Review: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Published in 1933, I do not seriously presume to review this classic. I will briefly summarize salient themes and relate some of what Huxley says to my novels. Full disclosure: such a review and linking as this is purely for fun. My novels are not in the same league as Huxley’s. I make no claim to profundity.

WARNING! SPOILER ALERT

I begin at the end because the connection to my work is at the beginning. The “savage” commits suicide because, among other things, he cannot reconcile his [perfectly normal] youthful lust for an attractive young woman—who makes plain her desire for him—and his austere upbringing outside the brave new world. His mother, who came from the new world but became trapped in the savage land when she was pregnant (by a new-worlder), craves a return to the new world. When she finally returns with her son (now a young man), she cannot handle the culture shock compounded by the social opprobrium of new world denizens for her having gotten—and looking—old. She also kills herself, albeit more slowly. In the new world, both she and her son are freaks.

In Huxley’s new world, nobody is ever [supposed to be] unhappy, and the powers that be achieve this in three ways:

First, individuals are literally bred and conditioned through their childhood to fulfill specific social and industrial roles. One often hears the adage: “Love what you do, and you will never work a day in your life.” In the new world, people are made to love what they are born to do.

Second, drugs, Soma, the fictional drug of the new world that provides temporary ecstasy and escape from the real world, is not, apparently, harmful over the long term unless taken too often and without some recovery time—this is how the savage’s mother kills herself. Everybody has access to this drug.

The third way is sex. There is no stigma to casual sex in the new world; indeed, all sex is casual. No one marries, and women are not supposed to have babies—Literal bottles make babies (remember this published in 1933). To be sure, sex is consensual on both sides. Men and women can invite sex, and either party can refuse or accept invitations.

There are a few things to note about the sex. Power plays are going on. Handsome men and beautiful women are, of course, favored, but there is also a dynamic in which more powerful men, higher up the management hierarchy, have an advantage when inviting women to bed. Lower-order women often accept invitations from such men because the men are in a position to help them along a [limited] career path or give gifts. But as one might expect, such sex does not always make the woman happy. Lenine takes Soma to get past the sex when she sleeps with her supervisor-lover.

As an aside, Huxley here exhibits some chauvinism. Even in Huxley’s new world, the women are responsible for preventing pregnancy. Why? Surely, vasectomies were available in Huxley’s day? Why weren’t all male children vasectomized, or for that matter, why not alter the invitro gestations so that everyone—or at least all of one sex—is born sterile? The story precluded such a solution. At least one woman, the mother of the savage, had to become pregnant.

Before getting to the connection to my work, I note a few things about Huxley’s vision. He was wrong about the future of flying cars, but he predicted our present throwaway culture in which old things are easily discarded and exchanged for new things. To some extent, this was—for Huxley—a cultural phenomenon as it is for us. Also, like us, on the macro-economic level, the steady acquisition of new items keeps the wheels of industry and the economy working.

Huxley’s insight is built into Capitalism as we have it. He did not invent this idea (it goes back to Marx and Engles), and his new world elides the ecological and climatological problems occasioned by our conspicuous consumption—problems already, albeit tentatively, appreciated by the scientists of the 1930s. He correctly predicted that conspicuous consumption would grow way beyond what was already manifest in his time.

I now return to the connection between Brave New World and my novels, a connection that runs through sex.

There are sex-related geopolitical implications in all of my novels. In the first novel, Foreign Agent, the Chinese plan to disrupt American social and political life by introducing genetically modified men and women who can deliver much more powerful peak sexual experiences than ordinary humans. In the second novel, Foreign Agent the Last Chapter, space aliens propose to pacify humanity’s militant inclinations with more and better sex than anyone—well, few anyway—is presently having. In Cult of Aten, novel number three, worldwide good sex precipitates international chaos because in many [actual] countries, sex, other than the minimum required to produce tax-paying citizens from a marriage explicitly sanctioned by the State, is literally illegal! In Indonesia, sex outside the bounds of a conventional marriage is a capital crime! In novel number four, LoveMe Inc., we discover that radically conservative women are conservative because they aren’t having sufficient—or any—orgasms!

In Brave New World, Huxley illustrates his new world’s failure to deliver endless happiness through a sexual union made, on the woman’s part, from habit, not desire—like much sex in the real world. Huxley’s mistake was failing to distinguish sex from good sex, especially for women. Like accidental pregnancy, this is a plot demand for Huxley. It does not burden my stories.

