Have you kept up with the Elizabeth Gilbert Goodreads drama? Here’s the short version: Gilbert, best known for her bestseller Eat Pray Love, had an upcoming novel called The Snow Forest, due for publication in February. The plot concerned a true story about a Russian family isolated in the Siberian wilderness during the mid-20th century reign of the Soviet Union. I guess they’re, like, eco-terrorists or something. Anyway, the book hit Goodreads, and reams of one-star reviews piled up from people who, with the book not out for more than half a year, have not read it, but were opposed to the very idea of a book about Russian people being published now. In response, Gilbert or her publisher or both decided to pull the book indefinitely from publication, with a video statement that has now, itself, been roundly mocked.
There are, obviously, many things going on here. First, the phenomenon of review-bombing, which happens on Goodreads, Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes (at least until they curbed user reviews from before a film’s release date), and other websites where users are granted the ability to rate products and content, usually with low scores to “protest” against something the group disagrees with. As commentators like Claire Whitley have pointed out, this practice is essentially about power and politics, and certainly not actually about art. Usually, it is done to target some piece of intellectual property that certain fans believe has “gone woke,” like the racist reaction to the Amazon Lord of the Rings series The Rings of Power. As the Gilbert situation proves, though, it can come from other directions, in this case either from people directly impacted by the war in Ukraine (I’m sorry, but this is probably not many of those actually leaving these reviews — they are, presumably, pretty busy!), or those claiming to speak and act in their name, because something about Russians coming out right now is, I guess, disrespectful.
Here’s the point: obviously this is all incredibly stupid. Recall the braindead period when, for instance, the US, UK, and other states put an end to Russian ballet performances, music performances, and other artistic ventures, regardless of if they were actually backed by the Russian state or had ties to Putin. Banning or censoring access to Russian art has no material impact on the war, and tends to, if anything, hurt Russian people, who are not synonymous with the state. Moreover, boycotting an American book because it takes place in Russia seems even more absurd, as though the very idea of potentially humanizing Russian characters of any kind is a threat and a slap in the face to the Ukrainian people. Let’s be for real.
It makes me think about how often celebrities now claim that something they made in the 2000s couldn’t be made now, because of, you know, all the sensitivities. Mindy Kaling, for example, claiming that The Office couldn’t be made now, as though it doesn’t remain the most-watched show for, like, every generation. Or Eva Longoria who just said that they couldn’t make Desperate Housewives now, the characters would be cancelled because of the shocking things they said and did (you know, how audiences hate that kind of thing?). On the one hand, this is a Hollywood bubble, where actors and writers are obsessed with cancel culture — you can’t help but imagine it’s all any of them think or talk about. It also, I think, reflects a larger cultural tension over who is “allowed” to make what, and when they’re
”allowed” to do it. I don’t have an interest in digging into that larger debate, because I think it’s remarkably boring. I do have an interest, though, in how different platforms or parts of the internet become weaponized to support various interests in these, ahem, culture wars.
There is a long, storied history of Goodreads review-bombing and content moderation issues. Gilbert and her response is interesting, because she is rare breed today: the millionaire author. As she says in her video, she’s putting this book aside (leaving the door open to publish it at some point in the future), and focusing on other book projects. Unlike many review-bomb targets, Gilbert is comfortable enough to just set the project aside to, hopefully, sidestep any prolonged controversy for the time being. She has the capital and cultural cachet to just take the project out of the conversation, when smaller authors, particularly Black and LGBTQ+ writers, don’t have the same resources. As Mariam Sharia writes, “most authors are not worth $25M and the financial and professional repercussions of having a book canceled would be calamitous” for them.
At the same time, you may have seen the story about the writer who freaked out about a 4-star Goodreads review: “I had a perfect 5 star average till this bitch came up. She said, ‘The ending was kind of predictable.’ Yeah, well, it’s my life, not a fucking murder mystery. ‘But other than that, it was incredible,’ so you just gave me four stars?” The writer was dropped by their publisher, and the book, naturally, was then review-bombed with 1 star reviews. Obviously, Goodreads is an unhealthy space that kills brain cells and turns people against each other, and discussion of the actual art and its merits is of secondary concern.
As Imogen West-Knights summarized the Gilbert situation for Slate, “it’s not a great travesty that this book has been postponed, but it is reflective of some quite ill-judged thinking about what a novel should be, what purpose it might serve.” Right, because at the risk of sounding like someone upset about the woke mind virus or whatever, it nevertheless remains true that art’s purpose is not to comfort you, or to provide moral instruction. West-Knights continues, arguing that the literary world is experiencing “a babying of readers that they themselves are participating in,” and “Gilbert’s decision may be rash and pretty ridiculous, but anyone who has ever logged onto Goodreads knows how she got there.” Goodreads, then, becomes a stand-in for online culture and its supposed influence on creation itself, a scattershot network of moral gatekeeping that continues to have real consequences on publishing, which becomes all the more troubling at a time of all-out book banning under conservative governments. We must understand these as coalescent events.
Let’s be clear: It’s easy enough to laugh at the comparative silliness of Gilbert’s canceled book, she’ll be fine, but when put into context with a culture at war with real consequences for real people, it is indeed suggestive of a worrying trend of cow-towing to a vocal minority that demands acquiescence. Websites like Goodreads, which seeks to empower users but has failed to even implement Rotten Tomatoes-like adjustments to address these issues, have a responsibility to counteract these forces, but they are unwilling to accept it, even at a basic level. Book bans are anti-art, full stop, and even a decision like Gilbert’s gets coded as self-censorship, but there is clearly power in the network-based ambush. It’s at art’s peril that we let it be wielded as a political weapon.
Ephemera
Alex Pareene wrote for Defector about how “we are living through the end of the useful internet,” meaning that, as the meme above suggests, even (partially) helpful resources like Reddit eventually run up against the unfortunate reality that it is “a private company forced to come up with a credible plan to make hosting discussions sound in any way like a profitable venture.” I think Pareene is largely correct here, but there is something unsatisfying about this style of doomerism, concluding that “the future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information.” Maybe! But I wish commentators wouldn’t just settle for saying that the Reddit strikes (whereby many subreddits went dark and private for 2 days or indefinitely in protest of Reddit’s move to charge third party apps to use its data) will fail — probably, but what else can we say about this kind of collective action? How can we harness it to make sure that future Pareene describes doesn’t come to be? These feel like more worthwhile questions.
Join me and many others in the media world making fun of the fawning NYTimes profile about the founders of Byline, who are apparently here to save indie media, broadly defined. If you know what Dimes Square is, I’m sorry, but basically this is the digital version of Dimes’ short-lived newspaper mini-phenomenon gossip rag, and wouldn’t you know it, they don’t pay their writers — cool, thank you indie media saviours!
Song Recommendation: Sorry but you have to listen to “Padam Padam” if you haven’t. It’s summertime law.