Reminds me of Roald Dahl's short story "The Great Automatic Grammatizator."
I cannot recommend it enough. Amazing story about a future in which an engineer creates a machine that writes stories quick and cheap, thousands and thousands of them in no time at all.
I cannot speak to her ideology, as I've only read her novels and admired her amazing craftsmanship and care. For example, in "The Dispossessed" she crafts a point of rational observation of both extremes of capitalism and communism. I've not had the opportunity to read of or hear her own personal views.
I think her remarks aimed at Amazon miss the mark. She said: "...We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write."
Amazon was not "punishing disobedience", rather they are attempting to negotiate more favorable terms for literally all involved parties. (Amazon's historical data shows a lower price for e-books increases overall sales generating a higher profit for Amazon, for the publisher, and for the author.)
To me, attempting to show an equivalence between Amazon's contractual negotiation with Hachette and religious pronouncements from Muslim clerics sounds a false note in an otherwise important statement.
> Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.
I never really studied history in any depth. Do you think this is just hyperbole? By which I mean is she simply overstating or exaggerating the role of art in historic events?
Am I taking it too literally - that art is the first step towards cultural upheaval? Can anyone give some examples of art effecting some kind of huge social change?
It's easy to point to examples when we construe art (as she does here) as including all forms of creative writing or storytelling. Just one example is work by many literary scholars on the 18th century novel as helping create a new sense of interiority and private life (i.e., reading a novel alone replaced gathering around a fire to hear a story). Or, going back much further, Alexander the Great's obsession with the Iliad would surely count as significant for world history.
Perhaps the real root cause of upheaval such as pervasive discontent correlates with occurrences of revolutionary art. Perhaps the art then acts as an amplifier or accelerator of the discontent, creating a feedback loop. Clearly it helps when the "art" is easily distributed and widely understood (printing press, literacy).
"So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."
Supposedly Abraham Lincoln said this to Harriet Beecher Stowe in reference to her book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is often credited for changing the North's attitude towards slavery.
The "art of words" has certainly effected huge social change. This is self-evident if you include political commentary and philosophy (Common Sense, Wealth of Nations, Federalist Papers, Communist Manifesto, etc.). If you restrict it to fiction, a common example is 1906 novel The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.
If you're talking about art like paintings, plays, music, etc., I don't have any examples off the top of my head. However, I think it's a truism that art is often the first/only safe place to criticize the powerful. I don't know if that's really art effecting change as much as art giving a voice to underlying forces for change.
Well, I hadn't considered academic books as art. I was automatically thinking about literature and other types of art like painting or music as I think that is what she was referring to the speech. After looking up The Jungle on Wikipedia [1] it seems like exactly what she was referring to. Thanks.
The gift of the artist is to express ideas that are in the air of a particular time, but have not yet been articulated. So it is inevitable that a cultural upheaval would have its origins in the art of a culture, even if it is not easy to draw a direct corollary. The art does not effect the change, except maybe in exceptional circumstances, it only expresses what is already in the air.
You don't have to look very hard to find examples. Take The Wire in the United States, which is all about the futility of the War on Drugs and the harm it causes to its citizens. Only now are we are seeing the first steps of decriminalization in states like Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. Did The Wire effect that change? No, probably not. But it did articulate the attitude long before it manifested in policy.
Art is often where change first appears, but it's also where change starts to figure itself out; to find a syntax and a vocabulary. In this sense, it's more than just a reflection, it's an agent - which is not to say it's causing the change, so much as channeling it.
It can also go the other way by leading us away from things. 1984 is the classic example of a work that gave people the tools - in the form of language and images - that they could use to describe all manner of disturbing developments that could take place within heavily centralized, industrialized nations. Dystopian visions are now so deeply engrained that any efforts to move government in that direction meet an immediately negative response.
Like the immune system, they don't block everything. But they block enough for us to know we'd be in very bad shape without them.
For anyone in London, it's worth seeing the Disobedient Objects exhibition at the V&A, "this exhibition is the first to examine the powerful role of objects in movements for social change. It demonstrates how political activism drives a wealth of design ingenuity and collective creativity that defy standard definitions of art and design."
There is obviously a feedback loop, but that doesn't mean that change begins in art.
Art is, like everything else, as much a factor as a product of the growing mindset changes.
You can certainly find examples, but if you think about it, 99% of the art didn't cause any shift.
Is the US socialist after "The Grapes of Wrath", or has race become less of an issue after "To Kill a Mockingbird"?
Was the history of Spain very influenced by Picasso being a communist, or portugal by Pessoa being anti-catholic?
You are correct; Good art has an amplification effect on what already exists. It translates an experience that affects one person (the artist, or a character in the artist's imagination) to an experience that resonates for a larger audience.
If a work of art has enough emotional impact to change the habits of thought, then it is plausible that it could change behavior as well; but here it may be difficult to discern the primary work of art from second-order effects: the discussions that arise in response to or in criticism of the art. These second-order effects may drive the actual impetus for change.
Great book, I got the Peter Constantine translation. It was published 30 years before the French revolution.
To answer your question, the fact that the powers that be at the time took the trouble to ban the book is some indication as to the potential they felt it had for disruption.
