Fascinating article. Lost of great stuff about knowledge, publishing, and genre.
Put differently, half of all the writers who have ever lived are living still. Given the unstoppable population growth and the lengthening of the average lifespan, this fraction seems again destined to increase asymptotically until the day when nearly all writers in history will be creating in the eternal present...
...It may take a long time, but you can be sure to find a proverbial good book in a thousand. But you will never find a million good books in a billion. So much for the bromides of serving the public by putting more and more art in people’s hands, or at their fingertips.
The spectre of unknown numbers of contemporary Shakespeares lying buried under pyramids of paper that no one could hope to burrow through should be enough to look for some kind of capping mechanism to the inflationary trends exhibited by our culture...
One thing, however, is certain: with ever more books around and buyers spoiled for choice, these days it takes a lot more than a knack for telling a good story to stand out as a writer. Hemmed in by millions of competitors for the readers’ and reviewers’ time, to break out from the shadows of zettabyte anonymity more than ever before authors need to think strategically to differentiate themselves and their brand from the countless millions of others on tap. Welcome to the culture of celebrity gushing and bashing, in which creators compete less with history than with the zettabyte present...
This is the essential problem of limitless creation and sharing. How to find an audience in a biblical flood of new content? We're experiencing the dawn of a new model of creation, and I fear it may be looked back on as a time of simple innocence compared to what comes after. Bots, algorithms, contracted bloggers under false identities, cliques as self-serving as medieval guilds, deeply compromised curators, contrived scandals, all cruising relentlessly in a fathomless sea of online data.