elitism is the enemy of the people

delayed thoughts on anti-intellectualism and the state of discourse

I’ve been plagued with the dilemma of discourse. It really began post-Feed Me’s “Machine in the Garden,” where I witnessed a canon event for this platform. When Emily Sundberg first published her piece, within 48 hours, it seemed like everyone in the town of Substack was compelled to share a take. I gave into the buzz myself, posting my first ever note about it (Insane. Thanks for the baptism, Emily!).

My reflex was to agree with Emily. I thought she made good points, but more importantly, she was the first person I read who pointed out what was happening on Substack. I’ve noticed my experience on here has changed over the past few years but I couldn’t put my finger on why? I used to come onto Substack for good, independent, mostly long form writing. I wouldn’t even spend that much of my week on the platform, because in the early days, the majority of the newsletters I followed posted once a month or once every few months. But now, I log on all the time. There’s always something to read. My homepage, aka the notes page, is flush with new blog-style writing every single day.

Kyle Chayka wrote about this in his newsletter One Thing, offering a different way to frame the “repetitive content”:

If you look at any one Substack newsletter in comparison to its peers, it does appear banal and repetitive. But they are not experienced as a landscape; they are experienced individually. Each one is its own tiny world. You tend to pick one and stick with it, going to it for everything from fashion recs to Marseilles itineraries. Only sickos like journalists constantly shop around and thus run into the homogeneity.

I agree for the most part, but I think the sickos extend beyond journalists to include anyone who uses the app in general.¹ Whether or not I’m in active pursuit of a new newsletter to subscribe to, my homepage seems to be, with how flooded it is with recommendations. And I’ve realized that when presented with an infinite scroll bar, I have no self-discipline. I will be scrolling until my eyes bleed.

Obviously, shopping and blog-style newsletters do not shape the entirety of Substack. And after thinking it over more, I don’t fault anyone for leaning into this form of writing either. It takes less time to put out a listicle and it makes total sense that if we’ve been incentivized to post as consistently as possible, the easier, less intensive writing is going to be the writing that we publish more consistently. It’s also fun. Idk.²

Emily smartly connects this shifting in content as having been shaped and encouraged by the Substack platform itself, but this point ultimately got lost in the discourse of “let women write.” And that’s another issue I have with internet discourse as a whole. I should mention that before I even read her essay, I was seeing notes about it on my homepage. After reading it, I immediately posted my own note, not because I felt that I had something genuinely amazing and inspiring to contribute, but because I felt like I needed to go to war for my girl who was getting battered left and right. The discourse was coloring my ability to just form my own thoughts and opinions based solely on Emily’s writing. I was immediately on the defensive from the first line.³

After discussing the article more in-depth over the past few weeks with irl friends, I’ve been able to interpret her ideas and others’ criticisms of the essay with more level-headedness. But if I made a note about the essay now, weeks after it went viral (which in internet-time is like 2 dinosaur epochs ago), I fear it would be perceived as beating a dead horse. Internet discourse is so pervasive and suffocating that once the majority has decided to move on, any person who is still lingering with their related thoughts is framed as jumping onto the bandwagon way too late. There’s just no possible way they could bring something new to the table, says the majority mindset. “Another girlhood essay?” We all groan.

I actually jumped on the girlhood discourse relatively early with my Youtube video on it last year (mainly through a sartorial lens). I read so much research related to it that by the time I published the video, I was ready to put the entire subject to bed. Since that video, I’ve seen numerous new headlines and essays about girlhood and I’ve skipped reading every single one. It’s not that I think no one else has anything insightful to say or that my thoughts and feelings are the be-all, end-all. But, I feel like my brain actually cannot fixate on one topic for this long. Maybe I blame my sicko journalist head or maybe I blame the internet. We’re not meant to be exposed to this many hot takes. It makes sense why we’re all tired.

A few days ago, I shared an unpopular opinion about a popular book on TikTok, which then incited so much uproar among a tiny group of people (for reference, the video got less than 100k views, a far cry from virality on that platform) that you would think they themselves were getting a cut of the book’s royalties. The video got stitched by another book reviewer who politely disagreed with me (we have no beef), though his comment section is another story. Some people took my 2 minute book opinion as a catalyst to insult my work as a whole. My video essays were brought under scrutiny as being “not academic enough,” which triggered my internal monologue, “It’s YOUTUBE! Cocomelon is platformed on Youtube!” 

I realize the irony now that I’m on the other side of the criticism. Only a few weeks ago, Substack writers were typing, “It’s SUBSTACK! This is a blog space not an edited publication!”⁴

Criticism is so important. I’ll always believe that to my core. But sometimes I wonder if we don’t consider the medium enough. I’ve been feeling compelled lately to revisit communication theorist Marshall McLuhan’s famous idea “the medium is the message,” in which he suggests that the medium through which content is communicated is just as significant, and sometimes more significant, than the content itself. He wrote this thesis in the 1960s, but it feels forever relevant.

There’s another Booktok video I want to mention. This one is actually gaining traction and was posted by Celine @/bookishwithb. In it, she laments the state of Booktok and how anti-intellectual it’s become. She explains how people use sensationalized trope language in their book recommendation videos to cater to the algorithm, which has ended up overshadowing the actual literary analysis that used to be present on the app. 

I generally agreed with that. However, she lost me when she gave an example of two people who reviewed RF Kuang’s The Poppy War over the past few weeks. The first creator gave a more in-depth review and the second creator solely characterized the book as having a “strong female protagonist.” She goes on to rant:

To absolutize The Poppy War into just a book about a powerful female protagonist, rather than the incredibly complex, quite traumatizing, dark topic of what it actually is and how beautiful and difficult it is to create a book like that […] IS INFURIATING.

