Oxford and the Observer Do Social Mobility

What’s wrong with this picture?

An Oxford university student, Oscar Jelley, has won the Observer/Anthony Burgess prize for arts journalism – a competition for ‘fresh voices’, no less.

The prize has been awarded for a review of Isabel Waidner’s Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, a novel that critiques the awarding of literary prizes by exclusive institutions and argues powerfully against ‘bourgeois cultural gatekeeping’ and the ‘unwritten rules that govern the often suffocatingly bourgeois world of prestige culture’.

The review claims ‘literature should not be the preserve of a moneyed elite.’ It's a statement with which The Fall would no doubt agree, their lyric, ‘Life should be full of strangeness,’ being used to top and tail the prize-winning piece.

Speaking of the prize-winning elite railing against ‘the elites’ while displaying little sense of irony … what’s the betting the reviewer supports Manchester City, too!

No 1 Introduction to the Robot Review of Books

No 1 Introduction to the Robot Review of Books from RRB on Vimeo.

Introducing the Robot Review of Books.

Like the London Review of Books ... but with even more robots!

The Robot Review of Books is an AI ‘magazine’ consisting of short computational media essays that are typically structured as book reviews.

🆓 Free: No subscriptions, no paywalls.

🚫 Non-Surveillance Capitalist: Viewer privacy is respected with no collection, storage or sale of personal data.

🤫 Quiet: No hype, no appeals for likes, shares or follows.

The RRB is not a business: there are no adverts, no podcasts, no RRB tote bags.

It's not run by would-be influencers, either human or machine. So, no urging you to get in touch if you have any questions. And new content does not appear online according to a regular schedule - certainly not one set by the algorithms of social media. Contributions are just added to the Robot Review of Books when they are ready to be published.

RRB #1 might be the only one. Or it might be the first of many.

On 'Critiquing the Vocabularies of the Marketized University' by Natalie Fenton et al

'Critiquing the Vocabularies of the Marketized University', by Natalie Fenton, Des Freedman, Gholam Khiabany and Milly Williamson, which has been published in a special issue of the journal Media Theory on Critique, Postcritque and the Present Conjuncture, is well worth a read.

https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/887/575

For all its concern with the hollowing out of critique in the marketized university, though, could this essay itself have been more critical?

1) Critical University Studies is cited approvingly by Fenton et al. Yet CUS has been heavily criticised by those in favour of an Abolitionist University Studies, for being ‘haunted’ by nostalgia for an expansionist postwar public university system that ignores how that system was ‘underwritten by militarized funding priorities, nationalist agendas, and an incorporative project of counterinsurgency’.

2)  The conclusion of Fention et al. is we that need to remain in the university (rather than plan to leave it as many are now doing) and fight for education as a public good. But if we stay, what are we actually going to do differently by way of resisting the marketized university and freeing ourselves from it (which for them is the purpose of critique)? Fenton et al. recommend continuing to value ‘solidarity forms’ - building ‘friendships and alliances’ etc. – where we can keep the flame of critique alive. But we’ve been doing that for years and its not stopped us getting into this mess. So how is it going to get us out of it?

30-Second Book Review No.2: K Allado-McDowell’s Amor Cringe and Pharmako-AI

30-Second Book Review.

No.2

K Allado-McDowell’s Amor Cringe (Los Angelese: Deluge Books 2022) and Pharmako-AI (London: Ignota Books 2020).

K Allado-McDowell’s pioneering experimental novel Amor Cringe is ‘half traditionally-written and half AI-generated’ (2022), and is published on an all rights reserved basis by Deluge Books.

The same applies to Allado-McDowell’s collection Pharmako-AI, which bills itself as the ‘first book to be co-written with the language AI GPT-3. It is published all rights reserved by Ignota Books, with serif being used to identify those parts written by Allado-McDowell, and serif font the inputs Allado-McDowell gave the model, the rest being written by GPT-3. This ensures the two co-authors – human and machine – remain ontologically distinct. In not being authored primarily by nonhumans, it also ensures both books are copyrightable.

But what if, as Allado-McDowell suggested recently at the Cybernetic Serendipty: Towards AI event in London, art in the 21st century will weave together human and machine intelligences? How will this impact those humanist notions of authorship, attribution and copyright Allado-McDowell seems so anxious to maintain?

Thousands of Readers, But Who Cares?

YouTube video on why lots of YouTube content creators are suffering burnout and quitting.

Because the idea that the internet allows you to do without gatekeepers is a myth. Today, there are more gatekeepers with more power than ever before. It’s just now they’re the recommendation algorithms of TikTok, YouTube et al. rather than the humans that content creators needed to appeal to in the past: the record label execs, movie industry producers and so forth.

And because you can have 1.8 million subscribers on YouTube. But unless you are capable of making someone money, or winning them some awards, nobody in the creative industries cares.

Are there any lessons here for academics? Especially given so many are burning out and quitting too. 

Should we be so surprised if operating in alternative ways to the legacy industries and institutions does not lead to thriving within them over the longer term? Doing so is only a ‘dead end’, surely, if what we really want is to be taken up and accepted by them on their (money-making, awarding winning) terms.

Which leads to the next question provoked by this video: is the point ultimately to be happy within the current western academic industrial complex as it has been generated by the traditional institutions plus the ‘shiny new creator economy’, or is it to change it?

Both would be nice, of course. But is that realistic? Is it even possible?