Free Chapter for You (!)
A full chapter appropriately titled Modern Bullshit from my forthcoming book: Raising Hell, Living Well (out 10/10)
Hi All! My book Raising Hell, Living Well: Freedom from Influence in a World Where Everyone Wants Something from You (including me) comes out in 4 days and I am thrilled (terrified?) to share this FULL chapter with you. I chose this one as it’s the title of this Substack and one of the pieces I am most proud of. It’s a long one but it’s been like crickets on here so I guess I owed you one. I triple dog dare you to make it to the end.
Special thanks to my publisher, Penguin Random House.
PS - I recommend not reading this on your phone and as a reminder you can share this, forward this, but comments are paywalled. Angry notes and love letters from anyone can go to my P.O. Box: Jessica Elefante, 249 Smith Street #130, Brooklyn, NY 11231 at any time.
Modern Bullshit
(or Engaging with the Gray Area vs. Embracing the Extremes)
Lately, I’ve noticed a trend in my book writing practice. If I spend any time at all on the crackling hellfire known as Twitter beforehand, I waste the rest of my day writing and then deleting, hyperconscious about what I’ll eventually be presenting to the world.
Write. Delete. Write. Delete.
I keep reediting, reformatting, and revising the angle. I try to “bury the lede,” as they say in journalism, which is usually a bad thing because it means trying to hide my point rather than being direct with it. Instead of saying what I actually mean, I start hoping that added nuance will allow me to communicate what I want without inciting someone else’s rage. I try to avoid creating a succinct line that can easily be copied and tweeted by someone who doesn’t like my opinion. Because of the nature of our culture today, I sanitize my thoughts, running them through a sensitivity test in my mind to determine who might come for me with pitchforks.
Not surprisingly, this sterilized version of my thoughts ends up being total shit, wringing the life out of my thesis, one placid sentence at a time. You’re not writing what you actually need to say. Because when you cater to the haters, you’re allowing the pushback to push you into submission.
It’s safe. It lacks character. It lacks soul.
In 1990, more than thirty years before he was viciously attacked on stage at a conference for refugee writers seeking asylum, Salman Rushdie—an icon of free speech—wrote, “Human beings shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the unsayable; not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men.” We are at our best when we test boundaries and are brave enough to be ourselves.
There have been periods of time in my life when I have retreated. I consciously disappeared from the digital world and returned to my real one for the benefit of connection, quality time, and my mental health. But there have been times when the retreat was driven more by fear of the digital universe itself.
In the past few years, I’ve noticed that I’m not alone. I’ve started to see some of my favorite writers and thinkers shrink away, heading into the unknown too. Newsletters have stopped arriving. Essays are fewer and further between. Many of the artists who have remained are sometimes motivated more by attention seeking and algorithm chasing than by true inspiration, dreaming up the most viral creation versus the most salient, sensitive, or dimensional. Once again, the most successful ideas are not necessarily the best.
During the pandemic, we were forced into a retreat, whether we wanted it or not. That slowdown of our modern activity in the world is now termed the anthropause. When we humans went inside, nature began reclaiming our cities, creating an urban wild where empty streets became places to graze, play, and hunt again. Coyotes skulked in downtown San Francisco, goats traversed the highways of Istanbul, monkeys, wild boar, horses, and sea lions were suddenly spotted in residential areas, and rats roamed New York City’s abandoned streets. But ultimately, it turned out that even the wild was dependent on our human activity. Without people to provide food through creating waste, growing crops, or bustling tourism—some species struggled. Even those frolicking rats eventually turned to eating one another, since there was no garbage on which to survive.
Our global slowdown didn’t just affect nature—it also created an opportunity, a pause, for people to reassess. Many of us found ourselves rethinking everything—where we live, how we spend our time, our choice of careers. That moment of perspective resulted in a flight from offices, professions, and cities. But in the creative world of the internet, I also noticed many of the primary people I followed began to recede. One by one, they disappeared—the voices of reason, the moral compasses, the philosophers.
This retreat had already begun because of the emergence of cancel culture online, but when everyone went virtual because of the pandemic, the phenomenon became even more pronounced. People grew angrier and more frustrated with the state of the world, and what was shared and said on the internet became the only focus. Real life barely existed. So people hid.
When your “job” is to feel then share, both can become too much. I know this from personal experience. I understand the need to retreat from the arena, fold the cards, switch careers, live offline. I also recognize that if we’re all busy navel-gazing, we can’t contribute to creating community or rise up against the pushback collectively. But I can’t help but feel concerned for what we’re left with if all the thinkers, empaths, storytellers, truth sayers, and moral compasses retreat from the internet. What happens when they all proofread their words for pitchfork avoidance and keep their art tucked away in case it challenges accepted ways of thinking? I believe that now more than ever we need the people who recognize and call attention to nuance. The problems we face today often feel insurmountable. And as our culture seeks to correct its legitimate past wrongs, the pendulum can swing too far.
