The Future of Criticism

Let people judge things

LISBON — Last week, I snagged a seat at the Association of Portuguese Editors and Booksellers (APEL) Book 2.0 conference, held alongside the Tagus at the Champalimaud Foundation in Belém. Intended as a kind of insider-baseball opener to the larger 2025 Book Festival (which was canceled due to Wednesday’s horrific funicular accident), Book 2.0 focused primarily on “the future of reading” and the “reinvention of the species,” with panels and seminars on how publishers can not only weather the “digital era,” but thrive in it.

As with any conversation about “the future” in a given industry, the organizers seem to have felt compelled to talk about “AI” as a partner in creativity and marketing, a move I’ve been told is pretty rote at these international book conferences — where indeed presenters and participants are invited to take photos and videos during sessions, upload them to social media, and tag the associations involved, ensuring that all of this activity is available on Instagram and TikTok, on which, after all, new books are discovered by readers every day. As in many other industries, the tech sector — which has undermined the ability of most writers, editors, and production workers to make a living — is greedily rolled into publishing’s citadel again and again as an irresistible and unquestioned gift.

As an example of this disconnect, APEL invited Gvantsa Jobava, the president of the International Publishers Association, to talk about the serious global threats to freedom of expression and of growing copyright infringement, and how publishers — by communicating across borders, sharing resources, and by helping one another translate each other’s literatures — can strengthen one another’s ability to withstand these threats. People (rightly) applauded her defense of democratic ideals, freedom of expression, and resistance to the tech sector’s plundering of intellectual property. Immediately afterward, they invited Nadim Sadek, the founder and CEO of Shimmr, to talk about how “AI” can be a “collaborative partner” in creativity, and how publishers should embrace the technology as inevitable. As an example, Sadek noted how he’d used this software to translate his own books into countless languages, as well as record his audiobooks, saving him from the prohibitive costs of paying translators and voice actors. Sadek gave a charming presentation¹ about his “discussions” with chatbots and how they sparked his creativity, and the publishers and booksellers in the audience laughed at his jokes. They applauded his speech.

As usual, the people in the room were offered a fantasy product that creates something from nothing, that hurts no one, and comes with zero cost — aside from its price, of course. Still, I found myself surprised at Sadek’s audacity in referring to “AI” as “the sum of all human knowledge, skill, and experience,” which he wraps up in a searchable neologism he calls “panthropism.”² When you speak with a chatbot, Sadek told us, you are speaking with everything humanity has ever thought and created, distilled into a single voice. The panthropic consciousness, in this logic, is therefore not only the “voice” of the author of Survival in Auschwitz, but also the voice of the author of Mein Kampf, and presumably offers the “combined wisdom” of both. Obviously, this kind of compartmentalized vision isn’t new; it takes only a glance at the opinion pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post to know how easy it is to pretend that mutually exclusive ideas can harmlessly coexist in a unified neoliberal marketplace. But the extent to which Sadek celebrates this kind of homogenized consciousness, as opposed to the fragmented, disparate, and diverse plurality of human voices, makes me wonder if he didn’t watch The Next Generation as a teenager and mistake the Borg³ for the storyline’s hero. Sadek’s focus on the unified simplicity of “AI” reveals the technology as a simple, unimaginative advancement of the principles already laid in place by Meta,⁴ Twitter (now X), ByteDance, Apple, Substack, Amazon, and many other corporations that have sought to remove sensitivity and conflict (which they call “friction”) from day-to-day life, including our day-to-day interactions with artistic endeavors in whatever form we tend to encounter them. As with so many of the tech sector’s utopian fantasies, “panthropism” is shockingly but familiarly misanthropic: without asking for it, we are to be given our salvation (or “solution”) by someone who despises our complexity, our plurality, our ongoing irreconcilability — by someone, in a word, who hates humanity, and wants to edit it out of the code.

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For the record, I’m not a technophobe — not completely anyway. I will admit that after the age of 35 or so I stopped wondering why my phone wasn’t working and just accepted it as broken, in some way, for the rest of my life. But I am, I guess, a kind of totalphobe — someone who fears the totalitarian ends to which most contemporary consumer technology aspires. That publishers and booksellers all over the world are interested in the capabilities of technology to reach more readers, to grow literature’s audience, and to hone the literacy⁵ of the general population, is an unambiguously positive and noble goal. But I don’t think many people will challenge me when I say that the kind of reading activity that Instagram or Goodreads fosters is not literacy, at least not as conceived of by the Book 2.0 conference, and that publishers perhaps misunderstand, purposefully or not, their own “products” in these kinds of marketplaces. But this doesn’t mean that the audience itself doesn’t exist, nor that it’s incapable of becoming far more sophisticated than most people in the literary industry give it credit for.⁶

