It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come
to our real work,
and that
when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind
that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded
stream is the one that sings.
Copyright ©1983 by Wendell Berry, from Standing by Words.
The passage of time is often difficult to visualise, its effects so gradual they can be hard to perceive. We age but we don’t even notice it: in one photo, a child; in the next, an adult. In Danielle, the filmmaker Anthony Cerniello achieves a remarkable visual expression of ageing, animating still photos of various members of one family to depict a girl’s passage from childhood to old age.
Director: Anthony Cerniello
To no one’s surprise, and almost as little excitement, Marvel Studios is
extruding new content. The Mr Whippy of cinematic fantasy disgorges Eternals in
early November, and yet more Spider-Man in early December.
Meanwhile, column inches continue to be generated by whether or not the next 007 should be a woman, and Superman is now bisexual. Just as reliable as the output of
these franchises is the grumbling about our apparent inability to come up with fresh new stories.
The usual explanation given for the domination of franchises over new
material is that media industries like a known quantity. But what if the real
problem lies deeper? What if, in truth, we’re no longer able to
come up with new stories because we’ve turned storytelling itself into a branch
of influencer culture?
This was the unsettling implication of last week’s water-cooler debate: “Kidneygate”. A long New York Times essay told the strange story of Dawn Dorland and Sonya Larson, two aspiring writers now embroiled in a bitter dispute.
Dorland donated a kidney to a stranger, then created a Facebook group to
talk about her “journey”, and shared it with her writing group. Larson, a
member of the same writing group, then wrote a short story depicting an
egotistical and implicitly borderline racist woman donating a kidney. When
Dorland learned this, she began an increasingly monomaniacal campaign of
lawfare against Larson.
Like the dress that was either black and blue or white and
gold, the story prompted a
lot of debate. When does taking material from the world around you stop
being legitimate and become invasive? Do we “own” our own stories? Or as
the NYT put it: “Who is the Bad Art Friend?”
But perhaps the question should be: would you trade a kidney for a shot
at immortality? For while on the face of it Kidneygate seems to be two women
arguing about art, in truth it’s about the only form of immortality on offer
since the internet killed literature: clout.
Once upon a time, the way to get famous as a writer was to publish a
book. But the internet inverted that. The print publishing industry today is
both bigger than ever and more beleaguered than ever by competition from other
media, not to mention the ocean of free digital content. The result is
diminishing returns: more than 188,000 books are published every year in the UK alone,
but only 5% of authors sell enough to earn more than £30,000 a year.
Against that backdrop, not unreasonably, publishers are more likely to
be interested in people with the sort of profile that will help market their
work. There are countless talented writers out there; the decisive factor in
who gets the book deal is often being an existing player in public
conversation. In other words, the swiftest route to becoming a famous author
today is already being famous for something else.
That means aspiring writers need that indispensable resource for an
attention economy: “clout”, which translates roughly as “the number of eyeballs
you can persuade to notice you online”. And chasing clout is indisputably a
skill, albeit not a literary one.
Building up clout can be done several ways, but perhaps the two most
common are emotional exhibitionism and identity-politics controversy. Expert
wielders of clout attract fans and haters in equal measure, set people arguing
among themselves and then leverage the resulting public profile for real-world
power or earnings.
One such expert clout-engineer is Nikocado
Avocado, real name Nick Perry, a YouTube celebrity famous for his “extreme
eating” or “muckbang” videos. Nikocado Avocado’s content is voyeuristic in the
extreme. Categories on his channel include “Fights”, “Emotional” and “Upset
Feelings” among others. More importantly, he has 2.6 million subscribers — a
store of clout that translates into serious earnings. In 2019, his net worth
was estimated at $3m.
It’s almost impossible to go too far with this kind of content. The only
unforgivable crime, as far as consumers are concerned, is being caught faking
the emotion. “Mommy vlogger” Jordan Cheyenne was recently pilloried after she accidentally uploaded an unedited
video of herself and her child, in which she could be heard encouraging her
child to act like he was crying. She has since deleted her channel.
In the more traditional cultural spheres of academia, politics and
literature, competition for eyeballs drives clout-chasing identity politics
controversies. These can be guaranteed to spice up any otherwise dull policy
debate with angry culture war clicks, while handily boosting the profile of the
would-be activist. Perhaps the consummate operator in this mode is the US
Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who attained
meme status recently by appearing at the $30,000-a-ticket US Met Gala in a
white dress with “TAX THE RICH” scrawled across the back, then blamed the criticism she received on racism and
sexism.
In every case, though, the core feature of clout-chasing is that it
centres not on what you say, but on others’ perception of who (or
what) you are. And here we see the heart of Kidneygate: a dispute
over who gets to use the organ-donation story as a means of cultivating their
public self.
