Aarthi Vadde has a Platform (JP)

0:00Hi everyone, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder of the Nubics Network on I'm also a historian. I used to be a history professor and I love maps. So I'm especially happy to tell you that this episode is sponsored by What's Your Map, which was the winner of the best education podcast at the 2025 British podcast awards. What's your map is hosted by a historian and prize-winning author, Professor Jerry Broughton. In each episode, he invites a guest to share a map close to their heart and unfurl the ideas, inspirations and stories behind it. I can tell you I've listened to this fascinating. The podcast is in its sixth series and is enjoyed by audiences around the globe. You can explore all the maps in the podcast at ockilyhyphenmundi.com while you listen. Jerry's guests include Zacchaeus-Sewel, who's an English broadcaster and writer-unfinding Albian Yoshmit, who's the head of maps at the Zurich Central Library, Pat Seed, a US historian on Tolemies' world map, John Romero, who's a legendary video game producer on the Doom Game Creator, Elif Shahraq, a well-known Turkish-pruditioned novelist and Czech venduser,

1:04a historian who will tell you about Martin Valkymuller's Carter Marina of 1645. I highly encourage you to subscribe to What's Your Map. It's available on Apple, Spotify and all major podcast platforms. Pomona College is widely regarded as one of the world's leading liberal arts colleges. Located in Southern California, Pomona is the founding member of the Claremont colleges. Working at Pomona combines a small college experience focused on undergraduate teaching with the advantages of a research university. Pomona is a small place with world-class faculty and staff alongside creative and intellectually ambitious students. Pomona is currently hiring tenure track positions in computer science, politics with a specialty in race and ethnicity, environmental analysis, psychology, biology, English and dance. Physical education is also hiring, and the Pomona College Scholar in Residence is also seeking a new pre-doctoral postdoctoral fellow in the social sciences and humanities. For detailed information about faculty employment opportunities, visit Pomona.edu and search

2:07faculty positions. That's Pomona.edu and just search faculty positions. Pomona College is one of the best colleges in the world. If you're looking for a new position, go and take a look at their offerings. Again, that's Pomona.edu and just search faculty positions. Welcome to the new books network. Dear listeners, how also over the years have you heard me open? Something like this. Welcome to a recall this book collaboration with novel dialogues, Fentagulous Host, Arthie Vade. So I began saying something like that back in 2021, but even before that, Arthie had established herself as a field-changing comparative literature scholar and as the E. Blake Bern professor of English at Duke. Arthie, I know you've so many ways as a president and society for novel studies. This is my co-editor of the novel dialogues book as co-editor of the Northern Anthology

3:08of English literature, volume-ath, co-editor of critic examiner and author of the Leaven Prize winning Cameras of Form, Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe 1914 to 2016. So that's all quite a mouthful. I know you that way, but now we need a brand new leaf to the book of Arthie because just this summer, you published with Columbia University Press We The Platform, which is the first crowd-based account of literary-ness in a world of exponentially growing, written expression. I'd like to say about this book. It's not just a caution against nostalgia for a past that never was. It's a really clear-eyed account of mass writing in the 21st century and as you put it, a demonstration of how the internet changed literature and how the literature changes our perspective on the internet. So Arthie, welcome. It's so great to have you at recallsble. Thank you so much for having me on, John. And I feel like we've been in the discussion for so long that this is just a continuation

4:11of that. And I've never been more comfortable talking to someone on a podcast. Okay. Great. We'd like to invite folks to start us off by laying out the key claims of the book. Maybe it's inception or it's intervention for our brilliant but lay listening audience. I wanted to write with the platform because it seemed to me that many scholars were going on social media, many people were going on social media and talking about the issues of the day. And very few people were reflecting on the fact that these conversations were moving from the print world to the digital space and didn't even seem very interested in the fact that all of this was accumulating an entirely different kind of infrastructure. And so I was very initially disturbed by what I saw as online movements like citizen journalism around Black Lives Matter and the MeToo movement.

5:11They seemed like just incredible examples of the kind of justice people seek when institutions seem to be failing them. And I was interested in that interplane interaction, but being a literature scholar and not a calm scholar or a sociology person, I thought, I want to understand what this means for contemporary literature. I probably wouldn't say that the content, like that the writers who are publishing online were looking for justice on the level that people posting videos of police stops were looking for justice. Is it? Of course. But for many young writers and for many writers whose work was getting rejected on mass by publishing houses, the internet was absolutely an outlet for getting your book out, for getting your thoughts out. And many of the kinds of stars of our contemporary literary world today started online. Though it's part of the formation of an author these days. Patricia Lockwood is the obvious example, but also Lauren Euler who I talk about in the book and then there's Talyn.