Right before the conference, I’d read

Celine Nguyen

’s incredible celebration of literary criticism and how, contrary to the popular and gloomy narrative, it has the potential to reach and to affect more readers, viewers, and listeners than ever. “If STEM disciplines have,” she asks, “won the war against the arts and humanities, why are so many of the software people I know suddenly obsessed with literature and films? Why is it that my groupchats full of programmers and product managers and designers light up whenever there’s a new Andrea Long Chu review? Why are tech people starting Robert Caro and Roberto Bolaño book clubs? Why are they getting NYRB Classics mailed to them every week?” It isn’t that people are indifferent to art, Nguyen says, nor that they wish to engage with it on the simplistic level the broader market currently encourages. But there is a lingering distrust of the critic as a kind of elitist, and of criticism as an outmoded or even “parasitic” activity when consumers themselves can record and share their experiences directly with other consumers. But a critic, Nguyen implies, is not the man in the Ivory Tower damning or sanctifying specific works of literature based on his own taste: instead, criticism “comes from a deep fascination with the medium (literature, art, fashion, design, architecture, &c) and an overwhelming urge to discuss it, as deeply and as rigorously as possible, in public.” It isn’t scorn, then, that drives the critic, but enthusiasm — a wish to empower you, as the potential reader of a given text, for example, with the same tools the critic has cultivated over many pleasurable years spent reading and thinking about reading.

Crucial to criticism is the “public” aspect that Nguyen highlights. In its very existence, literary criticism proposes such a public: Critics⁷ write with the faith that there will be varying reactions to specific works of literature, and that one of the many pleasures of reading a book is to discuss it with others who’ve read it, and for that discussion to perhaps change or enrich each reader’s experience with the book. What’s more, as anyone who’s ever argued about anything can tell you, part of all of this pleasure is the argument itself, in trying to persuade someone that your way of reading the book is the way they should read it too — which is another way of saying that you crave recognition for the work you’ve done in reading the book reverentially. All criticism, by the way, is reverential; not with regard to specific books, necessarily, but reverential to each book’s potential aspiration toward literature.

This level of discussion in literary criticism, and of argument, means there is no unifying consciousness in literature. Even the proposition of a “canon” (an intrinsically fluid and perpetually contested category) is not a unity of great books, but a plurality of them. Literature as an activity is not a distillation or compilation of human consciousness. Instead, it’s a fragmentation of it. The great pleasure of the novel, specifically, is that it’s the deepest dive we have into sharing or simulating the unique and contradictory idiosyncrasies of human consciousness, and how varied those consciousnesses can be.

This fragmentation continues today, despite enormous efforts to suppress it. To return to Nguyen’s proposed audience, she puts it “somewhat frivolously, somewhat seriously,” and concludes that the “total addressable market for criticism is everyone who has a Goodreads or Letterboxd account.” With these two examples, she captures important traits that users of these sites tend to share, including an “appetite for consuming cultural works in a vaguely organized, strategic and intentional fashion” and “a more-than-passing interest in having more, and better, aesthetic encounters in their everyday life,” not to mention a curiosity “about their own judgments of the works that induce those aesthetic experiences.” This is, after all, a form of social activity. Why else, Nguyen wonders, “would they read reviews or post their own, complete with ratings?” Why would they “seek out recommendations on what to read/watch next,” or “have a specialized app for keeping track of what they’ve read/watched?” But as social media has proven, “social” doesn’t necessarily mean “public.” Instead, Goodreads and Letterboxd foreclose a public, replacing it with a marketplace of consumers; and the consumer, like the customer before him, is always right, regardless of what anyone else may say. It’s because of this attitude that the critic becomes a bogeyman, someone who wants to override your taste and replace it with his own — someone who wants to boss you around, as a reader, and deprive you of your democratic right to read whatever you want.

The curious thing about Goodreads, to stick with only one example, is how it seems to have helped shape the publishing industry’s drive toward likable characters and fiction rooted in identity — usually by “trauma mining” the author’s own experience. Many readers on the platform fault books that deviate from this formula, as they don’t immediately recognize the book’s patterns or structures, and are generally repelled by any stylistic flourishes. But if this were truly all readers cared about — if seeking out likable characters and drooling over the ways Black writers experience racism or queer writers experience sexual violence are the only reasons to continue purchasing and reading books — it seems odd to read books at all when there are many other forms of entertainment that offer these same kinds of narratives, and that require less effort to access them. Television is the obvious example, but so too is social media a readily available and barrier-free alternative.⁸ Despite what people say, on these platforms, they seem nonetheless to seek out books not because of character or plot, but because of artistry: there is a reason to pick up a book and spend several hours of your life with it, and that reason goes beyond hanging out with a character or attempting some kind of catharsis with a victim narrative, or even “seeking representation.” Even the most “anti-elitist” reviewer on Goodreads is in truth reading for artistry: for the way an author phrases a sentence or captures a feeling, for the way a story leaps from one chapter to the next, for the little pleasure of seeing how an author connects one plot point to another or moves a character around a room. But the narrative of a website like Goodreads is the opposite: these artistic concerns are “artsy,” and therefore elitist — the kinds of things critics want to rub in your face to make you feel stupid and inferior, and which aren’t present at all, coincidentally, in the kind of AI slop novels a company like Amazon, which owns Goodreads, could easily produce and sell at 100% profit.