If Nikocado Avocado figuratively spills his guts for those who follow
his channel, Kidneygate saw someone spill them literally — and then post about
it on social media. Dorland created a Facebook group to collect the applause
she expected to receive. She walked in a local parade as ambassador for organ
donation. She even created a hashtag: #domoreforeachother.
Larson, in contrast, wanted to use the kidney-donation story alongside
her own Asian-American ethnic identity to boost her profile with a short story
about “white saviour” politics. That is, she wanted to apply the clout-rich
filter of American racial politics to this highly emotive content, in order to
increase her own standing in the world of fiction-writing. And it should have
worked: before Dorland’s legal action scuppered the offer, Larson’s work had
been selected for “One City One Story”, a Boston literary award that would have
seen her short story distributed free all over the city.
I’m just about old enough to remember the Before Times prior to mass
social media. Back then, we still clung to the idea that writing was about
immortality — an idea captured by Shakespeare: “So long as men can breathe
and eyes can see/So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”
Now, though, writing a book is just part of the “media mix”.
Where fame used to be a means of getting your message out, now messages are a
means of getting your fame out. In September, CBS launched The Activist, a show that turns political
activism into reality TV — and where successful activism is measured “via
online engagement, social metrics, and hosts’ input”. Never mind making a
tangible real-world impact: like successful writing, successful activism is
measured in clout.
And once you’ve attained enough of it, you can pivot effortlessly from
reality TV to book-writing, perfume launches, politics or whatever. The only
condition is that, like Harry and Meghan, you continue to feed gobbets of
personal tragedy, emotional intensity, marginalised identity or some other kind
of emotive content to the clout machine.
Do this, and the whole media mix is yours. It’s not just the raft of
celebrities flocking to write children’s books. The 22-year-old
poet Amanda Gorman made history earlier this year as Biden’s inauguration poet,
as much for her look and ethnicity as her aggressively bland poetry. Shortly
after the inauguration, she signed a modelling contract.
And this pipeline works just as well in reverse. Transgender model
Munroe Bergdorf has a threadbare literary track record, having attained clout
mostly for being photographed wearing clothes, or for public rows with corporations and gender-critical feminists over identity politics. And
yet Bergdorf received a six-figure advance from Bloomsbury for the “memoir and
manifesto” Transitional.
The true message of Kidneygate, then, is not about art but what art now
serves. It signals that if we allow it, the world of letters will irrecoverably
join cinema, music, politics and activism as mulch for an online economy of
attention.
And the Faustian nature of the bargain is increasingly clear. A culture
powered solely by the hunger for intensity will devour any form of culture that
isn’t already literal pornography. For in a raw economy of attention, the
aesthetic or moral value of your work is irrelevant: what matters is emotional
intensity and the power to generate discussion. Whether it’s politics, art,
literature, music or simply people’s personal lives, the clout economy will
transmute it, by a kind of reverse alchemy, into pornography of the self.
Before pivoting to YouTube emotional exhibitionism. Nikocado
Avocado dreamed
of being a concert violinist. Before pivoting to organ donation for clicks,
Dawn Dorland dreamed of being a celebrated author. But there’s little clout to
be gained through working hard at creating beauty for a common cultural domain.
No wonder one in five British children want to be social media
influencers when they grow up. And when everyone’s so busy crafting their
online selves, no wonder there’s no creative energy left to dream new shared
stories, leaving us nothing but zombie franchises crudely gingered-up by the
culture wars.
Will we rediscover an ability to resist donating everything — even our
organs — to the clout machine? I hope so. If we don’t soon regain a measure of
digital self-restraint, the endpoint of every aspiration will be emotional
porn. Or perhaps we could call it Kidneygate culture: a never-ending livestream
of lost and miserable souls self-defining, fighting, crying, binge-eating or
quite literally eviscerating themselves, all for our voyeuristic pleasure.
Would
you sell a kidney to be famous? - UnHerd
The world became modern when people who met for the
first time shifted from asking each other (as they had always done) where
they came from — to asking each other what they did.
To try to position someone by their area of origin
is to assume that personal identity is formed primarily by membership of a
geographical community; we are where we are from.
We’re the person from the town by the lake; we’re from the village between the
forest and the estuary. But to want to know our job is to imagine that it’s
through our choice of occupation, through our distinctive way of earning money,
that we become most fully ourselves; we are what we do.
The difference may seem minor, but it
has significant implications for the way we stand to be judged and therefore
how pained the question may make us feel. We tend not to be responsible for
where we are from. The universe landed us there and we probably stayed.
Furthermore, entire communities are seldom viewed as either wholly good or bad;
it’s assumed they will contain all sorts of people, about whom blanket
judgements would be hard to make. One is unlikely to be condemned simply on the
basis of the region or city one hails from.
But we have generally had far more to
do with the occupation we are engaged in. We’ll have studied a certain way,
gained particular qualifications, and made specific choices in order to end up,
perhaps, a dentist or a cleaner, a film producer or a hospital porter. And to
such choices, targeted praise or blame can be attached.