Does this mean I believe that good sex alone is the solution to the world’s strife? Of course not! My novels are ridiculous, clumsy satires, while Huxley’s, if not a masterpiece, has demonstrated staying power in the canon of English socio-political satire. But if good sex alone was not sufficient to cure the world’s ills, it would, I believe, make some difference. People would be happier, and happier people are more tolerant of others’ differences. No novel, however masterful, addresses everything required for human happiness, let alone global peace and prosperity. All art is an interpretation, some more faithful to perceived reality than others.

Brave New World is not faithful to reality except in its anticipation of conspicuous consumerism, cross-cultural psycho-social shock, and bigotry—the last two the ultimate themes of the story. Like Huxley, my novels are socio-political satires, but the first three anticipate nothing. The fourth novel does make use of a real phenomenon. Orgasms activate brain centers related to tolerance and compassion—The novel cites actual research. But I leverage this objective observation to absurd levels. In my hands, it is not a prescient theme but a plot point.

Huxley’s themes speak to real life. His satire is filled with irony, pathos, poignancy, loneliness, and false happiness. He is not, however, funny. Huxley’s world is ridiculous and physically impossible, but it serves as a stage for human social and psychological reality. The political nature of my satire is unmistakable, but my world is ridiculous not because of any physical impossibility but rather its psycho-social absurdity. Orgasms do not, alas, turn Republican women into Democrats! Would that it be so! Huxley’s characters react realistically to their world. My characters react unrealistically to our world. But for this reason, and unlike Huxley, my novels are funny!

Review: Nature’s Mutiny by Philipp Blom

Pure history, 1570 through 1680, mostly of Europe, though Blom touches on the rest of the world from time to time. Why Europe? Because the records are the most extensive. Why those dates? Because they are the coldest (with some exceptional outliers before and after) period of the “Little Ice Age,” and it is that period, and the social, cultural, economic, and political changes that occurred during that century, largely compelled by the cold, that this book is about.

Earth scientists call the five centuries between 1300 to 1800 C.E. the “Little Ice Age.” At the beginning of this period, the Earth began to cool, reaching its lowest temperature, 2C below the 1300 average around 1570, and remaining there until 1680 or so when it began slowly to warm back to pre-1300 levels reaching them in the mid-1850s—Note that this is fifty years after the beginning of the industrial revolution. There have been other coolings in the not-to-distant past. The Earth’s northern hemisphere became unusually cold from 535 to around 545 C.E., but this shorter (10-year) cooling can be traced directly to large Icelandic volcanic eruptions. No one quite knows what factors contributed to the much longer cool period beginning in 1300.

So what happened? Well, for one thing, the weather changed. More storms, more droughts, much colder summers. Crops could not grow properly in foreshortened growing seasons; fruits would not ripen. In short, people starved. The result, over the first two generations of the coldest period, was a revolution in economics, trade, and agriculture that saw small subsistence farming converted into much larger, more efficient farming that provided for storage of excess product in good years (there were some) and trade in the bad ones. Such changes proceeded at different rates in different parts of Europe. Some of this difference was driven by political and religious ideology (Spain and Italy were more conservative than England or Scandinavia) and partly by climate. Spain was colder than usual but not as cold as Denmark.

There was also a revolution in thinking supported by the availability of books, thanks to Guttenberg. The foundations of “The Enlightenment” were laid in this period. Blom spends much of the book describing the thinking and the thinkers of this period and, in particular, their new-found ability to move around the continent, relocating to places where their thinking was better appreciated. This was the beginning of modern science and political philosophy. Blom asserts that all of these changes were more or less directly (economics and politics) or indirectly (philosophy, nascent science) tied to the cold.

Ending the book, Blom asks what the Little Ice Age can teach us about our present issues with climate change. Alas, there isn’t much it can teach us except that we should prepare for a long bout with geophysical changes (and their effects like reduction in food production, pandemics, and wars) that will surely cause a complete rearrangement of global civilization, including the likely (Blom doesn’t say this but read between the lines) collapse of the present world order. The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) was right in the middle of the cold.

