Industrialized Print
Sean Latham · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2019
We now imagine ourselves to be living in an age of nearly frictionless authorship, one in which ideas – both wild and mundane – can be instantly published on a blog, in a Facebook comment, or on platforms from Reddit to Amazon that thrive on what we still awkwardly refer to as “self-published” manuscripts. Authorship – whether defined broadly as the mere production of text or more narrowly as the creation of a work of art – has become ubiquitous. Rapid developments in the field of artificial intelligence, moreover, have eerily extended authorship into the realm of objects and machines: nefarious “bots” flood Twitter streams and, in 2016, an algorithmically generated science-fiction novel advanced past the first round of cuts for the Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. 1 The origin of such ubiquitous authorship cannot be dated exactly, but its effects registered vividly on the cluttered newsstands of the 1920s, where hundreds of magazines, newspapers, paperbacks, gazettes, pamphlets, and books jostled with one another for attention.