Why does so much writing on the internet suck? Then again, why would we expect anything different? I can think of a few reasons, but let's set those aside for the moment. Here's how this Thursday's dose of web inanity came about: First, scrolling through the dread twitter feed, I came across this post, linked to by Freddie DeBoer, who nods in agreement:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/04/no-spooning-isn-t-sexist-the-internet-is-just-broken.html
And yes, Freddie's right, it's a decent overview of the bad incentives that are driving much of the daily flush of stupidity on the web. The solutions offered - essentially, better means of information gathering by advertisers, learning who is reading what, and how completely - are reasonable in their own right, which is to say, in a narrowly utilitarian sense. But there are a couple problems that jump out right away: One, this would seem to mean a further erosion of privacy, and should therefore be treated with the utmost skepticism. I don't want advertisers to know more about what I'm reading and how much I'm reading. I'd rather they know nothing about me, since I don't think I need anything from them, and I sure as hell don't want anything from them. We shouldn't be seeking better advertising, we should be seeking less advertising, to be replaced one day by no advertising. But in the interim, the more cool-headed, incrementalist, reformist, pragmatic side of me concedes, it would be better to slow the relentless race to the bottom of taste and intelligence, and perhaps these better "metrics" would help that cause.
The next point that jumps out, following easily after the first, is the absence of an alternative means of sponsoring journalism or "content" online. The most obvious example would be a subscriber based model, but the author of the Daily Beast article doesn't mention it. This isn't surprising, but it is revealing. On the immediate level, a shift to a subscription-based model isn't really an option, because nobody knows how to make it work, especially in the long term. There's a widespread assumption that a) nobody is willing to pay for content, or b) even if they did, they aren't willing to pay enough money to effectively sustain the model, at least not at the current volume of content production. These are real problems, as I'll get to in a bit, but the fact that they are so easily asserted should tell us that there are reasons beyond mere logistical worries. Taking a step back, we can see signs of what can only be called ideological resistence when it comes to alternatives to advertising. This is the Fukayama problem: history has ended, capitalism is here to stay, and there is no conceivable alternative. As goes capitalism, so goes advertising (and marketing and PR), because there is no other way to imagine the fundamental market relationship existing between consumer and producer. There is nothing empirically wrong with a subscriber model, and some sites do in fact use it, like the NYT, although very few use it exclusively. But it is remains ideologically problematic from the neoliberal capitalist perspective. One can't help but pause and consider the irony of this: the straightforward transaction of content for money is discouraged, because that's too purely capitalistic, too market-based. Far better, in the eyes of the overlords, to have the roundabout, ouroborus-like system of content providers selling audience attention to advertisers, who then sell that attention (if it can really be called that, a more accurate term would be something like "pseudoattention") to the makers of consumable things, who then sell those things back to the people who are reading the articles online... at least, that's how it's supposed to work.
The reasoning here is patent enough. Big corporate entities don't like small, clear-cut transactions between merchants and customers. They prefer mindless consumption by a powerless mass of undiscriminating drones. Any transaction that favors the consumer - that assumes autonomy, individuality, authentic choice - is to be strictly avoided. Advertising, when looked at from enough distance, is never about selling a mere product. It's about selling a mindset, an idea, an entire way of life. It is about reinforcing in the consumer a sense of herself as a passive, wholly dependent entity, a person only in a very narrow sense. This leads to a small, tangential, but important point: I've always wondered how advertising, even if one presumes that is is minimally effective, can possibly be so massive and lucrative a business. For a while I assumed that it was a kind of autocannibalism on the part of the major capitalist players, fueled, essentially, by excess wealth. Sure, somebody somewhere might be influenced by the latest Coke commercial or ad to buy a bottle of Coke. Someone, that is, who wasn't already planning on buying one, or, even less likely, who somehow had never heard of Coke. But how can that instance, even multiplied a few million times, beyond all plausibility, still account for the billions of dollars spent annually on advertising? The answer, I think, is something like what Zizek would say: it's about ideology, stupid. The saturating of the media with emblems, images, symbols that tie meaningful living, fulfillment, happiness, pleasure, sex appeal, success, with products of every shape, color, and use is part of a larger effort to creating a kind of person, and a kind of society, that thinks of itself first as a hydra-headed consumer, effectively disenfranchised and always anxious, wholly dependent on the image-machine for satiation and guidance. This project isn't conspiratorial. The people in charge understand this dynamic perfectly well, and acknowledge it openly, although they obviously frame it differently - put a positive spin on it, as it were. The ad account men think people are consumers, that products are solutions to life, and that this is a good thing. Do they (the advertisers, marketers, brand-owners) believe in the next logical step, that consumption is the very substance of life? I think that if you asked them straight out, they would deny it, offended at the implications. As the credit card ads have it, there are some things in life that money can't