If you want a behavioral explanation, you should consider the morale of any kind of resistance. Such morale depends on some kind of foundation and support. Inspiration for these may be found in art.
Incidentally, though, I think this no longer true: "Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship."
It's now easier than ever for writers to answer to no one but readers; the Internet in general and Amazon in particular are tremendous open platforms that let writers decide what to publish without the need for a conventional publisher.
The problem with Le Guin's position is that it's so Manichean, a world composed of good guys and bad guys with no ambiguities. To her, it's either sell books like deodorant or some ideal system where it's quality, not marketability, that makes books sell. This sounds good, but it's tripe. As you say, the Internet in general and Amazon in particular have opened up publishing -- Amazon getting huge credit because it not only allows freer publishing, but has set up a system that allows many thousands of new authors to actually connect with readers. Yet, Amazon is also a business focused on selling products at high volume with tight margins. These two goals aren't opposed, they're different aspects of a complex business. Amazon can be both a great contributor and profit-motivated, it's not that hard to see how.
Who defines quality, anyway? The tastemakers, like newspaper reviewers, who nobody much pays attention to anymore? Or Le Guin -- she seems to think she knows what's good. I imagine, what if John Kennedy O'Toole had the opportunity to self-publish A Confederacy of Dunces, instead of facing despair when all the traditional publishers turned him down. What if he'd been able to sell his work like toothpaste on Amazon, even if the tastemakers thought it wasn't worth publishing. To Le Guin, this would somehow violate the ideals the publishing world ought to aspire to. To me, I wish the opportunities offered by Amazon had been around back then.
Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" was a complete failure when published in 1851, and was essentially forgotten. It was rediscovered after WW1, becoming a great classic of American literature.
It was rediscovered after WW1, becoming a great classic of American literature.
There's also an open question about the book's intrinsic merit versus the need at the time to "discover" American literature and find exemplary American texts of the sort that were needed to instil a sense of unity in a country of disparate immigrant groups.
P.G. deserves most of the credit, that's correct. But Amazon also deserves credit for integrating it into the Kindle system. They didn't have to do that, and they make no money off of it.
I think in all fields of artistic endeavour there is a tension between what is good and what is commercially successful. Sometimes the two overlap, but often they don't.
And often I think some "bad" art tries to claim integrity because it is unsuccessful commercially.
Amazon intentionally delayed/prevented the shipment of Hachette books to customers. What actions did Hachette take that would be similarly punitive (or punitive at all)?
False. Hachette didn't have a contract with Amazon, and therefore Amazon wasn't under any obligation to pre-stock (i.e., donate warehouse space to) Hachette books. There was no prevention of shipments. Any delays were due to Hachette not having the same responsive fulfillment capacity that Amazon has.
Similarly, offering Hachette books at Hachette's list prices is being spun by Author's United as something negative. If Hachette wanted competitive prices--change the list price.
A friend of mine self-published her first novel early this year, sold 40K copies so far, and is doing very well with presales for the next. Most of her sales are on Kindle. She's friends now with a lot of other self-published authors who are also doing quite well.
So I wouldn't say people need publishers anymore for wide readership.
Selling books in large quantities isn't all that probable with a traditional publisher, either. Even if they publish you, they usually don't market your book near as well as you'd hoped, and your royalties are a much smaller percentage of the sales price. With Amazon you can publish a book at $2.99 and keep 70% of that.
I've seen a fair number of articles by people who'd published several books with traditional publishers, then decided the self-publish route paid more and got more books in the hands of readers.
What a bizarre connection! Disputing the divine right of kings had to be a private act or you faced the consequences; you and I, the consumers, ultimately decide the fate of the millions of businesses that constitute the system we call capitalism within a free market.
"Capitalism" is a system in which people are allowed to exchange and accumulate goods freely. Moving to a system "outside of capitalism" involves preventing this, and necessarily involves large scale violence both to take the accumulated capital of savers and to persecute anyone who still seeks to engage in the free exchange of goods. See for example the merchants in Maoist China and Stalinist Russia who were hung or shot for being capitalist traitors, and the landowners who were exiled or killed. It was literally illegal to own a shop, or to grow or make something and exchange it for something else.
If you add up Mao's and Stalin's bodycounts, that's 50-100 million people, so yes, compared to that we are quite safe. I don't know of any capitalist nation that's inflicted anything in that order of magnitude of deaths on its own citizens, and what deaths there are are usually caused by noncapitalist entities like the state police and army. Noncapitalist because they're not funded voluntarily; I suspect if the military was something we had to pay for as individuals like bread, computers, cars, etc. then it'd be a hellova lot smaller. Similarly I can't imagine many people would pay gangs of private detectives to go around locating and imprisoning drug users.
What violent acts of capitalism are you referring to? I suppose there is exploitation in the "3rd world", but it is not clear how that is caused by capitalism. How would other economic systems prevent that kind of thing? Or is that rather a problem of law and policies?
I don't think capitalism = everything is allowed as long as it makes money. You are not allowed to kill people because it suits your business in most capitalist countries, for example.
Socialism managed to suck the whole Aral sea dry, so I don't think it has any inbuilt mechanisms to protect against exploitation.
