Sooooo *that* just happened

Me, when Hamish McKenzie showed up in my comments: He's.....right behind me, isn't he?

There is a part in the beginning of the Dostoevsky novel The Brothers Karamazov when the middle brother Ivan publishes an article about how the church should essentially become the state—or, as some readers conclude, how the state should actually become the church—and it causes a big stir in the town. It’s provocative and everyone’s titillated. All the side characters talk passionately about it, and there’s one scene in the monastery where Ivan is referred to by the elder monks as this writer whose ideas are really shaking things up.

Johny and I joke about this constantly: He’ll say omg I have such a good idea for your next blog, and I’ll go what!! and he’ll say what if……(I’ll be waiting, holding my breath, fully invested)….the church…….became the state……… And we’ll laugh and laugh because there is so much humor in serious Russian literature, and this particular context—the Writer who’s gone rogue with their radical ideas and has everyone discussing and debating and gesticulating over a seminal article they decided to drop—is such a silly trope, and we love to do a character bit.

And yet—what has gone down with my last blog has me feeling much like Ivan! It seems I dropped an article and shook things up in the town of Substack. I honestly didn’t mean to, but it’s been a very interesting turn of events. In the two weeks since I posted it, a lot has transpired, and now it seems only natural to follow it up with some meta-analysis.

The first thing I’ll say is that there’s something so late 2000s/early 2010s/iCarly era about “going viral,” and it is sooooo silly. It’s like,

the techie friend watching the hits roll in: you guys *gulp* I thiiiink you’re gonna want to see this

and it makes the whole thing feel so unserious. It also makes me feel even more like Ivan because the joke of that episode in The Brothers Karamazov is that he purposefully wrote his article to be ambiguous, and he was basically trolling. It’s all very doge.

I, however, was not at all trolling. I very much meant what I said. In fact, I think part of what made my elite capture article so compelling to read is that I knew exactly how I felt before I wrote it. I’d already distilled and articulated my thoughts on the whole thing, so when I sat down and wrote it in basically one go on a red eye from San Francisco to New York a few weeks ago, it was easy to write. This time, on the other hand, I’m still not 100% clear on how I feel. I have a lot of half-baked thoughts regarding its reception and the attention it’s put on me and my other work—and on the concept of elite capture for that matter—and I don’t feel as totally confident about what I have to say as I did last time. But this is what I can tell you.

If I had to qualify it overall, I’d say weird. Unfamiliar and weird. Not necessarily bad weird—actually, the majority of the responses have ranged from generally positive (or at least legitimizing, insofar as people have engaged with it as a fair and valid critique) to embarrassingly flattering in a deeply personal way. People used my name at me in most comments/restacks/references to the article in their own blogs. People spoke directly to me, rather than about “the author” or “the writer,” like they do when you publish something for a magazine. It was weird to see my name in all these places, from all these people I didn’t know. And it’s this hot-breath-on-your-neck friendliness itself that is one weirdest things I’ve noticed, that causing a popular stir on Substack is a uniquely intimate experience.

Like most people who have put anything on the internet, I’ve posted things on TikTok and Instagram that have done numbers, but those never had anything in them that made me personally vulnerable (my face, my worldview). On the other hand, a blog (well, my blog, and generally the kind of blogs I engage with) is basically a public diary, with your real name and image and ideas attached, and it leaves you so defenseless, and that goes both ways. When people said, “Cydney Hayes, you are a great writer,” “Cydney has written a seminal piece with this one. Absolutely brilliant,” “Cydney, I’ve found this really, really inspiring, thank you so much for writing,” and on and on and on for hundreds of responses, it feels like a personal blessing of my skill and talent and specialness (I’m being hyperbolic obviously, but also I’m kind of not, if I could be so raw and real rn). But if things were to turn, if I were to write something that was not so well-received by strangers on the internet, I imagine it would feel like a personal stoning in the street for being ignorant and shameful and categorically bad.

Sometimes it’s hard not to internalize, because it’s unnatural to digest such an unreal volume of praise in such a short period of time. You’d never get 100+ gushing compliments in a single day from people you’ve never met, and if that did happen I imagine you might want to go home immediately and close all the blinds and lock all the doors, or you might have a panic attack from sheer overstimulation alone. So over the last couple weeks I’ve been careful to not take any of this too seriously either way. Referring to the meme above when necessary.

