Transcript 0:00 It's actually everybody's job to be part of the age of criticism, and that it's part of the pylon. We're all part of the collective conversation around the act of commerce. [upbeat music] Welcome back to Tasteland. 0:16 I am your co-host, Francis Zehr. And I'm Daisy Alioto. And Daisy, what did we talk about this episode? This episode is about the state of criticism. 0:29 And in classic Tasteland fashion, we have invited a representative from the media industry, the marketing industry, the technology industry at large. 0:38 But because all three of these people are critics, they actually really move between these three zones, which I actually think made it, like, made for a remarkable lack of consensus in the podcast, which I really appreciated. 0:52 I feel like coming off of our LA episode, where there was a lot of consensus about certain things, it's obvious that criticism is struggling in media, marketing, and technology. 1:02 But depending on where you're sitting on that spectrum, it's struggling in different ways because the industry incentives are so misaligned. 1:10 All these industries are so full of boosterism, and so there's much less earnest criticism or any earnest criticism easily gets buried by waves of boosterism. Think so. 1:22 I also think that each industry has a slightly different relationship to the algorithm and whether the algorithm rewards negative or positive takes. I think in general, the algorithm does reward extremes, but- Mm... 1:35 usually people are more willing to pay for one of those extremes over the other extreme. So that's super interesting. 1:43 I also think, like, whether your patronage comes from investors, brands, or publications does impact how you view the crisis of criticism in this moment and, like, who is responsible for fixing it. 1:58 [upbeat music] Selin Öztürk is a San Francisco-based writer of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. 2:05 Her work appears or is forthcoming in publications including Evergreen Review, Hobart, California Quarterly, Bayou Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate, Senses of Cinema, and Bright Lights Film Journal. 2:17 She's received support from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and holds a philosophy degree from UC Berkeley, as well as working as a journalist and the research director of a newswire. 2:26 I'd say that my standards are on the furthest possible extreme of not caring about plot or character. Ruby Tello is a designer, multidisciplinary artist, and cyber ethnographer based in New York. 2:39 Ruby's research focuses on artificial intelligence, cyber ethnography, the study of online communities, and digital ontology, or being online. 2:48 His work and research has been published and presented at the National Library in Estonia, at the University of Naples, and at the University of Quebec in Montreal, amongst other places. 2:58 My job is to put language in these things so people could actually explain why is it that their phone makes them feel so crazy. 3:04 Philip Jackson is a visionary leader, writer, and entrepreneur at the intersection of commerce, culture, and technology. 3:11 As the founder of Future Commerce, Philip has pioneered a media brand that explores the deeper implications of e-commerce on society, weaving insights from philosophy, psychology, and sociology into compelling narratives for the commerce industry. 3:23 I feel like we live in a society where it's incumbent on everybody to participate in some sort of, like, public discourse about a critique. 3:31 [upbeat music] The question we started with, with all of our guests, was what is criticism for, and does it reach anyone? 3:40 I think what it's for is to help cut through, like, the mass volume and then to cut through maybe disingenuously positioned work. It is for attention. 3:52 It's probably for a commercial end, but it's because it is our culture now. Like, there is no pure act. Every single act in human existence has a second and third order effect that is commercial in nature. 4:02 So even breathing at this point, I think, [laughs] you know, we need filtered air. You know, you buy a HEPA filter. 4:08 That's, you know, you- There's something that's going to have a commercial impact, and so we need attention around that, and that's the world that we live in. Kith had a campaign a number of years ago. 4:17 It was in collaboration with Marvel. I think it was a send-up of Felix Gonzalez-Torres' Untitled Portrait of Ross. It was that pile of candies, right? 4:26 And it's supposed to be a depiction of a loved one who's suffering from HIV/AIDS, whose body is dwindling over time. 4:35 Whereas Kith does this collaboration with Marvel, who has this stack of shoes positioned exactly in the same composition. [laughs] It's completely divorced of any meaning. It just looks exactly the same. 4:48 And the critique comes from designers and people like Elizabeth Goodspeed, who are raising objection and saying, "This is the output of mood board culture." 4:58 People just see something like this and they're like, "That looks cool." They don't understand the meaning behind it. 5:03 But by and large, I do not really believe that the audience of that criticism, namely the executives or the makers, seem to really care that much. 5:13 If they cared more, so many decisions would have been different, so many choices would have been different. 5:21 You know, the role of criticism is to make clear the different aspects, the different flaws of an industry, of a tool, of a device, and I've very seldom seen a feedback loop from criticism to any sort of adjustment. 5:35 And it, it is perhaps because a lot of the decisions made in these companies are data-driven. Mm-hmm. 5:40 And so this idea that more qualitative understandings or more social science-y takes on the things that people are doing would influence these decisions ends up being misguided because I think a lot of these executives are only looking at data, usage data or whatever else. 5:54 Who do you think is the audience for literary criticism? Makers, readers, ideally any publishers or funders of this stuff who are chiefly interested in promoting new work that's also beautiful. 6:06 I think what Criticism ideally tries to do is get across again, like what a certain book is trying to do, how well it's done it, while itself being interesting. 