“Julia was twenty-six years old, and worked on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department…”.

Julia is a main character of the “1984” novel by George Orwell: a book that becomes every year more a REALISTIC prophecy of real news. Too much realistic, sometimes.

Thanks to her job Julia, as we know from the novel:

“could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad… Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces”

Julia exists, and works at Amazon

Now, compare Julia’s description to this one:

“With its data and power, Amazon could make books designed specifically to keep people reading and buying, and with its impressively wide-reaching marketing strength, it could get those books in front of hundreds of millions of people with credit cards."

“So maybe Amazon (like Netflix too, by the way) is irreparably altering popular American culture by creating a new landscape of literature driven by data and algorithms, using notes from its own statistical model-cum-editor. Or maybe it isn’t. But there should be no doubt whatsoever that it could".

On the same topic…

This is already happening, albeit in mere “manual” mode, in music and movies:

• Record labels can see which songs will break out next with surprising accuracy, and they will
• Mashup of popular country songs confirms how formulaic the genre has become
• Hollywood franchise movies are VERY formulaic
• movie studios using copyright to loot their own basements
• some movie broke some record. Thanks, copyright. Or not?

P.S.: when I first commented this story on Twitter, user @lethargilistic pointed out that ” Fritz Leiber’s novel The Silver Eggheads is about a world obsessed with algorithmic novels. He called them “word wooze.""