Where Have All The Weirdos Gone?

I miss a time before whoring for the algorithms became the norm.

Photo by Artem Labunsky on Unsplash

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

Take the day off so you can return refreshed on Monday. You’re weird. Why are your words so bombastic, so multi-syllabic, so mouthy—requiring me to do the drudgery of looking up its meaning online? Be a savage, a saber-toothed beast and excise that first paragraph. I assure you it’s painless. Nobody needed it. We’ve got to get to the meat. Craft titles that deliver a benefit, a promise. Bold, but don’t be belligerent about it. Be clear, be precise, give the children sugar so the medicine goes down. All the way down. Hold their hand, their eyes, and speak softly into their fragile ears because nobody reads, nobody understands, nobody cares. Add an odd number to the title so people know there are five easy ways to make money to buy things you don’t need to fill an empty life of Sisyphean want.

Did you know there are three simple steps you can take to make a million dollars in five months? 3, 1, 5. Did you know we’re no longer making art because we’re too busy going viral. And why bother? An AI tool can write books for us anyway.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Nobody reads. It’s all about video. Snap to attention, kids, we’ve got a show for you! Contort your way to fame in twenty-five seconds. Swathe yourself in a blanket and make bag summarizing all the tom-foolery online. Amass a million followers off the hijinks and booty-shaking of a tabby cat named Kurt who has a bigger bedroom than I do. (For the record, I love Kurt, as well as Penny and Franny, whose weight loss journey has awed legions.) Lay supine, catatonic and drooling as every third video promises you’ll make the big, big, big money. Simply comment BURN ME ALIVE to score a copy of the e-book and a link to a course that will only cost you three easy payments of $399. Did I mention the supplement that will cure autism? Link to my MLM in bio. And maybe one day you too can be a private chef for a billionaire in the Hamptons. Ah, the ocean. You plastic, baby blue.

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We were reared to work, to produce, to crank out, to deliver. We practice self-care and productivity not to feel better or whole, but to work harder, deeper, and faster until the work itself becomes a kind of pornography we’re hot to pursue. Our rewards are the shiny trinkets we buy, the orgasms are the largess of our titles and the audience we’ve accumulated. Look at how much we have! We care more about becoming the equivalent of mass-market paperbacks and supermarket tabloids because we’re taught to believe more is better. Not realizing more is simply more.

I remembered it used to be that you had to be a great writer to publish (or, at the very least, connected, but the writing still had to hold). Now, you need to be a full-scale marketing agency. Shimmying your hips for book sales. Selling yourself, piece by piece, in hopes you’ll like and subscribe! Please, it will really help my channel.

(The treble of the lower lip. The anxiety of have I appeased the masses?)

Nah, B. Your girl couldn’t appeal to the masses if she tried; that’s not the way I’m built.

I’ve always been strange. Square peg in a round hole and like that. It takes me fifteen minutes to get to the point in a story. At one point in the story, I will say come to find out…I blurt out strange things. I cancel plans all the time because I can’t. Even finish the former sentence. I’m genetically fucked (mental illness, autism—all diagnosed after 40, all that white, white knuckling), although naturally sharp and semantically talented. I’m sensitive to loud sounds and bright lights and swarms of people. I don’t want an audience, a following because of the constant care and feeding. The tip-toeing and placating. The why can’t you be more like… The you should do this when I never cared or asked you to begin with. The your life would be so much easier if you played the game, wrote what was palatable…

When I started a blogspot account in 2000, I poured my life all over online paper. I didn’t write to amass a following or build a brand—I wrote because it was the one thing I loved doing. And in that writing I met other weirdos and misfits, strangers who became friends in the ways we had friendship books and pen-pals when we were kids. But we were adults now, clawing our way through the world. Looking for others like us so we were less alone.

We created to create, to connect. In 2002, I published one of the first online literary journals when print was the fashion and funded it for six years because of my love for it, not for the profit it would yield or the fame it would afford me. For years, I published unknown writers who didn’t have a fancy degree or a six-figure-book-deal-minimum agent because I wanted to see more of me in the world. Artists who create because it’s what gets them out of the bed in the morning, it’s what nourishes and sustains them when the world feels increasingly bleak and we might very well break from the burden of darkness we carry.

We wore our weirdness as a badge of honor before algorithms and platforms dictated that in order to make the big big money (because why else would one want to exist) we had to appease the masses. Tone down the weird, or make it more palpable.

