We all know what’s going on with Twitter these days. If you don’t, I think this is a good, quick run-down. What follows is some loose thinking of my own. Call it a mini-essay.
I keep hearing that books need to "compete" with social media for attention. But I can’t take hearing this anymore. As far as I can tell, what this has lead to is people with the most money and and the most aggression and the most impressive list of contacts in their phones purchasing media coverage for their books. I know, ‘twas ever thus, but every emergence of new media requires us to re-examine how influence is structured and yes, how it’s purchased and weaponized—as media studies scholars have been saying forever. Like Leonard Cohen says, everybody knows the fight was fixed. Coverage of the recent trial (resulting in the DOJ blocking the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster) was illuminating in this regard.
And we’re told, over and over again, to just be more aggressive about our presences on social media, as though that will solve any of the problems. It’s spun positively in many ways. “Take up space!” “Be noisy!” “Love yourself—fuck the haters!” But at a certain point, it all feels like so much shouting. And as any teacher or parent knows, once you start communicating in shouts, the shouts quickly lose their power. Unless you go back to some quiet, thoughtful (dare I say loving, careful) baseline, the only way to keep the listener in your thrall is to escalate the shouting, or to find more insidious ways of convincing them how badly they need you. Or you can just turn it into physical violence. The past few years of internet violence spilling into IRL violence is our dark proof. Which is not to say that shouting about books on social media is violence; it’s just to say that shouting usually begets shouting, and things tend to escalate from there.
And so I end up feeling crazy for wanting to say: ideally, a book is where you go for the opposite of life on social media. “Compete”? With my books? Can there not be a single space, however small, that isn’t given over to competition? I won’t speak for anyone else, but when I’m writing a book and even when I’m talking honestly about my books, I am far outside the realm of competition. I’m in the realm of expression and inquiry. Yes, I can and do and will try to translate my self and my writing for social media. (But I know from experience that the work of translation is never done and that it is very hard, often thankless work.) And yes, it's still a fake or made-up world on offer in a book, but it’s not the same as the world of social media, because a book is a world that (again, ideally) rewards you for your time and attention by making the rest of your life better, richer, stranger, more complex.
When is the last time 30 minutes of scrolling did that for you? Has it ever done that for you? Sometimes it can do this! I’m serious. So I want to be clear that this is not me shaming you or anyone else (including myself) for spending time on social media. This is more about the fact that people tell me, over and over and over and over, that their attention spans are utter shit, that they hate their bodies, that they feel like idiots, and that they know—really know—that time on social media is part of the problem.
And I have significant doubts that winning at social media is going to convince people that what I offer in the books I write is worth their time. Maybe I’m too pessimistic. Maybe I’m not (yet) up for playing the game at the highest levels. Maybe I’m just wrong. I’m open to all these possibilities. But I still suspect that there is very little any individual writer or book can do to actually tear your attention away from all these finely calibrated mind-colonizing machines. (Sorry to be lame but it's true.) What books and writers can offer you is a chance to come up for air, if you're ready. No algorithm can determine if you’re ready. No algorithm can make you ready.
Say you want to find these books and writers—say you want to come up for air. Maybe you'll find some on social media. Chances are you’ll find the writers with good SEO, with verified social media accounts. Or you’ll go into a bookstore and you’ll find the ones that have been widely distributed and written about in smart, succinct, sexy ways by very smart and often very caring individuals who are doing their best to champion books, but their sight is limited, because the algorithm’s myopia spills into the physical world.
And when you get those books, will you read them? Will they do anything for you? Like Clarice Lispector says, you must be ready for the books that really get into you. Again, no algorithm can determine that, even as the algorithm leaks into the physical world. Will you let them into you the way you’ve let the algorithm into you? Will you read them again and again, like you return to your frenemies’ feeds? And—here’s the harder question—what does what you’ve let into you do to your ability to seek out the people, places, ideas, works of art, meals, conversations (etc.) that will actually nourish you?
Sometimes, I get positive feedback from readers that goes like this: thank you, you might have saved my soul. Sometimes, I get negative feedback from readers that goes like this: I’m angry that you did not save my soul. And I think: goddamn, we do not know what to do with art. We’re all mixed up. We make the artists battle it out on social media, we make fun of them if they believe in their work, we barely compensate them, we want them to save our souls but then we say we have no soul to save, or we hand our souls over to whatever appears on the screen. (If you hate the word ‘soul’, just think ‘mind,’ and see if that works better for you.) I know people who pay obsessive attention to what they eat and where that food comes from, but then they think nothing of exposing themselves to hours and hours of shit—shit that, to hear them tell it, is harming their souls and they know it.
We have a real fixation on harm and suffering right now. And it makes sense; we are going extinct, after all. Spend 10 minutes online and you will see someone talking about harm done to them. It should be taken seriously that there’s a problem with people wandering this earth doing harm and little else. But it should also be taken seriously that if the conditions are right, we can get out of harm’s way and commit ourselves to doing as little harm as possible.
Yes, of course I want you to read my books. I want you to read my friends’ books. I want you to fall in love with books. I want to be able to use existing tools to make this possible, as imperfect and susceptible to corruption as those tools are. And yes, of course I want access to the resources and the opportunities that will make it possible for me to keep writing and publishing. But more than anything, I want you to have an experience with something or someone or some place that is not so fucking harmful, so governed by the sad, servile logic of competition.
The stakes are high right now. You can feel it, can’t you? So I’ll end by asking it again: what are we letting in?