That's it. No more print interviews.
Apparently, something about the way I put words together does not compute for the humans and algorithms that turn recordings of spoken sentences into text.
There's a chapter about my life and career in a book that will be released in less than a month. The author recorded our conversation, which at the time I thought would help the details of what I had to say make the transition from spoken conversation to the page, but in fact it had the opposite result.
For example, I voted for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate, in the 2016 presidential election. In explaining my outlook and relationship to the mainstream mentality, at one point in the conversation, I said, "I didn't vote for Trump." What appears in the book is, "I did vote for Trump."
When I informed the author, he apologized and explained, "I worked off a transcript of a recorded interview prepared via Print, the transcribing service… which is powered by algos, not humans."
If you search Amazon for KMO, you will find one book for which I am listed as the author. It is a collection of transcribed interviews, and I know from hard won experience that transcripts that you pay to have made are never accurate. NEVER. Some of the transcripts in my book were prepared by a volunteer, and those were excellent, but people who are doing it to make money are likely in a hurry, harried, money-stressed, and, God bless 'em, often not very smart. I turned my recorded interviews into print ready documents in 2010. The work was all done by humans, and it cost a pretty penny, and I still had to spend a lot of my own time and effort to correct the mistakes.
Since then, algorithmic transcription services have hit the scene, taking paying work away from humans. From time to time I've thought that I could have all of my interviews transcribed to post to my website now that algorithms have made the cost trivial. I discovered that the transcripts were always so riddled with errors that the time and effort that I would have to devote to straightening them out started to approach the time it would take me to simply create the transcript from scratch myself.
Most of those transcripts, inexpensive as they were, were a waste of money, as I didn't ever carve out the time needed to compare them to the original recording and correct the mistakes. Sometimes, the transcription algorithms produced such gibberish that I couldn't even describe their output as containing mistakes. To say that the machine made a transcription error implies that there was some evident correspondence between the recorded speech and the supposed transcript.
While algorithmic transcription services do the job faster and cheaper than the humans they displaced, where the human transcribers often didn't understand some of the ideas expressed in the words they were converting from sounds to strings of letters, the algorithms that now do that job understand nothing at all. Understanding is not their bag. It doesn't play any role in what they do.
I now recall reading somewhere, decades ago, that you should avoid using the word "not" when its omission would change the meaning of what you wanted to say.
Dangerous: Do not use the word "not."
Less dangerous: Avoid using the word "not."
But even safer, I now think, is to decline to be interviewed for print. In audio, I have better control over my message because I'm not relying on the interviewer to understand my meaning, remember it and relate it to the audience. I can talk past him or her and communicate directly with the listener. The person who made the recording can edit it to misrepresent my intentions, but that requires an act of deliberate malice. In print, my intended meaning can mutate into its antithesis even when the interviewer means well.
At present, withdrawing from my career as a very minor public figure is not an option. That's how I pay the rent, but I've learned a lesson here, and now I'm thinking that I might want to start looking for the exit and find a way to make money that does not involve being known to people whom I will never meet.