This article resonated with me. While there were and are problems with editors, which the author acknowledges, the lack of gatekeepers has resulted in an avalanche of “brain rot” material, which is being made exponentially worse by AI.
Perhaps I’m guilty of “fence sitting,” but I’m coming to believe that a hybrid approach, a combination of editors gatekeeping what gets published or broadcast along with the freedom of uncontrolled publishing and broadcasting separate from major media outlets, will improve the quality of what is published and reduce the pile of brain rot. Unfortunately, as pointed out in the article, we are rapidly losing the editors, the gatekeepers of quality.
I would argue that people like editors frequently produce conformity rather than quality. And that’s not inherently a bad thing, but it is a useful distinction.
I would further argue that in the modern context, to “reduce the pile of brain rot” what we need aren’t editors per se, but filters - of which editors are a single subcategory.
Editors filter pre-publication. Something doesn’t get published by the New York Times unless it’s been approved by the editor. That’s useful, provided you (a) trust the NYT, and (b) enjoy their writing style.
But we also need post-publication filters to surface quality material. And I think that’s the real goal you’re driving at. The fact that something wasn’t scrupulously edited and triple-checked pre-publication doesn’t mean it’s not good and worth reading. The challenge is that sifting through tens of thousands of pieces of content to find a few good ones is (a) something that arguably needs to be done, and (b) is incredibly inefficient.
To me the question is, in the modern information economy, how do we (a) efficiently surface the items of actual value, and (b) adequately recognize/compensate the value of the people who act as a filter on our behalf?
I don’t have a solution. But I do think that’s the real question.
That’s not how it works for major publications that charge readers/bookstores/distributors.
The acquisitions editor is the second or third person to read a submission. For trade publishing the percentage of unagented submissions that gets that far is somewhere between 2% and 5%.
Increasingly major publishers don’t accept unagented submissopns because the level of crap is otherwise unbearable just in terms of processing them to track them, never mind getting them into the hands of slush readers. Publishers I’ve spoken with recently are mulling over returning to hard copy submissions if they will even accept unagented mss.
The flood of unagented submissins was already a problem in terms of sheer numbers before 2023. With AI readly available now it is so much worse, and the amount of plagiarism has dramatically increased as well.
While I understand how frustrating it is for would-be authors to be told they have to find an agent or self-publish, I can understand why publishers rely on agents.
At the same time, the idea of filtering the published stuff to highlight the best is via reviews increasingly something that large papers (hello Washington Post) are doing less and less. Which leaves Amazonb. and Goodreads and TikTok, all of which have algorithms that are frequently manipulated.
Increasingly, I rely on word-of-mouth, from places like this, or podcasts, or, oddly, a Slack group for fountainpen & stationery fans.
Okay, I’m confused. My point was that the editors act as a filter for stuff before it’s published (which was also at least one of the points in the linked article). It sounds like you’re saying they’re not the initial filter? If so, I’ll happily grant that.
