The Age of the Ordinary

No, we don't got this. You don't got me. Shut up or leave.

My god… I started a new account for my stop-motion sitcom recently, and I had forgotten what a nightmare a new Substack account is, especially for a seasoned and proven writer who hasn’t hit the attention lottery in the disinformation age.

No, I am not going to spend weeks waltzing along with your little “let’s be girlfriends and pretend very fucking sincerely to the whole world that each other are geniuses!” scheme. I’m halfway to death. I would rather eat the neighbor’s elderly dog’s shit. Especially if your profile pic is in a sundress with a “marg.” And you wouldn’t want to dance with me.

I literally can’t tell you how many bots I’ve seen declaring they want to be “messy and real” in their maddeningly clichéd first-post-that-gets-4000-shares manifesto.

No, I literally-literally can’t tell you, even though I kept a tally for a while, because I realized, who knows?—half of these posts could be from physical, human weekend-warrior “writers” who can’t be told apart from bots but believe they have something exciting to express to the world anyway.

And you know what? The math on here fucking agrees with them.

Post-meaning mores

As a warmup to my public shadow work I’m going to dive right in, as a painfully unique person who despairs of ever finding more than four people who are anything like her, and say the math here stinks.

We live in an age where nothing is a meaningful life except celebrity. Celebrity is publicly paraded around as a miserable experience, but hey so is everything else, and at least it’s meaningful! Somehow! I mean, everybody gets to hear you!

The only drawback is that you can’t have anything to say.

The math

I smelled something like this coming at the dawn of the Internet age, but I wish I had thought it through more carefully, so I could have gotten being pissed off about it over with:

There are too many mediocre people here voting for each other. They make it highly unlikely that anything that isn’t crap will ever rise.

Think about it.

In this “cultural” moment (I use culture loosely now), because everything else that people used to cling to in life is scoffed at (serious artists and poets, pretentious and boring! breadwinners, fascists! factory workers, we wish, get me out of this cubicle!), everybody wants to be a celebrity, the same way they used to want to be good people when that was a thing. We really are barnyard animals.

Therefore, instead of merely being littered with damaged pill-heads in search of the love their parents never gave them, every possible route to celebrity, whether the contender actually gives a flying fuck about what they’re doing or not, is clogged with traffic from every walk of life.

Including, believe it or not, the formerly fairly grubby craft of writing. Saying you wrote things voluntarily, when you weren’t in school or in court, used to make people assume you were a homeless drunk.

Yeah, you didn’t know that? That’s because now everybody wants to do it. Everybody who isn’t sufficiently attractive/ugly or stupid/effortlessly-normie to be an influencer wants to be a writer now, everybody wants to be an artist, and everyone has access to a platform where they can blat endlessly, ha ha, really sounds like a utopia, don’t it? The cream will rise to the top!

Except look at the top. It’s all grease and poo. It’s either stupid and smarmy bullshit or an outright lie, and the person can’t spell and uses emojis. Shucks, how did that happen?

I should have seen this coming. We could have seen this coming. Lookit, lookit, LOOK at the math!

Everything that is too smart for the bottom 51 percent of the population will never gain traction.

Because somebody who doesn’t easily understand a thing resents it. They will never click on it, neither out of unthinking reflexive interest, nor even if they become vaguely aware that when they click on a thing they reward the entity they made it, and they do not want to reward a thing they resent.

But people will indulgently, smilingly click on something cute that a person who’s dumber than they are made. What harm can it do? That amused me a moment, and someone so stupid could never compete with me.

DUH!

Stupid wins more clicks from everyone, all the way down.

If the AI is our child, dear, what the hell are we teaching it?!

If you’re of even slightly above-average intelligence, you ever wonder why you’re always so bored on the Internet, even though it’s addictive?

This is precisely why.

Never mind your own ambitions. Think about your input: Everything that might actually entertain you, teach you something, make you a better person, lift your mood, is being relentlessly ignored and voted down.

Gatekeepers BAD

We used to complain—back in the 20th century when there were still a couple of malingering standards outside of MFA slop—about gatekeepers. Yes indeed, they certainly were festering with nepotism and cronyism, which means it looked like a dark forest to me then as well, being an autistic poor. And they arguably would have sunk their own industry even if the Internet had never occurred. Trying to tell us that boring, “crafty” MFAs were the best literature America could ever produce turned three generations of possible readers over to Harry Fucking Potter.

But at least there was still good music that poked through. Great music, even. Because the music industry had standards, still. And they weren’t just “you grinded through an MFA program and came from a reasonably acceptable family.” They were, you had to ROCK. You had to ROCK BALLS, even if you were Janis Joplin. I mean, it wasn’t exactly 19th-century French fiction standards, which is what I hold myself to thank you very much, but it was A standard, and rather a robust one.

