“Google recommends a pulse monitor while someone’s bleeding to death, or suggests skin tightening while Bateman makes sausage of a victim.”

INTRODUCTION

“UNSER SCHREIBZEUG ARBEITET MIT AN UNSEREN GEDANKEN”, Friedrich Nietzsche famously remarks on his use of the Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, a forerunner of the typewriter which was developed for the visually impaired.¹ Originally acquired by the shortsighted philosopher because of his rather illegible handwriting, the machine began to slowly affect his writing and thinking. Alluding to Nietzsche’s new telegram style and the capital letters (the Writing Ball did not have miniscules), his assistant, Peter Gast alias Heinrich Köselitz, observes in a letter: “Sowohl von der Deutlichkeit der Lettern, noch mehr aber von der Kernigkeit der Sprüche war ich überrascht. […] Vielleicht gewöhnen Sie Sich mit diesem Instrument gar eine neue Ausdrucksweise an.”²

Examples in literary history are legion, that each writing tool yields new materialities of text, new forms of writing and ways of thinking: The pencil for example allowed Goethe to effortlessly jot down his nighttime-inspirations, while Georg Lichtenberg’s experimental use of the quill resulted in his famous Sudelbücher (if need be, the quill dipped into coffee instead of ink); Kerouac binge-wrote On the Road on his Underwood Portable, the typewriter also enabling the typographic experiments of the Concrete Poets – in poetological texts and literary experiments writers investigate their respective writing tools as the technical conditions of the possibility of literature.³

With the advent of the personal computer, digital writing tools and their increased enmeshment through cloud-services, we have entered a new epoch of writing, in which “the interfaces themselves and therefore their constraints are becoming ever more difficult to perceive”, as Lori Emerson has noted in Reading Writing Interfaces.⁴ She has shown how the complex workings of digital writing tools under their shiny graphical user interfaces (GUIs) have become less and less observable to users, let alone comprehensible, since input and output are seemingly disconnected through opaque algorithmical operations and paradigms of user-friendliness and intuitive design, while the possibility of user’s choice has been strategically limited by software companies.⁵ The everyday digital writing tools thus appear as closed-off black boxes to the users,⁶ ever increasing the writer’s dependence on the Eigensinn of his or her tools.⁷ Or, more drastically put, as Emerson concludes at one point: “[T]hey frame what can and cannot be said.”⁸

Just think of the automatic spellchecking in Microsoft Word, which does not disclose on grounds of which grammatical rules or dictionary this or that word is underlined; or the AutoCorrect-function of Apple, which almost unnoticeably capitalizes words or corrects mistakes, whether or not the user intended it. AutoComplete interferes with smartphone-messaging, when words are proposed on grounds of a statistical or stochastic body that has been trained on the user’s habits; search engines complete search terms to entire sentences, and therefore influence what is searched and thus found; not to mention the most complex language technologies such as Google Translate and its machine learning algorithms.⁹

While one can get quite weary of reiterating how writing today is subject to international surveillance and corporate control – and that conditions of literary production, distribution and reception are becoming ever more intertwined with commercial, political and power interests as these writing tools have become the widely accepted and unchallenged norm –, a range of contemporary literary experiments still serves as a fresh take to critically assess these tools.

AMERICAN PSYCHO (2012): BLACK-BOX-TESTING OF AN ALGORITHM

“ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE”,¹⁰ are the first, Dante-channelling, words of Bret Easton Ellis’ infamous novel American Psycho, published by Vintage Books in 1991, in which the brand-obsessed investment banker and yuppie Patrick Bateman turns into a perverse mass murderer. The eponymous 2012 edition of the book however, released by the publishing collective Traumawien, and, judging by its cover, also written by Ellis, begins like this:

“Crest(r) Whitestrips Coupon, Save $10 Now on Crest(r) Whitestrips. Get Whiter Teeth for the Holidays! Coupons.3DWhite.com/Whitestrips!”¹¹

At first glance, one merely seems to be holding a cheap bootleg, at some stage of the illegal copying process infested by advertisements, a spambook so to say: Jacket, half-title and typesetting imitate the original’s design and typography, the chapter titles are identical, yet the 408 pages of the 2012 edition are almost completely white, except for constellations of footnotes, in which said advertisements appear (see fig. 1–4). On closer examination however, American Psycho (2012) turns out to be the result of the creative (mis-)use of a contemporary writing technology, namely Google Mail, as if taking to heart that “[t]he only conceivable way of unveiling a black box, is to play with it.”¹²

