Weekly Scroll: We all love mess

Plus a meta video game, conservative media's freefall, and The Flowered One

Congrats on surviving the weekend, you internet-addicted gremlins. This was originally going to be a paywalled update for paying subscribers. But because I’m such a generous and kind-hearted fellow¹ I’ve decided it’ll be free for all! If you’re also feeling generous maybe click the button below to become a paid sub - there will be a paywalled post later this week.

Leopards Eating Literary Faces

My favorite thing that happened on the internet last week was the steeped-in-meta-irony downfall of Lauren Oyler.

A warning: This is the pettiest kind of internet drama. None of this matters even the slightest amount and you’ll be a healthier person if you don’t read this. But maybe you’re a sicko like me. Maybe you’re gonna read it anyways, maybe your attitude towards life is like Marie Kondo:

Oyler is an author and literary critic best known for what are essentially scathing critical takedowns of other female writers and artists. She’s written mean reviews of Roxane Gay, Jia Tolentino, Greta Gerwig, and Sally Rooney. She’s the one who will deconstruct your work, critique all your dumb self-obsessions, and point out the tropes you’ve fallen into. She’s especially notable for her savage reviews of essayists.

Well it turns out Lauren Oyler has just released her own collection of essays, titled No Judgment. And it turns out the critical world had some things to say.

Things got a little bit dramatic when The Guardian and the Washington Post both gave No Judgment unflattering reviews. The book was weak enough that even softball interviewers were lobbing thinly veiled insults, like when the Paris Review of Books asked Oyler directly:

One thing that distressed me in your collection was the sense that someone as obviously intellectual as you are nevertheless does not carry around in her head a library of references and quotes from decades of reading and remembering what she read. It seemed clear that many of your references came from Google Books searches or internet searches.

This was one of the *friendliest* reviews Oyler got! But things didn’t really go into overdrive until BookForum released their review of the book. I don’t think I’m being overly dramatic when I call this review a public decapitation. This is one of those reviews that’s so brutal it single-handedly changes the course of a writer’s career.

BookForum’s review, written by Ann Manov, somehow went viral without even being online. It’s such an absolute evisceration that publishing/book Twitter were passing around screenshots of the print edition and the screenshots themselves were trending. They essentially bullied BookForum into putting it online!

Quoting Manov:

“One has the feeling that these critics do not really like literature—they do not enjoy reading.” This was a line my mind kept drifting to as I plodded through Lauren Oyler’s debut essay collection, No Judgment. The book was originally to be called Who Cares, and perhaps that title should have been retained.

Oh man.

Having been a teaching assistant in the department Oyler is so proud to have matriculated at, I am familiar with the less-than-Herculean intellectual labors needed to get an English degree from Yale. But I digress. Beyond the literal meaninglessness of the claim to “value style over voice,” the sophomoric airs of saying one “enjoys an unfamiliar vocabulary word,” the absurdity of claiming to be able to “identify a decent percentage of the permanent collection” “at the museum” “by sight” (the Met has almost two million items in its permanent collection), the half-hearted allusion to “opera,” the boast about seeing an adaptation of a Kafka novel—beyond this arch guilelessness, this churlish, half-ironic catalogue of her accomplishments, there is something greater here: the way Oyler conceives of her own claim to cultural elitism as a series of adolescent signifiers flung on with the pride of a Goth teenager donning her first Hot Topic belt. “I despise a happy ending”? If she’s so highbrow, I advise her to try out the ending of War and Peace.

Oh good lord…

Of course, Oyler makes little reference to this or any other of the “classics” she claims to love. By this point in the book—nearly eighty pages in—she has not discussed a single work of literature. Nor will she do so in the remainder of this essay. Instead, she sticks to criticizing Taylor Swift and Marvel movies

Oh my god…

But Oyler is contemptuous of disagreement, quickly bores of research, and rigidly attempts to control the reader’s responses. As a result, the writing is cramped, brittle. Oyler clearly wishes to be a person who says brilliant things—the Renata Adler of looking at your phone a lot—but she lacks the curiosity that would permit her to do so.

OH MY GOD

At one point, Manov realizes that virtually all of Oyler’s highbrow intellectual research is just lifted from whatever happens to be cited on Wikipedia:

The only history of vulnerability Oyler is concerned with begins in 2010, with Brown in a jean jacket on that purple-lit stage. How could Oyler have known about that other stuff, anyway? Brown’s talk is the only subject discussed under “Emotional” on the Wikipedia page “Vulnerability.” 

…

In her essay on Goodreads, Oyler offers a brief account of the history behind rating books out of five stars, all of which is—you guessed it—available on the Wikipedia page for “Star (classification),” which comes up when you Google “history behind rating books out of five stars.”

…

First, Oyler discusses Regency Englishwoman Mariana Starke’s exclamation-point-filled guidebook to the Continent (and a quote from The Charterhouse of Parma mocking it, conveniently referenced on Ms. Starke’s Wikipedia page)

Look, if anyone ever Ethered me this badly in public I would simply walk off a cliff. I would voluntarily give up urban life, writing, and cultural commentary and go live in the woods as an ascetic hermit farming mushrooms. There’s no coming back from this except as a supervillain.

