Speak Free or Die

 

I am not allowed to say this person's sex or name.

I hear that, like the box office failure of a string of recent Hollywood movies, recent “woke” books have failed to earn back their advances. One is “Elliot” Page’s autobiographical account of a female-to-male transition, a $3 million advance. Another, a “queer feminist western,” got a $500,000 advance and sold 3,500 copies.

Meanwhile, white male authors say they cannot get published.

It is possible to see firms like Disney or Anheuser-Busch deciding to take a loss to push politics. One imagines they have a financial cushion. It is harder to explain this in book publishing. Book publishing runs on tight margins, and publishers often go bankrupt. They need to be more careful.

I imagine something else is going on. The editors genuinely thought that the market craved these books. Perhaps, then, this is also the truth for Disney and the others.

Anyone who has been to university these days has been thoroughly indoctrinated in woke ideology. No other views are heard in class; or permitted. To be smart and educated is simply to accept these dogmas. It is easy to graduate imagining that everybody thinks this way, or should think this way, and only needs to be introduced to these ideas to accept their self-evident rightness.

Then, as all other views are unacceptable, they are suppressed if heard. In the classroom, in the media, in business, on the internet. Anyone who expresses them risks losing their livelihood. Some, even most, might privately doubt or disagree, but nobody dares say so. Safer to join in suppressing them so one is not suspected of holding them oneself.

The woke no longer hear any dissent; other than perhaps some “far-right” fringe. It is easy for them to imagine that they represent the vast majority. Silence, after all, implies consent. And so they push on.

But this no longer works when it gets down to individual discretionary spending. Even if you control the airwaves, the publishers, the internet, all the breweries, all the media of distribution, people can simply not buy something they do not need: a beer, or a movie ticket, or a book. They can stop attending church.

It’s not a boycott. It’s just their true preference. Nor are they easily swayed on these matters by lecturing them on their supposed social responsibility—an appeal that might work at the ballot box. One seeks here simple enjoyment, and the thing is fun, or it is not worth the money.

And so, get woke, go broke.

This is an argument against suppressing free speech. Over the longer term, it harms even those in power. Soon they are no longer getting reliable information, are operating in the dark, and will blunder off a cliff.

Dangerous Editing

Dangerous Uncle Tom faggot.

As a former and perhaps future editor, I am fascinated to see that the original manuscript of Milo Yiannopoulos's Dangerous has been released publicly, complete with editor's comments. For one thing, you get to read the book, a current bestseller, for free. For another, you get great insight into the editorial process at a top US publisher, Simon & Schuster.

Those who dislike Yiannopoulos are claiming that the editorial notes amount to a “takedown” and discredit Yiannopoulos.

My impression is quite different.

Milo's original manuscript looks lazy, granted. Close to being stream of consciousness, without any deep research or anything new for anyone who has listened to many of his public lectures. He needed editing.

On the other hand, this editor seems antagonistic to Milo's basic persona and message. The editorial suggestions seem often wrongheaded. The editor seems to be trying to make the book more bland, which does not serve the author, the publisher, or the reader. It especially does not fit with the Milo brand. It amounts to an act of sabotage.

For example:

Milo writes, “the film was limper than a frat boy's penis at a fat-acceptance rally.” The editor strikes that and replaces it with “the film was boring.” That is plain sabotage; this is the sort of colour people come to a Milo lecture to hear. This is why you want to read Milo instead of some generic writer.

Milo writes, in argument, “there was no reason why the left had to abandon its old blue-collar base.” The editor responds, patronizingly, “The reason was partly that the base abandoned the Democrats during the 1960s because the Democrats voted for civil rights legislation.” This is a tired left-wing talking point that Milo is surely entirely familiar with, and long debunked on the right—for one thing, the Republicans voted more consistently than the Democrats for civil rights legislation in the 1960s. That the editor states it as fact, and assumes Yiannopoulos has not heard this, shows that he has no knowledge of thinking on the right. This makes him fundamentally unqualified to edit a book directed at that readership.

