Fighting the Algorithm
Fighting the Algorithm
To my mind, there are two ways we can fight the push of collective mediocrity that is the result of all this commodification and algorithmic measuring of literature: the systemic and the personal.
Systemic
For the systemic solutions, I’d send everyone to the trifecta of books I mentioned already:
1) Chokepoint Capitalism by Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin
2) How To Resist Amazon and Why by Danny Caine
3) Everything and Less by Mark McGurl
We could also throw in Danny Caine’s How to Protect Bookstores and Why as a bonus even though I’ve not gotten around to reading that one just yet. Those three books are great books for understanding what literary artists are up against, but we shouldn’t stop with mere understanding.
The systemic changes aren’t changes we can make alone in isolation. They require collective action. This is why I recommend writers join the Authors Guild, or the Dramatists Guild. Although there are many professional organizations for writers,[1] the Guilds are specifically geared to protecting and defending author’s rights. One of their current projects is lobbying congress and the president to amend the National Labor Relations Act[2] to allow freelance writers to collectively bargain[3] without violating anti-trust laws. This would allow the Authors Guild to function more like the Writers Guild of America (East and West), which is a full-fledged union.
One thing we have to be clear about is that collective bargaining won’t mean we’ll all get six figure contracts. What we would get is more control over our work once a contract is signed. It also means freelancers could take on giants like Amazon and Ingram, companies who, despite their expansion into being publishers, are mostly distribution middlemen transferring books from publishers to bookstores and customers. Indie writers could also collectively take action to eliminate the “Darth Vader Clause” from Amazon’s self-publishing agreement, for example. Collective action led by a unionized Authors Guild, alongside the Big Five and other publishers, could force Goodreads (an Amazon company) to actually put a stop to review bombing. Collective action could also help writers fix problems with digital rights management (DRM) that actually encourages the piracy of our work. A unionized Authors Guild could also lead a more vigorous fight against the abuses of those tech companies stealing our work to train their large language models.
And, coincidentally, once freelancers are able to collectively bargain and to function like a union, we’ll see which of the Dogmatic writers following in Ayn Rand’s footsteps are true believers in Objectivism, and which ones are simply posturing hypocrites. It will also reinforce the simple truth that there are, really, only two important groups in the world of books: those who write books and those who read them. And if we, as writers, whether traditionally published or self-published, want to be read by as many people as we possibly can, we need to engage in activities that will break the unfair control that Amazon, Ingram, and the Big Five publishers have over the industry and our access to potential audiences.
One thing indie authors need to realize is that Amazon is not their friend. Amazon is trying to gain a monopoly in book distribution and sales, and they’ve nearly done it. Amazon would love to get rid of the Big Five publishers, squeeze Ingram out of the picture, and shutter every brick and mortar indie bookstore. It won’t happen overnight, but once Amazon has enough control over where and how people access books (a monopoly is the only way to continue making money off a mediocre, mass produced product), the only way Amazon will be able to extract more profit from the system is to come after all those self-published authors on the various Amazon publishing platforms. Sure you can try to take your books to another ebook distributor, but Amazon Web Services will probably be hosting the website you migrate to, which means your reach will be smaller if not throttled all together as Amazon then squeezes out other ISPs in favor of their own.
To put it another way, you’re not an “indie” author if the only avenue you have to publish your work and reach your audience is controlled by one company: you’re a subcontractor helping Amazon lure people into Amazon’s closed ecosystem.
We writers need to work together to ensure there are many and varied ways to reach potential readers.
Personal
To change things on the personal front, it’s not necessary to discover something brand new. Simple dissatisfaction with the current status quo would be enough, but so is cross pollination, which isn’t new by any means, and doesn’t even require the development of new technology, nor does it require us to learn code (but you can if you want[4]). The reason things become stagnant is because we, as a species, often fall victim to a kind of psychological inertia where we continue to do something a certain way because it’s the way we’ve always done it. That tendency toward psychological inertia creeps in on the edges of the isolation and integration spectrum. In isolation, that inertia becomes a routine, which can be a way to mark time and keep oneself sane, or, without social input, a way to arrive at untested, impractical solutions. In a crowd, that inertia first brings stability to a chaotic landscape, but can easily morph into pluralistic ignorance[5] where we fall in line with something we don’t fully agree with because we assume we’re the only ones with a different opinion.
