Freedom's Just Another Word...

...for nothin' left to lose.

This week The Atlantic published a tool that allows you to search the LibGen database which was used without permission or compensation by Meta (Facebook) to train its Llama generative AI model.

Like just about everyone else who has published a book or scholarly article or all kinds of other stuff, my work has been sucked into the LLM maw and is now a part of the thought-free, absent-of-feeling, lacking-intent extrusions of these models.

The Atlantic reporting of internal Meta discussions shows that they discussed licensing the work, but dismissed it as too expensive and that potentially licensing even one piece would undercut their future argument for fair use, so best to just plow forward and argue it wasn’t theft later.

The same process unfolds with every model, it’s just that we have this database and reporting about Meta that makes the facts plain in this case.

I think it’s probable to the point of certainty that this theft will indeed be retroactively authorized either by the courts or the Trump administration in which case they will be able to say that legally, this was not theft, but let’s be real here.

Sam Altman of OpenAI and other companies are currently pushing Trump to remove any “guardrails” on the industry as a necessity to beat the Chinese in the development of ultra-powerful AI models. Copyright will become meaningless as long as companies say the material is used for AI model training.

The primary value of my work now appears to be as fodder for the AI woodchipper, though apparently this stuff that it is so valuable as part of our national existential battle against the Chinese menace is not actually something I can be compensated for.

I sometimes joke about how, for some reason, I gravitated toward industries that were destined to collapse during my lifetime: education, publishing, print media. Of course, none of this was foreseeable at the time of my birth (1970), or even when I would’ve been old enough to start to form some sense of what I might want to spend my time on as a grown-up. If you told me in say, 1988, the year I started college, that someday I would have a Sunday column in the Chicago Tribune and I was teaching college full-time - as I did from 2011 to 2019, I would’ve assumed I was making an excellent living. At the time, lacking real-world knowledge, I wouldn’t have been able to put that figure in dollars, but let’s say that meant $200,000 a year, which may be conservative if, for example, my column was syndicated or something like that.

During that period, for that work, I made a bit less than $60,000 a year, an amount which remained unchanged the entire time regardless of increases in the cost of living.

Don’t cry for me Argentina! (Or any other country for that matter.) There are worse things in the world than getting paid to do things you fundamentally enjoy and value, and I have never experienced a truly precarious financial situation, so I count myself lucky many times over, but also, what the hell happened to the world?

That life I imagined wasn’t imaginary. Writing at The Yale Review on the publishing of former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s memoir, Bryan Burrough reflects on the “palatial home for writers” that was the magazine during the “halcyon days” of magazine publishing that roughly coincided with Carter’s tenure, confirming not just comfort, but something like wealth could come with writing for print media.

This bit from the article has been circulating in writer social media circles all week, often accompanied by that emoji of a face with hands clasped to its sides in amazement and horror, referencing Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

Obviously, this was not common, but the fact that it was possible meant that there was a whole raft of writers below that making their comfortable middle-class wages for respectable work.

The problem of there being no space for “middle fish” is the subject of an incisive piece by

BDM

(B.D. McClay) this week, in which she declares “essentially for greatness to happen, mediocrity has to happen.” This is undeniably true. I will demur as to whether or not I’ve ever achieved greatness, but for sure there were years of objective mediocrity that came prior to whatever one thinks of my work now that were nonetheless sufficiently sustaining to get me to this point.

Perhaps platforms like Substack are the new route to sustaining the mediocre among us until a breakthrough comes. This is a question I tackle in More Than Words and spoiler alert, I am skeptical.

A handful of writers are making huge money here. Another handful are making meaningful supplementary income (that’s me), but most are making nothing, which is not necessarily a problem in the short run - as I say in the book, like a lot of writers I worked for “exposure” early in my career - but the routes to that sustaining money arriving someday are fewer and fewer.

The money is now in whatever you want to call what this Mr. Beast does.

What do we call this? “Spectacle?”

We’re talking literal bread and circuses shit, if not exactly meant to distract us from creeping autocracy to at least have that effect. When I was growing up reading Mike Royko, thinking that looked like a good gig, are young people now dreaming of a future where they make money torturing people desperate for material security, Mr. Beast style?

Or maybe they’re just hoping to be one of the people singled out for the torture.

The irony of all this worry is that I’m in the midst of what appears to be my best year - financially and otherwise - as a writer. More Than Words looks to be selling pretty well, and more gratifying, people who have read it seem to like it. I’m doing more speaking than ever, and having more folks contact me about possible other opportunities.

I’m open to all of it both because much of it sounds interesting, but also because the places that pay me to come speak about about how I think we should change how writing is taught in order to help students develop their unique intelligences (colleges and K-12 schools) are under direct assault by our federal government. There could be literally no funding for the work I do a few months from now. (Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll be fine.)

Is it coincidental that these institutions in decline have also been traditionally considered part of our defenses against authoritarianism?

I think not.

What are the defenses against authoritarianism? I once would’ve thought that wealth and power would provide a kind of security against assaults on one’s values and mission, but it truly appears to be the opposite. Just this week we’ve seen Columbia University and the powerful New York law firm Paul, Weiss bend the knee without hesitation. Janis Joplin (via Kris Kristofferson) was correct when she sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” I guess.

There’s a lot we could examine as to the origins and structures of these problems.

Joshua Doležal

has a both thorough and concise breakdown of the forces that have crushed higher ed. He dates these to twenty years back, but I’d add an additional ten on that estimate.

In the end though, I’m most convinced by

Hamilton Nolan

as to “the underlying problem”

The underlying cause of our situation is inequality. We have allowed too few people to accumulate too much wealth. The imbalance has grown so severe that a tiny number of individuals with twelve-figure net worths have the means to purchase so much political power that they can effectively make the federal government’s decisions.

Addressing this is an old and hard problem, particularly when the wealthiest among us (Columbia; Paul, Weiss) aren’t interested in solving it.

I was about to try to end on an upbeat note by saying something like, “these are worries for another day,” but no, that’s not right. They’re worries for right now, and pretending otherwise won’t do any of us any good.

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I reflected on the passing of John Feinstein and how I believe he’s the last sportswriter of his kind in an era that’s become dominated by men with “takes” like Stephen A. Smith.

At Inside Higher Ed I explored how uninformed pundits like Bret Stephens are allowed to lie to people about higher education, even when confronted by people who know what’s up for real.

It was something of a career highlight to appear on the Tea for Teaching podcast, which I’ve listened to for years, in order to talk about More Than Words and related issues.

The National Book Critics Circle award winners were announced this week.

In sync with the theme of today’s newsletter, in an interview Nell Zink explains why she couldn’t be a writer in the United States.

Via my friends

McSweeney's Internet Tendency

“We Are Free Speech Absolutionists, Unless You Say Something We Disagree With, in Which Case You’re a Terrorist” by Carlos Greaves.

1. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
2. King Lear by Shakespeare
3. Orbital by Samantha Harvey
4. Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
5. Ursula Franklin Speaks by Ursula Franklin and Sarah Jane Freeman

Paul E. - Orange, VA

I feel like I recommended this book recently to someone else, but I’m too rushed to look it up and besides it’s the perfect book for Paul at this time, so it doesn’t matter anyway, Skippy Dies by Paul Murray.

1. James by Percival Everett
2. Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson
3. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
4. The Wedding People by Alison Espach
5. In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden

Jesi N.

Mix of the classic and contemporary here. Hard to go wrong. Here’s a contemporary classic, The Known World by Edward P. Jones.

Alright folks, what is there to say other than…onward!

Take care,

JW
The Biblioracle