Edinburgh Book Festival round-up: Irvine Welsh | Frank Cottrell-Boyce | Cory Doctorow
Our latest round-up from the Edinburgh International Book Festival contains a stark warning about AI, some literary hope, and the decline of American power.
Getting a new word into the Oxford English Dictionary brings with it a certain caché, especially when that word is “enshittification”. Cory Doctorow, the fiendishly smart tech activist and author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, said he faced an uphill battle getting people passionate about digital regulation.
“It turns out that the minor licence to vulgarity was the key.”
Doctorow’s book confirms what many of us were starting to suspect but couldn’t quite put our finger on: that internet platforms have got worse, from social media to search engines, first by prioritising ad revenue over their users, then by prioritising profits for their shareholders above all.
Take Google, for example. Having reached 95 per cent market share in 2019-20, the company still needed to continue to grow, and was advised by its chief technologist Prabhakar Raghavan simply to make the search engine less efficient: if people need to make more than one search to find the information they need, they will see more ads.
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Having someone confirm your suspicions is reassuring, but the major theme for the Edinburgh International Book Festival this year is Changing You Mind, and I’m glad to say that Doctorow has gone some way to changing my mind about AI: not about whether it’s a good or bad thing, but on how worried I should be about it.
He likened the technology to a plug-in, something which adds capability to existing packages. Not, then, a technology that is going achieve consciousness and take over the world. That’s what the AI companies would like us to believe, he said, but the truth is many of them are losing money hand over fist.
It wasn’t all good news however. While the ethical and environmental problems with AI are real, as is the threat to jobs in the short term, the bigger danger is that this bubble will burst, taking the world economy with it. The response to that will be austerity, said Doctorow, and austerity pushes people towards fascism. If you’re going to worry about anything, worry about that.
Children’s author Frank Cottrell-Boyce set out to change some minds, particularly political ones, in his two-year term as Children’s Laureate.
Having visited schools and youth projects all over the UK to gather evidence on children’s lives and literary, he found much which is perturbing, such as the teacher on Merseyside who told him not to talk about bed-time stories when some children don’t even have beds.
At the same time, he saw so much which brought him hope, particularly in the “amazing” work by local people, volunteers and small charities, work which is not quanitfiable but makes things immeasurably better.
Two nursery staff in Castlemilk performing Kes Gray’s Oi Cat! in “one of the best live acts I’ve ever seen”. The Liverpool teenager who stopped him in the street to recite Jabberwocky from memory. “The essential can’t be measured, and what can’t be measured is essential,” he said.
It might sound like a strange thing to say, but Irvine Welsh has done much to promote reading: consider how many people read Trainspotting who would not otherwise have picked up a book. Welsh was interviewed by Kevin Williamson, reminiscing about the moment in 1993 when Williamson predicted that Trainspotting would be “a phenomenon” but said he wasn’t sure about the title.
Welsh has outgrown his image as the bad boy of Scottish letters. His new novel, Can Nothing Save Us? is set in Las Vegas, against the decline of the Strip, and was described during the event as “a beautifully written family drama” and even “a traditional romance”.
It’s his first book set in the US, written from a desire to explore “the decline of American power”. I was almost relieved when he mentioned that the two main characters drink their own urine for a health kick. An intimacy with bodily fluids sounds more like the Irvine Welsh I remember. Susan Mansfield
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