Substacking the Spectacle

Readers know that I like to complain about our new influencer news media economy — and how it’s mostly evolved now into a low-rent, hyper-individualized version of the cable news circuit. A lot of the stars in this world position themselves as political and hyper-moral and invested deeply in democracy. In reality most of what they’re selling is an atomized anti-politics. To be political and democratic you need an actual demos, you need people working together — not a base of atomized keyed-up media customers consuming partisan outrage content for a monthly fee.

So I was glad to see that Joshua Sperber — who recently wrote a book about how internet platforms like Yelp turned consumers into managers — just published a great essay on the political economy of the new influencer left. He looks at how the leftwing media/influencer ecosystem evolved from listservs in the 1990s to today’s web 2.0 hyper-entrepreneurial interactive spectacle extravaganza. I gotta say, the essay is kinda brutal and funny, too — it cuts a bit too close to my own minor influencer bone. But right is right…

While some ambitious and ego-driven personalities assuredly dominated some of the earlier listservs, the format did not to the same extent as social media encourage such individuals to formally accumulate discrete followers or ‘entourages’ (Goldhaber, 1997) or to expand ‘their’ space in relation to and at the ultimate expense of that of others. Relatedly, users more rarely – certainly in the era of the pre- and early-aughts listservs – exploited the listservs to promote their so-called ‘brands’ or professional ambitions over and beyond the discussions of articles or other matters at hand. Professional left activists and writers over the past decade have, however, migrated to the corporate arenas of social media, primarily Facebook and Twitter, sites where the individual self – and its ongoing ‘projects’ – is visually and conceptually centered and promoted as such and in which ‘followers’ or ‘entourages’ can be collected and ultimately channeled to external sites – e.g., Substack, Patreon, GoFundMe, and Twitch – where revenue can be extracted via donations and subscriber or patron fees.

The critical point here is not that a number of popular and sometimes astute left political observers have ‘sold out’ or behaved unethically by operating in effect as private entrepreneurs. Instead, it is to emphasize the fact that, within an environment in which existing digital infrastructure is integrated into a work-or-starve economy, previously voluntary political analysis and agitation have become increasingly marketized and incorporated into the reproduction of capital. Indeed, this is less an indictment of these writers than of the unending penetration of the market system. Just the same, it is instructive to observe the specific manner in which such market coercion rewards and punishes writers and thereby affects critical publishing in general and left political discourse in particular.

The left-star

In their ultimate form, social media left entrepreneurs, or left-stars, become commodities unto themselves, even as maintaining and expanding market-share paradoxically entail the periodic repackaging required to sustain interest or ‘stay relevant’ amid shifting political terrains. If the left project historically included the use of debate over history, principles, and strategies, left-stars are structurally discouraged from forming consensus with competitors lest they endanger the uniqueness of their brand – a concern that notably does not undermine the comparatively anonymous contributors doing consensus-based work on, say, Wikipedia. Resembling academia’s prioritization of originality for originality’s sake irrespective of political relevance, such uniqueness is generated through the formation of mutually exclusive political arguments – and a corresponding discouragement of nuance and subtlety – as well as unending self-personalization and promotion. This can be seen in the rise of prominent unaffiliated or independent left political writers whose political arguments are in fact, when viewed over the long-term, incoherent and inconsistent. Salient among these writers is their continuous attention to their own personalities, which function as stand-ins for and become inseparable from their political projects.

Concerned with maintaining and ideally expanding their position in the hypercompetitive and hyper-ephemeral attention economy’s space, left-stars personalize themselves to their followers through a formulaic set of techniques: periodically disclosing intimate and frequently nostalgic personal histories or suspenseful and surprising real-time accounts; self-appropriated personal histories and ‘mood’s such as ennui, excitement, and melancholy; and personal developments including career accomplishments (and less frequently setbacks notwithstanding those now overcome, which are examples of the left-star’s teleological success), breakdowns, epiphanies, hardships such as the loss of pets, break-ups, and politically correct crushes. In this regard, left-stars are remarkably obedient in answering Facebook’s ever-present question: ‘What’s on your mind?’. Instructed by book agents and other professional promoters that they need to ‘tell a story about themselves’ in order to be successful, left-stars present an individualized ‘package’ including a (ideally challenging) personal history, a contemporary mission, and an accessible, vulnerable, and intriguing persona that says without saying that their success is the success of a – and ideally and ultimately the – cause. Confessional writing in particular reinforces the emotional connection between left-stars and their followers and is complemented by selfies or glamour shots conveying the complexities and intellectual or physical beauty of the stars. Reflecting existing sexist stereotypes, male left-stars typically post a wide array of pictures of themselves, while female left-stars are far likelier to share photos, whether on Facebook or Instagram, showcasing/constructing the stars’ mystery, beauty, or sexiness…

I’m glad Joshua doesn’t focus on any one personality because personalities don’t really matter here. It’s a systemic thing. Hell, most of my best friends and colleagues from the media world have gone down this path, as have I. And it’s not all bad, of course — especially on an individual basis. But in the larger scheme of things, it’s easy to see how it’s made this world even more atomized and capitalist and individualistic — a direct commodification of the media-self. Guess we’re in the New Economy that Wired was hoping for back in the 1990s!

Sure I complain about it, but the truth is that there is a huge amount of comic potential in this whole influencer ecosystem — and it’s really overripe for getting a Nathan Barley kind of satirical treatment. And in fact, Evgenia developed a brilliant show concept right before the pandemic hit that’s inspired in part this new media reality — based off her thesis film, Changemaker. Maybe she’ll make it one day.

Anyway, check out Joshua‘s full essay here: “The political economy of the podcast and the rise of the left entrepreneur.” And be a good media consumer…subscribe! And then watch some Nathan Barley.

—Yasha Levine

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