Criticism at the Beginning of the 21st Century

The asymmetry between creator and consumer was the foundation of the idea of "culture," which is a modern concept. The present book is the current pinnacle of closing the epistemic gap that enabled the institution of literature. The factor behind this surprising reversal in intellectual history, after thousands of years of widening the gap, is still not sufficiently understood. And here comes this book, pointing to the cause

Book Burning  (Source)

Since people no longer read books anyway, but only the reviews, it makes sense to create a new genre where writers only write reviews of the books they wanted to write. Or even more so, the review of their own book. Then they will also stop complaining about criticism, and there will be a whole book of reviews that will save people from reading an entire library, an entire culture, and everyone will benefit. Because usually, reviews are more interesting than the book. After all, if books were more interesting than reviews and more attractive to readers, newspapers would print excerpts from books and not reviews. Because the review is TL;DR [Translator's note: Too Long; Didn't Read] - it's the post that replaces the book, because when the writer himself doesn't have the energy to write the book, why would the reader have the energy to read? And so in the literature of reviews, which consists of reviews only without books, writers will also be able to directly address the books they loved and hated and not through pathetic imitation. And reviews of review books will already be truly pathetic, and all literature will deal only with literature, and die like classical music, with a loud noise, mighty and strong making a sound, rising up and slaying, against them praising and saying:



The book before us is a breakthrough in the way literature is written. Since time immemorial, culture has been asymmetrical. There were writers and there were readers. When culture was oral, the difference between storyteller and listener was more dynamic, but material culture, particularly written culture, created an epistemological barrier between reader and writer. Printing only amplified this gap, rather than narrowing it, unlike manuscripts. So did the establishment of the institution of classics and the sealing of foundational books of a certain culture, like the religions of the book. The sealing was the stage at which everyone who preceded it was a creator and those after it were interpreters. In other words, it created a barrier in time between writer and reader. Printing created a barrier in space. No longer a manuscript where both writer and reader had the ability to add to it or correct it, but a physical distance between printing and reading. The gap was then at its peak, and this is what created the institution of literature (and within it criticism, publishing houses, editors, copyrights, authors, and more). The pinnacle of asymmetry is the idea of the genius writer. An idea that the current book refutes fundamentally. And perhaps terminally eliminates.
The newspaper was the first stage in reducing the time gap between writer and reader, namely the inverse structure of the classics, and the typewriter was the first stage in reducing the space gap. The personal computer made the text itself dynamic, erasable and editable, and returned it to the manuscript stage. But both the typewriter and the computer lacked the ability to reach a significant readership. The web of sites was a typewriter whose audience was readers, and reduced the space to zero, and social media was the reduction of the time gap between writing and reading to zero. That is, the central moment separating a network of sites from a social network is not who the nodes in the network are, as is commonly thought, but action in space versus action in time. Immediacy in place versus immediacy in time, and spread in virtual space, versus arrangement in time as updates. The book before us intensifies both these trends, and seems to have been written minutes before its printing.
The asymmetry between creator and consumer was the foundation of the idea of "culture," which is a modern concept. The present book is the current pinnacle of closing the epistemic gap that enabled the institution of literature. The factor behind this surprising reversal in intellectual history, after thousands of years of widening the gap, is still not sufficiently understood. And here comes this book, pointing to the cause. Writers are simply not as good. But is this the end of human culture? Yes and no. Because there is a new culture growing. Computerized culture. The computer created a new writer-reader gap, between programmer and user, which only machine learning will be able to narrow. A book that can be programming, and a reader who will be a user - that's the future. So we eagerly await the author's (not writer's) next books, hoping he will develop as a programmer. Because the user experience certainly needs improvement.



How can one combine the reader and the writer? If we completely eliminate the division, as in a text open for editing on the internet, anyone will be able to corrupt the writing, and we'll drown in lack of talent. The writer's new book finds a solution to this problem. It consists of countless short passages, while readers can rate them. The best passages in relation to the number of ratings minus a constant parameter, designed to prevent a passage from being considered the best if rated by only one person, are displayed at the top in the non-personal version of the book. But the main thing is in its personal version, which is also divided into a road trip or a forest trip. In the road version, each reader rates a passage, and according to their rating, the algorithm gives them a passage it predicts they will like, and so from passage to passage the match improves. In the forest version, the reader receives two passages, chooses the better of them, and thus receives two more passages, chooses the better, and so on. The book was arranged by the author as a network, as an associative graph, sometimes narrative, of passages. Each node in the network (i.e., a passage in the book) can lead to several others from which the next passages are chosen. In such a situation, criticism of the book is impossible, because it is actually criticism of yourself. However, one can criticize the user experience. And the experience is associative. For there to be a book that truly eliminates the division between reader and writer, each paragraph or sentence needs to be written according to the reader's response to those before it, and therefore it needs to be written as part of the reading, and its writer needs to be the computer. Such a computer will learn the reader himself, and the reader will need to rate or choose to give the computer feedback necessary for learning. That is, the literature of the future will not be one where the computer is the genius writer who writes a superhuman masterpiece, and re-establishes the classic gap, but literature where writing a book is programming a book and the reader is the user. All this, while the book itself is a collaborative work of the reader and writer through the computer, which is a new type of text. That is, narrowing the epistemological gap between writing and reading will open a new gap between programming and use - where literature can reside. And when learning narrows this gap - a new gap will be found. That is, the history of culture is an epistemological accordion, creating periods of decline and flourishing, ebb and flow.



