"Of late, I have come to sense within myself an accumulation of all kinds of things that cannot find adequate expression via an objective artistic form such as the novel. A lyric poet of twenty might manage it, but I am twenty no longer, and have never been a poet at any rate. I have groped around, therefore, for some other form more suited to such personal utterances and have come up with a kind of hybrid between confession and criticism, a subtly equivocal mode that one might call “confidential criticism."
I see it as a twilight genre between the night of confession and the daylight of criticism. The “I” with which I shall occupy myself will not be the “I” that relates back strictly to myself, but something else, some residue, that remains after all the other words I have uttered have flowed back into me, something that neither relates back nor flows back.”
(Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel)
Lorecore (noun):
“An era, belonging to digital capitalism, characterized by people’s existential need to storify themselves at the very moment global narratives collapse in an unprecedented manner.”
“The internet of today is a battleground. The idealism of the ’90s web is gone. The public and semi-public spaces we created to develop our identities, cultivate communities, and gain knowledge were overtaken by forces using them to gain power of various kinds… …This is the atmosphere of the mainstream web today: a relentless competition for power. As this competition has grown in size and ferocity, an increasing number of the population has scurried into their dark forests to avoid the fray.”
https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-7dc3e68a7cb1
nostr:note1j5cx3j3h7prnr46yyfa4akllsjach4qxhnzu0tu4pcgh3afcj0qs5rd0w8
Nostr is not yet the literary, artistic and intellectual community it one day will be. It's early days. Writers in particular will be slow to adopt at first, then gradually will come to understand the very significant implications for writing, publishing, authorship etc.
Zygmunt Bauman on drones is the best model we have for the writer of the future:
"The new generation of drones will stay invisible while making everything else accessible to view; they will stay immune while rendering everything else vulnerable... The next generation drones will see all while staying comfortably invisible – literally as well as metaphorically . . . There will be no shelter – and for no one...
Everything private is now done, potentially, in public – and is potentially available to public consumption; and remains available for the duration, till the end of time . . . And let me add: the choice between the public and the private is slipping out of people's hands"
Bauman is right about the erosion of anonymity, just as he is right about the new forms of surveillance that will occasion that erosion. Art and literature will need to reclaim the power of anonymity by appropriating the very strategies that threaten it.
Staying invisible while making everything else accessible to view is the work of the writers and artists of the future, and the only workable creative model and mode of resistance in a society progressively constrained by surveillance and limited modes of identity.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jun/28/end-anonymity-technology-internet
“To undo some of our graphomania’s mutual traps of extremism and anxiety might just need a change in emphasis – a proliferation of small-scale writing that … is tonally unsure, based in uncertainty, in the quizzical and delightedly ambiguous. And if this kind of writing can’t algorithmically flourish via the platforms of social media then perhaps it needs a corresponding change in distribution, for example the zines and miniature books put out by new publishers including Nieves and isolarii, Prototype and Book Works. Or the gentler media of newsletters and mailouts.”
Adam Thirlwell
We needed to challenge automated thinking and attitudes to creativity long before it became necessary to challenge automation as we now think of it.
Writers must remove their face from the system, so that writing can return to the fore.
In a world where all art is content the writer’s future is merely to be a face for content produced by a machine.
Writers have been persuaded their identity is of value, while in the background what is truly of value - their work - has been taken from them and stripped of all identity.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/08/books3-ai-meta-llama-pirated-books/675063/
"Today men seek the kind of approval that applauds not their actions but their personal attributes. They wish to be not so much esteemed as admired. They crave not fame but the glamour and excitement of celebrity. They want to be envied rather than respected. Pride and acquisitiveness, the sins of an ascendant capitalism, have given way to vanity"
(Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism)
The dream of being someone else is a constrained dream. The true dream is to be no-one at all.
The fear is that if we abandon our face we abandon our humanity but maybe that’s precisely where the opportunity lies.
“in this chaotic landscape lies an opportunity for writers and artists to explore new avenues and redefine their identities beyond reputation-based constructs.” - the AI can see it but writers and artists themselves still can’t. nostr:note1cltgccexajqrglf6w7uvnhdvj3y5wrs4udjvt5qzm35er9qnfwzq3xekcp
“ A persistent fear of being turned into a meme or cancelled has, she says, made her shrink away from social media while admitting she needs it to “curate” her online self.”
In one line the paradox of the contemporary writer/artist encapsulated.
On one hand the catastrophe of no attention. On the other the catastrophe of too much attention. Famed or defamed and very little in between.
As she says “I just think we’re all gonna learn lessons, because the way we use social media now is not sustainable.”
Writers and artists are going to have to entirely rethink reputation based identity.
The intellectual and artistic future has no face.
Writers and artists offering “career advice” that places undue importance on the soft skills of social networking, professionalism, “getting along with people” etc are tacitly accepting and promoting a creative discipline based on conformity rather than risk.
Critical culture is now cop culture and creative culture is not well served by it.
If all new and emerging artists must submit to having their cultural consumption scrutinised and shared in order to pass some nebulous test of personhood the only sensible solution is for artists to be anonymous or pseudonymous by default. In the very near future absolutely no-one will want to be an artist or public intellectual under their own name. 