Everything I read in February
panic mode
As often happens when you’re dismantling the life you know, this month started off fantastically and ended unpleasantly. It’s been a week of stress, with anxiety levels so high my partner and I have been struggling to eat, sleep, function. All will eventually be well (I type through gritted teeth) but we are Going Through It and It is beyond our control and will be impacting us for a bit. Though thankfully, not permanently. I’ve started to read The Cut horoscopes daily and they clearly don’t gaf. Today, Madame Clairvoyant tells me, ‘try not to overthink it.’ Thank you, queen.
On top of that, I’ve had to do some very condensed book edits (let’s call them panic-edits), so have been reading books much less and perusing much more. I’ve said previously that I have three reading modes: work mode, pleasure mode, expansion-pack mode. Work mode is everything I read when I’m trying to learn from the greats. Pleasure mode is self-explanatory, and expansion-pack mode is everything I read to stay informed. Well, time to introduce a new, temporary mode: panic mode. I would term this as expansion-pack mode but with a frantic edge to it. Think: reading the same paragraph multiple times because you haven’t taken anything in. Let us begin.
Books
Time/Life, by journalist and Sunday Times Bestseller Catherine Mayer, is out in mid-May. It’s a science fiction novel that explores the (very prescient) issues of rising populism and abusive tech, but it’s also a story about love, and grief - if Ursula Le Guin decided to tackle the Elon Musks of the world. The book follows a journalist, Dory, who goes to Las Vegas for work, reluctantly leaving behind her dying partner. There, she meets a globally famous tech tycoon who catapults himself and Dory into the future - leaving her stranded and desperate to get home. This was a heavy, but beautiful story. Mayer has a unique writing style that is prosaic but also direct - she can say so much with very little. I think that this might be what happens when a formidable journalist turns to fiction. My favourite line:
Dory found it tough to sit still unless immersed in writing, the only reliable method of telescoping time available to non-scientists.
I mean, that’s fucking fantastic.
I also read Get Rich or Lie Trying by journalist and news correspondent Symeon Brown. This is a deep dive into influencer culture, looking into the fraud, exploitation and bribery that permeates online life - from sex work to plastic surgery to MLM scams to crypto bros. Through a race and class lens, Brown examines how fundamental dishonesty is when it comes to influencing, but also how much it’s impacted the way we behave both on the internet and off, and what the (alarming) repercussions might be. This was a super interesting read, but I’m still unsure how I feel about it. So much of what Brown says is compelling and insightful, but what felt missing - at all times - was a gender analysis. Sometimes he got so close, but then stopped a the last hurdle. Such as the chapter about multi-level marketing schemes when he noted that the vast majority of those involved in tricking and scamming other women were single/new mothers. A great nugget of information. But Brown then failed to interrogate why this might be the case. Perhaps it's because western societies fail new and single mothers becuase there's absolutely no robust support systems available. In the US, where most of the book is set, there is no mandated paid maternity leave - just giving birth costs thousands of dollars. Individualism - the brainchild of capitalism - has stripped away support systems that would have previously been accessible to mothers, such as families living together under one roof, or models of living that encourage community but don’t serve the bottom line. The UK is ranked as one of the top five countries with the most unaffordable childcare, and recent government policies have made it punitive to have more than two children, by limiting state support. Single mothers have high-poverty and low-earning rates specifically because society, as well as government policy, punishes single-parenthood, and because 90% of single parents are women. We know enough about post-natal mental health to know that mothers are at their most vulnerable in the years after giving birth, and also at their loneliest, and therefore more likely to turn to methods of income generation that can be done from home, that put them in touch with women in similar positions. All of this was missing from that chapter, and I could provide similar examples for the chapters on sex work, plastic surgery and fast fashion.