As humans, we naturally categorize what we see and experience into distinct buckets to make them easier to process—right versus wrong, black versus white, yes versus no. But the answer most often lies somewhere in between, in the gray. Data streams, metrics, and stats help us wrap our minds around our issues to a point, but without factoring in emotions, context, backstories, and the often overlooked difference between feelings and facts, we can’t truly begin to fix anything. We need to understand what’s influencing our human behaviors—the structures at play—before we can judge a situation. In order to do this, we need to be free to share even unpopular ideas. And when we do, instead of being attacked and written off, we need to be able to talk through these differing perspectives and biased lenses in hopes to correct what’s wrong.
Without space for nuance and differing viewpoints in our society, New York City’s cannibalistic rats seem—very darkly to me—like a great metaphor for our current downward spiral. Starved for valuable conversation and thoughtful analysis, left out to dry in a wasteland where everyone is competing to be the biggest victim, schmuck, or superstar—we have begun to turn on ourselves. The spirit of a place hinges on who is—or is not—there. Virtual ones, it seems, especially.
Currently we’re living in a world of extremes, especially online. Of course it’s easier to judge one another from the safety of our own homes, hidden behind screens instead of face-to-face. The arena is now a battleground, and similar to the spectacles in early medieval times, it’s a center for ruthless conflict, public humiliation, witch hunts, public executions, and performed dramas. In the midst of this unchecked chaos, the most depraved have remained to watch and participate, and those who are turned off, who feel horror instead of glee at the extremes of what they’re witnessing, have retreated to the shadows.
In their absence, the art, opinions, ideas, and thoughts don’t entirely disappear from the modern-day virtual coliseum, but they grow quieter. Avoiding useless conflict, a true losing battle, they whisper in safer spaces, which become smaller and harder to find. This is not a good thing. It’s grim, in fact. Over coffee with an old friend in 2018, a former fellow bartender from Red Rock, I caught myself lowering my voice. We were talking about a hot topic of the moment, one sweeping the virtual coliseum in a wave of polarizing debates. It was perfect fodder for hot-take, clickable headlines. The only twist was that on one side of the argument, people had chosen “gray area” as their convenient weapon of choice.
Since I’d changed the nature of my lifestyle, I typically turned away from that kind of celebrity gossip in general, but the subject at hand was Aziz Ansari, a well-known and much-loved actor and comedian who also happened to be a voice I looked to for poignant commentary on our modern world. It seemed to me that we had shared a lot of the same perspectives, and he amplified ideas that resonated with me. In fact, we had decided simultaneously to go offline because the digital world was making monsters out of all of us. We both scrapped our iPhones for dumb phones and began creating platforms to discuss our respective wake-up calls.
Unfortunately, Ansari was leading that week’s news cycle—and not for championing the art of unplugging.
In twenty-four hours, he’d gone from golden boy to canceled, at least according to reactive commenters online (today’s version of a Greek chorus). That’s how fast our churn-and-burn, eat-or-be-eaten civilization now operates. The arena might have been packed with an audience ready to observe and join debates over sexual assault, inappropriate behavior, boys-will-be-boys culture, and frat feminism, but really, above all else, this was about selling front row seats for profit. Who could hawk the most seats to a modern-day public execution?
As proof and point, the article that started the furor had a headline designed with one purpose in mind—go viral:
“I went on a date with Aziz Ansari. It turned into the worst night of my life”
Mission accomplished. The story, on the now-defunct website Babe.net, was a three thousand-word play-by-play of one night, told from the perspective of an anonymous twenty-three-year-old Brooklyn woman who’d had an encounter with the actor. The additional sources, fact checks, and context were scrutinized by those in traditional journalism while debate over whether this account of a gray area encounter warranted publication—and yet his life was blown up in a matter of minutes. Babe.net dropped the bait and the hordes pounced, becoming their own arena show.
Was Babe.net a news organization?
Well, let’s break down the behind the scenes to find out, by looking at the sources, how they operate, and what their values and practices were before we even get into assessing the actual story against our own values.
Before it was bought out by a parent company in 2020, Tab Media was positioned as a global media start-up for people under twentyfive. It was started by Cambridge graduates George Marangos-Gilks and CEO Jack Rivlin in 2009 as a tabloid site in opposition to the university’s existing newspaper. The umbrella company went on to publish The Tab and Babe, content farms both modeled after predecessors like the Bleacher Report and HuffPost. They relied predominantly on unpaid and/or underpaid writers, willing to barter their work for a first byline at the new twentysomething cool-girl media brand of the moment. And because, in our late-stage-capitalism world, people prize youth above all else, the scrappy start-up founders of a new generation traded their young audience, young know-how, young reporters, and young swagger for big money. From who? The old guard, the dirt-slinging dinosaurs in fear of being replaced, of course!
