Matt Seybold

@mattseybold

American Vandal Pod | Prof of AmLit & Twain Studies + Director of Media Studies, Elmira College | Resident Scholar @MarkTwain.bsky.social | Political Economy of Mass Media TheAmericanVandal.com MattSeybold.com

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Matt Seybold@mattseybold· 23d

Norway may have lost in the quarterfinals, but they are still winning.

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· 23d

🤓

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· 25d

Alex Karp: "AI is going to destroy the humanities." Me:

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· 25d

Maybe listen to that Fresh Air episode first. Seems urgent.

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· 25d

If we accomplish our goals we'll be worth more than the rest of the Earth.

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· 25d

Portrait of my (stimulated but scattered) brain the past three weeks.

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· 26d

tHE agE oF rEaDinG IS oVEr

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· 26d

Huh.

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· 26d

The More You Know.

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· 27d

An episode which I guarantee will yield equal amounts of “YAAAAAAAAS” & “what the hell are we doing here, guys.” podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

Reading Machines (Vandal
Live at Berkeley)
The American Vandal ›
1h 52m
The final episode recorded at the Modes of Reading Today Symposium, hosted by the Townsend Center For The Humanities focuses on media, mediation, and machine-generated texts. It opens with Nicholas Baer and Pardis Debashi's
"Unattainable Texts," following by David Bate's "Reading and Writing" [20:00], Nina Beguš's "Novel Audiences in 'Finnegan's Wake'" [37:30], Hannes Bajohr's "Surface Reading LLMs" [57:00], Matt Seybold's "The Technofeudal Reader" [81:00], and a brief Q&A [100:00].
Cast (in order of appearance): Yael Segalovitz, Nicholas Baer, David Bates, Nina Beguš, Hannes Bajohr, Matt Seybold, Jacob Gaboury, Deniz Göktürk, Jonathan Kramnick

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· 28d

Educators don't need education advice from restaurant critics, sportswriters, tradwives, or Sal Khan.

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· Jul 12

Guy who wants to build Big Brother (Alex Karp) thinks it’s hard to find engineers willing to help him build Big Brother because…Edward Said’s “Orientalism” is so “totalizing.” If true, this is the greatest Said endorsement ever. Eat your heart out, Bruce Robbins.

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· Jul 10

From forthcoming “Cultural Deliteracy.”

I have thought of Williams's analysis often in the past four years, as I-and increasingly, both my professional peers and political allies - have drawn back into a defensive positions against what Matthew Kirschenbaum has persuasively dubbed the "epistemic weaponry" of text-generating chatbots. Our tactics from this position often take conservative forms: abstinence rhetorics, appeals to arbitrary authority, romantic revivalism and performative adoption of the old ways, and even, for some, a truly terrifying turn to policing (Al detectors, intrusive proctoring, lockdown browsers, booby-trapped writing prompts, arbitrary limits on high grades, and other such self-defeating copshit). The speculative boom in Generative Al has contributed, at least temporarily, to muting the rising abolitionism and collectivist politics of the early 2020s, in part by inciting many leftist intellectuals, as Williams predicted, to participate in a negotiation of licensing and legitimacy which often defaults to the protection of intellectual property, credentialing apparatuses, institutional policies, and neoliberal university administration, exacerbating the confusing political dealignments of the decade.
But while finding our way out of the defensive position is surely desirable, Williams does not propose that radicals must embrace narratives of technological progress and the financial speculators those narratives serve. Once a technology is durably established in a system of mass production, these publicity narratives are revised into origin myths. The myth of invention casts a veil over what are often violent, involuntary projects of forced adoption. Creative destruction is not the will of nature spiraling organically towards spontaneous order, as Chicago School economists like Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich Hayek present it, but rather a will to power by specific groups of people, whose actions are retrospectively anonymized.
The defining stage of technological diffusion, standard
ac…

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· Jul 10

There once was an excellent airport bookstore in Detroit. 😔

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· Jul 9

The use of Doctor Zhivago is misleading, though I expect unintentionally. It was a massive bestseller. And it is challenging literary fiction. But what this eludes is that the U.S. intelligence apparatus poured millions into making it so, at home & abroad, at the peak of the Cultural Cold War. 2/

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· Jul 9

“THE UNIVERSITY IS AN INTEGRAL PART OF A SOCIAL SYSTEM THAT HAS GIVEN MORE OPPORTUNITY, MORE FREEDOM, MORE HOPE TO MORE PEOPLE THAN ANY OTHER SYSTEM YET DEVISED.”

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· Jul 8

Fellow Authors: without any context, what's the first line of your current work in progress?

