I came across this line in the Wlal Street Journal's review section about a month ago. It's from Sam Sacks, their fiction critic:
The story of the 20th-century novel is also the story of an art form brilliantly innovating toward its own marginalization.
Having read just about my fair share of novels, I think he's right. The more experimental the form has gotten, the less novels are being read. Even the best ones tend to be thinly veiled auto-fiction or else routine fan service, where the book is about books and book people being heroes against the unwashed, non-reading masses. As much as I enjoy Kingsley and Martin Amis, their brilliant novels helped ensure the marginalization of all the rest.
I might be wrong, but the more I think about it, the more I see that what Sacks identified about 20th-century novels applies to a lot of innovation. Some of the most brilliant and most innovative ideas accelerate their subjects, almost inevitably, towards their own marginalization. My work in software gives me a first-hand seat to watch an ever-complexifying toolset requiring more and more expertise to handle. The sharpest clients these days tend of have not one but many external agencies whose experts are able to actually use the tools in their client's workshop. Is enterprise software brilliantly innovative? Absolutely. But it takes ever-more niche expertise to do anything with it.
I like playing golf and, sometimes, watching it on TV. In the past few years, the golf people have innovated quite a bit: they've gone from essentially one to at least three organizations putting on televised golf events. They've just started another, where the golfers play via a grown-up Nintendo Wii simulator, so the spectators and cameras never have to move. It's pretty cool, but in diversifying the contests that comprise the sport, now no single golf event, not even the Olympics, includes enough of the top players to represent anything close to a championship. I don't think this was their intention, but when the golf people started to innovate, each idea took their sport further into itself and further away from a mainstream fan. Now I can spend all weekend watching a golf event and have nothing in common with my Dad, who did the same thing, just having picked the parallel league on the other channel.
The thing about any particular innovation—especially the brilliant ideas—is that when judged on its own, it makes complete sense. Who wouldn't want their CRM to come bundled with a CMS? Why not play golf inside in a futuristic simulator? Why not give the Pulitzer to Andrew Sean Greer? But if you zoom out a few clicks, perspective makes the idea a little less win-win. What happens to the average user when the software is able to do anything? What happens to golf when it becomes a videogame? What happens when authors only write about authors being authors?
It's a fairly cranky take, the idea that especially brilliant innovations tend towards marginalization, so the reading along the lines tends to be pretty good. I have three pieces for you: an essay on innovative social media alternatives turning into wastelands, a short piece identifying digital politics as inevitably self-destructive, and a nicely privileged takedown of AI and other cheap therapy alternatives. I'm not sure any of these is right, but perhaps they're the needed corrective to a de facto positivity towards technical innovation.
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