In The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen’s spirited but one-sided attack on today’s internet (of which more in a later posting), the author jokes about meeting a Web 2.0 evangelist in San Francisco. The latter says he is working on a new program for publishing music, text and video. “’It’s MySpace meets YouTube meets Wikipedia meets Google,’ he said. ‘On steroids.’”
To which Keen replies that he is working on a polemic about the destructive impact of the digital revolution on our culture, economy and values. “It’s ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule…On steroids.”
Keen is joking. But X meets Y meets Z is becoming an overworked formula not only in the handouts of desperately unoriginal publishers but in the reviews of publications that ought to know better. Michiko Kakutani, in The New York Times, reviewing Junot Diaz’s Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, tells us that it is “a wondrous, not-so-brief first novel that is so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets Star Trek meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West”. Original? Sounds more like an indecisive knock-off to me.