Not really. Those are reasonable examples of what it takes to try to "force" an entire country out of capitalism "for their own good". Socialism as a part of a general economic or ethical philosophy - embedded within the liberal democratic system - is not quite as bad on its own. The fundamental ideas behind the movement led to things like universal public education, national investment in the sciences and arts, as well as universal public healthcare. These are all things which almost every modern nation recognizes as good ideas. Where it goes off the rails is when you formulate an entire political theory that can be summed as "We shall get a moral and dependable dictator to forbid people from engaging in Capitalism or owning excessive property, thus forcing everyone to work for the common good. This will eventually lead to people naturally working for the common good, because that's what humans naturally do.". The main problem with that one is obvious by word #8, but it contains a few extra fallacies beyond that.
Now, it's perfectly possible to embed socialized literature grants and "literary tenure" within a capitalist system if democratic society believes that is the best way of generating valuable literary works that are not likely to produce an immediate return of investment in the open market. We can even do that simultaneously with a publishing industry producing literary works with a focus towards profitability. Scientific research and some forms of artistic creation already work this way.
As for completely replacing capitalism, as opposed to just having a mostly-capitalist mixed economy? Well, I can't see it happening in a scarcity society, but I can imagine it happening in a post-scarcity one. Suppose we get to the point where robots farm food for us, robots gather natural resources for us and robots keep basic infrastructure working for us. Now, suppose that at one point we mostly trade in "services" and "ideas" (software, books, music, movies, 3D printable designs for all our physical stuff). At what point there does capitalism becomes silly? "Oh, I don't need money to live, I am designing this car to get paid so that I can buy the 3D printable design of my bed. Oh, wait, someone open-sourced the design for the bed I wanted, neat, let me print it. Guess I can open-source my car design too." "But hey, does that mean you are never making another car design?" "Are you kidding? I love designing cars and what else would I do with my time? Besides, I get a kick out of seeing people driving the car I designed!". The beauty is that we wouldn't even need most people to think that way, just a small fixed count from the population. Things like reputation and competition for real state might have to be solved differently in a society without capitalism, but lets be honest, capitalism is a poor system for solving those two anyways, as evidenced by rent prices in the Bay Area and "Am I a failure if I am not worth $1Bn by age 22?" questions on Quora.
Now, capitalism is probably still the best system we know of to solve resource allocation and promote technological innovation in the conditions of contemporary human society. But those conditions are subject to change. So, yes, "we need capitalism because people need to exchange and accumulate [physical, non-duplicable, scarce] goods freely" is true at the moment. But so would have been at a time: "we need the King to keep all the feudal lords and their peasants united in peace and organized in the case of barbarian invasions".
(Note: This rant turned longer than I expected. Also, HN might be the weirdest place on the net to do a Commie rant ;) )
>Well, I can't see it happening in a scarcity society, but I can imagine it happening in a post-scarcity one.
The thing is, scarcity in the economic sense is defined in terms of peoples' wants, which seem to be able to expand indefinitely. Short of discovering an infinite energy source, there will never be enough energy to completely satisfy everybody's wants. So a method will be needed of deciding whose wants get satisfied. This method can be exchange based: you do x for Joe, because Joe either did something for you or did something for someone else and has a scarce token (money) to prove it. Or, it can not be exchange based: somebody makes you do x for Joe, because Joe himself doesn't have anything to offer you to make you want to do x for him.
>Suppose we get to the point where robots farm food for us, robots gather natural resources for us and robots keep basic infrastructure working for us.
I think it's an open question whether we can get robots that are capable of doing almost everything for us without requiring those robots approach human intelligence levels. If the robots that do all our work for us need to be as smart as us to do so, then they probably wouldn't be willing to work for free.
> The thing is, scarcity in the economic sense is defined in terms of peoples' wants, which seem to be able to expand indefinitely.
It's unclear to me whether this is true. For most of history, "infinitely expanding people wants" was not a thing, at least in terms of material wants. Maybe because it was not believed to be possible? But there are plenty of examples of autocratic rulers in pre-industrial times who extracted less resources from their subjects than it's believed they could. So, did they balance that against some risk or the effort required? Or were they simply uninterested in maximizing their personal wealth beyond a point? I feel even in modern capitalist society, above a certain threshold (which varies from person to person and according to circumstances) people are more motivated by status and recognition than material wants...
> If the robots that do all our work for us need to be as smart as us to do so, then they probably wouldn't be willing to work for free.
Does being as smart as us require being as self-aware as us? Does it require free will? Does it beget human needs and values? If 000, my scenario holds. If 100, we might be faced with a serious moral dilemma. If 110, who knows what our relationship with such beings would be. If 111, I've re-invented slavery and it should be abolished again at once, but I sort of doubt the answer to all three questions will be true. All other configurations are hard to imagine.
> For most of history, "infinitely expanding people wants" was not a thing, at least in terms of material wants.
Economics addresses material wants exclusively, but with a broader view than many people take when informally using the term "material wants". The only situation in which economic scarcity would not exist in the general sense would be if there was no good, service, or change in condition which would improve experienced utility for any person.