In isolation, our ideas don’t get tested, and in certain crowd situations our new ideas can be subsumed under the weight of conformity. That means we need to engage more widely in literary community and do so with benevolent, constructive, and flexible intentions. It will require us to exercise the two most important traits we should have as good writers: our empathetic imaginations, and our negative capability. Of course, the old adage “easier said than done” applies.
Except we are already doing bits and pieces of what I’m suggesting, we’re just not seeing how it all might fit together and work.
Out here where I live, I often feel like an oddity and it also feels like a microcosm of the wider literary world. Now, perhaps I wouldn’t feel that way if I were more integrated in the literary world in general. Perhaps if I were teaching, or if I lived in a city with a more active community of writers I’d feel more engaged, included, or “seen” as they say. Unfortunately, I’m here in a community that seems, at times, to have one eye on the outside world, and one diligently and suspiciously guarding the city limits for interlopers who might enter the scene and upset the mysterious hierarchy that dominates here: a hierarchy that I seem to exist outside of, or perhaps have been exiled from[6]. But maybe it’s fortunate that I am on the outside looking in (an Outrider, if you will[7]). If I were “in” maybe I’d be writing things to the status quo and doing what’s always been done.
We need to build communities that exist in the permeable space between the mainstream and the Outrider. None of us are strangers to community building. Writers groups of all stripes are common to us, whether it’s in an academic department, a literary center, a coffee shop, a living room, or an online forum like a Facebook group, or a loose federation of writers on Threads or Blue Sky, or the discussion forum on the Authors Guild website[8]. Writing is a lonely endeavor, and it’s easy sometimes to think that brilliant writers are the ones who disappear into isolation and return with evidence of their genius. But genius, inspiration, and creativity doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Doing the work, of course, does happen in isolation, but creative people actually do need each other. That need isn’t limited to simply commiseration and emotional support. A community can be challenging and inspiring and that requires respectful disagreement—or oppositional magic.
Early on, I mentioned the idea of oppositional magic, which was introduced to me by Dodie Bellamy my first summer at Naropa, and I also mentioned Brian Evenson’s comment about how young writers develop a rigid aesthetic to justify their existence and how it fades once those young writers start getting published. I would recommend that we, as writers, begin to revive the kind of aesthetic and structural arguments we may have had when we were younger, not to pick fights and make enemies but to embrace that idea of oppositional magic. The main reason, of course, is that we should want to be around exceptional writers rather than ones who have simply mastered the established system and its expectations, and to that end we should desire critique that pushes us to challenge our assumptions about story and writing and what makes them good.
As I said in the beginning section “A Personal Journey,” one of the things that could lead to a new literary movement is diversity: not just diversity among authorial identity but a diversity of utterance.
So many writers, agents, and editors have rules they throw about with the kind of weight and conviction that often accompanies religious gospel, and no one seems to challenge them. We often don’t challenge each other because we fear for our livelihoods if we were to argue with agents and editors. We won’t be too critical of an agent’s or editor’s or even another writer’s apparently weak aesthetic if we feel that person might hold the keys to our next publishing contract, or be able to write a review that will tank our next project, or marshal others to ostracize us. It doesn’t matter if that feels or sounds irrational. As arbitrary and random as the publishing world seems, the most rational response to rejection and failure is to try to control the things we, as writers, can control:[9] our behavior and our public image. Unfortunately, self-control and self-editing are separated by the flimsiest of borders. Suppressing the urge to challenge someone’s poor choices or faulty assumptions in a story can, easily over time, lead to withholding useful and constructive criticism out of fear that it will be perceived as an outburst.
I also suspect that not many writers—including myself--have an expansive enough understanding of existing theories about the novel to truly experiment and be successful at it, nor do we understand enough about our own craft to recognize the difference between a mistake and an experiment gone awry. So, we end up not wanting to be too critical of someone’s weak aesthetic if we aren’t entirely sure how to argue against it. We also won’t be too critical if we’re unable to determine a shared vocabulary, or to work from a shared understanding of the syntax and grammar of a novel.
I earned a BA in Creative Writing, and an MFA in Writing and Poetics, but in none of my workshops did we learn or discuss any theories of the novel. There was no education in Narratology. Maybe it happens at the PhD level, or maybe it only happens at certain schools, or maybe we only learn it if we’re going to be Literature professors. Either way, it sometimes feels as if writers are supposed to learn solely by doing, by feeling their way along blindly and talking about their “discoveries,” or more accurately, “rediscoveries,” in terms that are unique to them and therefore require regular definition each time someone new enters the conversation.
