Back when the internet was a teenager, I ran a graduate literary journal—one of the most thankless jobs on the planet. Midway through the year, we hosted a reading at a fancy cafe with a nice snack spread. At first, we were worried that nobody was going to show up. We were wrong. Everyone showed up at the end, for the free wine and the featured author. They skipped the rest.
The other readers were annoyed.
At me.
“If you really cared about us, you would’ve had the featured author go on first. That way, everyone would’ve shown up on time.”
A few months later, we hosted another event. We spent hundreds of dollars on catering, and hundreds of dollars on a guest speaker—a visual artist who did a lot of work with literary themes.
He went first.
Hundreds of people showed up on time.
When he was done, more than half the audience abruptly got up and left. They didn’t stay for the poems inspired by his work. They knew the event wasn’t over. They just didn’t care. The poets were annoyed.
At me.
“If you really cared about us, you would’ve had the featured artist go last. That way, everyone would’ve stayed.”
For some reason, I never learned my lesson. For years, I continued to plan and host events for the literary, artistic, and academic communities. I didn’t always want to do it. Sometimes the job was thrust on me.
When my tenure as editor ended, the next editor got twice as much pay and double the budget. “The department felt kind of bad for not supporting you better,” she told me. “You did so much.” A few months later, I was supposed to give her a ride to a conference. When I showed up at her house, she wasn’t there.
Three times, she texted me:
“I’ll be there soon. We’re having drinkings.”
“I’ll be there soon. We’re having drinkings.”
“I’ll be there soon. We’re having drinkings.”
After 45 minutes, I did something a little unusual for me.
I drove off.
She was angry. She wrote me a very long email the next day. I didn’t open it. A few years after that, I ran into her.
She finally apologized.
For some reason, I still didn’t learn my lesson. Instead, I continued to plan events. Guests seemed to treat their presence as a gift. Meanwhile, I showed up to every reading and signing I could. I bought books. I reviewed them in local newspapers. I promoted local authors. I interviewed them. I got them stipends and speaker fees. I organized contests. They loved it.
When I graduated and published my first book (under a different name), none of them showed up. They declined to write blurbs. They made invitations and rescinded them. They made promises and didn’t follow through. My thesis chair forgot to write me a letter of recommendation for jobs. Down the line, someone finally explained to me I should’ve been furious. That was literally his job.
At my first book festival, one of my mentors handed my novel back to my publisher and laughed when he asked for help promoting it.
Then he walked off.
Later, I ran into another mentor and tried to give him a compliment on some artwork he had on display. He looked embarrassed.
He cut me off.
Sometime around then, I went to a faculty reading. There was wine afterward. The department chair walked up to me and started talking. I tried to congratulate him and his colleagues on an award they’d won.
He said, “And what have you accomplished lately?”
He walked off.
Nothing is ever wasted on an observant person. My time in the academic literary worlds taught me something valuable.
These authors, poets, and professors complained on a regular basis about the death of art and literature. They complained about Dan Brown and Stephen King. They complained about chain bookstores. They did virtually nothing to support good content, then they mourned its loss.
Years later, I see the same thing happening with the internet. I see tons of people complaining about it. I see tons of backlash against artificial intelligence and content that promotes fascism. I see tons of people lining up to support content creators who tell them what they want to hear. These people turn right around and complain about the lack of good content online.
Recently, I learned that a number of companies do usability tests for the explicit purpose of finding out how much they can let their products degrade before people quit using them. How cutthroat.
And yet…
People continue to use crappy, mediocre products. They continue to settle for the bare minimum. They seem to want it.
They want to passively consume what’s in front of them. They want what’s cheap and minimally effective. When someone dares to give them something better, that costs a little bit more, they complain. When someone offers them the challenging content they want, they throw stones.
This is the American way.
In a final twist of irony, many of these people will complain when they get what they want. The monopolies consolidate their death grip and quality plunges. People mouth some bullshit about justice and move on.
Recently, I had to paywall most of my content. One of my long-time readers decided to send me a note. I’ll summarize:
Do you have any idea how much I’d have to pay if I actually supported all the writers, musicians, artists, and teachers I benefit from? It’s not fair! The internet should be free. I want you to succeed, but I’m unfollowing you because I disagree with the model you’ve adopted.
So, someone finally said the quiet part out loud.
It’s interesting that these people always send their missives to me. Do they talk to Hamish McKenzie with that mouth?
I doubt it.
For the last two years, people have yanked their support for all kinds of trivial, superficial, petty reasons. My experiences here reflect the broader culture we live in now. The minute someone does something we don’t like, we seek to punish them because everything should always be exactly what we want, and if it’s not, we can just go out and find more disposable content.
It’s a toxic pattern.
We live in an era of increasingly cheap, throwaway content produced in the most expedient way because that’s what most people have been seeking out and rewarding. They complain about Emily in Paris, but they continue watching it, don’t they? One reader even told me she didn’t have to support my work because there were “plenty of other writers” out there who gave her the kind of content she wanted. She made this comment because she didn’t like one sentence out of a 3,000-word, carefully researched article she otherwise loved.
I used to think these people simply vanished. No, they continue to read, share, and benefit from your work after their mic drop.
They’re just sneaky about it.
I’ve lost count of the people who’ve said they valued my writing but weren’t going to support it for some reason they made up. They do this because they believe the internet will magically continue to deliver them high-quality articles and videos that do exactly what they want, free of charge. They want to consume content a la carte, with no regard for the labor that goes into it.
The internet has fragmented into a series of echo chambers. Conservatives, liberals, and independents all claim to want the truth. In reality, they’re mostly interested in their own versions of it. They want to feel good. They all think they’re entitled to a constant stream of original, thought-provoking content the minute they turn on their screens. They claim to want hard truths, but they want those hard truths directed at someone else. They think it’s always going to be there.
So they don’t ascribe any value to it.
A few months ago, I stumbled across a viral tweet thread. Some influencer had assembled a big list of tools that would allow you to crack your way through any paywall to access any kind of content you wanted. He was using that to promote his own brand. I thought to myself:
This. This is what’s wrong with the internet.
This. This. This.
People can blame Microsoft and Google all they want for the deplorable state of the internet. They can get angry at Mark and Elon and Jack, too. But this entitled consumer behavior has also played a major role. When you treat every content creator as disposable, then you wind up with a disposable internet.
When you trash good content, you get trash content.
It’s that simple.