the divine right of kings

Almost certainly you've seen that quote from Ursula K. Le Guin, "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings." It's quoted everywhere these days — on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. I've seen it out of context so much that it completely slipped my mind that.....she was talking about book publishing (!)

It comes from her speech at the National Book Awards. A clip appears in the very good documentary, Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, which was on PBS last weekend. I watched that speech in 2014, and was in awe of it. Now I suppose the reason I had forgotten the origin of that lines is because the entire transcript is so righteous and uncompromising:

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book 6 or 7 times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this — letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings...

I always find it exhilarating to read Le Guin's interviews and essays where she's railing against the marginalization of genre writing. Same goes for Lynn Hershman Leeson's chip on her shoulder about early reception to media art (wrote a little bit about that here.)

I relate too much, perhaps. I'm projecting, probably. Because I definitely still get called "internet writer," as though that's something to be ashamed of—my writing career isn’t possible without the internet, and it is absurd to assess this path as in any way beneath the time-honored traditional of Ivy alumni networks and nepotism connections. Not to mention, there are formal and stylistic qualities of writing that are, yes, representative of that of an "internet writer," which aren’t appreciated yet.

As a person who writes about technology, it is expected of me that I should think Silicon Valley has a stranglehold on lies about meritocracy. But it's been my experience that art and publishing are horrible likewise, if not at the same scale or consequence. The divine right of kings’ doing, of course.

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I found this month to be the worst of quarantine yet. Right now, I'm trying to scrabble together some plan—and a way to afford such a plan—to escape the New England winter, because I don’t know how I can manage any more of this without afternoon walks and runs and bike rides.

I saw a headline about why keeping a journal would be a good thing to do right now, and wow, do I not want to do that. I don’t want to hold on to these memories—I want this all to evaporate from my mind when it’s over.

I continue to dislike every book I’ve picked up recently. Sorry. Especially new fiction, sadly. I need one of two things from a novel right now: pure escapism or a story with conflict that raises to the stakes of reality. Everything reads as so smug and comfortable. Oh, but Scholastique Mukasonga’s Our Lady of the Nile was not that way. I read it a few months ago and found the book to be unsettling and brilliant.

What has been of some comfort is rewatching old sci-fi movie favorites like Jurassic Park, Alien, and The Terminator. I also watched a few Mike Leigh movies on the Criterion Channel. My interests then converged with a rewatch of Threads, one of the strangest and grimmest movie ever made. This time I recognized Lesley Judd from Micro Live, as aired on OldTimeyComputerShow. She plays the news anchor.

The sense of longing for pre- or post-quarantine life isn’t as strong with period stuff, and it is interesting what now counts as period. I never watched Fringe before, but I checked out a few episodes the other day and was dazzled by it as a perfect aesthetic midpoint between Y2Kwave and 2020 pandemic apocalypse. It’s set in Boston, but obviously not filmed there or connected to the city in any way. Still, without trying, the show nails the Weird Dude from Boston type — randos with PhDs in physical sciences. Those dudes.

The location titles are stylized in the most late aughts possible way — big 3D graphics, which have inspired blog posts on “Diegesis and Augmented Reality” and academic journal articles on the ways that “locative text..encodes public fears about invasive pervasive data.”

I’m fascinated with the late aughts because that’s when all the big social media companies took off. There was the Great Recession and the launch of the iPhone, of course, but the general interest “ideas” writing about science and technology seems to play a role here as well. The culture of TED Talks and The Edge Foundation, Jonah Lehrer books and Radiolab segments. Now, in retrospect, we know Epstein is in this milieu, and Nxivm recruiters, and the eventual Silicon Valley titans, who were only mere millionaires or high six figure-aires then. This is where tech is very different from the culture…but it’s interesting that this is what’s going on at the “intersection” of tech and culture. Just thinking out loud here (writing out loud?) because, I’m newly obsessed with HBO’s The Vow too and can’t stop reading about that cult (and it’s influence in that scene!)

Anyway, I’m not sure if I’ll continue to watch Fringe, but I do find it delightful to see Blackberries and Nokias on screen. The beforetimes of beforetimes.

Thanks for reading.