The vanity and banality of the Author Online

On self-reification and social media

I need to thank social media, especially Twitter, for greatly reducing my TBR pile. These days it is customary to blame social media for one’s loss of focus but I’m not talking about this. What I mean is that there is a large number of writers whose work I intentionally avoid because of their online verbosity. Their opinion-incontinence about every single world event and their tireless broadcasting of everyday banality — but more importantly their constant pseudo-candid disclosure of the minutiae of the writerly metier¹ — has put me off reading them. You see, I am of the idea that the more you know writers the less interesting their work becomes. For that reason I keep those I admire at a certain distance — I don’t want to get to know them too well because behind an interesting piece of writing there is very often a very pedestrian person like me.²

I know this will come across as odious, because it is also now customary to pretend that everyone is interesting, that everyone has something interesting to say, and that we’re all entitled to an attentive audience. This is of course also a result of the social-mediatisation of everyday life, since one of the greatest coups of the Spectacle has been to convince each one of us that we are micro-celebrities. If once the Spectacle kept us in a state of alienation by flaunting the Star in our face, now it is ourselves that star in the Spectacle through social media, while we continue to be an audience, our own audience. In this way — by separating us from ourselves — the Spectacle has perfected our alienation. We produce ourselves and consume ourselves and perhaps the contemporary tendency to overshare has its root here.

But I digress. I want to come back to the vanity and banality of the persona I’d like to call the Author Online.

One of the places where said vanity and banality come to the fore in the Anglosphere³ is around the topic of writing and money. Trapped between the professionalism imperative — a leftover from the Protestant work ethic and the process of self-identification through hard work — and the natural existential desire to resist the reification of the self, the Author Online is confused⁴. Because The Author Online wants to be treated as a professional worker in an industry and for this reason — coherently — demands pay in exchange for labour. On the other hand the Author Online wants to be treated as something more special than a worker, a mere producer of cultural commodities, a simple cog in the Culture Industry Machine. This results in incoherences such as the Author Online both ethically rejecting non-pecuniary engagements — “if X doesn’t pay it’s not worth engaging with it, since this is my work” — and demanding that the cultural commodities that result from this labour be regarded differently to other commodities. As an example of the latter: an Author Online was the other day lamenting that his book wasn’t receiving the attention it deserved, after all the (emotional) work he’d put into it. It’s hard to imagine the same from a carpenter, this impression that effort alone justifies (monetary) recognition. The carpenter won’t do this because the carpenter hasn’t been sold the aura that the Author (Online) has bought. The same aura that intoxicates the Author Online and results in the 24/7 diarrhetic release of self-referential banality.⁵

I always find it striking that it’s very often those Authors Online who are more intent on reducing writing to its exchange value that spend copious amounts of time labouring for free on social media, addictively broadcasting every half-chewed thought, happily engaging in the free labour they frequently denounce, producing free content for the latest tech bro in the (Silicon Valley) hood. Perhaps they aren’t concerned with labour and proper remuneration per se as much as they are concerned with streamlining their self-reification so that they can better place themselves in the market — to stop being workers by becoming the Uber Commodity, a walking and breathing one. And here social media is central. Perhaps the banality, then, isn’t banality per se but the currency with which Authors Online trade in their journey towards Total Reification of the Self. A currency that fits the fragmented and superficial logic of social-media-powered communication.

A few weeks ago there was an open letter circulating through the usual channels. In it a writers’ association favoured by many Authors Online warned me about a rather interesting digitalisation initiative and what it would mean to my copyright and my income. I wasn’t surprised to find big Authors Online signing said letter, and it doesn’t surprise me they are protective of their copyrighted incomes since they are healthy incomes after all. But I was quite surprised that many of my peers, people who write mostly out of the need to write and make a living teaching, with para-literature, or in totally unrelated occupations were signatories. My thought was that our energies would be better spent campaigning for UBI than in defence of copyright, as the former would benefit ninety-nine percent of writers much more than stringent and ancient laws, obsolete hurdles to the dissemination of ideas. But doing so, perhaps, would mean renouncing to that whiff of professionalism, renouncing to the aura of the Author Online, renouncing self-reification.

And if all that’s gone — what’s left?

1. Tales of authorial success and failure are my pet peeve.

2. I am aware of the usefulness of social media, particularly when it becomes a platform for otherwise unplatformed voices but here I am talking about mindless and sterile oversharing, that never-ending feedback loop that stays within the social media vacuum, and that out of unmitigated excess devalues every word.

3. I am specific with this, as I come from a literary culture where money is rarely mentioned, mainly because most writers won’t ever attempt to live off “literary” writing, nor they tend to pretend to do it.

4. Natura abhorret vacuum; the Author Online abhorret Hobbyists…

5. On a similar vein but another angle, I read an Author Online the other day, comparing writers to factory workers, possibly in a bid to establish some working class credentials. “Factory workers would never work for free,” this Author Online rightly observed. So what would be the Author Online’s equivalent to the factory worker’s strike action? How does the Author Online withdraw labour and who cares? And if Authors Online produce commodities, what type of commodities are these? And if these aren’t commodities, then can we really talk about industry, professionalism, and labour? Some questions I don’t have the answer to.