Lit 2.0

A Manifesto

Read my other manifesto here

ARX-Han

dropped his review of Honor Levy’s My First Book yesterday. I haven’t read it, so I don’t have an opinion of it, nor do I know how much she leans into irony or sincerity. But I have read some of her short stories and I know and believe that this is an exercise in persona-based writing. Which sucks for literature in the traditional sense.

But what if we had a different criteria, a different canon?

Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick

wrote a Substack recently, his point being that, in a climate of media overwhelm, still images are more popular and travel better than videos. I am interested in this, but from another angle: what about creation?

For years I wanted to start a podcast, but I never did. For years I wanted to make videos with people whose work I respected. Nope. ¹ All I have done consistently throughout my online life is write.

Like the song says, I gotta feeling I’m not the only one.

Most of us are overworked, most of us are inundated with media and notifications. Most of us are lectured for not liking videos shared with us enough and get snippy attitude when we ask what they thought of videos we sent. The 2010s was the era of the Show You Gotta Watch. Forget Netflix queue anxiety: we have inbox anxiety now.

With all that, how can you make a movie? An album? Podcast? Video? Writing itself seems like a schlep. ² Yet, we do it. So if literature is defined as writing that has a lasting impact, should there not be a separate literature that honors, if not this writing itself (understandable and fair), at least this type of writing?

What type of writing is this? Well it is certainly persona based. It is also informal. As Gretchen McCullough says in her book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, the Internet has helped linguists study informal, colloquial language like nothing before. If it is good enough for linguists to study, is it not enough for artistic evaluation? We need a new literature: Lit 2.0.

Woah woah, slow down the spit, Mo Mo Bean! Alt Lit is literally what you are talking about. And there is an Alt Lit 2.0 already.

Yes, and Lit 2.0 is absolutely an outgrowth of Alt Lit (both versions). A couple of key differences:

1. Despite its intentions, “alt” inescapably carries connotations of “cool” and “hip” that greatly limit what it can be. If much of what came out of the ‘90s indie film revolution were insufferable Tarantino ripoffs, imagine if the genre was called “alt film?” It would have been gangsters with oversized striped sweaters!

2. The 2.0 version (which includes Honor Levy) places a great emphasis on proving how extremely online it is. Lit 2.0 is closer to post-Internet art. The Internet is everywhere. Try writing something honest about everyday life without including the Internet. ³

This brings us to the other reason we need Lit 2.0. Our lives are all terminally online. Yes I write a Substack and have Substack friends, but I have not officially been a member of the media since 2008. I am a billing coordinator for a hospital, I go to the gym as well as 12 step meetings. Yet I can honestly say at least half of my day is spent online. I wish I remember who said this, might be from an Alt Lit 1.0 blog, but only literature can accurately capture our online lives. Film and TV, at most, capture chats between principal characters or, at worst, have an embarrassing viral video of a character. It can never capture the rabbit holes, the shadowy message boards, etc.

How is this different from autofiction? Do we need another book of Tinder nightmares?

Lit 2.0 is a bigger umbrella but yes, it will probably have a lot of autofiction. There are refugees from the informal online world that need a home; that need to go deeper, need to be heard more. Lit 2.0 can be a digital homeland for these refugees, giving literature 1.0 room to breathe. Lit 2.0 doesn't compare writing from a teenage girl to Joan Didion. Many of these refugees might be autofiction writers escaping the inevitable backlash, if it hasn’t happened already. It can even act as an oasis for aging alts once that moment comes to pass (again). Lit 2.0 is meant to last at least as long as the Internet does.

Back in February,

Chris Jesu Lee

asked “Why are we so averse to self-published fiction,” especially when self-published nonfiction is popular? Months later,

Ross Barkan

furthered this inquiry by looking at the cult of nonfiction. What is easy to forget is that self-published nonfiction has only recently come into its own. The blog era of the 2000s was great, but it was hardly a golden age of self-published non-fiction. For every Mark Fisher, there was a lazy sod like me who linked to something cool and wrote a paragraph-long blurb about it. Twitter expanded its character limit to 280 because by the time they did, blog posts were obsolete and no one would ask what the difference is between Twitter and a blog. Now that self-published non-fiction is having a boom in the newsletter era, it is not necessarily a stretch to say that we will soon enter a golden age of self-published fiction. It’s a miracle that Substack worked at all. I certainly did not understand reading any of its newsletters, let alone the idea of writing them. But by reading them, I was mimetically influenced to write them. The same may happen for fiction and poetry on here as well.

But who do we want to hear from? Will we want to hear from the upper crust MFA grads who are comfortably nestled within the halls of academia? Or will we prefer the coarse writing of hard working schlubs who have interesting, if exhausting lives? The answer of course is both. For centuries, music was strictly defined as classical music. Then came the blues. I don’t want to choose between the two and I will never fault Blind Lemon Jefferson for being simpler than Mozart.

To nobody’s surprise, there are those in the academic world who want the vital voices of the Internet streets.

Anne Trubek

recently wrote, “People often ask me why I left academia and an answer I could but never give is ‘because I was having so many much more interesting conversations on Twitter.’” This is not to say that the best writing is the same as the most intellectual writing, or even the most intellectually stimulating. Some have argued that non-fiction (journalism to be specific) has been ruined by the influx of technocratic J-school eggheads instead of journalists who learned on the job purely through practice and pounding the pavement.

A podcast I have been addicted to lately is

Gio's Content Corner.

and

Katherine Dee

‘s The Computer Room. In the episode with Yancey Strickler, they discuss the Dark Forest theory of the Internet, and how the “main” Internet of major platforms like Instagram and TikTok have become like performing at arenas. This can be a good way to contrast literature with Lit 2.0. If literature is an academic auditorium, Lit 2.0 can be a smokey, or vape-ey, nightclub then. Like I said in my last manifesto, there has been plenty of inflation in the attention economy. A million followers does not mean as much as it did. Hoping to be a Mr. Beast-level star is not only a pipe dream, its an old, cracked pipe dream. The best you can hope for is pockets of the Dark Forest carrying torches for you.

