AR Hanlon
@arhanlon
Hanlon’s Razor II: Never attribute to intelligence that which is adequately explained by cynicism or greed. About: aaronrhanlon.com
Yeah, I'm sure the system that 'discovered' and developed Brendan Aaronson is so much more profitable than the systems that pulled Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar, Victor Osihmen, Luka Modric, and Raheem Sterling out of poverty. Famously no one's ever made any money developing those bums.
It's interesting to watch the convergence of artists and programmers on the general sentiment of oh shit oh shit oh shit shit shit shit fuck oh no.
It's therefore not surprising that 'reading,' understood in the Modernist sense as an act of endurance and difficulty, becomes a niche and 'performative' act.
They're just not thinking of 'reading' in the way literature profs and teachers (i.e. Modernist studies people in thin disguise) understand the act: as an act of endurance and difficulty.
People are of course still reading and writing a lot of text, and are still using brains.
Fascinating article, but I can't help but think what's being called here 'the end of reading' is actually just 'the end of Modernism.'
Fellow authors: without any context, what's the first line of your current WIP?
Note that the knowledge under consideration in the OP is not interpretive or literary-critical; it’s literary history. The conclusions are explicable with recourse to facts. I’ve provided an outline for what this could look like for literary history: philarchive.org/rec/HANEBI
This is a truly insane paragraph. This is like if I got a paper published in The Lancet in which I claim physicians only started taking seriously the germ theory of disease in the 2010s.
‘We seek to resist…’ oh word? Yeah standing athwart history yelling ‘stop!’ is gonna do it.
I’m thinking this way in particular after reading the MLA white paper on AI use in the humanities. Like, this is the most predictable, rote, dead-in-the-water thinking possible on this issue. And the use of ‘commitments’ give a e game away: no questions, we already know it all!