6:13And there's just the sense that there was a kind, there's a kind of nostalgia for the early days of the internet and the weird literary movements that were bubbling up in poetry and in fiction. But that could only live for so long. And so we can start there, but we don't really end there. Now I think the publisher platform framework is much more corporatized, but it still needs to be elaborated and understood as part of how contemporary literature is published. So I don't think there's a way in which this is led to more justice or equality for writers of color or something like that. But it is certainly true that for a while, if you weren't getting published or if you're writing didn't seem to have a legible market through this entrepreneurial self publishing, you could potentially create one for yourself. I was thinking about the tension between the paradigm of surveillance capitalism and in the throw right now of books like Empire of AI or careless people, which really focus

7:18on the new gatekeeping, gatekeeping 2.0 of the, yeah, what you call the media corporate empire, the kind of bogus platform neutrality that is actually data management and corporate gatekeeping of a newer kind. But I appreciate your pointing out a stagia for something that honestly, I was already a grown person when that thing occurred that we're not supposed to be nostalgic about, which is that explosion in the 90s of the possibility that anything could circulate. So yeah, it's interesting. I hear you navigating between like the older gatekeepers who had to be people wanted to get away from in that earlier moment, coupled with grappling with what are these new gatekeeping forms look like. Yeah, no, it's so funny to think about like how at some point like in the early 2000s, Facebook was a plucky startup and Disney was the corporate, the evil empire. And when I returned to the rhetorical formation of Web 2.0, I look a lot at the work of Larry

8:21Lessig in free culture and remakes because a really brilliant argument to make, right, to construct legacy media as copyright extremists and to think about how publishers have, or in back in that period, like around 2000, responded to the rise of the internet and file sharing and all of that with the RM digital rights management, which really did police you're reading in a new way, right? In a way that didn't even exist before, as Lessig put it, it changed consumption patterns behind your back. While that was true, what these startups were doing and now empires like Meta and Google, were the exact same thing with your data, right? They were just pointing to the previous generation of media empires that were trying to securitize their properties while you were trying to enjoy them. So RV, as is often the case, I've detoured you here and you're still laying out your

9:23main claims, I could give you lines that I thought of from the book that maybe one place to invite you to say more is like, you say in terms of the intervention, I wrote this book to respond to decline narratives about literature and literary study and to offer an alternative to the prevailing sense of defeat in the stale to the guidance them. And I think that nostalgia topic is maybe a nice one we've already unpacked, but can you maybe say more about your intervention in that way? Yeah, when I hear conversations around literature, they are almost always in the key of doom. And so the large story that's being discussed right now is that students can't read, they won't read and we have to lower our standards constantly to meet them where they are. And I feel like this is a narrative that in some ways speaks to the choir, preaches to the choir of the leader teamenists, but it's also a narrative that I'm just tired of hearing and I think comes from the purposeful ignoring of places where we have seen students

10:29read and write with a level of glee. And I'm not saying they should all be that in the classroom, I don't think fanfic is the future or anything like that, but to ignore the forms of literacy that develop online and call them forms of illiteracy is I think a problem in this narrative. So Gen Z, the younger folks are on places like Walkpad, the YouTube for stories is their tag line. I'm not trying to claim that they're they have you know they have some sort of interest in cultivating young people, they don't, they have no interest in cultivating young people. And I just think that this is a place where students I know jokingly embarrassed about it say, oh I read, I write, I can't share anything here, but this is where that happens. And I've actually had very good students from the grads, my grad students and my undergrad, when I asked where did you learn to write? They're like, oh, I was an editor on my fan forum or I just published something and then I started helping other people write. And so there are these groups that sort of organically

11:33live online that have very little cultural capital or respect associated with them. And the students themselves think are probably not worth telling their professors about. And I was like, what do we do with those forms of literacy? I don't want to call them a literacy. I feel like maybe they're not trained in how we read, but building the link between those environments and our more institutionalized environments to me seems more worthwhile than just integrating with. Yeah, one of the claims you made that I really that I underlined the first time I read this is the desire to we have there's a fallacious nostalgic belief that quote, the desire to read should proceed desire to write and that students streaming into English departments for creative writing at the expense of reading Shakespeare and James Joyce are a proof of the top sea terrariness that a discipline and distress. I guess we should say instead of streaming into the department, maybe they're not, maybe they're streaming onto Wattpad. But the point seems to be the same, right? Which is why are we locked into a mistaken model of the precedence of the desire to read

