Domestic Extremist

What on earth do you mean "can't explain it". It's obvious. The publishing industry is serving them garbage, and ninety-five out of one hundred indie authors is a hack with delusions of adequacy. New authors can't find readers. Readers can't find new authors. They are hidden from each other by a whirling snowstorm of trash. This problem is fixable. Hell, I could fix this problem in two hours if I could get @JeffBezos to lock Kindle's senior management in a room with me and not let them out until they really listened. It works like this. Tradpub, in the 20th century, provided a variety of services for authors. For readers, it provided one important service. Curation. Publishers were investors. They invested money in manuscripts and authors, so they vetted those authors and manuscripts for what they thought people would actually read. The system worked. If you picked up a science fiction novel from a major science fiction imprint like DAW or ACE or Baen, there was a risk it might not be to your taste, but it wouldn't totally suck. Well, the tradpub business model is dead. There's no longer any point for new authors in getting a publishing deal, because they can't do anything for you that Amazon doesn't. They add no value. As an author, Amazon provides me what publishers once did.... a store to sell my books, and a press to print them. What they don't do is provide readers the service that publishers once did. They don't vet or curate novels. Why would they? They sell every novel ever, and putting up an Amazon page for your novel costs them less than a dime. You're the one doing most of the work. They have no financial interest in rejecting anyone ever, because unlike tradpub houses, Amazon is not an investor. They have no skin in the game. Now, there's a tradpub word for the unfiltered, unvetted, uncurated output of everyone who wants to be a novelist. They call it the slushpile. And their job, back when they actually used to do it, was to strain the slush for tiny flakes of gold. Now, Amazon, who replaced them, doesn't do that. Amazon just exposes readers directly to the slushpile. Now, about this moment, you might think I am complaining how a large corporation, or a billionaire, isn't fixing my problem for zero dollars. After all, we just got done spelling out that Amazon sells all the books. Why would they have any interest in promoting one over another? Well, that's where they're wrong. This occurred to me when I was writing my first novel. I happened to mention this project to a acquaintance who was highly placed at Amazon, and he told me it was a bad idea. "The book market is saturated," he said. "We get a lot of data from people's Kindle devices, and we know what they have on them, what they have read, what they haven't and how fast they read. These people have an average of five years of unread fiction on their devices. The demand simply isn't big enough to support more supply." I nodded, and smiled, and said "how interesting", and didn't argue. But in my head, at that moment, I invented an idea I call the Thiel Fallacy: the belief that because monopolies have no competitors, they have no competition. Amazon, as an entity, was effectively bored with books, because they were convinced that, as the only game in town, they were selling all the books that could be sold. That they were selling as many books as people would read. A monopoly does not automatically have 100% of the potential market. It must compete with all of its opportunity costs, including non-consumption. In plain English, if you sell all the books there are, but people can't find a book they like, they're going to just chose not to read a book. Amazon was competing with nothing, and losing. If people have five years' untold novels on their ebook reader, this not mean they have too much stuff to read. It means they have not enough stuff that they want to read. If people could go on Amazon anytime they wanted, and easily buy a book they liked, they would have zero unread material on their Kindles, not five years' worth. So why can't people find a book they like? Because no one is sorting through the slushpile. It's just all being dumped on the readers. Imagine a store that sells everything in the universe, but it's all just dumped in a big pile. No one will buy anything, because no one can find anything. Amazon is like this. It gets an A+ at delivering you the book you ordered, but a D- at helping you find the book you want. So am I saying that Amazon should start rejecting books? Should build a whole publishing department and start reading the slushpile and rejecting things? No. Curation was just how tradpub helped readers find books they liked. It's not the only way or even the best. Amazon has data. Amazon has data from book sales. Amazon has data from Kindle. Amazon has giant computational clusters. Amazon has transformer AI technology. Amazon could build the best and most infallible book-reader matchmaking service in the history of the known universe. Omniscient, content-aware, and personalized. Then Amazon would sell more books. If you control 70% of the total book market, you don't sell more books by increasing your market share. You sell more books by increasing the size of the market. Right now, Amazon sells advertising. To authors. How retarded is that? Authors don't have money. If we did, we wouldn't be writing books and making a couple of dollars a sale. Instead, Amazon needs to advertise books for free. Not just the books that sell the most, but individually targeted marketing of the books each person would most enjoy. You don't even have to ask people which books they liked. They don't have to rate them from 1 to 5. Just look at the Kindles. Look at how fast they read it. Did they stay up until 2am reading The Hobbit? Okay, what else did people who stayed up late reading The Hobbit stay up to read? Build a correlation database. Turn AI lose on it. It should be Amazon's job, not the just the authors', to find readers for books. Because authors may be motivated, but Amazon has the data, and the eyeballs, and the money. They could single-handedly revitalize publishing, they'd make more money, authors would make more money, and readers would love them for it. All winners, no losers. All it would require is a development team, and an understanding of what the real problem is. Amazon's enemy isn't Kobo or Barnes and Noble. It's apathy.

