Facing the Content Monster, from 2025
on what it might still mean to want to write books and try to write books, now (part one)
Two writer friends stand at a fork in the road: one is quitting longform fiction, while another prepares a scholarly nonfiction manuscript, knowing full well the precarious state of academic and trade publishing. Across the seas, another writer friend is – finally – winning critical acclaim for their literary fiction, after selling rights to the previous novel to a large streaming platform. Writing is still happening, decisions are still being made, success can still come, people can still walk away or engage with dignity.
Writing is often a difficult and lonely Task; for many writers this ‘hard thing to do’ is a deeply personal ‘gruesome but necessary’, rather than the joy it ideally ‘should’ be. Some are induced into this Task by needing to eat, by needing to maintain reputation or pump gold coins1. Some are visited by the felt need to provide a conduit for that which courses deeply and cannot be contained in our lives and our heads. The container promises to contain our belongings, and spills out our longings. We write beyond the pleasure principle, in the same way (Freud beautifully observes), salmon swim upstream, driven by something transpersonal, known beyond a preference, felt in the heart like ice.
Beyond inputs, outputs, throughputs and outlets, there’s also an idea of an inlet I cherish: writing as a way to find some kind of shelter from the prevailing winds, a way to dwell by floating in a calm cove, writing in the name of mooring (not more, nor MOAH), rather than seeking-by-pushing into the wind – or pissing into it (of which, more in part two of this post). At heart here, too: I feel better if I write, and I feel so much worse if I don’t. Writing itself is an inlet, or gives me one.
Yet writing a book is so hard: having watched friends and colleagues undergo the ordeal, and having lived a long while alongside a partner who midwifed dozens of manuscripts into being (publishers and editors: those doulas of diction and fiction), it is in nearly every way a fraught and tiring undertaking. One had better be daunted and know that what one is doing will wring you dry at certain points (but not keep you dry, like antiperspirant… if you make it to the writers’ festivals, expect the stink of stress sweat, like flip questions and pat answers given to something you yourself will never understand about your work). Sometimes you might do something you were proud of, and it will ‘fall dead born from the press’ as Hume descried of his Treatise (with all due irony, now that he is ‘Hume’). Sometimes you’ll give it a red hot go and be almost entirely misunderstood, as 1970s Baudrillard was2; sometimes you’ll watch a person you don’t like or respect have a huge success and create resonance with a work that is not to your taste, that is trivial, baffling, appears to have no merit whatsoever, or that the mean parts of you even hope will fail3.
At heart here is the intimate power of acknowledgment, confirmation, recognition: not just finding an audience, but something deeper for self and identity. Writing as ‘who I am, as a person of worth and esteem’. Writing is a trade in worth; the book trade is a self esteem trade; publishing can make us feel like living, before we make a living, if we do, which most do not. Around this particular point I think we should dwell in a paragraph’s honesty: we want something from our writing, as well as through it. Something aside from food and money. As Erikson notes, this is about the “inner assuredness of anticipated recognition from those who count”, and how it appends the sense of “knowing where one is going” and the feeling of being “at home in one’s body” (‘The Problem of Ego Identity’, 74). Good writing demands so much of us, and if we’re honest, we should recognise that we need and want from it very much. Wanting to be good writers; wanting to write something good; wanting to be good; making it good. Fukuyama was deeply correct in his book (!) version of End of History: we want to be esteemed for it, both as equal to all others (isothymia), and as greater than all others (megalothymia). Xi, Modi and Trump are just conspicuous examples of the global-pervasive value of King Homer. This is all of us, a piece of us, a piece of it.
But what is the ‘it’ here in the writing? Is it the process, is it the product, is it the resonance? In quantitative terms, the most of what we produce in our lives is shit4. The hope then, is always surely qualitative: that we could rise out of the mire, transcending and redeeming the ground of creaturely existence with a sequence of meanings that makes something of the world, rather than squelching it under foot. To pull a golden it out of the shit, that is the trick of it.