It turns out that in being asked what
we do, we are not really being asked what we do but what we are worth — and,
more precisely, whether or not we are worth knowing. In modernity, there are
right and wrong answers; the wrong ones swiftly strip us of the ingredient we
crave as much as heat, food or rest: respect. We long to be treated with
dignity and kindness, for our existence to matter to others and for our
particularity to be noticed and honoured. We may do almost as much damage to a
person by ignoring them as by punching them.
Respect will not be available to those
who cannot give a sufficiently elevated answer to the question of what they do.
The modern world is snobbish. The term is still associated with a quaint
aristocratic value system that emphasises bloodlines and castles. But stripped
to its essence, snobbery merely indicates any way of judging another human
whereby one takes a relatively small section of their identity and uses it to
come to a total and fixed judgement on their entire worth. For the music snob,
we are what we listen to; for the clothes snob, we are our trousers. And
according to the job snobbery at large in the modern world, we are what is on
our business card.
The opposite of a snob might be a
parent or lover; someone who cares about who one is, not what one does. But for
the majority, our existence is weighed up according to far narrower criteria.
We exist in so far as we have performed adequately in the marketplace. Our
longing for respect is only satisfied through the right sort of rank. It is
easy to accuse modern humans of being materialistic. This seems wrong. We may
be interested in possessions and salaries, but we are not on that basis
‘materialistic’. We are simply living in a world where the possession of
certain material goods has become the only conduit to the emotional rewards
that we crave deep down. It isn’t the objects and titles we are after; it is,
more poignantly, the feeling of being ‘seen’ and liked that is only available
to us via material means.
Not only does the modern world want to
know what we do, it also has some punitive explanations of why we may not have
done very well. It promotes the idea of ‘meritocracy’ — a system that should
allow each person to rise through classes in order to take up the place they
deserve. No longer should tradition or family background limit what one can
achieve. But the idea of meritocracy carries with it a nasty sting: if we truly
believe in a world in which those who deserve to get to the top do get to the
top, by implication, we must also believe in a world in which those who get to
the bottom deserve to be at the bottom. In other words, a world that takes
itself to be meritocratic will suppose that failure and success in the
professional game are not mere accidents, but indications of genuine value.
It has not always felt quite so
definitive. Pre-modern societies believed in the intervention of divine forces
in human affairs. A successful Roman trader or soldier would have thanked
Mercury or Mars for their good fortune. They knew themselves to be only ever
partially responsible for what happened to them, for good or ill, and would
remember as much when evaluating others. The poor weren’t necessarily indigent
or sinful; the gods might never have looked favourably on them. But we have
done away with the idea of divine intervention — or of its less directly
superstitious cousin, luck. We don’t accept that someone might fail for reasons
of mere bad luck. We have little patience for nuanced stories or attenuating
facts; narratives that could set the bare bones of a biography in a richer
context, that could explain that though someone ended up in a lowly place, they
had to deal with an illness, an ailing relative, a stock market crash or a
difficult childhood. Winners make their own luck; losers make their own defeat.
No wonder that the consequences of
underachievement feel especially punishing. There are fewer explanations and
fewer ways of tolerating oneself. A society that assumes that what happens to
an individual is the responsibility of the individual is a society that doesn’t
want to hear any excuses that would less closely identify a person with
elements of their CV. It is a society that may leave some of the losers feeling
that they have no right to exist. Suicide rates rise.
In the past, in the era of group
identity, we might value ourselves in part for things that we had not done
ourselves. We might feel proud that we came from a society that had built a
particularly fine cathedral or temple. Our sense of self could be bolstered by
belonging to a city or nation that placed great store on athletic prowess or
literary talent. Modernity has weakened our ability to lean on such supports.
It has tied us punitively closely to what we have personally done — or not
done.
At the same time, the opportunities for
individual achievement have never been greater. Apparently, we are able to do
anything. We might amass a fortune, rise to the top of politics, write a hit
song. There should be no limits on ambition. Therefore, any failure feels even
more of a damning verdict on who we are. It’s one thing to have failed in an
era when failure seemed like the norm, quite another to have failed when
success has been made to feel like an ongoing and universal possibility.
Even as it raised living standards
across the board, the modern world has made the psychological consequences of
failure harder to bear. It has eroded our sense that our identity could rest on
broader criteria than our professional performance. It has also made it
imperative for psychological survival that we try to find a way of escaping the
claustrophobia of individualism, that we recall that workplace success and
failure are always relative markers, not conclusive judgements, that in
reality, no one is ever either a loser or a winner, that we are all bewildering
mixtures of the beautiful and the ugly, the impressive and the mediocre, the
idiotic and the sharp.
Going forward, in a calculated fight
against the spirit of the age, we might do well to ask all new acquaintances
not what they do but what they have been thinking or daydreaming about
recently.
The
Problem with Individualism -The School of Life Articles | Formerly The Book of
Life
