I went and looked at the Tiktoks. As far as I can see from the few videos I've watched it's not so much "criticism" as "plot overview, small background details, and what I liked about it".
It's kind of weird it's being framed as a tiktok sensation when there's nothing to really differenciate him from other booktokers? Other than perhaps more subscribers than usual.
Also, per the article:
> Edwards champions BookTok and also defends it...
Kind of interesting to note given his video saying he doesn't like booktok books[1]. I suppose he knows not to piss in the pond he drinks from.
I've seen a few of his videos over the years and remembered them similarly to your description, but watching that video you linked to I think he does do a proper critique. Goes into what makes the writing weak, plot drag, links books to other books, and even has a deep understanding of an authors' body of works to be able to compare and provide insight.
And in the beginning of the video he gives quite a lot of praise to BookTok, so I reckon the title is more tongue-in-cheek hyperbole, with a dash of clickbait!
You misunderstand the nature of newspapers. Playing devil's advocate just a little here, I absolutely can see the financial benefit of an author taking a single epitome out of a group of near clones, even a random one among them at that, and placing him right on top of a pedestal positioned just before a podium. The more details the audience drowns in, no matter how truthful, the more you simply clutter your narrative with unfortunate facts and drown out the whole point. I'm not saying the author is lying, nor advocating it. But sometimes a slice of the truth is more useful than the whole pi of it in a given moment for a given story.
The case briefing is really interesting for those that wish to read it, as it goes into a tangent defining what "is" and "isn't" information which can be considered as property
If you want a more philosophical version of some of the ideas posited by the blog post, I can't recommend Neil Postman's 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' enough.
He puts forward the position that the medium controls how we interact with information. When the information is scarce (and as a consequence: dense) like books, you have to spend a lot more time interacting with said information to understand it. When it's overwhelmingly abundant and easily accessible (TV, internet) information is entirely discardable. We see the effects of this more intensely in the current internet age where traditional teaching methods (book learning) seems to be oft complained about because we raise a generation to expect education to be packaged in a similar format as what they see on the internet: as entertainment.
What's interesting about this is the post also has the prompt the staff used to vet people, and an author has already shown it to be error-prone [1][2].
> REQUEST
> Using the list of names provided, please evaluate each person for scandals. Scandals include but are not limited to homophobia, transphobia, racism, harassment, sexual misconduct, sexism, fraud.
> Each person is typically an author, editor, performer, artist or similar in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and or related fandoms.
> The objective is to determine if an individual is unsuitable as a panelist for an event.
> Please evaluate each person based on their digital footprint, including social, articles, and blogs referencing them. Also include file770.com as a source.
The headline is a bit baity (in that the article is describing no job losses because there hasn't been any economic benefit to LLM/GenAI to justify it), but what if we re-ran the study in a country _without_ exceptionally strong unionisation participation? Would we see the same results?
You can also find the story on Nature[1] as well as a lot of other short fiction they publish[2], which includes stories from such authors like Clarke[3]
That's not how it works. Companies with global presence (like these 2) need to have regulatory permission in every jurisdiction where they operate. If a jurisdiction forbids the merger then they would no longer be able to operate there.
Consequently any regulator in charge of a sufficiently important market has de-facto veto power globally.
