The thrust of David Shields’ book Reality Hunger, published in 2011, is that the novel’s dead and a new hyperkinetic hyperlink way of thinking is required to navigate the world, let alone produce a meaningful work of art that says something about the world now. Made up almost entirely of quotations (listed in the appendix against the author’s wishes), Reality Hunger is, today, a flash of false optimism from the early-2010s; it all sounded suspicious then, and the last 15 years have proven all tech utopians wrong. The “democratization of art” hasn’t led to a millennial renaissance; people are more ignorant of art and art history than ever. As Shields and many others at the time wrote, the digital age would allow us to be in constant conversation; free of copyright, new forms and new works could be created without the bloated and obsolete necessities and peculiarities of the 400-page novel, the 80-minute CD, or the two-hour movie.
Shields isn’t interested in technology, nor does he talk about it much in Reality Hunger; nevertheless, the book’s consonant with much of the advertising and social introduction of social media and the smartphone. Shields defends James Frey (“a terrible writer”) and A Million Little Pieces against literalists who made an example out of him—that whole episode is such a world away, the idea that every month, one of the most famous people in the world (Oprah) would talk about a book and its author to millions of people, catapulting that writer to at least some fame and, almost definitely, a career. Even further away is the controversy caused by Jonathan Franzen when he refused to appear on Oprah’s show to talk about The Corrections in 2001—un scandal!
Even in 2011, the edifice was crumbling: the music industry had collapsed, cinema was about to enter into a new and still underwhelming digital age, and, as Shields wrote then, the novel was already dead. In fact, The Corrections was probably the last major literary novel to get the kind of attention it did. Maybe Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch in 2013, or Franzen’s own Freedom in 2010, which he did talk to Oprah about. The last major American play? It must be Angels in America, first staged in 1991 and 1992 in two parts. So Tony Kushner coincided with Francis Fukuyama and made his masterpiece right when history ended.
Reality Hunger gets a lot right about the 15 years that would follow: there will be many “facts,” but still an attraction to and a desire for “realness,” or authenticity. But every even somewhat optimistic forecast on the tech century was dead wrong, horribly wrong, and now people are falling in love with and seeking the counsel of robots, and not even particularly intelligent robots at that. One week after Apple disclosed that “artificial intelligence” is a ways off from understanding one iota of human consciousness, scientists found that frequent use of ChatGPT atrophied users’ brains. Promoting his film The Shards, where Vincent Cassel plays a Musk-like entrepreneur selling digital graves and tombs where people can watch their loved ones decompose in real time, David Cronenberg said that he’d already begun “offloading” his memory to his smartphone a long time ago. “You have to make room.”
Either way, you run out of space. The computer just accelerates the process. Being a true luddite isn’t necessary—does the phrase “use responsibly” solely refer to alcohol, tobacco, and firearms? I’m listening to the complete On the Corner sessions, more than six hours of Miles Davis making one of his best records; I remember when the multi-disc set came out in the late-2000s. I didn’t buy it, because it cost hundreds of dollars. Now, because copyright infringement is so widespread, it’s just sitting on YouTube, untouched by cease and desist letters. The musician Girl Talk was the first one to truly test the waters with his considerable mid-to-late 2000s run of entirely sample based music; in a twist, Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” made songwriters paranoid, and because credit is so disbursed, musicians make even less money from their actual music than they did 20 years ago.
I never believed in Shields’ dream, but I’d gladly live in the constantly creative world of exchange and collage proposed in Reality Hunger. The problem: none of this stuff sticks. YouTube shorts, TikTok, Instagram reels, Bandcamp pages—there’s nothing to grab onto. And this is hardly a novel observation, it’s something I started worrying about in 2011. Like I said, I’d settle for Shields’ vision now, but reading Reality Hunger only made me wish in vain for the return of all it mourns: the novel, the album, the cinema, the celebrated artist. Everyone’s allowed their bivouac of delusion today: no stars, just screens, pigs feeding and unable to break away.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits