My old pal and blogging partner Robin Sloan recently published an edition of his monthly newsletter where he puts on his media critic hat, in reaction to pieces by Max Read and Kyle Chayka, who conclude that media is now a personality cult you have to cultivate in newsletter writing just like YouTubers and TikTokers. Robin writes:
Everything has always been a cult.
If you think that word has negative connotations, squelch them; make the label, for a moment, perfectly neutral. I’ve long believed that cults are central to books: their history and longevity. It is no accident that the plot of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore revolves around a secretive, long-lived organization.
Who are the scholars of a novel like Ulysses, if not a cult? Who are the readers of Marvel comics, if not a cult? What is it to claim that any work is part of a canon, if not to say, it has a formidable cult?
The error is assuming cult membership must be exclusive. All of us, preoccupied by media in all its forms, we are members of many cults — dozens, hundreds — with densely overlapping memberships.
A work of art is nothing without its cult! Literally nothing. Inert marks on pages closed to the light; derelict bits in the coldest region of the database…
[Cults] have been necessary, at all times in all places, for the long-term transmission of art of any/every kind. Maybe the difference, here and now in the short 2020s, is that you need one right from the start.
In response, I wrote Robin a very dense email (I write a lot of dense emails), which I will cite in full (with added links) in italics below, then expand on here.
TIME FOR SOME WEBERIAN THEORY
There are three types of legitimate authority, according to Max Weber: tradition, bureaucracy, and charisma. Maybe these are the three types of media cults too!
Charismatic media cults are the most fragile and the most disruptive. They center around a single figure and her ability to work magic: literally perform miracles or prophecy, in many cases, but especially her individual charm and insight and authority. Charismatic authority is always a type that appears in great transitions, when the appeal of historical weight or rational processes melts into thin air.
But you’re always out on a limb: there’s no way to hand charismatic authority on for more than a generation before it turns into a new kind of tradition or bureaucracy (e.g., Jesus, then the Apostles, then the early Church, then the Catholic Church).
It is rough being Jesus! And it’s not a great way to get paid either. The coincidence of charismatic media and capitalism makes everything more unstable, but also, somehow… inevitable? What is alienating your labor but banking your own charisma?
More to come
Having been an independent newsletter writer (and for a few years, yes, a Substacker), I buy Read’s contention that it rewards a certain kind of personality and writerly perspective more than it rewards scoops, reporting, or even careful analysis. Not that those things aren’t valued: I did original reporting for Amazon Chronicles, and those pieces did well, but even those pieces were infused with personal details. Even when I was reporting on something new, readers wanted my take on the story as much as the story itself. And this is a natural consequence of both paying a writer directly for their work, and the somewhat bewildering collapse of traditional and bureaucratic forms of authority that are general to our times.
To be clear, the classic example of bureaucratic media is the newspaper. A second one (with a leavening of traditional and charismatic authority) would be academia. I’m honestly not sure where TV news fits: it certainly was a charismatic from when it started, quickly turned into a bureaucratic one, and now seems almost traditional, especially when it comes to local news. Even Fox, MSNBC, and the networks seem more like a church these days: you might get a flashy preacher or stolid reporter here and there, but its function is much more to indoctrinate the viewer into a set of traditional values that vary station by station.
I will also reiterate that working as an individual in charismatic media largely sucks. If you’re looking for influence and attention , it’s pretty good! If you’re looking for steady gainful income, for everyone except the tippy-top of the scale (which requires lots of capital to maintain), it stinks. You get all the negatives of the extractive economy, but you’re largely just exploiting yourself. You’re employer and employee, landlord and renter, leader and follower, all in one.
It’s not the new normal, it’s not the future. It is a symptomatic form of a culture that’s been disrupted to the point of collapse. It cannot last. As old Abe Lincoln said, we will become all one thing, or all another.