Content Writer Book Club

Dying Inside

I just recently read the Robert Silverberg classic of early 1970s science fiction, Dying Inside. This book should be on the required reading list of all content mill workers! If the telepathically shared LSD trip doesn’t sell you, certainly the occupation of protagonist David Selig will. At 41 years-old, he ghost-writes term papers for Columbia University students. Selig sets up shop near the Alama Mater statue and takes orders for papers, probing the minds of students for proper tone and vocabulary, and this is how he pays his rent. It reads like a middle-aged Catcher in the Rye.

“For a man of your intelligence, of your potential, to have fallen so low, to have ended up faking term papers for college kids–that’s sad, Dave, that’s awfully sad.”

How to Write Good Sci-Fi

Perhaps it resonates so much because I just turned 40, and my life bears a passing resemblance to Selig’s. Or perhaps because writing online for content mills is a modern equivalent of ghost-writing term papers. To be accurate, ghost-writing term papers is the modern equivalent of ghost-writing term papers. Let’s not stop there though. Have your entire PhD Dissertation ghost-written! Certainly David Selig’s approach to the work, as perfunctory, necessary, and dispassionate, resembles the attitude many of us have towards content generation when working in the mills.

Dying Inside was originally published in 1972, but was re-released in 2009, leading to this Washington Post review. I knew the name Robert Silverberg, but I couldn’t recall having read any of his writing. Crap, the man was prolific! His bibliography contains 957 entries, and that’s just book-length material. You could say that Silverberg is the proto content mill worker, if not for substance, at least for cranking the shit out as fast as he could shovel it. No wonder he never won any major awards. Although, he really should have for this.

Silverberg does a masterful job of planting the reader inside the head of a telepath on the decline. That’s no mean feat. In this solipsistic age, humans have a difficult enough time getting outside their own heads, let alone into one with super-human powers. I would say Dying Inside is primarily a story about entropy, aging, or lost and squandered abilities. It’s not just that Selig ghost-writes, it’s that he squanders such a rare talent as his mind-reading on ghost-writing. The book is equally fascinating for the portrait it paints of bohemian New York City lifestyle in the 1960s and early 1970s. The telepathic acid trip is almost definitely unique among fiction. If that doesn’t entice you, I’m afraid nothing will.

Silverberg’s Dying Inside is at the top of the list, but what else would you classify as a content mill oriented work of fiction?

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