As one starts to follow the algorithm through the book(s), one basically tries to get into the algorithm’s head: Why does this or that ad appear on this particular page? Where is the keyword that triggered it? Is there one – or is the output not only influenced by the text on the page, but by some other signals like IP-address or previous searches…?¹⁴ Furthermore, one starts to compare passages/keywords throughout the novel, which apparently triggered identical ads – the common denominator, at times impossible to find. This is only complicated by the fact that one already reads a human interpretation of the algorithm – Cabell and Huff placed the ads “by hand” –, so if ads seem to be arbitrarily attached to keywords the reader might start looking for more adequate keywords on the same page, or at times even presumes that strategic authorial intervention could be at play…¹⁵

Reading the new American Psycho in this manner, one thus reconstructs the authors’ process of composing the text, retraces the workings of Gmail’s algorithm, and at the same time reads a translation of a novel, famous for its portrayal of 1980s consumer culture, into a present whose consumer culture is dictated by online advertisement – all three ways of reading deeply intertwined with each other.

ALGORITHMIC ACTUALIZATION AND LITERACY IN LINGUISTIC CAPITALISM

Reading American Psycho (2012), it is astonishing how close to home the advertisements hit: If in the “original” there are page-long descriptions of Bateman’s frenemies’ suits, ads for clothes appear (“Dress Shirt – SALE $29.89 / 60% OFF Robert Talbott / Dress like a secret agent / Joseph Bank Mens Shirts / R Laurens: Secret Sale”);¹⁶ high-end audio equipment is praised when Bateman plays music; a two-pager about drinking water is accompanied by six ads for “LIFE Water Ionizers(tm)” or “Free Water Cooler Rental”,¹⁷ and last but not least, the notoriously recurring “Crest(r) Whitestrips Coupons” (on 81 out of 408 pages!), give away Bateman’s obsession for teeth (and/or Google’s fondness of bleaching-ads). Sometimes the algorithm even uncannily grasps the gist of a scene, for example when an “Instant Tenant Screening” and criminal checks are advertised, while Bateman is interrogated by a homicide detective.¹⁸
The conceptual match of pretext (a novel about consumer culture saturated with brands) and applied procedure (keyword-triggered algorithms to display ads), results in an awkwardly adequate actualization of American Psycho for the present, as of course all the products in the footnotes stem from the year 2012 and not from the 1980s. The absurdity of the breathless 2012 online-advertisement-sound seems at times to perfectly match the surface-fixated Bateman:

As an effect of this actualization, interesting superpositions appear. While in the original Bateman programs his VHS-recorder to record The Patty Winters Show, in the new version mp3-players are offered – in general, so it seems, the most striking difference between 1991 and 2012 are not the advertised clothes, furniture or food, but the media change as it is heralded in this ad: “Tape To Digital Converter, Convert Any Cassette Tape To Digital MP3 In 3 Easy Steps! $59.95, www.CassetteToUSB.com.”²⁰

Gmail’s ad-placement, as illustrated in American Psycho (2012), is an expression of what Frederic Kaplan calls “linguistic capitalism”, namely the current state of permanent algorithmic evaluation and commodification of linguistic material via language and writing technologies.²¹ With Google as example, Kaplan describes how the linguistic capital of accumulated search-entries is translated directly into revenue through algorithmic keyword-auctions: Each word or sentence that is entered into Google’s interface is auctioned in split seconds to advertisers, whose ads are then displayed in the results. Kaplan concludes: “Some words and expressions have therefore become commodities with different monetary values that can be ‘bought’ from Google. In some sense, Google has extended capitalism to language, transforming linguistic capital into money.”²²

This is also the case with Gmail and American Psycho (2012): For each keyword that has triggered an ad, a price has been paid (which makes one wonder how much money Google earned from the 819 ads in the making of the book); each word has been awarded a price in the logic of “linguistic capitalism”: it is treated and calculated according to statistical bodies, regardless of its narrative or semantic context, clearly implying a different sort of reading and appreciation of text than we human readers are accustomed to.²³ The configuration of both cultures of reading in one text highlights the threshold and/or transition from human to digital/machinic/algorithmic literacies – they “read” differently.

