Who Gets to Edit Culture? Sensitivity Readers & Censorship in Book Publishing

The purpose of literature was sort of to like reveal the human condition, to show aesthetic beauty. In the way literature was taught, it was a very a way of sort of like praising the best books of all time. Today that, and especially I'd say since like about the 1960s on, it's very much shifted towards what's called a hermeneutics of critique. critique or hermeneutics of suspicion. And a lot of this is informed by Marxism and its various offshoots.

So the way literature is taught today is books are promoting oppressive ideologies, whether it's along lines of race, sex, capitalism, and the job of the literary critic, the professor in the classroom and his students is to sort of like unpack those ideologies and then challenge them. Audience capture effect is real, which is like if you're someone who cares a lot about algorithms, if you're someone who really cares a lot about retweets and likes, especially because that's your whole income, like I don't think Candace Owens has another job aside from just creating content. And you're seeing like, oh, when I whatever, have a Holocaust denier on my podcast or I interview Harvey Weinstein in prison, like that is doing way better than me just offering sort of like a measured critique of an economic policy.

Then yeah, I think consciously or not, you're going to be incentivized to do more of that. People use change.org petitions now to get the attention of publishers and to get books canceled. And especially in the past decade, there's been so many controversies of quite literally books being cancelled before publication, retracted from bookstores after publication. There's this whole new profession of what's called sensitivity readers, people hired to edit books for potentially insensitive material.

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