This book actually copied from the Bible. At the beginning of the century, an acute aesthetic problem arose in the cultural center, for which many insufficient solutions were proposed: how to create a book from a collection of stories. Human attention and experience shifted to blogging, fragmented, internet-based, status-oriented, short writing, reading and understanding, while literature is a long form, and in order to create the depth of meaning of great literature, breadth is essential. The result was often shallow literature, not necessarily emotionally but culturally and ideologically, not important or meaningful, without depth and great spirit, that is, without aesthetic greatness. A huge black hole was created in the middle of culture in the ability to address and create big ideas, exactly at the stage when they were most needed. The insight of this book was that the Bible too is a collection of short stories, what gives them unity is the chronological developmental order, through the generations, and perhaps also one constant character, although in fact lacking depth and personality as a character, but more of a thematic subject. Neither the people nor God are heroes, but the heroes change according to the order of generations and follow the order of genealogy, over thousands of years. And here, especially in Genesis, the book found the solution. It essentially describes family genealogy, one of the most worn-out genres, but in summary and over dozens of generations, when in each generation only one child is chosen to be the leading branch, and already in a generation or two later they don't follow the siblings who became uncles, and all in biblical brevity that gives only the dramatic essence, and each generation necessarily reflects its time, and the book - the history of generations, in this case the history of the Jewish people, through dramas and tragedies, loves and deaths, over several dozen generations, until the death of the last descendant in the Holocaust. And this book opened a new genre, the generations story, which was widely copied in many cultures, with each trying to tell the Chinese or Italian story and so on, and each has something to say about history. Some emphasized individuals, and how similar the generations are despite everything changing, and some emphasized great themes of change, or the fatal and sometimes tragic repetition of patterns in the same family, genetically, or conversely, in global literature - the changes from nation to nation and from religion to religion over the generations, sometimes in a circular and ironic way, or how far a person's descendants can move to the other side of the world, and of humanity, and sometimes also return by chance. This genre proved to be extremely fruitful, and as a sequence of stories that can be read before sleep without losing both separateness and continuity. From A Thousand and One Nights to A Thousand Generations and Generations.



This book is the first network book. The transition of psychological literature was from the external conflict between two characters in the plot (or in more boring literature between man and nature), to internal conflict. But in biblical literature the conflict is in the heart of the people, that is, conflict in culture. And this is in contrast to ancient literature where the conflict is between man and god, or gods, or in Greek between the gods themselves, which is expressed in the world itself in conflict between people (two levels of conflict). Perhaps in more ancient, oral literature, the conflict was between forces of nature, or between supernatural forces. And before that maybe between animals, like today's sports descriptions - hunting and predation literature. That is, if today the problem is how to represent conflict in the network, in culture, we can learn from the Bible that dealt with the collective soul, with the people of Israel (or later with the Shekhinah [Translator's note: Divine Presence in Jewish mysticism], in a way that did not receive sufficient literary development, unlike philosophical - a little of this was started by Nachman of Breslov). But unlike the Bible, which set the collective soul against God and his representative or word (and sometimes also set the people's representative, the king, against him), in this incarnation of intra-cultural conflict, the description should be like in modern psychological internal conflict, that is, presenting conflict within the system (and later learning conflict, and later creative conflict). All these await appropriate literary representation and literary tools that will be developed to express them. Therefore, today, we need a form of literature of many against many: for example, two groups of users on Facebook including everyone between the extremes (for example religious versus secular or dog lovers against cat lovers), or alternatively representatives of the many, for example two network personalities fighting each other with their crowd of followers behind them. We must have literary representation for cyber wars, and indeed - this book describes how two parts of the network fight each other. Instead of drowning in countless characters and losing the reader, it is built as a war of talkbacks and posts and Facebook responses and private messages and emails and messages on a dating site. In its choice to describe everything that happens on an entire dating site in one evening, in cross-section, including the profiles themselves and the conversations between them, in parallel with the conversations between women and their friends and men and their friends, it exposes the depth of the war and alienation between men and women, in a gender war that has turned into a virtual trench warfare. After dramatic news, the book takes a turn and the participants rearrange themselves on Facebook in a new virtual struggle in two cross-gender camps - right and left - until (following additional news) a transition to new drama and division, this time in responses on a news site - Ashkenazim versus Mizrahim [Translator's note: Jews of European descent versus Jews of Middle Eastern/North African descent]. And finally after three acts, literally, the nightly drama subsides, and the book ends back in the eternal gender war on Tinder, of lonely singles, frustrated married people, and night owls who struggle to fall asleep (spoiler: there's nothing new under the sun). The pages are arranged in the form of posts and articles and the progression of responses and arguments below them - thus returning to an ancient form of literature that seemed to have been abandoned, and renewing it in a surprising narrative renaissance: the Talmud.