Further, with real people rather than the basically omniscient beings modeled by rational choice theory, to have a non-scarcity society in any meaningful sense, you'd need instead for their to be no good, service, etc., which any person would expect, even irrationally to increase their experienced utility.
To be a non-scarcity society with regard to a particular good, service, etc. (or any class of such good, service, etc.), requires the same thing (for either the theoretical and practical interpretations as above), but only within the class of goods, services, etc. of interest.
While there's certainly evidence that there may be a certain level of wealth -- which a number of people in the modern developed world reach or far exceed -- beyond which increasing wealth has no net positive impact on experience utility on average, I don't think there's any evidence that at any point in history there has been an society that is non-scarcity either in the actual sense of no actual capacity for improved utility from increased supply of goods, services, etc., or the practical sense of no expectation of improved utility from such things. There's certainly times where economic growth was not the norm and so expectations didn't expand as rapidly, but infinite wants doesn't mean that expectations are infinite, its that more goods (even in excess of expectations) won't satiate the desire for even more goods on top of that.
> people are more motivated by status and recognition than material wants...
Status and recognition are basically services provided by other people in exchange for something done for those other people -- they are economic goods, even though they may generally be the subject of fairly informal exchanges that are harder to attribute monetary value than more formal (even barter) exchanges.
I like that you acknowledge that the innate human drive to create is at least as strong a drive as the profit motive, yet are only willing to accept that it is a sufficient motive in a "post-scarcity" society (whatever that is supposed to be anyway - there will always be scarce goods, that's the nature of the universe). You also commit a common fallacy when you imply in your first paragraph that communism preventing people from accumulating capital is an act of unjust violence and oppression - it is not, and that is so for the same reason that preventing people from stealing from others is not an act of oppression either. I suggest to actually read one of LeGuin's books, mostly notably The Dispossessed.
The fundamental ideas behind the movement led to things like universal public education, national investment in the sciences and arts, as well as universal public healthcare. These are all things which almost every modern nation recognizes as good ideas.
There are many people who disagree 100% on that point.
> But our capitalism? The one we have? It's not that. It's not optimal. It's not efficient. It's not even fair.
There's no "our capitalism". You either have it or you don't. You mean "our political system". Feel free to find a name for it. Capitalism is taken, it means voluntary trade and savings. Stop listening to politicians trying to smear Capitalism. Wake up.
> "Capitalism" is a system in which people are allowed to exchange and accumulate goods freely.
That is neither what the term was coined to describe nor what actual historical systems described with the term have been. If you look at both the specific systems the term was coined to refer to and the historical systems it has referred to (and the specific policies, even that haven't been actually implemented, advanced under the banner), I think there are a couple of defensible short rough definitions that apply well in general (though neither matches perfectly with any popular articulation of capitalism, including that by the socialist critics who coined the term -- the first, based on means, is closest to that typically espoused by proponents [though it strips away the fuzzy term "freedom" for the more concrete description underlying the capitalist understanding of freedom] and the latter, based on cui bono intentionality, is more like that typically espoused by critics:
1. "Capitalism" is a feature of a politico-economic system which is exists in a system to the degree to which that system favors fee simple property rights as the basis for allocating power.
2. "Capitalism" is a feature of a politico-economic system which is exists in a system to the degree to which that system seeks measures and maximizes social benefit weighted by the magnitude of the fee simple property holdings of those participating in the system.
- caricatures of corporations as all-powerful Machiavellian forces wielding the very levers of global history
- castigation of "overly" aggressive and "too" competitive behaviour
- refusal to consider the role of competition and consumer choice
- refusal to acknowledge the participation of all people as both buyers and sellers of goods on the free marketplace
- refusal to ignore the massive and widespread concessions and responses to populist demands evident in modern politics
- sole focus on the influence of abnormally wealthy entities on the political system (and refusal to admit that without a massive cultural change a human-run politic is impossible to insulate from monetary corruption).
It's important to keep the facts in mind before you go wild insinuating something absurd like the average consumer being anything more than a ragged brainwashed puppet of the corporocrat Illuminati.
Sorry, I admire her writing, but I call complete and utter bullshit on this speech. Books are commodities, not some magical elixer from the gods. Some are good, some are terrible. I buy mine from Amazon and Audible. New technologies, and they are helping more people to read more books than ever before.
This is a typical view around here. Obviously to Le Guin they are more than that. But what would one of the great writers of our time, approaching the end of her life, know about that?
She's very good, but great? I don't know about that. I've really enjoyed many of her books, but at heart they seem to me to be the books of an author who isn't particularly conscious of her privilege level in the world. Furthermore she never really seemed to move beyond a very American-centric strain of 60s radical politics in her thinking and aesthetics.
If you're a certain type of American, I'm sure you could be convinced that she's a truly rich and resounding thinker. People on the other side of that fence would probably wish she was interested in speaking to the whole human audience.
That's surprising because in every one of her stories I've read, there is a stark awareness of racial, social and class differences. She is one of the most aware authors I can think of. She writes about differences between men and women, the rich and the poor, capitalists and socialists, leaders and servants, personal family events and large-scale world events.
I am not American and your comment comes across as very pigeonholing. What other part of the human audience do you wish she'd speak to?
