Did they have brains or knowledge? Don't make me laugh! They were popular.
The social media dilemma, the struggle for cultural status and capital, coolness, kitsch, and taste
✨ Welcome to obscure arts, the section of my newsletter where I write in-depth explorations of creativity, capitalism, and making art in uncertain times. If you’re only here for book stuff, feel free to unsubscribe from all sections except Lexical Gaps here.
Oh bae, I gotta tell you some Oh bae, I gotta tell you some
나 모든 게 싫어졌어 I’ve come to hate everything
Uh yeah, guess I’m wasted Uh yeah, guess I’m wasted
Time fuckin’ ticks and I hasten Time fuckin’ ticks and I hasten
온종일 YouTube and Netflix Youtube and Netflix all day
그저 또 폰 속 데이터와 datin’ Just datin’ the data in my phone
매일 아침과의 랑데부 My rendezvous with the morning
every day
빨갛게 돌아가는 나의 물랑루즈 My Moulin Rouge that’s turning
red—RM, “Lonely”
Lately I’ve been troubled by the persistent sense that I am too late.
For those of you who are new here (as I’ve received quite a few new subscribers recently), hello and nice to meet you. My name is S. Jae-Jones, but please call me JJ. I am an artist, an adrenaline junkie, and the New York Times bestselling author of young adult novels. I started this newsletter as a place to collect my wayward thoughts, pluck the fluttering ideas out of my racing brain and pin them to a display board so I can better examine them, but the honest truth is I started this newsletter as a means of genuine connection. To assert the wholeness of my humanity against the increasing impulse to compartmentalize and commodify parts of myself in order to “succeed” as an Author™ in the capitalistic grind of a creative industry.
But I’ve fallen behind on that lately.
It all comes down to the feeling that I’m too late.
Every once in a while, I used to send out essays about creativity, capitalism, and making art in uncertain times, but I’ve been silent for months. It’s not that I didn’t have things to say—I have multiple essays sitting in drafts on Substack—it’s that I didn’t know how to find the Point amidst all the thoughts swirling together. That and I feared being incendiary, of saying something that would anger those with whom I am ethically aligned, of being misunderstood and ostracized. There were themes I was exploring in the essays that I had sent out—the need for community and accountability, the lack of boundaries, cultural capitalism—but what I didn’t comprehend until too late was that the avenues I was trying to take in order to alleviate my malaise were also the cause of it.
The cause? The social internet.
Since I returned to sending semi-regular newsletters, I noticed I’ve consistently apologized for not being on social media. I’d cited multiple reasons for distancing myself, but the crux of the matter is that I’m tired and bored of it. I get absolutely nothing out of social media—not engagement with my peers, not attention from my audience, not connection. Yet despite this, I am a chronically online person, someone who likes to lurk and get the lay of the cultural landscape. The only reason I even open any of my social media apps is for the occasional glimmers of inspiration and entertainment, none of which is particularly useful to me in my own artistic endeavors. That leaves me feeling quite siloed and alone despite the millions of people at my fingertips, a wallflower at a party, silently pleading, Talk to me, please talk to me.
Oh god, please, please, please talk to me.
Let me tell you a story.
Once there was a young woman, an ordinary young woman, perhaps a bit thinner and prettier and whiter than most, who carefully curated her coming-of-age for consumption on social media, starting from when she was a broke college graduate trying to live her dreams in the Big City to finding the love of her life, from marrying him and fixing up the cottage of her dreams to having two adorable children and the perfect beige-ly aesthetic life.
Then, as time passes one, things become stagnant. She no longer knows what to put online. There doesn’t seem to be a narrative to her life anymore, no sense of a come-up, a rise, a Bildungsroman. The hopeful optimism of her broke college self has matured into a smug and slightly anxious mother of two, and now she struggles to find content out of contentment.
Her previous revenue streams start to become unsustainable (if they ever were sustainable in the first place). She starts taking paid promotion and is no longer authentic, she’s selling out, she is gentrifying her own life. Views, clicks, engagements, likes, etc. are all declining — a tangible, quantifiable metric she can see in the business account sections of all her social media handles. She is, simply put, becoming irrelevant, passé, boring.
