But there *is* one part of this book that's not online: my pal and mentor Bruce Sterling, a cyberpunk legend turned electronic art impressario turned assemblage sculptor, wrote me a brilliant foreword for *Canny Valley*. Bruce gave me the go-ahead to license this CC BY 4.0 as well, and so I'm reproducing it below.

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Having spent several days now handling hundreds of these books, I have to say, I am *indecently* pleased with how they turned out, which is all down to other people. My friend John Berry, a legendary book designer and typographer, laid it out:

johndberry.com/

And the folks at LA's best comics shop, Secret Headquarters, hooked me up with an *incredible* printer, the 100+ year old Pasadena institution Typecraft:

typecraft.com/live2/who-we-are…

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Typecraft ran this on a gorgeous Indigo printer on 100lb Mohawk paper that just *drank* the ink. The PVA glue in the binding will last a century, and the matte coat cover doesn't pick up smudges or fingerprints. It's a stunning little artifact.

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This has been so much fun (and such a success) that I imagine I'll do future volumes in the years to come. In the meantime, enjoy Bruce's intro, and join me in basking in the fact that "enshittification" has made Webster's:

bsky.app/profile/merriam-webst…

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INTRODUCTION

by Bruce Sterling

In 1970 a robotics professor named Masahiro Mori discovered a new problem in aesthetics. He called this "bukimi no tani genshō."

The Japanese robots he built were functional, so the "bukimi no tani" situation was not an engineering problem. It was a deep and basic problem in the human perception of humanlike androids.

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Humble assembly robots, with their claws and swivels, those looked okay to most people. Dolls, puppets and mannequins, those also looked okay.

Living people had always aesthetically looked okay to people. Especially, the pretty ones.

However, between these two realms that the late Dr Mori was gamely attempting to weld together -- the world of living mankind and of the pseudo-man-like machine-- there was an artistic crevasse.

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Anything in this "Uncanny Valley" looked, and felt, severely not-okay. These overdressed robots looked and felt so eerie that their creator's skills became actively disgusting. The robots got prettier, but only up to a steep verge. Then they slid down the precipice and became zombie doppelgangers.

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That's also the issue with the aptly-titled "Canny Valley" art collection here. People already know how to react aesthetically to traditional graphic images. Diagrams are okay. Hand-drawn sketches and cartoons are also okay. Brush-made paintings are mostly fine. Photographs, those can get kind of dodgy.

Digital collages that slice up and weld highly disparate elements like diagrams, cartoons, sketches and also photos and paintings, those trend toward the uncanny.

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The pixel-juggling means of digital image-manipulation are not art-traditional pencils or brushes. They do not involve the human hand, or maybe not even the human eye, or the human will. They're not fixed on paper or canvas; they're a Frankenstein mash-up landscape of tiny colored screen-dots where images can become so fried that they look and feel "cursed." They're conceptually gooey congelations, stuck in the valley mire of that which is and must be neither this-nor-that.

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That's what these images are about. They're cut-and-paste mash-ups that are native to the Uncanny Valley, but they're meant to crawl out toward solid ground, stand up and make an argument.

Satirical political arguments, mostly. They refer to, and often re-use, old-fashioned newspaper and magazine political cartoons. They are also somewhat like protest posters. They resemble viral memes.

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Corporate logos abound in them. They also chew up and spit out photographs both old and new. Even medieval manuscripts aren't safe.

A modern digital artist has billions of jpegs in files, folders, clouds and buckets. He's never gonna run out of weightless grist from that mill.

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Why would Cory Doctorow -- novelist, journalist, activist, opinion columnist and so on -- want to lift his typing fingers from his lettered keyboard, so as to create graphics with cut-and-paste and "lasso tools"?

I think there are two basic reasons for this.

The important motivation is his own need to express himself by some method other than words.

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I'm reminded here of the example of H. G. Wells, another science fiction writer turned internationally famous political pundit. HG Wells was quite a tireless and ambitious writer -- so much so that he almost matched the torrential output of Cory Doctorow.

But HG Wells nevertheless felt a compelling need to hand-draw cartoons. He called them "picshuas."

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These hundreds of "picshuas" were rarely made public. They were usually sketched in the margins of his hand-written letters. Commonly the picshuas were aimed at his second wife, the woman he had renamed "Jane." These picshuas were caricatures, or maybe rapid pen-and-ink conceptual outlines, of passing conflicts, events and situations in the life of Wells.

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They seemed to carry tender messages to Jane that the writer was unable or unwilling to speak aloud to her. Wells being Wells, there were always issues in his private life that might well pose a challenge to bluntly state aloud: "Oh by the way, darling, I've built a second house in the South of France where I spend my summers with a comely KGB asset, the Baroness Budberg." Even a famously glib and charming writer might feel the need to finesse that.

