Internet Anxiety at Singapore Writers Festival 2022

Judging by the events I attended at this year's SWF, it seems my main preoccupation is the anxiety of being a person on the internet. 

Right now this isn't much of an issue. I'm obviously not an influencer; hell, I don't even have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok. But because I want to be a writer, the obligation to be visible online is always looming overhead — threat and promise all in one. As one of my favourite panellists, Ruby Thiagarajan said, you have to use social media if you want your work to reach people.

There exists plenty of good-intentioned advice to help writers navigate the internet's treacherous waters. Merely shitposting from the bowels of your mind won't do, for example. You need to cultivate and curate a persona that conforms to both algorithmic logic and the conventions of each platform. 

All this self-marketing takes time and energy, and its calculatedness is, of course, at odds with the looseness and intuition of creating.

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In attending the panels From BookTok to Bookstagram, Vulnerability in The Digital Space, and When Experimental Poets Meet Instapoets, and Crystal Abidin's talk on Ethics of Social Media and Influencers, I was subconsciously looking for models of success. 

Meaning: (a) writers who have rejected the self-commodification the internet demands, and yet still enjoy a decent level of creative success. Or: (b) writers who have successfully done this Internet Persona thing and not lost their minds.

For (a) I am thinking of (aforementioned) Ruby T. of Tote Bag Library and Amaryllis Puspabening of Further Notes, from the BookTok & Bookstagram panel. Both women publish work online but consciously (and effortfully!) resist the pull of The Platforms. You can read a great post on the topic by Ruby T. here. 

As for (b), I'm starting to think that age restrictions may apply. For the post-1995 generation, there may not be a dichotomy between the "real" self vs. the internet-mediated self. There is no meaningful distinction between online and offline.

From my extremely limited observation window, I think Gen Z-ers have a very interesting way of managing the performed self: a constant affect of irony and self-mockery. Their speech alternates between high drama and bathos, so the result is both confessional and cynical at the same time. (Young woman in the audience: "I read a piece of manufactured content and I liked it, and that did things to my psyche.")

After many days' exposure to the lingo of internet natives, I went to the Instapoets panel, during which the (defo older than Gen Z) @timothyjoshpoetry and Adam Tie of @thenovelencounter un-ironically claimed to write from the heart on Instagram. I felt suspicious right away. How can any reasonably sensitive person (let alone a poet) not grapple with the ruthless machinery of The Platforms?

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On a deeper level, all this anxiety around performing the self online is about authenticity. Because there's always the spectre, isn't there, of selling out. (Even if you don't get a cent from your Instapoetry, you're still sort of a sellout. You fed your soul into The Gaping Maw for a few paltry Likes.)

We explored this topic in another panel, Unpacking the Indie Genre. This panel featured a live meltdown by CT Lim, which was a wonderfully bitter antidote to the overall tone of SWF, which veered towards sickly sweetness and toxic positivity. (When everything is "so interesting", nothing is.) 

His point was that the entire indie/mainstream dichotomy was really a sort of ouroboros: the drive to be indie comes out of rebellion against the mainstream, but the mainstream will eventually co-opt the indie. In other words, institutional acceptance and commercial success effectively kills the spirit of independence. And if you are a sexy white male genius like Kurt Cobain or David Foster Wallace, they may kill you, too.

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On another note. I love magazines the way some writers love sci-fi. It's really the same thing: world-building. So I really enjoyed hearing from independent publication creators from Pang Xue Qiang (Meantime) in Unpacking the Indie Genre and Ruby T. (again! Mynah) in Literary Journals in Singapore.

Both editors run entirely print magazines, and they shared some interesting conceptions of success that are not bound by the laws of the internet.

For Mynah, success is paying contributing writers fair rates. For Meantime, success is your magazine ending up all over the world, in random places. Pang Xue Qiang talked about how actual sales went down with each issue, but since sales was never a performance metric, he didn't regard this as a sign of failure.

Both notions of success are completely antithetical to the manic pageview-chasing in digital publishing. It's been a while since I lived in that world, but Delfina Utomo, talking about her work as regional managing editor at Coconuts during the literary journals panel, reminded me. She invoked the term "what the audience wants" at least 5 times. It was depressing, because IMHO the best part of being an editor is shoving your personal tastes and preferences and prejudices down people's throats.

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Maybe authenticity and the "indie spirit" in today's world is the ability to resist the pull of The Platforms' algorithmic logic, its formal conventions, its abundant monetisation opportunities. The ability to say fuck data-driven decisions.

I read this article The journalist as influencer: how we sell ourselves on social media (via Ruby T.'s blog) and this Jia Tolentino quote jumped out: “A good amount of my book is about how capitalism, the internet, the monetized self are all destructive to our functioning as real humans; yet, the better I express those ideas, the better I become a marketable object myself.” 

In the BookTok panel, Amaryllis P. talked about her habit of slow-reading and -writing as a small form of rebellion against the attention economy. Which makes so much sense! Given that The Platforms make money from attention, what better way to stick it to the man than choosing to direct that commodity elsewhere?