Alas, our situation is very different, something Blom mentions but does not elaborate. In the Little Ice Age, sea levels dropped a bit, something easier to deal with than our present situation. Moreover, our present situation is a result of our activity. There were not enough humans on Earth to have greatly impacted the global climate. Lastly, in the past, the climate changed and then changed back. It isn’t going to change back this time. Even should humans, or at least their industrial activity, be extinguished, and the population shrinks to where it was in 1600 or earlier, the climate will not “change back” for possibly thousands, even tens of thousands, of years. See my review of The Uninhabitable Earth.

Book Review: The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh

The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh, 2019 on Amazon

This was a somewhat disappointing book. Amitay Ghosh is an Indian novelist. His contention in this nonfiction work is that novelists, more specifically writers of “serious literary fiction” (compared, say, to science fiction), are not taking on or dealing with the challenge of climate change. Why? Ghosh gives a few related reasons. They come down to the modern novel’s focus on character and its—his, hers, or theirs—interaction with the world, usually leading to some triumph of the human spirit. In other words, the humans of modern novels control (more or less and sometimes imperfectly) their destinies in spite of what the world throws at them. We moderns are (so novels would have us believe) largely responsible for the character of our lives. Climate change, Ghosh believes, has, or will, put paid to this notion (which is true), but serious novelists have not caught up. Serious novelists are still writing novels in which humans, for good or ill, are in control or end up in control.

Ghosh spends much of the book connecting the modern novel to the “industrial age,” in other words, to the world’s carbon economy. He does a good job tracing this parallel evolution, particularly as it unfolded in India, but not ignoring the rest of the world. The problem is that this connection is indirect. It is a coincidence not because the modern novel—not to mention the novelist—is independent of the carbon economy but in the sense that the carbon economy is responsible for modernity in general, and the modern novel, the “we are in control” trope, is merely one expression of modernity like everything else.

But there is more coincidence here. There are many modern literary novels whose story occurs in the context, say, of big wars. Now, wars are caused by humans living now (or when the war happens), while climate change is the result of human activity over the past 275-plus years—and more especially the last 100 years. From a literary viewpoint, what big war has in common with climate change is that modern character-oriented stories cannot encompass the whole of it, instead focusing on the effect of the over-arching event on the smaller events of individual people’s lives. Like war events, climate events are discrete.

But there is also a difference between big war and climate change. People, governments, have control over big wars in that they can and do eventually stop them, if only for a time. No one alive today, in 2025, nor anyone who lives through the next ten generations is going to block the oncoming impact (in discrete events—more floods, droughts, heat waves, sea level rise, etc) of climate change! Indeed if we ceased human production of atmospheric carbon tomorrow, the worldwide climate—cascades like melting permafrost and enormous annual forest fires having already been triggered—would continue to grow more inimical to human life for the next thousand years (see The Uninhabitable Earth by Wallace-Wells)!

The “out of context” problematic nature of climate change (compared, say, to war) is some part of Ghosh’s point. It isn’t that the modern novelist cannot write poignant stories about people living through climate-driven excessive heat, or floods, or what-have-you. Grapes of Wrath is nothing if not that. The problem is, I think that a hypothetical climate-change-driven novelist cannot end the novel on a note implying mankind (instantiated in the novel’s characters) still has some control over his physical environment. If the novel is to be written for or about this time—the first half of the twenty-first century—the characters involved might make spiritual, moral, or intellectual progress. But against the weather, the atmosphere, and oceans, the characters must, in the end, be crushed.

What is a novelist to do? Ghosh never tells us, even tentatively. It’s the one thing I was looking for in the book. If, as I assert, modern novelists can write such novels, then why aren’t they? Ghosh’s final position on this question seems to be that they haven’t broken free of the human-ultimatly-in-control trope. Perhaps he is right about this, but surely there are some serious modern novelists who are willing to cite climate change along with human stupidity, develop sympathetic characters, and then kill everybody off. Kurt Vonnegut’s Glapagos comes to mind.

What, as a writer, could I do? Could a modern novel encompass climate change in the abstract? What would such a novel look like? It might be more like The Odyssey than a modern novel. Characters might develop over volumes as some intrepid band navigates the globe, encountering one disastrous effect of climate change after another. In each place, some climate-related effect is responsible for the death of one or more members of the group. In the end, the last member must also die—symbolic of the inevitable future collapse of our present civilization—and not too distant a future at that. The project is too big a bite for me, but perhaps Ghosh might give it a go.

Review: The Out of Town Buyer by Anon & Anon

By Wehttam Tropapar

The novella is linked here.

