Internet Personality? Thought Leader? Writer.

What are we supposed to be these days?

Internet personality?

I was reading New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka’s mini-profile of journalist

Taylor Lorenz

when I came across this passage.

Reader, I gasped. I cannot think of a worse thing - for me - than becoming an “Internet personality,” and yet reading Chayka’s piece on the trajectory of Lorenz’s career moving through several high prestige publications (New York Times, Washington Post) to now arrive at her own newsletter (User Mag) and podcast, made me wonder if the only way to make a living as a writer going forward is to become one.

As Chayka notes, Lorenz is well-positioned for such a shift with a large social media following combined with the credibility of her resume and book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. She also has some very dedicated “haters,” which is another prerequisite for generating the heat of online attention.

I have little doubt that Lorenz will succeed in her endeavor. She’s already demonstrated the skills and hustle necessary for the Internet personality life. I also think that her beat, “the online world,” is obviously well-suited to digital distribution in ways it isn’t a good fit with publications still tied to their print origins. The number of Amazon reviews is not a direct analog to sales, but Extremely Online’s number a full year after release (260) suggests that it was a modest seller, certainly as compared to her public profile.

Writing and publishing a book is a serious waste of time relative to what an independent creator can earn on Substack. One of the most successful newsletter writers on here, Matthew Yglesias, reportedly has 18,000 paid subscribers for his newsletter, which brings in well over $1 million a year in revenue. Selling 18,000 copies of a book would be a very credible success, but in royalties would also generate less than 1/10th of what Yglesias earns a year on his newsletter.

Substack enthusiasts point to this math and call it a success. They say it’s the future we should all aspire to, individual entrepreneurs getting paid what we’re worth.

I look at it and think: What if I don’t want to be an entrepreneur? What if I just want to write?

I don’t need to make anything close to $1 million a year. The notion of that much money as an annual income intrigues me, but it does not excite me. It intrigues because if I could manage that (for even one year, frankly), I would have the necessary slack to just write and not worry about what happens to this writing. Frankly, I could afford to pay someone else to worry about it. That kind of money has the potential to increase my freedom.

It does not excite me because I already have a very contented life, and it’s not clear to me how that much more money would lead to greater contentment. Oh, I’m sure I’d find some use for it because we all manage to do that, but would it truly increase my happiness?

If writers having to become Internet personalities is the future of being able to make a living writing, I have some questions:

1. Who will become writers?

2. What will writers have to do to bring attention to their writing?

3. What kind of writing will we read given what writers will have to do to bring attention to their writing?

4. What happens to books when all the money you can make writing comes from writing online?

I don’t have firm answers to these questions, but considering this possible future does not make me hopeful.

Thought leader?

While Matthew Yglesias has a significant and active Twitter presence, he is not properly thought of as an Internet personality. He is a “thought leader.” A thought leader is someone who is not valued for their writing per se, but for the ideas and concepts their writing represents, and the way those ideas influence the world around us.

Malcolm Gladwell is undeniably a thought leader, but his books are, at best, “truthy,” and at worst, kind of bullshit. Jordan Peterson is a thought leader. He’s also a whack-job. J.D. Vance is attempting a kind of thought leader persona as he runs for office. His recent interview for The New York Times opinion page with Lulu Garcia-Navaro shows him constantly attempting to spin his own sociopathy into a consistent world-view. In a way, Vance’s attempt to put an intellectual sheen on his own monstrousness is more disturbing that Trump’s overt nativist racism.

Being a thought leader is a good gig if you can get it. The problem is that once you become one, you may be trapped by your self-image and thought-leader presentation in a way that requires you be truer to your thought leader self than your actual thoughts.

You cannot tell me that David Brooks believes what he is saying about Donald Trump in his most recent column.

“I know what Trump wants. He wants to dismantle the elites who he thinks have betrayed regular Americans.”

