It's Not the Crime, It's the Coverup

Lots of cool coverage of The Mind Reels in the past week or so - in The Chicago Tribune, in New York, in The Wall Street Journal, in The Millions, in the Amherst student paper…. If you haven’t picked up a copy yet, what’s wrong with you?

Many of you would no doubt say “I never need to read another piece where Freddie says ‘It’s not about [specific writer] doing [bad thing], it’s about what [writer’s bad thing] says about the writing business,’” but too bad, because that’s what you’re getting yet again.

In this critique, Sarah Manavis points out that the sharpest indictments of consumer culture often come from voices who maintain their integrity by refusing to participate in the very systems they dissect; when those voices cease resisting and instead become part of the machine, the critique collapses into complicity. And as a man who believes that, actually, selling out does exist, it is bad, I love that attitude. The sweaty communal effort to deny that selling out “is a thing” has been a poisonous turn in human culture. Because, you see, the profit motive really does distort and cheapen and poison artistic and cultural production, even if it would be more convenient for everyone if that wasn’t so. As human beings, we have values that go beyond the merely pecuniary, or at least I hope we do, and we have impulses that are driven by something other than self-interest, or at least I pray we do. When we have erased the critique of selling out as anachronistic, we’ve pretended that we have no choice but to sacrifice our deepest beliefs on the alter of commerce. And that’s stupid and bad.

That tension between what we actually believe and what we are paid to believe, according to Manavis, is exactly what has ignited the backlash to Jia Tolentino’s new collaboration with Airbnb, in the form of a paid “Experience” she’s co-hosting, where one might “mine the writing brain” of Tolentino, pick books, talk, drink, and “gossip with the cultural force.” Sounds like a real hoot! Airbnb’s official copy frames it as a curated, almost intimate encounter, but critics (that is, a few lonely and powerless voices on social media) see it as a symbolic surrender: a writer whose work interrogates capitalism and “influencer culture” constructing a paid brand partnership. As a cultural critic whose work frequently examines the ironies, hypocrisies, and moral contradictions of modern capitalism, Tolentino’s turn to brand partnership strikes Manavis as a moment where the critic has become the product, a leftist writer making a pact with a company that has been repeatedly targeted by housing and pro-Palestine protesters and groups. And, you know, maybe she has a point.

Here we come to me ponderously saying that the problem is with this whole broken media enterprise rather than with one writer working at a high-prestige, low-pay magazine clumsily grabbing for the bag. The trouble is twofold. One, Sarah Manavis does not have the credibility (which is to say, the popularity) within the industry to throw rocks at someone like Tolentino, and two, the business has crumbled to the point where it’s not clear to me that any careers could be built that might reach the heights sufficient to permit such criticism. Media ethics are founded on the belief that the well-honed argument trumps all matters of rank or hierarchy; media careers operate on the Byzantine and arbitrary social hierarchy rules of your average middle school cafeteria. Not that it’s particularly unusual for an industry’s stated philosophical ethos and actual operating procedure to be perfect inversions of each other, mind you. But once upon a time there might have been a chance that today’s critics of selling out could ascend to a sufficiently lofty status that their complaints would not be dismissed as a matter of dogs pissing on cathedrals by the media kaffeeklatsch. Not anymore. You can’t climb a ladder while the rungs turn to dust in your hands.

I am bound and determined not to engage in the actual substance of the Airbnb controversy, largely because there’s no point and I don’t care. I am a BDS supporter, as readers know, but I have zero interest in relitigating that here. (I absolutely will not engage you about that issue so don’t bother.) And the broader contours of this specific iteration of Bob Dylan Victoria’s Secret ad, well, I’ll leave to people like Manavis. Doesn’t smell great!, to me, but no one cares what I think. To address an entirely different question where no one cares what I think, though, the backlash to the backlash is why this business is fucking corrupt and broken and diseased and awful. There has been a quiet murmur of disapproval about this Brand Influencer SponCon Native Advertising Creator-Corporation Synergy Event, and there has also been the usual outrage that anyone could be unhappy about any of this on various social networks and such. Peep this recap from Emily Gould’s New York Magazine newsletter, where America’s messiest queen surveys her no-doubt industry-leading network of media goblins. A sample:

COUNTERPOINT: “I think we’re being too hard on Jia. No one makes that much money writing anymore, especially not someone on a part-time contract, and child care is expensive! It’s pretty disappointing that she’s violating BDS, but cringe self-promotion isn’t a crime.”

OKAY, BUT: There’s a huge difference between “read my shit” and “read my shit, @sezanepartner.”

