The new chaddering class
Clavicular, Polymarket, and the illusion of mass taste
I finally saw Wuthering Heights last week…and absolutely hated it. For such a weirdo book and a supposedly weirdo director, it was an amazing disappointment. I can’t believe it didn’t end with the coffin scene from the novel, especially when we know Miss Fennell isn’t above some creepy grave provocations. My advice: don’t bother rereading the book / just tune out your girlfriend’s convoluted 45-minute “plot summary” that she forces upon you while walking to the theater. You’ll leave the movie so smooth-brained and happy, wondering why she’s still steaming mad about being cheated out of the neurochemically altering freak shit that was promised.
A question that has lately presented itself over and over more urgently in the water lately: In the age of content, what do we want journalism for? Is it to serve as a purely democratic mirror reflecting back the tastes of the “masses”? That’s what Jeff Bezos says he’s going for à la stripping down the Washington Post so that it’s not so much a newspaper as it is yet another customizable data-driven content feed.
But what if the “masses” ye speak of, as in the case of most of February, are a lode-bearing audience of terminally online young men who turbo-charged one of their extremist mascots — the 20-year-old looksmaxxer known as Clavicular — into the mainstream? For the highly specific Joe Bernstein-favoured oddity treatment, we might allow it. But peg the angle a little too close to your typical get-ready-with-me celeb credulousness, and you get howls of outrage over GQ “platforming” the same guy naught but a week later. As it turns out, the vaunted, possibly fabled “reader” would prefer some kind of curation from her journalistic outlets, or at least for us to pay him the compliment of assuming his tastes are not so base as they seem.
Is it journalism’s job to preserve the sanctity of semi-secretive communities, or to air them out for heightened public awareness (and that double-edged sword of critical consumption)? Alex Jung’s New York cover story on Heated Rivalry, fujoshi, and slash fiction — and thereby the entire subcutaneous universe of fanfiction online — raised hackles for training too bright of a spotlight on a subculture accustomed to its mossy, undisturbed corners. By the logic of some, such as the mega-irked fanfic writers, journalism sure looks like it’s mostly about blowing up the spot and ruining the fun for the real heads.
So is journalism discretion? Is journalism promotion? Is journalism strictly supposed to be the middleman between your eyeballs and someone’s advertising dollars? Is journalism only asking follow-up questions in order to juice your “completed listens” metric up on the pod? Is journalism actually just a prediction market that now more than ever is ungatekeeping the ability to hawk vibes-based truth to the dumbest bidder? A better question: And so what? Even better: So now what?
Possible silver lining to the Clavicular et. al press run (which, pro tip for up-and-coming personalities of all stripes: To make it into “mainstream media” consciousness, simply plan a trip to New York. As Luke Winkie put it to me recently, this is the post-travel budget media industry now, babe!), which is that we now have some new compelling candidates for a diminishing breed — that of the New Promising Young Media Guy.
You used to find these 20-something white dudes cluttering up the bylines at MEL Magazine (RIP), Vice (RIP x 2), Gawker, and olde Twitter, wherein they would then be summarily harvested by the institutional outlets for their writerly verve/online following/choice of hipster eyewear. But in the era of the girlstack, the pipeline of next-gen Winkies and Bernsteins has been left sorely bereft. Until now! Just when we needed them most, a new cohort of young white media men have materialized to help explain the young white online men. Charlie Sosnick and Kieran Press-Reynolds, it’s your game to win now. The prize: a full-time job…………somewhere...
One more thing: I do think Joe’s story on Clavicular is worth reading, if only for this excerpt, which underscores more than anything about how secondary the matter of actually having actual sex is to this demographic, versus the knowledge of being desired:
Inside, under the eye of a docent, Clavicular petted a sturgeon. He recoiled. (“It’s like when you drop your phone in the toilet,” he said, later excusing himself to “hand-sanitizer-maxx.”) He and Ms. Kirk wandered into a section called “Bizarre and Beautiful.” They pressed their noses up against a tank of luminescent jellyfish.
But they didn’t touch. Though Clavicular’s aesthetic ideal is hypermasculine, he believes he is currently infertile because of testosterone replacement therapy, which can affect fertility. Earlier that day, Clavicular confessed that knowing he could have sex with a woman was in some ways better than the deed itself, which “is going to gain me nothing.”
“It’s a big time saver,” he said.
Meanwhile, we finally know what the follow-up to the influencer is. Per Carson Griffith in Airmail, meet the “Bop:”
Depending on whom you ask, it stands for Baddie On Point, Body On Payroll, or Blown-Out followed by an anatomical reference. The term is elastic. The mechanics are not. Influencers sell products. Bops sell access to themselves.
The algorithm does not care whether it is moving lip gloss or proximity to a private story. And the audience is not just bachelor-party finance bros or anonymous avatars with burner accounts. It’s also 16-year-old girls watching from their bedrooms, absorbing the choreography of monetized desirability as if it were an extracurricular.
Good luck everybody!
I’ve thought about this tweet every day since.
On the old internet, you were in charge. You said “show me this” and built your own rabbit holes. The new internet says “you’ll probably like this” over and over to keep the feedback loop open. mymind has old internet vibes, making a space to nurture pure curiosity again <3
