What Now? A Question Ain’t Really a Question, if You Know the Answer Too: Part 4A

“This a picture. What a picture. I’m fuckin’ with you.”

Some thoughts on communication informed—in part—by life in the pandemic though not necessarily about life in the pandemic and, if I’m being honest, the writing kinda started beforehand anyways. The essay equivalent of a streaming mini-series in four parts. If you missed it, read Part 01, Part 02 & Part 03 here. And well, sneak attack, the last episode is a double. After next week I will eventually post a single edit of this essay, though please know that I know emailing it would be annoying, so I’m not doing that. Maybe I’ll publish it … maybe someone else will publish it? Who knows? Other types of content to follow.

The New Narrative

An inflection point in the trajectory of the relationship between our internal and public selves was the 2015 Joan Didion Céline campaign by Peter Miles, shot by his long time collaborator Juergen Teller. The image shows the aged Didion sitting on a couch; she’s dressed in Céline black and large sunglasses. The centered logo completes the image. Didion made her career by perfecting a style of writing that combined journalism and memoir. Her subjects were mostly journalistic even if they weren’t strictly news and yet she was consistently present in and affecting the narrative itself. With this one staged and widely circulated image, Didion made the full transformation from a performative side player in her writing to the star that she’d been crafting all along.

Joan Didion and Quintana Roo Dunne for Gap, photography Annie Lebowitz, 1989

Although certainly there are precedents to this in modern literature—the beats, the 1960’s autobiographical journalists, the New Narrative of the 1980’s, all of which attempted to fuse and confuse realism and fiction—there’s been a specific uptick in interest in these movements as social media began to infiltrate the lives and everyday thoughts of all young people, including writers. It’s no coincidence that I know several people reading Gary Indiana, a writer associated with the New Narrative, right now.  It’s also no coincidence that Didion’s first ad was for Gap in 1989, the same year Indiana published his novel Horse Crazy.

Céline, no matter how on-time, couldn’t possibly have picked this trend up first-wave. It seems a meteor shower of cultural factors brought back a deep interest in a combination of the personal and the objective in writing. A new generation had a seemingly voracious hunger for the fiction-memoir hybrids, a style that pays direct homage to the aforementioned movements, plus it would be rude to forget Brett Easton-Ellis. Writer Tao Lin published his semi-autobiographical novel Taipei in 2013, the now disgraced selfie-vlogging poet Steve Roggenbuck posted his influential make something beautiful before you are dead in 2012, though it was featured in The New Museum’s triennial also in 2015.

Natasha Stagg’s personal novel about social media influencers, Surveys, arrived somewhere in 2016, though her highly celebrated Sleeveless, was published in 2019. Sleeveless is a collection of personal essays with cultural commentary, and short fiction that is also personal. Of course most names have been changed, save a few juicy ones. She talks about how we build personae through curated relationships, fashion, lifestyle signifiers and social media all of which she’s done in her own life. Then there was the resurrection of Eve Babitz, the 1960’s Hollywood memoir-ish fiction writer who was republished in 2015 as well. Her mix of name dropping and hedonism has an ability to turn matter of fact diaristic writing into literature. Such is life, these are moments in it, and I will show you, not tell you why these little things matter.

Photobooth shot of Eve Babitz, photographed in situ by Mirandi Babitz

This of course has everything to do with the rise of the feed and the way it blurs the line between reality and fantasy. We crave a perfected simulation of life-like intimacy. On the feed it has to feel natural and we are rarely interested in fiction that declares itself. This was tested early, in 2014, by artist Amalia Ulman who turned her instagram into a craven journey to become an It Girl. She faked a boob job. She took a lot of selfies in fancy hotels and bathrooms. The account enthralled an audience well beyond the art world, though once the artist revealed it as a hoax, the mystique dissolved and it now exists as a footnote, an interesting experiment. 