It's useless to warn people about something if no one can have a conversation about why it's happening and what must be done to stop it. And that conversation is something that the tech elite are totally unprepared to have, because the solution will hit them directly in the pocketbook. I can tell you how to fix the fertility crisis in three words. But I can't actually fix the fertility crisis with those words, because y'all are not ready to do what's necessary. You think you are, but you're not. And you'll understand why I say you're not when I tell you the three words: Stop. Hiring. Women. Now do you get it? A moment ago, you thought you were willing to do anything to fix this existential threat to every part of the world that matters. Now, you want to ask me if there isn't, possibly, some gentler way that doesn't involve any nasty shocks to our nice, peaceful, tolerant, inclusive liberal way of life. Or you're just calling me a big meanie. Doesn't matter. When you argue with the point I am making here, you are arguing with Mother Nature, and I promise that Mother Nature cannot hear you, and she does not care. Women already have a job, a job they evolved for. A job that is so demanding that they have to 100% specialized for it. Women's job is making humans. And there's only 15 years between the age when it's a felony to make a human with them, and the age when the stuff they need to make humans starts to not work so well. If they are filling the role of men during that time period, they cannot do their own full-time, maximum effort job, and you get no new humans. This is precisely why Mother Nature designed women to only mate with men who are wealthier and more powerful than they are. Because a woman, who is working full time at making humans, needs to be supported. A baby human is an investment in the future. You can't make investments in the future without someone else supporting you in the present. If men cannot do this, women won't have babies with those men. This is why every single high-tech civilization has the fertility crisis. Because every time a civilization gets high-tech, the elites, who buy labor, have a bright idea. Let's start educating the women, they say. That way, we can hire them and double the supply of labor. Which is totally good for society, and the fact that we, personally, will benefit most from this is a total coincidence, and not in any way the whole reason that Wall Street loves feminism. Everyone knows that there's a near-perfect correlation between female education and the fertility crisis. But very few people have truly understood why. It's not the education. It's what the women are being educated for. If you just wanted to teach them matters animal, vegetable, and mineral, along with many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse, there would be no problem at all. But women are not being educated so they can be interesting conversationalists, or well-rounded human beings. They are being educated so they can sit in a cubicle eight hours a day between the ages of 20 and 35, and answer emails or design marketing campaigns. That leaves them neither the time nor the resources nor the inclination to make humans, because men aren't any more powerful than they are. Which gives them the ick. And, of course, they're miserable, because they are genetically programmed to be happy when they do their real job, which is making and refining little humans. Not emails or spreadsheets or marketing campaigns. But no one is ready for this conversation, because it would involve admitting that every change in Western values after WW2 was a huge mistake. @elonmusk isn't going to stop hiring women. Hell, it's not even legal to stop hiring women. You can get sued into oblivion for that. But woman can't make little humans unless the other responsibilities of life are somebody else's problem. And she doesn't want to make little humans with any man who cannot shield her from all those extra duties. The bar for being able to do that used to be "reasonably successful tradesman". Now it's actual serious wealth. We can't IVF our way out of this problem. And we can't just sit around posting "have more babies" on twitter. We have to address the real obstacles that prevent women from having kids. And the biggest of those is that we have, in effect, demanded that they share every single adult male responsibility from career-building to voting to military service. All of these responsibilities and burdens were sold to women as opportunities. But nothing is an opportunity if you can't opt out. Just try being 18 years old and finding a man who will 100 percent support and take care of you while you bear his children and do a little light housework. It's possible, but you had better be exceptionally beautiful, with a sunny personality to match, and social access to the right set of men. Because the average man can't offer you that deal anymore. Not won't. Can't. And there aren't enough rich men to go around.