Summary

The article discusses the shift in the publishing industry from valuing literary greatness to prioritizing marketing and platform-driven success.

Abstract

The text reflects on a bygone era when writers aspired to create works of enduring value, contrasting it with the current landscape where the publishing industry is more concerned with marketability and platform algorithms. It criticizes the modern emphasis on concise and sensationalist headlines, branding, and the role of social media in dictating the terms of success. The author argues that true merit in writing is overshadowed by the need to adhere to the rules set by "platform overlords" and that the essence of writing has been lost to commercial interests. The piece suggests a return to valuing the craft of writing, with poetry as its purest form, and calls for a reevaluation of the publishing process to create a system that serves the common good.

Opinions

The last great literary works were produced in the 1980s, a time when publishing was believed to disseminate the best ideas from the best minds.
The current publishing environment, influenced by digital platforms, prioritizes payment and productivity over the quality of writing.
The role of writers as custodians of truth and wisdom has been usurped by various figures, including marketers and salespeople.
Writing has become secondary to branding and marketing, with the actual craft being devalued.
The use of Medium's layout features and tagging system to highlight content is seen as a sign of the platform's inadequacy in supporting true literary expression.
The author advocates for a commonly owned publishing model that focuses on the common good, as suggested by Anna Mercury.
AI is acknowledged as incapable of producing literature on par with Shakespeare or Seamus Heaney, but it may become indistinguishable from human-written works to the untrained eye.
The democratization of writing will eventually expose those who lack a genuine passion for the written word, distinguishing true writers from mere marketers.
The author believes that great writing should reclaim its central place in the literary world, transcending the noise of contemporary publishing trends.
Poetry is considered the truest form of writing, essential for understanding and appreciating the art of writing.
The historical context of gender bias in literature is highlighted, with the example of George Eliot, to illustrate the long-standing issues in the publishing industry.
The author emphasizes the need to differentiate between genuine attempts to be heard, as in the case of George Eliot, and deceptive practices used to gain an advantage in publishing.
The ultimate struggle is seen as one between art and commerce, with a call to ensure all voices are heard and valued in the literary world.

Who Cares if AI Will Ever Write Great Literature?

Great was never the point.

There was a time when writers aspired to greatness.

Greatness has nothing to do with it.

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

A time when publishing actually did its job

The last great books to make it into the zeitgeist were written in the eighties. A time when we still believed in publishing as the best way to get the best works from the best minds out there.

I know I did. Nothing else interested me in the slightest.

All that changed, seemingly for good. Whereas before it was plausible to believe in writers (including novelists) as custodians of truth and wisdom, since then a succession of two-bit illusionists, comics, Wall Street charlatans, politicians, salesmen and marketers has taken their place.

And while some of us got the memo, many didn’t. For the latter kind, the assignment has always been (and may always be) to be as good as they can, and everything they’ve got coming to them will surely come.

In truth, it hasn’t been about merit for a long, long time.

It isn’t about merit today, when platform overlords set increasingly unforgiving rules of payment and productivity.

And it wasn’t about merit when, before platforms but after old media, traditional media retreads trialling paywalls told us that, in order to survive, writers had to write headlines that were, above all, concise. (Fuck concise, when a thing need only be as long or short as the message demands.)

Publishing in the broadest sense (making writing publicly accessible through social media, self-publishing, traditional publishing and the like) has got no better since the Internet.

It certainly isn’t about merit today, when social media maven millennials with no history in the origins of bona fide publishing told us they — headlines — also had to be mendacious and obnoxious.

When we can readily admit that it’s as much about brand and marketing as about writing — and the latter’s a distant third — we can accept (or not) that writing is no longer the point of writing.

When you have to use the rudimentary layout variations in Medium to indicate that this sentence right here, conveniently and patronisingly drawn attention to, is your kicker, your pride and joy, you’ve been taken in.

When you have to tag your story as humour to indicate, helpfully, that it is fucking humour, you dicks, it is you who ends up looking like a dick.

When you have to italicise to emphasise, it’s not about writing only for you, your ultimate critic and patron, but about publishing at its most remedial (when publishing is the platform’s job, which now busies itself exclusively with the parts of the process that alienate you from your works).