What makes the review² drama so delicious is that this is exactly what Oyler’s done to other writers for years. She who lives by the sword will die by the sword. She’s been hoisted by her own petard. Ask not for whom the mean review tolls - it tolls for thee. I never thought the mean reviews would eat MY face, cries critic who voted for the Reviewers Eating Faces Party!³

In the end, none of this matters. It’s a bunch of mess involving people you’ve never heard of, who are firmly ensconced in a weird elite culture of literary criticism and who mostly don’t matter. But I love mess, both experiencing it and analyzing it. While Manov’s review is an amazing read, it does say something about the emptiness of literary criticism that this is what gets attention.

These big takedown pieces - whether it’s Oyler taking down Roxane Gay or Manov taking down Oyler - aren’t really literary criticism as much as they are complicated forms of in-group status signaling and competitions for cultural capital. Everybody always wants to be cooler-than-thou and the best way to position oneself is to take a scalp from someone higher in the pecking order. They’re also a way for the society of critics writ large to decide they’re done with a particular conceit - Mean Girl Reviews are so mid-2010s, and we’ve now effectively communicated that by Mean Girling the preeminent Mean Girl Reviewer. It’s a deeply cynical way to operate, from a strange and toxic little subculture obsessed with navel-gazing and fixated on petty internecine feuds rather than actual literary analysis.

But hell, publishing and criticism has always been like this. In an industry that nepotistic and with so much unearned hype thrown around, it’s probably healthy to kill your heroes every few years. And if they’re gonna do it I’m glad they do it with style.

Content Warning!

One of the most viral video games in April 2024 is a game about… going viral. Meet Content Warning, a game where your character runs around a scary setting not to kill monsters, but to catch them on camera and then upload the content for views. Players team up to descend into monster-infested levels where they can only survive for so long, but instead of focusing on gunplay the game focuses on you toting around a camera to capture the monsters for ‘SpöökTube’. If you capture enough good footage without dying, you get lots of viewers and you career as a ‘content creator’ continues to the next level.

Gamers are buying in to the meta-premise - It was released on April 1st but is already #9 on the global Steam sales charts. This feels like a very ‘really says a lot about society these days’ moment that even in our video games everyone’s wildest fantasy is now to be a content creator.

Conservative Media in Freefall

There’s an interesting piece in The Atlantic about the struggles of conservative media. Fox News is down 22% over the last four years. The Daily Caller is down more than 50%, while The Drudge Report and The Federalist were down more than 80% and 90%, respectively.

The piece runs through a lot of the standard explanations:

• All online media is struggling, so it’s no surprise that conservative media is feeling it as well.

• 2020 was a VERY newsy year, so some regression is to be expected.

• Facebook and other social sites have deliberately de-prioritized news, and conservative sites rely on farming clicks from Boomers on Facebook more than any other kind of media.

But I think the most interesting explanation is barely mentioned⁴ - there’s simply a lot more crazy out there to compete with. I’ve written before about how the internet is structurally built to encourage extremism, and you can absolutely see that happening in conservative media.

The Internet is for Extremism

Ten years ago there were only a handful of truly big conservative sites online - the Caller, the Daily Wire, Drudge, etc. They were at the bleeding edge of internet conservative culture warrior content. But now you have to go much crazier if you really want to stand out. Not all conservative media is in decline. It’s just that the nutjobs are stealing eyeballs from the conservatives who are starkly right wing but not outright lunatics. This is the internet version of NewsMax and OANN coming for Fox News. Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast is doing big numbers. Nick Fuentes is more popular than ever. Alex Jones, somehow, is still doing great.

A bunch of these guys who thought they could farm right wing outrage a decade ago are now realizing that there are people even more psychotic than them - and the base will always go for the most psychotic option available. Leopards eating conservative faces, where have we heard that before?

Conan on Hot Ones

Hot Ones is one of the most successful content franchises on the internet. They’ve produced 23 seasons and are still pulling in huge numbers. They’ve spun off extensive retail operations and even had a network TV game show. And they’ve just released what is almost certainly the best episode they’ve ever had.

This is a good enough I’m giving it its own section here, you really should watch it. Conan O’Brien is a comedic genius. He’s able to slide seamlessly between personas, being the swaggering bully, the pathetic nerd, or the straight man, hysterically active or understated as the situation calls for. This episode is bonkers.

Links

• Elon Musk admitted in a deposition that he was behind the pervy burner account pretending to be his 3 year old son, and that he thinks his actions likely have done “more to impair the company than help it”.

• Investment firm Highmount Capital invested $100 million real dollars into YouTube channel Dude Perfect. On the face of it this seems like an insane thing to do for a channel that is essentially just guys doing trick shots. But hey, YouTube is the only healthy content creator system on the internet and Dude Perfect is a bafflingly huge channel. Who knows?

• A Twitch streamer broke the record for the largest donation ‘hype train’, and may have raked in more than $500,000 dollars in a single burst.

• TikTok, which is struggling in Europe, is releasing a rewards app called CoinApp that will reward users for using the app.

• Threads is apparently very, very popular in Taiwan. Twitter never took off there, so there was a need for a replacement product, I guess?

• The Washington Post declares the most consequential website on the internet.

• Conservative social media Gab explicitly instructed their AI to deny the Holocaust.

• The hottest new meme is industrial grade glycine.

Posts

• The Flowered One

• TikTokker attempts to drive the length of Florida in a child’s toy car

• A good replacement tweet

• Humiliating. Looks like shit.

• Stereotypes from the 1200s

1. And because it’s a day late! Oops!

2. Which is great in its entirety, and you should go read!

3. English has a surprisingly large number of idioms related to ‘poetic comeuppance’

4. It gets just a couple sentences near the end of the piece, and isn’t really expanded on.