Now we’re getting into the weeds, but another thing I noticed was the shift in the way people talked about the piece after it began to circulate. It became very meta. Perhaps the most memorable part of the article was my take on Notes, so when people began to encounter the piece as a critique of the channel on which it was going viral, they had a different reading experience than the ~100 people who received it in their inboxes. Like, a lot of people said something to the effect of, “I see the irony in sharing this piece on Notes, but…..etc etc” or asked me, “Now that this article has gone viral on Notes, I wonder if you feel differently about the feature?” Some people also commented some of the most random things, like, “This article is too long!” that you just wouldn’t comment on something with 6 likes, but people do comment on things with 600. Then there were tangential threads between commenters, and the couple days when it shored up one side of a TwitterNotes fight between a few writers.

And this is all because after a certain point, anything shared widely enough becomes public domain. It takes on its own life after you publish it, and you as the artist can decide where to place yourself in the conversation. For me, I stopped responding after the first day more or less, but I watched as things unfolded. There were times when I wanted to repeat myself or clarify things, especially when people misused the term “elite capture” or categorized the piece as me just hating Notes rather than what I really meant to do, which was to talk about Notes and Substack and the conflation of artist and marketer as reference points in a rumination on techno feudalism. In the end, though, I know that I meant what I said and expressed myself clearly. Other than that, I just let people take it wherever they were going to take it, and I kept in mind that the instinct to defend your work at every tiny misinterpretation only happens because social media gives you channels to immediately see and respond to every tiny misinterpretation. 

To answer a lot of people’s questions: Honestly I don’t feel differently about Notes just because it helped a lot of people discover my blog—whether I loved or hated or felt totally neutral about the influx of attention and subscribers, I still think it’s totally social media, and I still don’t love how going hard on social media makes me feel personally in my heart and soul. Additionally, I also remain at the same conclusion I’d come to before I wrote the piece in the first place: That I should balance writing in a vacuum on Substack, with working with editors at magazines, with making zines that can move around physically, hand to hand. I hope no one takes this personally! If you’ve found a community via Notes that you find fulfilling, that’s cool too. Do you! To quote a line from

Evana

’s latest piece that I loved: It doesn’t actually matter if we see things the same way. This approach is made by me, for me (◕‿◕✿) Different blogs for different frogs.

the only frog-related image i can find atm: i gave myself a bunch of frog temporary tattoos the other day

I told most of this to Hamish McKenzie last week when we had coffee at the Substack offices in the financial district downtown. I am still considering how much of that interaction I want to share on here. What I will say at this point is that our meeting was generally friendly and largely uneventful, but I also walked away with a lot to think about in terms of tech and San Francisco and what it means to be cool and to have a vision. We’ll see if I write something longer about that on here or for a mag, or if I keep it only in texts or voice memos for me and my friends and no one else.

Now, I’m very much ready to move on from the Elite Capture of Substack and to write other things. I’ve been thinking of a piece on Saltburn and what I call the Striving Class, as well as a piece on commuting, traffic, a suspicious episode that recently happened at the executive level of CalTrans, and what I call the Goodness Ceiling. (I like to give my ideas proper names, clearly.) I also am ready to just write random meandering blogs again. I’m especially curious how those ones will be received, now that I have collected an audience so abruptly from a piece that was a lot more scandalous than what I normally post.

I know I said I can’t defend every little misconception of every piece of work, but before I go, I am going to offer one additional explanation. Two nights ago, Johny and I were continuing our reading of The Brothers Karamazov, slowly trudging through the long section recounting the monk Elder Zosima’s life story, and we came to this scene that I found quite relevant: Zosima, still a young man, is telling a thoughtful traveler about a life-changing revelation, that all men should treat each other like they owe everything to each other, and if only everyone could accept and embody this mindset, there would be peace on earth. The traveler tells Zosima that this will indeed happen, but it won’t happen for a long time because they’re still living in the age of man’s isolation—but it is still important to take idealist little actions now and then to keep the hope of a new age alive. That’s the only way things could ever change.

Zosima’s revelation is different than my take on social media, obviously, but it is 1) very Emmanuel Levinas, whose philosophy who I like, and 2) a good summary of what I was trying to say in the elite capture piece: That you don’t need to be militant with yourself, but it’s good to know your ideals, so you can live by them now and then, in between living your life in the world that exists as it is now. So don’t come for me if I post on Notes! I’m not militant with myself and am not saying anyone needs to be either. Just offering a few starting points in case anyone ever wants to unpack things with me.