Seriously, WTF? On what planet does this describe Donald Trump’s motives? Why would David Brooks write a sentence that he knows to be untrue? My guess is because he needs to fit Trump into a grand theory of politics and narrative that he has promulgated over the years, and unfurls in a specific application in the column, drawing on the work of David Mamet, Aaron Sorkin, Mary Gaitskill, and others. Brooks has to make Trump fit the kind of theory that only a thought leader could devise, forcing him to write something that is simply not true.

Trump is a malignant narcissist who craves attention the way Godzilla craves radiation. He has no feeling for anyone other than himself. His own supporters are often the victims of his grifts or the grifts of the Trump-adjacent. (Truth Social users are getting scammed out of 100’s of thousands of dollars.)

Becoming a thought leader is not de facto bad, but becoming one significantly ups the risk of having to compromise one’s writing or ideals in the service of maintaining your position as a thought leader. There are a couple of high profile, best selling, Ted-Talking, thought leader academics who should be shamed by their blurbs on Sal Khan’s unserious book.

Holy cripes, I sound like a grump.

I’ve buried the origin of this post, which was an acquaintance of mine saying, explicitly, that if I want my next book (preorder!) to be a success, I should be gunning for thought-leadership. This person was being complimentary. They believe I would be a good thought leader, that my ideas about the ways writing remains meaningful in a world with generative AI are good and worth sharing.

I will admit, I let this notion roll through my mind a bit. It sounded good in many ways. Who doesn’t want to get paid $10k, $25k, $50k a talk as thought leaders do? Who doesn’t want to be able to put an opinion piece in a major publication simply by asking? This is not only the thought leader’s right, but because of the quality of their thoughts, it is their responsibility! Maybe this is the route to the freedom I seek to do the work I want.

But this is a trap, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, I’m very fond of my own ideas. I have great belief in them, and I want as many people as possible to read my book (preorder!), but I want the audience to read my book not so they can adopt my thoughts, but so they can be spurred to have interesting thoughts of their own.

I want my book to do for others what the books of others have done for me, to give them access to fodder that will help them create their own minds, help them shape their unique intelligences.

This is the inner teacher coming out in me, I suppose. As much as I desire success and attention for my work, I don’t desire success and attention for myself. I do not want to be an Internet personality or a thought leader.

I just want to keep being a writer.

A writer/A thinker

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a writer who others want to treat as a thought leader, but he refuses to play along, which makes for some very interesting public moments.

(Now, I can’t and won’t specifically comment on Coates’ new book, The Message, which has been the subject of so much discussion and controversy, because I haven’t read it. I wish this was a standard more folks held themselves to.)

Once a staff writer at The Atlantic, Coates very purposefully walked away from the temptations of thought leadership, virtually disappearing from public commentary for years as he wrote a novel, and comic books, and spent time living abroad in France. The writer who wrote “A Case for Reparations,” in 2014 could have made literally millions as a perennial public presence without injecting a single new piece into the world, but instead Coates chose to go off and write.

Coates is clearly a writer, but some of his critics want to turn him into a thought leader because it is easier to criticize and discredit a thought leader’s ideas in general, than it is a writer’s words in specific. The controversial interview of Coates by Tony Dokoupil of the CBS Morning News has come in for significant scrutiny, and I find it an interesting text to help map the thought leader/writer divide.

Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post (and others) have praised the interview as “good journalism” because of the “tough” questions. I think we can all agree that we desire more tough questions from our journalists, but it’s worth looking at how Dokoupil’s questions were framed. This was Dokoupil’s opening question:

“I have to say, when I read the book, I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim, took the cover off the book, the publishing house goes away — the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.”

This opening attacks what Dokoupil identifies as the ideas of the book, and outright claims that these are ideas shared by terrorists or at the least terrorist sympathizers. Dokoupil goes on to suggest that Coates is at least tacitly advocating for the destruction of Israel, possibly because Coates is anti-semitic: “What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state that is a Jewish safe place and not any of the other states out there?”

