[Freddie deBoer] Freddie Nitro Edition: there you go again

If you don’t like what I’m saying here, why not say something better? There’s opportunity there! I don’t understand why nobody ever takes me up on this: media’s social culture has, let’s say, some unfortunate elements, as I think even the most paid-up member of the system would acknowledge. Why doesn’t someone produce some big chunky essay about how the social mores of media affect the industry? Why not something about the pressures younger journalists feel to conform to the orthodoxies of media Twitter? If you aren’t nearly as negative as I am, fine! Show me I’m wrong. Demonstrate how a culture that teaches thousands of 30 year olds that they should throw stones only from the safety of a social network is good. Explain it to me. Tell me why groupthink and parasociality are healthy. But somebody, please, just write about this. What does it mean when an immensely important industry has organized itself entirely around the petty popularity hierarchies of a social network? That’s a New York magazine cover story, if you want it to be.

Not that I’m sure it would do much good. Certainly they won’t listen to me, right, but that’s a given. The issue is that Twitter is both the problem and the means through which the problem is avoided. If some already-disgruntled participant in the media circle jerk were to read this post, find some things to agree with and start to wonder if I’m on to something, those feelings would be quickly suppressed by all the other writers on there insisting that no, our critics are just assholes, there’s nothing worth talking about in our social culture, our industry is perfectly healthy, we’re just fine thanks. If self-criticism is possible for individuals, it’s not possible within mutual admiration societies. The socially-enforced self-defensive capacity of media Twitter means that no one ever takes a long hard sober look at whether everyone in an entire industry trying to ingratiate themselves with their peers literally all day and night could have some unforeseen consequences. It’s a shield against introspection.

The truth is of course that these people are whistling past the graveyard; their endlessly workshopped dry one-liners, shared relentlessly on a forum that makes them depressed and anxious, are the cries for help of desperate people, trapped in a dying industry, making pennies to grind out something called content while 70 year olds in the same business write 5000 words a year and watch their pensions grow. They think that they’re participating in the traditions of Joan Didion and Ellie Bly but the work they produce are listicles about Tik Tok and thinkpieces about Rick & Morty. They tell themselves that someday they’ll graduate into writing that book, not seeming to understand that literary advances are drying up like piss in the Sahara if you aren’t already famous. They cling to each other in mutually parasitic insincere relationships out of the vain hope that one day, one day, it’ll pay off.

They insist on living in the most expensive cities in the country while the interest on their student loans grows to many times the principle. They mock Silicon Valley while quietly knowing that they are utterly in its thrall, that any shithead VC baron could come along at any moment, decide to throw a switch, and obliterate them and their publication. They relentlessly freelance to get a chance to write for the big places and are shocked to discover that the big places are very happy to pay you $75 for 3000 words. They look at publications like the New Yorker as the cathedrals they aspire to work for, not seeming to realize that the beauty of being a cathedral is you get to treat even your big name employees like shit. They hate their industry and they’re tired of the city and they want some security but they won’t take that job offer from their uncle because they’re sure, somehow, that they’re better than him.

You’re poor now and you’ll be poor later and you always said you were happy to trade it away to do something meaningful and now you cry at night because you know none of what you do matters. So who’s the real fucking loser?