There remains a political undercurrent to everything, and the arts cannot escape.
Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
George Orwell, Why I Write (1946). Nor should they.
- One side aspect of "the arts" is the commercial part that actual creators handle somewhat (often entirely!) orthogonally to mudane reality. The struggle between influence and (noncreator understandings of) originality is just one starting point. (That that student of creative processes fell directly into the swamp of overt political influences should surprise no one.) When it verges on branding-friendly appropriation of descriptions it further masks the brain rot of commercial disdain for the differences between "creative process" and "creative output."
- Those differences are definitely at issue when oligopolists/monopsonists in the commercial aspects of the arts listen only to other oligopolists/monopsonists.† The key question ignored by this article — and that ignorance is entirely consistent with the venue's prejudices — is how likely listening to only one critical element of a multisided transactional chain is to actually reveal much of anything. Publishers' interests and knowledge bases do not encompass those of their suppliers (the authors) or either the direct (libraries) or final (readers/library patrons) customers. In media res may have a place in some storytelling, but this article very much assumes the can opener without ever wondering how the food got in the can — or whether it needs to be reheated, used as ingredients in other cooking, or is past its shelf life after it's out of the can. Let alone whether it's nonnutritious junk.
- This problem is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in proposed consolidation of access channels and its implications at both source and consumption endpoints. Clarkson's proposed solution to the "problem" of broadcaster "unprofitability" both ignores the freedom-of-expression non-Ricardian rent and embraces the colonial instinct of those already aligned with colonial powers on its way to proposing an increase in oligopolist/monopsonist power and structure… which is rather ironic given Clarkson's own past relations with an oligopolist/monopsonist in that very space that actually has an unusually broad and open conception of "gatekeeping." (Not broad and open enough, but "choosing the lesser evil" and all that…)
- There's that gatekeeper problem again. As Orwell notes in his underappreciated essay — widely cited, seldom contemplated — complete removal of "politics" from writing is impossible. Sometimes, however, the gatekeepers don't even try, even for writing about science and science-related issues. It's one, not-entirely-benign, thing for a publisher to engage with authors on purported style issues to maintain civility or some other purportedly unrelated-to-substance abstraction (that's never entirely independent of politics — or, indeed, of substance). It's much more disturbing when a publisher licenses a work (in a monopsonistic marketplace of ideas), and then attempts to impose its political preferences in opposition to the authors' own position that was known at acquisition time — for a children's book on a hot topic that's just short of 232° C to begin with.
- All of that is disturbing enough when we know who the gatekeepers are, and can at least contemplate the reasons the gatekeepers use their influence to start a war. It's much less clear when instead of a war they're "just" exploiting individuals, not excluding illusory creators busy following the long-con playbook ("enhance credibility, and pretermit outside inquiries, by establishing associations with and linkages to legitimate enterprises").
Looks like I didn't do so well at leaving the politics out, did I?
† A quick refresher: In the vocabulary of antitrust, a "monopolist" is a single marketplace vendor with control of the market (an "oligopolist" is a member of a group that does so, either by formal agreement or otherwise), usually measured by ability to inferredly control price and perhaps quantity in that market. A "monopsonist" is similar, but is instead a marketplace purchaser with the same kind of control; the antitrust literature doesn't fully contemplate "oligopsonist." Market role of a dominant player actually matters a lot, especially in any analysis of either the market's scope or quantification; the latter can easily result in multiple divide-by-zero-like errors. In this instance, because the library vendors act as both vendors and purchasers, they're in both parts of the transaction with distortive market power.