Point of Production

Anyone who spends any time on social media, especially Twitter, knows it’s an extremely contentious space. Theories abound as to why this is, often centered on the way that Twitter’s character limit imposes a kind of brusqueness. Critiques are boiled down to blunt instruments, arguments transmogrify into snark. Other explanations focus on the way that the share-and-like systems of social media turn debates into literal point-scoring matches, bending criticisms towards jokes that will resonate among one’s own pre-determined swarm of support. There is truth to both of these arguments, which, McLuhan-like, construct a theory of beef at the level of the medium by examining how the technical infrastructure of platforms determine the discourses hosted upon it. Here I would add a third, the way that the one-to-many/many-to-one communication mechanisms, constructed to be appealing to advertising, open the doors to floods of unwanted messages. Swarms and spam differ only in terms of their automation (thanks to guattari2600 for this insight).

However, these explanations lack something important: the social composition of these networks. To serve beef, one needs more than just a pot to cook it in. We need cooks, assistants, and so on: in short, who are the people involved in these beefs?

With apologies to the rigor that such an investigation would normally require, I will hazard an analysis. What we see in this beef is a bifurcation what used to be known as the profession of “journalism.” Much has been written about the ways that the Internet has worked to deprofessionalize (or proletarianize if you want to get Marxy and dramatic about it) journalism (Bob McChesney’s Digital Disconnect is a good reference for this), which, it should be said, has long been a rather amorphous group of people. A few – not unimportant! – professional codes and norms aside, little is required of a journalist other than that they be able to observe and write.

Many people can do this adequately, and with the internet, something else crucial is added: anyone can publish as easily as they can write. This led to a flourishing a blogs in the first decade of the 21st century, many of which were excellent precisely because they avoided the many aspects that had plagued journalism for years. Prominent among this was journalism’s reliance on advertising (and thus strict ideological limits as to how it could approach capitalism and commercial culture). This is well understood. Somewhat less understood is professional journalism’s symbiotic relationship with those in power. Professional political journalists need contacts, meaning access to powerful people, to get leads and scoops that other outlets don’t have. Politicians and other political elites need access to media platforms to spread their messages and consolidate their political bases. A quid-pro-quo relationship emerged where political journalism worked with elites – “objectivity” became a method to regulate any criticism that could threaten access. Of course, famous cases such as Watergate exist, but largely as the exceptions that prove the rule.

The optimistic estimations of blogging immediately understood that bloggers and other people writing and publishing on the internet in non-professional ways had advantages over journalism. They were not beholden to advertisers, old-guard editors, or elite gatekeepers, and so new forms of discourse oriented to the contemporaneous could flourish. This affected not just political journalism, but everything from cookbooks to music criticism to so-called “hyperlocal” coverage.

There was a downside that was often ignored, but has loomed especially large since the financial crisis: these unprofessional writers wrote for free, and so acted as a kind of cheap competition to professional journalists. I wouldn’t go so far as to label bloggers as scabs. But after the internet, especially after RSS and social networks leveled so many diverse publishing outlets into interchangeable “content,” journalism faced a deep crisis in profits. The effects on the profession – layoffs, closing of papers, consolidation, deskilling, outsourcing and so on – are well known.

This isn’t the end of the story, however. The era of blogs is over. An array of initiatives sprang up to capture the energy of amateur journalism and writing. Major newspapers experimented with their own stables of bloggers – 538 had a brief fling with the New York Times, Vox’s editors originated in the Washington Post, which also purchased Slate (which had been run with Microsoft money – tech companies and telecoms have shown a good deal of interest in these new formats). In addition, many independent media outlets that originated or came into their own with the internet capitalized on this large reserve army of digital writers: Salon, Vice, Gawker.

The subsumption of blogging was not simply an act of co-optation or colonization. It was an act of restructuring, where the qualities of the former affect the latter. Sometimes good work is produced in these spaces, largely due to the enlarging of the political spectrum allowed in publication. Less beholden to traditional advertisers (due in large part to much smaller budgets), political ideas that would never be aired in a major newspaper had their own outlets: the much-remarked-upon “little magazines” of Jacobin, The New Inquiry, N+1 (we might also add the LA Review of Books, Alternet, Mask Magazine, Reason, and, more tentatively, the Neo-Nazism-for-millennials publication the Daily Stormer).