ALGORITHMIC MISMATCHING AND THE POLITICS OF THE ALGORITHM

Besides the succeeding actualizations, the most striking feature of the new American Psycho are the absurdities, inaccuracies and paradoxes that originate from the algorithmic mismatches of semantic content and respective ad. If there’s “salmon au lait” on a restaurant menu, Google proposes to “Learn French in 10 Days”;²⁴ another time it is obviously misinterpreting “chow-chow” and offering “Cheap Cowhide”²⁵ (which for the knowing reader almost seems like an uncanny premonition to the skinning of people which will occur later in the novel), or having – without apparent keyword – a PR-campaign from the present of 2012 intrude the equally catastrophy-ridden Eighties: “BP, Info about the Gulf of Mexico Spill Learn More about How BP is Helping., www.BP.com/ GulfOfMexicoResponse.”²⁶

As one continues reading the novel(s) and Bateman begins his spree of murder and rape, the algorithm’s disturbing indifference towards violence becomes apparent: During the detailed description of the slashing of a dog, porcelain knives, knife sharpeners and a haircut are advertised: “[H]e doesn’t see me pull out the knife (Kyocera Knives on sale), the sharpest one (Best Knive Sharpener), with the serrated edge (Yoshi Blades Official Site)”. And a few sentences later: “I push the serrated blade into its stomach and quickly slice open its hairless belly (Great Haircuts).”²⁸ – If Google’s goal is to provide users “with ads that are useful and relevant to their interests”,²⁹ for a mass murderer like Patrick Bateman that apparently works just fine.

The list could go on and on: Google serves instant soup-ads while Bateman cooks a woman’s head, or suggests anti-wrinkle-products while he skins his victims. During these passages, which are unbearable to read and were responsible for American Psycho’s temporary indexing in countries such as Germany, the algorithm displays a decided insensitivity towards the semantic content and context. Googles full-mouthed ad policy can only be counted as a sarcastic comment to these observations: “[W]e are careful about the types of content we serve ads against. For example, Google may block certain ads from running next to an email about catastrophic news. In addition, we will not show ads based on sensitive information, such as race, religion, sexual orientation, health, or sensitive financial categories.”³⁰
The reader’s amusement, ambiguity or disturbance regarding Gmail’s ad-placements, are again effects of the relationship of two different kinds of reading and their playing against each other in the book: the sense-making, semantic reading of human recipients and the algorithm’s keyword-oriented “reading”, or processing, of text against a database of ads.³¹ American Psycho (2012) is thus a hybrid book: Produced according to the logic of an algorithm³² but published as a printed book, the familiar narrative genre of the novel is what makes the taken for granted workings of the blackboxed writing interface observable through defamiliarisation: Gmail’s “ignorance” towards violence and racism and its willingness to serve ads on top appear as part of the bigger picture that similar technologies have been and are used in the “fight against terror”, equally combing mails for keywords, or how self-learning algorithms used in predictive policing exhibit racist attitudes with real-life effects, how hiring-tools of tech companies disadvantage women, etc.³³ The programmed, economic, and political dispositif of the algorithm remains necessarily opaque, but here it can be glimpsed in the literary.

A POETICS OF THE GLITCH

As we have seen, not the perfect match of text and ad that facilitate this scrutinizing reading but rather the inconsistencies, paradoxes and mismatches throughout American Psycho invite the reader to reflect on the workings of the algorithm. Operationalizing the faultiness of an unperfected writing tool, Cabell and Huff employ a poetics of the glitch. Glitch theorist Rosa Menkman explains that a glitch appears when any medium is brought “into a critical state of hypertrophy” that allows to “subsequently criticize its inherent politics.”³⁴ American Psycho (2012) does just that. It oversaturates a novel, which is already brimming with brand names, with even more advertising, bringing it into an unreadable “state of hypertrophy” and testing the sensitivity of a technology with page-long descriptions of slaughter. This critique in the guise of literature not only allows to reflect, but also to make tangible the politics of the program, as Nathan Jones notes: “[A] glitch is a moment which gives propulsion into an unforeseen area of critical enquiry – allowing us to not only observe, but experience beneath a media surface.”³⁵

