The parasitic model

My post yesterday, about how the profit motive in (and corporate control of) media has annihilated any hope of getting accurate representation of the news, was almost immediately followed up by my running into a story about how the same forces in creative media are working to strangle creativity at its source.

The article was from Publishers Weekly, and was about an interview with HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray.  It centered largely on the company's whole-hearted endorsement of AI as part of its business model.  He describes using AI to take the place both of human narrators for audiobooks and of translators for increasing their sales in non-English-speaking countries, which is troubling enough; but by far his most worrisome comment describes using AI, basically, to be a stand-in for the authors themselves.  Lest you think I'm exaggerating, or making this up entirely, here's a direct quote from the article:

The fast-evolving AI sector could deliver new types of formats for books, Murray said, adding that HC is experimenting with a number of potential products.  One idea is a “talking book,” where a book sits atop a large language model, allowing readers to converse with an AI facsimile of its author.  Speculating on other possible offerings, Murray said that it is now possible for AI to help HC build an entire cooking-focused website using only content from its backlist, but the question of how to monetize such a site remains.

Later in the article, almost offhand, was a comment that while HarperCollins saw their sales go up last year by only six percent, their profits went up by sixty percent.  The reason was a "restructuring" of the company -- which, of course, included plenty of layoffs.

How much of that windfall went to the authors themselves is left as an exercise for the reader. 

I can vouch first-hand that in the current economic climate, it is damn near impossible to make a living as a writer, musician, or artist.  The people who are actually the wellspring of creativity powering the whole enterprise of creative media get next to nothing; the profits are funneled directly into the hands of a small number of people -- the CEOs of large publishing houses, distributors, marketing and publicity firms, and social media companies.

I can use myself as an example.  I have twenty-four books in print, through two small traditional publishers and some that are self-published.  I have never netted more than five hundred dollars in a calendar year; most years, it's more like a hundred.  I didn't go into this expecting to get rich, but I'd sure like to be able to take my wife out to a nice restaurant once a month from my royalties.

As it is, we might be able to split the lunch special at Denny's.

Okay, I can hear some of you say; maybe it's not the system, maybe it's you.  Maybe your books just aren't any good, and you're blaming it on corporate greed.  All right, fair enough, we can admit that as a possibility.  But I have dozens of extraordinarily talented and hard-working writer friends, and they all say pretty much the same thing.  Are you gonna stand there and tell us we're all so bad we don't deserve to make a living?

And now the CEO of HarperCollins is going to take the authors out of the loop even of speaking for ourselves, and just create an AI so readers can talk to a simulation of us without our getting any compensation for it?

Ooh, maybe he could ratchet those profits up into the eighty or ninety percent range if he eliminated the authors altogether, and had AI write the books themselves.

Besides the greed, it's the out-of-touchness that bothers me the most.  Lately I've been seeing the following screenshot going around -- a conversation between Long Island University Economics Department Chair Panos Mourdoukoutas and an ordinary reader named Gwen:

The cockiness is absolutely staggering; that somehow it's better to put even more money in Jeff Bezos's pockets than it is to support public libraries.  They've already got the entire market locked up tight, so what more do the corporate CEOs want?  It's flat-out impossible as an author to avoid selling through Amazon; they've got an inescapable stranglehold on book sales.  And, as I found out the hard way, they also have no problem with reducing the prices set by me or my publisher without permission, further cutting into any profit I get -- but, like HarperCollins, you can bet they make sure it doesn't hurt their bottom line by a single cent.

And don't even get me started about the Mark Zuckerberg model of social media.  When Facebook first really got rolling, authors and other creators could post links to their work, and it was actually not a bad way to (at the very least) get some name recognition.  Now?  Anything with an external link gets deliberately drowned by the algorithm.  Oh, sure, you can post stuff, but no one sees it.  The idea is to force authors to purchase advertising from Facebook instead.

Basically, if it doesn't make Zuckerberg money, you can forget about it.

If I sound bitter about all this -- well, it's because I am.  I've thrown my heart into my writing, and gotten very little in return.  We've ceded the control of the creative spirit of humanity to an inherently parasitic system, where the ones who are actually enriching the cultural milieu are reaping only a minuscule percent of the rewards.

The worst part is that, like the situation I described yesterday regarding the news media, I see no way out of this, not for myself nor for any other creative person.  Oh, we'll continue doing what we do; writing is as much a part of my life as breathing.  But isn't it tragic that the writers, artists, and musicians whose creative spirits nurture all of us have to struggle against seemingly insurmountable odds even to be seen?

All because of the insatiable greed, arrogance, and short-sightedness of a handful of individuals who have somehow ended up in charge of damn near everything that makes life bearable.  People who want more and more and more, and after that, more again.  Millions don't satisfy; they need billions.

As psychologist Erich Fromm put it, "Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever actually reaching satisfaction."

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Reaping the whirlwind

Back in 1980, I came up with an idea for a novel.

Ronald Reagan had just been elected president, and many of us were alarmed at what seemed like a lurch toward far-right populism -- anti-regulation, pro-corporate policy that was marketed as somehow being beneficial to the working class.  The buzzwords were "trickle-down economics," the idea that if you gave big tax breaks to the rich, the benefits would "trickle down" to you and me and the rest of the working stiffs.  It was bolstered by a belief that the rich were actually concerned about lifting the working class out of poverty; that it was possible, in the society as it was, for a poor person to become wealthy.

