The People's Media was an easy sell
so what does a buyback look like?
A couple weeks ago, I had an experience I hadn’t had since I was a teenager: I lost myself in several physical magazines, one after the other: an in-depth Vanity Fair article by a Columbian journalist about the epic-within-an-epic to get One Hundred Years of Solitude made as a Netflix miniseries, a heartrending People article about Celine Dion’s equally epic health challenges, a series of mesmerizing cinematic photos in Vogue. I thought back to my early relationship to magazines: papering my teenage bedroom with glossy photo shoots of Drew Barrymore and Ewan McGregor, taking all the quizzes in Seventeen, worrying over charts of what was In and what was Out, feeling my chest cave in if I ardently listened to a band or watched a TV show on the Out list.
Behind and below and around all this was the pervasive I’m not enough foreboding that arose from looking at models. I’d soon become aware of a movement underway that served as a direct rebuttal to magazine-induced conditioning, to the notion that highly paid adults in skyscraping publishing houses should tell teenagers what’s cool, what’s beautiful, who’s hot. Zines, which could be made cheaply and by anyone, would democratize the media, making it a mouthpiece not for Sony and Revlon but for truly whoever about whatever. Young people, armed with staplers, sharpies, and access to a copy machine, could disseminate actual messages about matters that mattered. Glossy? No. But that was part of the point.
The Internet rendered Thoughts and Opinions even more democratic: make your zine an e-zine and you could put it online to be read anywhere in the world, minus even the cost of black-and-white copies or postage. Media became everything we had ever dreamed it could be.
Enter YouTube, 2005. The creative lifeblood of ordinary people was no longer confined to the page! Now anyone with a webcam — and by then, webcams were ubiquitous — could pour out their manifestos in living, breathing, moment-by-moment existence and reveal anything about what life means to them to anyone who stumbled upon it. As YouTube’s popularity/traffic increased, a friend of mine remarked that he wasn’t sure what the platform’s business model was. There were no ads, videos were free to post, nothing cost money, so how was money being made?
One fateful November day in 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion dollars. “Ah,” my friend said. “This is their business model! Become insanely popular and then get bought out.”
Sometime in 2010, a friend living in New York asked me if I was familiar with this weird take on capitalism that was gaining traction in the city. “The teenagers who make YouTube videos?” she said. “These companies pay them for product placement, so that part of their video is about them promoting this brand. They’re called Influencers.”
An Influencer could be anyone. There was no barrier to diversity either. By the time Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, Influencers didn’t even need YouTube channels. All they had to do was talk a product up enthusiastically and look good doing it. Capitalism discovered the people’s media, and saw that there was bank to be made in paying ordinary people to do ordinary things, seamlessly enfolding a trademark.
So we got what we wanted, and it’s the Monkey’s Paw-est situation we could have wished ourselves into. Now, some of the most systemically neglected young people in America are convinced that a better life is just one viral TikTok away. Rightly concluding that they likely have more to say than Ninja, countless pre-teens have determined that they, too, can be professional video game streamers on Twitch or YouTube, set for life from a Red Bull sponsorship.
No need to point fingers. We could not have seen this coming. But what can we do about it? We are sharing this doomed boiling planet with almost 8 billion people. The depths of our doom does not — hearteningly — eliminate our need for human connection. It’s arguably never been more urgent to get real with other people, to make sure that we’re Seen well beyond our analytics, followers, views. And I’m all for making zines in 2024 and beyond, for every expressive or creative reason possible. But we’ve lost the luxury of a “culture-jamming” dream in which we’ve gone out of the reach of ads. Advertisers these days can keep track of how much time you spend reading a sentence in the online edition of the New York Times.
There was a time we didn’t realize was blissful that marketers couldn’t do a whole lot. When I spoke, years ago, to Glenn Eichler, the creator and head writer of MTV’s Daria, and asked how they got away with a cartoon so rich in cultural and class commentary, with drawing specific attention to the kind of bullshit marketed toward teenagers, he said, “Marketers didn’t have the technology then that they do now. MTV was still new, and nobody actually knew what young people wanted. So they left us TV writers alone.”
I’m no industry insider, but I think we all know this much: no TV writer is left alone.
Others have written with more knowledge and experience about the disaster that is streaming, the countless narratives written and shot that will not only never be shown to audiences but are even inaccessible to the people who made them, the writers, actors, directors. Laments about “commercialization” that echoed throughout the 90’s sound quaint these days: commercialized? That implies an effect on a larger world that is not, itself, a commercial.
I’m the daughter of entrepreneurs who exercised a sort of anti-commerce commerce. My parents met at the College of Santa Fe and had a brain wave when they realized that there were no coffeehouses in New Mexico. My dad, a New Orleans musician, had grown up with a coffeehouse scene, but outside of America’s scant number of bohemian outposts, there weren’t many US coffeehouses in 1985. When they opened EJ’s in Albuquerque on Silver and Yale, across from the University of New Mexico and next to the lesbian bookstore, the in-house-roasted coffee, open mic nights, poetry readings, and generally welcoming atmosphere quickly became so popular that they expanded into a bakery, then a full-scale restaurant. Nearly everyone on the waitstaff were artists. Realizing you’d forgotten your wallet after you’d placed your order was no big deal. EJ’s emphasis was on community. When I met the folksinger Dar Williams in Chicago, she said she vividly remembered playing there in 1992 and 1994, because it was listening venues like that one that kept her going through the ups and downs of a career as a female singer-songwriter.
