In the footsteps of Musil

While in Vienna for the 3rd EDDY conference this week, I took the weekend to stroll through the city in the footsteps of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.

I have been reading the book for about four years (it is very dense), and while walking over Josefsplatz today, I was reminded of some philosophical excursions between Arnheim and General Stumm that take place there.¹

After walking out of the library, Arnheim complains that everybody is a writer now, but nobody reads anymore. A hundred new books, he tells General Stumm, are printed every day and a thousand new journals founded every year, in Germany alone. Everyone writes, he concludes, and helps themselves to any thought as if it were their own.

Re-reading this passage on the steps of the monument, I wondered to what extent what we experience in academic publishing with AI-generated papers is a new phenomenon, rather than a continuation of this trend of removing gatekeeping in publishing.

The book felt very contemporary when Musil goes on to describe the scene: cars and horse carriages passing next to each other on the asphalt street (just as today), and the statue of Emperor Joseph II watching the scene from his monument in the center of the square.