She who has built her entire identity on being the definition of Aspirational Aesthetic suddenly finds herself no longer aspirational. Friends have long since given way to followers, her net worth measured in attention, the only currency she knows. But culture has moved on—several times over—and now she is faced with losing the only capital she has: social. She feels status slipping away from between her fingers, but her entire identity has been tied to the performance of her life online, and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. Activities and hobbies had been cultivated with the aim of sharing with her audience; after all, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
In reality, however, the systems we live within — both algorithmic and societal — often push us towards the opposite [of multi-faceted uniqueness]. Through Identity Compression, it feels like being tossed into an industrial crusher – reduced to the grieving parent, the cancer guy. We are forced to pick a singular lane and consistently craft our personal brand, package ourselves into a product and appease the repetitive, insatiable appetite of the algorithm. If we do this successfully, we can grow our audience and reap the rewards of financial and social capital.
Susi, Nick, The Multitudes of Self
She takes time off from the social media grind, retreats into the real world, reconnects with tangible validation, finds a sense of self, and thinks, Now I am ready to return. Only the social internet is an entirely different place than it was when she left, and she finds herself baffled and worse, out of touch. Culture has moved on without her. She who was once cool now finds herself cringe.
Old methods of reasserting status no longer work. Working her way into the algorithm’s good graces again means putting herself back in boxes she thought she had outgrown. What is the point? she thinks. If she’s one of the lucky ones, she’s found revenue streams outside social broadcasting, and no longer needs to rely on popularity to support herself. But if she’s still tethered her economic worth to her online presence, then…
She’s trapped.
I have made no secret that I miss the old days of internet. Back when being online meant networking (one-to-one or one-to-few) instead of broadcasting (one-to-many). Back when I had to take the effort to go to someone’s Facebook wall in order to connect with them instead of passively browsing an infinite scroll of personal news. I’m of the cohort that got on Facebook when it was still only open to those with college email addresses, and in the early days, it truly did make connecting with people easier. You met someone you liked in class, looked them up on Facebook, then sent a friend request. You got invited to parties and events through this network of connections, met even more people, and lo and behold, your social network grew. Online really felt like an extension of real life in that way, and it mirrored the social status I had grown accustomed to while growing up: familiar to many, liked by several, known by a few.
But now I am familiar to a few, liked by many, and simultaneously known by everyone and no one.
Now, despite my ability to broadcast to thousands of people at once, I have never felt more isolated in my life. Online, that is. In real life, I still have the social status I’ve always enjoyed, but moreover, I am a whole person. I’m JJ, someone who writes for a living, has a black belt in taekwondo, likes geeky things, has an interesting sense of fashion and style, draws, takes photographs, plays music, and is just a little bit pretentious.
Online, I am an Author.™
I hate it.
I feel the Identity Compression of it all, and I chafe at the constraints. I do not want to talk solely about my writing process or my books. I do not want to be an amplifier for my publisher’s marketing efforts. I am, actually, rather peeved at the constant flood of “book-related content” on my feeds because I simply don’t care. It’s like I’m constantly attending a professional mixer where everyone is talking about their work when what I really want is to chat with someone about the latest episode of DanDaDan. Or the lore drops in the new Dragon Age game. I already know what you do for work; let’s talk about culture at large. Online, despite the fact that content is ostensibly entertainment, it is all work and absolutely no leisure. You are constantly performing for an audience that is also performing, which means there is actually no audience at all.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading lately on status, culture, and popularity, parsing out what it is I really want and I think what I really want is to be cool.
Cool as a concept fascinates me because it’s a socially-agreed upon concept, and one that differs from culture to culture, generation to generation. Yet the vague notion that seems to thread all ideas of who or what is “cool” together seems to be one of effortlessness. People who are cool just are cool. They don’t try. Cool people are both conscious and unaware of their allure; the moment it seems as though they’re working at being cool is the moment they lose it forever.