Admittedly, it is difficult to distinguish where the glitch begins and ends, as not only the artist or the faulty software are responsible for the glitch, but also the recipients who experience something as glitchy, as “glitches only exist against human expectations. […] [A] glitch comes into being solely at this moment of transversal entanglement between human and technological systems.”³⁶ That said, the hypertrophy and seeming immorality of Gmail’s algorithm as displayed in American Psycho may also merely be effects of a human reader’s brain that cannot yet process the “newness” of a medium: “[N]ew media devices and artifacts themselves produce the sensations of a destabilizing surge of information or signal when they come into contact with a worldview of technics that has no affordances for them. […] New media are glitches by virtue of the forms this newness takes.”³⁷

So what if the seemingly faulty or immoral ads in American Psycho (2012) are not glitches at all, but show us a future, where Kaplan’s “creolization” (in his use of the term, natural languages incorporating “linguistic biases of algorithms and the economical constraints of the global linguistic economy”)³⁸ has already happened – and our contemporary semantic reading habits are just not adapted to it yet?

MEDIA POETICS AND INTERFACE-SPECIFIC LITERATURE

Cloud-based writing technologies are ephemeral: Google discontinued the algorithmic assessment of emails in 2017,³⁹ but in contrast to locally installed software, which can still be accessed and researched on old PC’s, cloud-based software is forever lost to the researcher. The book American Psycho (2012) then just may as well be one of the few pieces of evidence we have on how the algorithm in Gmail worked in the year 2012.

American Psycho thus not only marks a specific point in the genealogy of writing, which is ever more difficult to trace due to the permanent stream of updates, bug fixes, add-ons or discontinuation of services; but is also a contribution to what Lori Emerson has called media poetics – writer’s engagements with their respective writing technologies –, the literary correspondent of media archaeology. For the 21st century she identifies “a practice not just of experimenting with the limits and possibilities of writing interfaces but rather of readingwriting: the practice of writing through the network, which as it tracks, indexes, and algorithmises every click and every bit of text we enter into the network, is itself constantly reading our writing and writing our reading.”⁴⁰

American Psycho may then herald a specific subgenre of readingwriting, which by feeding canonical literary works into writing interfaces, reverse-engineers these technologies, rendering visible the opaque workings of the black box in the difference between pretext and new text.⁴¹ Operationalizing glitches, authors of such texts more resemble bug hunters or beta-testers than traditional writers, identifying the not-yet-perfect workings of a machine, but then, instead of writing a report or making suggestions for improvement, they use the book/novel as defamiliarising tool to illustrate their findings.⁴² This subgenre – or what could be called a version-specific, interface-specific literature – not only “addresses” or “questions” writing technologies but makes a direct claim to comparative analysis. It radicalizes Emerson’s notion of media poetics as media archaeology, as in American Psycho with the juxtaposition of canonical pretext and algorithmically mediated new text a way of literary comparison is offered, that lets the reader directly reflect on the workings of a blackboxed digital writing technology.

With cloud-based writing software increasingly also taking into account place, time, browser history, user profile, etc. and changes in the algorithm go unnoticed by users and even developers,⁴³ the notion that interface critique can only be version critique⁴⁴ is further complicated – each use of the algorithm being potentially singular and results impossible to reproduce. In the end, American Psycho thus of course cannot explain, how the Gmail-algorithm “really” works.⁴⁵ But it explores how one can experimentally generate any knowledge about black boxes – and how this knowledge can be made tangible for human readers by using literature as a familiar mode of representation.

CODA: THE (WRITING) TECHNOLOGY OF THE SELF

If we return to Friedrich Nietzsche’s remark that writing tools affect our thinking, it appears as if in the case of digital writing technologies and algorithmic black boxes we increasingly cannot know how they influence our texts and how interfaces co-determine what is written (and thought). With the enmeshing of writing technologies with all areas of life – just think of what one does with the PC/smartphone, before/while/after one writes: book flights, communicate with friends, send money –, in the digital age, Foucault’s écriture de soi becomes a default, exploitable and heteronomous act – a “technology of the self” in the truest sense of the word:⁴⁶ We are all like Patrick Bateman (minus the murder), portrayed and defined by opaque always-on algorithms with personalized constellations of products around us.

In his essay on “linguistic capitalism” Kaplan concludes that new tools must be developed to observe the current developments of algorithmically mediated language.⁴⁷ – And if literature always also reflects on its technical conditions of possibility, why shouldn’t these “new tools” be works of interface-specific readingwriting like American Psycho (2012), tools that open up fresh perspectives on the contemporary revolution of writing and language?⁴⁸