Scrawled in Wax

First, a minor digression: in all the hubbub over the Gawker clusterfuck and that NYT piece, it was easy to forget just how damn well Emily Gould can put a sentence together. I mean, like, really, intimidatingly well. The same goes for Moe Tkacik. But writer-crushes are a conversation for another time. Probably while I’m lying backwards on a leather couch talking about my mother. Anyway.

In this lovely piece, Gould talks about why she writes for free, largely in response to this n+1 piece on online literacy and culture. It was an article we all bookmarked and really wanted to find a reason to agree with, but couldn’t because it  simply articulated the same formal and structural problems with the web we already knew. Thanks a lot. We need more pessimism these days.

But what Gould cleverly points out in this piece is:

• ‘The Internet’ is not simply one thing. It is no more ludicrous to say ‘the culture of the internet’ than it is to say ‘the culture of the world’.
• the internet is not a text. Gould argues that this is because you find what you`re looking for. I`d add that I think all texts ultimately act this way, but what’s different about the web is that it’s a network of texts and databases and cannot be understood solely through the view of textuality. You will find what you’re looking for long before you actually start looking,  because the web is not a passive medium.
• writing for free sustains the really cool smart work you find on places like The Awl or, well, nplusonemagazine.
• Writing for free and getting paid for it are symbiotic, not mutually exclusive ideas. Accept it. This is the new world.

To this, all I want to add is ideology. (Hear that sound? That’s the clicking sound of the Marxist brain implant they force you to get when you get into grad school.) There is a relationship between economic networks of distribution and the reception of ideas. No-one will pay you to say things that people don’t think they want to hear (but might after actually hearing them) or to say things that only a tiny number of people care about. Writing for free – coupled with: a) the web’s low barriers to entry; b) the difficulty in controlling flows of information on non-linear, asynchronous networks; -  allows you to say things that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to.

Of course, we all have bills to pay. I’m unabashed about the fact that this blog is partly meant to kickstart a writing career (and, in fact, is already responsible for starting it). But it isn’t just about creating a brand of oneself: it’s about writing for its own reward; of writing against the grain; and writing things and one’s self into being.