disruption

Among The Disrupted

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This essay by Leon Wieseltier originally appeared on The New York Times Sunday Book Review on 1/7/15.

Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind. Everybody talks frantically about media, a second-order subject if ever there was one, as content disappears into “content.” What does the understanding of media contribute to the understanding of life? Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all things must pass, but this is ridiculous.

Meanwhile the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. There are “metrics” for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. Economic concepts go rampaging through noneconomic realms: Economists are our experts on happiness! Where wisdom once was, quantification will now be. Quantification is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary American understanding of, well, everything. It is enabled by the idolatry of data, which has itself been enabled by the almost unimaginable data-generating capabilities of the new technology. The distinction between knowledge and information is a thing of the past, and there is no greater disgrace than to be a thing of the past. Beyond its impact upon culture, the new technology penetrates even deeper levels of identity and experience, to cognition and to consciousness. Such transformations embolden certain high priests in the church of tech to espouse the doctrine of “transhumanism” and to suggest, without any recollection of the bankruptcy of utopia, without any consideration of the cost to human dignity, that our computational ability will carry us magnificently beyond our humanity and “allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. . . . There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine.” (The author of that updated mechanistic nonsense is a director of engineering at Google.)
Read the full essay on The New York Times Sunday Book Review. Note that The New York Times may move this material behind a paywall in the future.

 

They Might Be Giants

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This post by Philip Jones originally appeared on FUTUReBOOK on 6/24/14.

Are we at the beginnings of a backlash against big tech? Last week the New Yorker published a disruption takedown from Jill Lepore in which she castigated the tech community for its “reckless and ruthless” philosophy of disruption. Over the weekend the Observer criticised tech companies for sometimes thinking “they are above good rules”. A few weeks ago the New Statesman ran a series of articles puncturing the Silicon Valley dream, and warning about the “political and social damage that may be done by the future land-grab being pursued by the big internet companies”.

For publishers the context for this are the ongoing negotiations between Amazon and its suppliers over supremacy in the book business. As The Bookseller exclusively reported yesterday, Amazon’s latest terms indicate a direction of travel that would see the online retailer take a sizeable control over both a publisher’s inventory and its marketing. Can’t deliver fast enough to meet Amazon’s super-efficient distribution machine? Amazon would now POD the book. Not sure how best to market a book, or a list? Amazon could do it for you, albeit for a cut of the turnover.

 

Click here to read the full post on FUTUReBOOK.

 

LBF’s Digital Minds: The Golden Age or End of the Book?

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This post by Roger Tagholm and Edward Nawotka originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 4/8/14.

The Digital Minds conference in London took a philosophical bent, questioning is this “golden age for publishing or the end of the book?”

Copernicus, Ptolemy, Einstein, Wittgenstein and Willard Quine (don’t worry…he was a US philosopher and logician) were all name-checked in a presentation at yesterday’s Digital Minds that was as abstract as the speaker’s hair. Bill Thompson from the BBC Archives gave a philosophical masterclass on what we mean when we refer to a book and how the print and digital versions are very different animals, one passive, the other active.

“A [print] book sits there. It will contain the same words every time you open it. A book is outside the stream. Like a neutrino [sic: it was that sort of presentation], it rarely interacts with the world or interferes with the thoughts of even a single reader. This is its merit and its damnation…It is printed, dead, done with. Furniture.”

An ebook, he continued, is a file, “and because it’s just a file an ebook is never finished, an ebook is never cleanly separated from the rest of the flow of bits, an ebook is active, part of a wider ecosystem.”

Thompson thinks the industry needs to find a new paradigm because at the moment “publishers, agents and authors still act as if printed books are the center of the universe, and all other forms of publishing revolve around the printed, bound text.

 

Click here to read the full post on Publishing Perspectives.