Books and Crooks
The Sirens of Titan, and Medium Shills
The content mill bloat of 2022 was just the beginning
It is snowing, and I am unpopular. My brain chemicals today frothed in such a way as to make me grumpy and unkind. Or rather, unwilling to be kind when faced with what can only be cynically taken as a content mill on Medium. And one currently focused on the works of Kurt Vonnegut, of all things! Hah! Ain’t that something.
I’ll cut right to it; while searching for anything on the internet, I will always prioritize a Medium link, even if it doesn’t seem entirely relevant to the search. Call it moon-eyed esteem of Medium’s potential, but I genuinely value what the writers on this platform can put out when trying. So imagine my profound disappointment when researching how modern readers are “Navigating the Cosmic Comedy” by reading The Sirens of Titan, only to find three paragraphs of insipid summary and two paragraphs of Amazon links.
Why does this Medium “article” exist?
My fellow human machines, you may have further questions. Such as, who is the intended audience for this content? How do Amazon links for a sixty-five year old novel benefit a modern blogger? What the hell is a chrono-synclastic infindibulum? Trick question, but don’t worry, you didn’t need to read any Vonnegut in order to ride along. I just want answers, and if I have to angrily will them out of thin air, I’ll do just that.
The Sirens of Titan
It is, I believe as of this writing, to be my favorite book of all time. I’ve read it half a dozen times, over a long period of my life. As with all of Vonnegut’s work, the themes relate to me differently depending on what stage of my life I’m in. Were I unstuck in time and able to experience my entire life at any point at will, I still believe his stories would hold competing value and virtue for me as my own understanding of myself changes and improves. Such is the depth and quality of his storytelling.
As a new father, I felt deeply the same elemental desire as Malachi Constant/Unk to be with and care for a family, in ways I could barely articulate let alone comprehend. I ultimately sympathized with Winston Niles Rumfoord after hating him for most of my life when I finally drew the parallel between him and a former boss who I realized was caught up in the machinations of nameless forces beyond him. And as a teenager, I thought it was a cool space adventure.
My most recent reading seemed remarkably relatable to the current state of the world. At least, of my world. It’s been three years since moving in self-imposed exile to Missouri’s largest moon, St. Louis. I did so during the pandemic, having capitulated to a conspirator who had not an iota of sympathy for my malignant Midwest sentiments. They pressed a button; the antenna in my brain moved my limbs. The next, as they say, is history.
If there is a God, He didn’t conspire to put me in the right place at the right time. If there is a God, He is utterly indifferent to me and to think otherwise is the grandest foolishness.
I was the victim of a series of accidents. As are we all.
The Sirens of Titan is a masterwork of interconnectivity. It is a tapestry; Vonnegut tells you early and often exactly how the story will go from a Titanic Bluebird’s eye view, and yet as your gaze trawls along up close all the individual story threads twist and turn in such a way that it stuns you, not with revelations of the plot but of your own understanding.
This isn’t a review. I’m like most Vonnegut fanboys — annoying. I would be remiss not to talk about the book that inspired my original search for other fans. Which is more than can be said of the uncanny hazard I tripped into while Sirens was on my mind during a Google lark this afternoon. A hazard that I won’t link to but should be as blazingly obvious as a pillar of Day-Glo orange light on an avocado background to find at this point.
Thrill of the Shill
“Without delving into spoilers,” we are treated instead to the stout indifference of a content miller at work. There is no attempt at drawing a personal connection to the book. A lack of spoilers doesn’t explain the lack of anything substantive about the book at all. Not that one needs preparation before diving in, but it’s almost extraordinary how little is said of Sirens beyond it being a “mind-bending trip through space and time.”
When I first joined Medium a year ago I was disconcerted by all the bullshit hustle culture listicles that clogged up my recommendations. Through 2023 there was a niggling fear that generative AI would vastly amplify this nothingburger bloat. Surprisingly that didn’t seem to be the case. Indeed, Medium is beginning to push back against the algorithm-chaser economy. Not that I’ve ever been “Boosted” or “Boasted” or whatever the hell they call their new human curation method for elevating real writing.
I still struggle to find good content from new and established writers. There are the huge names I follow, some of which even contribute to my most favored of the old rags, The Atlantic. And putting around the low hundreds of followers there are some genuinely funny and unique voices I’ve found exclusively through Medium and its publication system. It sometimes takes awhile, but when I find a good writer here, it is a thrilling experience on par with discovering a new working author with a shelf-length backlog of covers to peruse.
I love finding good writers on Medium. That’s why I give Medium preferential click-through experience on Google and across the internet. And why I am so utterly baffled at the writer — and their “writing “— that has so psychically wounded me.
They began posting December 31, 2023 by dropping a similarly impotent recommendation of Vonnegut’s first book, Player Piano. In two weeks, they have churned out ten articles, all from the same uninspired mold, pushing Vonnegut books. All of them are drivel. All of them link to Amazon.
Well, that’s not true. Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut’s most contentious and difficult to parse multifaceted ramble, is suggested to be perfect for beginner’s. That’s pretty audaciously wrongheaded as far as showcasing an understanding of Vonnegut’s work.