That, to quote Steinbeck, the poor were just "temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

It didn't work.  The rich got richer (as intended) and the working class reaped exactly zero benefits from it.  And it generated deep resentment, as corporate profits soared, CEOs raked in unimaginable amounts of cash -- and workers' salaries stagnated.

And I thought: this can't go on forever.  At some point, people are going to get fed up, decide they have nothing to lose, and pull the whole superstructure down.

This was the genesis of my novel In the Midst of Lions.

The title comes from a line from Psalm 56: "Have pity on me, O God, have pity on me... for I lie prostrate in the midst of lions that devour men."  The story is set in Seattle, and centers around five completely ordinary people who are caught up in the collapse.  The attacks are precipitated by a shadowy worldwide organization of violent anarchists called the Lackland Liberation Authority; the "Lacklanders" are people who lost their property from corporate buy-ups of land for industrial agriculture and mining, and because price increases made home ownership out of reach.  Threatening LLA graffiti, in their trademark red spray paint, begins showing up on walls.  

Then the attacks start.  At first, they're scattered and sporadic, targeting a few of the most egregious offenders; but when that doesn't work, they strike hard, and simultaneously, at governmental and business leaders across the world.

The result is spiraling chaos.

Back in 1980 I wrote a few chapters of it, but somehow sensed that I didn't have the background, knowledge, or writing skill to pull off something this big, so I tabled the project.  It was in the back of my mind -- for forty years.  In 2020 I finally decided to tackle it, and wrote it and two sequels (The Scattering Winds and The Chains of Orion), which I published in 2023.  

The reason this comes up is that there's a passage from In the Midst of Lions that's been on my mind for the last couple of days:

“But there’s one thing I don’t understand,” Soren said.  “If they had this coordinated, worldwide plot, planned well in advance, there has to have been communication between different places.  By destroying the telecommunication hubs, they’ve cut themselves off along with the rest of us.  It’s sawing off the tree branch you’re sitting on.”

“I doubt they care.” Cassandra’s lips tightened, the only display of emotion she revealed.  “I’ve read some of the Lacklanders’ manifestos.  They’re no different than the suicide bombers in the Middle East back during the Gulf Wars.  The point is to destroy the power structure they despise.  If they can take down the corporate-capitalist overlords, they still count it as a success even if they go down along with them.”

“That makes no sense at all,” Mary said.

“I didn’t say it was rational.”

The deadly attack on UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson comes from this same desperation.  UnitedHealth is in first place amongst American health insurance companies for percentage of claims turned down -- estimates are around a 32% denial rate.  "Deny, Defend, Depose" was written on the bullet casings -- and the disingenuous media is still saying, "Gee, I wonder what the murderer's motive was?"  Instead of outrage at the violent act, the result has been an outpouring of anger against health insurance companies -- and by extension, ultra-wealthy corporate CEOs everywhere -- coupled with a complete lack of sympathy for Thompson and a celebration of his killer (who, at the time of this writing, remains unidentified and at large).  A Facebook post by UnitedHealth asking for "understanding in this difficult time" got almost a hundred thousand responses -- 77,000 of which were laugh emojis.  

But what gave me the biggest shiver up the spine was the following image of graffiti I saw on Facebook.

In red spray paint.  In Seattle.

I said to a friend -- and I was only half joking -- "I didn't think I'd have to move In the Midst of Lions to the non-fiction shelf quite this soon."

Thompson's murder, and the glee that followed, isn't laudable, but it is understandable.  And it definitely isn't one pundit's characterization of "a sign of the deep moral and ethical corrosion of America."  It's a result of something that we've seen over and over again in history, from the American and French Revolutions to what's happening right now in Syria; if you push people long enough and hard enough, profit off their struggle, empower corrupt oligarchs and expect the working class simply to play along, eventually the whole tower of cards collapses.  People will then take action by whatever means they can to put an end to it -- legally or illegally, ethically or unethically, peacefully or violently.

Something Donald Trump and his ultra-wealthy corporate capitalist cronies might want to keep in mind.

Stephen King wrote, in his book The Stand, "The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short."  It's a line that's stuck with me since I first read it, perhaps thirty years ago.  The power-hungry and super-wealthy -- who are, of course, usually one and the same -- think their riches will protect them.  That's what King Louis XVI thought; so did Napoleon, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, Idi Amin, Benito Mussolini, Pol Pot, Ferdinand Marcos, and Muammar Gaddafi.  

All of them were wrong, and several of them paid for that error with their lives.

The problem with all this is that the result of the downfall of dictators is often chaos, destroying economy, infrastructure... and the ordinary people who only wanted to be able to feed their families and have a roof over their heads.  In In the Midst of Lions, it's not just the corporate oligarchs who end up suffering, it's everyone.

I'd like to hope that the people in charge will recognize where we're headed before it's too late, but unfortunately, we have a very poor track record of learning from history.  (Or from cautionary fiction, for that matter.)  The overweening arrogance that comes with wealth and power tends to make them say, "Oh, sure, it may have happened to all those people in history... but it won't happen to me."

It all reminds me of another biblical quote, this one from the Book of Hosea: "Who sows the wind, reaps the whirlwind."

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