The first line on any new Medium draft is “Tell your story…”. Like a lot of folks in my demographic, I grew up with social media’s ascent. Xanga, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter — Tumblr — I’ve been on most of the big ones, and one major unifying factor among all of these different sites is the invitation to be open. Maybe even radically open.
When I tell my story here, it’s not a discrete story with a beginning, middle, or end, but merely the latest chapter in a stream of consciousness narrative I’ve crafted for myself that’s etched into the surface of an all-encompassing algorithm.
The desire to share and overshare is strong. But lately, there’s a lot of evidence that this might be a bad idea after all (go figure). Facebook is selling user data to the highest bidder and your phone is not only recording you all the time but giving your information to advertisers to make hypertargeted ads.
These companies, it turns out, are also engaged in expressly political action, sometimes undertaking smear campaigns against political orgs they disagree with, all backed by the vast and comprehensive user dataset they own.
When I consider all the years I’ve been a willing participant in these new data sinks, it’s kind of amazing that the thought that I should, I don’t know, maybe consider the motives of the people I’m publishing my content with is just now occurring to me.
But maybe that’s just what it means to be media literate in 2018.
I’ve been thinking a lot about cults lately. I started following a cult researcher on Twitter who specializes in the Aum Shinrikyo death cult and who lately has been observing the Q anon phenomenon. This, compounded by my attempt to finish Against the Fascist Creep by Alexander Reid-Ross, and finishing Not That Bad, a compilation of essays about rape and rape culture edited by Roxane Gay, has sent me into somewhat of an emotionally compromised state. It doesn’t help that I helped a friend confront her rapist and his friends a month ago.
But anyway, all this has led me to almost obsess over cults. It’s a weird obsession, I know. It almost helps to compartmentalize all the insane real-world shit going on all around me.
One cult I’ve been thinking about a lot is a short-lived cult that existed for five days in 1967 that managed to replicate German fascism almost to a T. Ron Jones, a history teacher in Palo Alto, Calif., devised a quick, dirty and wildly unethical social experiment at Cubberley High School, the school he worked in at the time. Thirty-five to 40 years prior, the Nazis took power in Germany and quickly began to consolidate said power through a combination of physical force, intimidation tactics and insidious integration into the German political infrastructure, something we’d label as entryism today.
While they were cunning and ruthless to their enemies, the Nazis were also very savvy — they built up their popularity among the German electorate by appealing in basically equal measure to the things that caused everyday Germans the most pain, as well as their deepest desires. Germany wanted to be strong, but it was hamstrung by so much: The Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression almost KO’d the Germans with a one-two punch. You’ve probably seen the photos of German citizens carrying wheelbarrows of Deutschmarks down to the bakery for a single loaf of bread.
At the time, Anti-semitism was as high as it’s ever been, across political parties. Hating and scapegoating Jews is almost a well-worn, time-honored tradition when you need someone to hate on. The Nazis knew this, so they played to this in a major way. There’s a pretty direct line linking anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia and other parts of Europe with the Holocaust. But it’s hard to explain this to teenagers with literally any degree of removal from the horrific event. Part of the reason for this is that teenagers are still naive but they command high degrees of empathy. It’s literally difficult for them to imagine doing something as horrifying as covering the Holocaust up because they believe firmly that they’d never fall for shit like that.
So Jones did what anyone would do.
He kind of became a Hitler Youth instructor and started drilling his students on how to be good little fascists.
“STRENGTH through DISCIPLINE! (STÄRKE durch DISZIPLIN!)
STRENGTH through COMMUNITY! (STÄRKE durch die GEMEINSCHAFT!)
STRENGTH through ACTION! (STÄRKE durch AKTION!)
STRENGTH through PRIDE!” (STÄRKE durch STOLZ!)
These were the slogans he taught his students, who quickly internalized what he told them they meant and spread those ideas to others. Compare this to the slogans in Orwell’s 1984, or perhaps more directly, one of the most common Nazi slogans in Germany: “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer!”
Short, sweet, easy to remember and shout at rallies.
What is your goal, what is their motive, do these two aspects align, do they diverge?
If the idea behind Jones’ “Third Wave” experiment was to get young people to think critically about ingroup-outgroup dynamics, it failed. As a cult, it was highly successful. What started with posture drills among ~20 students in a single classroom soon spread to nearly 200 students at this high school. Nearly everyone was part of “the Third Wave.” They had a salute. They had a motto. They had a shared purpose and goal. It was even fun for some.
