Does modern capitalism make it harder both to produce and consume demanding literature since a lot of people today are too exhausted from work, commuting, precarity, fragmented attention spans and constant digital overstimulation to devote hundreds of hours to a difficult work?
Nah. Work has always been a part of life. Commuting became common pretty much since WW2 aftermath
>>25289248Commuting has always been a thingThe distance simply change with the progress of technology and transportation but people have always lived on average about half an hour away from their workplace
Taking away the hour long lunch break was the greatest crime ever done against both readers and humans as a whole.
>>25289269>Commuting has always been a thingNo it hasn't.
>>25289211Compared to when? To the time when the vast majority of the population were illiterate peasants, or proles doing back-breaking 14 hour shifts? Or to the 1950s in America for WASPs?
>>25289211Both harder to produce and harder to market, for sure. That said, I can envision a future in which difficult fiction adapts to declining attention spans by creating intense, experimental reading experiences that can be completed in a single sitting. Contemporary writers like Mike Corrao are already doing this sort of thing. I think any successful literary innovation of the future will necessarily depend on short-form content- that’s not to say the long novel won’t exist, but it might even return to something like its original serialised form, given the popularity of social media threads.
>>25289211kinda cute how you describe the symptom and propose the symptom as the problem in the same breath. did OP just rediscover Fisher seventeen years late? read him. Capitalist Realism 2009. he wrote it as "post-literate New Flesh too wired to concentrate" and the diagnosis was already late then (i know i'm being a bitch btw). if ADHD is anything it is a late capitalism pathology. it trains you, not accidentally. it exhausts you slowly and the first thing you end up seeing is slogan recognition because slogan recognition is the cognitive mode that sells things. it's not built to make it harder to consume the /lit/ holy grail. it is built on extracting attention and language from you as a kind of labor. the work itself now is the reading. the premise is sentimental. 19th-century factory workers with their twelve-hour shifts, no electricity, no weekends, read Dickens in monthly installments and got through Bleak House. russian peasants memorized Pushkin. exhaustion isn't it. the variable isn't exhaustion, it's the type of exhaustion. nothing was better or worse back then. things were structurally different. the post-fordist version is worse in a peculiar way you cannot generalize. TL;DR: attention is labor and there's no off-clock for attention. "Attention is under siege everywhere. Not silence but uninterrupted noise, not the red desert, but a cognitive space overcharged with nervous incentives to act: this is the alienation of our times." (inb4 you tell me I didn't have to write an essay, the citation only made it more cringe)
>>25289211>Does modern capitalism make it harder both to produce and consume demanding literature Yes.>since a lot of people today are too exhausted from work, commuting, precarity,>since a lot of people today are too exhausted from work, commuting, precarity,No. People read when they had to work.>fragmented attention spans and constant digital overstimulationYes. This is why. Capitalism figured out how to make our minds into capital. Our very attention spans are bought and sold, to the point we're addicted and it cuts into our sleep.
>>25289211yes. not just "demanding" or "difficult" literature but ANY true literature. In fact I would argue that it takes more time to produce a work of literature that is both profound and accessible. I think "precarity" is the most significant of the things you mentioned. Work, commuting, and the distractions of a debased culture seem like much smaller problems when you actually have a sense of security in your life/livelihood. Those other sources of exhaustion are all symptoms of the state of precarity.>>25289322OP is obviously referring to the segment of the population that frequents this board, not the population as a whole>>25289370word salad
>>25289211Duh. Poor thirdworlders don’t have time for BS like writing or art, even as a hobby.
>>25289379>Yes. This is why. Capitalism figured out how to make our minds into capital. Our very attention spans are bought and sold, to the point we're addicted and it cuts into our sleep.Utter nonsense. The entertainment sector has always been about monetizing attention. We are currently in a state of flux because no one trusts the institutional gatekeepers of publishing to filter for anything but their political bias, that for the last 20+ years has been skewing aggressively left and female.Joe Rogan didn't "buy and sell" his viewers attention, he provided an outlet of entertainment that wasn't tainted with DEI or feminist screeching. The entertainment industry killed itself to appease radical left retards, and it sure as fuck wasn't the fault of muh "capitalism."
>>25289391>word saladway to tell on yourself. couldn't digest a high-school-level rendition of Berardi and Fisher, went straight to "word salad" because the alternative was admitting the salad is the mixture of bad faith & utterly miserable reading comprehension currently brewing in your brains. boy do I pity it, and you. (fucking dimwit.)