When I first became a published author, I had a discussion with another writer friend about relevance vs. longevity in the industry. One doesn’t necessarily guarantee the other, and of the two, I would rather the latter than the former. Unfortunately, none of us quite know what generates longevity, so we spend much of our time chasing relevance instead. We want to be relevant, we want to be popular, we want to be cool, but they’re not really the same thing.
I’ve never cared much for relevance. It’s mostly because I’m too lazy to chase trends for clout, but it’s also because I’m so intensely private, the thought of commodifying even the TINIEST bit of myself makes me want to curl up and die. I would, however, like to be popular, which I see as being just familiar enough to the public be a regular-ish sort of person, but shinier. Fame destroys and distorts ordinary lives, but popularity seems like I could live a version of my life, but better. (I would also like to make it clear that I do not want to work for my popularity; please refer back to my aforementioned I’m too lazy.)
But Cool is neither cultural relevance nor popularity. In fact, cool is often just the slightest bit underground, slightly off-step with the mainstream. What’s cool is not usually what’s on the Top 40 charts or bestseller lists; cool is anti-establishment. In many ways, what’s cool is the most punk thing there is, because the instant it sells out or gentrifies, it loses all credibility.
Unlike relevance, coolness is ageless. Anyone of any age can be cool. (I am, at the moment, entirely enamoured of Hideo Kojima, who is 61 years old.) Unlike what is popular, coolness is as much elitist as it is anti-establishment. The very nature of coolness implies a sort of exclusivity, determined by the privileged few who are in the know and are able to put a thumb on the scales of cultural significance.
I suppose I’ve always been a little bit of an insufferable hipster, that irritating colleague who tells you they were into something “before it was mainstream.” I tend to experiment with and try on new things quite a bit before they catch on to the mainstream, not necessarily because I am in the know, but mostly because my ADHD seeks novelty, in addition to my being bipolar. I get interested in things quickly, but lose interest just as fast. Hyperfocus and mania?
In the Identity Compression crusher of being an Author,™ you cannot be cool; you can only be popular. To be cool is to be punished by the algorithm, to be buried and unpromoted because you don’t fit into an easily sortable category. And the problem with the algorithm, as I’ve stated before, is that it caters to the lowest common denominator. And after reading, Status and Culture by W. David Marx, I now see the content on my feeds as what it is really is: kitsch.
Due to the inherent elitism in most cultural criticism, “kitsch” is a pejorative term. But we should think about kitsch in a value-neutral way—as a specific type of commercial product that copies the format of high culture (books, music, films, clothing, interior goods) but removes its artistic aspirations. Kitsch is low in symbolic complexity: little irony, few ambiguous emotions, and muted political gestures. Using stock emotions, kitsch meets consumers’ expectations, thus requiring no specialized knowledge to understand.
Status and Culture, W. David Marx
We call it slop these days, but no wonder I’ve been feeling a sense of malaise about everything online. As someone motivated by novelty (neophilic is the term), the fact that the algorithm never serves me anything new is the reason I feel so disconnected. This is made worse by the encroachment of generative AI in creative spaces, a technology that can never create, only imitate. If you want something new, AI is never going to serve it to you. I’m against the use of generative AI for ethical reasons, but neither do I feel existentially threatened by it. The fact is, AI will never be cool. Will it be popular? Possibly. But as humans we are inherently driven by the need for status, and AI will never be anything but a low status convention, available to everyone with no barrier to entry.
And thank god for that.
I have no interest in being an Author.™
I would like to be recognized for my artistic output, of course, but that is not the same thing as being an Author.™ I want to be part of cultural conversations, not to be a cultural object. And the troll in me wants to throw off convention and be cool. The nature of my work dictates that I cannot quit social media entirely (nor do I want to), but going forward, I’m simply going to use it the way I want to: as an expression of my taste. I am going to bid farewell to the algorithm rat race. I’ve been heading there for a long time, but today is the day I abandon popularity with intention instead of by omission. Come find me. Come talk to me. Or don’t.
If you know, you know.
Yup. Thanks for this.