buy. For everything else, there's Mastercard. The ads, of course, rather blatantly posit that those wispy, ephemeral things that one can't buy - love, happiness, the smile of a young child - are in fact facilitated by money (in this case, credit.) But I think the larger reason for the spillover that occurs, where being a passive consumer comes to be more and more fundamental to our identity as people, is that there exists a vacuum, which nature, as we know, abhors. Bereft of a meaningful model for aspiration, a star to steer by, some stable standard for personhood, some kind of spiritual substrate, one falls back on the next available thing. In capitalism, which destroys the imagination and the community with one hand, while providing consumerism as a balm and a consolation with the other, we have nowhere else to turn but back to the marketplace. We all carry with us the sense that there is something missing, but we have a hard time remembering what it was. And the ad men, aware of our inchoate yearning, are quick to supply us with soothing illusions - fleeting, unsatisfying, like the empty calories of potato chips, because endless flux is necessary - to keep us dazzled, but just stimulating enough prevent despair and self-destruction. The host that is killed too quickly must also kill the parasite. Better to keep it alive, weakened, hobbled, not dead but dying a perpetual death. Viruses don't have to be intelligent to thrive; the same goes for capitalism.
So the current model works just fine, as far as the dominant ideology is concerned. But lets return to the hard ground of logistics for the moment, and re-consider the subscriber model. It boils down to a matter of cumulative costs. I don't think people can afford it, and my own example, while necessarily anecdotal and limited, is, I suspect, broadly relevant. Currently, I live pretty much hand-to-mouth. I'm able to pay down some of my debt, student and otherwise, but only very slowly, and the next hiatus from work will cause the needle to start moving the other way again. I don't save, because I can't afford to, or at least not without sacrificing a great deal of what I enjoy in life. Currently, I subscribe to Netflix, which I share with my girlfriend and my brother. She subscribes to Hulu, which we share, and her parents are Amazon Prime members, which service they share with us. I don't subscribe to any online publications for writing, and I don't give money to the public radio stations I listen to, of which there are at least five, despite their frequent guilt-inducing fund drives. If I were to pay for anywhere near the amount of media I consume, I would be going very rapidly into even more debt. I suspect that my experience is not unique. As much as I would like to pay the writers, musicians, filmmakers, and other people out there who are making really good stuff that I like, I simply can't afford it. I can't even come close to affording it.
I suspect that the media producers, small and large alike, know that this affordability problem is real and pervasive. Even the recent landmark of the NYT website hitting a million subscribers is cold comfort. They still have to advertise, even to their well-paying subscribers, and they have already begun integrated advertising, or "native content," a particularly invidious form of advertising that some people bizarrely seem to think is a solution. None of these innovations will change the fact that many, many readers are just too strapped to afford it all. The current economic conditions of stagnation and decline are exacerbating the issue, but even before the recent crunch, the problem existed. Basically, newspapers have always lost money on subscriptions. Even in their glory days, they stayed in the black (when they could) by bolstering their bottom line with ad sales. They also made profits, it's true; sometimes, they made enormous profits. But those cases were the exceptions, and they also bring us right back to the problems of quality. The biggest, richest papers made their money through ad sales and through pandering to the lowest common denominator. Thus you get sensationalism over investigation, triviality over substance. Yes, there have always been good reporters and good journalism, even at some of the worst rags, big and small. But the really excellent, issue-based journals, the best examples of a democratic press, were almost always in the red. An informed public is a loss leader, in capitalistic terms. It's just one more thing that markets can't do, or can't do well. And so an accommodation is made - not to the stated goal, an informed populace - but to the market, in the form of ads, sensation, and distraction.
What to do? One can jump back again and view the matter from the high, chilly perch of ideological critique, and perhaps divine a hint of an answer. Clearly, in my view, the market is the problem. Any system of keeping citizens informed that is based upon narrow economic interests is bound to fail, and since the businessmen run our society, the cost of the failure will be borne by the people, not the balance sheets of the media outlets. Should the state step in? In the short term, I would say, yes. There's no immediate reason why the state would be worse at providing good journalism than corporations already do. I'm not imagining a centralized news bureau, which I readily admit summons up creepy images of Soviet apparatchiks and Ministries of Information. I'm imagining something that's widely distributed, only centralized in terms of its funding. Something like a Social Security trust fund that disperses money regularly to news outlets far and wide, whose eligibility for funding is determined by stakeholders. It's not a perfect model or a detailed one, but something like ProPublica would fit the bill, only on a much larger scale, and more widely dispersed. It would treat the citizens as citizens rather than customers (which is what they are right now, any use of the euphemism "reader," as in "to our loyal readers..." notwithstanding). This has already been accomplished, to some degree at least, in Great Britain with the BBC. It has its risks and its shortcomings, but it is much more valid in principle than the consumer based model, which is patently corrupt.
