[I've been meaning to post this for a while. I've been hesitating because it feels unfinished, but I now think that's because the central idea is going to need a long time, and many posts, to percolate into anything really coherent. Consider this a disclaimer or an invitation, however you prefer to see it. Sorry about the glitchy typeface colouring – not sure how I ballsed that one.]
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I’ve been reading this doomsday book about the internet, called You Are Not A Gadget, by Jaron Lanier, which explains why I went offline almost entirely for a while there. The book just might, incidentally, help us understand why we’re so fucked up as a species.

I found the book last year, over-priced at Unibooks in Adelaide. I try to be frugal, but: it was called You Are Not A Gadget; the cover is a picture of a Kindle, with a prefacey chunk of text explaining why the author had chosen to publish the text as a book, not online¹; I immediately developed a mancrush on the author when I flipped to the inside-back cover and saw that he was a large, dreadlocked man with big, almond-shaped eyes and a pensive demeanour.

(I was going to insert a copy of the picture, but I can’t find it online – check out his website: see the picture with all the vines coming out of it? That’s the face from the picture I saw. Considering the website doesn’t appear to have had a makeover since 1987, I’m pretty sure it won’t change before you get a chance to look at it, whenever you’re reading this.)

Jaron Lanier is a philosopher and computer scientist who pioneered the development of virtual-reality technology back when we were grubbing for penny candy at the school canteen. So he was thinking about this stuff way before the internet went mainstream, and has pretty much seen it all. Now he is described by one critic as something like ‘the first great apostate of the internet age’, but I think ‘apostate’ is too strong – he’s critical of the internet, but has by no means forsaken it: like I said, he has a website, (granted, it’s old skool, so maybe he has – he’s not on Facebook or Twitter, though that doesn’t mean anything).

I love these books about the internet – I reviewed a couple over the last couple of years, including The Blogging Revolution (which sucked) and Say Everything (which didn’t, which was actually really awesome). I love them because they read like history books, discussing out-moded internet apps as though they’re relics of the past, artifacts of a bygone era, which I guess they are. Things develop so rapidly that you can write about something that happened in the nineties as though it happened a hundred, not fifteen, years ago.

Herein lies the rub: the central thesis of Lanier’s books is that the software systems developed to supply an interface for the internet – Google, Wordpress, Facebook, Twitter, now Quora, soon voyURL and Diaspora, etc. – are at risk of suffering ‘lock in’, a syndrome that software programs suffer when they develop too fast for us to ever actually understand how to use them properly. I may have that wrong, but it’s my interpretation of his argument².

Lock in starts at an early stage of development – is basically a symptom of flawed design (cf. the universe)

Lock in occurs when a system is adopted so rapidly that so many other systems come to depend on it and you can’t really improve the foundation software because too many other things are tapped into it: like brain surgery – fuck with the brain wrong and you could lose all sorts of faculties (cf. Flowers for Algernon).

Lanier makes the example of MIDI, a protocol that has rendered music two dimensional, according to him, who is also a renowned classical musician on top of all the other awesomeness. MIDI was developed and adopted so fast that all digital music is now based on this protocol, which is apparently quite limited, rendering the various, mellifluous tones of organic music into a series of pixelatted sound waves that merely replicate the sound of music. Felice, who proudly wears a ‘keyboards are for typing’ badge, will appreciate this, though she dances like a motherfucker to The Presets, even when sober.

The MIDI example continues to pop up in the book, but is only a metaphor for the greater problem of lock in that is beginning to affect those who eke out any sort of existence online: due to the shortcomings of the software we are rapidly adopting in our daily lives, we are threatened by the risk of becoming defined by what that software allows us to express; worse than two-dimensional, we become Facebook-dimensional.

This made me wonder if ‘lock in’ could be applied to the human condition more broadly, but also to human emotion in particular: I remain convinced that humanity is yet in its adolescent stages, that each of us is barely protruding from the experiences and emotional manifestations of our upbringing.

Apparently we have ten per cent of our intellect at our disposal, a system of morals handed down by a guy with food in his beard, and an emotional range more phenomenal than any one of us can truly comprehend, yet we go around the place as though we’ve got our shit together, interacting with others, hating and loving each other, and really what we’re working with is intellectual, moral and emotional systems that have developed so rapidly that we don’t know how to use them properly. Each of these systems is dependent on others, and vice versa. We cannot remove ourselves from the world to wash that emotional baggage out of our pants, anymore than we could seriously expect to hang Google out to dry, or capitalism, or Justin Bieber.

