onanism in the 21st century
There’s a masturbatory quality to confessional writing, a sort of subtle narcissism. This is why it’s called trauma porn. You saw through your sternum and expose yourself, each malignant little tumor vying for attention inside your body. A biopsy done, illness diagnosed, no treatment plan ever presented. At least not one that makes any sense. The 21st-century mode of confessional writing is so horribly, horribly degrading. To the writer and the reader.
At least not the openly confessional. There’s a certain lack of mystery today in authors, all thanks to the triumph of marketing. I could go into the triumph of the confessional mode, the gradual restriction1 of available viewpoints to the author’s ‘lived experience’ — I could, but that’s not what this post’s about. Other people have written about that and have likely done a better job than I have. (Here's a great New Yorker article on the subject and Carson McCullers, one of the most unjustly underrated writers in American literature.)
This post’s about careerism in writing and, more broadly, the gradual, creeping rise of ‘public personas’ and how that effects artistic freedom. To cut straight to the point: Twitter is a voluntary panopticon and participation is important when it comes to creative fields such as writing, visual art, and (to a lesser degree) music.
the-self-as-brand and negative marketing
The advertising agencies won sometime around the mid-20th century. Their victory is old news at this point and pointing out that we live in a world made for ads, not people, feels too obvious. Looking past the obvious benefits of highways, the experience of driving along one in any major American city is similar to that of watching television: there is a main event (be it the act of traveling or a certain show or movie) and there are advertisements, whose presence is inescapable and at this point partly subconscious.
By the late 20th century, the human body began to serve a similar function to billboards. Branding became more obvious and, mostly among those who aren’t going to Heaven because they lack2 a soul, a point of pride. With the internet, suddenly the self could be marketed and branded, at least in the sense that a completely normal person could gain a following through the persona they present online. Creative work is ruled by this, because good self-marketing and branding can help sell books, commissions, EPs, et cetera. This is why branded Twitter accounts (i.e, Wendy’s, Steakumms) posting relatable, seemingly human content unrelated to the brand feels so wrong: the artificiality present in all self-branding is more transparent. The difference between, say, the Steakumms Twitter account posting a thread about depression and, say, a sub-ten thousand follower account is that whereas the latter has the appearance of humanity, the former is a grotesquely blunt marketing effort designed to get you to buy frozen meat products.
Self-branding is not in and of itself a negative or even contemptible thing. To a certain extent, nearly everyone with an online presence (especially in creative fields) engages in it; one example that would be neutral is a writer simply advertising their book using their personal Twitter account. The issue only arises when the authentic self, which is always filtered through the internet, is wholly erased to present a completely false self-brand.
Take, for instance, Steve Roggenbuck.3 Roggenbuck was a poet, part of the now dead ‘alt lit’ movement; he survived the initial wave of cancellation and pivoted towards branding himself as a feminist. This worked. In 2018, it came out that Roggenbuck was, to be blunt, creepy. While his initial accuser later walked back some of her claims in a Jacobite piece and admitted that there was an undercurrent of cynicism to her accusation, the fact remained that Roggenbuck was caught sexually harassing teenage girls over the internet.
The same exact thing happened to Virgil Texas. In both cases, men who publicly presented themselves as progressives, respecters of women, — virtuous, in the 21st century, for lack of a better term — turned out to be pedophiles.4 As a result, Virgil Texas is currently hiding out at an opium den in Sarajevo and Roggenbuck hasn't had a public life in four years.5 Neither of them have much of a chance of making a comeback; why? Moving beyond that what they both did was contemptible, ugly, and perverted, it's because they lied about who they were, and when it comes to self-branding, lying is unforgivable. It breaks the illusion of authenticity. Louis C.K is back because he was always open about being Louis C.K.
When it comes to self-branding, there are two primary forms of currency.
Authenticity, defined as how closely your self-brand seems to align with your reality. We’re also including some vague sense of ‘quality’ in authenticity.
Virtue, defined as how closely your self-brand seems to align with your cohort’s worldview.
