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.
"Starting tomorrow, there’s a new rule in place for commenting on this newsletter: any comments that do nothing other than to dismiss the relevance or importance of the topic of the given post will be deleted, and the commenter will be issued a one-month ban. I mean specifically comments of the type “this is worth talking about because?,” “why is this worth a post?,” “I don’t care about the phenomenon the post is describing,” etc. There’s not going to be any warnings - if your comment merely dismisses the relevance or worthiness of a post’s topic, you’re banned for a month.
A particularly annoying, self-aggrandizing version of the type of comment I’m talking about is the “this is just meaningless online stuff!” “This is just a Twitter phenomenon!” Etc. These comments are uniquely annoying and self-defeating. First, this newsletter is about many things, and one of those things is online culture and its influence on culture and politics. Many people, in the 21st century, spend a great deal of time online, so elements of online culture have natural and intrinsic interest. If you personally don’t see the interest in a given post, simply pass it by; no one will miss out on anything by not seeing your comment about your lack of interest. Another aggravating element of this tendency is that commenting on an internet newsletter is inherently a marker of being online. This tends to be so self-celebratory, even masturbatory - “you’re all so online, but not me! All of this online stuff is beneath me!” My friend, if you are online enough to launch a comment on a blog, you are not so offline that you get to strut around in that way.
If you routinely find yourself uninterested in what I write about here, you are of course free to take your readership and your money somewhere else. That’s an option you have. An option you no longer have is to peacock around in my comments section, bragging about how the topic of the day isn’t worth your interest. That ends now, and people who violate the rule will catch bans. You have been warned."
I seem to recall hearing a story about a frustrated Austrian artist channeling those negative feelings into a politics ... short guy, funny mustache ...
I'm glad you mentioned bullshit jobs, because I think that plays a huge role here. If these people built cars or something, they'd still want to be a star, but at least they'd have 40 hours of useful work to fill some of that void. Meanwhile, if you're a senior customer success specialist for a B2B software firm, you're going to wish you could do something that made a difference. Since the average white-collar worker can't imagine doing something blue-collar, that dream will naturally be something in the creative field. It's that sliver in the center of the Venn Diagram between "useful jobs" and "comfy, white-collar jobs," outside highly technical stuff like engineering.
I also think it explains some of the "wokeness" phenomena within the workplace. If your job is bullshit, you can kinda maybe convince yourself that you're doing something useful by working towards "diversity in digital marketing."
I speak from my own experience here, having spent years in bullshit jobs. I don't mind it, I agree with your positive assessment, but clearly other do mind it
My first job out of college was “newspaper editor.” Sounded so cool. I even went to Express and bought slacks that were branded Editor Pants. I worked in an architecturally interesting old building downtown for a Pulitzer winning publication.
Salient details: it was a local newspaper in North Carolina; the building was dirty and not maintained very well; downtown was a semi hollowed out old tobacco town, which had not yet been fully revitalized; my parking spot was waaaay down a hill, next to the park where in the 80s a female editor was raped and murdered; and I was the “celebrations editor,” meaning I wrote wedding and anniversary announcements and had to deal with bride-mom-zillas and accusations of “ruining my parents’ 50th anniversary” because I couldn’t make out the spidery handwriting on the page they sent in (not filling out the actual form) and they left no contact information.
It was actually in many ways a great job. And now, 20 years later, I’m becoming a nurse. I write for fun. It’s better that way.
I think you're really right about "Why not me?" I also am seeing, both online but in IRL organizations from family to non-profits, an evolution of "Why Wasn't I Consulted?" Reading back on the Paul Ford essay on the topic of web as a medium for customer service is instructive: https://www.ftrain.com/wwic
We all have a ton of what are essentially customers with nowhere better or more useful to put their sense of knowing how to do it better, or their pride, or their disgust, or their sense of being left out.
There is a "fun" academic version of this where people with cushy tenure-track / tenured jobs at second-tier but still very good universities enjoy massive freedoms on how they spend their time, good salaries and benefits, and general respect from society. But they feel they should be at Harvard and have a public profile, and complain bitterly about those they feel don't deserve it.
Thanks for this insightful essay, all of your other nuanced perspectives, and the new comments rule. I stopped reading the comments section because of the nonsense and am glad you are implementing a zero tolerance policy.
