Renewable energy?
Mathing the aftermath of de-platforming
There’s a part of me that resents the fact that I’ve spent the past few days obsessing over the untimely demise of my field’s flagship organization. Instead of working on one or more of the projects on my summer slate, I’ve interrupted a pretty steady workflow to backchannel with colleagues, craft messages for my department’s mailing list, and post both serious and unserious thoughts on Facebook. Facebook! The ghost mall of social media! I can’t remember the last time I sat on that site/app/platform and hit the Refresh Feed button, but there I was, reading the comments.
When I wrote about our organizational banishment on Friday, I remember sitting there trying to come up with an appropriate analogy for the disorientation that I felt. When we encounter external shocks like that, it’s hard for us to imagine that anyone else could possibly understand exactly how we feel in that moment. Now that I’ve had a couple of days, I realize just how self-inflating that lack of imagination was. Having the rug pulled out from under you is such a common experience in the crypto space that I rarely see a discussion that doesn’t use that language. Thousands and thousands of government employees lost their jobs as the clown prince of corruption and the griftiest man in the world1 decimated most of the regulatory and protective infrastructure in our country. Over the past decade, our journalism and media institutions have been transformed into pale, sloppified imitations, retained only for the extent to which their branding can be used for one last gasp of extraction. And those are just three of many potential examples of folks who have experienced the same sort of loss, and I’m being generous to my own experience in connecting those dots. In the grand scheme of things, the loss of a scholarly organization is small potatoes.
Burning Down the House
I offered a couple of serious posts on Facebook, one of which described the dissolution of our organization as a “great example of platform dynamics,” and implied that we were effectively experiencing the end-state of enshittification. Not long after I posted it, I regretted the word “great,” which I intended more as intensifier than adjective. At the same time, that was what ultimately helped me connect those dots above, the realization that our own de-platforming was one episode among many rather than an especially distinctive event.
Interestingly enough, when I gave that talk at CCCC this past spring, I was already thinking about platform dynamics. I introduced myself as a ghost, described how I had recaptured my desire to write after binding it to platforms for so much of my life, and warned that “We have become ghosts in the machine, swept along by alternating cycles of hype and austerity, subject to the opaque decisions of those who want to ‘run it like a platform.’” Towards the end of my talk, I said,
I’m not suggesting that we should abandon our academic infrastructure altogether and start up newsletters.
The funny thing about variations on the “I’m not saying” construction, at least when I use it, is that it often comes from my own realization that I’m at least in part definitely saying that. This was only a few months ago, so I still retain some memory of having worked on the talk, and I remember specifically thinking that (a) abandonment was a fairly reasonable conclusion to the case I was making; and (b) that I couldn’t stand in front of an audience at CCCC and tell them we should burn it all down and start over with newsletters. That would be crazy. So even though a part of me was thinking exactly that, I made the conscious decision to add a white lie to my talk, in the hopes of sounding a bit more reasonable or credible.
It never occurred to me that NCTE would choose to burn it all down themselves.
Once in a Lifetime
I’ve read a little about the history and origins of our field (and its infrastructure), but I don’t consider myself particularly expert. I shared a little bit of this in my last episode, but CCCC began as a place for those members of NCTE who were teaching at post-secondary institutions (colleges, et al) and interested specifically in the teaching of writing (as opposed to literature) to share information. When John Gerber announced the CCCC in the first issue of the journal newly associated with the conference, that announcement was a single page. The entire “issue” itself was only 16 pages.
I highlight those features because our early journals were a far cry from today’s versions. Today’s journals are the product of decades of evolution, and they function as repositories for scholarship, shaping (and being shaped by) highly specialized genre expectations, standards for research and its communication, and the generation of metadata. In their much earlier stages, journals were functionally (and sometimes explicitly) newsletters. They were physical objects allowing geographically dispersed writing teachers to build a sense of community, to share ideas, and to connect and stay in touch with one another. The annual conference had much the same goals, with the important addition of ritual, an opportunity to linger and establish co-presence (these terms should sound familiar). For me, those values have been central to CCCC, and in March, I explained that I’d rediscovered them in the writing I was doing on Substack.
It should be no surprise, then, that I argued on Facebook this week that
before we decide who we are, what we can do, or try to rebuild a massive, intricate organization, I believe that our first priority should be to establish a reliable site for communication…I would begin CCCC 2.0 as a newsletter.
It should be a far easier thing to accomplish than it was in 1950. Gerber echoed an estimate that there were some 9000 people teaching college writing and communication. Imagine the task of trying to wrangle even a fraction of that population into a coherent organization, prior to social media, the internet, email, or even the personal computer. And yet, if I needed urgently to contact my colleagues across the country, and not just those in my email address book, I’m not sure that my task today would be any easier than it was for Gerber. The closest thing we’ve had to an “all hands” method of communication was probably the NCTE membership mailing list, and that’s the exclusive property of the platform that just shitcanned us. Oops2.