Back at the crossroads of our shapeshifting self and the communication networks that will distort our inherently inconsistent signals, the question remains, which levers ultimately define our public faces and are we in control of them? As the speaker intends for his signifier to have specificity, it is ultimately the listener’s interpretation of the signified that is received. It makes sense that this topic fascinates so much of psychiatric study as many of the problems they face professionally have to do with a person’s fundamental misunderstanding or misinterpretation of reality and that this imperfect language is their tool to understand and cure the patient. In Laing’s Knots he writes,

JILL: You think I am stupid

JACK: I don’t think you’re stupid

JILL: I must be stupid to think you think I’m stupid if you don’t: or you must be lying. I am stupid every way:
to think I’m stupid, if I am stupid
to think I’m stupid, if I’m not stupid
to think you think I'm stupid, if you don’t. 

Cognition, cultural understanding, personal psychology and trauma can all lead to breakdowns in even the most basic exchanges between people. The psychiatrist has to recognize and understand the internal source of the misunderstanding in order to re-orient the patient and, by doing so, reroute the dysfunctional neural pathways with new reward mechanisms. 

This is certainly complicated by the narrow space between personal expression and manicured self-presentation. Something that needs to be unpacked is the relationship between memoir and Instagram. The line between the need for real human contact—one that feels even more dire in this age of the hypnotic screen—and the branded self. In a cover article by Tavi Gevinson for New York Magazine about her abusive love affair with social media she writes about her need to live more truthfully. Enough showing her best self all the time. Instagram Stories never show the moment’s when a couple is fighting. Even if the content is abject, the simple understanding that the image engages an audience immediately aestheticizes it and the gesture is inherently performative.

Photography Eva O’Leary

Tavi’s piece is written in the first person, which almost makes it feel like Instagram turned into prose. In talking about the platform she says “people are sick of unrealistic lifestyles and picture-perfect aesthetics, the next era of Instagram is all about the ‘relatable influencer.’” However Tavi is now using a new platform—a timely confessional magazine piece, a genre we’ve anointed with the veneer of truth—that constructs a self who as told lives like a real person but remains mediated by meticulously measured language that alludes to vulnerability but retains all the same control.

Tavi doesn’t get deep into the premeditated cycle of control these apps actively wield, largely because it’s written from and services a personal perspective. I didn’t know really how it worked until recently when, yes, I did watch The Social Dilemma, the new dinner party fave Netflix doc about what the backend of AI is really working towards and how even the smartest engineers in the building don’t quite still know what its up to at this point. The film is solid if you cut around the edges. The best part of the doc is that the production team seemed to track down and get on record a fair number of crucial CEO’s and information architects from the social media boom at the turn of the 2010’s. What’s pertinent to Tavi’s piece is the ways in which the AI, or more simply, self-teaching algorithms are set in motion with the broad directive to maximize profit which, in this case, directly correlates to screen time. When you’ve been off your device for too long they send just the right notification to coax you back into their interface. And once they have you, they sense and manipulate your emotional state with things like interaction features and autoplay suggestions. As the machine becomes savvier, it learns our patterns. Your emotions may feel chaotic but with enough data and computational power a person can be broken down into a series of predictable actions. It learns a user’s pattern and always seeks to optimize, to find our weakest triggers that will yield their optimal results through billions of tests to chemical response mechanisms.

This is something that the most savvy content creators know. To maximize exposer and profit the human creator has to mirror the logic of artificial intelligence. An understatement would be that they can’t compute as much data in as little time as the warehouses of intricately networked, expertly programed, high power computer systems at all of these companies, but then again, a person can notice an evocative sunsets, shift and respond to micro-trends and have the type of sticky personality that render’s their energy or aura aspirational. The two really must work in tandem.

But creators conduct similar AB testing and analyze the data from one post to the next. This is one of the reasons, I suspect, along with a likely preferential placement on the feed, people tend to post at breakneck frequencies. Casey Neistat is a good case study for this, though he no longer uses his platform in quite the same way. Before his channel blew up it was built on sporadically conceived and produced short form video content a good portion of which was the proto-vlogging lo-fi documentary style that his brother largely pioneered for the Tom Sachs studio. Still up there, if you dig far back enough is a random music video he did with my friend Teddy. But Neistat’s exponential rise in popularity that placed him on a vast cross-section of next-play suggestions, came with out of a kind of template he developed. This achieved two things: By looking through his metrics, Neistat was able to see and start to repeat the tropes of his more successful posts, and by uploading a video daily, the algorithm had to take notice. Neistat essentially allowed the platform mechanism to dictate both his creative decisions and release schedule and for a while he was the quintessential popular YouTube presence. Of course, if you watch the original Neistat Brothers show on HBO, a certain amount of creative ambition was lost, but this was not something the twelve-year old boys decked in Supreme, Kith and a digital SLR with portable tripod who formed the burning center of his fanbase seemed to care about at all. While most of his rhetoric was about hard work and creativity, he was ultimately selling the benefits of complete integration with the network.