To keep the entire corpus of Matthew Rapaport’s work together, I cannot fail to mention this book attributed to Anonymous & Anonymous. Make no mistake. Mr. Rapaport is one of its authors. Yes, only one of them.

In the mid-2000s, Matthew had an affair with a married woman whose real name and location still cannot be revealed. Known only as J., he discovered she was a good writer of erotica and they conspired to co-create an experimental novella in which each party uses a paragraph or two to describe some part of a scene, the paragraphs alternating between Matthew (M) and J as they proceed through the story. To separate the two voices, each author’s part is written in a different font and signaled with an M or J.

The story concept is simple: a man travels from the West Coast to the Midwest to buy a house for his family because his job is to be transferred there. His realtor, J, meets him at the airport and they go off together looking at houses. Each finds the other attractive, and back in his hotel room, Matthew seduces J. As it turns out, J, married for 25 years, does not have a great sex life in her marriage and lustfully craves the orgasms Matthew’s tongue delivers. What follows is a weekend of house hunting punctuated by a lot of over-the-top explicit sex.

Unlike Matthew’s other novels, The Out of Town Buyer is not a story mixed with a lot of sex. Rather, the sex is the story! As an experiment, it works well. Matthew did all the editing, but J’s voice comes through nicely, the two complimenting one another well. The story, written in 2005 wasn’t published until 2012 when Amazon publishing came to Matthew’s attention.

My Fiction

As of December 2024 there are four novels (five counting an anonymous novella) published on Amazon. All but the novella are published in Kindle (recommended) and paperback form. There are also reviews published here by guest author Wehttam Tropapar. I will link to Mr. Tropapar’s reviews below. There are links to the books on Amazon in each review.

Foreign Agent. 2021

Foreign Agent was conceived while I was taking a shower, having just finished joking with my girlfriend about Chinese technology (his television, Alexa, phones, etc.) monitoring our sex. I joked that I should invoice the Chinese. As I go off to my shower, I say to her: “The only fantasy in all of this is that the Chinese would pay me.” In the shower, I had an epiphany! “I could,” I said to myself, “simply make believe the Chinese would pay me”—not for sex, but for my geopolitical opinion! Sex was an added bonus. And so Foreign Agent was born.

Foreign Agent the Last Chapter. 2022

Foreign Agent was to be a stand-alone novel. I had no thought to write another. But some months after the publication, in another shower, I had another epiphany. There was an element of the first novel, the aliens mentioned only in its last chapter, that could be the basis of a second novel, and so Foreign Agent the Last Chapter was born! This novel is closely tied to the first. The locale and characters are the same; only time has passed.

Cult of Aten. 2023

Once again, in the shower, I wistfully realize that my two novels are not selling very well—a few copies a year, maybe! But what might happen, I wonder, if the Cult of Aten (conceived in the second novel) were made real and took off? That became the basis of the third novel, the Cult and the first two books becoming wildly successful! But while the first two novels are ostensibly drafted by Francis Nash in Bangkok, this one is written by me-as-myself. The setting and characters—except for introductory mentions establishing context for the reader—are entirely different. If Foreign Agent and Foreign Agent the Last Chapter are brothers, Cult of Aten is more of a distant cousin and can be read as a stand-alone novel.

LoveMe Inc. 2024

My fourth novel, LoveMe Inc., is entirely independent of the other novels. Narrated by a 38-year-old Matthew (who is not supposed to be me), the novel takes place near Washington, D.C., in 2027-9 and is something of a political thriller. There are a dozen or so main characters, but the central trio includes a libido-charged artificial intelligence conspiring to take control of U.S. and international politics based on ideas found in its training documents—which happen to include—surprise, surprise—the three prior novels of Matthew Rapaport!

The Out of Town Buyer (Kindle only)

The Out of Town Buyer is a co-authored novella, my first non-short-story piece of literature, written in 2005-6 but not published until 2012. The authors are listed as Anonymous & Anonymous to reflect the joint authorship and also hide themselves as both were married (one still is) at the time of the writing. Discovering that J (the co-author) was herself a stimulating erotica writer, I proposed that we write a story together. She proposed that we get together to “do some research.”

The story idea was that each scene (the sex and what happens before and in between the sex) would be crafted in detail and that each author would take a paragraph or two to describe that part of the scene in first person from their own viewpoint, the shifting voices being signaled by a change in font. Together (sometimes in bed), they mapped out the story paragraph by paragraph.

