Re-working Phasmatopia

A brief housekeeping note.

So, here we are again.

As suggested by the past few cryptic entries here, I’ve been thinking over what I want this publication to be—and, more broadly, what contributions (if any) I can continue to make to The Conversation.

I’ve arrived at a crossroads with my work, for a few different reasons:

First, it’s looking like my day job will be changing significantly in the next few months.

I was laid off from my last full-time job during the pandemic—four years ago now—which opened up more time for writing. Although it hasn’t been finalized yet, I have a potential opportunity for a full-time job that I can’t pass up. This will mean dramatically scaling back my work here, at least temporarily.

Second—I’ve just about reached the limits of what I can do with long-form writing.

Single-author writing only works with a common understanding of basic principles. Wandering way out where the buses don’t run, conceptually speaking, means either going full gonzo—describing things exactly as you see them, hoping the audience is game for it—or articulating every logical step along the way, and helping to bring people along with you.

The logical progression requires a whole lot of legwork for the author, and a whole lot of close reading for the audience. While the gonzo approach is very appealing, as an author, it takes a level of artistry that I haven’t developed yet. And, truthfully, these days, I don’t know how much of an appetite there is for it. People seem to be craving certainty in These Dark Times. Much as I personally believe that this is exactly when we should be relentlessly interrogating our preconceptions (how did we get to this point as a civilization? What do we mean by “the world”? Who gets to define what “humanity” is, and what are the consequences of trusting the wrong definition? How many of our cultural institutions are built around these potentially faulty understandings of “the world” and “humanity”?) there’s no benefit in lobbing thousand-word screeds at people who are already overwhelmed. We don’t need to rely on an antiquated model of spray-and-pray publishing to work out these big ideas, when we have plenty of available technology for real-time conversations. These really challenging concepts, the ones I want to work with, are best handled through dialogue.

Consequently, there are better ways of “writing a book” that I want to explore. If we’re being really, really honest, there are more people who want to write books than there are books that need to be written. This is not to say that books are obsolete. There are some concepts that deserve book-length treatment. But there is an increasing divergence between the practical concerns of communicating ideas to an audience in a compelling way, and the romanticism of individual authorship. The dream of making a living as an independent wordsmith was defined by an era of economic and cultural surplus. That’s over now. As the margins get increasingly tighter at the top, the profit trickling down to the dreamers gets smaller and smaller.

We have a pernicious cosmopolitan fantasy about the creative industry as somehow inherently progressive, exempt from the meanness of mundane business. This is bullshit. The creative industry is still an industry. Management still profits from Labor competing with itself for the ever-shrinking chance to strike it rich. We lose more than we gain by perpetuating the exploitation of creativity for the sake of romanticism.

If we’re fighting to sustain the creation of books, it should be in the form of illuminated manuscripts, not disposable commodities.

Personally, I believe there’s a future for publishing collectives that build and distribute multimedia narratives—audio, video, print, digital—with a well-defined aesthetic and equitable profits. (If this sounds appealing, drop me a line.) Substack has some interesting potential to support that model. But we’re not there yet. We won’t get there until more creators let go of the dual fantasies of The Author making a middle-class income from breathlessly anticipated monographs, and The Publisher as the big boss with a stable of eager artists working for them.

There is no future in which everybody is making it on their own.

I’m doing my part to let that dream go.

Not sure where that leaves me for the moment, in terms of available time and creative output. But I’ve got some ideas. Although it might get quiet around here for a spell, I intend to keep this thing going, one way or another. Stay tuned.