Yeaterday, I was in a Seattle bookstore browsing through the new fiction and non-fiction front tables. I read bios and book descriptions and noticed that the word "marginalized" appeared quite a few times. And I thought, "Well, dear authors, your books are on the front table at this independent bookstore so that means your books are probably on the front tables at every independent bookstore. So what happens to the concept of marginalization in these circumstances?" But then I remembered, with my thirty years of being a successful author, that most of those writers will never again have a book prominently placed on a bookstore front table. Some of them might get their next book front-tabled. But only a very few will spend their entire careers on the fromt table. Yeah, those front tables are the source of generational resentment. One-hit wonders in music are still millionaires because of royalties. One-hit wonders in literature are usually adjunct professors in pursuit of tenure.
For my part, I'm still impressed that the attempts to monetize people endlessly procrastinating at their bullshit jobs has only gone so far. We've got social media ads-while-you-scroll and "influencers" as the most dominant force, followed by "Temporary Ticket to the Creative Overclass"-style monetization like Twitch donations and YouTube Superchats (and Substack comments).
I'm curious on if they'll figure out a way to get more than that from the "could've been me" class. I'm also still deeply amused by Carina's Footnote in her Elbow Grease Review: "I want him to grow up to be a prolific Substack commenter like Mommy." The humble dreams of the gifted underclass (that I, of course, share).
Terrific read Freddie. I was almost blushing reading your description of white collar workers who can’t help but wonder what would have happened if they’d chosen film making or journalism or whatever, as that describes me to a T. I’ve learned to cope by recognizing that while there will always be exceptions, Nate Silver is not where he is on accident. Read “Signal and the Noise” and look at his work leading up to 2012 and everything he’s built and created since and despite his average appearance and political takes, you’ll recognize he is anything but an average talent. I have a feeling the vast majority of highly successful creative people are in the 1%+ of creative talents, and I can live with the fact that I am not in that percentile group.
As for me, I’ve started journaling and have made New Year’s resolutions to get more involved with a charity and learn guitar and these things keep me happy and busy so I don’t become a resentful internet shit poster.
Here's the commenting rule I posted yesterday.
"Starting tomorrow, there’s a new rule in place for commenting on this newsletter: any comments that do nothing other than to dismiss the relevance or importance of the topic of the given post will be deleted, and the commenter will be issued a one-month ban. I mean specifically comments of the type “this is worth talking about because?,” “why is this worth a post?,” “I don’t care about the phenomenon the post is describing,” etc. There’s not going to be any warnings - if your comment merely dismisses the relevance or worthiness of a post’s topic, you’re banned for a month.
A particularly annoying, self-aggrandizing version of the type of comment I’m talking about is the “this is just meaningless online stuff!” “This is just a Twitter phenomenon!” Etc. These comments are uniquely annoying and self-defeating. First, this newsletter is about many things, and one of those things is online culture and its influence on culture and politics. Many people, in the 21st century, spend a great deal of time online, so elements of online culture have natural and intrinsic interest. If you personally don’t see the interest in a given post, simply pass it by; no one will miss out on anything by not seeing your comment about your lack of interest. Another aggravating element of this tendency is that commenting on an internet newsletter is inherently a marker of being online. This tends to be so self-celebratory, even masturbatory - “you’re all so online, but not me! All of this online stuff is beneath me!” My friend, if you are online enough to launch a comment on a blog, you are not so offline that you get to strut around in that way.
If you routinely find yourself uninterested in what I write about here, you are of course free to take your readership and your money somewhere else. That’s an option you have. An option you no longer have is to peacock around in my comments section, bragging about how the topic of the day isn’t worth your interest. That ends now, and people who violate the rule will catch bans. You have been warned."
I seem to recall hearing a story about a frustrated Austrian artist channeling those negative feelings into a politics ... short guy, funny mustache ...
I'm glad you mentioned bullshit jobs, because I think that plays a huge role here. If these people built cars or something, they'd still want to be a star, but at least they'd have 40 hours of useful work to fill some of that void. Meanwhile, if you're a senior customer success specialist for a B2B software firm, you're going to wish you could do something that made a difference. Since the average white-collar worker can't imagine doing something blue-collar, that dream will naturally be something in the creative field. It's that sliver in the center of the Venn Diagram between "useful jobs" and "comfy, white-collar jobs," outside highly technical stuff like engineering.