Virtue-as-currency is not traded alone. Amanda Gorman, the world’s least talented poet, is the sole exception. Kolleen Carney6 tries to practice virtue-as-sole-currency. You can shout about queer bodies/globohomo/liberals/Zionist oppression from the rooftops until your vocal chords snap. If it feels fake, people will be able to sniff that out and avoid you. Authenticity-as-currency can be traded alone, but trading it alongside virtue - i.e, either genuinely extolling the ideology of your peer group or paying it lip service - is good, too.
What “virtue” is can be pretty vague; it can be quite literally anything. If you’re an anarchist trying to get into the latest zine, then you better make it seem like you actually believe in anarchism. Namedrop a few theorists, too, just not Hakim Bey. In mainstream publishing, “virtue” shifts from year to year, but it often comes in liberal packaging.
In creative fields today, there’s something I like to call the attention economy. There is no shortage of talent; the opposite, if anything. Talented writers have benefited greatly from the advent of the digital age in a handful of ways, but one unexpected way in which they’ve suffered is that the reading public’s attention is now divided between an ever-increasing number of authors. In tandem, the number of opportunities have declined in scale or remained stagnant. Mainstream publishing houses can only put out so many books a year and have the newfound benefit of the writer-as-brand and being able to pick and choose from a much larger field whose work they choose to publish.
At the moment, your avenues for gaining attention are somewhat straitened. Get an MFA, attend a prestigious writer’s workshop, make connections, live in New York, and you have a not-zero chance of being able to publish one of the latest pieces of realist literary fiction that drops out of Random House and lands next to the unsold copies of Michelle Obama’s memoir that still line bookstore shelves. You’ll be part of the grand cultural bowel movement that American literature has become. You’ll have a career, in other words. Paris Review, here we come!
Your other option is whatever the latest buzzword for ‘people who write primarily for an online audience’ is — call it alt-lit, call it indie lit, call it cyberwriting, it’s essentially the same, regardless of whether a coherent ‘scene’ exists somewhere. We’ll call it cyberwriting.
This is where things get grim.
Ten-thousand indistinct people with indistinctly identical headshots as their profile pictures, all hawking the same indistinct chapbooks and novels touching on themes so personal as to not matter. The recent Hobart meltdown made me laugh for a handful of reasons. Number one was the delayed response, number two was the overblown reaction to the thoughts and feelings of a remarkably pedestrian right-wing journalist, and number three was the response to Elizabeth Ellen’s very obvious trolling.7
Here’s a made-up example. I’m probably subconsciously plagiarizing someone else’s joke.
Hello. Please take down my Figleaf Award Top 50 Best In Moon-Related Poetry nominated River Phoenix tribute poem, “fuckable boy”, which you published in December of 2015. Take it down. Now. My lawyer will be in touch if you fail to respond to my e-mails by October 25th. I love harassing women!
This is all part of a branding effort. By publicly attaching yourself to minor controversies and having an opinion, you market yourself as X type of person, the goal here being that people will see your post, click on your account, follow it, and (touchdown) buy your novel/chapbook/macramé art. This is where cyberwriting gets ugly. This is where negative marketing appears. Negative marketing is, to put it as straightforwardly as possible, my own personal term for one specific aspect of what’s called “cancellation.” You’ll notice that, on occasion, people will bring up someone or something that’s been “cancelled” in a negative sense, long after the initial wave has receded back into the sea. This is negative marketing. They are reminding you of this bad thing.8 I estimate that, by 2024, there will have been numerous tweets made by various people about the Hobart controversy, long after it’s passed, reminding you that Hobart did something bad. The goal of negative marketing differs from regular advertisement in one crucial way: distinct from normal badmouthing, it specifically points towards something (be it a short story, interview, or public persona) and asks you to look at it and feel contempt. Here’s a plausible draft of what negative marketing can look like:
[black and white headshot pfp] italian and nonbinary @FrampHampton
remember when hobart published an interview by a racist
white guy crying about “masculine fiction” or some shit. lol
Sent by iPhone 2:13 AM 11/2/2024
How does negative marketing differ from cancellation? For starters, it moves beyond the regular weekly cycle; most cancellations are spurious and quickly forgotten unless there’s a truly egregious aspect (i.e, hideous, open racism, sex offenses, ties to weapons manufacturers). Negative marketing insists that you remember the regular Twitter slapfights, things that are inherently not worth committing to memory. It demands that you have an opinion.
