But so the physical book goes on the endangered-species list, so responsible book reviewers go extinct, so independent bookstores disappear, so literary novelists are conscripted into Jennifer-Weinerish self-promotion, so the Big Six publishers get killed and devoured by Amazon: this looks like an apocalypse only if most of your friends are writers, editors or booksellers. Plus it’s possible that the story isn’t over. Maybe the internet experiment in consumer reviewing will result in such flagrant corruption (already one-third of all online product reviews are said to be bogus) that people will clamour for the return of professional reviewers. Maybe an economically significant number of readers will come to recognise the human and cultural costs of Amazonian hegemony and go back to local bookstores or at least to barnesandnoble.com, which offers the same books and a superior e-reader, and whose owners have progressive politics. Maybe people will get as sick of Twitter as they once got sick of cigarettes. Twitter’s and Facebook’s latest models for making money still seem to me like one part pyramid scheme, one part wishful thinking, and one part repugnant panoptical surveillance.
Only one part repugnant panoptical surveillance? Flattering.
I resonated with this essay, but I’m not 100% sure why.
Perhaps it’s because I’ve been slowly coming to the realization that the model I had at 17 about the world and its inhabitants is wrong. People have always had anxieties and obsessions with the trivial. People have always had the propensity for jealousy, pettiness, judgmentalism, and shortsightedness, myself among them.
Maybe it’s not that the world is getting worse, but that the world I thought existed at 17 — the world where all, or at least most, adults acted like adults: hard-working, intelligent, driven, taking pride in their labors, and caring about the betterment of humanity — was a mirage constructed for me by my parents, teachers and mentors, in the hope that I might actually become one of those adults.
But the reality that many people are hard-working, intelligent, driven, and caring is lost to me now. My only interactions with such people today are through my work and my friends. My charmed childhood put me in contact with a greater-than-average share of those people, but my adult life does so to a much lesser degree. Instead my view of the world is now filtered not by people with my interests at heart, but by people with their own interests at heart: people who benefit from showing me a world I’m likely to find as addicting as watching a train wreck — I can’t turn away, but ultimately it’s meaningless.
Instead of recognizing that beautiful outcomes result from hard work assiduously applied over years, instead of recognizing that the sum of incremental improvements can yield a complex result that one would otherwise assume requires superlative ability — instead, the story strips the toil, the complexity is presented as simplicity, and we are left to assume the trivial is the real.
My model of the world needs an update.