There are babies involved in all of these link sausages, and really not in a cute way.
- Remember when actually talking about nepo-babies in H'wood was a thing? Nobody talks about them in publishing, but they're definitely there — on a slightly skewed axis, as the nepotism isn't all that often within publishing but mostly within the cultural-gatekeeper ecosystem. Both instances are not about actual skill or merit, as the subtext of the respective articles indicates (as to the MFAs, through silence); they are about virtue signaling, and in particular credentialism. And that doesn't lead to "elitist art" so much as "Arts but without Progress" — not a good thing at all, and my fondness for the m-dash predates the internet so there. Better to have a real education, as an immigrant, as a background for writing that actually creates Progress in the useful Arts… without appropriate virtue signaling or credentials.
- Slightly farther away, we need to worry about another thing babies say: "Mine!" And here, it's not the creators who are shrieking; it's the thieves, the imitators, the collectors. As to that last set, there's a very simple explanation: The entire LLM mindset (shared by most techbros) thinks only in terms of "ask forgiveness rather than get permission," whereas if there's one thing common across the arts it's thinking "get my permission before you do anything with My Stuff" — even when that permission is imposed by law in the form of fair use and fair dealing and the anxiety of influence, because the for-lack-of-a-better-term "reuser" needs to follow those permission rules. (Would that the author of that last link had been more assiduous himself in doing so over his career…)
- Contrariwise, there's the issue of how much should academics charge for access to their scholarly work, considering that unlike most creatives who put stuff out there academics aren't relying on income directly attributed to sale of copies of their works for lunch money. Although given pay scales, a latte may remain out of reach if they did…
- They wouldn't give her the Nobel or many of the other awards her work merited (despite her adjacency, anyway, to the right credentials), but at least Ursula K. Le Guin's house is now a historic landmark. Even with dragons and spaceships on the covers.
- Last for now, the big baby with his finger on the button and his hands in your wallet. He's certainly following in the tradition, although it's somewhat unfair of the letter-writers to cast blame solely on one source — Europe (and, in particular, British Petroleum and its sycophants in the British government spanning a century) and a couple millennia of negative selection-of-leaders sense (demonstrated ability to select the worst available leader and senior assistants) have surely soiled the playpen in advance. Meanwhile, other babies are squalling too, even as this one tries to deflect attention from his bad behavior with an entirely different temper tantrum from a second-generation "natural born citizen."