This is ironic because you could apply the same statement to issues like open-source software, walled gardens and net neutrality. To the regular joe, the issues we talk about as developers on here hardly matter, yet as a people actually writing the software, we tend to be of the opinion that we know better.
I.e. re a typical speech by rms:
"Sorry, I admire his coding, but I call complete and utter bullshit on this speech. Programs are commodities, not some magical elixer from the gods. Some are good, some are terrible. I buy mine from Apple's or Google's app stores. New technologies, and they are helping more people to consume software than ever before."
Even from a hardcore free market perspective, you can't really say books are a commodity, insofar as they they have limited substitutability. There is no way to make up for quality with volume. You can't just take a masterpiece of human literature and say: "Suppose the Ulysses was never written by James Joyce, well I can just have the same utility by producing 10^9 pages of teen Twilight fan fiction".
But I think that's my point, although I didn't express it very well. I happen to be reading Ulysses right now - amazing book. But what about Danielle Steel's books? They're also books, right? There's a tremendous range, so I don't think we can have these blanket statements that books are special and that we need protection against companies like Amazon.
No, that's exactly the opposite of your point. The history of thought would not be the same with or without Ulysses, we would not be more or less the same with enough Danielle Steel. And books are not special, many other forms of human expression deserve this kind of protection.
Would you then say that 'The C Programming Language' are 'Structure and Interpretation of Programming Languages' are commodities, no better or worse than the dozens of alternatives?
After I posted, I realized that my phrasing made it look like I didn't read the article thoroughly. Here's another attempt:
Would you then say that 'The C Programming Language' are 'Structure and Interpretation of Programming Languages' are commodities, good books among many equivalent good books?
I watched the video (rather than just relying on the transcript) and while I am inclined to agree that books are commodities, I think the only failing in her speech was the conflation of concerns that produced an incoherent thesis.
On the one hand, she had a call to action for authors (and perhaps others in the publishing industry) to respect quality, to produce quality and to seek quality. But she ended up out of her depth by entering the Amazon/Hachette dispute with a poor understanding of the forces at play, and a lack of awareness of how Amazon has enabled new outsider authors to find broader recognition that she started her talk complaining about how it took her and her peers a half-century to find.
The lamenting call for quality was inspiring. But the lack of awareness of how the industry has changed, and perhaps suffering from what JA Konrath calls the "Bookholm Syndrome" of being inside the publishing world too long that you start to empathize irrationally with your exploitative publishing company--that was bad. Or at least some kind of cognitive dissonance at work.
The notion that the publishing industry was ever able to reliably discern quality is scuttled not only by "Moby Dick", but by a long list of other failures:
That's a list of "Best-sellers initially rejected", though. Not quite the same as quality initially unrecognized. Some of them could still be books of low quality, that happen to be popular.
You might be surprised how many people there are who would consider the quality of art to be inversely proportional to what others are freely willing to pay for it. Particularly those in the business of making art that few are interested in paying for.
Not at all. I've also run into people who put on stage productions who are disappointed if people actually go to see them, feeling that means they "sold out".
While they're entitled to their opinions, I suspect that this is just a rationalization for being terrible artists :-) It's like people who take pride in not knowing anything about technology.
Really? Because while Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes are far from perfect, they are quite useful in pointing out movies that have more rather than less quality.
Sure they have -- your response to the art. Its a perfectly reliable metric to determine the quality of art, since "quality of art" isn't an objective quantity but instead a subjective quality, and so is exactly what each viewer finds it to be.
My favourite quote by her (if not in general) in this one:
“If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.”
"But who decides who qualifies as a writer? Does it take one sonnet? Of what quality? Ten novels? 50,000 readers? Ten, but the right readers? God knows we shouldn't trust the state to make that kind of decision. So we should democratise that boisterous debate, as widely and vigorously as possible. It needn't be the mere caprice of taste. Which changes. And people are perfectly capable of judging as relevant and important literature for which they don't personally care. Mistakes will be made, sure, but will they really be worse than the philistine thuggery of the market?
"We couldn't bypass the state with this plan, though. So for the sake of literature, apart from any- and everything else, we'll have to take control of it, invert its priorities, democratise its structures, replace it with a system worth having.
"So an unresentful sense of writers as people among people, and a fidelity to literature, require political and economic transformation. For futures for novels – and everything else. In the context of which futures, who knows what politics, what styles and which contents, what relationships to what reconceived communities, which struggles to express what inexpressibles, what stories and anti-stories we will all strive and honourably fail to write, and maybe even one day succeed? "
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadI cannot recommend it enough. Amazing story about a future in which an engineer creates a machine that writes stories quick and cheap, thousands and thousands of them in no time at all.
http://bookophile.weebly.com/uploads/6/4/0/8/6408830/the_gre...
In that regard I think her comments miss the mark ("corporate fatwa" being the biggest silliness).
I think her remarks aimed at Amazon miss the mark. She said: "...We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write."
Amazon was not "punishing disobedience", rather they are attempting to negotiate more favorable terms for literally all involved parties. (Amazon's historical data shows a lower price for e-books increases overall sales generating a higher profit for Amazon, for the publisher, and for the author.)