My “plan,” then, wasn’t just a matter of “I like newsletters, so we should all just use them.” I contend that “collective vision, material organization, physical location, journals, conferences, etc.” are all 2nd-order concerns. If we want to reconstitute ourselves organizationally, we have to confront realistically just how much of that infrastructure we handed over to the platform and how unrealistic it is to imagine that we will build 80 years worth of development back quickly. For me, the first priority should be to establish communication channels first and foremost. The best example we have for how our colleagues in media have accomplished this is in the federated space of newsletters. (I’ve thought some about all of the steps that would need to follow, including positioning ourselves not so squarely within academia, but I need to keep this manageable.)
More than anything else, I think that we need to be wary of the idea that we can or should simply reconstitute our organization. It was built as it was for a very different time and population, and it accreted over time in some ways that aged like the Electoral College. There are all sorts of habits and customs that got baked into the organization through inertia, and then just became “the way it is.” I do believe that it will be useful to think about any new organization’s mission, but the tools to do so should be our first priority.
Road to Nowhere?
I’m torn here. Part of me is hopeful while another is pragmatic. Let’s start with the latter.
Renting an apartment doesn’t prepare you to build your own house. Harsh as that sounds, I don’t think that most of us in the field fully understand just how much of our infrastructure we offloaded to the platform over the years. I’m not sure that I could or would have made this observation prior to becoming Chair of my department, and having to divert most of my attention to keeping it running. And I was lucky—I inherited a largely functional, much smaller organization already well embedded into a much larger platform. The prospect of building a national organization with tens of thousands of potential members—from scratch—would necessarily be a sizable team’s full-time job, and the only people eligible to do it all already have full-time jobs.
And this may sound insulting, but because much of the day-to-day operation of our organization has been the responsibility of a platform, our selection process for leadership has never focused on the qualities and capabilities that would be needed to accomplish a task like this. This is not a criticism of anyone in a leadership position for our organization, past or present. It is a commonplace among academics that our hiring process selects for things like research productivity, service commitments, and teaching excellence. That’s how we get our jobs. But none of those criteria are especially predictive when a faculty member is asked to Chair a department, or moves upwards into college or university level administration. It’s simply a different set of skills, one that we’re not trained for3. I’m honestly worried that most of us will simply expect those who were elected to lead CCCC to step into the breach and take on the much different, far more complicated task of rebuilding. Not only do I think that it would be quite unfair, but I don’t think it’d work.
Yes, the pragmatic part of me believes that this is the end of a particularly long chapter in our field. As fired up as many of us are in the moment, I think that ultimately, we won’t be able to rebuild Rome in a day, that most folks will take their membership fees, their attention, and their loyalty to the organization and transfer it elsewhere. They will commit a little more to their local communities, invest a bit more time in another of our many affiliate organizations, attend smaller conferences, and CCCC will fade into nostalgia for everyone the way it already does for those of us who are later into our careers.
Despite this, I can’t help but feel some hope as well. I believe in the good faith efforts of many of my colleagues who are trying to sort through what’s happened, what went wrong, and speculating about how we might build back better. I’ve had multiple conversations with folks who are holding onto similar hopes, who are willing to extend themselves to support such efforts. We believe that, even if we ourselves are at a different stage, CCCC provided us with certain irreducible value in our careers, that it made present to us friends, colleagues, community, audience that we wouldn’t have otherwise found, and that our professional lives would have been poorer for its absence.
I do genuinely believe that there is a great deal of energy out there, but it will take time, effort, and vision to activate it, qualities that I’m not sure any of us possess in abundance these days. But here’s hoping.
And here’s hoping that writing this episode will finally clear out some of my brainspace so that I can get back to work on other things. My section titles are all Talking Heads song titles, and in honor of that, I’ll leave you with a quick video. More soon.
I’m not going to go into it above, but one of the major shifts that social media has wrought upon us is the dissolution of institutions designed with scale in favor of scale-free networks. We are far more connected to others in the field than they were in 1950, but we are less connected to the field itself as a result, or the organization that we allowed to represent it to us. Back in the 00s, I blogged about this, and the fact that CCCC hadn’t evolved to account for this shift.
Just so this is clear, I hold myself to the same standard that I’m suggesting here. During my own time as a department chair, I brought some skill and perspective to the job, had to learn a great deal of it on-the-job, and there are still places where I struggle to reconcile my own abilities with its demands. And going into my 5th year, if I were all of a sudden tasked with establishing a brand new department, I’m not sure that I’d be able to do it well.
NOW I finally get David Byrne. Thanks, just even for that.
I think it became fashionable to say that one didn’t go to C’s anymore—conference was too big, problematic, inaccessible, expensive, etc. But then when NCTE did away with it, suddenly it was the most important thing ever, formational for new scholars, etc.