more rather than less consequential in the neoliberal era--amid unending austerity, with the pressure to justify everything in terms of short-term corporate profitability the greater, with a predictable result that where neoliberalism has gone, so too has the imperative to reduce education to occupational-technical training (from the Thatcher-era overhaul of educational funding, which has continued ever since, to the requirements of the "structural reform" programs foisted on developing countries). Meanwhile the politics of interest are ever more marginalized, the politics of status in the ascendant--with the resulting era of culture war seeing the humanities demonized, to the point that disdain for the work of historians and the like has right-wingers openly gloating over the prospect of the demise of humanities programs on campus.

It would be a profound mistake to imagine all this does not have consequences for how those of the sciences and letters see each other--with, perhaps, the young indicative of the trajectory. While I think that there is, again, much ignorance and incomprehension on the part of those in the sciences and letters alike, I never actually noticed any actual disrespect. I am less sure that this is the case today--certainly to go by what we hear of the sneering, mocking STEM major openly disdainful of the humanities, an attitude all too predictable in an era where the war cry of "STEM! STEM! STEM!" is unceasing, and unmatched by anything the defenders of the humanities have to say on their behalf.

Will the New Chatbots Mean the End of the Novelist?

Over the years I have remarked again and again the reports that writers' wages--and certainly the wages of writers of fiction--have long been collapsing. The result is that, while the chances to "make a living" writing fiction (or anything else) have always been few, the path far from straightforward, the remuneration usually paltry relative to the effort and skill one put in--and one might add, society at large deeply unsympathetic to the travails in question (just ask Balzac, or London)--it does not seem unreasonable to say that matters have just gone on getting worse this way.

Consider, for instance, how even in the middle years of the last century there were writers who scraped by (sometimes did better than scrape by) selling short stories to pulp fiction magazines. Any such thing seems unimaginable today--in an age where writers have it so tough that they are giving away vast amounts of quite readable content, and finding no takers. Meanwhile what could be salable seems an ever smaller category as a good many old reliable genres die (consider action-adventure fiction, for example), and what does sell, if always reliant on authors' platforms and "brand names" to persuade consumers to take a look (just remember the unpleasant truths spoken by Balzac's vile Dauriat), the reliance on those supports would seem to have only grown greater and greater, while one is struck by how new platforms and new brand names are not emerging, hinting at the game being one of milking an aging and dwindling consumer base. (Just look at the paperback rack. The thriller novelists you will find there are pretty much the same ones you saw in the '90s--James Patterson, John Grisham and company, with Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler still writing somehow to go by the bylines.)

Indeed, it seems to me safe to say that the key factor here has been the shift in the relation of supply to demand. People spend a lot less time reading fiction than they used to do, their leisure time increasingly consumed by audiovisual media. (I suspect that in this century far more people have played Tom Clancy video games than read Tom Clancy novels.) Meanwhile, due to the widening of educational opportunity, the number of those who endeavor to become published authors has grown, with publishing fiction, while a nearly impossible task for anyone who does not have fame or nepotism on their side, still seeming more plausible than trying to make it as a writer in the more glamorous but more closed-off film and television industry. Still, whatever one makes of the cause, the result is inarguable--and the writers' troubles may well escalate if what we are hearing about chatbots bears out. Whatever writers, critics or readers may think, publishers--who are first, last and always businessmen, moving literature as they want any other good (again, I refer you to Balzac)--prefer to keep putting out the same old stuff that has had takers in the past, and it is inconceivable that they would balk at replacing writers with chatbots. For the moment, of course, they are barred from taking such a course by the limits of those bots, which are much better at producing short work than long (and truth be told, not producing that very well). However, if we see the progress some expect they may get to the point where a human would only be needed to clean up the result--and maybe do a lot less clean-up in the process--within a decade's time, and publishers will not hesitate to exploit the possibility (such that the Jack Ryan and Dirk Pitt novels of ten years hence, and the Alex Cross novels too, may be churned out by some new iteration of GPT). The only question then would be whether there will still be a big enough audience for those books to make the venture profitable.

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 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 rarely 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. (Indeed, 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.