Writing is a way of making something of ourselves in the course of making something of the world and for the world – by which we’re seeking something from the world, too. If our parents could not always provide adequate mirroring (maybe they were busy being great writers, like Alice Munro5), perhaps we could make something of ourselves, something to be proud of. So much golden hope is tied up in the writing of books: a genius is someone who appears to shit gold without straining, to the frictionlessly effusive applause of the world.
I’ve just gone through a five-year process that has involved a very complicated set of feelings around writing books, included among which are edges of futility and annulment, like the halos of a migraine. I’ve wrestled with moments of feeling thwarted, feeling hopeless; suspended beyond still wanting a recognition that has not been forthcoming (but recognition for what? and from whom?), still invested in writing, in publishing books, as a way to get this. 1926 Horney might remonstrate that this is an unconscious envy of “pregnancy, child-birth and motherhood, as well as of the breasts and of the act of suckling” (link). Writing, for men in a men’s civilisation, is a grand irony of patriarchy: the inability of men to create, except through the erection of external, prosthetic, constructions – of which the bound objects called books are one set, attached to huge cultural and symbolic capital. Get hard with a hardback, make a thing outside yourself that has your name on it6. By writing, we do not get a living creation, but, ‘if we succeed’ we get a name that is recognised, by a group of people whose care we care for, an audience whose recognition means something to us, gives something to us7. We reach out for the gimme, in the hope the hollerback might make us something, make us into something, against death, against shit.
In a certain sense, great books do have a life of their own. They are not ‘going concerns’ like Winnicott calls a living child; but sometimes they do outlive their authors. In this sense, they do deny and repudiate death and dying, as well as shit and nothingness (see Becker above and below). A book that makes a difference is an entropy offset device that attaches to its author and effaces their obliteration – by human spans of time and the unfathomable stretch of cosmic indifference. Yes, we have to confront our own fading into irrelevance and then death; but in the meantime, could we create something that would give us a name and esteem in the eyes of the worlds that we esteem? This is Otto Rank’s challenge of writing that Becker brought into focus, the challenge of our negentropic grandiosity against the most powerful force in the expanding universe – a force that always wins, in the end, as far as we know, based on everything about earthly existence we’ve experienced so far.
In all these ways, the writing of books is an overburdened, overdetermined, reified set of practices. It is so caught up in self and ego, group and world: we can’t extract writing, in all its modes, from any of this, if writing books is still central to what it means to write and be a writer (which I think they still are).
By 2025, however, things are even more complicated: Wired Magazine recently reported that another science journal has quit, protesting the permeation of submissions and processes with AI-driven bilge. The pervasion of generative language models, and the banality of its writerly competence, should give us pause – in the context of service economies like ours, where a huge portion of the population sits in a chair in an airconditioned room and produces and exchanges content ‘for a living’. But we do not stop and think, and (mostly) we do not read: instead, we continue to ramp up the content monster, collectively producing the conditions by which everything is ‘written writing’, inflating with the speed and force of SecureFoam in Demolition Man, and nothing that is written is any longer quite meaningful, no longer really and meaningfully human. Academics descry students using GPT for essays (kids these days!), while very openly declaring that they use GPT for grant applications (grants these days!); content-oriented professionals in the digital space use Claude to generate LinkedIn posts that people take as ‘humanising’ them; AIs read everyone’s resumes, to the point where everyone now uses AIs to optimise their resumes – for AIs (who are the only ‘ones’ who read the resumes now, apparently). Round and round the content monster maypole. AI means writing means something different, probably something less.
We don’t know for another decade or so, but my intuition is that something has truly changed here in society because of this. For writing, I can’t know, but I feel it’s at least as big a change as smartphones were, from roughly 2012. What could writing a book in this global reading environment possibly mean; why do it? Or, on the contrary, why delay – why not? Fuck it. Is now the time to urgently go to our desks and write our human meanings. Shit your gold NOW: ‘while we still can’?