These new publications also had less need to rely on elite access for their content. More academic and theoretical in tone (in large part due to a massive overproduction of academics in the US), they didn’t need to rely on banal quotes from politicos, but instead could derive intellectual authority from references to Marx, Foucault, Derrida, Butler and so on.

But more than a reliance on academic credentials, the new style of publishing relied less on original reportage (which it couldn’t hope to fund anyway), and more on commentary. This was closely aligned to an academic training devoted to critique, but also derived from the citational practices of blogging culture, where posts frequently built on previous posts from within specific discursive milieus. 

There is also a mostly untold story of the socialization of many of these writers on massive message boards, such as Something Awful, where humor and takedowns were as prized as informative essays, if not moreso. All of these inflect today’s content, which is built almost entirely from a critical perspective, often veering into contrarianism for sheer effect: in current-day parlance, this is known as “a take.” (A “hot take” is simply a very timely take.)

[I also want to remark, though I am not sure where to place this, upon the ease in which the internet’s searching and compiling makes for doing basic research on issues. Google and Wikipedia and other search functions make it simple for someone uninformed on a historical issue or political figure to come up with countervailing perspectives, or to find an egregious lapse in ethics or judgement. To my mind, this is essential for the composition of deprofessionalized writers I am theorizing here.]

And so we have a bifurcation in online political content producers. The elite stable of journalists, beholden to the narrow official discourses of capital and the state remain. There are fewer positions in this class, and those positions are much less stable than they once were. This is due to economic factors, but also because, as individuals with long publication records, they are subject to the search-and-destroy techniques I mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Then there is a vast, more amorphous group of writers, meme-makers, Twitter wags, trolls and so on: the amateur stable of political content creators. “Amateur” doesn’t quite capture it, really – these people are often paid (erratically) and hold technical skills, while working much more precariously. I prefer the term “deprofessional.” It’s a much more lively and irreverent group, and, as should come as little surprise, their anti-establishment positions mean they often espouse anti-establishment politics. That Bernie Sanders should be so popular in this milieu is not due only to their youth, just as the professional class’s sometimes-desperate puffing for Hillary Clinton speaks to its occupational responsibilities to the elite status-quo.

These groups meet and overlap in Twitter. Twitter is essentially a requirement for anyone working in online writing today. This is for multiple reasons. First, it is simply a good and cheap way to promote one’s content. But it is also, itself, the fodder for content. We have all read “takes” on “liberals” or “leftists” which seem to speak, not to the broad constituencies of activists and thinkers in these ideological camps, but to cliques on social media. Twitter is where a writer can interface with The Discourse in real time, and the more talented and ambitious can provide what are essentially opinionated summaries on the day’s tweeting and retweeting for a small fee at any number of online publications.

More than a fee, a publication record can become the means to transition to a more stable writing career. These deprofessionals can wind up in high places. Jeb Lund graduated from notorious Something Awful troll to bylines in Rolling Stone. Gossipy Gawker editors have wound up in more respectable investigative online publications such as The Intercept.

This means it is less clear that the right credentials – degrees, internships, references, all the hallmarks of a dedication to maintaining the status quo in order to benefit from it as you reproduce it – means having a journalistic career. This extremely contingent and rapidly shifting situation places a lot of pressure on the Professional Class. They are vulnerable. Hemmed in from the restructuring political economy of journalism on one side, they are easily shown to be humorless shills, holding boring hand-me-down political ideologies that have less and less appeal, and ultimately having too much skin in the establishment to provide ample critique. Every day on Twitter the mendacity and timidity of this class is revealed in screenshots produced by independent and pseudonymous content creators from the Deprofessional Class.

While vulnerable the Professional Class is not defenseless. There is nothing a hack will fight for like their career. The weakness of the Deprofessional Class is that they still need jobs, and many of them, while not having high-profile bylines in major publications, still work in the lower tiers of the media and information industry: freelancing, web and graphic design, public relations, teaching as adjuncts, the occasional full-time blogging position. They are vulnerable too, and increasingly we see the professionals attack the deprofessionals where it hurts: their jobs. Doxing, complaints of fostering harassment (almost always nebulous – these platforms are designed to subject people to messages they did not necessarily ask for), cries of poor decorum and the holding of “extreme” or “controversial” opinions: these can, and have been, grounds for lost jobs, hampered careers, reduced income streams.

This is the terrain of the battle in political discursive space. Enter at your own risk.