It is now September but back in July the #ChallengeAccepted movement occurred on Instagram. If you took part in it, you probably read something from someone criticising it. If you didn’t take part in it, you probably criticised it. Or maybe, like me, you watched on with intrigue and debated whether to say something or not and then eventually discovered it originated from Turkey. Then it didn’t. Then it did. Then it didn’t? Then you threw your phone at the wall. You didn’t know what was true anymore and you gave up trying. The most frustrating thing about that movement was the airtime it took up. We like to think the internet remains on our laptops and phones, but it doesn’t. Online discourse infiltrates our physical realities, whether we take part in it or not. If you didn’t have Instagram, you still would have sat through conversations about #ChallengeAccepted. And what became overwhelmingly clear in July was the pressure on individuals to say something. Pick a side, get informed, project that information. Go. The reason that movement resulted in me throwing my phone at the wall wasn’t because people posted a black and white selfie. If you wanted to, great. It was the all-consuming rhetoric and debate around it that I’d allowed myself to be consumed in when I could have, I don’t know, been writing this newsletter? And the reason I was all-consumed by it was this overwhelming pressure to say something. I have a feeling I wasn’t the only one.
I was reminded of this simmering frustration yesterday while listening to the author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Longform podcast. Coates made his name as a national correspondent for The Atlantic before writing his bestselling book, Between The World And Me, a meditation on living as a Black man in America. Toni Morrison hailed him the James Baldwin of his time, and he has a handful of books to his name now. In the Longform podcast, Coates reflected on recently guest-editing the September issue of Vanity Fair while protests continued across the United States. While he worked, he felt this weight. “There’s this pressure to say something. Say something. The world’s burning, say something. But I try to stay where I’ve been or where I’ve tried to be for most of my career, and that is longform [journalism],” Coates said. “Good things take time. You gotta let things cook. You gotta let it simmer. You can’t Insta-bake something like this.”
The rise of social media in our lives has not only left us scrolling through an incessant pool of projections from other people. It has deluded us into the belief that good things don’t take time. Opinions can be drawn quickly. Art is produced fast. And maybe, crucially, a life can be reduced to a profile. And as we navigate the world through the home base of our own profiles, we project our own identities. Our complicated selves are quickly packaged up into neat personal brands. In order for that brand to remain relevant, it must continue saying something and that something must be in line with the brand. If you do not say something, the brand suffers. If you say the wrong thing, the brand suffers. So we go about our days developing opinions on everything in line with the selves we project on the internet. When in reality, we live in messy existences driven by contradictions and inconsistencies and opinions yet to be formed. In an epic conversation with Rick Rubin last year, Pharrell said something wonderful about the human condition and what it contributes to music that machines cannot. “There’s a different thing that man has that the machines don’t,” Pharrell said. “It’s an intuitiveness. Intuition and prediction are two different things. And so the machine can give you a bunch of predictive equations for examples of some changes you might like, or things you might like to do [to the song], and make some interesting suggestions, but it’s predictive and it’s based on different variations. Whereas intuition is like, ‘No, go completely left’.”
Individual brands and social media algorithms are predictive and leave little room to go left. Yet humans are inconsistent beings driven by our intuitiveness and our feelings that are, more often than not, irrational. We forget this when we reduce ourselves to fit into platforms and pressure ourselves to deliver opinions as quickly as the algorithm refills the feed. Our feelings are not predictive and cannot be distributed on scale. They also take time to process. Unfortunately, the pressure to say something isn’t going to go away because the architecture of the internet supports it. The feed will always need to be scrolled. What we can control, though, is when we choose to buy in and how much we choose to buy in. The answer to that question, of course, lies in our contribution. How much can you contribute to this conversation? Is this argument worth your time? Is this contributing to your awareness or feeding your ego? Or is this taking time away from something useful you could be contributing to? “If I’m in that world [of debating trolls] then I can’t do Vanity Fair. I don’t have the time or the mental energy to do the big thing,” Coates said. “I have really had to try to make sure I am exercising some discipline over myself, that I’m doing the work that I’m supposed to be doing that captures my imagination and the questions that I really want to answer.” We all have the ability to say something quickly, but the value, the goodness each one of us can bring to a bigger conversation is different. Maybe we can’t all guest-edit Vanity Fair but we all have some good we can be doing somewhere. Only you will know what it is but what I know for sure is that this good thing will always take time; because it is driven by your intuition, your humanness. That is our magic, and we must not forget that. Don’t rush. Take your time. Feel it, and go left.
Some related (and unrelated) recommendations:
Obviously, Vanity Fair's September issue. I have recommended it previously, but if you haven't taken a look, please do. It features Breonna Taylor on the cover, and some brilliant/important features.
If you're a music fan, take 50 minutes out of your week to watch Pharrell and Rick Rubin have an epic conversation about music and humanity. The most nourishing thing I have done with my week.
If you're a writer, or are interested in hearing more from Coates, listen to this Longform podcast.
I went into an Architectural Digest hole last week and thoroughly enjoyed these two home tours: Lenny Kravitz' Brazilian Farm Compound and Dakota Johnson's mid-century home in LA. (Shout out to Jen Cunningham, who will devour these.)
This Interview Magazine profile on Lana Del Ray.
This brilliant New Yorker article on how we can pay for creativity in the digital age. And how artists are not winning like we may assume they are.
Between The World And Me, of course. I'm saving it for the summer.
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