MAKING LITERATURE RELEVANT
Now up as featured story at New Pop Lit is my short story, "The Advisor," about a mega-billionaire advisor to the U.S. President. "Yanked from news headlines," as long-ago promotions used to say.
The Question is whether other writers will begin penning tales about broader society during the here and now-- or remain stuck creating ever more examples of Selfie Fiction??
For myself, too much is happening in this country to ignore. Writers have voices. Time to use them!
Strange bedfellows indeed.
America's conservatives have thrown in with a coalition that includes Nietzscheans, libertarians, and tech accelerationists, with a scattering of angry Christians (which should be an oxymoron) thrown in.
Moreover, the movement is currently led by two of the most UNconservative individuals who could be found, namely billionaire Donald Trump and mega-billionaire Elon Musk. That is, if conservative still means, at its core A.) control of one's appetites, and B.) moral consistency.
What the two men are is not conservative. They are, instead, opportunistic salesmen, for whom nothing is more important than making the sale-- for their own personal benefit.
Both men, after all, have been masters at cronyistically benefitting from government largesse over the years. For most of their careers they weren't Republicans. Most of their wheeling-and-dealing was with the political party on the other side of the aisle. Trump, for his real estate projects in New York. Elon Musk, with the federal government, beginning with his relationship with Barack Obama.
Elon, needless to say, has never had scruples about doing business with anybody. Tesla's largest and most profitable factory is in China.
Donald Trump of late has also shown a preference for dictators. . . .
Which part of the Awkward Alliance will get burned?
Guesses are welcomed.
WHAT MANY don't realize is there are two kinds of censorship: the old-fashioned kind and the current version.
In the past, censorship meant removing writings and other kinds of media from any and every platform-- blocking access to every avenue of expression. While the situation was difficult, if you somehow did get your or your group's words and ideas out there, they could spread quickly and cause a sensation. This happened in 1917 during the Great War when Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik colleagues distributed their broadsides to Russian troops on the frontlines-- to an audience hungry to read alternatives and explanations. The simple printings were widely circulated.
Today, anyone can say and print anything, somewhere. Good luck getting it noticed! We are in the midst of a bombardment of Too Much Information coming at us from all sides-- a situation exacerbated by the onset of AI, which gives individuals and entities the ability to flood already-saturated markets at ten-to-100 times the previous level. Instead of new ideas or words of truth standing out against a barren landscape, they're buried beneath an avalanche of nonsense.
THE NOTION that technocratic billionaires like Elon Musk or Marc Andreessen can be censored, as they claim, or denied free speech, is ludicrous. They have gigantic megaphones, given their wealth and standing, to start with. As we see with Musk's purchase of Twitter, or his enormous monetary contribution to the Trump 2024 campaign, they retain the ability to steadily and exponentially increase the size of their speech.
We retain the right to scream like lunatics at the air, heard by nobody.
To date he's tangled with co-founders, critics, banks, regulators, competitors, media, and always comes out on top. Which doesn't mean this will continue. The one person in fact who can least afford a public setback is Musk, for this would puncture the bubble of perception about his unstoppable genius.
In this regard, the historical example most analogous to his situation is that of Napoleon. You know: the French conqueror who at the height of his success crowned himself emperor. A giant setback was sure to follow-- and did, when Bonaparte invaded Russia, then quickly enough had to leave, his much-lauded army vanished in ice and snow.
There's a kind of immutable law in the universe which decrees if you get too high, too hubristic, you're due for a devastating crash.
Anyway, I wouldn't bet against it.
