The Mills Are Closing
As much as it’s annoying to be constantly reminded that the only constant in life is change, that annoyance doesn’t make the truth of the proposition go away. We can regret some changes and applaud others; but they’re going to happen, with or without our approval, whether or not we’re prepared for them.
I live in New England, once the center of the Industrial Revolution in America. Here were town after town with a single industry: the “dark, satanic” textile mills, the noise that never stopped, the ability to earn a wage. And the mills, you’ll have to admit, had a good long run. Many of them were built in the first half of the 1800s, some surviving into the 1960s and in some places the ‘70s.
Until they didn’t. I’m not here to make any value judgments about mill work and its effect on people and their communities, but I will note that for good or bad (and sometimes both), entire towns were dependent on them. If you didn’t work in the mill, you worked connected to it, dependent on the income of mill workers for your shop or your service.
What happens, then, when an entire industry shuts down? In some ways, we’re about to find out.
A recent article by analyst Thad McIlroy in Publisher’s Weekly gives a pretty reasonable roadmap for what is happening, right now, as you’re reading this. The mills haven’t closed yet, but layoffs are starting for sure. And the engine behind the change is artificial intelligence.
I believe that every function in trade book publishing today can be automated with the help of generative AI. And, if this is true, then the trade book publishing industry as we know it will soon be obsolete. We will need to move on.
I strongly urge you to read the whole article, as McIlroy takes readers on a tour of the different facets of publishing that will be affected by the use of generative AI: acquisitions, editorial, production, distribution, advertising, marketing, and discovery. In other words, everything.
And there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop this process. We all live in a culture shaped by the economic straitjacket of capitalism, and faster, cheaper are the bywords of our age, just as they were of the Industrial Revolution.
McIlroy is enthusiastic about embracing the coming changes, and scoffs at those who see it as apocalyptic. My own take is somewhere between the two extremes: I don’t believe that generative AI is the end of art and culture, but nor do I believe it’s going to be a magic pill that will straighten out all of publishing’s current woes. (His excitement over enabling books to “morph into additional revenue-producing mediums,” for example, is a little disquieting to those of us who do not see publishing through strictly capitalist lenses.) What I do believe is that it is coming and we’re going to have to adapt—or find something else to do.
Which isn’t to say that adaptation is going to be painless. The biggest and inescapable issue associated with new technology is that by definition it has arrived before anyone has had the chance to question what it means. Morality will always trail technology, since we need to see and understand something before we can work out both its efficacy and its ethics. We are a culture that asks if something can be done and then waits a good long while before asking whether it should be done. Those of us in publishing aren’t going to change that.
We’ll be doing things differently five years from now, and making it personal—as in, how is this going to affect my writing practice?—is one way to cope. If you can see a roadmap ahead, even if it’s for only a brief part of the journey, you’ll feel more control over something that’s largely out of our hands. We can’t affect the development of generative AI, but we can affect how and where we allow it into our lives and our work. Bonhoeffer—and, behind him, generations of AA participants—enjoin us to change what we can and accept what we can’t, and I think that’s a good way for writers and readers alike to approach the new revolution.
Because, like it or not, the mills are closing.