WELL, EXCEPT: “My issue is that the reactions to Jia in particular seem motivated more by Schadenfreude than a concern for ethics. I don’t think it’s sexist to criticize her, but I think many criticisms of her are sexist (or racist).”

Setting aside that having a part-time contract at The New Yorker when you could fall out of bed and demand mid-six figures from The New York Times is a flex of the affluent, not a compromise of the struggling - I just fucking love that last bit. I love it. It’s not that criticizing Jia Tolentino is sexist or racist! It’s just that her critics are racist and sexist. What an exquisite formulation, here, what poetry, what a potent brain-twister. Writers are the best. Do I understand the concept, that it isn’t sexist to criticize someone, but that the actually-existing criticisms are sexist? Sure. Such a thing can exist. But that claim can only work if, you know, there are actual specific sexist (or racist, take your pick, teehee!) arguments that you’re talking about. Who or what is sexist and/or/and/especially racist, here? No idea! So what we’re left with is not a specific accusation but instead the threat of one; hey, Ms. Manavis, perhaps it’s not sexist (or racist or, I don’t know, anti-papist, what the hell, why not) to criticize Jia Tolentino, but her critics sure do seem to be racist and sexist and fascist and every other bad thing, and are you suuuuuuuure you want that on your resume, Ms. Manavis? Hmmmmm? Are you confident that’s something you want in a Google search when you go looking for whatever poisoned crumbs this industry still has to offer? Hmmmmm?

It’s just perfect, honestly. It just could not be a prettier picture. Some anonymous jagbag in Emily Gould’s New York newsletter soft-launching a “it’s racist (/sexist) to criticize Jia Tolentino for taking money from the company that has turned Bali into a Holodeck for the richest assholes you’ve ever seen” trial balloon…. It’s exquisite, a work of art. It’s not racist (aka sexist) to criticize her! It’s just that you’re sexist (and racist) if you do! That this has appeared in Gould’s nook is perfect, really, as Gould has long epitomized the role of “writer whose work inspires unhinged and unfair criticism which then perversely serves as a shield against the many legitimate criticisms that should be made instead.” What a tangled web we weave, when we turn every possible opinion we ever have about any writer into a clumsy statement on our identity hygiene. Count me out.

I have recently acknowledged that my past criticism of Ta-Nehisi Coates was often intemperate and lame, and I have also recently expressed great admiration for his talent and courage in speaking out for Palestinians when he had every incentive to just coast on his preexisting fame. It’s also true, though, that there were years there where being in media and publicly criticizing Coates would automatically get you labeled racist. That is a simple, true fact. From like 2014 to 2019 or so, even mild criticism of Coates was routinely met with a round of accusations of racism on Twitter. Conservatives did it anyway, but being called racist only helps your career in conservative media, so that was a special case. For the rest of us, there was really no easier way to engender Media Twitter’s ire than to criticize Coates, except possibly suggesting a specific date of birth for Taylor Lorenz. As I said in that older piece, I was shitty towards him, and I regret it. But my criticism was always not really about him but about the phenomenon his white audience had made of him: he was laboring to escape the shadow of white approval, and because white liberals love nothing more than treating being less racist as a competitive endeavor, this earned him a truly unprecedented amount of white approval. I think the record suggests that he felt that this was an uncomfortable position to be in, but I don’t want to put words in his mouth. What I certainly can tell you is that nobody in the business was willing to consider the difference between a criticism of Coates and a criticism of the Coates phenomenon at the time. To people in the biz, it was all racist. Ask Tom Scocca!

The next part always engenders groans, but I am dedicated to riding truths about the media business towards my destruction like Slim Pickens, so here it goes: that criticizing Coates was off-limits and would inspire certain and immediate accusations of racism was a regular topic of conversation in the off-Twitter, backchannel, often IRL media industry chatter of that same exact period of his ascendancy from 2014-2019. This was as clear and as classic of an example of the difference between public vs. private in media circles as I can possibly imagine; offline, so many people in the business would admit/complain that you just could not criticize him without inviting severe professional reprisals down on your head, while online, not a peep was peeped. Please note, this is obviously not Coates’s fault - again, I’m talking about the reaction of white people to his ascendancy rather than about his work - and the fact that people complained about his untouchable status doesn’t mean they didn’t respect his output. As far as I can tell almost everyone did. It’s just that I have to say “as far as I can tell” because most people weren’t stupid enough to poke the bear by being vocal in their criticisms if in fact they had any.