To me, attempting to show an equivalence between Amazon's contractual negotiation with Hachette and religious pronouncements from Muslim clerics sounds a false note in an otherwise important statement.
I never really studied history in any depth. Do you think this is just hyperbole? By which I mean is she simply overstating or exaggerating the role of art in historic events? Am I taking it too literally - that art is the first step towards cultural upheaval? Can anyone give some examples of art effecting some kind of huge social change?
Supposedly Abraham Lincoln said this to Harriet Beecher Stowe in reference to her book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is often credited for changing the North's attitude towards slavery.
If you're talking about art like paintings, plays, music, etc., I don't have any examples off the top of my head. However, I think it's a truism that art is often the first/only safe place to criticize the powerful. I don't know if that's really art effecting change as much as art giving a voice to underlying forces for change.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle#Federal_response
You don't have to look very hard to find examples. Take The Wire in the United States, which is all about the futility of the War on Drugs and the harm it causes to its citizens. Only now are we are seeing the first steps of decriminalization in states like Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. Did The Wire effect that change? No, probably not. But it did articulate the attitude long before it manifested in policy.
Does art cause change or reflect change that is occurring?
I think it's probably more like a feedback loop rather than a simple cause and effect with both reflecting and reacting to the other.
It can also go the other way by leading us away from things. 1984 is the classic example of a work that gave people the tools - in the form of language and images - that they could use to describe all manner of disturbing developments that could take place within heavily centralized, industrialized nations. Dystopian visions are now so deeply engrained that any efforts to move government in that direction meet an immediately negative response.
Like the immune system, they don't block everything. But they block enough for us to know we'd be in very bad shape without them.
It's free.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/disobedient-objects...
There is obviously a feedback loop, but that doesn't mean that change begins in art. Art is, like everything else, as much a factor as a product of the growing mindset changes.
You can certainly find examples, but if you think about it, 99% of the art didn't cause any shift.
Is the US socialist after "The Grapes of Wrath", or has race become less of an issue after "To Kill a Mockingbird"?
Was the history of Spain very influenced by Picasso being a communist, or portugal by Pessoa being anti-catholic?
If a work of art has enough emotional impact to change the habits of thought, then it is plausible that it could change behavior as well; but here it may be difficult to discern the primary work of art from second-order effects: the discussions that arise in response to or in criticism of the art. These second-order effects may drive the actual impetus for change.
Great book, I got the Peter Constantine translation. It was published 30 years before the French revolution.
To answer your question, the fact that the powers that be at the time took the trouble to ban the book is some indication as to the potential they felt it had for disruption.
If you want a behavioral explanation, you should consider the morale of any kind of resistance. Such morale depends on some kind of foundation and support. Inspiration for these may be found in art.
Incidentally, though, I think this no longer true: "Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship."
It's now easier than ever for writers to answer to no one but readers; the Internet in general and Amazon in particular are tremendous open platforms that let writers decide what to publish without the need for a conventional publisher.
See further http://www.vox.com/2014/10/22/7016827/amazon-hachette-monopo... .
Who defines quality, anyway? The tastemakers, like newspaper reviewers, who nobody much pays attention to anymore? Or Le Guin -- she seems to think she knows what's good. I imagine, what if John Kennedy O'Toole had the opportunity to self-publish A Confederacy of Dunces, instead of facing despair when all the traditional publishers turned him down. What if he'd been able to sell his work like toothpaste on Amazon, even if the tastemakers thought it wasn't worth publishing. To Le Guin, this would somehow violate the ideals the publishing world ought to aspire to. To me, I wish the opportunities offered by Amazon had been around back then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby-Dick#Later_reception
There's also an open question about the book's intrinsic merit versus the need at the time to "discover" American literature and find exemplary American texts of the sort that were needed to instil a sense of unity in a country of disparate immigrant groups.
Menand discusses some of this in The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, which is an interesting and wonderful book. I wrote more about the book here: http://jakeseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-lo...
And it's unencumbered by copyright, so there's little reason not to give it a go.
And often I think some "bad" art tries to claim integrity because it is unsuccessful commercially.
Similarly, offering Hachette books at Hachette's list prices is being spun by Author's United as something negative. If Hachette wanted competitive prices--change the list price.
So I wouldn't say people need publishers anymore for wide readership.
I've seen a fair number of articles by people who'd published several books with traditional publishers, then decided the self-publish route paid more and got more books in the hands of readers.
I personally found myself skimming through the written version while her delivery left me glued to the screen and quite moved.
Everyone's freedoms - especially the freedom to get paid a fair rate for hard work - are quite safe.
I don't think capitalism = everything is allowed as long as it makes money. You are not allowed to kill people because it suits your business in most capitalist countries, for example.
Socialism managed to suck the whole Aral sea dry, so I don't think it has any inbuilt mechanisms to protect against exploitation.
Now, it's perfectly possible to embed socialized literature grants and "literary tenure" within a capitalist system if democratic society believes that is the best way of generating valuable literary works that are not likely to produce an immediate return of investment in the open market. We can even do that simultaneously with a publishing industry producing literary works with a focus towards profitability. Scientific research and some forms of artistic creation already work this way.
