when the cheat codes stop working

Mar 31, 2024

Recently, for Filmmaker magazine, I wrote about my friend Alan Warburton’s experience as the accidental archivist of work by his neighbor, George Westren, that otherwise would have ended up in the bin.

I keep thinking about the reasons Warburton explained for getting involved. It wasn’t necessarily because Westren’s art is good (which it is), but Warburton, as a fellow artist, could see the hours it took, the attention, and care he put into it. “It was obvious how much time had gone into it,” Warburton said. That time and labor “was its own kind of currency.”

I guess I keep thinking about this example as a code of honor of sorts: that I know this thing I do is inefficient and senseless, that it costs nothing and at the same time you can’t put a price on it; I have to honor that same care and attention in work by others, even if it’s not to my taste (whatever than actually means).

Two books I think you should read include Zito Madu’s The Minotaur at Calle Lanza (out Tuesday) and Holly Pester’s The Lodgers. I might try to pitch a review of The Lodgers because I straight up want to tap dance I love this novel so much. On every page there is at least one line that has me stunned. Howwwww did she do this?

Also, I expect soon enough to add my voice to the chorus about The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera. I just started it and oh, this is a real one. This is novel as an event. It’s exciting when things start snapping together for a book this good.

I’ve been incredible lucky to continue to receive thoughtful reviews of Wrong Way from writers and thinkers I admire like Henry Wessells and Peter C. Baker. And last month, the Spark on CBC, which has an excellent new series called Being Human Now, ran a profile of me and the book in the first half of its episode on AI and labor.

Also recently, Wm Henry Morris wrote this incredible review reading the book in the context (and outside) science fiction. I'm biased of course, as it concludes this is the "kind of science fiction we need right now," but I think this review would be of interest to anyone who wonders about the hazy spaces where science fiction and literary fiction overlap and depart.

This Thursday, I’m part of a free virtual event, Computer Pasts/Computer Futures, with Cory Doctorow, Laine Nooney, Charlton McIlwain, and Malcolm Harris. This should be fun.

Then on April 20th, I’m on a panel with Malcolm again and Brian Merchant for the Los Angeles Festival of Books. This also should be fun. Tickets, which are free, are available on the festival website on April 15th.

There have been a few wacky distribution problems tripping up both of my books but at least for now, today, you can order both from Bookshop dot org or from any independent bookstore. This is a really really wonderful time to pick up a copy (of both books, of one or the other, or even neither—wherever you are at, works for me).

I have had the sentence, “Americans love forgiveness and fear atonement” in an otherwise empty document in my files for several months now. I’m not sure where I meant to go from there. But perhaps the white space is what I have to offer, that loss of words I have for the genocide of Palestinians. It’s why, Pankaj Mishra’s essay for the LRB, The Shoah After Gaza, stands out as an essential text. It’s rare writing that moves from the big picture to the specifics on a vital issue that is hard to comprehend. You have to read it, if you haven’t yet.

Something else that you probably have already seen but I’ll link to again anyway, is this Cat and Girl comic, “on being listed on the court document of artists whose work was used to train Midjourney with 4,000 of my closest friends and Willem de Kooning”. It nails a sense of frustration I have felt over the idealistic ways that I had used the internet before which are no longer possible. Not just for now, but that my own past online is ground up in LLM sausage. You can try your best to avoid the most cynical and evil parts of the business and get bit in the ass all the same.

The answer to this and every question these days seems to be: don’t go back to blogs, go back to zines.

Well, I’m listening…

In my interview with Tech Won’t Save Us, I talked with Paris about the conundrum we face as artists. The world isn’t made for us to get our work out and appreciated. Sometimes we can be crafty with tools like Substack or TikTok to enter the castles of culture production, but it’s never sustainable.

"PM: Absolutely. And I do think about those same things sometimes. Because people do occasionally asked me: How would you recommend I get started in this industry? And I’m like: I have no idea, because I feel like things have, fundamentally, changed. And I don’t know, I feel like even if you look at now, like you have something like Substack, which is a commercialized form of what blogging was back in the day. That still doesn’t work the same way as blogging used to. For Substack to work, you almost have to have already developed a following somewhere else. And if you haven’t done that, then what is the way that you get started? Maybe you have a TikTok that takes off, and you just luck out with the algorithms and whatnot. But it seems so much less certain as to how that works today, I don’t know. JM: One thing, and I don’t want to go down a bleak path that, for those writers and musicians and artists and filmmakers who might be listening, that feel stuck and don’t know their way, I will say that there is an audience waiting for you. So we just have to figure out how to get you to them. Because the work that these conglomerates are publishing, are producing, it’s so cynical. A lot of it is just driven for this vague, allegedly political, but just completely meaningless, upper middle class viewer. That there really aren’t that many people, and they’re all in New York, but there are a lot of people in this country who love art, who love books. And there are people like us who want to help you get your work to them, and we just have to keep brainstorming on this."

And those castles have their own cheat codes. A book might appear like it came out of nowhere when in fact that nowhere is the result of marketing, which, when done right and with lots of money, you, the reader don’t see. It’s things like letters sent to thousands of librarians to put a specific book on their radar or sales reps arriving at individual bookstores with a dozen galleys for the staff and a cake. I imagine it in my mind like shadowy figures whispering, Mulholland Drive-style, “This is the girl.” (This is the book!!) Strategies like these create the groundswell of awareness, at least, and ideally enthusiasm that leads to sales. And these strategies require resources that various organizations no longer have in abundance. Also, these strategies require resources from the world—robust library funding and bookstores that remain in business. Social media has been a way to leapfrog some of this, but the results are inconsistent. Even when it works, it’s always a cheat code, and eventually every cheat code stop working.

I think a lot about how a book like the Female Man sold half a million copies in its day. And that, despite knee-jerk assumptions that no one reads because of the internet, in fact, there have got to be at least half a million people who would buy a book as experimental and unconventional as Joanna Russ’s novel today. But it would take some serious utopian thinking and risk-taking with a shit-ton of capital to build systems of distribution and discovery to make it possible.

Maybe I’ll feel like an idiot in a few years, because I haven’t given up on better ways of doing things. And to get there, I think, means to stop looking for the cheats, and try, finally, for something true and something real.

Anyway.

Thanks as ever for reading.

All My Stars

when the cheat codes stop working