"... will be used to analyze, market, and categorize your work into the appropriate tribalist-identity."

And destroy you should you write something that others don't like. Privacy is becoming an invaluable good whose loss can't be undone.

Who has been destroyed in this fashion?

To pick an example, as a kid I read Ender's Game Because it was SF and had a cool cover. Now, because of the odious nature of the author's personal politics, I don't read his books.

This is entirely his own fault, but if he was just another name on a book I would still be buying his novels.

To pick another example, there stuff like this: https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_55f1...

In neither case is the person's tribal identity used against them for writing things that others don't like. Orson Scott Card holds a professorship. He just published a book this year. A large corporation made a mass market film out of his book, well after he had been writing things that others didn't like.

The controversy with the poet seems like a different issue, but even so -- Michael Derrick Hudson seems to be in exactly the same place before Sherman Alexie assumed he was a Chinese woman 3 years ago.

Maybe OSC isn't a good example of an author being destroyed, but it IS a good example of being unable to separate the person from their work.

If you really need examples of how a public identity can impact how your work is viewed, see every famous person who has been named in the #MeToo movement.

(Please don't attack me for that statement. I'm implying neither support nor opposition to #MeToo in this post. That's not the point.)

So in the case of Ender's Game, I first read it without any knowledge of who OSC was or what his views were. And I came away from reading it as being about the underdog, about how complicated power and morality can be, about trying to do the right thing. I thought it was a wonderfully complex story because almost every character sees themselves as trying to do the right thing, yet are seen as villains by others.

Then I read about OSC and think: Did I miss the point? Did he? How can the person who wrote this wonderful story not see that they are in turn bullying others? It complicates the whole relationship to the story.

Of course, you may argue that I'm the one who is mistaken. That's fine. But we have to at least agree that the more we know about the artist the more we think about their art differently, and vice versa.

I’d say this is your fault - OSC is the same being as when you picked up the first Ender’s book.

I mean, given what you said, should I even read your opinion if I don’t know who you are or what you stand for

There are numerous examples of kids bullied up to the point they committed suicide. Sometimes it starts at school or in the neighborhood and later moves online but there were also people victimized just by writing something the dominant pack found worth of being bullied for.

> Some people just want to write a book...and have it be read as a book, not a sociopolitical statement. Call it the "craftsman ethos", if you like.

I've read My Brilliant Friend. I liked it a lot (I'll probably read the other three someday), and I'm not curious about the identity of the writer.

At the same time, Elena Ferrante gives interviews. It's one thing to write novels pseudonymously and have them published. It's another to give interviews - when you do that, you're taking on the role of public intellectual, and you can't really blame people for being curious about who you are.

I wouldn't be surprised if giving the occasional interview is something the author is doing to keep their publisher (or their publisher's marketing department) happy.

Whereas in the past, all books(+) were written by white guys, plus a few women writing under male pseudonyms; and this situation was called "not political". Writing books about non-straight sexual orientation was simply banned - or, up to the famous Lady Chatterly trial, any sex at all. The last police raid on queer fiction in the UK was on "Gays the word" in 1984. I believe there are still incidents in the US and other places where angry parents try to get books banned from school libraries.

(+) to a first approximation, in the canon of western literary fiction, up to about the 1960s-70s

I don't think there's a problem with fictional works' authors being unknown or anonymous. The problem lies in nonfiction works that seek to directly convey any kind of knowledge or wisdom that is difficult to judge and evaluate independently on its own merits (with would cover just about everything outside the hard sciences). There is value in knowing the identity and character of an author, as well as the fact that they associated their personal reputation with the book they wrote.

For example, If I look for a book on developing physical fitness, I want to know who the author is and how fit or disciplined they are. If I read a book about history, I want to know how much the author has studied their topic, whether through formal scholarship or not. If I read a biography, I'd like to know if it's written by someone who personally knew their subject, how close or far removed the author was in time and space, and the kind of scholarship that the author is known for.

Identity and reputation matter when evaluating sources of knowledge in topics that you don't have the time to learn and master yourself.

Plea to authority & ad hominem, agree & disagree, respectively

You've listed the names of various fallacies. Logical fallacies. But what logic are you saying is fallacious in the parent comment? The commenter has their own set of biases and hueristics for choosing what to spend their limited time in.

Unless they follow it up with, "and for these reasons, these are the correct books to read" then there is no fallacy.

My point is that identity is a bad measure. If you like their identity, that's plea to authority. If you don't, that's ad hominem. So rather than going off of the value of the content, we're going off of whether you agree or not. This is the thinking that gets people stuck in echo chambers. Better to optimize your time by seeking reviews which might hint at whether the content could be interesting for you or not

Fallacies in argumentation may nevertheless be useful rules in managing limited time. That are fallacies because they do not price the conclusion, but that doesn't mean that they are without value as mechanisms for making decisions based on lose associations that do not need to be 100% correct to be valuable.

Plea to authority is a fallacy when it is an inappropriate plea to authority. Asking that someone who writes a history book actually be an authority on history is not a fallacy.

When a work is popular and heavily critiqued the authority of the author is no longer necessary. Surely the volume of critical analysis provides you sufficient information that you no longer need such a noisy signal as the author's identity.

Argument from fallacy is a fallacy

The only thing that has really changed is that now more combinations of ``race'', gender, sexual orientation, age etc are heard, and that the canonical tuple is being criticised.