Writing itself has been its own dark forest, which is why I chose to compare literature to an academic auditorium rather than an arena rock concert. But its a dark forest of academic incestuousness. Lit 2.0 would be a dark forest with a deeper ecosystem.

Also an ecosystem that can better survive AI predators. One of the biggest complaints of writing that is informal and persona-based is the lack of technical craft. Well guess what: AI can simulate writing craft. I’ve always been terrible with descriptions. AI can take a picture and write the description for you. I have been tempted…but that’s not me. I want to be me. AI can be me, of course. I can train an AI to write in my voice But the market for that is one: me. AI has a greater incentive to write in a technically elegant manner that university administrations, editorial staffs of mainstream publications, marketers advertisers, PR, can benefit from. Humans will be left not only to write in their voice, but to sell it. If you want to write a novel, you need to convince the world that it needs you. That’s the thing about great artists: we never knew we needed them in our lives. AI can only give us more of what we already want. That unifies algorithmic AI and generative AI. If it were to replace me, it would need to presume that you wanted to read from an ethnically Muslim recovering drug and sex addict. I can guarantee you, of all the people that read and subscribe to this Substack, none of them knew they wanted to read a Substack from someone like that. For now, you need to enter that criteria into Gemini yourself. And Lord knows what media analysis you would get from that.

OK. Is there an example of any of this or is this just a long battle cry?

One Lit 2.0 example that comes to mind is

Rachel Haywire

‘s My Girls in the Florida Lockdown Facility. It is a simple, but affecting story of the friendships she made while she was institutionalized. It’s not Proust, but I have no doubt that Haywire wrote it and lived it. Trying to get an AI to write it is like trying to get an AI to write hardcore rap; absolutely possible, but we know Chat G ain’t about that life.

There was a brief window of time when Lit 2.0 would not have been necessary. When Walt Whitman wished to write about everyday people, using free verse to capture the vital rhythm of everyday speech, it seemed that the colloquial, informal, everyday voice would be all there was. Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes all carried the torch. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, literature became more academic. There was an increase in diversity. Diversity of ethnicity and sexual preference, anyway. But the neoliberal political perspective and academic language grew more and more prevalent in literature. And let’s not be coy, literature has always had class implications.

Lit 2.0 can better reflect our current reality because, for the past twenty years, we are all writing more than ever. Think how much of your life is spent deleting typing errors. Ask anybody. This was uncommon as recently as the ‘90s. “Everyday people” does not only mean blue collar anymore. There are wage slaves in cubicles without voices in literature.

As Richard Seymour writes in The Twittering Machine:

We are, abruptly, writing more than we ever have before. Our ‘scripturient’ disease, the writing symptom, shows, in part, how much was waiting to be expressed before the digital upheaval incited a new revolution in mass literacy. Handwriting was once the privilege of a few, before the first explosion of mass literacy in the late nineteenth century. Where it was taught, penmanship was indexed to social class, gender and occupation: merchants, lawyers, women and upper-class men were taught distinct letterform styles. The very appearance and configuration of the shapes and spacing of letters allowed a reader to quickly understand its social significance. Even in the printed word, there emerged an association of letterform with social class: think, today, of the different fonts deployed by ‘popular’ newspapers and those of the broadsheets. Writing has always been laden with hierarchies of significance and signification. What distinguishes the new mass literacy from its nineteenth-century predecessor is the spread of writing, in the homogenized fonts of the computer, the smartphone, the Twittering Machine. The characteristic experience of literacy prior to the Internet was reading; now it is writing. Amid a collapse in trust in the old media, whose commercial strategies and political affiliations have drawn it further and further away from the priorities of its audiences, the people formerly known as the audience have become the producers

Fitzpatrick praised the image for its economy. I would like to close this manifesto by focusing on another humbler element of our attention economy: texting. Texting arose in an era when phones did not have much choice in the media they displayed. The junky ringtone versions of top 40 songs of the Y2K era was enough to get people excited. Approaching 30 when texting was invented, I wasn’t sure what the appeal was. Then one day, I realized its appeal: gossip. Well, that’s where it started anyway, for most of us. Then we realized it was a place for secrets. Now I look at it and I realize, like the image, it works because of its economy. The online world is a world of high compression. Information needs to travel fast. Making films is as laborious as it gets. Even watching a film demands attention. A book is interactive in the sense that you have to turn the page. A movie demands you listen and watch. Not a bad thing. But it doesn’t fit the zeitgeist either. What’s more, after all the innovations and advances in digital filmmaking, video creators still don’t make narrative short films as much as they do video essays. Why? It’s easier. Simple as that. Self-published fiction like ARX-Han’s Incel may not be as popular as it should be yet. But Ross Barkan wrote a glowing review in The Mars Review of Books. Han’s writing is truly elegant and in that sense it belongs in the canon of traditional literature. Having read his Substack and heard him on podcasts, I also know that he writes how he talks. In that sense it belongs to the 2.0 canon. Along with all the other unspoken secrets.

1. I edited videos using only my voice. I had an ambitious phase before and during COVID where I used multiple audio channels of my own voice to make sketches. I stopped.

2. It’s the hottest weekend of the year and the two reasons I am writing this (after two weeks of nothing) instead of fucking off: a) I promoted this on Notes, saying it would drop Sunday; b) I am scheduled to have lunch with two Substackers this weekend and want to avoid the “what you working on” anxiety

3. As people who love to write tedious status updates on Facebook say, I’ll wait.