If you can’t be bothered writing it, I can’t be bothered reading it. — Crooked Timber

Home

Comments policy

Subscribe

If you can’t be bothered writing it, I can’t be bothered reading it.

by Hannah Forsyth on August 4, 2026

The producerist vision of AI seems to assume an endlessly expanding market for reading. And reading. Well. It is rather more than a market.

Warning: this post is a little more sweary than usual. If that bothers you, maybe read something else.

We read aloud in our household. A lot.

We always have.

When my daughter was five years old (she’s now 26) she and I once squished into a beanbag and read Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen aloud. When we got to the end of the story I realised to my horror that we were so absorbed that it was her bed time and we (OK, responsible adult here, I) had forgotten we also needed to cook and eat dinner.

We scrambled through the Snow Queen incident but didn’t ever stop reading aloud. We read all the Harry Potters (yeah, yeah I know, don’t @ me – but they were great to read aloud) multiple times. If we drove somewhere, or were on holidays, one member of the family – and taking turns is important – would read. Vacation campfires were kept aflame by reading aloud. Stories, Poetry. Non-fiction.

My daughter’s been out of home for several years but my beloved and I do the same, still. We read Carlyle’s French Revolution aloud, until it got boring and we switched to Hilary Mantel’s version. We’ve read EP Thompson’s ‘Moral Economy of the English Crowd’ and Kindleberger’s Financial History of Western Europe aloud. And many, many more.

Recently, somehow not aware that a major film was in the offing, we’ve been reading Homer’s Odyssey – the Emily Wilson translation, obviously. It is fucking great. When you hit the Cyclops, the iambic pentameter really takes off and it has energy. Wondrous.

I saw the film the day it was released, approximately 24 hours after learning it existed – I loved it, don’t @ me – and have coerced my beloved (who hates going to the movies) into coming with me again. Yes, six hours of my one precious life at the movies watching the same film. Totally worthwhile.

As we were reading Book 10 the Odyssey about Circe tonight I was struck by what precious time reading is. And – like you, I expect – it is so hard to ever have enough of it. I know most people think Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey had multiple authors, but their coherence to me suggests a singularity of vision, at least. This will matter in a minute.

Reading time is scarcer than I wish. I honestly can’t keep up with everything written by friends and in my field(s), let alone pleasurable reading. I subscribe variously (as much as I can afford…so the profile changes a bit) to New Left Review, Jacobin, Solidarity, Overland, Griffith Review, LRB and a bunch of academic journals especially Labor, Economic History Review and Labour History. Getting through these plus everything people send me and the articles in the journal I co-edit, Australian Historical Studies. Well, frankly, it is a fuck load of reading.

And that doesn’t even include the reading I need to do to prepare for writing the book I want to write, or to do the paid work I do. And it definitely doesn’t include the dozens of other substacks, nor the FT, nor the ABC’s markets blog that I follow religiously.

I’m sure you feel this too.

So. I’ve been beyond puzzled to see people getting chatty (or other AI) to write their stuff.

I totally get the pressure to produce. Academics have been long turned into content churners. ‘Publish or perish’ in some regions and institutions meant how much could you produce in how little a time. As a postgraduate student I attended a workshop where a senior professor describes turning the same conference paper into five publications FIVE!? Who do they think was going to read all this samey shit?

Later, ‘publish or perish’ meant ‘quality’, which some senior professors could claim also meant producing less (the rest of us were not typically afforded such luxuries). Quality ofc was measured by some juvenile fucking rankings of outlets in which you published, not – as was implied by the word quality – how good was the work.

And then quality went out of favour, and ‘impact’ came in. Show us your ‘impact’ they said. My first book in 2014 was quoted in the Federal parliament. Recently both my books were cited in a submission to the NSW parliament. Which is fucking IMPACT, right? Well, actually it just means I said exactly what the Shadow Minister Kim Carr needed. It didn’t actually change anything. Still. ‘Impact’ was really only meant to be performative, because uni bosses saw them as metrics, not real things.

How stupid – disconnected from any reality – are the metrics under the logic of managerialism? But we all internalised them. And when academics do it, how can we be surprised when students do, too?

Of course, this is all a symptom of what Pete Chalmers in this excellent essay in the...