Virality and vanity

Extrapolations from my failings as a writer

Today, I’ll be exploring several topics through my own failings: the degradation of thought; the effect of reader feedback; the vanity stoked by the attention economy; the male gaze and me; how writing forces a look in the mirror; and a meditation on George Orwell.

Subscriber update

I’m taking a two-month break to quiet my mind and allow ideas to percolate uninterrupted. I have paused subscription billing for the duration because the business model creates pressure to produce. I’ve closed the gender chapter of my writing journey because it’s led me to the next thing — epistemology. It was never about gender at the bottom, but the incentives in institutions and groups that produce the suppression of truth. I had to work through gender as a lens to understand my relationship with reason and emotion, and I’ve succeeded.

All online platforms degrade thought

The incentive for any communication platform, including Substack, is to maximize usage, which means to monopolize attention. I don’t consider Substack as problematic as visual platforms, because long-form writing isn’t as addictive as short videos, and there’s a higher bar to building an audience as a writer. Nevertheless, it has similar problems because one is forced to become an influencer rather than an intellectual.

The bar for an influencer is their ability to stoke emotions and/or attract the attention of the opposite sex. Visual media platforms fragment attention, but the imperative to regularly publish on a platform like this fragments one’s thinking. Several ideas are running in the background, and a book is bursting out of me. I can’t fully develop ideas or write that book while I’m producing essays for a platform designed for immediate feedback.

Substack isn’t good for serious idea writers. To produce writing that will matter in five years, deep thought and attention to the craft are required, while Substack’s incentive is to publish on a schedule and gather likes. Any platform that rewards engagement will eventually degrade the ideas. I'm fortunate to have thoughtful readers who leave intelligent, substantive comments, and I want you all to know that people frequently remark on this in real life. What we have here is special, at the risk of sounding earnest.

I also have highly aligned readers, even if I don’t have much actual reach, but therein lies the problem: Substack doesn’t reward writing or ideas at all, but engagement the writing elicits through button clicks. This indirectly degrades my quality of thought because I respond to incentives like everyone else. I predict that when I come back with an essay about how we define truth, it will be far less popular than my gender studies work because it requires abstract thought — most people have let that muscle atrophy in the age of comfort, or never developed it due to social punishment.¹

Rob Henderson wrote recently about being a writer in the age of the influencer, and I was forced to fully face what I knew already — the Internet's medium debases thought and language, making truth impossible to reach.

Neil Postman argued in Amusing Ourselves to Death that the medium determines the possible truth claims it can deliver, and thus, visual media distort truth because they reward performance rather than depth. Incentives also shape what is considered true. Similarly, writers today are forced to be influencers if they want reach, which eventually leads to the sacrifice of quality. This is because you truly get the audience you deserve.

I’ve tried these past two years to write seriously, relentlessly improve my craft, and develop original ideas. I’ve been resisting the incentive structure mightily, and that’s given me the audience I deserve: actually intelligent people who consider reason the foundation of a good life and hold contradictions without collapsing.

Not everyone is qualified to comment

Until the internet age, a layperson could only give a writer feedback by sending a letter to the editor, and the editor had to filter them for quality. We’ve lost all mechanisms to filter feedback. A person can ignore my argument, use ad hominem, put the onus on me to repeatedly prove myself, and, when I refuse, claim I’m shrinking from debate. Not everyone commenting with a challenge is entitled to a debate.

This happens to me frequently and metastasized last month. The charge was led by a credentialed female academic. Even ostensibly serious people can’t or won’t resist the incentive to climb by cutting someone else down, and gender amplifies the status game.

I was actually afraid to write under my real name for the first year and a half, but it was the right decision to claim authorship. It forced me to use my plan of not engaging or apologizing, and it actually worked. Several of you argued for me, especially Rohan Ghostwind, for whose support and friendship I am grateful.

I considered referring to this pile-on, and I’m sure at least one person will think it’s rude to do so, as though the person bullied is the problem for naming it. I’m not a victim, though I’m also not obligated to protect people who attacked my character. This imperative to be ‘professional’ is how soft control flies under the radar. Experiencing my first social media mob confirmed that platform incentives distract from the development of ideas and encourage shallowness. This is a feature of writing online.