Think about this for a second. This is 1967. The Nazi Party was only founded 47 years prior. It only took power in 1933, 34 years prior to this experiment. Within four decades, the stark lessons of fascism’s dangers were already becoming obfuscated by the slow march of time. So what happened at this high school? Well, some kids started to feel uncomfortable, and they used the tools at their disposal to express their discomfort, like the student newspaper. The Third Wave did not like this. They began to intimidate and threaten the dissidents.
Fights broke out. Non-members were being identified and targeted. Jones, at this point, had lost control of his experiment. He decided to hold a rally at the end of the week where, he told the student body, a national politician would be addressing them directly as Third Wave. By this time concerned parents and some faculty were closing in. A father of one student even broke into Jones’ classroom and tore it up one night because he’d spent time in a German concentration camp as a US soldier. He identified the horror, and could not abide it.
When the rally rolled around, nearly 300 students had joined the Third Wave. They demonstrated their discipline to attending photographers prior to their address. Finally, Jones announced that there would be no address. There was no leader. They had all been duped. He then played footage from the Nuremberg Rally. During this rapid, haphazard deprogramming, the emotional strain of even just a couple days participating in a fascist cult made some students break down. Going from feeling and being important in the Third Wave back to the status quo was heavy. But despite swearing they never would fall for a fascist, each student did exactly that. Only a couple dissented, and they paid for it.
I remember reading about this as a kid, in a novelization of a TV dramatization of the events as described by Jones in 1972. My middle school actually made it required reading, and it stuck with me viscerally. I’ve never forgotten it, even if sometimes it’s not always front-and-center. But I’m drawn back to it today because I think we’re basically in the middle of a national Third Wave experiment, only the stakes are much higher and there are proportionally way fewer people who actually seem to have an issue with this.
1967 was further away from today than it was from the rise or even the inception of the Third Reich. For decades, The Wave was required reading — at least in California, where I initially went to school. Regardless, it doesn’t seem like we collectively learned anything. I especially don’t think democrats learned anything — if we’re to take the recent announcement from presumable House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that she’d be working with Trump at face value, and if we take the rumor that Hillary Clinton (or Bernie Sanders) will run again in 2020 seriously.
The only peaceful way out in the early days of the Trump campaign was rapid deterrence and assisted deprogramming. But since we’re past that point now, our options are pretty limited. We’ve basically just got to hold onto our asses until the shit hits the fan. That’s fucking horrifying and depressing.
Trump supporters are actually great examples of people who — assuming good intentions — never asked the questions: what is my goal in voting for this person? What are their motives for running? Where do my goals and their motives meet? Where do they diverge? Trump is a fascist, but his message of economic populism and returning strength to a failing nation appealed to a lot of people who, if transported to 1930s Germany, would feel quite at home as “Good Germans.” Nevermind that Trump’s message was coupled with a blinding racism and xenophobia. Nevermind that he was a brute. This translated only to his apparent strength as a Leader™.
I live in Oklahoma City. We’re propped up economically by oil and natural gas. The previous mayor attempted to woo Amazon to build its second HQ in OKC, but no one thinks of us as a hotbed for STEM expansion. We’re not educated enough, we’re too economically depressed even despite the windfall oil and gas give us, and there are really only two areas in the state where “smart” people might tend to congregate: here and in Tulsa. The rest of the state basically survives on oil and livestock/agricultural farming. Teachers get paid better in every state that surrounds us, and we’re near the bottom of the barrel in terms of just about every educational rubric you could throw at us.
In other words, we’re an ideal state for Trump’s ideology to take hold and thrive. When he visited the state, he did so during the State Fair — in fact, his speaking place was the State Fair, and he received a pretty substantial fanfare. His policies have hurt farmers, and the outgoing Governor, Mary Fallin, is almost universally disliked, but during the midterms, functionally only one county — Oklahoma County — went blue. Kendra Horn, a conservative Democrat, won the 5th Congressional District.
Back in August, I took a mini-vacation to the Broadway Inn, and while I was there, Proud Boys and other alt-right folks were congregating in the lobby and rolling out to somewhere in the city. Turns out there was an action opposing ICE they wanted to counterprotest, but they got the week wrong.
How do you get Oklahomans to think critically about the media the read and share, about the ideologies they subscribe or cling to?
Okay but why in the fuck is Jim Acosta or CNN fighting so hard to have a seat in the Trump administration’s White House Press Corps?
Acosta has positioned himself as being the biggest Trump opponent in the media, bigger than Jake Tapper or Rachel Maddow. His angle is different in that he’s there on the frontlines … of the White House press room. He asks confrontational questions and has become Trump’s personal anti-CNN/anti-media lightning rod. And he got banned from the press room after an intern tried to take his mic in a fight between himself and Trump.