12:35before the desire, right? I do think that is an inherited model. And it's one that casts students whose desire to write precede their desire to read as in some way narcissistic, right? And I think that there's plenty of I just saw I don't remember where who wrote it, but I just saw some like somebody kind of been moaning the fact that students don't want to be influenced. That's why they don't read. They want to just maintain their own voice. While that can be the end of the conversation and the kind of thing that you complain about with your colleagues, to me, that orientation is the starting point, right? It's not the end point, right? Everything like, oh, here's the end of literature that they think this way. And I'm like, no, that's the new starting point for literature. Yeah. And I think you can educate them into not feeling that way and to understanding influence as something outside of what they're just calling it, but it's not the end. It's the beginning.

13:36Not to get too sociological about this, but you probably have the same experience that I do of dissuading people from becoming graduate students in English. People still show up in graduate school. I love having them. I love teaching them, but by and large, if somebody asks you if they should do it, we tell them no nowadays, right? Because the field is imploding. Do you think there's something related to that? Because in the old days, if you fell in love with 19th century poetry, someone would say to you, would pat you on the head and say, okay, there, don't worry, you can go off of being a professor. Right. But who would say that to anybody now? It seems like there's so many things that people could say are definitive of the humanities, but one of the nostalgic forms is that reading and passive, not canonical may be, but just like passive consumption and appreciation, and a macuartleton, like that's the paradigm of what it means to do humanistic thinking. But why should that be the paradigm? Actually, why couldn't the paradigm be in creation as much as it is in suitably critical reading? And you think that's right.

14:37In some ways, in light of the large backlash against AI, especially among young people who are watching or fearing even more jobs disappearing, you can make the case for the version of the humanities as completely unplugged from any kind of digital infrastructure, a physical book in hand, and rebuilding your attention. I feel like that is one strategy for the humanities that in this moment might be deeply successful. But I tend to think of English departments as multi-front battles, you can have that AI free space, or you can dub it the AI free space and do traditional humanities and teach the gorgeous beauty of close reading, which I practice, I hope. But when it comes to the writing of it, I think we can have a different orientation towards what it means to write about books. And we can ask, what is the gateway to literature? Is it the canon or something else bring

15:42you to us? I really like the paradigm of the multi-front space, just because I was talking about this with somebody yesterday about there are other smaller humanities disciplines. And I always think of Donald Trump's novel, Secret History, because I think, oh yeah, the thriving class its department, you don't need to know there was a moon landing, you could all just sit around and read, tacit us together. And that is one front on which we should fight. But I completely agree that English is a little bit more like an empire than it is like an island republic. It needs to be fighting in various ways. But so apropos of that are the can I invite you to just talk more about your chapters, because you go on so many different directions. I really want to talk about your work with emoji and the innate visuality that lies so close to the surface of letters, like the relationship between letters and visual images and how certain synonymous that you see happening nowadays are blurring those boundaries in interesting ways. Yeah, now that's chapter five, which I'm happy to talk about, maybe for the sake of secrets, I'll just yeah, the order of the chapters. So I feel

16:44like what I tried to do in this book is write in your history. And I wanted to narrate the history of web 2.0 from about 2004 to the present via my engagement with some of the kind of foundational writing of that business model and cultural movement and how writers themselves responded to it over the 2008 to the present. So the first chapter after the introduction really returns to the rhetorical moves of web 2.0 folks like Tim O'Reilly, Lessig, and how they defeated the free software movement started by Richard Stullman and found a way to make information free as a kind of cyberlibertarian mantra. Try to take it out of the socialist idea of collective governance of information and just make it about companies being able to circulate cultural materials at maximum speed. So that kind of sets up the what I call the internet culture framework that is eclipsing print culture

