[Freddie deBoer] The Creative Underclass is Still Raging

Fifteen years ago, New York magazine published a piece called “Gawker and the Rage of the Creative Underclass.” (Alternative headline: “Everybody Sucks.”) The piece argued that Gawker, then still a niche publication beloved of insiders, was powered fundamentally by the resentment of those struggling in creative industries or who aspired to creative industries but had not made it. This, the piece suggested, drove both Gawker writers and Gawker readers. That cultural moment is very much gone, the original Gawker is no more, and the internet has developed a whole suite of new pathologies in the meantime. Yet I have come to think that the basic tenor of online life is still heavily influenced by the dynamics identified in that ancient-by-internet-standards piece. The creative underclass is still raging.

The internet, famously, is full of negative emotion, and there are all kinds of angry people on it. You have conservative anger over an evolving culture, liberal angst over the continued salience of reactionary populism, leftist fury over our inability to make anything happen. You have impossibly defensive stans taking to the digital ramparts to defend their favorite pop singers, you have the endlessly-churning resentment of comic book movie fans who have won an unconditional victory in the pop culture marketplace yet whine as if they lost in a blowout, you have the wails of those whose favorite artforms are dying. You have angry conspiracy theorists and angry fact-checkers and angry gamers and angry Redditors and angry feminists and angry queer people and angry homophobes and angry libertarians and angry anarcho-primitivists and angry guys with podcasts who are under the misapprehension that they’re funny. When it comes to anger online, our cup floweth over.

I have no possible way to be scientific about what I’m going to lay out to you. But I think that, in the cacophony of constant anger online, there’s a kind of person that plays an outsized role in the general tenor of ugliness and resentment that permeates online life, and it looks more or less like the creative underclass that Vanessa Grigoriadis described a decade and a half ago. I’m talking about people, almost always college-educated, most gainfully employed, who have unrealized dreams in creative industries like movies, novels, journalism, music, essays, TV, podcasts. They have positions in the world that are, by international or historical comparison, quite comfortable. And yet they’re angry all the time, angry because of thwarted ambition and the sense that they were meant for more than comfort. Sometimes these people have actually tried and failed in various creative endeavors - gone to film school, sent their manuscript out to agents, bought an expensive microphone and ring light for their YouTube channel, spent a year begging people to like, share, and subscribe to their podcast. My sense, though, is that many of the people I’m talking about have never actually made an honest try at a creative field, perhaps too embarrassed to dream big and fail. They are nevertheless possessed of a deeply-ingrained cultural expectation that they’re supposed to desire more than middle-class stability and the fruits of contemporary first-world abundance.

These people look out at a world filled with creators creating, look at the considerable benefits they accrue (in money, yes, but more importantly in status) and they want. They want what others have. And want breeds resentment, especially when it’s so plain that some of the people who have succeeded have done so despite no clear advantage in talent, worth, or effort. They have absorbed the contemporary left critique of capitalism as an arbitrary and fickle distributor of reward, but without the steadying influence of the old left’s valorization of working, of the dignity and value of work. (They have not apprehended that the left can never be anti-work, that the left is labor.) They live in a digital culture that has obliterated the distance between the creatively successful and their audiences, allowing them to see all that the victors enjoy, over and over again. Crucially, they also benefit from the protections of, if not literal anonymity, then obscurity - the easiest way to avoid getting attacked online is to be so little noticed that no one would bother. Since no one pays much attention to them, unless they get very unlucky, they have no self-protective motive to moderate what they’re saying. And they have ample laptop and phone time - so, so much laptop and phone time - and are perpetually bored. It’s all a recipe for an entire class of people who spend their time taking out the resentment engendered by unfulfilled creative dreams on anyone who they see as an undeserving success.

Grigoriadis refers to the perceived targets of the rageful creative underclass as “the grasping and vainglorious and undeservedly successful,” which is as good a gloss as any. Part of the resentment lies in that sense that the successful are tryhards, that they have pursued their careers too nakedly, that there’s something gauche and uncouth about working out in the open, in full sight of the rest of us. Somehow they think wanting and not getting something is nobler than wanting something and getting it.