Maybe even book death is hype. I lived vicariously through the time in which Kindles were to destroy bookstores and e-books were to destroy books: neither of these blows were as heavy or as fatal to the ecosystem as feared. The worry around Kindles was roughly synchronous with the worry about Predator and Reaper drones as ‘scary flying killer robots’. A decade on, however, and drones are cheap, tiny, Turkish, and changing the conduct of war in Ukraine (a war that also finds a tactical place for e-scooters), while that worry about epubs and bricks and mortar likewise seems quaint, like worries about the Tea Party under President Obama seen from the age of the alt right under President Trump-Musk-Dogecoin. It doesn’t really pay to speculate here about the ‘death’ of the book or publishing or the writer (maybe one of the real rules of the world is that nearly nothing ever truly dies, especially things that should), although the trendlines seem clear-ish, and the momentum and path dependence appear very strong right now. But tides change; the world is full of surprises. Disruptions disrupted disruption – why not this too? No one saw WWI, the GFC, or covid.
What I feel like I can say with more coherence is that writers and writing, especially book writing, face an environment which is characterised by the following ‘not excellent’ social facts. I don’t think we can really face the content monster and reckon with what it means to write – and to want to write books – from 2025, without somehow considering them. Here’s my listicle-style dotpoint list; in the follow up post to this one, I’ll produce more content, by way of trying to say what I mean, or why it’s the case.
There is too much content
Scrolling and feeding ‘won’
Little that is worthwhile has so much to say
Intentionality truly matters; most people don’t care to know
There is a failure to parse shit from champagne
Literacy is less literate; publics are no longer so public
Until part two: thank you for reading.
‘Pumping gold coins’ is how I think of ‘publish or perish’: one paper, one gold coin. Like in Mario.
“this concept of seduction has been so badly misunderstood that I've more or less given it up. And the same goes for the symbolic. There have been so many misunderstandings about the symbolic, about seduction that ...
SL: The symbolic too?
JB: Oh yes. Symbolic Exchange was very well received. Very well indeed. But it was received either by reference to the symbolic in Lacan – sometimes as contrasting with his positions – or within a very religious perspective – as being opposed to rationalism and so on. But the way I tried to get out of all that – in the system of reversibility etc. — wasn't clearly understood. There was an awful lot of confusion, which contributed to the success of the book, but did so on a basis that was somewhat dubious. That has often been the case - as it was with seduction. And when we come to the way simulation has generally been taken up by artists and those in the fine arts, then you have a total misunderstanding” (Boyne and Lash interview, 85).
NB: I therefore find it so interesting that Baudrillard got famous for a bunch of stuff (like simulation, like his nihilistic aphoristic later stuff) that completely misunderstands his ‘sincere’ stuff of the 1970s, that most people never read properly… and that most people miss the influence of ‘pataphysics (thus satire &c), and a certain sense of humour that I see between Baudrillard and Jacques Tati, a rueful irony at the tragicomically busted-irreversible outcome of modernity.
I think of this great Clive James poem as an admission of the schadenfreude attending this at a ‘scene’ level:
'The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered'
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book --
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seeminly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.Tonnes, right? If it’s hundreds of grams a day, it’s a few kilos a week at least, which means 150kg a year at least, which over 75 years would be 11250kg… NB: the faecality is very directly addressed by Ernest Becker in the Pulitzer-crowning The Denial of Death. He was dying of colon cancer, but he, err, plays with it very well, and would approve of what I’m doing here, I think.
Norman Mailer would probably have been the last guy to own this fully, to ‘wrestle’ with it sweatily, in his hoary hairy way.
The fact that Horney, a mother, was also an ambitious woman who wrote books, and that many women write books, belies an aspect of this whole theory, without I think losing the witty aptness of turning so-called penis envy on its glans. There is a lot in Adler and in the size and shape of men’s preferred SUVs that suggests they’re compensating prosthetically….