the outlier

twittertwatter, being watched, kardashianism and pole vault

hello,

Quite a long one this week so I won’t dally! Neither should you with my paid subscription…

This week paid subscribers received a short discourse on a new hero of mine and an introduction to the work of another with 5 quick and easy ways to get into the world of James Baldwin.

heroes + an introduction to James Baldwin

the books📖

The Superstrengths release date will be the last Thursday in August. As I said last week, we’ll roll with an increasing pricing strategy for the ebook to try and drive some early adopters and get those crucial reviews in. I previously thought we’d stagger the release of the different formats but now I think we’ll just make them all available at once which gives me a couple of weeks to do the audiobook version.

This week I took to TikTok Live to read Jane Austen’s Emma which was great fun and got a whole load of ‘do you do this all the time?’ and ‘you should read audiobooks for a job’ which makes me think spending a month later this year focussing on audio is a good idea. It’s a good opportunity to learn Substack’s audio possibilities, get a whole load of stuff out on my TikTok subscription, Audible and Spotify Premium and to give paid subscribers here a whole wealth of stuff to listen to as I can create a private podcast feed.

It will also be really, really fun and I’m particularly excited to pick a load of different stories to record. I’m thinking myths, legends, epic poems and the like so suggest some in the comments!

(Another push for my appearance on the Beyond Football podcast here or on YouTube here.)

me podcasting and a couple of my more wholesome preoccupations

for your interest

twittertwatter, being watched, kardashianism and pole vault

twittertwatter

I’ve got a confession to make. I love Twitter.

Since the Muskification, it feels totally unhinged and for someone like me who likes to be chaos adjacent rather than participating (I don’t tweet myself), Twitter provides the perfect place to indulge this peccadillo. I find the funniest things on Twitter and quite often, as I’ll share below, I find the things that interest me the most on there too.

Unfortunately, in the UK this week it’s been much less funny than usual and in the maelstrom of different ‘news’, I found what Rory Sutherland had to say in this interview enlightening. The opening question was both simple and complex: ‘What are you thinking about?’ His reply:

I think that question, by the way, is the right question to ask, which is — what we're talking about quite often is the product of a kind of media feedback loop where effectively every news publication and to some extent social media, but actually I think social media is less guilty in some ways than the mainstream media is — effectively decides what's important based on what other people are reporting.

Once you pay attention, you realise that many news stories are just articles about something someone tweeted. Football transfer rumours are the perfect low stakes way to see this in action, where a totally uninformed tweet can start a chain reaction that leads to an article in a broadsheet newspaper and the riots this week in the UK are the worst possible outcome of this sort of downstream information distortion; one incorrect tweet provided a spark that resulted in an ongoing storm of outrageous behaviour.

Sutherland goes on to say that ‘what determines our sense of priority and our sense of importance is often our attention’ and our attention is naturally co-opted by our news sources. Prior to Musk’s takeover there was a partial version of events going on, one that excluded the frightening factions we’ve seen speak up this week. Without their voices, it felt like they weren’t there.

I think that despite the mess it makes, I am all for free speech, something that clearly wasn’t going on before, and rather than pretend these people don’t exist, I feel like it’s a good thing I can see them. It’s also good that everyone else can see them. We can all unite and they can face some consequences.

being watched

I’ve spoken about the idea of the panopticon before (watch NBA player Jaylen Brown explain the concept here) but in short, it’s a prison design where one guard can control all the prisoners at once because they cannot know if they are being watched or not at any given time.

Social media provides this function. We can see it in the events of this week where clips are published as evidence of misdeeds and to push various agendas.

While you could argue this sort of surveillance has some truth-telling utility, there is a more trivial but perhaps more chilling version as evidenced by a famous TikTok incident where a man was outed for appearing to cheat on his wife. The video went super viral, with a general atmosphere of virtuosity and triumphalism, but this it’s worth watching this take from someone called @prettycritical who explained that,

Posts like these fundamentally value entertainment over privacy but position themselves as forms of activism or justice. To those participating and celebrating this kind of behavior: “Your addiction to surveillance and attention is betraying the fact that, although you’re the exact demographic to call yourselves girls’ girls, your only allegiance is to your own entertainment.

