A Self-Study Syllabus, Gilgamesh, Audience Capture, AI Threats
Genius Loci readers:
I write to you from an airport terminal, which explains why this month’s dispatch is delayed. Not that you noticed. Most of July, before I left, belonged to a set of four-thousand-year-old texts. One was the Epic of Gilgamesh, which I read for the first time in 25 years, since I read it at the community college that now employs me. This time I’m reading it more soberly… soberly enough to notice that much of what gets called “the text” is really someone’s interpretation of it. In fact, everything is a kind of interpretation, including what we perceive, think, and create.
A Method to Start New Projects: The Self-Study Syllabus
The history of ideas as an academic discipline is young. It’s usually traced to Arthur Lovejoy, who founded the History of Ideas Club at Johns Hopkins in the 1920s and laid out his method in his book The Great Chain of Being. This book gave the field its founding assumption. An idea (say, “the great chain of being,” or for my purposes, “the sacred mountain”) can be traced across centuries and civilizations.
Not everyone agreed with that assumption. Michel Foucault spent the greater part of The Archaeology of Knowledge — I think — arguing more or less the opposite. What looks like one continuous idea is often several distinct ideas that use the same word. Around the same time, Quentin Skinner made a related point in his essay “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.” If you read an idea outside its historical context, he argued, and you’ll mistake your own assumptions for the past’s. Ideas evolve and context matters.
I mention this all because it is related to my own project. When I look at how mountains have been imagined across thousands of years, I often wonder if I am I following one continuous idea (“sacred mountain"), or cataloguing a series of unrelated ideas that happen to share a similar concept or a landform. Lovejoy may have been concerned with “continuity” or tracing an idea throughout time, but I find myself more interested in noticing them pop up in time. In other words, I’m less interested in connecting the dots than dotting some possible connections.
These writers — Lovejoy, Foucault, Skinner — were writing for other academics mainly. Their debates assume a graduate seminar’s worth of context. But a project like mine (global in scope, aimed at a general reader) needs a method too. I have been building what I’ve started calling a “self-study syllabus,” essentially a reading list broad enough to cover the period I’m thinking about, assembled before I know which threads are worth pulling on.
What I am talking about isn’t similar to a chapter outline. An outline might be about shaping a narrative or an argument, about weaving research into a story, which is the harder and later work. A self-study syllabus is about surveying the field, getting a general sense of the lay of the land before deciding where and what to build.
Because my project is global and aims to be rooted in the history of ideas, I started with the earliest textual records we have, those from Mesopotamia. This part of my syllabus contained primary sources like Gilgamesh, the Enuma Elish, the Gudea Cylinders, the old Sumerian Bilgames stories, some myths and so-called “dialog” literature, some cultural artifacts like the Babylonian Map of the World, and so on. During the first part of the upcoming fall semester, my goal is to finish primary research into Mesopotamia.
From here I have a few directions I could go next: the Judeo-Christian world, ancient Egypt, ancient Greece. While my instinct is to move chronologically, it is hard to do in this case. What is most important here, though, is committing to an area not too far afield and exhausting it. Do no read around willy-nilly, no not skip straight to synthesis. Survey a period on its own terms before deciding what you actually want to say about it.
Reading Gilgamesh
The first place my syllabus took me this month was back to the Epic of Gilgamesh — a text I hadn’t read in decades. I had forgotten how good it is (had I known to begin with?). Gilgamesh is a great, if strange work. The hero is a tyrant. He is violent, rash, and hard to root for. As a human, he mostly sucks. But he grieves for his dead friend, and that grief earns the reader’s sympathy. His friend’s death changed him. The story is fascinating, complicated, and full or literary and cultural tropes we would recognize in any Hollywood movie or modern book: literary cliffhangers, antiheroes and complicated characters, men sowing their wild oats and women “domesticating” them, human pride and the destruction of the environment, and so on.
My first reading many years ago was a narrative retelling. This time, I wanted as close to a literal translation as possible. I settled on Sophus Helle’s newish translation. Though I wish I had known before buying Helle’s book that, while his translation seems faithful, the translator is nonetheless a poet and he took poetic liberties — he even says as much in the introduction.
Helles’s translation is good. But the gold standard — even Helle acknowledges this — is Andrew George’s two-volume Oxford edition. Heavily annotated, George’s academic edition is the one every serious scholar works from. It is not to be confused with George’s earlier, more affordable Penguin edition of Gilgamesh aimed at general readers. I went looking for the scholarly edition after finishing Helle’s translation. I found a copy in a library. It’s magnificent, and it costs about $600 for both volumes — accessible to institutions, to research libraries, to perhaps a handful of scholars, and to almost no one else. George’s Penguin edition is, taking everything else into account, might be the best for everyday readers.
Since finishing Gilgamesh I’ve been reading further into Mesopotamian letters. I read again the Enuma Elish, the Gudea Cylinders, and the old Sumerian Bilgames stories. A lot of the Mesopotamian texts can be found on the electronic Babylonian Library, the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, and other online repositories.
