Matt Langer

i know i’ve probably said the words “this is the last thing i have to say about all this curation nonsense” at least twice in the past but for real THIS is the last thing i have to say about all this curation nonsense at least probably until the next time

seems a little weird to me that over the last few months that we’ve been talking about “curators” none of these people has actually ever engaged in the discussion, at least not in any meaningful way, i.e. at length, and in public, because, i mean, marco wrote a thing about it and all he got was an email reply, and all i got was a comment on Gizmodo that i wouldn’t have even seen had honan not emailed it to me, and yeah i totally understand that i’m just cranky matt langer being cranky on his cranky tumblr tumbleblog and that maybe all i deserve is a quick copy-and-paste job into a gizmodo comment box, but anyway now that choire has weighed in (and kottke too) we’ve now got people calling bullshit on this who like Actually Have Influence On The Internet and all i’m saying is it will be sort of interesting to see if this latest round generates any sort of dialogue (not holding my breath) or if the curators just keep right on patting themselves on the back because, yeah, the latter would prove highly ironic to me, at least considering that popova closed her gizmodo comment to me by saying “this isn’t a new conversation, but it’s a necessary one,” which, you know, cool! so have that conversation then.

p. good definition of curation

re: this shit show

j: wait, is it being celebrated?
j: so confused
langer: I AM TOO
langer: bc that does not sound like a thing jonathan harris would say in a positive light??
langer: but sounds like exactly the sort of thing swissmiss would think was totally great?!
langer: idk
j: yeah
j: It sounds like something Jon would say with a sigh.
j: the only upside I can imagine is “creation” has typically been reserved for a pretty small portion of humans and maybe “curation” allows for a broader spectrum of folk to self-express
langer: well of course
langer: but if the scales tip it all turns into an ouroboros
j: HAHAHA
j: I was going to say:
j: I don’t know what that is, but it sounds like everyone blowing themselves/each other
j: but I was pretty much right

(↬ gchat)

Dear reader, You are reading

ugh ok i didn’t want to just leave this sitting in my outbox—which haha yeah this is basically the blogging equivalent of re-gifting, but whatever, here are all my thoughts on that thing we’ve been talking about this week. RIPPED FROM THE SENT ITEMS FOLDER [names have been changed to protect the innocent]

i’m going outside now really.

———————————-
from: Matt Langer
date: Sat, May 26, 2012 at 12:34 PM
subject:
mailed-by: gmail.com

Ok so there’s just one thing I have to add to all of this and then I’m done I swear, which is this bizarre disconnect at work here in the way that every other medium of Making Stuff that has come under the boot heel of technological innovation or piracy or whatever we’re calling it has at least enjoyed a certain defensive moral posture, as in: when we download new Saint Etienne albums we feel bad about that and promise ourselves to buy the album when it comes out (ok yes we might not end up doing that but at least technologies exist such that come next Tuesday when it actually drops I’ll be listening to it on Rdio instead because that’s easier and I guess they’re getting money for that? God I hope so.) or when people download movies and TV shows from Pirate Bay we know it’s bound to happen and there’s nothing anyone can do about it anyway but we still all know and are all generally in agreement that they’re at the very least kind of being dicks when they do it, or like, look at the way the entire internet joins forces to rip somebody a new asshole whenever they blog a photo without attribution (or wait I guess we only really did that before Pinterest came along didn’t we).

But when it comes to writers and their writing and the readers reading them we somehow ended up in this place where people can reasonably say things like this (reasonably? idk that’s not a point I’m really willing to concede just yet but w/e) and talk all this “reader first” business that is fundamentally necessarily at base a really quite silly thing to say because it necessitates setting up readers and writers in two opposing camps in some sort of zero sum game in which THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!! or whatever except winning this game means that writers go <strike>broke</strike> even more broke and readers don’t have shit left to read.