17:47as the substrate from which literature arises and is made. And the subsequent chapters are about how contemporary writers themselves have negotiated the power structures of the internet and also engaged with the writing they find online like mass writing and even participate in mass writing. So I start from what I think of as the beginning of this which is Jonathan Lethams' interactions with Lessig in his essay Exocie of Influence and then I go forward. So I look at writers who think about how some of these ideas of circulation have been commodified and monetized like that's whalers work I look at writers who try to escape that steward home this kind of avant-garde provocateur. And then I also move into what I call the center of the literary field in a subsequent chapter where I look at celebrity writers like Jennifer Egan, Teja Cole and Margaret Atwood, Naomi Alderman and talk about how they basically go online interact with the crowd develop new

18:50styles of writing as a result and that feeds back into what we think of as their major contemporary novels whether that's Candy House or Tremor by Cold or the Testaments or the power those are at what an an ultimate respectively. And then I get into as your interest. Hey, Austin, you just say what oh so I want to get to that also but can you say one word more about Atwood because I'd love to think about that example. Yeah, I'm like how does the Testaments get shaped by that? Yeah, so the Testaments is a great example of so that one the Booker Prize it was tied with Everie Stowe and Girl Woman Other. And anyway that novel is a sequel to the Handmaid's Tale at what is in some ways like the literary face of the Me Too movement. She has really commanded a popular presence while also being a highly prestigious writer. And I think that there's a way to read the Testaments which is entirely continuous with Atwood's career which is a portrait of the patriarchy and how women trapped within it and imagining the escape through words and literature. But when I read and

19:55thought about that book in light of Atwood's deeply non-respectable engagement with Wapad, she endorsed the platform. She did a lot of work for the platform in the 2010s including authoring with Naomi Alderman on it. I realized that in a way she was trying to recruit young people into literature and she was going where they were. And I reread the Testaments and of course it's a feminist dystopia but I reread it through the kinds of complexities of democratization and information access. So I think that's a different angle on the book than is ordinarily developed or discussed. Great. I think you're about to get to chapter 5. Yes, so chapter 5 is my experimental chapter on the intersection of literature and conceptual art. So I really wanted to talk about the relationship between text and image and shoobing's work book from the ground. And I also discussed Fred Benesson's emoji dick. And to me this chapter is all about what it means to read and

20:58look at books in the age of the internet. And I think one of the by the time that one of these books were initially published around 2008-10 period, I think there was a lot of optimism still around the idea that the internet would be an amazing engine of communication and connection or it would make like in Benesson's case really complex projects easy and doable without a lot of resources. And in the course of reading both those writers and artists statements and the books themselves, I felt like they were allegories of reading and interpretation. And they were also completed in the language of the digital vernacular. So emojis, right, images that are also ways of communicating emotion in an environment that seems pretty toneless, right? Like print and how basically how informal writing develops its own tools for conveying things that just didn't exist in the print world. And then to just to start with the easier access, the way that I

22:00came to know it through at least the Giddleman's work on a mochi dick. So that is literally a version of a mobi dick done in emojis. Yeah, yeah. Through the use of mechanical Turk, right? And they did. That's right. Yeah. The procedure of making that book, I feel like Benesson used to work a Kickstarter and I think he is also associated with the creative commons movement. And so it was it was a way of promoting this idea of circumventing institutions, right? So emoji dick was not particularly about mobi dick. It was particularly about showing the capacities of platforms to make impossible projects easy or elused easier. I do read it as an example of drinking the cool aid and basically modeling an exploitative labor system as this kind of great project, which is a hurt sog. It's like a comic version of a hurt sog attempt to do something grand and have it just reveal all the problems, which is how I see the icon novel too. You want to do something

23:02grandly encyclopedic. And at the same time, when you're trying to do this aggregative work, you end up revealing all the things that make it impossible to be positive about this aggregative work. So I say that this is an example of how the dream of the internet becomes the nightmare of the internet. You want to communicate by your travesty in communication. Yeah. So speaking of the travesty communication, can we just unpack a couple of different dimensions of the what it would mean to write an emoji face work? One is could you talk to us a little bit about the category of the AC next, like the writing looks like writing that isn't. And then also for some reason, I'm sorry, we're damn, but I can't find it. But the notion of a it's not panseem, but the notion of graphic. Yeah, pasographic. Yeah, tell us about the pasographic in the AC. And I think that will give us great grounds for your point about whether this is presenting some kind of magical Rosetta stone or whether it's more like parroting the impossibility of translation or cross-cidad