Sure, you could say the extremely formulaic fiction publishers have preferred since the year 2000 is a standard of kinds, but I mean good standards. If you had any taste you wouldn’t need an explanation, so I’m giving you advice instead: Go read some 19th-century fiction. If you’re bored, please quit “writing.”

Clicks: The Argument Against Democracy

Experts used to pick who got published. And even great writers had to go through an editor. Now what do we have to separate the wheat from the chaff?

Clicks. Clicks—which don’t differentiate between a read from a clickbait headline on slop that’s designed to plug into the brainstem, and a life-changing perusal of a novel that took years to write. They don’t differentiate between a hate-watch and a devoted fan, which is why Amberlynn Reid’s gonna wind up dead, but that’s a whole other cultural cesspit. They don’t differentiate—more germane to this specific complaint—between someone who read your piece because it’s interesting, and someone who read your piece because you read her piece.

And the more people click on slop, the more they get. The more they get, the less they consume of anything that could teach them anything. Their capability to understand gets worse. They click on an even dumber thing.

If you’re honest, you can remember at least one time when you felt it happening to yourself. After trying to fit in online for a while, I went back to real books and for about a week I thought “Jesus, did I really drink THAT much in my 20s”? The ability snapped back, but what if you never had it? What if you never knew that level of literary experience even existed? And then one day one of your many friends said “You’re real smart, why don’t you become a writer?” And six weeks later you found yourself living in a cave, eating raw meerkat?

I’m kind of surprised I can even fill out a form, sometimes.

The Auld Reygime

I’m not Nostradamus, but maybe we need to go back to some kind of mechanism where writers are vetted by other writers—not perfect, it’s an imperfect world, but at least the guy stabbing you in the back knows what he’s doing. Or maybe everything should be vetted by a mixed-IQ panel so the idiots don’t continually have the power to keep voting everything that isn’t stupid down. Granted, how the hell would you handle that on free-for-creator platforms with no barrier to entry?

But think about it. It’s necessary. And I don’t just mean the fancy-schmancy publishing-house writers; gatekeepers hit more than their fair share of false negatives. I mean that for any writer, there needs to be some way to earn a public hearing outside of name recognition and glad-handing. EARN!

Because guess what? In a system with expert vetting outside of votes for the lowest common denominator, aka clicks, there’s still room for a determined outsider to break out. Because he isn’t surrounded by all the other outsiders with easy access to publishing but no talent, trapped in their glue. Yer cute and yer funny, kid, but how are we supposed to tell you apart from the 100 other squid with merely a vague “Why not me?” wish? A wish that is bolstered by the reality that, indeed, the people who do get famous tend to be roulette-chosen trash, or good at hiding their nepotist roots.

Because be real, it’s still nepotism and cronyism that greases the slide toward the big breaks. It’s just easier to hide now under the algorithms, the forces of momentum help—but with more and more weekend warriors plodding along in the game, the glue that holds momentum back amongst the poors at the bottom grows stronger and stronger.

People are stupid. Numbers are real. If we keep letting the stupidest 51 percent of the population pick what art and literature is considered… well, I was going to say good, but nobody is considered great right now, and rightly so; all those I can think of who are actually great at writing are obscured by the light of the blazing trash-fire.

You let stupid people keep voting for their favorite bad entertainment instead of anything approaching medicine for what ails us, you get a public discourse that grows worse and worse and worse. Instead of being forced to tolerate a little Shakespeare and grow, people’s demands for stupider and more extreme adrenaline and dopamine fixes will be indulged until our capacity to appreciate the sublime, or even understand our own languages, spirals so far down the drain that Generation Delta will be repeat-watching pictograms of a crotch shot from the cradle to the grave.

Do you want that?

Or do you want a few gatekeepers?

Insert Rousing Conclusion

OK, maybe that’s a little hyperbole-adjacent. But what I’m saying is, there are plenty of writers on here I’d like to encourage. If someone is genuinely better than I am, I have no problem with taking the chance that my followers will like them better than me.

It’s just… I don’t find nearly enough of them that I would ever get enough return back-scratching to build a following the normie way.

And what kind of insane demented “meritocracy” rewards stupid friendliness in literature, anyway? If I want that shit, I can TURN OFF THE COMPUTER AND GO OUTSIDE!!!

It might be time to do that anyway, and the word “meritocracy” is a whole tangent in itself, so I’ll sum it up quickly:

People who are friendly and well-socialized but stupid and boring have an IMMENSE advantage on here. And if they were really as nice and well-meaning as they wink wink convince each other they want to be, they would either step aside and promote people who have standards, or go the fuck away.

—But! Jeez, I’ve been in such a mood, writing this, I almost forgot about the light I keep seeing at the end of the tunnel. I can’t say it often enough:

I can’t wait till the bottom drops out of the arts prestige market. Once we’re all grubby vaudevillians again, the parasites will maybe fuck off and we can build things back again.