Wired’s Patent-Pending Big-Idea Book Generator
This is the big idea for our time!
Honan, Mathew. “Concoct a Best-Seller With Wired’s Patent-Pending Big-Idea Book Generator,” Wired Magazine, Issue 15.10, 09.25.07.
I discovered this brilliant article in January. It’s more than an article; it both characterizes the “idea” sector of the culture industry and enhances its productivity. I envy the author’s ability to formulate clearly and schematicallyhow all the gimmicky bullshit piled up in the new books section of the bookstores is generated.
I remember some good popular sociology in my childhood, but I can’t be sure when pop intellectualism really took off, where everyone had some angle, some arbitrary notion purporting to unify and explain everything in society in an unintentional parody of scientific method. I think Marshall McLuhan was the progenitor, and it is probably no accident that the subject matter that catapulted him to fame was the electronic media.
It’s the fetishism of commodities embodied in the realm of ideas. Our fragmented, surface sense of social reality enables these middlebrow explanatory frameworks to proliferate. Freakonomics, anyone?