6:15 So yeah, whoever's interested and, you know, it's a miracle that anyone reads at all. So I definitely wouldn't narrow, narrow to any certain audience. 6:24 I think it's tough to have great criticism when you have like a literacy problem. Mm-hmm. 6:29 I think the internet offers this false promise that you can actually sort of leapfrog the fundamentals of literacy and just jump straight into like offering your opinion. So like to Phil's point, everyone's a critic. 6:40 It's a golden age of criticism. But a lot of this criticism is not actually grounded in an understanding of, A, the fundamentals of the industry that they're criticizing. 6:50 And like I would also say that people that I tend to agree with, like on literary criticism, might out of like their own values ignore the mechanics of the tech industry and be offering criticisms that I don't think are well-founded. 7:03 So that's like an example from my own life. What's the difference between criticism and an opinion? I think an opinion can be ignorantly offered, but true criticism has to come from some sort of expertise. Yeah. 7:15 I think that's a really good point, like the Substack opinion industry or like the short form video opinion industrial complex, right? 7:24 Like those in particular are places where people go to like practice having an opinion, and it's like you might be quite wrong, which is fine, I would say. 7:33 It's become the norm to do this in public, and maybe you become less wrong over time or you develop a tougher skin. People tell you you're wrong, you argue against them, you learn. But there... 7:43 I guess that's the opinion to criticism spectrum that people climb, and that it can be hard to distinguish as like a consumer, as a watcher of videos, as a reader of posts who's- For sure... who's legitimate. 7:57 Substack has sort of democratized the pan a little bit- Mm. I think in a way that it wasn't before. 8:05 Like I think when people were trying to get a platform, it's like you kind of like ride authors' reputations on the way up, and then once you get to the top, you could turn around and pan. Mm-hmm. 8:17 Substack is a bit of a like anarchy free-for-all. You know? I think some people have just chosen to go negative off the bat because- Yeah... it spurs engagement. 8:27 Great case for the need for more gatekeepers than ever, Substack is. 8:32 Policing of criticism right now and the policing of, you know, actors, gray, gray hat actors, ba- black hat actors in the marketplace, it is, it is not just happening online, it's happening at every level of, you know, the, the commercial ecosystem. 8:47 It's always been happening. 8:48 I think it's just happening more, in a more concentrated fashion now, and I think it happens s- with such tight feedback loops because of the algorithmic nature of the feed, and our content finds the audience so quickly, and it, you know, it resonates so quickly with the person that it's meant to resonate with. 9:07 And so yeah, those, those guardrails are imposed by the audience that the content is targeted towards. 9:13 [upbeat music] I mean, after you talked to Ruby about his enshittification take on this podcast, which you recorded with Ruby over a month ago now- Yeah... 9:24 between him putting the essay out and talking about it on MTS, which is a live stream show that was incubated by a16z as an alternative to TBPN, um- And with which Ruby has just joined as a host. 9:38 Ruby seemed like he had a pretty clear idea in his head of like how much he's willing to quote unquote "sell out" and- Mm... 9:47 the risk, and seems to fall into the camp that if you are going into it eyes open, that you are better off than, you know, people who are sort of like starving in obscurity. But I don't wanna put words in his mouth. 10:01 No, no, no. But I would say that's kind of how I feel. Well, I, I think with anything... So who pays for criticism, right? Like I think I talked about this. Was that our second question? That is our second question. 10:12 Okay. I, I, I think I talked about this with Ruby too. 10:14 Like in my work, I am paid by Beehive to write about creators, digital media entrepreneurs, and so my work, you know, I try to write with as little bias as possible, but it's always colored by the fact that my bills are paid by this company that has particular interests. 10:30 I think, I think it's important for people like reading anything on the internet to know who funded it. That's like crucial. I don't think everybody does, but I... 10:41 Like to me, that's like, that's, that's like a, a basic media literacy principle is like literacy. 10:46 And media literacy, you know, larger, but like especially digital media where everything is now marketing and paid for by companies. 10:55 So this was this week, you published, um, it was published on the Andreessen Horowitz blog, and a, a basic argument here is that this idea of enshitt- en- this idea of enshittification, people are misusing the word, uh, misapplying it to social media platforms. 11:09 What they- Yeah... what, what they're really typically talking about is platform narcissism, which is sort of a belief that platforms should keep serving your particular needs. 11:16 My question here is in how criticism is fund. Like is there conflict of interest here? I think quite often now in any writing publishing, money comes from brands, and this is sort of a reality, right? 11:31 You don't have to take that money necessarily. But to fund a thing- Uh, you know-... sometimes you take money from a brand... look at the furniture in this house. Someone's gotta pay for it. 11:39 This Ciroc ramada ain't cheap. [laughs] Now, okay, here's the truth about this actual argument. 11:44 I have made this argument before, so much so that I did an interview in London last week before the piece was published, and the interviewer was like, "I've heard you say this before. 11:53 Can you break down to me what your argument's about this?" So this is something that actually has nothing to do with Andreessen. Yeah. The piece was already written when- Mm... they approached me. 12:02 I was actually gonna publish it in a more like critical tech. I'm not gonna say the name of the, the publication, but like it was going to go more on the left side of sort of the internet critical tech. 12:12 And yeah, that piece existed before the conversation with An-with Andreessen. Um, it was gonna be published in a more sort of left-leaning magazine and, and print publication. So... 12:25 And the arguments that I've been making, I think I've, I've been making in some shape or form for a minute. And so the question of who funds criticism, for Ruby, it's like a lot of this stuff is just here for free. 12:35 Like, I'm giving you this game on Substack, on Instagram, and it's, for the most part, it is all from genuine belief. 