Community meant a million things: communities of artists, communities of University students, activists, philosophers, communities of chess champions who honed their skills on EJ’s black-and-white checkered table tops, slamming the chess clock between them, communities of hippies and Dead heads who’d stop at EJ’s while following the Grateful Dead’s tour, communities of musicians like the one my father was a part of, communities of unconventional parents and of coffee connoisseurs who were impressed that they could get a damn good espresso in Albuquerque in 1992. My mother often quoted a customer who mused, as she filled his drink, “You’re pouring coffee and I’m drinking it but there is so much more happening here.”
Transactions, where I come from, were never merely transactions.
Yet we’re now expected to fight to make everything into a transaction. Arguably, this has always been the case: Tim Wu writes in The Attention Merchants that television shows were invented as a means to keep people watching commercials, not the other way around. Radio advertisers were initially greeted with skepticism because no one could believe that the average American would put up with a commercial interrupting their dinner or their time at home. We’ve come a long way in the worst way.
Sadly, artists with a satirical eye were almost immediately exploited. When Saturday Night Live started doing the parody commercials that made cultural history, advertisers realized that people appreciated a funny commercial and took non-ironic cues from them. Hard to beat the system from within when the system is looking over its shoulder and figuring out new ways to predict your next move.
How can we come together in ways that defy commodification? Is the cost of living now too astronomical to strive for such a goal? Did the wild success of Lena Dunham’s Girls ultimately prove that even visceral humiliation sells, and therefore every real feeling can? Something in the queer American spirit died with the birth of the Bank of America Pride float, but that’s not to suggest that the answer to an un-commercialized life is societal hostility. Still, when even “authenticity” has become an ad-copy buzzword, where do we go?
I don’t have an answer. What I do have are memories from a time before marketing tech went full sci-fi, and prior to the assumption that a person you’ve spoken to wouldn’t just know what you had for dinner but would actually see the plate as you ate. I remember when people shouted “Damn the man!” instead of begging the man for a sponsorship, and of course that’s all tied in with memories of my parents’ talented employees living full lives working on their art, which the generally low-stress job that paid their reasonable rents left them plenty of time to do. I have memories, too, of the phrase “computer nerd,” from a time that tech CEO’s weren’t on par with Wall Street tycoons in terms of who was “desirable” in our hypercapitalist society. They were way too smart to run this world.
Zuckerberg ushered in the age of the narcissistic tech manchild, of whom Elon Musk is now our most monstrous incarnation. Ian still keeps up with Hacker News, a website favored by old-school tech eccentrics whose work started in the 80’s. Like every social gathering, you’ll find frustrating people on those threads, but generally, it’s an intellectual oasis, populated by genuinely smart people with sharp senses of humor of looking for real conversation.
Meaning cannot be commodified. But how do we foster it in defiance of everything we’re told to do and every pressure we might legitimately be under? I have no idea. I’m writing this because I’m convinced that there are ways, though I’m more immediately convinced that Americans have so normalized anxious and depressive behaviors that we’ve collectively lost the capacity to understand what the human mind can do. Right now, a sizable percentage of cultural-norm-makers think the human mind has reached its limit and can be reasonably approximated by a series of algorithms that make predictions about what information logically follows from other information. This supposedly limitless AI un-mind cannot differentiate between satire and truth, cannot question any information it’s been given, and, most crucially, cannot come up with any ideas on its own. That’s not a bad thing: even if our devices didn’t collude for world domination, any number of things could go wildly awry if robots became fully independent, unconcerned with what we wanted them to do.
But we’ve spent so much mental and emotional energy arguing about what AI can’t do that we’ve essentially forgotten what we can do. So concerned are we about what AI might learn that we’ve lost the significance of the fact that we’re already there. Neuroplasticity is a miraculous thing. We, human beings, can learn and change, and we don’t need a racist sexist Silicon Valley programmer to show us how to do any of it. We are literally born to learn.
One thing only keeps us back: the impact of trauma and ensuing coping mechanisms that don’t work to our neurological or psychological advantage. When that shit goes untreated, avoidance and numbness and other block-out mechanisms blunt our capabilities tragically. AI cannot be traumatized and rendered unable to do what its racist sexist programmers tell it to do. AI will never lose a loved one. AI will never dispense information in a fog of grief. It has that advantage over us.
But that’s precisely where our brains come in: we make meaning of all we go through. Yes, that’s sometimes impossible, but that’s exactly what community is for. The word has been watered-down to mean “people who watch this franchise” and “people who enjoy this fringe sex act” and even “people who buy from this brand.” Community can start there, because community can start anywhere. Where it leads when it deserves the word is, We come together to make meaning of the impossible.
Even Bezos can’t buy that. He wouldn’t know where to look.