As for completely replacing capitalism, as opposed to just having a mostly-capitalist mixed economy? Well, I can't see it happening in a scarcity society, but I can imagine it happening in a post-scarcity one. Suppose we get to the point where robots farm food for us, robots gather natural resources for us and robots keep basic infrastructure working for us. Now, suppose that at one point we mostly trade in "services" and "ideas" (software, books, music, movies, 3D printable designs for all our physical stuff). At what point there does capitalism becomes silly? "Oh, I don't need money to live, I am designing this car to get paid so that I can buy the 3D printable design of my bed. Oh, wait, someone open-sourced the design for the bed I wanted, neat, let me print it. Guess I can open-source my car design too." "But hey, does that mean you are never making another car design?" "Are you kidding? I love designing cars and what else would I do with my time? Besides, I get a kick out of seeing people driving the car I designed!". The beauty is that we wouldn't even need most people to think that way, just a small fixed count from the population. Things like reputation and competition for real state might have to be solved differently in a society without capitalism, but lets be honest, capitalism is a poor system for solving those two anyways, as evidenced by rent prices in the Bay Area and "Am I a failure if I am not worth $1Bn by age 22?" questions on Quora.
Now, capitalism is probably still the best system we know of to solve resource allocation and promote technological innovation in the conditions of contemporary human society. But those conditions are subject to change. So, yes, "we need capitalism because people need to exchange and accumulate [physical, non-duplicable, scarce] goods freely" is true at the moment. But so would have been at a time: "we need the King to keep all the feudal lords and their peasants united in peace and organized in the case of barbarian invasions".
(Note: This rant turned longer than I expected. Also, HN might be the weirdest place on the net to do a Commie rant ;) )
The thing is, scarcity in the economic sense is defined in terms of peoples' wants, which seem to be able to expand indefinitely. Short of discovering an infinite energy source, there will never be enough energy to completely satisfy everybody's wants. So a method will be needed of deciding whose wants get satisfied. This method can be exchange based: you do x for Joe, because Joe either did something for you or did something for someone else and has a scarce token (money) to prove it. Or, it can not be exchange based: somebody makes you do x for Joe, because Joe himself doesn't have anything to offer you to make you want to do x for him.
>Suppose we get to the point where robots farm food for us, robots gather natural resources for us and robots keep basic infrastructure working for us.
I think it's an open question whether we can get robots that are capable of doing almost everything for us without requiring those robots approach human intelligence levels. If the robots that do all our work for us need to be as smart as us to do so, then they probably wouldn't be willing to work for free.
It's unclear to me whether this is true. For most of history, "infinitely expanding people wants" was not a thing, at least in terms of material wants. Maybe because it was not believed to be possible? But there are plenty of examples of autocratic rulers in pre-industrial times who extracted less resources from their subjects than it's believed they could. So, did they balance that against some risk or the effort required? Or were they simply uninterested in maximizing their personal wealth beyond a point? I feel even in modern capitalist society, above a certain threshold (which varies from person to person and according to circumstances) people are more motivated by status and recognition than material wants...
> If the robots that do all our work for us need to be as smart as us to do so, then they probably wouldn't be willing to work for free.
Does being as smart as us require being as self-aware as us? Does it require free will? Does it beget human needs and values? If 000, my scenario holds. If 100, we might be faced with a serious moral dilemma. If 110, who knows what our relationship with such beings would be. If 111, I've re-invented slavery and it should be abolished again at once, but I sort of doubt the answer to all three questions will be true. All other configurations are hard to imagine.
Economics addresses material wants exclusively, but with a broader view than many people take when informally using the term "material wants". The only situation in which economic scarcity would not exist in the general sense would be if there was no good, service, or change in condition which would improve experienced utility for any person.
Further, with real people rather than the basically omniscient beings modeled by rational choice theory, to have a non-scarcity society in any meaningful sense, you'd need instead for their to be no good, service, etc., which any person would expect, even irrationally to increase their experienced utility.
To be a non-scarcity society with regard to a particular good, service, etc. (or any class of such good, service, etc.), requires the same thing (for either the theoretical and practical interpretations as above), but only within the class of goods, services, etc. of interest.
While there's certainly evidence that there may be a certain level of wealth -- which a number of people in the modern developed world reach or far exceed -- beyond which increasing wealth has no net positive impact on experience utility on average, I don't think there's any evidence that at any point in history there has been an society that is non-scarcity either in the actual sense of no actual capacity for improved utility from increased supply of goods, services, etc., or the practical sense of no expectation of improved utility from such things. There's certainly times where economic growth was not the norm and so expectations didn't expand as rapidly, but infinite wants doesn't mean that expectations are infinite, its that more goods (even in excess of expectations) won't satiate the desire for even more goods on top of that.
> people are more motivated by status and recognition than material wants...
Status and recognition are basically services provided by other people in exchange for something done for those other people -- they are economic goods, even though they may generally be the subject of fairly informal exchanges that are harder to attribute monetary value than more formal (even barter) exchanges.
There are other alternative methods besides exchange and coercion. One is gifting or Potlatch. [0]
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch
There are many people who disagree 100% on that point.