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Cory Doctorow also has some remarkably tangled, scandalous and precarious issues to contemplate, summarize and discuss. They're not his scandalous private intrigues, though. Instead, they're scandalous public intrigues. Or, at least Cory struggles to rouse some public indignation about these intrigues, because his core topics are the tangled penthouse/slash/underground machinations of billionaire web moguls.

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Cory really knows really a deep dank lot about this uncanny nexus of arcane situations. He explains the shameful disasters there, but they're difficult to capture without torrents of unwieldy tech jargon.

So instead, he diligently clips, cuts, pastes, lassos, collages and pastiches. He might, plausibly, hire a professional artist to design his editorial cartoons for him.

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However, then Cory would have to verbally explain all his political analysis to this innocent graphics guy. Then Cory would also have to double-check the results of the artist and fix the inevitable newbie errors and grave misunderstandings. That effort would be three times the labor for a dogged crusader who is already working like sixty.

It's more practical for him to mash-up images that resemble editorial cartoons.

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He can't draw. Also, although he definitely has a pronounced sense of aesthetics, it's not a aesthetic most people would consider tasteful. Cory Doctorow, from his very youth, has always had a "craphound" aesthetic. As an aesthete, Cory is the kind of guy who would collect rain-drenched punk-band flyers that had fallen off telephone poles and store them inside a 1950s cardboard kid-cereal box. I am not scolding him for this. He's always been like that.

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As Wells used to say about his unique "picshuas," they seemed like eccentric scribblings, but over the years, when massed-up as an oeuvre, they formed a comic burlesque of an actual life. Similarly, one isolated Doctorow collage can seem rather what-the-hell. It's trying to be "canny." If you get it, you get it. If you don't get the first one, then you can page through all of these, and at the end you will probably get it.

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En masse, it forms the comic burlesque of a digital left-wing cyberspatial world-of-hell. A monster-teeming Silicon Uncanny Valley of extensively raked muck.

There are a lot of web-comix people who like to make comic fun of the Internet, and to mock "the Industry." However, there's no other social and analytical record quite like this one. It has something of the dark affect of the hundred-year-old satirical Dada collages of Georg Schultz or Hannah Hoch.

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Those Dada collages look dank and horrible because they're "Dada" and pulling a stunt. These images look dank and horrible because they're analytical, revelatory and make sense.

If you do not enjoy contemporary electronic politics, and instead you have somehow obtained an art degree, I might still be able to help you with my learned and well-meaning intro here. I can recommend a swell art-critical book titled "Memesthetics" by Valentina Tanni.

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I happen to know Dr. Tanni personally, and her book is the cat's pyjamas when it comes to semi-digital, semi-collage, appropriated, Situationiste-detournement, net.art "meme aesthetics." I promise that I could robotically mimic her, and write uncannily like her, if I somehow had to do that. I could even firmly link the graphic works of Cory Doctorow to the digital avant-garde and/or digital folk-art traditions that Valentina Tanni is eruditely and humanely discussing.

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Like with a lot of robots, the hard part would be getting me to stop.

Cory works with care on his political meme-cartoons -- because he is using them to further his own personal analysis, and to personally convince himself. They're not merely sharp and partisan memes, there to rouse one distinct viewer-emotion and make one single point.

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They're like digital jigsaw-puzzle landscape-sketches -- unstable, semi-stolen and digital, because the realm he portrays is itself also unstable, semi-stolen and digital. The cartoons are dirty and messy because the situations he tackles are so dirty and messy. That's the grain of his lampoon material, like the damaged amps in a punk song. A punk song that was licensed by some billionaire and then used to spy on hapless fans with surveillance-capitalism.

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Since that's how it goes, that's also what you're in for. You have been warned, and these collages will warn you a whole lot more.

If you want to aesthetically experience some elegant, time-tested collage art that was created by a major world artist, then you should gaze in wonder at the Max Ernst masterpiece, "Une semaine de bonté" ("A Week of Kindness"). This indefinable "collage novel" aka "artist's book" was created in the troubled time of 1934.

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It's very uncanny rather than "canny, "and it's also capital-A great Art. As an art critic, I could balloon this essay to dreadful robotic proportions while I explain to you in detail why this weirdo mess is a lasting monument to the expressive power of collage. However, Cory Doctorow is not doing Max Ernst's dreamy, oneiric, enchanting Surrealist art. He would never do that and it wouldn't make any sense if he did.

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Cory did this instead. It is art, though. It is what it is, and there's nothing else like it. It's artistic expression as Cory Doctorow has a sincere need to perform that, and in twenty years it will be even more rare and interesting. It's journalism ahead of its time (a little) and with a passage of time, it will become testimonial.

Bruce Sterling -- Ibiza MMXXV

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The most enshittification-proof way to get the Enshittification audiobook, ebook and hardcover is to pre-order them on my Kickstarter! Help me do an end-run around the Amazon/Audible audiobook monopoly and disenshittify your audiobook experience in the process:

disenshittification.org

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