To many of Milo's jokes, the editor just notes something like “unfunny,” or “doesn't land,” or “superfluous.” Not helpful. Yiannopoulos is an experienced comedian who has honed his routines in front of live audiences. It is pure arrogance—or sabotage--for this editor to imagine that he is the better judge of what gags work. One suspects the real problem is that they seem to him to sting—that is, they make Milo's point too well.

In one paragraph, Milo states that the non-unionized working class were attracted to Thatcher and Reagan because of their tough stances against unions. The editor comments “Point out that the working class were attracted to Thatcher and Reagan despite their tough stances against unions?” He simply seems ideologically incapable of grasping the point.

Yiannopoulos says of a certain sort of opponent, “They are the type who will be disappointed by a DNA test that shows they are 99% of European ancestry, because they thought 'I might be something interesting,'” and adds a few other amusing hypothetical examples of limp-wristed leftism. The editor notes “cite examples.” This is like jamming a stick in someone's bicycle spokes as they ride by. Milo is not saying these people do this, but that they are the type who would. Not the same thing, and trying to pedantically document examples of people doing this would murder the joke.

Yiannopoulos then calls gay marriage a “relatively trivial” issue. Quite a reasonable thing to say, surely. The editor will not have this, and rewrites it as “previously ignored.” Comment: “Don't call it trivial.” No further explanation. This is thought-policing at its most blatant.

People like to listen to Milo because he says things in the strongest terms. This is the point of Milo: to poke a finger in the eye of political correctness. People buying his book will be buying it for more of this. Yet this editor objects every time Yiannopoulos uses a particularly strong image or analogy. He is not allowed to compare anyone to Nazis. “Ever.” He is not allowed to call himself a “gay Uncle Tom,” because this is “inflammatory.” And so forth.

Yiannopolos calls his boyfriends “denizens of the dark continent.” The editor strikes this, on the grounds that it sounds like “darkies,” and replaces it with “black men.” Granted that “denizens of the dark continent” is awkward—nothing dark about Africa, and probably Milo's boyfriends to not actually live in Africa. But at least it is far better than the editor's substitution, which is bland, boring and lazy; or else deliberate sabotage. He could at least offer a decent alternative. How about “gentlemen richly endowed with pigment”? “Not prime candidates for the Red-Headed League”? “Of the Sub-Saharan persuasion”? “Ethnically somewhere south of Timbuktu”? If he can't write better than that, or does not care to, how can he presume to tell someone else how to write? He should go into accountancy or something.

I'm not sure whether the editor is incompetent or malicious; but it is an interesting window into traditional publishing. Like just about everything else, in recent decades, editing and book publishing have become hopelessly politically slanted. Traditional publishers and editors have decided that their job is not to serve the public by simply to the best of their abilities ensuring a high quality in books, but to ensure that nothing is published that goes against certain political stances and certain shared class interests. They see themselves as an elite in command.

Among other problems, this tends to mean that no interesting books can any longer be published: nothing that says anything new.

The situation is not as bad as in magazines, or newspapers, or in the rest of the media. The general principle in book publishing is that the author, not the editor, has the final say, and all the publisher can do is pull the book if they disagree too strongly.

But it is, at best, an annoying obstacle course, requiring steady nerves. If, of course, you can get a contract in the first case. Myself currently working on a book for self-publishing, I have actually had freelance designers and printers, who work on contract, refuse to bid on my book because of its apparently right-wing tone. They would probably get drummed out of all the industry cocktail parties. Good thing for them I was not asking them to cater a gay wedding.

For this reason, conventional publishing, like the rest of the mainstream media, is ripening for destruction, indeed, seems to be busy killing itself. It becomes overwhelmingly attractive for someone like Yiannopoulos—or little me--to pull their book from the big houses like Simon & Schuster—he was lucky that they pulled the plug, so he did not have to. And now he can sue.

After all, nobody any longer needs them. Fortunately for the public, fortunately for writers, and unfortunately for the traditional publishers, it is now not just possible, but fairly easy, to bypass all of this. With epublishing and print on demand, there is no need for any big capital outlay to publish—other than the significant time investment of writing the book. Strictly speaking, if you do only ebook format, you can publish for free. Nor is there any need for a big distribution operation. The big problem in the business used to be getting it out to those thousand little bookshops. Now, you can cover most of the field by selling only to Amazon, Chapters, and Barnes & Noble. Yes, author tours and book signings help, but traditional publishers were always notoriously unhelpful with them anyway. It was always mostly up to the author.