24:06Yeah. So the AC make writing movement is actually when I learned about via reader railies work, but it basically is called draw writing. That's another way to think about it. It's inscriptions without meaning. Hence AC make a semantic. And when people look at it, they think it looks like writing, but there's no meaning attached to it. And so that's a form that has I think taken in internet culture, even though it's much older than that, because it's a way of reflecting on that people are looking at visual images and not reading online. And another angle is, and it is, I think, was partly, even though Giddleman did the use the AC make, this is partly her argument, that when you read online, there's so much you don't see beneath the screen, right? That entire infrastructure of code, protocols of all of these things that are just inaccessible to you in a way that are reading a book doesn't replicate. And so how do we think about the parts of the

25:09internet that are enclosed when we are always being reminded by our tech overlords that everything is open, accessible and blah, blah, blah, blah, that's not quite the case. So AC make as a form gives us a handle on that relationship between seeing and not seeing reading and not reading. And then, pastographic, Hasigriffy was the word I learned in the course of writing this book, which I'm always really grateful when I learned a new word. Like when I wrote Pay Miras, the new word I learned was autarky and on this Ogoop was Hasigriffy. Hasigriffy, yeah. And that is writing in a universal way or writing that can be universally understood. And I was like, how if that even a word, like, whoever it's not, that would be possible. But of course, there, there were as I discovered through writing this, there are all of these attempts to produce a language, especially in the early 20th century, that is highly rationalized and quote unquote perfect. Right? Yeah. I mean, it's a big science section. It is a huge, yes, I'm burnt to the echo's written

26:11books about this is a whole industry. And once I found the word, I was like, oh, this describes a whole universe. But then isn't there aficigraphy connection to the origins of emojis themselves? Isn't that right? Isn't there something about Olympic to the Tokyo Olympics? They were trying to come up with systems of communication. That's exactly right. So when we go back to attempt set universal language that were more pictorial, the Olympics in Japan was one major source for the kinds of icons that they felt would be understandable by people who wouldn't speak Japanese. And so that was one inspiration for the first designer of emojis, Carita, another inspiration was manga, visual symbols like the tears that you might see in manga to suggest anxiety or stress. And he really mixes up alphabetical language and pictorial language. And he says, I wanted this to be a keyboard of images that resembled an alphabet. They really. And so I think where perhaps locating language and non-European languages is really

27:12helpful in thinking about emojis and thinking about the relationship between picture and image and word and how characters are written in Japan versus like how we construct letters. So I'm not saying it's a pictorial language, but I think that word and image aren't divided in the same kind of biblical way that they are in European languages. Just say more. I think because it feels like the the ACMIC and the passive graphic there both are about proximity between word and image, but they kind of go in different directions. Does the ACMIC goes towards the disintegration of the possibility of legibility and the passive graphic is almost like super writing or something like that? Yeah, trying to achieve that universality. And shooting was definitely in the passive graphic mode when he tried to write books from the ground. He was collecting earport cards with those visual that are basically all individuals. And he was like, here are all these things I see in spaces of global capital like the Olympic Village or the airport where there's so many ways

28:14of communicating through basically picture signs. And I thought, could I have this novel that I wrote entirely out of these signs? And the answer is that no, you can't tell a complex story through visual images unless the complex story is about the relationship between text and picture. You're not going to have a story with characters and psychology. You're going to have a story about systems. Yeah. So that's what makes the conceptual art and not a novel and the way they'll be thinking about it. Unless I miss something and I probably did, I don't think you talk about how comics work the Scott McLeod stuff, but it seems related, right? He's so acutely aware and say like he says every comment writer is thinking about that tension between is this line that I've drawn, tending towards being a letter or tending towards being an image. That's really helpful to think about. I did research wordless novels from the 1930s. Oh, those are great. Yeah. The woodcats. Man, the woodcuts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. German expressionism. I think. Totally. Some and they're just

29:16gorgeous and they're emotional and they are. Yeah. But they come out of a comic background too. All those people had seen newspaper comics before they wrote them. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And when I've talked about those novels with people and something like emoji dick and book from the ground. I think the immediate responses, those are expressive. You can see the sign of the writer's hand or that drawer's hand in the strokes. Whereas this is so standardized, right? Emotions are standardized pictorial and that pictorial images. Yeah. The way that the page is arranged in these books is linear. It's not through comic frames. Yeah. Things don't break the frame. They're making painstaking attempts to reproduce the look of the literary is what I call it and building a Joanna Drucker's work, right? Making it look hyper standardized as though there were no mark of a person's hand. Yeah. And so that maybe would be the point for you to talk about your, is that your file chapter or your epilogue? The sort of writers. Yeah. It's a long epilogue. I feel like it will potentially be a