When it comes to that sort of thing, the best move is to not care. To actively refuse to care, to refuse to play the game. Hobart is just an example — and it’s the equivalent of tripping over your own feet and looking around to make sure no one saw. It will not matter right now as much is it will not matter in 2024, 2028, 2032, et al. Cultivate a jouissance around meaningless, puffed-up controversy. You ought to find it funny, if nothing else, but nothing more!
And yet here I am, writing about it; why is controversy of the most meaningless kind so enticing, so fun to talk about?
controversy as public fornication and pornography: solution
Controversy of this nature is best viewed as equivalent to two people hatefully fucking one another in public, possibly in the lobby of a thirty-story tall commercial building in downtown Manhattan on a rainy day. You stand by the revolving door among a crowd of businessmen, financial experts, marketing executives, ties being straightened, Patagonia puffer vest pockets filled with hands, rain pattering against floor-to-ceiling plate glass. I can certainly just walk away, you think, but then, if I do, I’ll never understand why they’re doing this. And dull moaning and insults issues from the writhing mass on the floor, their clammy skin squeaking against polished tile.
There is a pornographic thrill to watching people engage so openly in behavior so ugly, so worthy of disdain. Maybe it’s my mortal fear of public humiliation speaking, but I find mobbing to be completely incomprehensible. Certainly, some bad behaviors ought to be called out: sex pests should be exterminated, and racism is hideous. But most of what I see is foreign to me. It borders on being incomprehensible. Like trying to decipher hieroglyphs, I read a call-out, the aggrieved noting that the person they want me to hate has problematic takes on Steven Universe and, much later in the call-out, that they're a domestic terrorist who manufactures fertilizer bombs.
I admit that I enjoy watching people argue with and insult each other, especially when what they’re arguing over makes about as much sense to me as the cost of shipping wheat from Kansas to Mars. I do know that some people are afraid of being the target of the mob; the one metaphorically being fucked on the floor of the One World Trade Center in front of an awed crowd.
The reason people attach themselves to controversies, I’ve already explained; it’s keeping in with the self-brand they want to present and more than that, every single one of them is hoping to get more attention that way. It’s a career move. It’s all a career move, carefully calculated from the start; these people have no love of art. They are vampires. This is why not giving a shit is so painful to them, why responding with flippancy to some right-wing journalist sharing his funnily neurotic views on writing instead of righteous outrage hurts. It’s like pulling out a cross. Not caring is incomprehensible to them, because not caring is anathema to their entire modus operandi. To not care is to admit that the work matters more than being viewed as perfectly righteous.
These people don’t write for readers, anyways. Certainly not for themselves. It’s for other writers. To get pats on the ass.
Keeping in with my prior advice, the key here is to stop caring. By all means, stay on Twitter — it’s a great way to connect with other people — but put your coat on, turn away from the ugly couple fucking and sucking on the floor, and leave the building. Refuse to have an opinion. Roll your eyes at every “take” that comes your way. You need to be focusing on the things that actually matter, not things that matter to people who would enthusiastically vote for a theoretical Harris-O’Rourke ticket in 2024. More than anything else, refuse to brand yourself in this sort of way. Don’t water down who you are for theoretical observers. Don’t participate in controversy.
Essentially…
I mean this in a very loose sense, by the way. No one’s going out there and shooting people for writing outside of their ken, but I do get the sense that it’s considered unfashionable and potentially offensive.
Jesus said, "It's not possible to sow on rock and harvest fruit.”
Shout out to G.G Roland for helping me remember Steve Roggenbuck.
Yes, I know that what Roggenbuck and Texas engaged in doesn’t fit the definition of pedophilia. Regardless, in the public eye, both of them are viewed as pedophiles. Roughly as good as the reality, which is ‘horny menaces who wanted to fuck high schoolers.’
And thank God for that!
Hi, Kolleen!
Before some theoretical scold accuses me of being a conservative, I’m a social democrat and “LGBT”, but probably not the letter you’re guessing.
You’ll notice that I’m being very flippant about the Hobart controversy. Perhaps I’m causing harm right now, by so traumatically dismissing the lived experiences of bodies and voices? Uh-oh…!
Feeling a bit worried because this post has gotten as many views as my previous one in an hour, as opposed to a week.