1/ I've been an editor for almost two decades, in print an online, and I’ve seen firsthand the tectonic shifts that have happened across this business. And, folks, I have some thoughts on this George Packer piece in the Atlantic.https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/packer-hitchens/605365/ …
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8/ Packer argues that having made their deal with the devil, today’s writers are “always vulnerable to being punished for your independence by one group or another, or, even worse, ignored,” and that “standing on your own… [is] no longer considered honorable or desirable.”
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9/ Maybe so, but today if your pieces don't land—i.e., you are “ignored”—you're also going to be punished by an inability to make rent, and be considered insolvent. As a young freelancer wrote me this morning:
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10/ “I can’t be out here taking weird/aggressive stands because I don’t have…any institutional backing…health insurance…savings…a strong desire to do something else for a living…confidence...[or] editors who want aggressive shit. So yeah, writing gets hard.”
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11/ Packer writes, “The fear [of incorrectness] is more subtle and, in a way, more crippling [then fear of being killed]. It’s the fear of moral judgment, public shaming, social ridicule, and ostracism. It’s the fear of landing on the wrong side of whatever group matters to you.”
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12/ And while I personally have no patience for groupthink or ideological thinking, I’m pretty well-situated in my career. For a young writer today, membership in an ideological community works the way membership in any community has always worked:
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13/ You play by the collective rules, and they protect you. A hundred thousand years ago, they protected you from animal predators. Today, they protect you from the panicked whims of publishers and owners, and the cruelty and stupidity of the content economy.
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14/ Second, unlike previous generations, writers today can expect little or no support, legal or otherwise, from the publications that run their work—as evidenced by standard contracts that all but explicitly say: If the Shit Goes Down, You, Writer, Are On Your Own.
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15/ The “shit” in this case can be legal—a legit or nuisance defamation suit—but it can be a Twitter mob. In the latter case, publications want to stir the pot, but not so much that it gets all over them. When it does, as it did with my friend Luke O’Neil and the Boston Globe...
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16/ ...the writer can expect to be piously and publicly excommunicated, even though the piece was edited, approved, and published by the publication. Again, that means less income for the writer. So why bother stirring the pot at all?
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17/ Third, Packer imagines young writers always asking themselves, “Can I say this? Do I have a right? Is my terminology correct?” And yes in one light that internal voice seems like self-censorship and an unwillingness to speak truth—internalizing the “thought police." But...
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18/ “Internalizing the thought police” is also a pretty good description of “having a conscience.” So instead of writing off a whole generation for being lazy or fearful herd fauna, let’s at least allow for the possibility that some of them are in fact trying to be moral.
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19/ I know I’m generalizing, and I know that some writers are sincerely playing to their allies, as many writers always have. Everyone writes for different reasons, some good, some bad, often several at the same time, in the same piece.
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20/ And I know that writing has always paid badly for most people (even if there was at least the chance of advancement, which is a pipe-dream for most today). And I know that I, too, often bitch about a scarcity of bold and interesting work out there.
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21/ But you can’t separate the quality of the work being done from the economic conditions it’s happening under. And I'm not going to expect young writers to go broke just so I can have something good to read on the train.
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