30:16chapter. But yeah. Yeah. So I called that writer's hand at a distance because I really wanted to engage. And that's a wonderful phrase, by the way. It's like your phrase, right? You're quoting. No. Yeah. Your building. Okay. Yeah. On the artist's hand at a distance, which is a phrase of John Roberts, who's a, our, who's work I didn't know, but that's yeah. I recommend his work. Maintangibilities of form where he basically talked about art after the ready made. So you shomps ready made and I sometimes think having read more art history and criticism to write chapter five on the emoji novel and the epilogue that maybe the ready made just broke through more in, for our critics and someone like Joyce's Ulysses, I broke through because there are people just believe that they cannot go back, right? How do you talk about the right, the artist's skill after the ready made? That's what the Roberts book is all about. And I feel like

31:20in literature, many of us are like, oh, yeah, that was a high point of experimentalism. And then realism came back and beautiful prose came back and blah, blah, blah. But they're like, no, you can't go back. Ready made so impossible to paint a picture again in pretended groundbreaking. And I love that comparison because I do. I read a book in graduate school called Art After the Shamp, which is so much to that point. And I, how you framed it, the notion of artisanal expertise just goes out the window once you can put a year on a lap on a wall and call it art. As opposed to, and this is me speaking as a Victorianist now, spending my entire career struggling against the notion that modernism did change something not just fundamentally, but irrevocably, because I completely agreed that Joyce changes something fundamentally. But then I feel like I growing up in the 90s and the 2000s, there's just a decade after decade of literary criticism, it was predicated on the notion that it wasn't just a fundamental, but a new irrevocable break. Whereas everything that I saw about literature made me think it wasn't irrevocable at all.

32:21It was like constantly pivoting. Literature is a, we're a small market, but at least we're a bigger market than art. And so it's very important that we can sustain multiple styles of literature. And, but in that particular epilogue, I was really, I thought it was very important to remind people that even though we're living through what feels like an unprecedented disruption with generative AI, that the arrival of those technologies in their current form are the culmination of a web 2.0 model, not a radical break from it. And so this is, it might be the end of web 2.0 as, it's hard to clear the end of a historical period so close to when it started, but it might lead to a different kind of business model powering the internet since it's crushing the current business model of the internet, this training data model. But for the purposes of my epilogue, it is the culmination of this movement that I have been articulating over the course of the book.

33:22And I wanted to show a cross section of writers, I would say, were early adopters of GPT3 before the release of chat GPT, not for reasons of efficiency, but for reasons of artistry, and for reflection on what felt like a deeply gary time and moment for professional writers. And so I look at what I call writers handed a distance works like MacGunow Gieblins Babel, Sheila Hedi is Hello World, Wahini Vara's Ghosts, to show how writers are maintaining a commitment to what I would call experimental writing while at the same time engaging the power dynamics that are befalling them with the arrival of this automation tool. So can I connect that to something you say? And this is something you and I, and basically all the people who work on novel dialogue together, we like to talk about in our AI assisted Slack channel, we like to think about what exactly we are nostalgic for in this moment. And I think Sheila Hedi is a

34:27great example for a salam Don because she's so wonderful at both exploring but also in Dalgian, our nostalgia for the authentically human, she's just Hedi has such a like a rickstly, retellent sense of oh, what does it mean to be an artist, to be part of a generation of artists, but she's also so acute about why don't I just train a chat and bot and see if I can make it through that. But you have a freeze that maybe you could unpack for us. You said that one of the places we are now that we have to be cognizant of and be and then terror again ourselves about is a repulsion towards AI that goes beyond, I can't remember whether that is, that goes beyond to a space where some purified version of writing becomes synonymous with being human. Oh, purified, yeah, no, sure. Purified. I said, purified, and so, purified. Purified. That was an other correct, yeah, purified version. Yeah, some purified version of writing becomes synonymous with being human. Right. I think the history of writing is also the history of writing technologies. And what newer technologies do is help you forget the technologies