This, simply, is the point: the rules are always different depending on who you are. Jia Tolentino is a big enough deal that she gets sponcon offers, she’s also a big enough deal that this attracts some muted criticism, but she’s also also a big enough deal that the flagging immune system of the dying media industry beast still kicks into gear and puts it out there that criticizing her is maybe sorta kinda always racist and sexist, so watch yourself, OK buddy? The only rule is to be the kind of writer for whom they rewrite the rules.

Now there is no more media business, almost, and all of this seems kind of decadent and stupid, but it putters on. What endures is the work, and the trouble is the way these rules influence the work - what gets written, what doesn’t, who gets one of the last seats in the sad game of media musical chairs, and who will publish who. Under such conditions we would all do well to try and take our swings and write our big statement pieces while anyone is still trading money for them. I do think, as you are aware, that Tolentino’s sole book Trick Mirror demonstrates an almost stunning lack of ambition, and I would really love to see her write one worthy of her talent, whether fiction or non. I would preorder a copy the day I could and read it with interest and if it really is the book she’s capable of writing I’d praise it to an insufferable degree. If it was worthy of her potential, it would be a book that I would celebrate as loudly as I can, and I would gladly look like yet another sycophantic loser in doing so.

But this is precisely the problem with a writing culture where being cool is so much more important than being good, and also the problem with working so hard at being the coolest kween on Media Twitter instead of on an ambitious, risky, potentially-flawed big-think hang-your-nuts-out-there novel instead: because if you succeed whether the work is good or not, there is no particular reason for you to do good work. Trick Mirror received accolades beyond the ken of mortal men, just rapturous reviews and endless awards, despite being, fundamentally, a pretty good essay collection that would have made much more sense as a second or third book. It’s fine! It’s fine. Never in my life will I earn reviews that good. I just wish I trusted that those reviews were a referendum on the book and not on the desire of the review writers to stay on the right side of a uniquely popular and protected figure in a small and shrinking world. This reality, that you can find yourself on every year-end Best Book list without trying, naturally makes it more difficult to summon the willpower to try, which is perhaps why Tolentino is now on a sedate publishing pace at her magazine and has not sold a book since. When you add that sweet Airbnb money, well….

And, indeed, this is what I admire about Coates: he reached a pinnacle of untouchability like we’ve never seen in this industry, and he’s come back throwing uppercuts in the political debate that is still the single most dangerous live wire in American life. He could’ve made millions of dollars doing a few ideas festivals a year, giving speeches and pretending to listen to questions at cocktail parties, writing books when he felt like it and being fast-tracked to the Pulitzer shortlist regardless of how hard he tried. Instead, he stuck his finger right in the Israel-Palestine electrical socket at precisely the moment when that issue is the most salient and controversial in his lifetime. That’s integrity even if you are (unlike me) a critic of his particular stance on the issue, and it has not gone unnoticed. Jia Tolentino is doing sponcon for Airbnb. Everybody reacts to getting tenure in different ways. Some people immediately set about protesting the college administration, and some stop showing up to teach class. We’re all on our own journey! Or perhaps I should say, our own Experience.

But she’ll be fine; indeed, no doubt when she decided to take this particular bag of money like the Beagle Boys stealing from Scrooge McDuck’s vault, she did so knowing that she’d be fine no matter what. The criticism has been real but confined to low-status (read: don’t work for the New Yorker) writers, and anyway, Media Twitter is dead, and so there’s nowhere for people to perform their outrage in the exceedingly unlikely event that a critical mass of people was willing to voice it. Besides, she knows that influential people would not voice it, precisely because of those years in the influence mines, her previously-mentioned white-knuckled effort to appear cool to people in media, the most bedraggled and unsightly collection of uncool people to ever congregate on this planet. If this humble newsletter entry of mine ever broke the narrow orbit of my moderate-readership newsletter, her defenders would say I’m just jealous, or maybe they’d say I’m sexist and racist, probably both jealous and sexist/racist/whatever-phobic. There’s always some reason that criticism of Tolentino is illegitimate, unfair, a demonstration of some sort of pathology; that people in her professional orbit complain about this privately (and incessantly) is much less important than the fact that they wouldn’t dare to do so publicly. And that’s why you hustle so hard for so long to be the coolest girl in school: not just because your sharp, smart, low-effort book of essays will receive over-the-top hosannahs no matter what, but because everyone will be afraid to point out what you’ve done - wasted the last little bit of juice that was ever squeezed out of this noble, dying venture of ours.

And since this will inevitably result in exactly the kind of accusations of hateration or sexism or negative obsession or whatever else, remember, there is literally nothing I care about in a writer other than chops, and Tolentino has them in spades, so she is thoroughly capable of putting out the book I want and shutting me up for good. I’m an egalitarian in that way. So please, shut me up. Impress me. Show me what you can do. Show me.