Automation, Authorship, and Apology

Automated advertising is not what readers deserve

Anne Waldman and Ambrose Bye. Photo by Natalia Gaia

To those of you who recently received a “thank you” (i.e. “special offer”) email—ostensibly from me, on behalf of Reading Is Art—I want to apologize: this was an automated message, designed by Substack to “optimize [a publication’s] revenue by determining the most opportune times to offer a particular subscriber a special offer, including free trials, discounts on paid subscriptions, gift subscriptions, or the likes.”

*barf*

The email was not authored, as the subject line would have you believe, by “Joe at Reading Is Art.” But it was, in fact, authorized. In other words, the tool—which Substack calls its “most comprehensive investment to date in helping writers accelerate their businesses”—was enabled, either by default (like smartphone applications) or by my regrettable ignorance. The message, sent.

Substack is a well-designed platform, and the option for readers to support writing projects financially is one of the reasons we’re using it to celebrate the bookshop community. I recognize the need for Substack to make money and sustain its operations, which in turn sustain the exposure that writers intend and readers appreciate. But the reflexive conflation of writing with promotion, language with business, and letter with logo is predictably misguided. And the idea that authorization is tantamount to authorship is an age old problem becoming more complex by the day.

Rather than capitulate to these ominous digital signs and collapse into a fear-fueled lament of artificial intelligence, I’ll turn—“in a dark time,” as Roethke would have it—to poetry, particularly Anne Waldman’s Vow to Poetry. This landmark collection of essays, interviews, and manifestos is introduced by Anne’s notion of the vow as “a metabolic necessity” rooted in “the call to articulation… on the one hand choiceless, and on the other a matter of ongoing activity and improvisation.” She continues:

“Vow comes from the middle English vowe, which is from vou, from Old French, from Latin votum: vote. Vote comes from the neuter past participle of vovere: to vow. Also to be enjoyed: the playful association with vowel from Middle English vowelle, from Old French vouel, from Latin vocalis: sounding, from vox, vocis: voice. By my own skewed associational mathematics. Vow = Voice. I vote always for the transforming of language’s energy side with a full voice.”

And that’s just it: the automated (let alone advertising) voice is not full, not in Waldman’s sense. Sure, there are things we say and write in order to proffer, persuade, and pursue results, and these things are real, even necessary. But the voice’s true choicelessness stems not from legalization but surrender; the activity and improvisation not from calculus but sentience.

The fullness of a voice exceeds all standards of comprehension, believability, and recognition. A full voice cannot be analyzed, cannot be replicated, cannot be measured. A full voice has no echo but silence. A full voice is endlessly affirmed.

Thank you for sticking with this project. We’ve got some phenomenal guest essays on the horizon. And the robot’s permissions have been revoked.