Unlike the later novels, part story and part sex, the novella is, except for an introductory few pages where we meet, all about the sex. My primary aim was to coax J into describing her orgasms. The reader will have to judge my degree of success.

***

Sex in the novels: Through the 1980s, 90s, and into the early 2000s, I wrote a half dozen pornographic short stories published on the Usenet (it was one of these stories, published in 2005 on Literotica, that brought J and me together to write The Out of Town Buyer). In those stories, excessively erotic explicitness is the backbone of the writing’s humor. This practice is only a little smoothed out in the novella, and sex remains over-described in the first two novels. When I wrote Cult of Aten, I decided it was too much of a good thing. In the longer form, the over-description got tiring. As a result, most of the over-description and even some, but by no means all, of the explicitness is removed in Cult of Aten, and this process advances in LoveMe Inc., where even more of the sex, but not all, is closer to soft-core.

Review: LoveMe Inc. by Matthew Rapaport

By Wehttam Tropapar

The novel: ebook and paperback available.

LoveMe Inc. is Matthew Rapaport’s fourth novel, a new story in a new place, with new characters, including the narrator (also Matthew), who is but thirty-eight years old. Ah to be young again… And yet, despite it’s narrative separation from the person of the author, Matthew manages to contrive some marketing for himself and his particular skills.

The story begins ambiguously in the summer/fall of 2027. Matthew, a programmer and statistical analyst, is contacted by a libido-endowed artificial intelligence (AI) and leads him into the employ of Dr. Pamela Parker (who researches psycho-sexual pathologies in women) and her post-grad student Lakshmi Tripathi. When the book opens, Matthew has already seduced and fucked six of Dr. Parker’s patients—I’m drifting into spoiler country here! No sex is portrayed in this part of the narrative, but his “bad boy” behavior comes back to bite him (and not in the good way).

Together the three of them, along with the AI, discover that certain women can be politically liberalized by orgasms. Between them, and soon more characters come into play, plots are hatched to help sway the national election of 2028, which the Republicans—having, as we know, won in 2024 by disinformation-appeal to an undereducated electorate—plan to fix so that electoral politics in America is ended once and for all.

There are multiple twists in this plot. AI is at the center of most of them. To tell you anything would commit major spoilers. Here is a minor one: how does Matthew Rapaport market himself? The full answer has two parts, but I’m only going to reveal one. His three novels (Foreign Agent, Foreign Agent the Last Chapter, and Cult of Aten) are the last three novels in the training corpus of the libidinous AI! Of the second, I will only say that it is one of the novel’s tragedies.

Mr. Rapaport is surely honing his craft. This is the most complex of his novels thus far, and except for a limited amount of gratuitous sex—90% of all the sex being softcore—the action all connects up sensibly. Moreover, there are no hanging threads needing resolution in epilogs. Mr. Rapaport ends this one properly!

Review: Liberalism and its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama 2021

Here a link to the book itself: Liberalism and its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama 2021

Liberalism combined with modern democratic government is the only socio-political philosophy that builds and maintains a happy society in the long run. The basic idea is that the locus of cultural and political choice lies with the individual, not the group. Fukuyama makes clear that this freedom of the individual cannot become license. There must be some commonly accepted behavioral boundaries, roughly captured by the notion that I am free to swing my fist until it makes contact with your nose.

Fukuyama uses most of the book to explore alternatives to liberalism: Communism, Fascism, neo-liberalism, pointing at Libertarianism, and identity politics. One by one, he shows how these alternatives (combined with human nature) always lead to political and economic unfairness greater than that of democratic liberalism, democracy–the vote–adding the dimension of political choice.

He then explores criticisms of “true liberalism” itself, for example, its insistence on tolerance of widely diverging cultural norms and possible violation of religious or nationalistic prescriptions or proscriptions. These might help establish cultural norms of behavior but may just as easily discourage tolerance of differences. Without something to be shared—Fukuyama cites nationalism as one, albeit dangerous, possibility—the polity is ultimately pulled in so many directions that policy gridlock ensues.

Of course, all of this is theoretical. The U.S. is no longer entirely “democratic,” and what aspired to be reasonably liberal in the post-WWII generation is now divided, socially, culturally, politically, and even economically, into blocks that see competition between themselves and others as a zero-sum game.