The worrying side of it all is the sheer thrill people take in perpetuating the panopticon, that these acts of surveillance are ultimately for entertainment, ours and someone else’s. Largely anything you post is ultimately in service of the platform it’s posted on but you have to consider, who and what is really being served by what you post? And by what you watch?

kardashianism

I found the work of mj corey on Twitter this week when she tweeted a comment about photos of Charli XCX’s birthday party being heavily styled like the mid-2000s. Her comment appealed to the English Literature student side of my brain:

for me these hyperreal "party pictures" say that nothing is back -- in fact, something we maybe hoped we could recall is irrevocably OVER.

Aside from her work as a therapist, Corey spends a lot of time thinking about this sort of stuff, writing with an academic eye about the Kardashians and their cultural significance. I really enjoyed this interview with her where she outlines how the Kardashians are great authors:

What initially drew me to their content was a fascination, as a writer, with their mastery of narrative formulas. They use macro and micro-narratives–there’s the big story of Kim Kardashian and her American dream which serves as an umbrella for mini-episodic narratives. Every little scene has its own arc, and every Instagram story has its own arc. If I reflect on it, what I get really passionate about comes down to narrative.

I used to enjoy listening to the High/Low podcast because it acknowledged that these mass amusements are just as worthy of real time analysis as ‘high’ culture, that the things that most people watch are not pure triviality but that their popularity has some inherent meaning and interest. This week’s letter has been very online, concerned with algorithms and intentions and corey posits that the Kardashians understand all of this very well:

I think they pretty much know what to deliver us and feed us. The algorithms know us better than we know ourselves, and the Kardashians are an algorithm at this point. I think the reason they’ve gotten so good at this is because they are very good at reflecting the culture of the time.

Reflecting the culture of the time is what great storytelling is. You can read The Great Gatsby and understand that era. mj corey can look at the Kardashians and understand this one.

pole vault

The Kardashians and the Twitterati are telling stories at today’s hyper pace and given how quickly the news moves (can you recall the big stories of even 2 weeks ago?), I feel like the pace of nostalgia is increasing too. Given a lot of this week’s letter is concerned with images and their reproduction, it feels appropriate to chuck a Baudrillard quote in the mix,

When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.

One of my favourite happenings this week was Sweden's Armand Duplantis breaking the pole vault world record. It was amazing.

But Duplantis had already won the gold medal with an Olympic record-breaking attempt and celebrated by pulling a pose mimicking gone-viral Turkish pistoller Yusuf Dikec, whose nonchalant silver medal-winning shooting stance amused everyone so much. Duplantis recalling the previous week’s events feels perfect for our time, an act of rememberance and a demonstration of being in on the joke.

So it was reassuring that when he broke the world record with his next vault, he was less considered about it. Instead of posing, Duplantis ran off to celebrate with his girlfriend and family in the stands nearby. It’s nice to think there are still some moments that can be enjoyed full stop.

a book

I’m going to give Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (amazon / independents) another push. It’s really stuck with me.

Right now I am enjoying a biography of Marie Colvin, someone I’ve always wanted to learn about and now I’ve finally taken the plunge, and I am really, really enjoying the new Sally Rooney novel Intermezzo which comes out in September. I’m not far off finishing so I’ll reserve final judgment but right now, I’m thinking it might be her best book yet.

a listen

Saying ‘brat summer’ is annoying but I actually love the music. If this grubby pop is not your thing and you’d prefer a fun podcast, this How Long Gone chat with author Jonathan Lethem (classmate of Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt at Bennington) is super fun.

a quote

I have Asthma, allergies, dyslexia, ADD, anxiety, and Depression. But I will tell you that what you have does not define what you can become. Why Not You!

– Noah Lyles

lastly

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I’ll see you next time.

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