>>25289429>Utter nonsenseThat's supposed to come after you've made your point. If you say it before, I don't think you actually read anything.>The entertainment sector has always been about monetizing attention. Yes, but our phones allow them to do that to a degree they could only dream of doing back when they best they had were plays.>We are currently in a state of flux because no one trusts the institutional gatekeepers of publishing to filter for anything but their political bias, that for the last 20+ years has been skewing aggressively left and female. Yes, but the lack of good new books can't be the primary reason. There's a world of literature out there to read that came before this feminist-slop paradigm.>Joe Rogan didn't "buy and sell" his viewers attention, He was more ethical about it than most, but he certainly did buy and sell attention.>he provided an outlet of entertainment that wasn't tainted with DEI or feminist screeching.Yes, but he's not the main reason we as a society can't read long books anymore. Youtube Shorts is moreso why. The algorithms personalized for every user are why. The phones in everyone's pockets even when they're sleeping are why. It takes a lot of focus to read through something like Ulysses, but we never get the chance to develop out focus, since we're never left without stimulation.>The entertainment industry killed itself to appease radical left retards, and it sure as fuck wasn't the fault of muh "capitalism."It's not like socialism would do a better job. It's arguable that misandrist slop invaded the market the way it did because they wanted to sell shit to women. The best way to keep people engaged, by far, is to make them angry. So, they kept making shit that pissed women off. It's no coincidence that the popularization of smartphones correlated with the radicalization of women.Rich business owners, the rare moments they're not jerking off to AI, are frothing at the mouth at the idea of a neurolink system they can use to get even more entrenched into people's minds so they can push their ads and influence people at an even more invasive and intimate level.Imagine if you had to think about Snickers every single time you wanted to get navigation somewhere with your neurolink. Imagine if businesses could actually see what your thinking and your brain patterns.
>>25289429dur dur feminists, DEI, muh capitalism, left retards, clocked the second retarded anon fed on the you page on X, thinking any of his ignorant npc'esque rightoid rhetoric is in any way a contribution to anything ever, cursed /lit thread included.okay, i'll bite. lmao though. anon's opening line — "the entertainment sector has always been about monetizing attention" — funny how you just regurgitated, sweet cherub, Adorno and Horkheimer's 1944 culture-industry thesis verbatim. Dialectic of Enlightenment. entertainment was identified as commodified attention extraction by the Marxists eighty-two years ago. anon thinks he's refuting Marxism by reciting the Marxist analysis. the call is coming from inside the house. truly rightoids are outperforming themselves every. fucking. single. damn. time. using Adorno against Adorno is a feat so audacious it is caressing genius territory -- alas, it falls under pre-existing affect and backwards-conclusion cretinism.
>>25289211Yeah capitalism sucks and takes away from the lives of individuals living lives of value and purpose
>>25289211
>>25289391>word saladI understood it. Maybe you're just illiterate. Sorry
>>25289429you want to sound smart so bad kek
>>25289429Joe rogan ought to go back to joe rogan’s roots for awhile and smoke some dmt and float in an isolation tank seeking after enlightenment is the way i feel
>a lot of people today are too exhaustedFrom what? I wake up at 6:30, work from 8:30-5:00, drive to the gym and work out for 1.5 hours 3 nights a week, get home, shower, cook dinner 5 nights a week, and I still have time and energy for gaming, Youtube, TV shows, listening to music, books, whatever by the time I go to bed. And I'm in my mid 30s, not some addied up zoomer. People these days are just lazy, gay, and depressed. Reading is too much effort for them.
>>25291870Lol your bloodline will die with you. Good on you for being a nice little consoomer tho
>>25289211>infinite jest>demanding
>>25289211>30th Anniversary Edition>Doesn't add anything except a new foreword that no one asked for by some indie singer>Didn't even try to recreate DFW's original idea for the cover>The hundreds of pages that were cut from DFW's original submitted version of the novel are still unpublishedTotally lame. Why even bother?
>>25291829Is that a dude? Sauce?
>>25289248>Work has always been a part of lifeTraditionally work ended (for men) when you stepped through the front door unless you were a farmer or a luddite. Work isn't any more strenuous in 2026 than it was in 1926, but a lot of what is now forced onto us as "life admin" used to be handled by the extended family or cheap labour.
>>25289211Commuting makes reading easier, if anything.Unless you're American and have to drive your own vehicle to and from work, then you can't read on the road.
>>25291717>t.
>>25289370A good, high effort post. I appreciate your thoughts.
>>25294504it's chatGPT, faggot
the big problem are screens of all kinds, visual culture and trash composition like posts on this site and all others. if capitalism is the cause of those things then i guess you could blame it, but by allowing for wealth concentrations and neets and pseudoneet sinecures capitalism probably benefits writing, let's be real the nineteenth century and the first half maybe more of the twentieth produced a lot quality and quantity. if we stopped at movie screens we'd have been ok
>>25294511>screens are... LE BAD!>he said, on a screenrevolutionary take, my guy
>>25289274>Taking away the hour long lunch break was the greatest crime ever done against both readers and humans as a whole.You guys don't get an hour long lunch break?What is it, just half an hour?Do you get 15 minute morning or afternoon tea breaks?
>>25294574When I was a wagie for a corporate restaurant they would only force me to take an hour long break whenever they couldn't justify paying me an extra hour, whether that was through being overstaffed or whatever. Most days I would eat food quickly and go back to work within 20 minutes (which I was fine with as I had nothing to commit my time to, and didn't want to pull out a book as I worked as a greasy dishwasher and my employers might think I was getting ideas above my admittedly low station). I didn't mind this as I would get paid that extra hour. And in fact, being forced to take an hour break was almost a punishment as I would just sit outside chainsmoking fags.