35:33that were old. Right. And so this is a particularly extractive technology. This depends on other people's data, which is a, I think, a phase change from the platform which monetize the collection of data, but didn't depend on it to produce its own output. But what I'm saying is you can reject AI on the grounds that most people are rejecting it out loud, which is to say as a labe, as a profound kind of cultural theft. But what I think is inspiring a revolution that I would question is this sentimental reaction to what human being is that we didn't use to have a couple years ago. And so, just to play out the technology point, you don't need to go all the way back to Plato and the discovery of writing, but the sort of the logic of remediation that each technology produces a set of kind of logical affordances. So unpack it. I don't know where do you want to go with like the printing press or mass publishing or something, but there are things that can be expressed more easily, thoughts that can be developed more readily. And that doesn't constitute the human

36:35necessarily. It constitutes like a capacity of being human with these technologies that you're supposed to. Exactly. If you think about the printing press, making distribution and copying just way easier and faster than scribal culture, I don't know that if we looked at that moment, we would start fetishizing handwriting because we're not afraid of the printing press, right? So yes, there's this tendency to equate the soul with handwriting on some level. And in fact, you even see that in, I think, commodified Instagram poetry. And I just keep, oh, my sorry, that's a great example. Let's come back to, I just want to give you one data point about the weather we fetishized handwriting. So when the original moveable type, the Gutenberg era clearly was influenced by scribal writing, they used whennastic letters to form their letters that nobody thought about that at all. But in the 1890s, when William Morris is deeply worried by the kind of acceleration of printing presses, the way that you've been just

37:40printing so much faster and so much cheaper, he basically goes around giving a series of lectures and wish he emphasizes. But the original printing presses really were more handwriting like, but in other words, he's going to reclaim that artist hand, I guess you would say. In a way that's true and untrue at the same time, but it is what he's emphasizing. So in other words, I do, I wouldn't be surprising if there's a wave of the kind of nostalgic authenticity seeking the gorgeous scribing that occurs with every new technological innovation. Yeah, and in that sense, I don't think we're in an unprecedented moment in terms of reaction and response. Right. Right. Every time something speeds up or seems to change the rules of the game, we want to go back to a previous time where we knew the rules and can draw clear boundaries around the machine and us. Right. But I think writing, there is something in human and standardized about writing because if it were entirely personal, you wouldn't communicate it to someone else. Right. Yeah. But my other kind of theory of what writing

38:44is at the kind of exteriority of memory going back to Plato is that there is this sense that the more we give over or outsource, the less we as human beings can protect our own intellect. And I think that's the large conversation around AI that needs to be happening. And I'm glad is happening. Right. If you are allowing you to do certain things, what is your argument for allowing it to do those things for you? And what I really wanted to emphasize about the writing that I interpret in the epilogue is that it's not to my mind in any way labor saving device. They're not using GPT-3 to save them time. They've repurposed it for the sake of making something that hadn't artistically that I think hadn't really existed before. There's been generated poetry and there's been machine enabled constraint-based writing. But what is a meme-team-thetic output with your own originated writing and then reflect on the status of a mind that has been shaped by other minds and by the crowd? Wait us far more in some

39:49ways. Literal on the page when you see the writing of the crowd be a synthetic output, right? Montagne might talk about his meditations and his response to the social forces around him, but he wouldn't have been able to marshal that kind of passage. The actual distillation of all of these voices, sure an extractive model. But still. Again, I get the import of your writer's hand at a distance there. There is something about it's needing to navigate through those layers of not remediation. Yeah, technological mediation on video show. That's the real work is to make sense of that. And also, and maybe this goes back to the problem of the unacknowledged aspects of AI and our daily lives, which is that, I don't know, do you know Meredith Martin's new book about poetry data? Poetry data, poetry data and exactly. And I think part of her point, I'm going to paraphrase it and get it terribly wrong. But I think part of her point is we claim to be exempted from these conditions of production. But if you look at actual citational practices

40:52and actual referential work of any scholar in the humanities, we're completely immersed in it. That is the river we're swimming in. Even though we pretend we give the people a page number for our citation. But come on, that's bullshit. Yeah, the D.I. number. Exactly. Right. Yeah. And she just wants you to admit the price of it. Okay, I was thinking of this before. I think maybe I'll ask your thoughts about it. But do you remember at the end of modern times, Charlie Chaplin actually sings? Do you remember there's like a song that comes on in the restaurant? But he's babble. It's not actually language. So Chaplin, the silent actor, is performing speech, but the speech is like a bud. But he really, really, really, really, it's AC Mac. And that's it. So I wonder, yeah, I don't know. If something about what he's doing is slowing this up and making us admit, oh, you're a tool of this technology. You might not admit it, but here you are. Glitching, noise, all of these techniques are important parts of the history of tactical media

