Chicago Sun-Times Publishes List of Fake Books
The article opens with a recommendation for Tidewater Dreams by Isabel Allende. Supposedly Allende’s “first climate novel,” it’s said to blend magical realism with eco-conscious activism.
The next book on the Sun-Times list is The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir. This novel too does not exist. And it only gets worse. The first ten books on the summer reading list are entirely made up.
But is this a problem? After all, books like these can now be generated on the fly using AI, meaning your book might already be reviewed by the paper before it’s even published. It’s just a matter of getting used to a new order. And no one needs to do lunch anymore to get their book noticed by the press.
All jokes aside: who doesn’t remember the proud rhetoric about real journalism shoved down our throats—not unlike a goose being fattened up for foie gras. We were told the world was full of conspiracies and fake news, but if you bought a newspaper, you were guaranteed craftsmanship.
If they replaced that smug little Van-Oorschot-ball they now call a “critic” with an algorithm, I might actually publish my work again. Oh, wait—fortunately, I no longer write in Dutch. But truly, swapping out some of those tricks with AI would be a major improvement.
It takes an nation of sellouts to hold us back.®
Yesterday, Normalobob from Left Laser went on a glorious rant against the Filthy Anarchists on Drugs, who of course must be sent straight to the Gulag. Working-class heroes have no time for that scum, and once Bob moves into Soestdijk Palace, all writers will soon be Siberia-bound—because let’s face it, the working man doesn’t care about writers.
Varoufakis should count himself lucky that Bob is still in a pre-dialectical-centralist phase—a time when omnipotence merely hovers above the party head like a gaseous layer, where purges are still test balloons, and the people’s consciousness manifests only through angry stickers on the cargo bike of the neighborhood agitator.
I say all of this as a Comrade of the Show.
In our anarchist squats back in the late ’80s, we played a lot of Public Enemy. In hindsight, quite a strange phenomenon, that band. Flavor Flav—a caricature of a rapper so exaggerated you wonder what they were aiming for. There’s something uncanny about them, a band that vanished after striking gold.
Their best track, in my opinion. Strangely current once again—at least if you’re not one of those people who just withdrew 70 euros from the bank two days ago.
Regards,
Martinus Benders