Some might argue that a uniform vocabulary, or a uniformly understood syntax of the novel, would lead to a similar kind of conformity that I’ve been writing against here. But a shared vocabulary and understanding of the structures around other artforms like music, painting, sculpture, hasn’t calcified those disciplines. There will always be a large number of people who will create entirely within the confines of a single form or formula, but that should always be considered a choice that a writer makes and not a rule that should be applied to everything and everyone.
Now, the novel, which is my primary concern, is unlike other literary forms. Poetry, drama, and even short stories to a certain degree are syntactically constrained. There is a boundary within which they must operate. Poetry is bounded by the line, and its rhythm. There are defined forms requiring certain syllabic stresses and rhyme schemes. Drama, whether on stage or on screen, is bounded by its discourse time[10] and what can be visually displayed. Short fiction is also a bit more bounded than the novel. It requires a focus and brevity, an attention to the individual line that is almost similar to poetry or, more accurately, myths and folktales. There’s also a boundary on a short story’s discourse time. Although that boundary is a bit flexible and vague, there is still a certain point in the word count at which the name of the form changes from short story to novella, then novel.
A novel is bounded only by its covers, and its form is, ideally, variable within that boundary. John Berger and Michael Ondaatje have both written books that are sometimes called “novels” but are actually hybrids. Berger’s Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos is a hybridization of fiction, poetry, and essay. Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy The Kid is sometimes shelved in the poetry section, and sometimes in fiction. I’m sure there have been other books over the years that have been called “novels” that defy the standard Freytag’s Pyramid structure, ignore the Save The Cat model, and try to get out of the matter-of-fact journalistic style of modernist prose and its totalitarian interest in formal linearity. They’re just not getting through the noise, and the narrow gateways monitored and controlled by the fast-approaching monopoly and monopsonies represented by the Big Five, Amazon, and Ingram.
So, what does community building and oppositional magic, narratology and the theory of the novel, and the attempted race to monopolization between Amazon and the Big Five publishers have to do with our personal efforts to fight collective mediocrity?
As I discussed in a previous section, we have been in the process of commodifying everything we do. Art is now “content” and content, like any other commodity, needs to be fundamentally interchangeable, as uniform and reproducible as possible, so that costs are kept down. Handmade clothes are more durable, but fast fashion is more profitable. The same principle is being used in publishing. The quirky, individualized, off-beat piece of art might be more durable over time, but the passably written book that is similar to another passably written book, written by brand name “content providers,” is more profitable. The quirky and individualized is hard to fit into the “If you like X, you’ll like Y” model of commodified book marketing.
A good corollary to keep in mind would be the Luddites. The Luddites were opposed to machines taking over for skilled labor, especially in the textile industry, where experienced workers were being replaced by industrial machines that were run by workers who could barely darn a sock. In the more easily commodified industries (textiles, manufacturing, agriculture), the Luddites mostly lost. For mass production to work, the costs of production need to be kept low: a machine, once purchased, only requires maintenance, and never needs to take time off. On top of that, the worker needed to operate that machine is easier to train and replace than a worker trained to do by hand what the machine now does. If we apply that principle to literature, then the costs of production are what publishers pay the writer and editor. If a publisher stocks its list with formulaic, fast-producing writers all writing in roughly the same way, regardless of their marketing genre, then that publisher doesn’t need as many skilled editors to read and shape unruly work. Most of it can, as the tech bros might argue, be done by Artificial Intelligence trained on all the great literature of the past. For that to work, we, the humans, have to be kept ignorant of the historically unformed and incomplete nature of the novel and its seemingly inexhaustible capacity for variation.
The machines cannot be allowed to take over art and commodify it, and the best way to ensure that is for writers, editors, and eventually readers, to learn as much about the craft of writing as possible so that we can fight the blind drive to standardize everything in service of profit, and instead insist upon the right of the quirky and unique to be seen and read.
We have to remember, and talk about it often, that publishers, editors, and agents are readers, just like the rest of us. Their educations are not that much different than the writers they publish and so, I assume, their knowledge about various theories and approaches to writing is just as limited. They, too, are susceptible to psychological inertia, and, in fact, might be under greater pressure to succumb to that inertia than writers are (at least for now). Comp titles, the profit and loss statements, market research, Bookscan, the workload that often necessitates quick knee-jerk decisions based on a single paragraph pitch, all push humans to desire things that can be quickly and easily assessed and delivered. All of those business things serve to reinforce the notion that this is how it’s always been done and this is what people really like to read. But the truth is, I’m bored by the majority of what I find on the shelves in my favorite bookstore, so are a lot of other people.