12:43 Many different people from foundations like Mozilla Foundation, who I have a very dear and beloved relationship with, to sometimes Andreessen Horowitz, to sometimes companies like Death to Stock or Radar, whatever, will allow me to spend a week or two weeks to research something like booksmaxing, so I could write and think about it. 13:01 And I'm very grateful for all these relationships. I will say that I've never been-- I've never felt any kind of constraint in the things that I wrote. 13:08 There was one publication where actually I tried to make the insignificant education point early, and they were like, "No." That, that, that's, that's the one time where it happened, where they were like- Yeah... 13:16 "Hey, that's, that's too..." And I was like, "All right, it's a hot take, but..." And, and they, they did not allow me to do so. But was, you know, the thing that we did with them was really, really fun. 13:25 Do you think the institutions that pay the best for criticism have a disproportionate impact on the type of book criticisms and reviews that get published and what doesn't get published? 13:37 [sighs] I-- my answer probably wouldn't be accurate 'cause I was quite surprised that this New York Times rave review seemed, you know, good for that guy, but, like, that Marlon James book is really selling out. 13:50 I don't know whether it was the extreme emotion beyond it, whether this is already, like, a well-known good author, but I don't know. 13:58 I, I think there's increasingly less correlation, certainly less than ever for the people who regularly care in this tiny, tiny niche. I guess less expectation that 14:11 The New Yorker will have the best take about what's the greatest book of the year versus, I don't know, like, the Cleveland Review of Books. I was on this panel. 14:21 First of all, I did not go on this panel to be, like, a radical truth teller, but they were, like, asking, "Do you ever, like, wanna give up?" I said I love suffering. 14:30 I love struggle, and, like, also earlier, like, in the summer, I was so broke from running Dirt Books that I sold my watch in Chinatown. And then after everyone was coming up to me like, "Did you really sell your watch? 14:43 Did you really sell your watch?" I didn't really think... Like, to me, it was, like, already a funny story. It was- Yeah... 14:47 it was kind of upsetting at the time, but it was, it was already funny as it was happening to me. 14:51 And I think, like, you're, okay, when I don't have, like, these patrons I'll be beholden to, then I'll be free to, like, really speak my mind, and it's like, but you're still not free because you spend all your time thinking about how you're gonna get fed. 15:05 Yeah. And so there has to be, like, something in the middle because, like, when you are impoverished, you also are not free because you are impoverished by... And I've never been impoverished. 15:14 I'm not saying that I've been impoverished. Yeah. 15:16 I mean, like, when you're broke, say broke, your new master becomes the struggle and the cycles of the struggle and doing weird, like, financial jujitsu so that, like, Optimum doesn't charge your card until, like, this thing gets charged, and transferring money around. 15:29 Mm-hmm. And it's like that's what you're doing instead of doing your art. 15:33 So I do think there has to be a balance because if you truly make this radical choice not to take money from everyone so that you can give your opinion any time, you will just become enslaved by your own discomfort. 15:46 Every time I've ended up in that situation accidentally, I've tried to get out of it as soon as possible because I just have seen too much. 15:52 Okay, let's talk about the crowd as an enforcer in, in sort of any critical sphere. I, I remember asking Ruby who he felt beholden to. 16:03 I forget exactly how I worded it, but he said, "I only truly feel beholden to my family, my friends, and my community, and to truth," right? Which I think is, uh... 16:14 This, this sort of came out of that, the, the funding conversation, and this was Ruby's stance on, like, Ruby having some internal compass on how he orients his opinions, his criticism, which I respect. What is truth? 16:28 Well, that's for Ruby to know what his truth is. I don't know what his truth is. I feel only truly beholden to my family, my friends, my community, truth, and, you know, I'm in service of the demos of our polity. 16:45 Like, I'm in service of, of the people around us. I'm also an art critic, so I also get to write about, like, dance and theater and painting, and oftentimes I'm like, "The other people are wrong." 16:53 I got into a big tiff, a big mar with critics who disliked Anna Imhof's Dune. And my sense was that a lot of the, the people in the field were not being beholden to truth. 17:05 And by truth, I mean the subjective experience of such a raw and moving piece of performance art. That's my truth. 17:15 When people work for these publications, I see them bow to not even, like, established or explicit standards or rules, but the cop is in their head in a way. Mm-hmm. You know? 17:26 They talk about a work of art as if they're, like, haunted by the ghost of woke one or something. It's like- Under the eye of the panopticon of Twitter, so to say. Yeah, of cancellations of Christmas past. 17:36 Like, I have this piece called The New Critic's Disease, where I'm like- Mm-hmm... just, like, lick the painting. Like, dance with the dancers. Like, move a little bit. 17:44 It's not all about which political cookie point has been... Like, it is okay to be moved by a disturbed work of art. Now, in tech, I don't know how th-this is-- I think the, the art world's kinda different. 17:57 Um, in tech, the rules and standard are very interesting. I mean, there was this whole thing this week with the Pangram CEO and Wired. Mm-hmm. 18:05 Where it seems like the CEO, maybe their comms person was not advising that, like, journalists can do whatever. Like, not whatever. 