Venkatesh Rao

In a way it was a supernova that exploded. The heavy elements are streaming across the world. What’s left behind is a very pretty nebula and a rapidly spinning neutron star. Still interesting to engage in other ways, but no longer the most vital source of writing-energy around.

I don’t think I’ve found alternative collective unconscious energies to tap into since 2015. I’ve become more self-sustaining/self-contained. Kinda like how space missions tend to switch from solar power to onboard nuclear power beyond Jupiter.

There are no big, public, external psyche energy sources now. Since SV went supernova (what was the precipitating event?) the world’s cultural energy landscape has become a lot more diffuse. SV pre-2015 was pretty unique. It was a huge ball of solutionism fusion energy.

It’s still financially thriving and the deal-making goes on even more furiously, but it now more of a New York style financial energy. A superego/ego energy. Not the more id-like solutionist energy that is great for writers to tap into.

SV will remain a finically center for a long time. It’s been a century or more since New York and London went though similar phase transitions and they’re still citadels of high finance. Sandhill Road has merely joined the ranks of Wall Street and the London financial district.

Cultural energy landscapes go through cycles of being plugged into a late-stage supergiant stars versus being unplugged/out in the cold. You can see that reflected in writing. Lost Generation and Bloomsbury Set both show signs of a great unplugging from Robber Baron economy.

When big solutionist energy sources decline, cultural producers often try to tap into problemist energies instead — the energy fields around institutions built around big problems. This is almost always a mistake. You don’t get energized by such fields, you get captured by them.

The thing is, solutionist energy fields, like the one around Moore’s Law, feed you an abundance surplus. They don’t have an agenda for you because you’re too unimportant. So it’s free energy. You don’t have to toe the party line (of course there’s one) unless you actually buy it.

But Problemist energy fields... they have plans for you. They traffic in scarcity games around problems that need to be kept alive and managed to perpetuate the institutions. Cultural producers are more important in this scheme of things and their freedoms are reined in more.

To the extent there’s a literary-industrial complex (or cultural-industrial complex) around SV, it’s pretty laissez-faire. Any problems with your work, any cringe earnestness or hustleporn quality, is your own problem. Not the result of a party line.

By contrast Solutionist energy fields (like say the old economy one centered in New York)... boy do they come with strings attached. There are enforcers and gatekeepers and tastemakers and such at every bloody turn. This energy will destroy your soul if you draw on it too long.

Fall in line and produce by their recipes, they’ll love you. Violate any of a thousand subtle production norms, and they’ll turn on you. If you’re incompetent they’ll simply ignore you. If you violate their tastes but draw attention they claim, they will try to cut you down. Etc.

So in the absence of big solutionist energy fields, I strongly recommend you wander off into the desert on your own, without whatever energy source you can strap onto your back. If you accept problemist energy bargains you’ll likely regret it.

Energy in this sense is some mix of inspiration, energizing ideological commitments etc. But money is a pretty good proxy for it. If you’re a cultural producer, your money source is a pretty good proxy for your energy. So be careful and discerning in whose money you take.

Solutionist energy sources = laissez-faire cultural economy that can fail by producing tone-deaf smarmy cringe Problemist energy sources = cultural command economy that can fail by producing overwrought incestuous taste-swamp slime IMO It is easier to do good work in the former

Diffuse energy landscapes requiring self-contained energy sources... they can fail by being too self-absorbed and inscrutably idiosyncratic. Think mediocre autodidact tomes nobody reads or precious and self-important indie films nobody watches.

This is the great risk of the inward-turned domestic cozy place we’re in now. It’s going to be so easy and tempting to withdraw from broader cultural landscapes altogether and focus on “what sparks joy” a lot of people are going to do just that, and spend years producing dreck.

Staying plugged in beyond domestic walls will be fairly painful and energy-draining in the next decade, but if you can do it, it’ll be like buying into a cultural options lottery. You’ll have a shot at doing something that finds a place in a 2020s New Lost Generation canon.

To bring it back around to my own writing, despite a weird second wind for the Gervais principle, riding a second wind for The Office, I think 80% my old writing is no longer relevant. It’s too 2010s. I was aiming for “timeless” at the time, but turns out there’s no such thing.