And, well, that’s all I have got to say about that.

She had got the cancer ...

I’m worried about it, is all. I think it was Orwell who warned us that we would become trapped by the technology we thought would bring us to freedom. Also I read this other article about how social-networking sites are resulting in our own, special brand of cultural elitism, and that upsets me too, and I need to link back to this post to make my point in the one I’m drafting about that article.

Of course I don’t have any answers, just more questions, which is why I won’t stay off the internet for long.

1. because it is a self-contained, book-length argument, as which it would never be read online – part of his his whole beef: the fragmentation of reading, learning and dissemination of sound-bite knowledge
2. which, granted, is not the most coherent I’ve read, suffering from the very fragmentation for which he criticises the society of the internet age

This article on Dave Eggers’ optimism about youth literacy and print books (via @Mean_land) made me think of the title of his unfinished Salon.com serial, The Unforbidden is Compulsory, or, Optimism: for Eggers, it would seem, optimism about print books is compulsory, and should not be forbidden.

Elsewhere (almost everywhere else), it seems the trend is in the chatter: it’s trendy to be pessimistic about print books, regardless of whether there is actually a declining trend in print-book readership, because worrying about the decline of print books seems to illustrate your affinity with digitial technology and the democritising power of the internet.

But I think it’s true that the concern is misguided:

Adults might be projecting from their own behavior when they worry that kids will forsake reading in favor of Twitter, Eggers said, as some adults in the audience nodded in apparent self-recognition. “We’re blaming the kids, but we’re the ones who can’t stop checking our e-mail and adding the latest Google apps.”

So stop worrying about it, stop reading this blog, and go sit in the park with a book, it’s spring time!

For ages I had this article open in my browser at work because I am loosely interested in keeping in touch with developments in experimental fiction: some days I just want to read a good book, of the ‘lyrical realist’ variety mentioned in the article – the kind of novel we inherited from the nineteenth century; other days I feel bored and want to read something I have to work hard to understand.

I tend to leave these sorts of articles open until I’m feeling relaxed enough to read them over lunch or something, because I know if there’s any sort of revelatory information in there I’m going to need to feel receptive to doing anything with that information, such as, in this case, ordering a book by a writer I’ve never heard of, from a publisher I’ve never heard of in a city I’ve heard a lot about, but never visited.

The book – a novel called Fences, written by eighteen-year-old British schoolboy, Ben Brooks – is published by Fugue State Press in New York, and is not to be confused with the 1990 Garth Brookes album, No Fences.

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According to FSP’s minimalist website, their novels

tend to be unusual – singular, eccentric, impractical, emotional, visionary. They are also ‘experimental’ in the sense that any good art is experimental. It comes down to one person looking for truth.

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This is the sort of grandiosty that makes me shell out coin at a dubious online checkout and then forget about my purchase until it arrives in the mail, at which point I will fall into one of my new armchairs to douse myself in a … ahem … fugue of literary inspiration. Or frustration, depending on how the book weighs on the ol’ effectiveness scale.

Right now I’m just hoping the difference in time it takes to receive the package from the US varies from now only as fractionally as the difference in the strengths of our dollars, for this US$15 novel cost me a whopping AU$15.15 including postage.

Obviously I’ll review it here sometime after it arrives.
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I’m in the kitchen at the café, scraping the detritus of some asshole customer’s food into the bin and the radio starts playing that song I can’t stand. I suddenly can’t tell what I hate more: the fact that I just stuck my finger into a pile of half-eaten and probably now disease-carrying scrambled eggs, or that skin-melting noise pollution accompanied by vapid words. Later, I am in a dark club with my mates and the floor is sticky and lit only by pools of flashing light and my pint cost me less than £2 and the DJ starts playing something I recognise. I’m halfway through choking out the lyrics to the second verse, thinking if I know it then it must be good, before I realise it’s the same song I heard in the kitchen. It’s not always the booze that does this. It’s the drugged state of familiarity that overtakes my genuine disgust.

I have just started riding the London tube, which has the greatest saturation of book advertisement that I have ever seen. Most stops have posters for two different titles, sometimes three or four, with huge book covers and then a couple of endorsements thrown over the top like ‘international Twitter sensation’ and ‘most shocking thing since I threw your mother under a train’. I see these posters every day and have no strong reaction to them as I slide past on my way to work, but when I actually consider each title, I do a mental sneer and decide that I won’t buy that book. And when I wondered about why this might be, I started to worry about the implications of holding such an attitude.