To return to the immediate cause of this post: spooning article was dumb. But it was transparently dumb. I don't think a single soul took it seriously, including the author. Okay, he might've taken it halfway seriously, but that's not the same thing. He was also clearly being "playful," either out of genuine playfulness or out of some kind of anticipatory defense against the backlash he must've known was coming (and which his editor and publisher certainly knew was coming, indeed it's obviously why they ran it.) These kind of things might be good to denounce, but it's a bit like blaming the scorpion for stinging the frog, asking the leopard to change her spots, etc. In my view, there are more appropriate targets. Take, for instance, this other piece, also sourced from a link on twitter:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/11/against_subtlety_the_case_for_heavy_handedness_in_art.3.html
This piece is less obviously the work of a hack, less clearly an example of clickbait. It's reasonably well-written, and it comes close to having some kind of a point. But it's still bullshit. It's in the same league as Kathryn Shulz's Pond Scum, the most recent example of pseudo-intellectual eyeball-farming. While ostensibly reasoned and informed, it requires only a few seconds of sustained reflection to realize that it is inane, and grossly so.
The basic response, if one is to bother with responding at all (a questionable prospect, I admit), is that subtlety is just one tool available to an artist or craftsman, not the point of the entire enterprise. It's a means, not an end. Nobody who is even marginally serious about making or consuming art has ever argued otherwise. In order to launch his argument, then, the author, Forrest Wickman, needs to construct a strawman. Admittedly, the sheer range of stupid writing on the internet is more than enough straw with which to build. It's true that there are plenty of writers out there who have lazily deployed "on the nose" and "obvious" whenever they want to appear smarter than what they are reading/watching/listening to. But this isn't because they are especially perceptive, it's because they are insecure, and hurried, and terrified of appearing sappy or naive. I won't dwell on this point; David Foster Wallace has more than covered it, and much more acutely and articulately than I could. Suffice it to say that it's still a problem, maybe worse now than ever, and the internet is one of its main wellsprings.
After the strawman has been erected, the sophistry must commence: in this case, a slippery definition of the word subtlety, harkening back to its older usage, when it meant something that was so small as to be hardly noticeable, and when it apparently connoted something minor, petty, or hidden. The meaning has changed, and that ought to be the end of it, but that would mean no thinkpiece, so that point is sidestepped. For a few moments, Wickman seems to be groping, however clumsily, towards a point: clarity is not a vice, sometimes forthright emotion can be powerful and affecting, sometimes ideas must be transmitted directly and forcefully. Subtlety, especially if treated like an end rather than a means, risks being a cover for obscurity or imprecision. No careful, intelligent, subtle reader would disagree. But that's tautological, and not enough of a basis to build a thinkpiece on, even a Slate thinkpiece.
And so other digressions are pursued. Science is invoked. The purpose of art is touched upon, however provisionally and tentatively. Eventually, a picture emerges: not the impish corrective promised by the headline, but a jeremiad that reflects once again the dynamics of the informational marketplace circa late 2015. What this all amounts to is yet another tirade against "serious" or "high" art. This is by now deeply familiar, but it remains incredibly frustrating. It turns out that Wickman has set up a shuffling preamble from which to launch yet another simple-minded, anti-intellectual salvo against any experience that doesn't come with instructions, against any work of art that isn't captioned. Anything that makes the reader/viewer/listener pay attention, never mind actually think, is flatly condemned. Art is conceived as a one-way street: the artist has a message, he packages it in a sleek, pointy container, and sends it soaring, arrow-like, into the soft, slumped mass of the target audience, where it is received without comment and without much even in the way of notice.