This is what I mean by a suppression of the public: using a massive platform owned by one of the largest and most insidious technology companies in the world to make people think they don’t care about art when they actually care quite deeply, when they love it so much they spend hours of their life looking for the shimmer of it in every book they read. These are people who’d love nothing more than to sharpen the tools they already have to appreciate and celebrate the art that they love, and don’t seem to realize that Goodreads is there specifically to blunt and break those tools, to convince them that the tools are elitist — or colonial, or racist, or sexist, or any shade of oppressive — when in fact it’s the platform itself that demeans and insults their intelligence.

The phrase “let people enjoy things” has justifiably become a kind of whipping post for this kind of oversimplification, this so-called democratization of taste by the annihilation of discussing or cultivating it. You still see it crop up sincerely now and then, but for the most part anyone who’s serious about the longevity of reading and writing, or of any kind of artistic activity and engagement, can no longer take its false promise of equity seriously. What’s missing here is the alternative: Let people judge things. If the technocratic approach to art is to disempower viewers and readers, to blunt their judgment while promising democracy, critics are here to empower them, all while actually participating in the republic of literacy. Nor is the longform essay intrinsic to this activity; the critic can participate via any variety of technological means, ideally without the structural subversion of social media platforms.⁹ In print or onscreen or over the airwaves or on camera, the critic’s enthusiasm bestows not just the passion to read more, read deeper, and read wider, but offers the gift of judgment — a gift, of course, whose propensity for growth can’t help but tempt it to direct its gaze outside the discipline of a specific medium and toward culture at large: toward society and politics, where words carry their greatest and gravest weight.

One of the most ignorant things certain artists like to say is that “They don’t build statues of critics,” which seems to me the equivalent of saying there’s no reason to celebrate our greatest teachers. A critic, in their boundless enthusiasm for an artistic medium and their wish to welcome you aboard as a fellow maniac, is a teacher for those of us who’ve left school behind. And in Champagne, Illinois, there’s a statue of one of the most influential critics who ever lived — a man who taught millions not only why they should love the movies, but how to love them, how to appreciate them, how to think about them, how to write about them, and how to talk about them with your friends. Roger Ebert, more than any other reviewer, made loving the movies a shared public activity — and he wasn’t shy about using technology to do it, right up to his death. Even if you’ve never read one of his reviews or watched him argue about a film with Gene Siskel, you nonetheless know more about the movies — about how they work and what you should expect, what you should demand — because of the standards he set. These standards comprise the judgment he gave to the moviegoing public. That is the kind of power a critic can have: not to make or break a film, not to laud or pan a book, but to hand that power to you so you can judge for yourself.

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Thank you for reading! As I wrote on Friday, Entertainment, Weakly is “back,” and I’ve reopened paid subscriptions. Upcoming topics include the antifascist potential of UX design, reading Anne Carson’s The Glass Essay as a novel, the televised revolution, why I’m still obsessed with Modernism, food on Star Trek, and more. If you enjoyed this essay, please consider showing your support with a monthly or annual subscription:

1. There were no opportunities for Q&A, so I didn’t get the chance to ask how much potable water it took to produce one of Sadek’s translations, not to mention one of the “generative advertisements” Shimmr sells to publishers; nor could I ask him to tell this audience of people who make their living on books on what materials, exactly, Shimmr’s LLMs had been trained.

2. A search which seems to indicate, by the way, that “panthropism” was first used to describe the threat of feline viral transmission to all humans, not as a cute way to unify human consciousness in a computer.

3. “We are Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.”

4. Social media was bad in the beginning, too, Sadek said, but it “improved.” I’ll leave that one right there.

5. By which, one presenter qualified, we need to understand as the ability to read carefully, to parse meaning, and to form sound judgments, and not as the simple recognition and understanding of written words.

6. Myself included, as the majority of my admittedly pessimistic essays about literary criticism have demonstrated.

7. For some of my favorite collections, revisit this list I wrote in June.

8. Indeed, parasociality is, in this version of “what people want,” the contemporary novel’s greatest competitor — which is evidently ludicrous.

9. One wonderful example of this, in recent years, is the Reading the Room podcast, where Jaylen Lopez invites authors to talk about the structure, mechanics, pacing, and style of their books as opposed to the inspiration or the process of writing them, which not only sets these conversations apart from most of those you’d find in the literary media sphere but takes the listener’s casual intelligence and curiosity for granted. Lopez never questions whether or not his listeners care deeply about books as literature rather than books as lifestyle objects.