Last year I read a lot of older books for the contraptions book club (because of the theme, not because I have a particular fetish for older books), and this year is the same. By older I mean pre-1990 or so, not ancient, a few selections were if the original-source variety from 1300-1600.

In the process I realized I don’t like modern mainstream books post-1990 (ie internet era) books because they’re way too “market aware.” They seem written with an acute sense of current trends in intellectual culture, and honed by publisher expectations through an overdetermined proposal phase. Not just content, but style too: New Yorker style dated ledes, presence of an unnecessary sympathetic “viewpoint” character holding a through-line, confessional personal narrative serving no purpose, subcultural scene vignettes etc. Just like journalists decided their job was to create the narrative of the news rather than report the news itself, making news increasingly useless, the book industry I think decided their job was to create the narrative of culture, rather than just diving deep into topics of interest. Both are a kind of involution. A low-energy inward turn.

Both scholarly and popular books 1950-1990 or so have a modern but highly individualized feel to them, like the book was shaped by the author’s idiosyncratic sense of the material itself, rather than their shared sense of the market (which is often entirely lacking). Post 1990 popular books increasingly read like products of a taste monoculture machine. Even when the density is high and it’s not fluff, the feel is mass produced. Scholarly books, fortunately, seem to escape this for the most part. On the flip side more academics are choosing to write TEDesque books where a denser scholarly one could be written.

Ie modern books feel like the authors know relatively more about each other, the publishing industry, and the “market” than about their topic (scare quotes on market because I don’t think their mental models represent the actual nature of the reading public; only the segment manufactured by the bestseller-industrial complex comprising people who only read bestsellers). This is classic disruption — the industry retreated to the highest-value customers and the writers followed. These are not the biggest readers but medium-volume readers who all read the same things, allowing extremely low costs of catering to them. The disruption was likely amplified by blogs, but the trend started mid-late 90s (*cough* Malcolm Gladwell).

Essays are going through the same cycle on substack now.

I don’t mind that these books and essays exist and large masses of people seem to like and consume them (and presumably because they like participating in broader culture through the books more than they care about the particular topic/theme). It’s just not what I like to read (or write, for that matter). This means it’s relatively harder to find books on topics I want to read about. I have to filter out the too-market-aware ones, because I’m interested in the actual topic. Not the topic as an indirect view of the publishing industry, the people invested in it, and the current chapter of the cultural grand narrative they’re collectively authoring (Oprah book club as marker?).

Ironically, AI generated writing, despite the tendency to uniformity that you have to fight, and “index fund” sampling of what the textually recorded world has been thinking, actually seems to break out of “market awareness” a lot more because an industry hasn’t yet emerged around it. When slop finds its Oprah, that will suffer the same involutionary collapse into itself.