Would you buy a book you saw on a billboard? The medium screams of mass-production, which in turn seems to cheapen something’s cultural value. I know not many people will admit to the fact that liking books that other people haven’t heard of is like being in a club where you get a membership card – it drips of desirable exclusivity – because as readers and producers of literature we should all be wanting to get good literature to those who don’t currently classify themselves as ‘book people’.

But isn’t this the underlying principle I’m adhering to if I scoff at a book that’s got a massive poster with tag lines written by famous people all over it? And by extension, don’t I want books to remain something only experienced by a select and worthy few, who have discerning taste built into them like the perforations in toilet paper?

Pretend for a moment you are a small publishing house, or the publisher of a small independent journal that is mostly reliant on grant money, and you suddenly come into a whole lot of cash with no spending guidelines. Would you spend it on making twenty billboards and an intense marketing campaign for your latest release that could potentially boost your readership numbers in the long term, or would you put it towards a hardback print run or a full-colour photography essay?

Are a lot of independents shooting themselves in the foot because of an underlying assumption that production will always be more important than marketing? One should not come at the expense of the other. Both from my own attitude and the attitude of a significant number of people I have met in the publishing industry, expansion doesn’t seem to be desirable thing for independents.

So my question is this: is it lack of funding that serves to hold back independent publishers from having a larger market presence, or is it an attitude of elitism?

Because, let’s face it, these posters probably will boost sales of the book. Maybe I’ll scorn the poster on the tube, and later see the same title in a bookshop and remember the cover, but not remember where from. Maybe I’ll think it was from a book review website. Maybe I’ll think the endorsements on the cover are all true. Maybe I’ll have a false memory about hearing that it is the next ‘Catcher In The Rye’. Just like the song that I hate but then find myself singing along to at a club, the familiarity is often enough to make something endearing. And that’s probably not something any book producer should sneer at if they seriously want to increase their readership.

We were lying in the fields on an overcast Saturday, 28 degrees, the sugar of iced lollies dribbling down our hands and hoping the sun would bless us for long enough to darken our transparent skin. Beautiful people surrounded us on all sides: impossibly thin; impossibly well dressed in that garage-sale chic kind of way; impossibly camp in their mannerisms. I had decided not to wear a hat and was regretting this when I saw the ocean of varied head adornments riding atop these sculpted hairdos. Then I remembered that I had lost my favourite hat in Edinburgh, and started feeling lonely instead.

I was reading ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, which made me miss ‘Catch-22’, maybe only because it was about the war. Sentences toppled over me like lego and I was without a building guide. What is this book about? Where are these characters taking me? Is the author talking about a dog, a person, a place, or an idea? I had felt this way before when reading Pynchon. And a glance around told me that this was the general sensibility of our time: a chronological period where the more nonsensical the t-shirt slogan, the greater the cred.

Security through obscurity is a principle used by computing systems. Applied to literature, I am basically talking about the text becoming an insular entity that the author alone can draw meaning from. I know this is an old idea tackled by many literary theorists, but I am seeing a tangible manifestation of it more starkly than before.

Can any text that inspires confusion, deliberately mind, be valuable beyond being comment on the disparate nature of individual existence? If the style moves the readers to pocketed pastiche rather than collective communication, then isn’t this book and others like it just furthering parochial division? Shouldn’t literature be a gateway to further the communication of ideas, more in line with Kerckhoffs’ principle, where ‘it is necessary… that the system be easy to use, requiring neither mental strain nor the knowledge of a long series of rules to observe’? Or would this lead to a stylistic plateau?

There are many pages still ahead of me, and maybe they will hold instructions for how I am meant to build a doorway into this text. Or maybe next time I go to the fields to read a book, I should take a boating hat and surrender myself to these seas.

I figure a lot of people could save a lot of time if they weren’t rebuilding the wheel each time they wanted to get something rolling. For example, I have been contracted to build on the existing bookshop relationships for Breakdown Press and the process involved harvesting email and phone contacts of Australian bookshops.

It was kind of annoying to have to do it with the knowledge that many had probably been through the same process before, and were sitting on their own database somewhere, compiled with a similar sense of frustration. SPUNC kindly shared the database they are beginning to compile – Breakdown Press are members. I assume the Australian Booksellers Association has one, but you have to pay for it. I reckon we shouldn’t need to pay for this sort of information – just as people are producing open-source and free versions of micro-blogging sites, word-processing software and project management tools, the open-source philosophy could be applied to small-press industry resources.

