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What is Orwell’s 1984 really worth?

£58318.14 to be precise. In theory anyway… to Google. I’ve been playing around with running longer texts through {poem}.py and eventually managed to process (and price) the whole of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I use the idea of Newspeak in my critique of Google’s monetisation of language, so I thought it made sense to use the book for this particular experiment. The book took 7 … Continue reading What is Orwell’s 1984 really worth?

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{poem}.py : a critique of linguistic capitalism

How much does poetry cost? What is the worth of language in a digital age? Is quality measured on literary value or exchange value, the beauty of hand-crafted, hard-wrung words, or how many click-throughs those (key)words can attract and how much money they earn the company who sells them? But haven’t words always been sold? As soon as they became written down, moveable and transferable … Continue reading {poem}.py : a critique of linguistic capitalism

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