Neither liberalism nor democracy can persist in the face of an insufficiently educated public. If the education system permits a generation to forget the horrors perpetrated by attempts at systems other than liberal democracies, the next generation—dissatisfied with the difficult choices liberalism forces on the individual—will think to attempt them again. Even worse, an education system that leaves basic facts (scientific and historical) in doubt breaks apart the last atoms of common ground the polity possesses.

I have said elsewhere that a fully tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance at the risk of its tolerance being politically undercut. The U.S.’s tolerance of intolerance had led us down the populist path thanks to education’s failure noted above. Fukuyama’s apology for classical liberalism is right on the mark as far as I am concerned, but then, I’m an educated individualist who gets along with his fellow man! Too many now fail at one test or the other.

In the not-to-distant past, we were, perhaps, a bit closer to the educated-liberal polity ideal. Of course, we were never entirely there—the “good old days” were never wholly good. Distortions have always existed—selfish individuals who would leverage the non-liberal to their own political or economic advantage, further distorting the system—and under those conditions, when society tolerates outright intolerance of others for political, racial, or sexual reasons and historical education fails, the liberal order is quickly eroded. We are living the process now.

For a historical look at ideological liberalism, have a look at this review: The Once and Future Liberal by Mark Lilla.

Review: Conspiracies of Conspiracies by Thomas Konda, 2019

Author’s note: As of December 2024, I am no longer posting reviews of my non-fiction reading on Amazon (see this for more information). I will continue to post reviews here, and in addition, instead of posting the original [Amazon] review preceded by my extra comments, I will review with integrated extra comments.

While not posting reviews on Amazon, I will still provide my readers links to the books: Conspiracies of Conspiracies by Thomas Konda 2019

***

A superb review not only of conspiracy theories but also of the psychological and now political phenomenon of conspiracism, the inclination to believe broadly in conspiracies. Belief in broad fantastical conspiracies has been around for a long time. Dr. Konda takes us through some history, starting in Europe but then quickly moving to the U.S., which has, it seems, been conspiracy-addled since its founding.

Konda takes us through the broad conspirational ideas, the hidden hand conspiracies of the Illuminati, Jews, bankers (often Jewish bankers), and so on, down to more modern variations, like the anti-vaccine crowd, climate change denialism, Kennedy assassination conspiracies, the “9-11 truther movement,” and so on. Some of these ideas—fake moon landings, flat Earth—are harmless in themselves, while others—mistrust and misunderstanding of science in general or the illegitimacy of the Federal Government—are potentially very dangerous—psychologically, socially, and politically.

Konda leaves us embedded in the modern problem. Despite conspiracism’s long U.S. history, it is surprising that so little government economic and social policy was impacted by it—until the present century. The rise of social media—cheap international communications direct to the individual—has greatly increased the reach and danger of the conspiracist landscape.

How have we come to this sorry state? The bottom line seems to be a failure of American education, a crucial lack of civics and critical thinking. Ironically, the present educational environment is reinforced by a generation of conspiracists who now comprise a large part of the government. Civics is “socialism”, and critical thinking is “wokeism,” and so on.

I make only one small critical point. The book was published in 2019, and there is no mention of QAnon, a conspiracy consolidator and clearing house—capturing everyone’s social media attention—appearing on the scene in 2017. Konda is too thorough to have missed this. The book was likely finished before QAnon’s emergence, and the publisher responsible for the two-year delay.

An excellent and frankly frightening read not nearly as long as it appears—almost half of it is end notes: hundreds of books, articles, and websites. If you are looking for the roots of present-day conspiracism or have concerns about its present political implications and force, this is a good source.

why I no longer write non-fiction reviews for amazon

I believe I have written something around 150+ book reviews for Amazon, but I have posted my last. Why? Over the years, Amazon has rejected three of my reviews for words they didn’t like.

The first two rejections were pretty illogical. In a book titled “On Bullshit” (the book title and link laid out by Amazon at the top of the review), I used the word ‘bullshit.’ In a book titled “Assholes, a Theory,” you can guess the rest. I didn’t make changes to satisfy Amazon’s absurd demands. I simply didn’t post those reviews—the very short Assholes review is here.

The third rejection went differently. In a book titled “Conspiracies of Conspiracies” (history and content of conspirational thinking), the author notes that from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, most political and economic conspiracy theories blamed (among many others) ‘Jews,’ or ‘Jewish bankers’ for the world’s troubles. It seemed to me it must be the words derived from ‘Jew’ that was Amazon’s problem.