18:11 As in, like, you, you talk to them, and, like, they can, they report factually, but Let me, let me recount what this was. 18:16 I think what you're talking about, I saw this clip that the CEO of Pangram, I think his name is Max. Uh, yeah. 18:20 He had posted a snippet of this interview with Wired, and there's a little, like, setting the scene bit where he's like, "It's insane that a journalist would do this when I'm just, like, taking some time to think." 18:30 And what they said is, "I asked him a question, and he, like, said, 'Hmm,' and turned away and microwaved his food for 15 seconds." It's something like that, right? 18:39 And he's, like, calling out, like, I-- It's insane that journalists can just do anything. My guess is he did pause, turn around, and microwave his food. Outside of this, I think that's a little rude. 18:49 That's neither here nor there. If we're having a conversation together, like we're at, you know, at, at our... 18:53 the, the birthday party where we were hanging out, and I stood up, walked over there without saying anything, you'd be like, "What is this guy doing?" Is it a little petty to write this? Yeah, of course. Of course. 19:04 But I think it's fine to tell people that they're being weird. Mm-hmm. That's what we do. We enforce norms by bullying. [laughs] Like, like normalcy, it doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens through social pressures. 19:18 I-- Once again, this is just like, that's how society works. Yeah. You, you say the wrong thing on the playground, you get told that it's wrong, and then you don't do it again. Anyway, once... This is very normative. 19:27 I'm, like, kind of man explicating how, like, social norms are formed. That's what podcasting is for. Exactly. 19:33 And if your auntie didn't tell you, like, if she's talking to you, you can't just walk away and then come back, and if she didn't give you, like, an earful for doing that as a child, then I guess someone at Wired has to do so. 19:42 It was interesting to see this parallel emerge between Sellen's comments about Rachel Cusk. I think I said, like, Rachel Cusk has stayed the same and her critics have evolved, and I stand by that. 19:53 Obviously, we had that conversation closer to when Life of M came out. 19:57 Life of M, for those that don't know, is sort of like a thinly veiled account of a projection of Natalie Portman's life by a writer who very much resembles Rachel Cusk. 20:09 And when I talked to Phil, closer to when we're recording this, about something in marketing right now, he brought up this sort of decentralized protest of the new Liberty Biberty mascot. 20:22 And so we have on one side- Is that... Sorry, is that, is that real? Is this a real protest, or is this another company staging a fake protest? Well, where's the line, right? 20:31 I think it's an individual creator doing a bit that has kind of gained some legitimacy. Yeah. 20:38 So, you know, on one side, we have this parallel in the literary community between the backlash to Life of M and the backlash to the Liberty Biberty mascot. 20:47 Only logical conclusion is that Natalie Portman needs to become the new mascot for Liberty Biberty. That's too much context collapse for me. Fair enough. But this is Taste Land, where we collect- [laughs]... 20:58 context for a living. Bold proclamation, Rachel Cusk is coworker books. What did you mean by that? Um, I mean, I wrote it when I was in the bathroom. 21:08 I don't think [laughs] I was thinking it through that much, but Ryan Ruby had that review of her, no? 21:13 And he had this point that it's diagnostic rather than aesthetic the way people are talking about it, so it's like a symptom of look what this flat, alienated book says about our flat, alienated society, not so much the book itself. 21:26 I think that people who are writing, you know, a lot of fiction poster kids like her, Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, generally got like a one or two decade pass for whatever else they did. 21:35 Not, you know, not saying it all sucks, but I think there's been sort of, with Cusk and everyone converging against her, that sort of like a end to that getting a pass. I was surprised. It wa- it seemed like a first. 21:46 There was almost complete convergence of criticism against her. 21:49 And all the pans I read, and there were like tens of them, and the expected cases seemed to be using the same language to make a case for why it wasn't great, that 10 years ago it was like making a case for why Outline Trilogy was quite great. 22:05 You know, it was flat, it was like overly detailed, very insular, no real external psychology. Rachel Cusk hasn't changed, but like her critics have. Um- Yeah. 22:17 I thought her last book wasn't great, and so I'm surprised that everyone just smelled blood in the water this time. 22:25 The, uh, really good example of this right now is Connor Harvey's protest of the Liberty Biberty mascot that's happened in the last few days. If you're not familiar, there's this new mascot that Liberty Mutual has. 22:37 It's like this ugly little... It actually looks like the ChatGPT dot. It's like- Mm.... this fuzzy little yellow thing. 22:43 Connor Harvey has this critique that it's lazy, but the, the joke was it's a critique about being forced to be subject to advertising and brands, and if you're going to be subject to some form of advertising, they might as well be clever, right? 22:59 And so why this one? It sucks. We should all protest it. And so people actually organized a real protest, and they showed up, right? Liberty Biberty lookalike contest? Right. [laughs] Exactly. That's next, right? Yeah. 23:12 And the meta there is like, it's actually everybody's job to be part of the age of criticism, and that it's part of the pylon. We're all part of the collective conversation around the act of commerce. 23:23 [upbeat music] We asked all three of our guests about, like, what it costs to be a contrarian, to be really critical of something that might be popular. Uh, what does it cost me? 23:32 I mean, for me, it's cost me reputationally quite a bit because I've been very anti a bunch of marketing tactics for a long, long time. 23:42 Live streaming, for me, has been a thing that I've been very outspoken against for five, seven years now. It's become my reputation now, is I'm the person who's like Mr. Anti-Live Stream, and I say it's just... it's... 23:54 there's a reason why every single platform has to incentivize every part of the ecosystem in order to participate in it, and I feel like that's an unsustainable ecosystem. The... 24:03 I'm the only one who is willing to say it, that it's not a viable tactic for brands today. 