I didn’t realize how good I had it for such a short period of time. I wish I would’ve held on to that pureness longer. I wish I can hold the first print journal I published and say I made this, with my hands, and it’s perfectly fine if only a hundred people read it.

But soon, it seemed as if the weirdos went into hiding. Or rather, they were drowned out by all the noise. It was a shift, imperceptible to everyone because it wasn’t the lobster tossed into a hot pot of water, it was a slow slimmer. It was a watched pot boiling. Everyone created to sell something. Although this piece centers on how one fashion lover witnessed the evolution of fast fashion and the emergence of the Antichrist known as Shein, its sentiment, especially in this paragraph, holds:

FOR YEARS I REMAINED a loyal reader of the blogs. Then the bloggers moved to Instagram. The internet was changing, consolidating; social media had become the dominant mode. I followed the bloggers across platforms, but their content was more muted: carousels of photos whose sparse captions offered only an occasional glimpse of the charm of the old blogs. Their outfits became harder to distinguish from one another as their focus moved toward trending looks and stores. The fashion girls I loved were becoming more like advertisers, tagging the brands in their outfits in every post and occasionally doing sponcon. Instagram itself became like a shopping mall, adding features that allowed you to buy clothes straight from the app. I missed the uniqueness and idiosyncrasy of the blogging era. The fashion subcultures I loved became harder and harder to see, subsumed by the logic of algorithms.

Everyone has become a commodity under capitalism—in some form or degree—we vary only in how much or little we embrace the reality. It’s a strange thing to see the world change over the course of my not-so-old-at-48 lifetime. How we’ve become tethered to the cult of things to an unhealthy degree, how our dollar doesn’t go very far or as far as it used to, the astonishing cost of milk and bread, and the crippling weight of having to work simply to survive perhaps also figures in the shuttering of weirdos.

Perhaps we’re devolving, as Brandon Taylor would have it in his LRB essay, into a naturalism (the “lowering of man from the Romantic or idealised hero of his own story to the mundane victim of the universe and its cold indifference”) and flailing deeper still into determinism and its associated feelings of powerlessness, alienation, and lack of agency in how we see the world and the art we create.

Suddenly the scope of what we create feels small, bite-sized, manageable. Those reels and TikToks are all we can manage. The book written by a machine is good enough.

Or maybe the weirdos are exhausted from taking care of their kids and families, and negotiating their grocery bill—how are there fewer Doritos in a bag at double the price?

Or, possibly, all of the above.

Or, maybe it’s this. Why bother? The algorithms will suppress it, and on the rare occasions we spot one in the wild they’re weird, but still accessible and they’re cute and young and blonde and where did you get that skirt from? SO CUTE. Link in bio. Because there’s no longer weird for weird’s sake. There’s weird in furthering an agenda which often involves the desire for more. More followers, more clout, more brand deals, more courses and e-books pedaled and sold.

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I resell clothes as one way to pay my bills and I’ve made friends with people who do what I do and it takes all kinds. The grandma who can’t quite retire. The kid who needs to pay for college. The mom who needs to feed her family. And I’ve become friendly with a guy who’s maybe half my age but we share a love of 90s hip hop. I’ve become the annoying stereotype bemoaning the current state of musical affairs. We had Wu-Tang! A Tribe Called Quest! Mobb Deep! Rakim! Guru! Mc Lyte! Lauryn Hill! The Jungle Brothers! We took for granted how good we had it because you had to be great to get a tape in a kid’s hands.

And my new friend tells me he feels me but offers this. There’s good music out there, you just have to look harder for it. Because all we hear is the noise because it’s loud. And he pulls out his phone and shows me his Spotify and the ways in which he’s discovered obscure artists. How he’s had to do the work to find them, hunt their music down, and enjoy the music that isn’t the 90s but an evolution of the greatness that came before.

I nod because this kid’s right. He’s 23 and he’s wise. Preaching from the front seat of his Prius pulpit. I tell him this and he laughs. See, we got some knowledge.

But also, this:

Give me my apex predators, who will tear your algorithms to bloody pieces and feast on its gristle and bone. Give me the blogs that told our stories and showed our art. Give me the weirdos who tip-toed to their computers and tap-tapped into a world filled with people who were brilliant and beautiful and bold but were awkward, stammering their way through their real life. Give me the kids who grew up on glass but still want to play on grass. Give me the people who want to play outside. Just to play. Just for the love of it.