Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction | Zadie Smith | The New York Review of Books

Metadata

Author: Zadie Smith
Full Title: Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction | Zadie Smith | The New York Review of Books
Category: #articles
URL: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/10/24/zadie-smith-in-defense-of-fiction/

Highlights

And language is also, literally, the “containment.” The terms we choose—or the terms we are offered—behave as containers for our ideas, necessarily shaping and determining the form of what it is we think, or think we think. Our arguments about “cultural appropriation,” for example, cannot help but be heavily influenced by the term itself. Yet we treat those two carefully chosen words as if they were elemental, neutral in themselves, handed down from the heavens. When of course they are only, like all language, a verbal container, which, like all such containers, allows the emergence of certain ideas while limiting the possibilities of others.
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We behave as if we don’t want to be known by one another, but we sometimes seem oblivious to the idea that we spend our days feeding ourselves into a great engine of knowing, one that believes it knows every single thing about us: our tastes, our opinions, our beliefs, what we’ll buy, who we’ll love, where we’ll go. The unseen actors who harvest this knowledge not only hope to know us perfectly but also to modify us, to their own ends. And this essay, too, will no doubt enter that same digital maw, and be transformed from ideas to data points, and responded to, perhaps, with a series of pat phrases, first spotted by the machine, then turned viral, and now returned to us as if it were our own language. “I just can’t with Zadie Smith right now,” or else “This Zadie Smith is everything,” or—well, you know the drill. We’ve gotten into the habit of not experiencing the private, risky act of reading so much as performing our response to what we read, which is then translated into data points.
To the technological monopolies that buy and sell your data—and for whom your daily input of personal information is only raw product, to be traded like orange juice futures or corn yields—you reveal yourself not so much in your views or hot takes as by the frequency of your posts or tweets, their length or syntax, the pattern of their links and follows. They do not care that you are woke or unwoke, patriot or activist. To that shadow text, all you are is data. You are the person who tweets fourteen times in twenty minutes and therefore is needy in some way and vulnerable to a particular kind of political advertising, or else you are the person who moves through a series of lifestyle and news sites, which route will predict, with extraordinary specificity, the likelihood of your booking a vacation in early February or voting in November.