30-Second Book Review. No.4: Why Have Book Reviews Become So Hypercritical?

30-Second Book Review.

No.4

Why Have Book Reviews Become So Hypercritical?

Curious as to why book reviews today have become so hyper-critical, bordering on takedowns? This chain of articles dealing with books by Jia Tolentino and Lauren Oyler discussing the impact of the internet in the writing of literature provides a good overview of the situation.

There’s Lauren Oyler’s ‘Ha ha! Ha ha!’  from the London Review of Books of January 2020.

Rachel Cooke’s review of Oyler’s No Judgement from the Guardian newspaper of 19 February 2024.

And Richard Joseph’s ‘Everyone’s a Critic’, from the Los Angeles Review of Books of January 13 2022.

In a nutshell, as the literary world shrinks and becomes even more competitive, writers need to find other ways of setting themselves apart from their rivals. Attending Oxbridge or the Ivy League is no longer enough - they all did that. So they have started to divide themselves up into high and middle brow by correcting references to Donna Haraway and the classics.

The takeaway? To build on a line of Joseph’s, what these reviewers are saying to the authors under review is: ‘you’re not special … but I am’.

Although I’m also mindful of Vilém Flusser’s point in Does Writing Have A Future, that the ‘words critique and criminal come from Greek krinein and Latin cernene, which mean something like “break” in the sense of “break apart” or ‘break the law”. ‘To read a text critically’ here, then, ‘is to take the writer to be a criminal’.

30-Second Book Review No.3: Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence

30-Second Book Review.

No.3

Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (London: Verso, 2023).

Prompt

Write a powerful monograph that provides a sociotechnical history of AI and a performative illustration of algorithmic thinking.

DO foreclose the question of the politics of artificial intelligence in advance by basing the book on the 19th century labour theory of automation.

DO NOT view machine intelligence and algorithmic practices as having the potential to open an undecidable space in which radically transformative questions can be raised for otherwise ossified conceptions of politics, technology and labour. 

DO approach AI by reiterating pre-programmed ideas from the history of progressive thought: ‘ideology’, ‘dialectic’, ‘praxis’, ‘materialist critique’ and so on. In particular, see the design of intelligent machines as following the schema of the division of labour and its metrics.

DO NOT attempt to mask the large repositories of collective knowledge (i.e. ‘general intellect’) that are appropriated and encoded into this algorithmic model to produce the material artefact that is the book-cum-commodity.

DO endeavour to draw attention to the process whereby both the writing and labour of a multitude of human and nonhuman others is extracted and commodified by using numerous quotations, references and endnotes to locate the book in a network of texts and intelligences.

On 'Critiquing the Vocabularies of the Marketized University' by Natalie Fenton et al

'Critiquing the Vocabularies of the Marketized University', by Natalie Fenton, Des Freedman, Gholam Khiabany and Milly Williamson, which has been published in a special issue of the journal Media Theory on Critique, Postcritque and the Present Conjuncture, is well worth a read.

https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/887/575

For all its concern with the hollowing out of critique in the marketized university, though, could this essay itself have been more critical?

1) Critical University Studies is cited approvingly by Fenton et al. Yet CUS has been heavily criticised by those in favour of an Abolitionist University Studies, for being ‘haunted’ by nostalgia for an expansionist postwar public university system that ignores how that system was ‘underwritten by militarized funding priorities, nationalist agendas, and an incorporative project of counterinsurgency’.

2)  The conclusion of Fention et al. is we that need to remain in the university (rather than plan to leave it as many are now doing) and fight for education as a public good. But if we stay, what are we actually going to do differently by way of resisting the marketized university and freeing ourselves from it (which for them is the purpose of critique)? Fenton et al. recommend continuing to value ‘solidarity forms’ - building ‘friendships and alliances’ etc. – where we can keep the flame of critique alive. But we’ve been doing that for years and its not stopped us getting into this mess. So how is it going to get us out of it?

30-Second Book Review No.2: K Allado-McDowell’s Amor Cringe and Pharmako-AI

30-Second Book Review.

No.2

K Allado-McDowell’s Amor Cringe (Los Angelese: Deluge Books 2022) and Pharmako-AI (London: Ignota Books 2020).

K Allado-McDowell’s pioneering experimental novel Amor Cringe is ‘half traditionally-written and half AI-generated’ (2022), and is published on an all rights reserved basis by Deluge Books.

The same applies to Allado-McDowell’s collection Pharmako-AI, which bills itself as the ‘first book to be co-written with the language AI GPT-3. It is published all rights reserved by Ignota Books, with serif being used to identify those parts written by Allado-McDowell, and serif font the inputs Allado-McDowell gave the model, the rest being written by GPT-3. This ensures the two co-authors – human and machine – remain ontologically distinct. In not being authored primarily by nonhumans, it also ensures both books are copyrightable.

But what if, as Allado-McDowell suggested recently at the Cybernetic Serendipty: Towards AI event in London, art in the 21st century will weave together human and machine intelligences? How will this impact those humanist notions of authorship, attribution and copyright Allado-McDowell seems so anxious to maintain?

30-Second Book Review No.1: Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI

30-Second Book Review

No.1 in an occasional series:

Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2021).

Crawford’s 'seminal' book Atlas of AI is a classic example of a work that emphasizes how media is ‘made from natural resources, fuel, human labor, infrastructures, logistics', while leaving its own media-materiality masked.

It may be the case that, as Crawford pointed out in an article in Nature last week:

Generative AI systems need enormous amounts of fresh water to cool their processors and generate electricity. In West Des Moines, Iowa, a giant data-centre cluster serves OpenAI’s most advanced model, GPT-4. A lawsuit by local residents revealed that in July 2022, the month before OpenAI finished training the model, the cluster used about 6% of the district’s water. As Google and Microsoft prepared their Bard and Bing large language models, both had major spikes in water use — increases of 20% and 34%, respectively, in one year, according to the companies’ environmental reports.

But, as The World Counts shows, it's also the case that:

In the USA, Japan, and Europe an average person uses between 200 and 250 kilos of paper every year. In India the figure is 5 kilos, and in some countries it is less than 1 kilo.

Producing 1 kilo of paper requires 2-3 times its weight in trees. If everyone used 200 kilos of paper per year there would be no trees left.

It takes between 2 and 13 liters of water to produce a single A4-sheet of paper, depending on the mill. The pulp and paper industry is the single largest industrial consumer of water in Western countries.

(Talk about 'denial' and 'the elephant in the room'.)

Of course, there are any number of legacy authors producing new theories of the politics of technology in old ways.

If we want to be more hospitable, then, we can follow Crawford’s lead when she writes in her Atlas of AI about the importance of understanding ‘how AI is fundamentally political’. Taking her ideas about a ‘multitude of interlaced systems of power’ to their logical conclusion, we can see Crawford as encouraging us to ask: ‘what is being optimized, and for whom, and who gets to decide’ with respect to the ‘abstracting away’ of the hegemonic, authoritative, ‘material conditions’ of the making of her own 336 page paperback book as well?