I wrote about each on my On Mountains blog:
Fortunately, most of the Mesopotamian primary texts are short. However, the secondary scholarship is not, and it’s a real hazard for a project like mine — endlessly interesting and available and capable of eating the time I should be spending moving forward. My plan is to read the primary sources first, see which threads are worth pulling, compile my thoughts, and then dive into the secondary sources.
Rebuilding my YouTube Channel Around the Work
For a few years I’d been posting photography-adjacent content on YouTube. I used photography as the entry point into what was interesting me. I’d talk about my Bolivia work, for instance, through a photography lens. In these vidoes, my main interest (mountains) was secondary to the tool (the camera). In hindsight, that was backwards. Photography should have lived at the margins of that discourse, not be the frame around it. But the photography angle was the easier sell, and I built a small audience on YouTube because of it.
Eighteen months ago, I made a video on the photographer Josef Koudelka that was meant mostly to encourage other photographers to do more with less. This video alone pulled in over 550 new subscribers (over 25% of my total number) and helped get my channel monetized. I don’t care much about subscriber counts as an end in themselves, but they matter when the algorithm determines whether to keep showing your work to others. For me, this meant that video was quietly training YouTube to find me more people who wanted similar photography videos, not more people who were interested in my projects and research.
This is the much-feared “audience capture.” It is the way a platform’s feedback loop can push creators into creating more of whatever already struck a nerve. This is why some bands never evolve. “Audience capture” trains you to ignore your interests in favor of that which “performs” better.
I keep thinking of Kierkegaard’s claim here, that “the crowd is untruth.” Shaping your work to what will be legible and popular to the masses is at odds with pursuing “truth” or what’s actually worth making. Pandering to the algorithm is about conformity and consensus (like the outputs LLMs produce), and doing so betrays the self, the spirit, the individual.
My Bolivia video — the video of mine I’d argue is the most historically and culturally substantial one I’ve made — has picked up only around 200 views since March, making it the lowest-performing video I’ve ever posted. The photo community (the community to which most of my subscribers belong) doesn’t care about the subject at all. Fine. But this means that, if I want to continue on my current channel, I need to start over. It means letting the old, photography-interested subscribers slough off and building a new catalog of videos.
This isn’t really a YouTube problem, or even really a me problem. It’s the problem anyone doing slow, specific work runs into the moment they try to work in public view: the thing that gets you noticed is rarely the thing you actually want to be known for. More people are searching for the latest camera from a well-known manufacturer than for your weird, specific, nerdy project. That gap is the difficulty.
I unlisted most of the old photography-focused videos. And I am rebooting my YouTube channel with my mountain work as the organizing principle — subscribers be damned. Photography stays, but only as a tool in service of the larger work, not a topic of its own. I’ve posted a ”Welcome to My Channel” trailer, along with a piece on mountains in the Bible and their bearing on the crucifixion story that probably nobody will watch. There’s also an angle of my new study, still a little cluttered, in the new videos if you’re interested in seeing how it turned out.
Is AI Killing “Informational” Writing?
Tim Ferriss recently wrote about the collapse of his own prescriptive nonfiction book sales — down roughly 80% since 2022, on current trend. He writes: “The death of prescriptive nonfiction books, at least as a mass-market information business, is nigh.” His more interesting claim is that: “The market for information is collapsing into the chatbot. The market for transformation—for sitting with one mind at length on a subject it has bled for—might get smaller, but stranger and more interesting.”
On a subject that someone has bled for.
Nonfiction is broader than the prescriptive, how-to end of the shelf, but the decline isn’t isolated to the genre Ferriss operates in. Travel writers and bloggers have watched their informational posts get swallowed whole by AI tools that answer the question directly, without sending anyone to the source. It’s a rerun of an earlier disruption lead by the bloggers themselves: guidebook sales evaporated once bloggers and social media influencers started giving the same information away for free and in different formats.
If Ferriss is right that the market for information is collapsing, the real question becomes: which kinds of nonfiction books are doing something a chatbot can’t?
I’d like to think that history, narrative nonfiction, current affairs, journalism, and the like are kinds of nonfiction genres the chatbot can’t do well. People who don’t read history often assume, understandably, that it’s a chronicle of settled facts. It isn’t. It’s an interpretation of the past, a story built out of events, sometimes advancing genuinely new research or evidence, but just as often simply telling the same past in a new, more illuminating way. That act of interpretation is the historian’s actual job. It is not a job an LLM trained to predict the next likely word can do, because there’s no “likely” version of a genuinely new interpretation of the past — only a synthesis of readings that already exist. Ted Chiang made this point about AI-generated text in general: a large language model is, in his phrase, a blurry JPEG of the web — compressed, lossy, a reconstruction of what’s already there, warts and all. It can remix, but it can’t have bled for anything. The kind of nonficiton writing that might survive will be the kind built on lived experience, interpretation, and the new/now.
Thanks for reading and farewell,
JB