Your writing -- from Formula 1 reportage to McMansion Hell to Baffler articles about the old internet to Siegfried chapters on your neocities -- have delighted, inspired, encouraged, and provoked me for years. I think I speak for many people when I say: I feel better living in a world that has people who think and write like you do, despite all the shit. I know sympathy as a reaction to an essay like this can seem trite or completely in step with the enshittified social media cycle, but my life has been enriched by your writing. Thank you.
Thank you AC -- this means the world to me, really. (Especially because some of my more obscure projects are mentioned!) I think that the way things are makes it really difficult to remember that people *do* read and enjoy what I (and other writers) write, especially as we become more and more separated from our audiences at the same time as we become more and more intimate with them. It's another paradox! Anyway, all this to say, you're the best,
You're very welcome! It's a stupid and hellish state of affairs that writers get so much more exposure to readers' anger and critiques, rather than their appreciation. Wishing you endless good luck! (And also wishing that a well-funded and well-resourced media organisation with an adventurous yet rigorous editorial team and unwavering ethics offer you a stable union contract!)
I’m going to be earnest for a second because you were too in this piece:
Your writing has made my life, frankly, better. The way you write about cycling is the thing that made me love the sport, and I am truly grateful. Your writing has made me realise that sports, and the way we think and talk about them, can be so much deeper, more political, and more beautiful than I had thought.
You probably don’t give yourself enough credit when you say that writing is the only thing you can do but I will say that you are, as you hopefully have internalised, a hell of a writer and thinker. And while I completely agree with your overall diagnosis of the particular dead-end we’re in culturally and socially, I will say (perhaps with some biased hope as an academic) that people who take the time to think and read and write deeply are important to anything we can build in the aftermath of all of this burning down.
I don’t know how to end this and it does feel a tiny bit overfamiliar but I guess one of the things that’s wrong with our current discourse is the lack of earnestness, lack of vulnerability and lack of real human connection — even if those things are there it sure is gauche to acknowledge them, a very 2010s way of talking online if you will. I guess what I’m trying to say is: solidarity, and also, thank you.
You really articulated something I've felt in my chest for a long time but could never find the words for. That this is crazy, that fear is the rational response to our industrial conditions. I'm a young writer, and looking at the industry the last year or two it seems not even like there's no future, but like there's not even really a present. There's no coherent fabric, just the acid taste of slop.
I was reading this while listening to my crank wave playlist and that definitely gave the whole experience a certain essence of dark maw-staring. You're always good at giving voice to what is beyond words for most people so thank you for that.
To the extent that we're peers -and I wouldn't give myself that honorific- I have to say it is near-impossible to write anything these days. I've barely strung together 1000 words since my book came out. Even writing this is comment is fueled by procrastination toward finishing my syllabus. I start putting ideas to the page and I immediately start to self-censor. I either start worrying about my health insurance or -somehow this is worse- feel as though I've argued the opposite of whatever I'm writing somewhere else at some other time. I also start to feel hopeless as I think about my other writing and realizing the publication it appeared in is either long-gone or has put up an impenetrable paywall that even I, THE AUTHOR, cannot get around. It really feels like the death of culture around here.
David your work is great and I loved your book so much. We are absolutely peers. I wish the better for both of us. If I find a way to destroy the cop in my head (and I think because we travel in similar lefty urbanist circles our bullies have the same faces) I’ll pass the information along to everyone. Keep doing what you do.
Thank you. Funny to phrase it this way, but this is a beautiful, resonant, important, and wrenching piece. It can't have been, or be, easy, to understate things a bit. Though, in a strange way, it sounds like you're very much on the right track and have found a really good and healthy relationship to "it all."
This is also the first of yours I've read (knowingly, at least) and quite easily the best I've read in a long while. I subscribed and paid, even as you have shown how clear it is (or can be) that it's pretty much impossible to act within and through any of these platforms' choice architectures and not share a meager but profound complicity in reinforcing the paradigm, as it were. Onward?
Your writing -- from Formula 1 reportage to McMansion Hell to Baffler articles about the old internet to Siegfried chapters on your neocities -- have delighted, inspired, encouraged, and provoked me for years. I think I speak for many people when I say: I feel better living in a world that has people who think and write like you do, despite all the shit. I know sympathy as a reaction to an essay like this can seem trite or completely in step with the enshittified social media cycle, but my life has been enriched by your writing. Thank you.