24:09 From a reputation perspective, it makes me look like I'm not modern in our sensibilities and understanding the current state of the market. Also, I'm I feel like I'm getting on in my years. 24:19 Maybe I also just don't understand what's happening. 24:21 I also think the way that we behave, we make decisions about what is success in such short periods of time, that even in, in the brand ecosystem in marketing, what we call customer lifetime value is measured in, like, 90-day increments. 24:36 Do you know how long a lifetime is? [laughs] Like, it's not 90 days. [laughs] I mean, for like a mayfly or a small bug- Exactly right. [laughs]... that would be perfect. Exactly. That would be ideal. Right. 24:46 You'd get the whole spectrum. Do you think that there's, like, a weird sort of residual sense of, like, fear of being ba- blacklisted? I don't know. I think it's, like, half a function of 24:57 my age, lack of age, half a function of not physically being in New York that close to, like, what's still the central locus of access and ad relationships and jobs. 25:08 I imagine it'd cost me the opportunity to work with or be as well-regarded by whoever I'm panning or their friends, but the people I wanna work with generally are people [laughs] whose work I like. 25:17 But I do have a friend in New York who was telling me they had panned a well-regarded work that had come out by someone big on Twitter, and these critics were like, "This is someone in the scene, you know. Good luck." 25:30 And today, the friend does still describe, like, a coldness around publishing somewhere this writer is associated with. But even as I talk about this, it, like, doesn't matter. Mm. You know, people do move on. 25:41 I love ending on a note that none of this matters. [laughs] What could be realer? [upbeat music] I think a lot of times it's overstated how much you can change an organization from within. Mm-hmm. 25:52 But people also underestimate the importance of, like, knowing, like, being inside just to know what's happening. 26:00 I also think, like, if you don't know what's really happening in the technology industry, if you don't know the difference between, like, an open weight model and a closed weight model, for example- Mm-hmm... 26:09 how are you gonna talk about AI? I think anyone can form an opinion on what they wanna use and how they wanna use it, but I don't think everyone is in a position to say this is all good or all bad about most things. 26:23 And I think if you are of the mentality that the internet has brought us nothing but net negative innovation, I would seriously question, like, why you feel the need to be on Twitter and say that, [laughs] 26:38 you know, if that's, like, really how you feel. I find the field of tech criticism to be actually really blossoming in a counterintuitive way because of the platforms. Mm. 26:50 Whether it's people like Cyber Celibate or an anth- anthropologist or Aidan Walker or, um, um, Et- Etymology Nerd, like these are people who are looking at these things quite critically in this roundabout way. 27:02 It's been enabled by the platforms that they are criticizing. And okay, here, here's a provocation. Maybe, just maybe, the master's tools can dismantle the master's house. 27:13 To, to put a meme on it, you know the image I'm talking about. We should improve society somewhat, yet you participate in society. Curious. I am very intelligent. Yeah. 27:21 Uh, that, that's kind of what you're talking about here. People are using these social media apps that they're criticizing as a vehicle of- Oh, I, I'm, I'm, I'm-... criticizing those platforms... 27:29 actually, I'm like, I'm like the ob- obverse of that meme because I'm saying that's freaking cool and amazing. These are more about, like, media consumption, but relevant- Mm-hmm... 27:37 to your, your tech criticism as well, I, I would say. The rules, I don't know if this is the up-to-date version. 27:43 You can maybe correct anything that's wrong, but you can o- you only allow yourself to watch 12 movies per year. That's correct. No television. Um- No television... I think you get one weekend of TikTok. 27:54 Yes, it's my weekend right now. Oh, well, there you go. Always a glorious- Per month, per month. I think the thing that it elucidated for me is that we are not powerless. 28:03 You know, at the end of the enshittification article, I tell people, like, "If you do not like the platform, uninstall it." Mm-hmm. Vote with your thumbs if you will. I refuse to use Partyful. 28:14 Partyful is visual violence. It looks terrible, and as a person who respects aesthetics, I refuse to use Partyful. It is abhorrently unchic. 28:23 The language of dispossession, the language of progressive degradation of the technological infrastructure to which you have no power or control plays in the feeling of disempowerment that I think benefits the big tech platforms. 28:40 [upbeat music] I didn't necessarily expect AI to be such a lens for all three of these conversations, which, which it was, right? It's sort of like the kaleidoscope topic of everything- Mm... right now. 28:52 But, like, with writing, and we were talking about Pangram and how Pangram, um, and, like, AI detection creates this sort of Barbara Streisand effect- Haven't heard about Pangram in weeks. Flash in the fucking pan. 29:01 I- Jay-Z, Aliotta vindicated. Do you have thoughts about AI and literary criticism? 29:06 Because I think that I am a bit of a, I would say among my peer group and who I, people who I generally think of political comrades, I, I feel like I'm a bit of an outlier on AI in that I think it's genuinely useful in some cases and h- don't really have a strong identity politics around blanket opposition to AI. 29:26 But I do worry that some of the energy that could be going into better literary criticism or just evaluating writing has gone into trying to prevent the platforming of AI writing at all costs and catching people out by using these, like, really imperfect tools like Pangram that j- are honestly backed by, like, the same investors. 