We, as writers, have a choice to make. Do we allow the “market forces” of late-stage, extractive, commodified capitalism, which has financialized everything to the point that profit is the only measure of worth for anything, to dictate to us the very form and content of our work, or do we insist upon the right of art to be weird and personal and meaningful—and to fight for its chance to be seen?
Some writers will be content to stay within the confines of the already established and commodified structures. Some readers will also choose to stay within the confines of the familiar. But stasis and uniformity isn’t healthy, especially if it is allowed to overwhelm everything else. We have to revive the spirit of the novel as an unfinished, unpredictable, and fluid genre. To do that, we need to be able to argue about things in good faith, which requires more than the knowledge gained by simply doing. Learning the history and theory of the novel can help us break our psychological inertia and embrace a spirit of experimentation.
As I said early on, humanity’s first science was story. It holds a sacred, and deeply integrated place in the human experience. The story that humanity has been telling itself for the last one hundred and fifty to two hundred years has been one that’s lead us to this cancerous commodification and financialization of everything in our lives. Humanity reduced to a tool and generator of profit for profit’s sake is making our lives miserable, violent, and empty.
We have to tell ourselves a different story, and one of the first places we do that is in our fiction whether in novels, short stories, stage plays, television, or movies. We’ve already seen the regional limitations of theatre surrender to TV and movies, and we’ve seen TV and movies overrun by the formulaic demands of lowest common denominator mass entertainment. The novel, despite my doomsayer opinions so far, is still able to work against conformity. However, that resistance is weakening as the economy continues to overwhelm small presses and drive the Big Five into ever more bounded forms dictated by sales algorithms. Slowly, the structure of the novel is being forced into a commodified, mediocre form that stifles new ideas and limits our ability explore different approaches, which might break the chokehold that capitalism is trying to apply.
As the Big Five merge more and more, as they homogenize the form while expanding the visible variety[11]of the products offered, and as more people dive into the sea of self-publishing, which is, despite the protestations of self-publishing’s champions, still under the ultimate control of mega corporations like Amazon and Ingram, we’re left with a realization that the only way to truly fight the faceless machine of commodification is through personal, human-to-human interaction. Independent bookstores have survived Barnes and Noble, Borders, and Amazon by doing something that Amazon can’t—providing a trusted, personalized, community based oasis. And we as writers, editors, publishers, and readers should take that as an example of how best to resist: embrace the personal, make it weird, and argue in good faith with those who are also embracing the personal and weird.
Works referenced:
1. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. University of Texas Press, 1981.
[1] The aforementioned Romance Writers Association, Mystery Writers of America, The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America are all excellent organizations for writers engaged in those genres, but the Authors Guild and the Dramatists Guild are broader and more concerned with protecting writer’s legal rights.
[2] The Authors Guild. “Collective Bargaining - the Authors Guild,” February 7, 2023. https://authorsguild.org/advocacy/collective-bargaining/.
[3] Read about the PRO Act here. https://authorsguild.org/blog/the-guilds-proposed-amendments-to-the-pro-act/
[4] Douglas Rushkoff has often made the case as “learn to code or be coded,” but this doesn’t apply simply to computer languages. Learning the “code” of one’s art form allows the artist to better control what they want to happen.
[5] Wikipedia contributors. “Pluralistic Ignorance.” Wikipedia, April 23, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance.
[6] And yet, I don’t leave because, somehow, the cost of living is still somewhat reasonable here I make about $75K per year, and I bought a house in 2021 for $87K. I could sell it now for about $125K.
[7] This concept of the Outrider is something I’m borrowing from Anne Waldman and her book Outrider. An artist in this role is someone who is a outside the mainstream but still in conversation with it, and attempting to stear and guide the mainstream.
[8] I tend to shy away from online groups because after getting up at 5 a.m. every day to write and then spending forty hours a week on a computer at work, the last thing I want to do when I get home at night is to spend more time on a computer trying to socialize online.
[9] This must be where the desire to self-publish comes from. It removes all but the most essential of arbitrary things from the process of publishing a book, which is finding an audience.
[10] Discourse time is the amount of time it takes for the audience to consume the piece. So, a play’s or movie’s discourse time is its runtime.
[11] The visible variety of commodities makes us think we are exercising choice when we pick one of thirty different brands of something, say, like deodorant, but those thirty brands are actually owned by two or three different mega corporations.