Why get worked up about this? It's true that there are many times when I consider just shutting it all off, deleting my twitter account, staying off the web as much as possible, or just being much more selective about what I choose to "consume." I don't think a clean break is either necessary or desirable; there's simply too much good stuff out there. But pieces like Wickman's are more than just instances of relatively smart people being squeezed into mouthpieces for dumb ideas. It's the squeezing that's the problem, and we need to look more carefully at who is applying the force, and how. In that spirit, let me make a final aside that will help to provide some degree of focus. At one point in the piece, Wickman links to a book by John Carey, an Oxford don and frequent book reviewer. As Walter Sobchak would say, he's not exactly a lightweight. But he appears to be spectacularly wrong in at least this instance. The thesis of the book is that High Modernist writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis and others, were motivated by their disdain and even genocidal hatred for "the masses." Now, I haven't read the book. I've read a couple reviews, and skimmed the available preview, and I think I get the gist. And I am aware of the basic contours of this argument, which were sketched by Jonathan Rose in his Intellectual History of the British Working Class. The idea is that Modernism is, at root, elitism, and that to a large and perhaps even fundamental degree, the formal innovations, density, and complexity - the stuff that makes Joyce and Woolf and Faulkner "difficult" or "challenging" - was actually a logical response to a growing readership among the hoi polloi, a means of keeping serious readership as a privilege for an enlightened, select few.
There is undoubtedly something to this argument, at least in its broader strokes. It's true that one can find ample evidence of working-class antipathy among many of the dons and doyennes of the High Modernist canon. Many of them were out-and-out misanthropes. But I am highly skeptical that the case can proceed much further. For one thing, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Almost every author mentioned above didn't sell many copies of their books, at least not in their lifetimes. They were always hurting for readers. Why would they favor some kind of vague class privilege at the expense of a wider readership? And many of these writers were at least as disdainful, and in many instances even more so, of the upper classes and their waste, idleness, opulence, frivolity. It would seem that the case is more complex than a vain coterie of ego-stroking mandarins who wanted to perpetuate an archaic system of patronage.
It would seem that Carey introduces some sensational evidence into the proceedings. One would certainly hope he does, to make so sweeping a series of accusations stick. A casual perusal, however, finds a few cherry-red flags. For one thing, the argument against Lewis is apparently Godwinized. He might not be familiar with this chestnut of web polemics, but Carey ought to know that comparing your targets to Hitler is widely recognized as a lazy and largely ineffectual mode of argument. The other, more expected invocation is that of Nietzsche. Still an enormously controversial figure, it is at this point nonetheless possible to say that Nietzsche was not the proto-Nazi he is often made out to be, and that his ideas, while influential in ways great and small, wondrous and terrible, are a good deal more complex than they initially appeared. Simply, he was no simple reactionary, and like some of the artists he would inspire - many of them modernists - he hated the rich, hated nationalism, hated the pettiness and parochialism of the ruling classes. So his use here as evidence against the accused is, to put it mildly, problematic. But it seems as if a modus operandi is being revealed in the prosecution. Guilt by association, and a heavy emphasis on circumstantial evidence. Yes, Lawrence once said something in his personal correspondence that sounds chillingly like a wish to exterminate "the masses," even more chillingly because what he is describing resembles a gas chamber. But that's Lawrence; he is always prone to excess and provocation. Moreover, its clear that he imagines this genocidal act as one of mercy, a way to relieve the sufferings of a broken people, whom he refers to as "the sick, the halt, the maimed." It is still disturbing and wrongheaded? Yes. But to interpret it as simple elitism, and a pledge of allegiance to fascism avant le lettre, is a distortion.
My intention isn't to defend Lawrence, or any of the other writers listed. A more sustained engagement with these ideas, and with Carey's book, is in order and in the works. Many of these writers did have shitty political ideas. But if we are to grapple with this ideas instead of dismissing them, and, far more importantly, if we are going to treat them in relation to the works of art they produced, we're going to have to dispense with cheap sloganeering and sentiment. In other words, we're going to have to be subtle.
Broadly, then, to summarize: The modernists didn't so much hate "the masses" as they hated "mass culture." Their lack of willingness to engage in effusive shows of pity for the people who were being ground into dust seems strange to us, since now, even the most committed enemies of the masses make great shows of caring about them. Many of the high modernist writers were uninterested in economics, and partly as a result, they were shaky on the sources of the misery. But they were right to deplore much of what they saw. The world was being remade in the image of a new god: progress, as exemplified by the machine, mass production, heavy industry, all powered by capitalism. What was sacred about the world, what was profoundly mysterious and sublime, was being either ignored or destroyed outright. They saw what the new world was bringing, and they didn't like it at all. Too often, they conflated their hatred for this world, this culture of decay and sickness, with the people who were, like them, victimized by it. But that is a very different thing than what Carey seems to suppose.