Thank you AC -- this means the world to me, really. (Especially because some of my more obscure projects are mentioned!) I think that the way things are makes it really difficult to remember that people *do* read and enjoy what I (and other writers) write, especially as we become more and more separated from our audiences at the same time as we become more and more intimate with them. It's another paradox! Anyway, all this to say, you're the best,
Kate
You're very welcome! It's a stupid and hellish state of affairs that writers get so much more exposure to readers' anger and critiques, rather than their appreciation. Wishing you endless good luck! (And also wishing that a well-funded and well-resourced media organisation with an adventurous yet rigorous editorial team and unwavering ethics offer you a stable union contract!)
I’m going to be earnest for a second because you were too in this piece:
Your writing has made my life, frankly, better. The way you write about cycling is the thing that made me love the sport, and I am truly grateful. Your writing has made me realise that sports, and the way we think and talk about them, can be so much deeper, more political, and more beautiful than I had thought.
You probably don’t give yourself enough credit when you say that writing is the only thing you can do but I will say that you are, as you hopefully have internalised, a hell of a writer and thinker. And while I completely agree with your overall diagnosis of the particular dead-end we’re in culturally and socially, I will say (perhaps with some biased hope as an academic) that people who take the time to think and read and write deeply are important to anything we can build in the aftermath of all of this burning down.
I don’t know how to end this and it does feel a tiny bit overfamiliar but I guess one of the things that’s wrong with our current discourse is the lack of earnestness, lack of vulnerability and lack of real human connection — even if those things are there it sure is gauche to acknowledge them, a very 2010s way of talking online if you will. I guess what I’m trying to say is: solidarity, and also, thank you.
You really articulated something I've felt in my chest for a long time but could never find the words for. That this is crazy, that fear is the rational response to our industrial conditions. I'm a young writer, and looking at the industry the last year or two it seems not even like there's no future, but like there's not even really a present. There's no coherent fabric, just the acid taste of slop.
Thank you so much for writing this.
glad to know that im not the only one gripped by The Fear
well said
I was reading this while listening to my crank wave playlist and that definitely gave the whole experience a certain essence of dark maw-staring. You're always good at giving voice to what is beyond words for most people so thank you for that.
To the extent that we're peers -and I wouldn't give myself that honorific- I have to say it is near-impossible to write anything these days. I've barely strung together 1000 words since my book came out. Even writing this is comment is fueled by procrastination toward finishing my syllabus. I start putting ideas to the page and I immediately start to self-censor. I either start worrying about my health insurance or -somehow this is worse- feel as though I've argued the opposite of whatever I'm writing somewhere else at some other time. I also start to feel hopeless as I think about my other writing and realizing the publication it appeared in is either long-gone or has put up an impenetrable paywall that even I, THE AUTHOR, cannot get around. It really feels like the death of culture around here.
David your work is great and I loved your book so much. We are absolutely peers. I wish the better for both of us. If I find a way to destroy the cop in my head (and I think because we travel in similar lefty urbanist circles our bullies have the same faces) I’ll pass the information along to everyone. Keep doing what you do.
The cop in my head looks like Zoomer Le Corbusier :(
For real tho that means a lot! And you keep doing you for as long as you can! You're one of the best voices of our generation!
Will do my best! Also zoomer le corbusier is such a powerful image
Thank you. Funny to phrase it this way, but this is a beautiful, resonant, important, and wrenching piece. It can't have been, or be, easy, to understate things a bit. Though, in a strange way, it sounds like you're very much on the right track and have found a really good and healthy relationship to "it all."
This is also the first of yours I've read (knowingly, at least) and quite easily the best I've read in a long while. I subscribed and paid, even as you have shown how clear it is (or can be) that it's pretty much impossible to act within and through any of these platforms' choice architectures and not share a meager but profound complicity in reinforcing the paradigm, as it were. Onward?
onward indeed (in spite of and in service to ourselves!) Thanks for the sub and for the kind words!
I quit writing years ago because I already couldn't take it and this is exactly why it often feels hopeless to try. Not much more to say!
yawn…
If you want real hopelessness try being a Canadian writer.