Personally, I find these framings unhelpful as an act of journalism. They are clearly - to my mind anyway - an attempt to discredit Coates as someone whose perspective should be considered as part of a larger debate. If he’s sympathetic to terrorists or anti-semitic, Dokoupil wants us to believe, we shouldn’t even consider his perspective.

It’s interesting because Dokoupil’s fear of the ideas he thinks Coates’s words represent distract him from dealing with what should be the subject of inquiry, the book itself. For an object lesson in how to deal with a book as a book, rather than a source of cultural thought leader fodder, I recommend

becca rothfeld

’s review in The Washington Post.

A long conversation between Coates and Jon Stewart on The Daily Show suggests that the ideas Coates is conveying via the book are perhaps not so certain as Dokoupil makes them out to be. Stewart starts the interview by saying, “My friend, you are grappling. This is a book of grappling.”

This suggests that for at least one reader, the book is a story of a struggle towards understanding, and sharing of an individual perspective, rather than a the work of a thought leader type.

After a little summary of the book’s content’s, Stewart asks, “What was in you that you thought, I need to take on these big questions, including, what is this for? What is writing for?”

Stewart’s question made me far more interested in reading the book than I had been previously. I had fallen into the trap of seeing Coates as a thought leader, and if that was the case, I could imbibe the interviews, the reviews, the commentaries, the controversies, and basically know what’s up with the book. But here is Jon Stewart saying that the book is “a grappling” with “big questions,” including “What is writing for?”

This is what I want to do: think, grapple, write, and in so doing, provoke the thoughts of others. If I read The Message, I may wind up vehemently disagreeing with some part of Coates’ world-view, but that disagreement will be rooted in the experience of reading and thinking and feeling.

Maybe I’m thinking romantically, given that I’m publishing a book that tries to answer the question of “What is writing for?” from a different angle than Coates, but in my view only writing and writers can do this.

Internet personalities and thought leaders need not apply.

Links

Slowly, but surely, I’m introducing myself to some great writers who have been largely forgotten. Earlier its been Fran Ross, William Melvin Kelley, and Charles Wright. This week at the Chicago Tribune I discuss another, John A. Williams.

There’s a handful of people who have had an outsized effect on my career as a writer. One of those is Doug Lederman, the co-founder of Inside Higher Ed. I paid tribute to Doug as he embarks on his next chapter.

Old news now, but worth noting, Han Kang has won this year’s Nobel Prize for literature. Mark Krotov and Alex Shephard offer a very witty take on the news at the New Republic.

People Magazine has 20 scary books to read during this halloween season.

Here’s an excerpt from Kate Greathead’s The Book of George, a novel that I was mightily impressed with and may quite probably write about at some length in the future.

From

McSweeney's Internet Tendency

and by Mike Drucker, “I Wish I Went Before Mary Shelley in This Storytelling Contest.”

Recommendations

1. The Odd Woman and the City, by Vivian Gornick
2. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride
3. The Messenger, by Charles Wright
4. The Wig, by Charles Wright
5. Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About, by Charles Wright

Melissa M. - Brooklyn, NY

What is the recommendation for someone who has been on a Charles Wright kick? I’m actually going to just go with the John A. Williams book I talk about in my column this week, The Man Who Cried I Am.¹

I cannot tell you how much I’ve enjoyed everyone sharing their favorite books as young people in the comments on last week’s newsletter. Some have raised favorites of my own that I’ve overlooked. Others have introduced me to books I never knew existed. The fun doesn’t have to stop. Comments are still open.

As always thoughts, comments, (reasonable) complaints are welcome in the comments. Please feel free to make use of this community of readers.

See you next time, same place.

John
The Biblioracle

1. All books (with the occasional exception) linked throughout the newsletter go to The Biblioracle Recommends bookstore at Bookshop.org. Affiliate proceeds, plus a personal matching donation of my own, go to Chicago’s Open Books and an additional reading/writing/literacy nonprofit to be determined. Affiliate income for this year is $102.30.