I also think it explains some of the "wokeness" phenomena within the workplace. If your job is bullshit, you can kinda maybe convince yourself that you're doing something useful by working towards "diversity in digital marketing."
I speak from my own experience here, having spent years in bullshit jobs. I don't mind it, I agree with your positive assessment, but clearly other do mind it
My first job out of college was “newspaper editor.” Sounded so cool. I even went to Express and bought slacks that were branded Editor Pants. I worked in an architecturally interesting old building downtown for a Pulitzer winning publication.
Salient details: it was a local newspaper in North Carolina; the building was dirty and not maintained very well; downtown was a semi hollowed out old tobacco town, which had not yet been fully revitalized; my parking spot was waaaay down a hill, next to the park where in the 80s a female editor was raped and murdered; and I was the “celebrations editor,” meaning I wrote wedding and anniversary announcements and had to deal with bride-mom-zillas and accusations of “ruining my parents’ 50th anniversary” because I couldn’t make out the spidery handwriting on the page they sent in (not filling out the actual form) and they left no contact information.
It was actually in many ways a great job. And now, 20 years later, I’m becoming a nurse. I write for fun. It’s better that way.
Lol, the art accompanying that New York mag piece
I think you're really right about "Why not me?" I also am seeing, both online but in IRL organizations from family to non-profits, an evolution of "Why Wasn't I Consulted?" Reading back on the Paul Ford essay on the topic of web as a medium for customer service is instructive: https://www.ftrain.com/wwic
Interestingly, he first start talking about this idea also in 2007 https://www.ftrain.com/SiteLaunch
We all have a ton of what are essentially customers with nowhere better or more useful to put their sense of knowing how to do it better, or their pride, or their disgust, or their sense of being left out.
There is a "fun" academic version of this where people with cushy tenure-track / tenured jobs at second-tier but still very good universities enjoy massive freedoms on how they spend their time, good salaries and benefits, and general respect from society. But they feel they should be at Harvard and have a public profile, and complain bitterly about those they feel don't deserve it.
Thanks for this insightful essay, all of your other nuanced perspectives, and the new comments rule. I stopped reading the comments section because of the nonsense and am glad you are implementing a zero tolerance policy.
Yeaterday, I was in a Seattle bookstore browsing through the new fiction and non-fiction front tables. I read bios and book descriptions and noticed that the word "marginalized" appeared quite a few times. And I thought, "Well, dear authors, your books are on the front table at this independent bookstore so that means your books are probably on the front tables at every independent bookstore. So what happens to the concept of marginalization in these circumstances?" But then I remembered, with my thirty years of being a successful author, that most of those writers will never again have a book prominently placed on a bookstore front table. Some of them might get their next book front-tabled. But only a very few will spend their entire careers on the fromt table. Yeah, those front tables are the source of generational resentment. One-hit wonders in music are still millionaires because of royalties. One-hit wonders in literature are usually adjunct professors in pursuit of tenure.
Don't the Buddhists say desire causes suffering?
For my part, I'm still impressed that the attempts to monetize people endlessly procrastinating at their bullshit jobs has only gone so far. We've got social media ads-while-you-scroll and "influencers" as the most dominant force, followed by "Temporary Ticket to the Creative Overclass"-style monetization like Twitch donations and YouTube Superchats (and Substack comments).
I'm curious on if they'll figure out a way to get more than that from the "could've been me" class. I'm also still deeply amused by Carina's Footnote in her Elbow Grease Review: "I want him to grow up to be a prolific Substack commenter like Mommy." The humble dreams of the gifted underclass (that I, of course, share).
Terrific read Freddie. I was almost blushing reading your description of white collar workers who can’t help but wonder what would have happened if they’d chosen film making or journalism or whatever, as that describes me to a T. I’ve learned to cope by recognizing that while there will always be exceptions, Nate Silver is not where he is on accident. Read “Signal and the Noise” and look at his work leading up to 2012 and everything he’s built and created since and despite his average appearance and political takes, you’ll recognize he is anything but an average talent. I have a feeling the vast majority of highly successful creative people are in the 1%+ of creative talents, and I can live with the fact that I am not in that percentile group.
As for me, I’ve started journaling and have made New Year’s resolutions to get more involved with a charity and learn guitar and these things keep me happy and busy so I don’t become a resentful internet shit poster.