41:55and glitch art to slow down the signal, to slow down the machine. The writers handed it to distance. I also say operates the machine counterproductively. So if the machine is the chatbot, then turn it against its purpose. That's what art has historically done to comment on society. So I think you're absolutely right that we should be resisting literature's automation. But I don't think that the only way to resist literature's automation is to go down the road of a kind of fetishizing of an earlier organic sphere of production is how I put it in the book. So I think that this is great. We could obviously continue indefinitely. And I just, I want to make sure that people go off and read the platform, how the internet changed 21st century literature. I don't think I read the sub-pedal before. But maybe this is a good moment to ask you to recommend a recallable book, which is a book that if people enjoy this conversation, they might also find was worth reading. Yes. So I'm going to recall Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an

43:01agent of change. Yeah. Which is an oldie but a goodie. And I think deeply controversial within this historian community. So I'll add to that recallable book of a collable debate between Eisenstein and Adrian Johns and then American historical review. Oh great. I've never read that. That's amazing. I think of them as from two different generations. They are. And it was an intergenerational meeting of the minds where Johns, I think his book had come out and had in some ways, I think represented a break from the Eisenstein perspective. But the Eisenstein perspective was such a huge shadow over print culture and in history of media. And so they had it out in a very civil way that you would never see anymore over 20 pages of print. I will post the links to that. That's fantastic. Yeah. But I think it's good if you are interested in wanting to understand the moment we're in as one of, in what feels like the kind of intense

44:03change in which there's uneven timescales, people unevenly adopting things and holding world views that are deeply diametrically opposed. Yeah. Yeah. It's the only book I read recently that I felt gives me some purchase on what is happening around me right now. That's fantastic. I've actually been meaning for ages to just mention, this isn't my recallable book, the that Mary Poovy book, uneven developments. I think about that all the time because her point is precisely about the unevenness. We have to get away from that fructody and smoothness of the epistemic break. First, we were one thing and then we were another and Dustin and Galison have a wonderful model of succeeding epistemic virtues. But I think Poovy really puts her finger on it and she's, no, it's uneven and you cannot expect it all to be one thing. You just have to keep an eye for how the different threads do window could hear. It's such a hard task to try to do that too. As an academic who wants to write about the present, how do you keep in mind all the competing points of

45:03you that result from the uneven adoption of different claims around this, like right now AI technology. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's wonderful input. I totally agree. So actually speaking of competing claims, I want to recommend for my very quick recallable book is someone we had on the show last year, Ben Nangram, at least the book Comedy of Confutation or how I like stuff worrying and love obsolescence. And just first, a cystic aspect, which I think probably our feet is in your spirit and your wheelhouse. But he's really interested in the site of the kind of human knowledge worker facing their own obsolescence. In other words, we've been living in the juster age for a long time. But everyone's in a while a the mind-based disciplines, the knowledge worker based disciplines, say being a professor, being a lawyer, things like that, being a Hollywood screenwriter, they come under particular fire and they and that produces a certain kind of literary response. And so Comedy of Confutation is one of the books that documents those. And I think the final chapter of your book is really wonderful at thinking about how writers are not

46:06freaking out nostalgicly necessarily. But yeah, responding under pressure to this story. Yeah, I think that's right. And I know Ben's book and it yes. And I think they're good pairing. Yeah. And maybe we can get people to sell them at a discount if you buy them together. Yeah. I had to say to say that we might be part of the same recommended machine algorithm. Oh, yeah, maybe that's right. You like this. You might like that. Yeah, we didn't talk about curation at all. That's part of the story. Yeah. Okay, Pete. Thank you so much. It's pleasure as always and a wonderful discussion, a wonderful book with a platform. And yeah, and thank you and listeners. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. Recall this book is the creation of John Plotts and Elizabeth Ferri. Sound editing is by Newell Irfani and music comes from the song by Eric Choslow on Barbar Cassidy. We grateful acknowledge support from Brandtice University and its Mandel Center for the Humanities. We always want to hear from you our listeners with your comments, criticisms, or suggestions for future episodes. Finally, if you enjoyed today's show,

47:06please forward to five people a right review and read us wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.