Ryan Broderick touched on something that’s been on my mind a lot recently—namely, that legacy outlets and platforms no longer provide the necessary infrastructure needed to create and sustain real and vital culture up to and including removing it for the sake of cost-cutting or dubious TOS guidelines; and that we need to decide how to continue on until something better grows from the ashes. Broderick’s solution sounds provocative, but lacks substance: Pre-De-Platforming. Essentially, create something so daring and audacious that it arrives pre-packaged with baggage (heh). Pre-loading controversy, generating scarcity before true discussion, generating friction that will cause people to pay attention. Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker is used as an example, citing its copyright issues and independent screenings before rights issues were resolved.

Most importantly, he says what people need to hear: that this is already happening in far-right culture spaces, where bigotry and reactionary opinions gain purchase until they can finally break containment. It’s part of how things have shifted the way they have in the past decade or so: platforms refuse to moderate, reactionaries test the boundaries, the boundaries themselves get rewritten, rise, repeat.

Broderick makes the argument that copyright infringement is the last taboo. Ownership uber alles. But to be more direct, and more cynical: it’s about shock value. I wouldn’t say it’s useless, but this smacks more of working backwards than trying to formulate a real picture.

I just don’t necessarily buy the argument that everything is attention now, or that everyone is everything. The presupposition of “content” being key here justifies gathering up a lot of incoherent and disparate data points and declaring it A Thing.

And given the concerted crackdown on queerness and all of its myriad forms of expression, I don’t think his criteria of something being “unacceptable” works, because people can just call me a tranny faggot and no one will give a shit, but to speak on or express my experiences gets flagged by content filters. The People’s Joker was a fluke, not the norm.

And ultimately, it doesn’t work because it tacitly accepts the framing that there is only one way of doing something, and that is solely through the narrow pipeline of the content platforms themselves. Decoupling politics from a fundamentally conservative tech ecosystem is naive at best, and asserting that rebellion exists in simply defying market logic by…capitulating to the whims of the market…borders on credulous.

It’s nostalgia. My distaste for his argument arises partly from the fact that I’m a fiction author, partly because I have a day job, and in large part because I’m queer. Cultural production and its upper echelons are already difficult for me to reach, reducing the struggle to “be daring” and “offend sensibilities” as if that’s some kind of actual material analysis doesn’t fucking solve anything.

It is a hyper-modern wrapper over the same useless morsel of conventional wisdom. A melancholy for “organic” and classically viral “content” passed off as something unique. It is not escape; rather, it is capitulation, as its endpoint is always further in the machine: money, capital, attention. Endlessly ceding ground, reducing the horizons of the possible to “shock.”

Call it “post-influencing”.

Acting in ways that reinforce hegemony, and also, in some way, attempt to angle you into being an oracle, are seductive for the same reason: they burnish credentials without risk. Jon Caramanica can say the most obvious and asinine stuff about content creation and attention and have it register as profound, but he also draws a check from the NYT, which is precisely why anyone actually cares.

Any form of attention gathering or influencing that requires acknowledgment from platform holders won’t solve or save anything.