This time, I tried an experiment. I re-submitted the review, substituting underscores ‘____’ for the words ‘Jews’ and ‘Jewish.’ The result was not merely another rejection but a warning letter telling me I had “violated community guidelines.” (Is there a guideline pertaining to underscores in reviews?), and I should consider the letter a “first warning.” Amazon would, they said, ban me from posting reviews should I continue my unsocial behavior.

That email was the last straw for me. The “first warning” will be my last. I will post no more reviews of non-fiction books on Amazon. I will make an exception for fiction writing by authors I know on social media, especially if they also review one of my books (novels or non-fiction). I will continue to read non-fiction purchased from Amazon (via bookbub.com), and if interesting enough, I will continue to review them here as I have done now with my conspiracies review.

Matthew Rapaport

December 2024

A.I. Can Have My Stuff!

Elon Musk recently changed (Nov 15, 2024) X’s (formerly Twitter) user agreement. From that point on, anything posted or displayed becomes the royalty-free but non-exclusive property of Musk to sell as he pleases, including for A.I. training purposes. This comes down to Musk not paying for your content—is he paying you now?—but also that you still own your content and may sell it to others if you wish. I noticed the summary I read did not distinguish between public and DM messages.

This policy change has naturally occasioned discussion on X, and I have said for a long time that I do not care if my content is used for A.I. training purposes. To be clear, I think people have legitimate concerns about the misuse of personal data. I may elaborate on this later, but for now, I’m only going to say that most of those “personal abuse” issues already occur; they do not need to buy what Elon is selling. In this hopefully short essay, I will only talk about A.I. training and response.

What does A.I. want with our content? A.I. is not trying to steal your work (images, text, music, what have you) to duplicate it. It is reading, viewing, or listening to your work to “understand” it (notice the scare quotes)! It wants to “know” how elements go together, what is a “proper” association or transition, what key concepts or color/line associations or musical phrases are present, and how they relate to those around them, including all the other music or images or text the A.I. “sees” in its training. That’s millions, even billions of texts, images, or bars of music. What constitutes “your work” in there is a miniscule portion of the total.

Human artists have done this with one another’s work since Homer! I do not know a writer who doesn’t read others and “draw” from what they read. The same is true for the visual or musical arts. When I write on a particular subject or craft a story, all that I have read is, in some part, melded into how I express myself—a combination of my own skills and what I have learned and remember from others. A.I. is doing exactly this when it outputs an answer. It associates around a topic using all that it has “learned.”

Of course, A.I. has total recall and we do not. Critics would say that A.I. can’t add anything strictly novel. That may be true, but I suspect much of what we think of as novel about our own creative thought or that of others has come from some long ago encountered thing whose source—in our minds—has been forgotten. The difference between us and the A.I. is that the A.I. doesn’t forget! The human melding of past experience and A.I. melding of training data are entirely different mechanisms, but the results are similar.

If some random human can read my tweets, essays, or novels and assimilate an idea that later finds its way into one of their works—remember, it isn’t a copy of my work—I would be honored by my inclusion. Why should it be any different if it is an A.I. that does the assimilating?

Suppose that phrase of yours, hardly noticed today, comes to be on everyone’s lips thanks to another artist’s—or A.I.’s—output fifty years from now? Either way, no one will know that you are the original creator of the phrase or technique, but either way, your creation is made to live again! That is why I invite Elon (in fact, I dare him, but that is another matter) to use my tweets to train A.I. As for Amazon or WordPress, they can use my books, reviews, and essays! I won’t get paid, but then I’m not being paid now and I’m still writing stuff!

My books and essays are copyrighted (A.I. cannot just “read them out” without getting into abuse territory already possible without A.I.), but copyright does not prevent other authors from incorporating my thoughts—even literally, as fragments of text in their work. Why should I object if some future A.I. output does the same? That kind of fragmentary inclusion is pretty much the worst thing that could happen!

***

Why do I say above, “I dare Musk”—or Bezos, or the owners of WordPress—to let A.I. train on my writing? Because if they do dare, their A.I.’s will end up with such original phrases as “consummate conscious cunnilingists” and “pluripotent poetic porn” in their repertoire! I say let them!

Ruminations

"And a woman is only a woman but a good cigar is a smoke" Kipling. "The Betrothed"

Author: Quine Atal