His access was restored by a judge after CNN sued, but the Trump administration vowed they’d ban him again soon. Meanwhile Andrew Whittaker is Trump’s new AG and soldiers are, as we speak, stationed at the southern US border with Border Patrol agents shooting tear gas at asylum-seeking families from Honduras. The political theater would be cute if the world around the amphitheatre wasn’t burning.
What is Acosta’s goal? How could his goal not be better served as an “outsider?” People don’t like the media, but they love “outsider” media figures. What is the Trump administration’s motive? This question is almost silly to ask: the Trump administration wants a compliant media, and barring that, it wants a nonexistent media. How do Acosta’s goals — which ostensibly amount to protecting free speech and manifest as maintaining “critical” access to the administration’s propaganda slop bucket — match up with the Trump administration’s motive? It’s hard to find a place where they do.
CNN has to maintain its relationship with power, but it’s not clear anymore that they’ll be able to do so without taking extensive damage to the quality of their work.
There are no easy narratives.
Cults and fascists rely on an unquestioning public and a media that craves power and access.
No media organization — social or otherwise — acts altruistically. If you make something for them you perpetuate their goals rather than your own.
What is your goal, what is their motive, do these two aspects align, do they diverge?
As a newly-out nonbinary (agender?) person, I have literally no experience as a trans person. Not only would I not then immediately proclaim my expertise in that area of literally anything, but I ALSO would not pitch an article to the New York fucking Times on that expertise or my experience. What I’ve experienced is going to differ from someone else who identifies similarly. Hell, this is true of my asexuality. Trying to stuff everyone else’s experiences into the box my experiences fit into is a bad fucking idea.
Doing this in front of a hostile audience is even fucking worse.
I don’t know a whole lot, generally, about sexuality and gender but I do know about the media, and news-flash: the media might be hated by Donald Trump and the alt-right, but that doesn’t make it liberal or progressive or — fuck — leftist.
Writing for hostile audiences means you always have to ask two questions at minimum: what is my goal for publishing it in this medium and what is the publisher’s motive for letting it go to print? The failure to ask these questions will lead to figurative piles of shit every time. Someone I follow on Twitter made a great point about this:
I’m not one for Writing Rules but there is one golden rule to all writing, and in particular to writing about subjective experience (and all writing is, to some extent subjective)
An absolutely imperative and oft forgotten rule:
YOUR EXPERIENCE IS NOT UNIVERSAL.
I said on Twitter a couple weeks ago I’d been thinking a lot about the Dr. V debacle from a few years ago. Here’s why.
So, again: writers pitching stories to hostile audiences should ask themselves two questions: what is my goal in publishing in this space, and what are the publishers’ motives behind accepting my pitch? A bonus question might be: do my goals and their motives align?
You may craft a piece with the best intentions only to have those intentions twisted during the editing process. This could happen all the way up to publication (see Julia Serrano’s latest thread on being approached to write about contentious/controversial trans issues recently). You might think you’re writing the post that will finally break through to your hostile audience, but when you open the post up after it’s been published you find to your shock and dismay that it no longer reads that way and is instead an apology for the worst of your enemies.
This is, of course, assuming that all writers putting pen to paper about marginalized people, or contentious subjects, or with hostile audiences are writing in good faith. That’s a big assumption. Many — most — writers in this field are doing all they can to make the most money. That means instead of asking “what is my goal/what are my publishers’ motives in writing about/publishing this sensitive topic,” a writer might ask, “what’s the wildest shit I can write about?”
Your story has to get clicks. It has to be read in order to matter. Your publication must make money on your labor. Nobody gives two fucks if you think the subject is interesting or if the story is “important.” Does it entertain? If no, who cares if it informs? This increasingly debased media landscape will turn all freelancers into literary carnival barkers given enough time and not enough money. And when you’re a carnival barker, what’s the story of a “freak” to you but more eyes on your precious work?
Even if you don’t think that way, your editors already do. You want to talk about medical gatekeeping being detrimental to the trans community, they want the juicy, lurid details about neovaginas being “forever-open wounds” or some wack TERF-ass shit.
It. Gets. More. Clicks.
It. Doesn’t. Change. Anyone’s. Mind.
This leads me back to the whole Dr. V debacle.
Now, this is a moment that I’m sure writer Caleb Hannan would like to forget — at the time, he was a sports blogger and freelancer writing for Grantland, ESPN, etc. Now he mostly focuses on business and true crime writing. But all aspects of this story are important to see. Dr. V, or Essay Anne Vanderbilt, was an inventor who claimed to have made the world’s best putter under the moniker of Yar Golf. She got investors, she got production deals — and somewhere along the way she ended up not delivering on her promises. Hannan wrote about all of this for Grantland. He procured various interviews with Vanderbilt. He discovered her academic credentials weren’t real, her business partners were losing money on her claims, and that she’d been mired in lawsuits.
