When We Devalue Art (Books!) We Devalue the Future

When you’ve spent your whole adult life working in and around book publishing you get used to hearing that people don’t read anymore and that the industry is on its last legs. There is always a crisis. In August it was reported that reading for pleasure has declined by 40 percent over the last 20 years. But pleasure reading has been on a decline for ages: the Victrola, then the talkies, then TV and Nintendo and the internet, have all cut into our reading time. Yet still, people continue to read.

Which is why I felt a different kind of existential dread for the industry last week when I came across a Slate article entitled “The Case for Whole Books” by Dan Sinykin and Joanna Winant. As a childless person who doesn’t teach I’ve been happily unaware that, due to standardized testing requirements that favor close reads of excerpts over whole books, there’s an entire generation of students who have very little contextual framework for the literature they’re being taught in school. Last year I wrote about the way that the tech industry has been trying to transform books into easily uploadable Blinkist-style digests, but I don’t think I understood that children are also being fed less than enriching knowledge pellets.

In that same week a piece for The Baffler by Noah McCormack called “We Used to Read Things in This Country” contained a passage that stopped me in my tracks: “It is AI that has given the American ruling class the final impetus to more or less abolish education. As primary and secondary schools prepare to push AI on students, higher-education funding is basically being eliminated.”

Maybe this is another form of catastrophizing. People are still buying books, young and older readers alike. Certainly there are some high schools that are still assigning and engaging with The Great Gatsby in full. But with the rise of Big Tech and AI I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that our values as a society appear to be changing for the worse.

We have more content than ever, but fewer opportunities for art and artists to thrive.

When I was in college in the late 1990s I was told time and time again that employers of all sorts love a job candidate with a degree in the humanities because a liberal arts education fosters critical thinking skills, the ability to learn. Not everyone has to be a lifelong reader of books, certainly, but studying them, I thought, set people up to be strong communicators and critical thinkers. It’s devastating to look at the job market and see the denigration of so many qualities that I always thought were non-negotiable: reading and writing skills, human interaction, and creativity overall.

At the risk of moving into old man yelling at cloud territory, I grew up with a subscription to Entertainment Weekly. I took it as a given that its subjects—books and music and film and theater and yes, even TV—enrich our lives. In fact, I wrote a book about the interconnection between high and low(er) forms of popular culture and how we’re all better for it. Now Entertainment Weekly exists as a scaled-down website, and media spaces for cultural criticism continue to dwindle.

For years we’ve been grappling with the collapse of the creative middle class due to corporate greed. By changing the ways we consume various artforms and thereby devaluing them, large companies have been limiting the number of workers who can earn a liveable wage from their art. This is true across the board: from Amazon and books, to Spotify and music, to Netflix and TV/film. We have more content than ever, but fewer opportunities for art and artists to thrive.

In the midst of so much cultural destruction is generative AI, an almost trillion-dollar industry built on the backs of writers. The AI boom not only normalizes plagiarism, but it also entirely ignores the work it takes to produce great writing. The championing of generative AI devalues our ability to read and to think and to comprehend, to be moved by art, and to interact with and criticize it. When even book publishing CEOs are championing the merits of AI at the expense of their own writers, it becomes easier, for me, at least, to understand why and how students are learning excerpts rather than whole books.

I have to believe that we can still push back, that creative people can find the means to defy the ruling class and keep on creating. I also believe that curiosity, especially in young people, is a virtue that we can continue to nurture beyond inputting a question into a search bar. There is power in wanting to learn more about the world in which you live, and great joy awaits when you read the whole book just to find out what happens.