While most of his colleagues in the Summer of 1988 were writing postmortems for the junk bond, its associated machinations, and ensuing crises, a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal became fixated on something that was happening at Merrill Lynch. Merrill was then regarded as one of the more forgettable operations on the finance beat, built as it was on the dependable but tedious business of advising and brokering for retail investors across the country. Its revenues accumulated via low-percentage fees on millions of small-dollar transactions, usually for government securities or stock in well-established companies. Business thrived not on innovation, nor risk, as was the case for many of Merrill’s putative competitors, but simply on the sheer size of its customer base.
The bureaucratic burden of Merrill’s operations, headquartered on Wall Street, but connecting tens of thousands of local branches, made them keenly interested in the

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· Jul 8

You would think so, right? And yet, to Jo’s point, every time an episode about close reading drops, thousands of people listen to it almost instantaneously.

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· Jul 7

Fuck you very much, Gemini.

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· Jul 7

For every Henry Kissinger a Kenzaburo Oe. For every Bill Maher a Conan O’Brien. For every Jimmy Buffett a Toni Morrison. Twains of Darkness and Twains of The Light, Dance Battling Across Space and Time.

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· Jul 6

We live in an age of texts disappearing under suspicious circumstances. It upsets me.

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· Jul 5

They used to dismissively refer to on-camera talent as “haircuts.” Like, “Go get the haircut from his dressing room.” It’s usually totally unfair. But in Lalas’s case, a haircut bought him three decades of paychecks. And this was the haircut!

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· Jul 4

Tough question, but this was the first thing that popped into my head.

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· Jul 4

Elsewhere Twain had already skewered the Alger Myth, but in his Lee sketch he uses it to make the Lee Family seem decidedly un-American, especially by the standards of the “patriotic mob” assembled in & around Independence Hall.

He dealt in no shams; he had no ostentations of dress or equipage; for he was, as one may say, inured to wealth. He had always been used to it. His own ample means were in-herited. He was educated. He was more than that—he was finely cultivated. He loved books; he had a good library, and no place had so great a charm for him as that. The old Virginian mansion which was his home was also the home of that old-time Virginian hospitality which hoary men still hold in mellow memory. Over their port and walnuts he and his friends of the gentry discussed a literature which is dead and forgotten now, and political matters which were drowsy with the absence of corruption and "investigations." Sundays he and they drove to church in their lumbering coaches, with a due degree of grave and seemly pomp. Weekdays they inspected their domains, ordered their affairs, attended to the needs of their dependents, consulted with their overseers and tenants, busied themselves with active benevo-lences. They were justices of the peace, and performed their unpaid duties with arduous and honest diligence, and with serene, unhampered impartiality toward a society to which they were not beholden for their official stations.
In short,

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· Jul 4

His travel arrangements might explain why he chose to expedite the proceedings by drawing laughter out of his fellow authors whenever he felt a speaker was violating the genre of the biographical “sketch.” Several reporters spent more time on trying to decipher Twain’s jokes than on the speeches.

which occurred on the 1st, was a tine allair. The platform was crowded, and the square was filed with a patriotic mob bursting for a chance to cheer. They were ready to holler at anything. and needed only the slightest pretext to go off Into spasms of applause. The invitations for the stand were sent by the Mayor, and the platform was filled with the solld citizens, with & sprinkling of foreigners and invited guests from other cities
or States. The authors of the country met in In-dence Hall before the exercises commenced, and deposited biographical sketches of Revolutionary heroes and heroism. The exercises commenced at half-past 12 o'clock, at which time the brains of our country made their appearance on the stage.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Ike Marvel, " Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Mark Twain were the only ones that I saw to know. Mark Twain sat in the midst of an admiring group of satelltes, who seemed perfectly convulsed at his asides throughout the performence. His crowd was especially hilarious during the speech or Mr. Mc.
Lean, who so bored the audience with his long and dry remarks that they tried their best to
•
cheer him down.
The blushing orator took it all
and orbite twas maderedover he doe
and on.
It was a matter of doubt if
would stop turning over a fresh page.
The peo-
ple stamped, pounded, clapped and hoorayed so that no one could hear a word, but the little man stood up with his eye-glasses atilt of his nose and glowed with pride and perspiration. The irreverent heark sat there with a face a yard long, and every time he moved his lips those near him Sendied up and grew alry purple in the e
lid wish so much that I could be near enough t hear what he said, but I could'nt help laughing at those who were enjoying his remarks.

Matt Seybold@mattseybold· Jul 2

I especially appreciated her reminder that the U.S. literary archive is "vast and weird," and canon-making is a pastime we can all participate in. Have fun matching you local literary scholar to their contribution to "the other canon."