Digest 5/10/2021

Writing for the algorithm, UFOs!, getting mad at Tweets, and more.

WHEN WE’RE ALL CREATORS, IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO JUST BE A USER

By guest Digest writer Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard.

I spent the salad days of my working life at BuzzFeed’s Los Angeles office in 2015, during digital media’s brief, manic period of venture-funded glut. Over the course of a four-month internship, I was instructed in what I’d later refer to with gentle disdain as “the dark arts of the social web,” by which I meant, BuzzFeed’s then-secret, now-ubiquitous sauce: a mostly benign form of psychological manipulation that launched articles to virality by encouraging readers to identify so strongly with a given theme, or joke, or identity that they’d share the articles across social platforms. “It me,” and so on. 

There was a salesman-like quality to crafting pieces of writing that were simultaneously specific enough to elicit this sense of identification in readers, but also lowest-common-denominator enough to go viral (the only metric of success then, and now). I finished the internship eager to shelve that particular skill: writing for BuzzFeed had felt like a kind of marketing, and what I wanted — naively! earnestly! youthfully! — was to write, not to sell.

Well, good luck to 2015 me. Writing online has always — one way or another — been a kind of commerce: the production of data, the driving of traffic, the establishment of a brand. But the trend I was wary of at 22 has only accelerated since, and seems to be reaching some kind of fever pitch now. As platforms from Substack to Snapchat push hard on content monetization and creator loyalty, the line between what it means to be a user of a platform and a creator for a platform is growing increasingly thin, essentially eradicating the line between writing and selling, as well as the line between writing and simply existing online. Virtually every social platform is now designed to encourage users to be creators, and creators to become vendors: having reached near-saturation of ad revenue, these platforms now require more than mere engagement and attention, they require production. This accelerating cycle of monetization — liking, sharing, subscribing, producing — is the result of systems intentionally designed to obscure the distance between consumption, identification, and production. In other words, we are living 2015 BuzzFeed’s wet dream.

I’m sure many would attribute this to some element of the culture wars, or an inherent millennial personality disorder incubated from birth, or some high-theory point about late capitalism’s commodification of the self. But really it seems simpler than that to me: a feature of perverse UX design. To be a person online — at least, to be more than a lurker — requires building an avatar of yourself, out of identification with the content others produce and the content you produce yourself. 

I realize this may be nothing new, but recently revived discussions of the turn towards moralization in literature — which is to say, the internet’s impact on primarily offline works of writing — have returned my attention to the way in which writing online essentially bulldozes the distinction between expression, discussion, identification, and commerce. Written work is now forced to serve every role at once, and it’s producing voices that are paranoid and hyper-defensive, or at least overly concerned with how they might come across to the widest, harshest, and most cynical audience. In life, if we meet someone who is constantly watching their back, forever self-promoting, self-curating, self-aggrandizing, and self-effacing, we tend to view them as pathological. Yet we spend our time (and our writing!) in online spaces designed to accentuate, deepen, and ultimately normalize those impulses–and in service of what? The wealth of billionaires, dressed up as the chance for us to have our own slice of the pie of Big Tech’s success. 

As platforms continue to push a version of engagement that collapses the distinction between existence and production, socialization and consumption, identity-building and writing, I think a turn towards hyper-moralization in literature will be the least of our concerns. Already, the BuzzFeed-ification of writing online has been taken over by eCommerce-ification: some of the healthiest “media organizations” with the best rates and broadest readerships are literally content factories for brands. That old adage — everything is copy — might be truer than we realized, in the end.

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LONGREAD OF THE WEEK  How do you write an extensive, fact-checked, essayistic magazine feature about a subject that no one can fact check? Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s new feature for The New Yorker, on the U.S. government’s knowledge about actual UFOs, answers the question: You emphasize the facts that do exist. UFOs, in the sense of literally unexplained happenings in the air and atmosphere, are very real, and there are events that many sources have seen at once, that data have captured, that international governments have records of, and yet know ones what they are or why they happened. Fringe beliefs have gradually become true public concerns. The feature is full of mind-blowing details, but the undergirding tension is just when fact bleeds into fiction. Lewis-Kraus admits that at times even when talking to serious UFO experts, they often admit to believing in little green men. — Kyle Chayka

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

— Andrea Valdez leaves relatively new publication 19th News to become SVP of Audience — Strategy at The Atlantic. 

— Scott Nover is leaving Adweek to write about “emerging tech” (…DNA-sniffing robots?) at Quartz. 

— Former Mel writer Miles Klee launched a newsletter called the Miles High Club.

— Seerat Sohi is leaving Yahoo for NBA coverage at The Ringer. 

— Analytics and audio person at The Athletic Max Glassman is leaving the sports site. 

— There are layoffs today at The Appeal, including fact-checker and researcher Ethan Corey, that comes on the same day as the publication’s staff announced the launch of a unionization effort. 

— Teen Vogue’s new editor is Versha Sharma who leaves the managing editor job at NowThis.

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EVERYTHING ELSE

— At the influencer-focused newsletter Embedded, Kate Lindsay explores part of the content economy: the part where you essentially make up a tweet to get mad at. The New York Times reported that people were getting mad at Vogue’s Billie Eilish cover photoshoot, but had only one tweet for evidence. Stories like that happen when there’s too much pressure to make content out of every single thing that happens online — a vintage blogging problem.

— Netflix is developing something called N-Plus, a kind of expanded Netflix Internet where users can create their own playlists, message with friends, and publish content about its shows. The move makes sense because discovery and conversation are still difficulties for the streaming service: We find recommendations on Twitter or look up episode recaps on Vulture. Why not own that part of streaming, too?

— In her newsletter, Alicia Kennedy writes a short, worthwhile essay on the difficulty of solo creative work and the tension between creating that work — like a newsletter — and maintaining the public persona that drives it. Sometimes ideas just aren’t there, and then what do you do? How do you take a break when the business is just you? These are questions that every freelancer has to answer, sooner or later.

— At least 15 Washingtonian editorial staff announced the magazine would not be publishing May 7 after the D.C. publication’s CEO, Cathy Merrill, published an op-ed in the Washington Post originally titled, “As A CEO, I Want My Employees To Understand The Risks Of Not Returning To Work In The Office.” The piece is strongly anti-worker, and seemingly unaware that the global pandemic which made working from home necessary is far from over. After this brazen display of plantation mentality and CEO brainworm, Merrill has apologized and stated the Washington Post was responsible for the incendiary headline. 

— Twitter would like everyone to be less mean. They’ve also acquired long-form reading app Scroll. 

— Unimprisoned former president Trump is now blogging after losing the ability to tweet from the bathroom at 4am but his buddy incendiary pillow salesman Mike Lindell has a social media website that exists. 

— Chaos-loving nerds rejoice! Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney opened his company’s anti-trust lawsuit against Apple by comparing Fortnite, Epic’s popular video game that Apple banned from its App Store, to a “metaverse” — a term he borrowed from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel, Snow Crash. Arguing that independent media workers who sell goods and services on Fortnite constitute a virtual economy whose members are unfairly affected by Apple’s App Store rules, Sweeney is painting himself as a heroic underdog in a legal battle that some experts say is unlikely to end in his favor.