Unfluence

the sad world of "content capital"

One of the challenges of writing in this space, and holding myself to a regular schedule, is that my focus is more about momentum than it is about the final product. By that, I mean that I try to do a certain amount of writing to maintain the habit of writing and one consequence is that there’s going to be a certain amount of unevenness. Sometimes, I’ll bang out a post that really hangs together; other times, I’ll regret a post as soon as I hit the submit button. That’s just how it works—I’m more interested in keeping myself writing than I am in meeting a particular standard of quality.

Here’s how I think about it: writing is about quantity, while editing is about quality. A good writer needs both, but you can’t arrive at the latter without the former. And the latter takes time. So when time is in short supply, I’d rather write than edit, especially here.

But I was reminded today, in a couple of different ways, about how that attitude sometimes goes wrong, and it got me thinking about my last post, which sort of lost the plot partway through. I could feel it happening, but I ended up posting it, instead of keeping hold of it, doing some editing and revising, and waiting until later. I think that you can feel it too, if you look back at it and see how many times I ended up adding in parenthetical remarks and qualifications. When I’m spending my time telling you what “I don’t mean to say,” it usually means that I’m not doing the best job of actually saying the things I mean to.

So part of what happened in that last post is that I had a set of connections in mind, motivated in part by my thoughts on Filterworld that linked up with some broader opinions that I held. But as I was making those connections, a couple of other things popped on my radar, and they shifted my direction, like road construction might force you to take a different route to work one morning.

So there are two more things that I want to talk about. The first is about the idea of “influencer” itself. I think you could infer my opinion from my discussion, but I didn’t ever say this outright, because I spent so much time qualifying my writing.

I’m not a big fan of the term, but then, language doesn’t always develop or evolve in ways that we like. Here’s the thing, though: so-called “influence” is the outcome that some folk who are successful at social media are able to achieve. Even though “influence” is indeed a verb, it’s not an action. It’s a result. And I should know that, given that my field, rhetoric, is in part the study of how we influence and are influenced by others. The thing that frustrated Plato to no end was that rhetoric couldn’t be tied to outcome. There are really smart people who simply aren’t persuasive. There are people who know very little, or are horrible, but who are nevertheless are very adept at changing people’s minds, manipulating them into acting against their self-interest, and/or scamming them out of their life savings.

The thing that makes “influencer” such an attractive option in those surveys is precisely this idea that it names the outcome rather than the actual work. We don’t actually have a good word for what it means to do that work. Partly this is because there are big differences between platforms (and within platforms, for that matter), and there is no good term that captures the similarities. “Social media” itself is woefully vague. Inviting someone to imagine themselves an “influencer” isn’t all that different from listing “winner” or “billionaire” as a potential career option. Some (few) people may indeed eventually be those things, but they have nothing to say about what it actually takes to arrive at that outcome.

And that’s why the lottery feels like a good analogy to me. No one wants to play the lottery; they hope to win the lottery. And as a lot of the social media burnout stories reveal, even those who’ve won don’t really enjoy it—the work that influence requires often takes those people away from the values and practices that led them to start in the first place. And that’s setting aside the fact that, no matter how much one might “succeed” on social media, they’re making more money for the platform than they ever will for themselves (and participating in the hype phase of the enshittifcation cycle).

So that’s one piece that was missing from my last post. The other is more personal.

Photo by Unseen Studio on Unsplash

It’s no accident that a big chunk of that post used bookstores and bestseller lists as its example. Two of the pieces that I came across while I was writing it were Cory Doctorow’s post on the way that certain folks “pump and dump” their work to manufacture success and Nicole Brinkley’s “Let’s Talk about Goodreads,” which tries to get at both the oversized role that the site plays in the publishing industry, even while it incentivizes some really shitty behavior. I read both articles after I’d started, and they layered on top of some of the discussion of “Booktok” in Filterworld. Chayka observes there that, as a consequence of social media, “the promotional content has a way of superseding the actual craft,” and thus,

A book, for example, must first make for good tweets and then provide the material for good essays prompting public dialogue, perhaps inspiring a follow-up or an op-ed. Readers must retweet her thoughts and share pull quotes on their Instagram stories. An agent must notice the burgeoning momentum and sign the nascent author. Then finally, perhaps, a publisher will consider her manuscript—if she has accrued enough of a “platform,” that is, high enough numbers of social media followers and an ability to influence the content stream. (The choice of word is telling: people are platforms, too.) Once the book sells to a publisher and debuts on bookstore shelves, the author leverages that platform, tweeting to her fans, posting images of the cover, holding it up in a TikTok video—driving attention to its launch in as many spaces as possible.

While I don’t talk about it a great deal here, I make no secret of the fact that I’m working towards an eventual book about the topics I discuss here. I enjoy writing, and would do it regardless, but the idea of an eventual book is one of the ways I motivate myself. When I read passages like this, though, I have to admit that my resolve stumbles. I know what kind of work it takes to complete a book manuscript, and I want to do that work, but to arrive at the end of it and learn that what I should have been doing instead is flooding the zone on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok? That is fundamentally demoralizing. And I’m not the only one to think of it that way. Doctorow, who’s a prolific writer, describes our current moment as a “dark age of publishing”:

This may be the golden age of scams, but it's the dark age of publishing. Consolidation in distribution has gutted the power of the sales force to convince booksellers to stock books that the publisher believes in. Consolidation in publishing—especially Amazon, which is both a publisher and the largest retailer in the country—has stacked the deck against books looking for readers and vice-versa (Goodreads, a service founded for that purpose, is now just another tentacle on the Amazon shoggoth). The rapid enshittification of social media has clobbered the one semi-reliable channel publicists and authors had to reach readers directly.

Brinkley’s essay is a really thoughtful exploration first of the “review-bombing” scandal, but more importantly, of the awkward place that Goodreads occupies in the industry, which involves both undeserved influence and the complete inability to fend off those who would abuse it.

The way the industry treats Goodreads as both a one-stop shop for information about books and some kind of guiding light with the ability to predict a book’s reception gives the website far more heft than it deserves. Goodreads weighs more heavily than it should on the minds of authors and publishing professionals alike, and the high status this affords the site leads people to use it to justify bad decisions and ill-informed upset.

My hope for my own work is that it will thread the already-challenging needle of trying to write about academic work in a way that’s accessible (and potentially interesting) for a general audience. Do I expect it to be a best-seller? Heck, no. Would I like it to reach a somewhat broader audience (than, say, my family and friends) that might take up, challenge, or extend my ideas? Yes, even if that means that I too am “hoping to win” to an extent. But it’s tough to rest easy in that hope, when Chayka writes, for example, that “one’s ability to engage in work as an artist or a writer is increasingly contingent on one’s content capital; that is, on one’s ability to produce content not about one’s work but about one’s status as an artist, writer, or performer.” Excuse my language, but that’s fucking discouraging.

And it’s a choice that we’re making culturally. Doctorow gives a (nostalgic?) glimpse of what we’ve left behind:

The one thing a publisher does that makes them a publisher – not a printer or a warehouser or an editing shop – is connecting books and audiences.

Seen in this light, publishing is a subset of the hard problem of advertising, religion, politics and every other endeavor that consists in part of convincing people to try out a new idea…

So yeah, it’s hard for me not to believe that our brave new world of “democratized” influence is one that’s cast out the baby with the bathwater. And I’m afraid that personal (and entirely self-interested, I’ll admit) doubt crept into my last post, even as I tried in places to fend it off with qualifications and hedges. It might have made for a better post if I’d just started over, and let myself be a bit more honest.

But then, that’s what this post was for. Thanks for listening.