The Internet Infection

The viscerally negative reaction (one Tweet got upwards of 1.3 million views) of The DiscourseTM to Honor Levy's My First Book, or rather, more importantly to Honor Levy's recent profile in The Cut, is enough to make the reviewer a partisan: a defender of the right of any serious author, including Levy, to be criticized for their work, and not their character (or perceptions, rumors, or machinations about who and what they might be). The behavior of a banal, envious mob of semi-intellectuals (over-produced humanities elites jockeying for the last traces of financial and moral support left inside a dying cultural system) online is a perversion of intelligent culture, and a sign that books are almost nothing more than tokens to be inserted into the giant-digital-talking-machine.