That's what the word means. But our capitalism? The one we have? It's not that. It's not optimal. It's not efficient. It's not even fair.
But then, the then-accepted concept of "Divine Right of Kings" was never what it purported to be either, was it?
There's no "our capitalism". You either have it or you don't. You mean "our political system". Feel free to find a name for it. Capitalism is taken, it means voluntary trade and savings. Stop listening to politicians trying to smear Capitalism. Wake up.
That is neither what the term was coined to describe nor what actual historical systems described with the term have been. If you look at both the specific systems the term was coined to refer to and the historical systems it has referred to (and the specific policies, even that haven't been actually implemented, advanced under the banner), I think there are a couple of defensible short rough definitions that apply well in general (though neither matches perfectly with any popular articulation of capitalism, including that by the socialist critics who coined the term -- the first, based on means, is closest to that typically espoused by proponents [though it strips away the fuzzy term "freedom" for the more concrete description underlying the capitalist understanding of freedom] and the latter, based on cui bono intentionality, is more like that typically espoused by critics:
1. "Capitalism" is a feature of a politico-economic system which is exists in a system to the degree to which that system favors fee simple property rights as the basis for allocating power.
2. "Capitalism" is a feature of a politico-economic system which is exists in a system to the degree to which that system seeks measures and maximizes social benefit weighted by the magnitude of the fee simple property holdings of those participating in the system.
- shadowy allegations of conspiracies
- caricatures of corporations as all-powerful Machiavellian forces wielding the very levers of global history
- castigation of "overly" aggressive and "too" competitive behaviour
- refusal to consider the role of competition and consumer choice
- refusal to acknowledge the participation of all people as both buyers and sellers of goods on the free marketplace
- refusal to ignore the massive and widespread concessions and responses to populist demands evident in modern politics
- sole focus on the influence of abnormally wealthy entities on the political system (and refusal to admit that without a massive cultural change a human-run politic is impossible to insulate from monetary corruption).
It's important to keep the facts in mind before you go wild insinuating something absurd like the average consumer being anything more than a ragged brainwashed puppet of the corporocrat Illuminati.
If you're a certain type of American, I'm sure you could be convinced that she's a truly rich and resounding thinker. People on the other side of that fence would probably wish she was interested in speaking to the whole human audience.
I am not American and your comment comes across as very pigeonholing. What other part of the human audience do you wish she'd speak to?
I.e. re a typical speech by rms:
"Sorry, I admire his coding, but I call complete and utter bullshit on this speech. Programs are commodities, not some magical elixer from the gods. Some are good, some are terrible. I buy mine from Apple's or Google's app stores. New technologies, and they are helping more people to consume software than ever before."
Try reading the parent a little more thoroughly.
Would you then say that 'The C Programming Language' are 'Structure and Interpretation of Programming Languages' are commodities, good books among many equivalent good books?
On the one hand, she had a call to action for authors (and perhaps others in the publishing industry) to respect quality, to produce quality and to seek quality. But she ended up out of her depth by entering the Amazon/Hachette dispute with a poor understanding of the forces at play, and a lack of awareness of how Amazon has enabled new outsider authors to find broader recognition that she started her talk complaining about how it took her and her peers a half-century to find.
The lamenting call for quality was inspiring. But the lack of awareness of how the industry has changed, and perhaps suffering from what JA Konrath calls the "Bookholm Syndrome" of being inside the publishing world too long that you start to empathize irrationally with your exploitative publishing company--that was bad. Or at least some kind of cognitive dissonance at work.
http://www.literaryrejections.com/best-sellers-initially-rej...
While they're entitled to their opinions, I suspect that this is just a rationalization for being terrible artists :-) It's like people who take pride in not knowing anything about technology.
Really? Because while Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes are far from perfect, they are quite useful in pointing out movies that have more rather than less quality.
"You've never met people whose stated opinion did not match their behavior? I find that rather normal."
Are you retracting the freely paying method as a way to determine quality then? You're claiming then that there's no way at all to determine quality?
My favourite quote by her (if not in general) in this one:
“If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.”
Another great (anti-capitalist) novelist who I admire, China Mieville, touched on some similar topics in his keynote speech at the Edimnburgh International Book Festival a few years ago: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/21/china-mieville-...
"But who decides who qualifies as a writer? Does it take one sonnet? Of what quality? Ten novels? 50,000 readers? Ten, but the right readers? God knows we shouldn't trust the state to make that kind of decision. So we should democratise that boisterous debate, as widely and vigorously as possible. It needn't be the mere caprice of taste. Which changes. And people are perfectly capable of judging as relevant and important literature for which they don't personally care. Mistakes will be made, sure, but will they really be worse than the philistine thuggery of the market?
"We couldn't bypass the state with this plan, though. So for the sake of literature, apart from any- and everything else, we'll have to take control of it, invert its priorities, democratise its structures, replace it with a system worth having.
"So an unresentful sense of writers as people among people, and a fidelity to literature, require political and economic transformation. For futures for novels – and everything else. In the context of which futures, who knows what politics, what styles and which contents, what relationships to what reconceived communities, which struggles to express what inexpressibles, what stories and anti-stories we will all strive and honourably fail to write, and maybe even one day succeed? "