29:49 It, I just think it can't be good for the culture because if anything, it's kind of, like, put the spotlight on, it's like Streisand effect for, like, bad writing. Mm. 29:58 And it's also convinced a lot of people that aren't good writers but don't use AI that they're somehow superior because of that, and I think that they- Mm... would be better off just improving their craft. 30:07 Another crutch. I'm, yeah, I'm with you. I'm of the opinion that you can't be, like, for evaluating books in themselves and make blanket opposition of AI, even if you don't like it. 30:17 Like, if you'd never heard of Ulysses or transcription and you unwittingly, like, picked up a machine-produced Ulysses and 30:26 Loved it, and then, like, retroactively says, "Man, this sucks," when you learn that a machine produced it. You're no longer evaluating it on its own terms. 30:34 I personally think we'd be better off overall as writers if these machines didn't exist. But, like, when people say an AI work is bad, I think they're making two very different claims that they're confusing. 30:47 Like, one, the story sucks because it's, like, in ChatGPT ease, and two, the story sucks because ChatGPT, like, made it. 30:56 S- I don't, yeah, I don't think the day will come that a machine actually gets close to writing something on a level with Ulysses. But, 31:05 uh, you know, if we focus on whether a machine made a work versus whether a work is good, we don't really have an honest leg to stand up, stand on if the day does come that a machine writes something good. 31:17 I guess what I'd add is, like, if most of us, maybe probably even you, like, knew beforehand that a book was completely machine produced, we'd be far less likely to engage with it. 31:28 How I, like, reconcile that with everything I just said, I think, like, the encounter with another person, the sense of being joined with, like, a specific human that made the work should be defended at all costs. 31:39 But it's, like, not a neutral value. Like, it needs to be argued for explicitly. 31:44 But I think this sort of witch hunt around, you know, automatically running things through filters to see is it AI, is it not AI, is just a misdirection of energy to me, away from what actually improves somebody's discernment or their knowledge of the canon. 32:00 Yeah. I mean, I guess kind of ironic given the water usage thing, but it does seem like-- remind me of going after people for taking 10-minute showers versus going after, like, oil CEOs. 32:11 Like, again, I have never seen use of, like, writing that AI has come up with on itself and thought that was, like, at all a good piece of writing. 32:22 But going after people who do use it in whatever way they use versus the institutions themselves, like deploying this technology, like Penguin Random House runs an internal AI group now and, like, hires AI engineers. 32:35 Harper Collins has deals giving tech companies access to its backlist for AI training. I'm sure, like, scores of editors are using AI to summarize the manuscripts they get. 32:46 I don't know what it'll take to have, like, some agreed-upon policy on authors using AI probably 'cause whatever policy they come up with would be hypocritical. What currently gets a pass in your field? 32:57 Like, what's rarely criticized, and why does it get a pass? I mean, uh, AI influencers are in AI video editing. 33:06 Like, pretty much anything that's, uh, automation that's driving down any cost of operations is not just getting a pass, but it's being evangelized in such a way that's turning a lot of people and, like, brand operators and marketers into thought leaders. 33:22 And I'll be honest with you, it's done wonders for my bottom line and my business too. But the net effect really is that there's a human capital cost for sure. 33:32 But if, uh, if I'm really honest, and they're really honest, there was probably an unsustainable nature to the way that a lot of these businesses were operating. 33:40 There's an unsustainable nature to the way that my business was operating for a while too. 33:45 Uh, I think it's pretty telling that if you have enough time to create, you know, gobs of content about the work you're doing, you're probably not doing as much of the work as it seems you're doing. 33:54 So, and I think that gets a lot of a pass. I think a lot of people creating a lot of courses and, you know, seeming like they're about the work rather than actually doing the work, that-- I don't know why. 34:05 That seems to be a magic trick that people just buy into, and, uh, that's not lost on me. What would you say gets a pass even in this perhaps more incisive and critical environment? 34:17 What typically still, like, we're not necessarily gonna criticize that aspect of this. Is there anything that comes to mind? I would say that, like, there's vitriol for most parts of tech right now. 34:27 I think people are feeling, whether it's like a Girardian boogeyman or whatever, but I think it's like people are feel-- or, or scapegoat. People are feeling the squeeze economically. Mm-hmm. 34:36 They're feeling the squeeze socially, and that's the, that's the finger they wanna point. 34:40 The, the, the, the reason why n-nothing, I think, is sort of off-limits in tech criticism is because the first spoils, which have been like this, the ability to connect. 34:50 You know, we-- I think the, the value's has already been, like, a bit saturated. Like, the fact that I can call my family in Haiti, um, for free, that's like incredible and amazing. 34:58 Now, for the rest of the things, that was made pretty much free if you made an account and you've accepted to look at ads. That was made free. Mm-hmm. 35:07 The rest of the innovation for the most part, and I mean, you know, you can read Tyler Cowen, like, people will say that, like, it's been generalized and it's, it's-- And I, I've read some of these more like abundance-minded things that like it's, it's actually trickling down some way. 35:22 I don't think people feel it. You know? I have this video where I, I recite this poem by Gil Scott-Heron called "Whitey's on the Moon." Mm. Yeah. "A rat done bit my sister Nell, and Whitey's on the moon." 35:33 Very simply, the poem is about how he can't pay his rent, he can't pay his electricity bill, but it's from nineteen sixty-nine, and but Whitey's on the moon. 35:39 Technological advancement don't matter if eggs are nine dollars. 