There comes a point when I have to wonder… what is a fair condemnation of anti-intellectualism and what is just… elitism? 

“IT’S TIKTOK! Sigma Ohio Rizz is platformed on Tiktok!”

To go back to mediums - Obviously, all these platforms are different, though tech execs seem to want them all to converge into the same thing. The enshittification of Substack in particular feels like a gut punch to many long term users because it happened recently and almost overnight with the introduction of notes. But within a year, I expect that the algorithm will become so ever present that it will be a bit “old man yells at cloud”⁵ to complain about it.

TikTok on the other hand has a much wider community; its user base spans across multiple generations and the people on there have varying educational backgrounds and life experiences, and everyone also uses it for different reasons. TikTok also didn’t start as any sort of academic platform, but as a dancing and lip syncing platform with only 15 second video time limits. 

There are just some mediums that are not meant to host long-form, educational content or good, peer-reviewed writing. To my haters who want more academic essays, I’d suggest getting off Youtube and reading a book. (I’m for real. The Youtube medium is just not that serious.) And obviously, every platform is what we make it, but there are some actual logistical restrictions sometimes (IG Reels has a 90 sec time cap) and there are financial incentives we’d all be naive not to consider, such as the fact that without an existing following, you can’t get away with posting once every few months and still make money.

Sometimes I think we forget that these are the real drivers for the kind of content people produce and that it doesn’t necessarily mean that the people who choose to review books using trope language are stupid. When we silo people into being intellectual vs. anti-intellectual, we make a moral judgment over issues caused by systemic forces. (For what it’s worth, I do think anti-intellectualism exists (e.g. people complaining about other people writing with “big words” as if a dictionary is not easily accessible with Google), just not in this context.)

A few months ago, I caught the Broadway showing of An Enemy of the People with Jeremy Strong as protagonist Dr. Thomas Stockmann. It was phenomenal. I think Jeremy Strong is one of Hollywood’s best.

The play starts with Dr. Stockmann finding out that the local hot springs, a business that his town depends on economically, have been contaminated and he asks the mayor to close down the springs and repair them to prevent people from getting sick. The problem is that the repairs will be expensive and considering the springs are the town’s only industry, shutting them down will wreck their local economy.

Stockmann is fully earnest in his pursuit of truth and justice, believing that no matter what, the public has the right to know. And despite getting threatened, he perseveres by broadcasting his findings at a town meeting. The people in power spin his words into hysterical lies and jump on him with personal attacks in order to keep the springs open and as Dr. Stockmann gets angrier and more unheard, his shadow self steps into the spotlight. In a fit of frustration, the once bumbling, good-hearted scientist poses this disgusting dog analogy that had the audience in my theater gasping:

There’s a difference between a stray and a poodle, isn’t there? There’s a fundamental difference. I’m not saying those mutts wouldn’t be capable of learning good behavior if they’d had the right opportunities, but I wouldn’t want one living in my house… But somehow when it comes to humans—when I say I have studied biology, I know things you do not know, you should listen to me, that—that you can’t abide.”

Regardless of whether Stockmann’s right about closing down the springs, the elitism (and scientific racism) in his speech shifted our perspective of him. (As a note, the stage was ingeniously set up theatre-in-the-round and they even invited a few people from the audience to sit directly on the edges of the stage. It made events more visceral as if Stockmann was lecturing not just the other actors, but us as well.) It’s actually not because the townspeople disbelieve his findings that he then becomes branded “an enemy of the people,” it’s because of this social evolution rant he makes equating us all to mutts.

I understand the kind of anger and overwhelm that internet discourse can cause, where it feels like you’re trying to tread water but water keeps coming into your ears and you have no choice but grapple at any arm, leg, body nearby even if you’re scratching them in the process. It’s the kind of pressure that keeps me off my Youtube comment section if a video is getting too viral and off Twitter completely and maybe now off TikTok.

Admittedly, I don’t get many Booktok videos on my algorithm. I don’t interact with a lot of the book community online either, and so, I’m not seeing the enshittification happen in real time. I imagine someone who is part of that community and who has noticed a dip in quality can feel like it’s the end of the world. I won’t argue with that. The longer I spend on social media, the more I feel it’s starting to make me feel deranged. I’m still pro-opinions and pro-criticism. However, I’m becoming pessimistic; maybe the internet is not the place to host them, or maybe it just requires a steeliness that I don’t have yet.

With all that said, I’m taking some time to recalibrate my own social media usage (which now includes this platform), in fear that I might start blaming the townspeople a little too much, and forgetting the actual problem all along was the contaminated hot springs.

1. Maybe the best course of action is to go back to reading newsletters straight from my email inbox again.

2. I also want to add that my algorithm is an echo chamber and I’m sure there is a lot of similar short form writing being pushed by say, conservative men on Substack, but it’s not what I’m exposed to. The problem I’ve noticed is that young women tend to be very critical (this is a positive thing), but because the internet is so fragmented, we end up being critical over the writing we consume/are exposed to (which tends to be written by fellow women), which can feel oppressive for everyone involved. I get it. 

3. Marshall McLuhan categorizes mediums into “cool” vs. “hot.” A cool medium provides low-definition information e.g. television. When you’re watching a tv show, there’s external noise in say, your living room, that could impact your experience watching it. A hot medium is one that has a hi-def experience e.g. film. When you watch a movie in a movie theater, the sensory detail is so clear and there’s minimal distraction affecting how you absorb the movie. (McLuhan wrote all this before the advent of DVDs.) Through his definition, I’d say that Substack is a cool medium, because it becomes impossible to ignore the comments and discourse that surround every essay I read.

4. I do think that Emily was way more diplomatic than these TikTok commenters, especially since she didn’t namedrop anyone in particular. I don’t usually look myself up on the internet because I think it would make me suicidal.

5.