Virality and vanity

I’ve written about how social media hijacks women’s status drive to encourage vanity, because (male) attention is currency for us. I force myself to confront my flaws, and vanity is the biggest. It’s not the compulsive usage of the app; that is downstream of the conceit that’s fed every time I open something, including Substack. I stopped using Instagram because it encouraged an obsession with my appearance for the camera’s gaze, and Substack encourages vanity about my intellect. I know that something must change if I’m to continue writing without debasing myself inadvertently at the altar of attention. I am strongly considering moving to a platform without social media features on my return (there’s a poll at the bottom).

I went on a podcast a couple of weeks ago, and the host posted several clips of the conversation on Instagram, which I rarely check. One video actually went viral this week, and I felt the vanity activate automatically. What I said wasn’t particularly deep, just naming a contradiction between women’s revealed and stated preferences. It apparently elicited strong emotions, like some of my essays have, judging from the metrics, but no essay of mine will attract as many eyeballs as a video. This is again a feature of writing online, because people are often accustomed to shallowness. But this video wasn’t satisfying like writing a strong essay that elicited thoughtful comments. Virality is a poor substitute for true mastery that requires discipline. And this risk of vanity is precisely why I don’t create videos, even though that’s the next logical step for a writer in the age of the influencer.

The male gaze and me

I inadvertently subjected myself to the male gaze, but not visually. I also don’t think there’s actually a male gaze; it's just time-bound attention from individual men. The attention can be physical or virtual. Each kind encourages distinct forms of self-surveillance. Attention from women encourages hedging, softening, and a concern with how my words might be misinterpreted to insult someone. Attention from men encourages both narcissism and hyper-self-awareness in an attempt to remain self-possessed. Male attention has destabilized me before, and I have inadvertently subjected myself to it by writing here about topics men happen to care about.

I’m aware that my most active and engaged readers are men, while women are more likely to read silently because the social cost of agreement is higher. This creates the impression of being metaphysically surrounded by men, which elicits the same level of self-consciousness as if a man were actually looking at me.

In my corner of Substack, the sex of the active audience and of the author is generally the same. I’m not upset or criticizing the men in my audience; this is a personal problem. Men are distracting, and being a woman who prefers friendship with men requires maintenance of strong physical and mental boundaries, regardless of the other person’s intentions. I wouldn’t likely feel this if I weren’t writing on a medium that encourages immediate, public feedback.

Sitting with Orwell

I joined The Rosedale Society in Austin last year, and in the mere six months since, I’ve produced my best writing. Zac Solomon built a community for writers that’s only growing because there’s surprisingly nothing similar in this city. I’m happy to report that I’ve made intellectual friends there, including Zac. Now, I’m going to help turn it into a place built on adversarial reasoning rather than belonging. The creative class collectively doesn’t engage with truth claims in no small part because truth is considered rude. Adversarial truth-seeking doesn’t flatter; it reveals a hierarchy of reasoning ability. The Rosedale Society is a vast improvement over other writing groups I’ve joined, which were actually therapy groups. If truth-seeking isn’t made the explicit purpose of a group, it will invariably slide toward comfort and consensus.

I’m leading a discussion on 1984 next month, so I’ve read it for the first time. It’s been sitting on my shelf for a decade, but I have learned lately that I will only read books when I’ve done the intellectual work required to digest them. I’ve dipped my toe into epistemology in the past months, and Orwell helped me weave disparate threads together at the right moment. I’m even more surprised this happened through fiction. Oceania isn’t about fascism or mere totalitarianism. It’s about the epistemic closure² of the knowledge class³, though they would claim it’s about the groups they happen to dislike.

Orwell wrote in his essay “Why I Write” that he wanted to expose lies and make political prose beautiful. In “Politics and the English Language,” he exhorts us to write clearly, because clarity is the basis of political action. The obfuscation that’s trained into us through higher education stops truth claims in their tracks. Caveats and hedging don’t produce truth, but compliance. He also reminded me of the principles of writing I already followed unconsciously with intermittent success:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Clarity in our culture is read as aggressive and wrong simply because sentences don’t apologize for themselves. Read any academic treatise, and you may notice that sentences are often nonsensical. This is intentional because you practically can’t refute vague sentences and imprecise arguments.

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I close by asking you to create opportunities for discomfort in your life, particularly to face difficult truths about yourself; you will be more resilient on the other side. I look forward to sharing the fruits of this break with you.

1. Women tend to punish abstract thought in each other, which I’ve explored before.

2. They’re impervious to knowledge in conflict with their self-concept, which allows the abuse of power and the socially enforced curtailment of speech.

3. Creatives and the corporate white collar class, along with any prestigious job outside those sectors.