I think Yiannopoulos can manage it on his own.

The Future of Publishing

We are at a watershed in human history. Computerization is changing the world not just as dramatically as did the Industrial Revolution, but much more so—probably as dramatically as the invention of writing. For the computer is a greater advance in the handling of information than anything since the invention of writing itself. Information is now cheap, permanent, and infinitely interconnected.

What does this mean? I cannot begin to guess. For comparison, the invention of writing gave us such innovations as civilization, monotheism, the state, settled agriculture, and the division of labour.

And now, as part of this process, comes the new Amazon Kindle, an improved ebook reader. Certainly, something like it is inevitable; and the Kindle may be the product that crosses the barrier. We need this: a computerized book reader, allowing electronic texts to be read comfortably wherever we go.

For the inefficiencies of traditional publishing are staggering: all the reams of paper, the massive, hanger-sized Heidelberg printers, the big heavy physical blocks of pressed wood needed to convey something essentially mental in nature, the distribution chain with its repeated 100% markups and remainders, the need to come up with and market a dozen or a hundred essentially new products every season, the three month delay between writing and distribution—for something as perishable as information.

All this is gone with electronic books. All we need is a convenient reader, and the case for going electronic, it seems to me, is overwhelming.

Look at it this way: classically, when a book is published, the author’s royalties are 10% of the retail price. The Kindle eliminates almost everything else that goes into manufacturing a book; meaning it should be possible now to deliver books at one fifth to one tenth the former price. This could, in turn, expand the market for published books substantially. Meaning not just lots more books for readers, but lots more money for writers. An information economy.

I think one fifth is more realistic than one tenth, mind—there still will be a need for one or more big retailers, on the lines of Amazon, to serve as bookstores. There will also still be a need for editing, illustrating, picture research, advertising and promotion, and I expect for publishers who will put together packages including all of these.

But gone will be the bookstores. Gone will be the printers. Gone will be the pulp and paper mills. For years, people have been scoffing at the old idea of “the paperless office.” But it really is happening. The demand for newsprint is already going down year by year. Old habits die hard, but they are dying. I myself no longer subscribe to the newspapers and magazines I read on paper; I get them over the web.

It will also become vastly easier to self-publish—this is important, because freedom of the press is important. And the press is freer when everyone can afford to own one. Even without government censorship, the concentration of presses in only a few hands can lead to significant censorship of unpopular views, if only for business reasons. As a former editor, and former president of the Editors’Association of Canada, I can vouch that every editor in the business is expected by publishers to censor authors’ opinions for political reasons, and most editors take this for granted as part of their job. Most will do it without prompting. Similarly, a concentration of media ownership in Canada for many years restricted political discussion; certain views, even common views, were simply never permitted in print.

Now those days are gone—we have already seen it, in Canada and in the US, with online blogs. A comfortable ebook reader, which can also accommodate web content, will multiply their influence. Our politics may be changed dramatically as a result. Just as the printing press, by expanding the ability to publish, led to parliamentary democracy and liberalism.

Ebooks can also add some nice features print books do not have: the ability to search, for example, on any given keyword—even across volumes. That’s a massive advantage for any researcher. Photos, an expensive item in print, can be inserted in an ebook at will and at no extra cost. So can hyperlinks to the web, so that any book opens up onto the whole world. Accordingly, Ebooks can also be automatically, continually updated—reference books need never become obsolete. There will no longer be anything musty about books.

Perhaps less crucially—except for a few--ebooks can easily include a zoom feature, so that the sight-impaired can adjust the type to whatever size is comfortable. It would not be much more difficult to build in an electronic reading voice, so that even the blind could use an ebook. With such sound capabilities on board, books could also imbed sound files in their text—for illustration, information, or for ambience.

So—when am I going to buy one? I’m not sure. Amazon is currently sold out—a good indication this is an idea whose time has genuinely come. And even if they were in stock, they are not selling them outside the USA yet.

When I can, I will. You bet I will.