At times, I found the book sexist, to be honest. Brown is judgemental about everyone - which I think is fair enough, because he’s making the overarching point that the influencer industry is all based on deceit, and those participating in it are often complicit and predatory. But some of the ways he wrote about women felt denigrating and condescending, and I didn’t get that same vibe in the chapters focusing on the men. A few examples, that, yes, are lifted out of context but still didn’t sit right with me when they were contextualised:
“It was young women’s growing desperation to be desirable online that has changed his life.”
“She shouts from the rooftops about her new confidence and the paid opportunities she receives from having a figure like a coca-cola bottle.”
“…she laughed on an evening where she was undoubtedly the queen bee.”
“After Instagram presented its new features for influencers, an obnoxious and prissy press officer fobbed off my interview request.”
At surface levels, these might read as surprising but harmless. Yet when you see the same detached and blunt sentiments over and over, both lacking in empathy and failing to demonstrate any understanding in why women might do what they do online, they feel unsettling. I can’t quite figure out if I am being defensive here, which is why I’m not sure how I feel about it. But I think that if a piece of writing is unable to make a point about exploitation without recognising the specific gendered aspects of say, Only Fans, then I will likely have a problem with it.
Other:
The loudest megaphone: how Trump mastered our new attention age. An excellent Guardian long read (and obviously somewhat on theme for me this month) about the way Trump has changed what matters in politics - quality over quantity. Back in 2016, Steve Bannon’s strategy to address what he saw as the enemy (the media) was to ‘flood the zone with shit’. That means just constant content that is at all times outrageous, meaningless and confusing, which has one of two effects. People either get so distracted trying to wade through said shit, or are overwhelmed and switch off completely - allowing the Trump administration to do what they’re really there to do, which is line their pockets. This was a great, if depressing, read.
This kinda random but weirdly entertaining piece in the New Yorker, What We See in Lauren Sanchez’s Cleavage. Naomi Fry basically suggests that the recent resurgence of big boobs reflects the current shifting political climate, akin to the lipstick economy theory, which suggests people buy more affordable luxuries when things are going to shit. Honestly, a strange take, but sometimes the zone is simply full of shit and you just have to grab on to whatever breast-related raft comes your way.
And vaguely related: The death of sex, 3 years later, by Haley Nahman of Maybe Baby. This is an update to a piece Nahman wrote in 2022 about the decline of sex, by which she doesn’t necessarily mean the act of sex, but ‘earthly pleasures and all its attendant qualities: desire, touch, anguish, longing, satisfaction, thrill, connection, presence…’ Basically, the sterilisation of being extremely online, of obsessively maintaining a personal brand, of tech replacing human interaction. She suggests that if we want to somehow wrest back control from all the scary, far right madness that’s in the air right now, we need a slower, more expansive political vision that relies less on exclusion and more about offering compelling alternatives. When I used to work at the Women’s Equality Party, we talked about this idea a lot - the need to offer an alternative future that didn’t leave anyone behind. We’re at a point where scarcity mentality is so strong, too many people interpret gains in equality for others as losses in opportunities for themselves, which erodes the possibility for radical solidarity.
A piece by The Cut on how Candace Owens is using the Lively-Baldoni lawsuits to appeal to centre-left audiences. Owens is a fascinating character, and her portrayal as a voice worth trying out - even as the piece makes excellent points about why she’s so damaging - made me nervous. But it’s not surprising that Owens is becoming so mainstream. She’s an excellent orator. I almost wonder if I should listen to her podcast. I’m also annoyed at myself for how defensive I get about Blake Lively. I can’t stress enough how alarming it is that the internet is so universally united against a woman - regardless of how likeable or not she is - who is alleging abusive behaviour and sexual harassment. I really can't. Anyway, here’s the nightmare-fuel.
Next month I hope to stop obsessing over tech and the internet and move on to some delicious fiction.
A quick favour. I love writing these posts, and I intend to do them for free for as long as I can. If you enjoyed reading this, forward it to a friend (or three) who you think might like it too. It helps massively, because validation from strangers is truly the only thing that makes the horrors bearable for me.