Who Among Us
When the book’s cover is more evocative of the story contained within than the almost 200 words used to ostensibly advocate for purchasing it, I can’t help but wonder what the point of it all is. To return to our first questions here, who is the intended audience for this? And how do Amazon sales of Vonnegut’s books matter to this writer?
I recommend books all the time to people, whether they want me to or not. And Kurt, specifically, is dead as can be. So I’ll hock ratty paperbacks and half-priced bookstore finds all day to keep my favorite cheapo haunts afloat. But hey, if Amazon is the convenient option, I wouldn’t judge if it’s the option one takes.
I’m not a cynic, I think. I just can’t help but dispense with charitable assumption when faced with uncanny, low effort hogwash. Maybe the Amazon links are a mislead. An attempt at appearing supportive of the author being featured. It’s a wonderful sentiment when promoting underexposed writers. It’s bewildering when applied to a standby of high school English classes the country over.
That’s what makes it all so strange. Did an AI write this stuff? Everything, from this writer’s avatar to the generic book-related Unsplash choices to the rote publishing schedule, screams of generative tools. What a painfully existential scene it is to happen upon; a robot self-anthropomorphizing, desperate to indulge in the human experience it synthesizes.
AI-volution
My purpose in dragging to light this offensively banal content (and I mean “content” in the most offensive way possible) is not to cry foul of AI coming to take our jobs. And I should qualify right now that if this particular Medium writer is really a human, than I hope they take this for what it is; a clear indicator that their voice is no more discernible from the refined noise of a Large Language Model than the average Sports Illustrated article. It’s not too late to work on that.
The concept of AI tools awes and alarms me, in equal measure. As a student of the old and new science fiction, I am well aware of the many conceptual paths we now face as a civilization. The future could well be Skynet or HAL 9000 or AM. It could also be MULTIVAC. AI is as scary or as amusingly mundane as we design it to be. If we’re careful.
I’ll be the first to admit it is so far outside of my depth to explore the ramifications of AI development and what it means to human civilization as a whole. At least, for right now. The matter pressing me at the moment is what they mean to me, and to Medium.
I’ve tooled around with ChatGPT, as most people on the internet have at some point in the last year. Bing utilizes ChatGPT in its “Copilot” mode to condense search results for your grammatically phrased questions. Right this very moment, the garden walls have been opened for companies to come in and make their own products using ChatGPT. Snapchat introduced to me a little chatbot companion a few months ago. I named it Mycroft and gave its bitmoji a rainbow mohawk.
We’re going to see AI content a lot moving forward. And the one thing that I think has escaped a lot of people’s attention is that aspect of questioning their screens. To return to our examples, Skynet will telegraph its arrival with time traveling Austrian murderbots. HAL 9000 will shunt a couple unlucky astronauts out of an airlock before getting shut down. AM…well, just go ahead and read I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream and accept that maybe we kind of deserve to be wiped out.
But think of the evolution of the internet over the last two decades, and the inverse relationship between critical examination of information and the spread of misinformation.
Our first family computer was built for us by my uncle in 1999, and at the tender Starcraft-obsessed age of eleven I found myself at the vanguard of learning the ins and outs of our burgeoning online culture. At the same time my parents were telling me not to believe everything on TV, I was pleading with them not to believe everything they read online.
Supposedly it is easy to tell generative AI slop from true human editorial discretion. Not to have buried the lede this far in, but I worry that maybe we’re kind of bad at it. The account in question here is only two weeks old, and hasn’t gained much of a following (zero, as of writing). But that’s just it, isn’t it? The concern isn’t that this stuff surges in like a storm, washing out all the real writers into an ocean of obsolescence. But that it bubbles up from between the cracks, quiet and unseen, until we’re all all floating in stagnant meaninglessness.
I worry that this is a sign that we maybe aren’t practicing being discerning enough. These AI models have scoured vast swathes of literature, the internet, content, blogs, musings, recipes, opinions, editorials, letters to grandma, manifestos, you name it. There are a billion topics you can prompt them to churn out meaningless, insipid drivel about. Frustrating, when those topics are ones you’re interested in being inspired about.
It makes it that much harder to find a real human to connect to, and that is so profoundly sad. We shouldn’t allow this, and indeed, need to be better about calling it out. The internet was supposed to connect all of us. Now we’re letting it dilute itself. It’s a machine designed to feed itself, to solve its own problems, and to serve its own algorithms. How soon until it requires no humans at all? What then?
Likely not death. Just desertification of ideas.
Got a little existential there at the end, huh? Wanna laugh? Follow me, and maybe read my other essays about things like Burger King burgers that are formulated to give you nightmares.
Or maybe a little dread enhances your zest for life, who am I to judge?
Thanks for reading this far, goddamnit. You’re one kind baby.
Updated (Jan 17, 2024): I believe I know why this article exists, and it has to do with Amazon Affiliate commissions! I’m going to produce a follow-up at some point in the near future. Drop a comment if you have any insight into this!