35:42 If, as Dario's claimed, AI cures cancer, do you believe that, A, the cure for cancer will be made free to every single person on this planet who, of course, cancer kills millions of people every year? 35:53 Do you think, B, at the very least it'll be subsidized by the government in America and made available to American public, or C, will be sold for profit? All I know is the investors have to be made whole. Exactly. 36:02 It costs a lot of money to make a, to find a new drug or whatever. And so people have wisened up. They've realized [chuckles] that shit don't trickle down. 36:13 And so whether or not you cure cancer, it doesn't matter if in order to have access to the cure, I need to mortgage my house, or I need to like... Some people do this strategically. 36:23 You'll probably hear about this some-sometimes on Reddit, on the news, like you, you reduce your income by like one partner goes off so you can get on Medicare, whatever. Like, it, it just, it's just not accessible. 36:31 It'll cost you an arm and a leg to, for the cure for whatever thing that the, that the AI comes up with. 36:35 Now, if Sam or Dario says, "Wait We're gonna do, you know, like UBI, all the things that, that are found by AI are gonna be in the public domain 'cause of a strain on all of your things. 36:46 That's a different story, but no one said that. [chuckles] Yeah. Um, and so I think, yeah, I think that that's the fundamental disconnect, and that's why there's no safe, safe cow. Like, what's the good analogy? 36:57 What's, what's the idiom here? There's no- Mm... there's no sacred- Sacred cow... sacred cow, yeah- Yeah... that is untouchable because people are not, they're not feeling the spoils. 37:07 They're not feeling- The abundance... the abundance, yeah. 37:10 [upbeat music] Can you remember a piece of criticism that you read recently that actually, like, changed your mind about something that you didn't like or that you had written off and, like, convinced you to then go read it? 37:23 Um, yeah. 37:24 Maybe it's telling how old it is, but I had a book of essays by Richard Rorty, the philosopher, and I picked it up a while ago, and he wrote this essay in the late '80s about Nabokov called The Barber of Casbeam. 37:38 So the barber's this guy in one almost throwaway scene in Lolita where Humbert stops into this town, Casbeam, to get a haircut, and the barber's, like, talking about his baseball player little kid, and Humbert's going through some thought loops about the fact that he just, like, kidnapped and is continuing to molest a child. 37:56 And it's only toward the very end when Humbert looks at this photo nearby and realizes that the barber's son has been dead for 30 years. 38:02 What it changed my mind about, I already cut my own hair, so I guess it didn't change my mind about that. But his basic point is, like, the worst form of cruelty in Nabokov is incuriosity about the suffering of others. 38:14 While I personally still think the child molestation was worse, his point is it's, like, the interiority of literature that expands your consciousness of cruelty. 38:23 There was a, uh, a post on Reddit that referenced a, someone's experience with having bought into the Shopify ecosystem. It's one of those things that you read that just, like, makes you see the world a different way. 38:37 Basically, bought into Shopify in the pandemic thinking that, you know, they're gonna be an entrepreneur, but realized very quickly that this is not a side hustle. 38:48 It's gonna take tens of thousands of dollars of paid media for them to actually run this business, but they're not gonna give up on their business. 38:55 It wasn't terribly eloquent, but something flipped a switch for me, and that's when I started noticing that there's Shopify advertising everywhere, and in places it doesn't really belong. 39:05 MrBeast selling Shopify to kids is not a mistake. If you go look at its earnings, it doesn't make its money in volume on subscription fees. It makes its money on payments. Like, it is a payments company. 39:20 But there's something about that and the way that they make their brand ubiquitous and the way that they'll happily take subscription payments from anybody who doesn't wanna give up on the idea and the dream of being an entrepreneur. 39:32 It just made me see them differently. 39:36 I mean, I think the bigger conversation is if AI is going to get baked into every distribution platform that your media company currently uses, how are you prepared to account for that? 39:46 And that's, like, the thing that people don't seem to want to dig into as much. I mean, there was a woman, Genevieve from New York Magazine, talking about the way New York Magazine approaches their audience analytics. 39:59 Like, they are right now paying much more attention to the KPI of subscriber engagement. 40:05 There seems to be this tension right now where people, like, really wanna return to, like, hyperlocal, in-person, online hybrid model bubbles- Hmm... 40:16 but have no idea how anyone's gonna discover them or find out about them on a broken internet, and, like- Yeah... nobody has resolved this contradiction. 40:24 And the way that that relates to criticism, I think, is, like, if you are writing criticism, of course you want it to reach the people it's most relevant to if they're willing to pay for it. 40:34 But I think every critic also wants to have the biggest audience that they could possibly have, and in order to do that, you have to be riding, you know, the algorithm superhighway, and that highway is under construction. 40:47 So, like, I asked my friend to photograph Dirt's Christmas party, and I said, "Of course I'll pay you," and he said, "Instead of paying me, will you come to coffee with my friend who kinda accidentally started a niche social network and wants to talk through, like, what's next for it and, like, give him advice and then, like, you don't have to pay me. 41:04 That'll be, like, the payment." And I was like, "Fuck, yes. I love to use my brain instead of paying money." I get this link to sign up for this invitation-only social network. 