No matter. Take care of the first thing — writing, your actual job — and in an ideal world, the second will be taken care of for you by actual professionals.

Except platforms like Medium may not be it. They aspire, perhaps (noises to that extent don’t convince, precisely because they conflict with capitalist strategies of owning the means of production, channels of distribution, and fruits of your labour).

But there’s no need to be a stooge of capital or to feel there’s little you can do.

Here’s what you can do: If publishing continues to fail us, let us create commonly owned publishing for the common good (as Anna Mercury suggests).

Meanwhile, write. It’s what you’re good at.

Writing is believing

I’m a believer. I believe the great democratisation of writing will play out and find its level. Marketing mavens will be seen for what they are — marketers who can write but who lack the passion and deference for the written word to be real writers whose words inspire in and of themselves. And sure, let them live. They have a role too.

AI will never match Shakespeare or Schiller, Hesse of Heaney. But it will be good enough. Practically indistinguishable from its betters to the tone-deaf (in the literal, original sense of the term) and eschewed by those gifted with aural intelligence but lacking in the moral fibre to protect their birth-right. Writing (and sales and business and crypto) coaches will be exposed for being just marketers, not writers or even true successes within their domains.

I still think great writing is the core of the endeavour — how can it not, when that is its very nature? And I still think there’s a place for it — and not just that, but to return to its rightful place showing the way again, right at the front of the tearaways of writing, art and philosophy.

The rest of the writing revolution is just noise, fluff, stuff and content.

No, headlines don’t have to be anything in order to be great. A concise headline will almost never be great. It can mostly only strive to be a marvel of economy, and if it’s anything more and attains greatness despite the form restrictions, it’s basically wasting it’s time on productivity cultism when it should be moving hearts and firing minds with poetry. When it has accidental poetry, such luck will be lost on a disinformed public. Do we even remember the term, oh lovers of ‘progress’? Did we forget history again?

We need to hold on to the craft and art and sublime form of poetry, so we can again set our sights on greatness.

Poetry, in my view, is the truest form of writing. Bequeathed to and practised by people who believe in something and understand or at least seek the meaning of things. Who hear the music of sound. Poetry has not by its nature been unpopular, but by not defending itself against lesser forms. It is absolutely crucial and only difficult until you learn to, first, hear it, and then feel it. Like music. It’s the simplest thing. Not to like poetry is to think olives are yucky and school is stupid. It’s an immature, foolish position to be in. Get out of it.

Writing stopped being about merit when pretty people with nothing to say amassed large followings. But it actually started long before that:

In 1857, [George] Eliot chose her pen name, [explaining]: 'George was Mr Lewes’s Christian name, and Eliot was a good mouth-filling, easily-pronounced word’. She chose to write under a pen name, as she felt women writers were not taken seriously. ExploringEliot.org.

The Mr Lewes who George (Mary Ann Evans) referred to, was George Henry Lewes, a philosopher and literature critic. They “openly lived together”, i.e., never married. Good for them.

Here’s the problem:

If the author of Middlemarch felt she couldn’t publish under her own name, it’s because it was true. Aren’t we ashamed, since we’re just the same, and roused to be different? And in such an era, aka all of our male-only literary history, how can writing be said to have been about merit? Nothing further needs to be said. State and defence concur, case closed.

But it wouldn’t be history if we didn’t learn nothing from it, would it?

Publishing continued to be vile and sexist when a white man from Sydney won an award for ‘best first novel’ under the persona of aboriginal woman, one ‘Wanda Koolmatrie’, later explaining he felt white men were discriminated against in favour of new voices. Embarrassing? Oh, sure. Clothes were rent, accusations and counter-accusations hurled, families split down the middle.

But hey, newsflash: a nominally gender-privileged person (currently disadvantaged due to gender) who assumes a protected identity to get equal (or, actually, lol, preferential) treatment is the very same thing as a bona fide disadvantaged George fucking Eliot taking on a privileged white male identity. With both, there’s a noble desire only to be heard and judged for what they produced: a serious, honest work of literature.

Let’s get back to writing for writing’s sake

The real fight here is not between men and women or between people and robots, but between art and commerce, platform and literature, publishing and public. All voices deserve to be heard. Let’s make it so.