And like this is why not having any kind of a defensive morality is kind of problem! Because lord knows the market has no soul and the only way we can beat back undesirable market forces is with moral arguments about Shit We Can All Generally Agree Kind Of Sucks About Capitalism but if we just let all our decisions be purely market driven we’re going to keep going right on down this road where this influential clique of tech innovator types are going to keep getting away with framing it all as if readers are customers and writers are just mean nasty evil businessmen forcing them to look at terrible terrible ads when it’s like no, I’m sorry, we need to be saying that’s bad behavior and if nothing else conduct unbecoming of people who self-identify as readers and I don’t really think we should be enabling it by coddling it? ESPECIALLY not when there’s that little twist of the knife that happens when these reader-first types don their self-congratulatory reader caps and pat themselves on the back for being REEEEEADERS who just really love REEEEEADING—I mean! as if they’re the first breed of human to ever walk the earth who care about sequences of words that convey meaning! the kids these days!! *shakes fist*—and then because they’re so impressed with themselves and just so blinded by their own delight with the fact that they care so very much about reading they turn it into this thing where it’s like how dare you violate my very delicate sensibilities with your clumsy attempt at a sustainable revenue model can’t you people see I’m trying to READ over here!! because it is up to YOU, dear writers and publishers, to figure out how to give me something to read at low friction and low cost and if you can’t do that then I’ll just take my business elsewhere and then oh wait shit the spigot just ran dry and the aggregators are just reaggregating the aggregators what happened where’d it all go.

And I also get that times change and DISRUPTORS GONNA DISRUPT and all that, but I also think people forget that this is writing and fuck I don’t know how does writing even adapt to that? Movie studios bolted a second camera onto their riggings and made people keep coming to the theater for 3D and yeah that shit sucks but it’s at least funding those studios’ art houses (ok yes only sort of but at least I live in a world where Paul Thomas Anderson and Terrence Malick can still make films and that’s a consolation), and indie bands can’t sell records anymore but the live music scene is probably healthier than it’s ever been and bands are getting by, but christ, we’ve already killed the mid-list author and now I mean look at the stunts we’re pulling just to get eyeballs, we went from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird to Jennifer Egan’s Tweet by Tweet in the span of twenty years and then there’s the whole other problem with the fact that James Patterson’s books are selling for less than they ever have and he’s having to write twice as many of them just to keep up and at the rate things are going where’s the money going to come from to make sure any sort of healthy creative ecosystem can ride in on his schlocky coattails? Are we going to tell Matthew Gallaway that if he wants to get paid for his writing he’s got to go on a road show and sell tickets to a Union Sq. Barnes & Noble reading? Will he have to market t-shirts?! Or do brand partnerships? “The Metropolis Case, brought to you by Mountain Dew, the preferred carbonated beverage of opera-goers the world over.” Ok yes just stab me with a knife right now please in both of my eyeballs thanks.

Also let’s not forget that there’s a pretty disturbing irony to the fact that the only morality at work here is the exaltation and fetishization of technological progress just for the sake of technological progress (damn you, internet! you love bacon so much but you’ve never read any Bacon!!), a default morality that is so very Enlightenment of us but one that necessarily if one were to rigidly adhere to it plays out in an end game that oh hey would you look at that it actually looks a lot like the Enlightenment itself, back when the only people who could afford to write for a living were people who were born into great wealth in the first place and ♬ hayyyyyyyy i just met you and this is crazy but here’s the thing about rich people doing the thinking for the rest of society and i’m kind of not so into that maybe?

And yes I’ll grant that we’re being #olds if we’re just going to sit around yelling at the internet to get off our lawn instead of thinking up and building and executing on whatever that solution is that’s going to help sustain this thing that we love and yes, we should do that, but please for the love of god everyone, so that I don’t kill myself before that day ever comes, can we all just call a truce on people congratulating themselves for being readers while they run around and shit all over whatever shred of economic sustainability remains for small publishers? Because that’s just not something I can endure for very much longer.

Anyway there’s sunshine out there and no joke if my rabbi could see how pale I am right now he’d demote me to gentile so I’m going to take the dog for a walk and see how many Am Appy gold lamé onesies I can count in McCarren Park.

m