Bedside reading

If there was a snap test on Elon Musk I would probably do alright at it. The man is a subject of so many articles and podcasts that stepping in stories about him is unavoidable. Nevertheless, I was pleased to add to my knowledge Zoë Schiffer's comprehensive account of Musk's Twitter purchase, Extremely Hardcore (Portfolio / Penguin), a crisp timeline of short chapters not entirely unlike the articles Schiffer has written for The Verge and others.

Even more forensic detail would have been welcome -- we would kill to know what Apple CEO Tim Cook said in his November 2022 meeting with Musk that calmed him down after their "misunderstanding" -- and only so much logic can be applied to people who are not operating on much. It's a slow-motion car crash told very fast, and the car is driving itself.

I also recommend Kyle Chayka's Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened The Internet (Heligo Books) which tallies strongly with my opinions of the internet in 2024. The author makes sharp observations about the statistics about book publishing and music in our decade, and our learned dependency as consumers on what is served up to us by menus on retail sites like Netflix and Amazon.

'The need to corral an audience in advance by succeeding on social media can be explained by the useful phrase "content capital". Established by the scholar Kate Eichhorn in her 2022 monograph Content, it describes the Internet-era state in which "one's ability to engage in work as an artist or as a writer is increasingly contingent on one's content capital; that is, one's ability to produce content not about one's work but about one's status as an artist, writer, or performer." In other words, the emphasis is not on the thing itself but the aura that surrounds it ... If Roland Barthes's 1967 essay predicted "the death of the author," the author's personal brand is now all that matters; it's the work itself that is dead.'

Shout-out to Jaron Lanier who is one of the blurbs on Filterworld and not online so will never read this. Lanier wrote the book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts, and all 10 were solid, but Chayka's unpicking of the banality of our reliance on numeric expressions of corporate policy is somehow more motivating. Chayka quotes scholar and critic Gayatri Spivak: "Globalisation takes place only in capital and data. Everything else is damage control."

(For short-form news about oncoming internet shittiness, see Gita Jackson's article 'AI Video is a scam'.)

Also read / reading: Nevada, by Imogen Binnie (Picador); Maria Golia's biography Ornette Coleman: The Territory And The Adventure (Reaktion); Pascal Garnier.