‘Content Machines’ Asks The Right Questions About Publishing In The Platform Era

Every season, there’s a particular sort of novel that elicits its own genre of disdain. It’s somehow “too personal” and also lacking in “depth.” It’s called things like indulgent, trashy, lazy, artless, frivolous, embarrassing, or perhaps just very online. This is the mauvais genre of our times, the gimmick of the not-quite-memoir, autofiction. Over the summer, as Rachel Cusk’s Life of M: A Novel  took its turn, Grace Byron remarked that by now, speculation over the genre’s boundaries of fact and fiction is “its own bloodsport.” Since its rise in the 2010s, “the only thing trendier and triter than writing autofiction is hating autofiction,” as Sanjena Sathian put it in 2022. But why, if it is so silly and unserious, does this genre seem to pose such an enduring threat?

To perennial debates over autofiction and much else, Sarah Brouillette’s latest book Content Machines is a welcome redirection from questions of literary merit to a sharp historical analysis of the contemporary publishing industry—and many of its attendant anxieties. Brouillette, a literary scholar and Marxist-feminist whose cultural criticism has appeared in Defector, continues the interventionary work of her previous books on UNESCO, the creative economy, and the global literary marketplace, regarding contemporary questions about the “fate of the literary”: “We are told to worry about the threats to literary art’s essential moral seriousness, distinction, difficulty, and purpose,” as she writes in Content Machines. “We are warned that publishing today is overrun with what are basically entitled consumers: ideologically inflexible, uncomfortable with hard ideas and disagreement, untrained, incapable of nuanced thought, and always on the edge of tears or outage.” Rather than stoking the panic, Content Machines historically situates it, uncovering urgent political questions about an era of publishing permeated by digital platforms such as Wattpad, Kindle, and Audible, and social media phenomena like BookTok and Bookstagram.

Content Machines examines digital platforms as “technologies of precarity,” instrumental to the ever-worsening labor conditions in publishing. More specifically, Brouillette conceives of platforms as forces of feminization. It’s not just that women are doing more of the jobs and that the jobs are getting worse. Women are doing more of these jobs precisely because they are worse. “The more work in writing and publishing becomes available only to those willing to do it on a contingent basis,” as Brouillette explains, “the more it is likely to be women doing it,” as workers accustomed “to low-prestige work and to taking jobs that allow them to continue with housework and childcare.” This is the case across many workforces, and what we’re always really talking about whenever masculinity is in “crisis.”