Bookshop databases are just the beginning: Alex Hutton, a guy I worked with at Voiceworks, has all sorts of crazy ideas about pooling the administrative infrastructure of the sector, including the slush pile; when we were trying to execute a Voiceworks promotions mailout to Australian schools, you can imagine how far we got, a small, under-resourced organisation up against ten-thousand-odd schools. I’ve since found the Australian Schools Directory, but even this is marginally useful – the information needs to be more easily accessible, and malleable.

So I want to share the database I’ve compiled, but am not sure about the best way to do this. Having compiled it for Breakdown Press, I wondered briefly whether there would be copyright concerns with sharing such a resource, but they’re cool with it – because they’re cool, see? It’s just a spreadsheet right now, but if a group like SPUNC came on board it might be turned into an online database that SPUNC members have access to. Online CRMs like Highrise come to mind.

Does anyone else know of ways to share these sorts of resources?

In comments on my recent post about claims that YA literature is ‘intrinsically of less cultural value than the real books’, Linnet Hunter raised some interesting questions about the perception of YA literature in Australia

I was going to reply with a comment, but I was compelled to delve deeper into the subject.

Reviewing Space

The first question – ‘How much reviewing space is given in national newspapers to this section of publishing?’ – seems most relevant, but is problematic: literary magazines receive little newspaper coverage as well, but few would doubt their intrinsic cultural worth. Review editors of national newspapers are allocating space according to their idea of their readership, which doesn’t include YA readers. Trade publications like Bookseller + Publisher, and various library magazines, represent YA in greater proportions, which suggests that certain publishing sectors rate the value of YA quite highly.

Famous YA Writers

The second two questions – ‘How many writers of YA books can you name?’ and ‘Which YA writer is the winner of the largest (financially speaking) writing prize in the world?’ – would have to be asked of a grand-scale sample if they are to reveal popular attitudes. Perhaps this has been done already, and I simply haven’t discovered it.

Yoof Suf’rage

The question of youth suffrage has more to do with general attitudes to youth than attitudes to the literature published for them. Young adults do not hold the keys to the perception of YA literature beyond the capacity to ‘vote’ with their (or their parents’) money, and teenage-choice awards such as the INKY Awards.

Prices

As Thuy Linh Nguyen commented, it might be that YA books are cheaper because they are generally shorter, and designed to be consumed as a relatively disposable product. They are rarely released in hardback, and they are often designed according to a genre-specific aesthetic, rather than book- or story-specific.

Some Other Thoughts

I recall more claims that we are experiencing a ‘Second Golden Age’ of YA – claims that are much more easily substantiated by sales figures that suggest young people read heaps, which suggests that the most important demographic do rate the genre.

The increase of YA representation on the lists of such publishers as Text, and A&U also supports this claim. Then there’s the recent emergence of YA-specific publishers: black dog books and Ford Street Publishing.

Whether this renaissance of YA has been reported on by the mainstream press or not merely reflects the editorial policies of the majors, which have long-since begun to distance themselves from matters of real social importance, such as youth literacy.

The reasons that Linnet posited for the lower price of YA books are more emotive than reasoned: no publisher or bookseller would deliberately undermine the value of their products or their creators’ intelligence.

Something that might be contributing to the cultural perception of YA is the general bad perception and portrayal of youth. This still doesn’t explain the source of the misconception that YA literature is intrinsically of less value than ‘real’ literature.

Basically

I remain unconvinced that youth literature is under some sort of attack from, or even a passive dismissal by, people out to discredit it as a literary artform. I continue to wonder about where these claims arise from. Who has an interest in undermining the cultural worth of YA literature? Who’s doing it?

If it is merely the community of producers and advocates of the genre feeling self-conscious about enjoying YA as adults, then we need to curb such an insidious inferiority complex, lest YA dig itself into a pit of self-determined cultural irrelevance. If, on the other hand, certain proponents of other forms of literature are leading a charge against YA, then we need to challenge that, because engendering a reading culture among young people is paramount to our literary future.

I am currently trying to get my shit together, and the likelihood of it ever happening is feeling increasingly elusive as I try to plan and work at the same time. Meanwhile I’m reading The Land of Plenty by Mark Davis¹, which isn’t helping.

He’s going on about the ‘prosperity scandal’ and the mythologies that have propped up the misconception that neoconservative, free-market orthodoxies have increased the nation’s wealth in the last thirty years. Instead of managing the nation’s economy, these policies have thrown caution to the wind at a time when Australia has been fortunate enough to be buffeted upwards by globalisation².