By itself, this is the setup for a genuinely good story — at least a Dateline NBC-level story. There’s intrigue and deception. There’s mystery. All this over a putter? Wild. But that’s not where it ended. Because Hannan found out Vanderbilt was trans, and he used it against her.
I wrote about this story when it was published and there was one moment that seemed particularly monstrous to me:
In his essay, Hannan details at least one scenario where he discussed Vanderbilt’s gender identity with an investor of hers, and it becomes clear as the article progresses that he viewed her transition as another aspect of her con. He casts her increasingly agitated email exchanges with him over the course of the reporting period as attempts to obscure his ability to tell the entire story. It probably didn’t occur to him that she didn’t want to discuss her gender or have her trans status publicized.
And yet, he did it. And it killed her. Vanderbilt committed suicide on October 18, 2013, almost exactly three months before the piece went to print. Hannan styled the final paragraphs of his essay as a ‘eulogy,’ clicked ‘save’ in his word processor, and sent it to his editors at Grantland, who had no problem publishing the final product.
What seemed blindingly obvious to me then and what seems blindingly obvious to me today have almost traded places. At the time I wrote my reaction to Hannan’s post — which was getting wide praise across the sportswriting world — I was appalled at the apparent inhumanity of it. How could this writer so distinctly ignore the pleas of his subject to not publish this irrelevant aspect of her life, even as he was exposing her scams? How could his editors look at this story and say, “fuck the human being we’re writing about, the story is all that matters?” I laid out the ethical reasons for nondisclosure according to the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics and everything.
Today I no longer doubt the inhumanity of the broader media industry when it comes to handling marginalized people, especially trans people. TERFs have overrun the Guardian’s op-ed page. Jordan Peterson and Jesse Singal can hold court on trans issues in any publication they want. “Rapid-onset Gender Dysphoria” is some weird bullshit that keeps popping up and keeps getting touted as a real thing. The media loves this shit and they will 100 percent lap it up. They are willing carnival barkers to whatever they deem to be the “freak show.”
Think about your goal. Think about their motive. Think about how they align. Think about how they might diverge in ways you find unpleasant. Don’t fucking collaborate with people who would dispassionately watch you die or gleefully have you killed.
I turn 27 on Tuesday. What is my goal in publishing this today, when I should be working on a long-overdue podcast episode, getting a haircut, or doing my laundry? I’ve been in this fucking coffee shop since 11. I have 25 percent battery life left and of course I left my charger at home. Would it surprise you that I’m coming out of a bout of depression? I’ve written about that here before. Am I lonely, alienated, stifled, trying to state “fundamental truths” but without the words to do so?
Nah, really I just saw some common threads running through a lot of the stories I’ve been exposed to and I thought, “fuck it, let’s talk about this shit.” Because I historically have been afraid of my own voice, and because when I’m feeling depressed or alienated I tend not to write.
What is Medium’s motive in letting me publish this piece? Well, on its face it’s because this is a free publishing service (that I’m paying $6/month for). But ideally it’s because my rambling post will generate clicks, which may generate some revenue, which may link to other posts on the site, and so on.
Where do my goals and Medium’s motives converge? Medium lets me publish whatever I want, and what I probably want, if I had to give you the ~Freudian take,~ is to feel validated by your clickthrough. Medium is more than happy to provide, and I’m more than happy to deliver.
There’s that final question, though, that’s kind of fucking with me right now as I get ready to hit “publish.”
Where do my goals and Medium’s motives split?
Well, perhaps in my writing about a sensitive personal topic, like my mental health, I might end up driving readers away. Maybe since the post itself isn’t SEO optimized, Medium might not push it through to various readers. These are pretty basic surface level divergences. But is there a deeper split here?
Medium is a blog service but it’s also, technically, a social media platform. Interactivity is a big deal for Medium, and there are trends it would like its creators and consumers to follow, content-wise. While the Medium Partner Program exists to allow writers to get paid for their work (and Medium will sometimes pull essays from Medium writers to add to curated publications and much, much greater pay), and while Medium readers can subscribe (now for $50/year!) to access premium content, much of the site is free for readers to access.
What data does Medium collect? Who does it give that data to? How does Medium’s relationship with these potential financial partners effect its content month-over-month, if it has any effect at all? And zooming back in, how does it effect me?
I haven’t written a lot this year. I did some stuff for New Normative, which was neat. But this post will be the first longform piece I’ve done in a very long time. And I’m just going to hit publish and let it sit here. That seems really weird.
Should I want to be wanted by Medium?