Cross Current One Year Anniversary

A Look Back

I started this whole thing back on August 29th. That was back when I wrote these from work during the weekday. Before I did this Substack, I wrote a direct email newsletter called Foisted for about a month because I was bored at work. The joke was that I emailed you the newsletter if you were my friend regardless of whether you liked it or not. Or, I foisted it on you. Most of my friends just sighed and rolled their eyes. One friend, Trafton Crandall, kept pushing me to write a Substack. The first post, “Generation X,” was pretty much like a Foisted post: quick, irreverent pop culture stuff with no art or graphics whatsoever. Also the Substack was called Sup Culture and it was focused on subcultures, a topic which of course has not stopped being an obsession of mine.

The first post I wrote where I took it seriously (and I also moved to my Saturday schedule) was “How Duracell Might Outlast Human Culture.” That was when this became an obsession of mine. Sitting for hours trying to push a big preoccupation of mine out (in this case, how advertising affects culture) felt great. Arduous but great.

Later that month, I changed the title to Cross Current and the focus to the overlap between legacy media and new media, since this seemed to interest me even more than subcultures anyway. The first Cross Current post, “The Real Bad Actors,” was about the history of how acting trickled out of theater and film into everyday life, starting with Reagan’s legendary presidential acting and ending with Amber Heard’s lackluster trial performance.

By December, I wrote my first three-parter, “Mall Messiahs.” ¹ It was inspired by Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites and her take on online spiritual movements, but it was more critical.

I don’t think it’s an accident that my most popular posts (“Hyper Dystopian",” The Great Escape from Escapism.” “No Core, No Lore,” “The Postfame Era” and “No Art, Just Vibes”) all came out this year. The AI scare earlier this year led me to a lot of existential grappling that made me dig deeper.

I find it hard to cherry pick which of my latest posts is worthy of looking back on because recent work tends to fall under recency bias. The latest is the greatest. What I can tell you about my last post is that it feels like this is the direction I want to go in: looking at the completely arbitrary distinction between legacy media artists and online “creators.”

Anyway today is my first day off for my weeklong vacation and there will not be a new post next week. But look in the fridge. There’s plenty of leftovers. Thanks for reading and supporting. Let’s see where the current takes us next year.

1. Part two and three