On some level Australia’s mind boggling economic ineptitude and short-sightedness makes me feel better about my own financial mismanagement. Especially when I remember how I like to make concessions for my life, based on reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being a few years ago.

By mashing Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return and Parmenides’ Theory of Opposites³ , Kundera’s concept of lightness might mitigate our bungling through life: if we are not burdened by the responsibility of having lived and learned from this life before, we are light – but our lives are meaningless, without weight; if we are burdened with this responsibility, our lives are weighty – but the repetition somehow gives them meaning, something to do with cycles⁴.

I’d say that we’re making it up as we go along, so as long as we endeavour to learn from our mistakes, our lives might be meaningless, but at least they’ll be pleasant. And by really bastardising it I came up with something like consolation: just as I have no experience of this life prior to my birth, I also have no experience of living in an economic environment that might have encouraged me to think long-term about my finances.

I had my parents of course, and they’re great with money, but I disregarded a lot of what they said. My bad. And anyway, I’m talking about how I might have turned out if I had grown up immersed in a successful, carefully regulated mixed-market economy – such as …⁵ Maybe I’d be able to make rent without living off beans and noodles for the following two weeks.

Seriously, I wonder about how a nation’s psyche might manifest as characteristics in whole portions of generations of citizens. People my age – teenagers growing up from 1996 to 2007 – were raised to believe that the prosperity we enjoyed would continue forever.

It didn’t, and the prospect of getting my shit together in this climate is all the more troublesome because of the pervasive feeling that I am pushing shit up hill.

Because we have both⁶ relied extensively on unexpected economic windfalls to give the impression of progress. We’ve worked hard, sure, but I’ve also been a lucky boy in a lucky country. Just as Australia has ridden the sheep’s back, then the miner’s back and now ‘the debtor-citizen’s back’⁷, I have coasted on the back of my parents’ success, on the back of a generation of false economic pretenses perpetrated by the Whitlam government through to the K Rudd, a bunch of noobs acting out on ideology rather than reason or good common sense.

And just like Australia, I have hit a brick wall after this unbridled, rapid and sometimes inexplicable propulsion through a false personal economy. About all that I’ve gleaned from living in this economy is an understanding of the ‘bubble’ concept: when the luck ran out and I needed to scrape myself up, I got my head around the bubble.

I feel like I’m back at the starting grid, but the race hasn’t stopped. Mark Davis’s Australia is at a similar point, from where it must learn from the failure of two eras of political consensus and move forward with a new vision. Get its shit together, basically.

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1. whose blog is unfortunately not working
2. Mark Davis, Land of Plenty, p. 255
3. which, the deeper I dig, seems to not exist – being, instead, a theory that Heraclitus presented and Parmenides rebuked
4. my intuition makes it more difficult to grasp weight than to grasp lightness – the fleeting, meaninglessness of a quick fling with life, a chromosome glitch and nothing more, that makes more sense to me
5. do these exist?
6. Australia and I
7. Mark Davis, Land of Plenty, p. 262

I often read claims like this:

So is YA taking over the grown-ups’ table? It’s a revealing question, steeped in the kind of condescension that assumes books aimed at young people are intrinsically of less cultural value than the real books, speculative or otherwise, that are ostensibly for adult readers. It’s also drenched in fear because, oh my lord, the young people are invading! With their depressing music and tight jeans!¹

But I’ve never come across anyone actually saying that about young-adult literature – that it’s ‘intrinsically of less cultural value than the real books’.

Are there cases of people saying or writing this? Or is this the inferiority complex of an adolescent genre in an adolescent culture in an adolescent nation?

Whatever the case, I’d like to know the source of this contention. It seems like something worth nipping in the bud.

1. I found this in an article by Karen Healey called ‘Where the Popular Kids are Sitting‘ at Strange Horizons, which I found through Alien Onion

I’m really glad to be working on a book that’s not government funded. A stack of money has been poured into this and we need to earn the money back to pay off the debt.

This just came to mind when I was talking to a guy who put out a bunch of comics with a group called Silent Army. He said they never had a real distribution model – they used half the grant to make an approximation of the funded book, then the rest to make the book that didn’t fit within the funder’s criteria.

Fine, but this guy was disappointed they could never really get the books out to a broader audience. Government funding has a tendency to hinder considerations of sustainable business models in the arts – especially with literature, which is so labour intensive, in a culture where production skills outweigh business acumen considerably.

Today we figured out we need to sell half our print run to break even, then we have the potential to make enough to for Breakdown to do another book.

This is the sort of thinking that I’m really happy to be a part of.