https://medium.com/@cshirky/publishi...g-6a80139d13cc
Lots of good points (and one factually incorrect paragraph, presumably as bait) as one elite holds up a mirror to the rest. Can't quote 90% so I'll stick with this:
Quote:
Culture is a funny thing, transforming even people with otherwise democratic sensibilities into haughty patricians. Coll ran the New America Foundation, Packer wrote “The Unwinding”, the most sensitive portrayal of American hard times since Michael Harrington, yet the thought of Amazon improving the availability of books horrifies them.
The tension between their ordinary sympathies for the general public and their withholding of that support in this particular case stems from the duality of authorship as an open marketplace and a closed cultural arena. To criticize Amazon, the publishers and their defenders must simultaneously insist that literature is essential for society, and that a sudden increase in its availability would be a catastrophe. This tension was best dissected by Pierre Bourdieu in his masterwork, “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.” Bourdieu describes the dilemma this way:
Intellectuals and artists are thus divided between their interest in cultural proselytism, that is, winning a market by widening their audience, which inclines them to favor popularization, and concern for cultural distinction, the only objective basis of their rarity. [T]heir relationship to everything concerned with the ‘democratization of culture’ is marked by a deep ambivalence which may be manifested in a dual discourse on the relations between the institutions of cultural diffusion and the public.
On the next page, Bourdieu suggests that:
“An analysis of the debates which occurred when cheap paperbacks came onto the market — a promise of popularity for the author, a threat of vulgarization for the reader — would reveal the same ambivalence.”
This was a historical aside about the 1930s, but now looks like a guide to the current decade.
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And this:
Quote:
I say this as a beneficiary of that older system. I earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in advances for my last two books, to say nothing of the opportunities those books opened up, so the system has worked admirably well for me. However, I am a WASP, an Ivy League graduate, a tenured professor, and a member of the Sancerre-swilling East Coast Media Elite. Of course the existing system works well for me — it’s run by people like me, for people like me.
Despite my benefitting from it, I am unwilling to pretend that this system is beneficial for readers or for writers who lack my privilege. I’d always aspired to be a traitor to my class (though I’d hoped it would be for something a bit more momentous than retail book pricing), but treason is as treason does, so here goes: The reason my fellow elites hate the people who run Amazon is that they refuse to flatter our pretensions. In my tribe, this is a crime more heinous even than eating one’s salad with one’s dessert fork.
The threat Amazon poses to our collective self-regard is the usual American one: The market is optimized for availability rather than respect. The surface argument is about price, but the deep argument is about prestige. If Amazon gets its way, saying, “I published a book” will generate no more cultural capital than saying “I spoke into a microphone.”
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Nothing like shining a spotlight on the elephant in the room.