Although iTunes is ad free and a subscription model, it still offers a predictive and frictionless experience. I wonder how deals are structured for certain event releases like Frank Ocean’s mesmerizing live performance of Endless, a surveillance style video of Ocean doing what looks like very competent carpentry accompanied by a new set of music, that led up to the release of Blonde in 2016. Possibly it’s as simple as the need for a watercooler event so big that people just have to sign up. Like buzz around an HBO show. Before Endless, there was the Beyoncé Apple exclusive video album drop in 2013. Honestly I never loved the music—except the production and melody on Drunk in Love by Future and Detail—but its vanguard approach to the medium itself makes it a legendary moment.

I notice here too the years between 2013 and 2016 are important and that the thing happening is defined by memoire as well—Both Endless/Blonde and Beyoncé were self-aware of their own diaristic natures—the notoriously private Ocean built a Big-Brother style surveillance system but it was ambient and abstract even if it was literal documentary footage. Beyoncé editorialized her personal life, moment’s previously known exclusively in that form of gossip-rag pigeon english, and turned her thinly veiled truth into a larger than life fictive account. Beyoncé obscures specific details to deliver something that, in its open and poetic nature, has a broader ability to express a more nuanced truth. She didn’t express her frustration with the literalism and banality with which her life was discussed, instead, she opened the dialogue to multivalent interpretations which in their complexity have an ability to transfer to the audience the experience of an original thought. Both were a new lens on available media that eschewed expected convention. It’s also worth noting that because they built such immersive worlds, their merch, magazines and any other expression of the project always evoked this original narrative.

Top: Still from Frank Ocean’s Endless, 2016. Bottom: Photography David Brandon Geeting with my art direction for a story I wrote in The Fader about the new ways in which the nature of merch had shifted right around the release of Beyoncé.

Now a series of videos with a Spotify album drop is not uncommon for bigger releases. Taylor Swift’s folklore which was ostensibly a homespun affair birthed from the physical and emotional conditions of quarantine came with a set of looping videos for each song. Smartly, Taylor also continues to release what she calls “chapters” but what amount to themed playlists built from small selects off the album, each with a name like “The Saltbox House Chapter” or the “Yeah I Showed up at your Party Chapter.” Although the commercial motives for this gesture is hard to hide, the titles are suggestive enough that you might, in fact, get a new experience listening to the same songs again. Of course, this also allows her to continue to pop up on the new albums feed.

Photography Beth Garrabrant 

Another phenomenon that came up around the same time is the podcast. Yes, there are the big, produced shows like Serial, a contemporary version of pre-television radio, but the essence of the podcast is simple and conversational. The best example is probably the most popular. The Joe Rogan Experience, hosted by comedian Joe Rogan, commands an audience of around five to seven million listeners a day. Compared to people like Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity and who average around three million viewers daily, Rogan’s influence is larger than the Fox News and MSNBC dichotomy we’re told controls our discourse.

The show is three plus hours of freeform talk. Guests range from fellow comedians to scientists, entrepreneurs, reporters and media figures of all stripes. Rogan’s loose style, often lubricated by weed or whisky or a good dunk in a cryo tank and his nonjudgmental college-dorm demeanor puts people at ease. The unfiltered flow gives the effect that they may forget the mics are even there. The result is an intimacy that is at least believably natural: the opposite of a contained press junket. Rogan’s professional staff and the machinery of YouTube and podcasting platforms all work together to keep millions of people listening daily but this is noticeably obscured. Rogan is keen to remind anyone who will listen how great it is to be entirely independent, a refrain that is a mainstay of his brand. The software and mirrored human performance combine with the hardware, the earbud, to produce a parasocial relationship with sensorial, physical contact points. Here the format, more than the content, carries the most influence over the individual human experience.

To be concluded…

Parts 01–04 will be archived on hgtv420.substack.com. Part 4B next week and then thats it for this one.