41:12 There's, like, hundreds of people in here, including, like, some micro celebrities, and it is very strange. So I get into this social network, and there's, like, two feeds, okay? Shit and cum. So- [chuckles] Oh, God. 41:27 And the guy who's running this network, he can move your post from one to the other. So I'm, like, default posting in shit 'cause I'm like, "That's me." Yeah. For real. 41:34 [chuckles] But sometimes I'll get an email that, like, one of my posts has been moved to cum, and I'm like, "Damn, I got moved into cum." Yeah. So anyway, all, all I'm saying is, like, stuff is happening. 41:47 I do think that there's, like, something happening around these, like, smaller networks. 41:51 I think it just comes back to this question of, like, can critics, like, thrive in these circumstances, or do critics need a much wider surface to operate in? No, I like this. 42:01 This is something we talked about really with Seven- Yeah, like Comfy... and Ruby. Yes. No, no, no. The, the, like, 42:07 the difficulty of establishing a canon when there's no monoculture anymore and everything is, like, fragmented. Yeah. But I guess then there are just many canons within this. 42:17 Like, there's, there's a shit canon, um [chuckles]- There's a shit canon... so to speak. 42:21 I think the canon, like, if by that you mean whatever knowledge you need to reference to be a good literary critic or an effective one, is sort of, like, more of a moving goalpost now and contingent on whoever's reading you. 42:35 Everyone's, like, frame of reference and knowingness is always moving, and you step out of the sphere for, like, a day and everyone's like, "You, you've never heard of this?" 42:44 You know, "You can't believe you're left out." Digitization of journalism and media, and by extension criticism, has pushed the discipline into the physics of the platforms on which it is usually shared. 42:56 And though that allows for certain more niche or marginal ideas or stories to break out and suddenly become very big because of network effects, I am still unsure as to whether or not that has been net good. 43:08 Are we back to subcultures? I thought there was the death of subcultures for a while. I think these are like sub-subcultures. Well, this is the thing where I've been like so- Sub-subcultures. 43:13 Well, but, but, but then, but the point is like criticism within these sub-subcultures, like that's maybe the state of criticism, is like less on the monocultural level, but like sharper criticism for smaller audiences. 43:23 I have been so anti-scene for so long, and now I've arrived at the point where I actually think the only good stuff right now is made by scenes. 43:31 I also think that every scene contains inside of it the seed of its own destruction, and the media layer cannot be as vulnerable as like individual scenes. And so it's like, how do you like skate along? 43:44 Like I could say, okay, I have Dirt Books. Mm. Every book that I put out is going to represent the output of some sort of scene that I see like value in. But then am I just like a vulture? I don't know. No. 43:56 Stuck on this now. I feel like this is sort of the answer to the topic we set out to explore. Yeah, fuck criticism. Fuck our guests. Guys, Daisy and Francis on the mic. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. 44:05 No, the state of criticism is like the value of, of people. There's small groups of people like writing criticism for each other within about what-- I guess scenes is the right word, right? Or subcultures, whatever. 44:15 But like, that's what's more valuable right now. It's like the small, and then, I mean, the large scale, I guess, which is like, that's where you have people writing for publications or like, you know, making movies. 44:30 Like, you could say that, um, you can see everything as like a form of criticism of, of documentary and of like tech culture, right? So like that sort of like larger scale criticism is valuable. 44:40 And then, but like the other valuable criticism, criticism is smaller, targeted for niche groups about these niche topics. Yeah, it's like BUFU, bias for us. Mm-hmm. 44:51 My obsession, though, is how do you get these people money? Like somebody in the top layer above it has to be selling out and take-- figure out how to take from the rich and give to the scene. Mm. 45:03 Because these scenes like, I mean, some of them have people that are like wealthy in them, but a lot of them, it's Venmo-ing the same fifteen dollars back and forth. Yeah. 45:12 So if that's where culture is coming from- Isn't that how the economy works? 45:15 I mean, you're telling me that like not a single person that's gonna cash out on the Anthropic IPO is going to have like a single toe in any scene? 45:23 I, well, I don't- I think we're gonna see like a big hearts and minds push to be the like-- nobody will admit to wanting to be like the token thing that rich tech people get interested in because it's like fucking humiliating to be the chore coat, right? 45:36 But like, think about how much money you have if you're a chore coat right now. Yeah. I would love to be the literary chore coat for SF bros, as long as they don't mind that I have a lot of scorn for them. Yeah. 45:48 Well, and you know- But some people wanna be scorned, like in almost like a sexual way, you know? For sure, yeah. Rachel Cucks. Yeah, it's not the K-shaped economy, it's the cuck economy. 45:58 You just gotta figure out like which, you know, where are you on the cucks spectrum. Which, which if you're, if you're the chair or the bed. [laughs] Yeah. I was cucked by Liberty Biberty in two thousand twenty-six. 46:11 My T-shirt is getting a lot of questions. Mm-hmm. That T-shirt's gonna sell on eBay for, uh, five hundred and seventy-five dollars, um, in the Anthropic post-IPO economy of twenty twenty-eight. 46:22 I was cucked by the Anthropic IPO. And all I got was this grant from somebody who was an early employee at Anthropic. And all I got was a fifteen dollar Venmo from somebody who couldn't get into Basement. 46:36 This is less about tech criticism, more about art criticism. I lament the fact that I feel as though these critics don't have heart. I want people to feel, I want people to live, cry, dance, sing, you know? 46:47 You said you're railing against critics without hearts. Is-- what's where their heart should be? Is it the algorithm? Is it the market? No, go kiss a stranger in front of a painting. 46:58 Stop telling me that the, the, the politics of the work or whatever, like does not-- Just make out. We're gonna end it right there. That's the perfect ending. [upbeat music]