In the same way I once used my youth to pave my way into the digital universe as a liaison between C-suite executives and the new modern world they didn’t fully grasp, Rivlin—the hustling, elite-school-bred CEO of Tab Media—got a door opened into a meeting with Rupert Murdoch because—do I need to say it? He knew a guy.
As the story goes, at least as framed by its founders to the press, the future CEO, Rivlin, showed up in London hungover, disheveled, with glitter in his hair from the night before, and wielding a book of viral headlines and possible exclusives for his millennial outlet. Their hook—what separated them from competitors—was that they understood their audience on a different level. After all, their writers were the same age as the target demo. In fact, the average age of the editorial staff was twenty-three. And the reporters were often even younger. In Rivlin’s words, “If you put those guys in charge, it’s chaotic and you get something pretty unvarnished. It also helps that they’re always up for a scrap.”
Always up for a scrap. A takedown. A polarizing hot take.
By fall 2017, Tab announced that it’d secured Murdoch’s backing to the tune of six million dollars. This is the same Murdoch, of course, who is credited with creating the modern tabloid: newspapers that focused less on news and more on controversy, crime, and scandal.
The Ansari story went live on January 13, 2018, mere months after a second cash infusion—ten million dollars in funding from Murdoch and the venture capital firm Balderton Capital. This is important because it gives you a glimpse into the motivations behind the website and the influence a group of twenty-year-olds were under to run certain types of stories and deliver on their promise.
When you pitch yourself as the next “unicorn”—a term used in the venture capital world to describe a start-up company with a potential value of more than one billion dollars, you have to start performing for those big investors ASAP. You’re under the influence of outside pressures associated with underperforming for your new bosses.
A bombshell report—like, for instance, a story that charges a celebrity with inappropriate sexual advances—can do a few things that are good for business. First, it obviously generates an increase in traffic to the website, attracting new followers and readers. This also allows the site to put advertisements in front of your eyeballs. The more eyeballs, the more profit.
Second, the true “bombshell” nature—in this case, the notable person involved and the headline, as opposed to the actual content of the report—garners a lot of press, which further feeds the machine of traffic-equals-eyeballs-equals-money. But it does another thing too: It creates brand awareness. Under the umbrella of Tab, Babe was trying to be the next Bleacher Report meets Vice but for young women, specifically aimed at “girls who don’t give a fuck.” Yes, that was their slogan.
If this upstart media company wanted the next “it kids” of the NYC media scene to work for them, they needed to invoke a comparable laid-back culture on the cutting edge. For that borrowed interest, Babe.net rented offices in Brooklyn, around the corner from Vice’s headquarters. On their website, they announced their funding in a blog post written by the CEO. He said their inaugural Tab team was comprised of fifteen like-minded visionaries: friends who were crashing on couches, spending nights at the pub, and dealing with disciplinary actions. “Tab Media’s audience is the generation of people born after 1990,” he wrote, and “it’s great to have the support of so many people born before 1960.” They really leaned in to the generational divide for profit, brand, and influence.
An enterprising, hungry—and yes—young editor, a twenty-twoyear-old recent college graduate according to New York magazine’s platform The Cut, finally got the perfect golden nugget for a media start-up looking for conflict-stirring, traffic-growing content. Babe had been previously running a campaign soliciting stories about sexual misconduct for months in hopes that they could unearth something big—clickbait gold, especially in 2018, when #MeToo was heavily trending. She was under influences of her own. These types of stories were ruling the zeitgeist of the time. Now the speculators were editors like her, looking for that viral headline, their version of a gold rush.
Tab had an incentive-based structure, unusual for press, but similar to many sales jobs. The more you produced, the more you earned. Babe.net offered “prize money” for hitting specific page view goals.
I’ve had enough low-paying, commission-based, tips-only, steppingstone jobs myself to know that they make you hustle. If your basic needs aren’t being met with the help of a decent salary, you will do whatever you can to get that cash for rent, food, or transportation to that potential opportunity or potentially exploitive job. Perfect for the young, scrappy, driven, or desperate. Practices like having unpaid interns and salespeople are now frowned upon, but they weren’t when I was coming up, so competition was fierce. But where there’s a will, there’s most definitely a way. As opposed to calling it a publication, the people at Babe.net specifically referred to themselves as “between a platform and a publisher,” which allowed them to justify the unpaid labor. As a platform, they could argue that their contributors were just willingly posting content for content’s sake, like on Facebook.
So the conclusion can be drawn that Babe.net’s writers and editors who are responsible for what goes out onto the influential megaphone of a giant website, can only pay the bills by having the most clicked headlines. They will create under the influence of their needs and their knowledge of how to win in the coliseum—which is of course (as you now know) based on the influence of the culture they learned it from— that inciting rageful online conversations equals viral success. And paying the rent.
Data, testing, science, and tech people guide most mass-market publications’ decisions about everything from the length of articles and videos to what tone to strike and types of content to prioritize. That’s who and what really determine what will catch and keep your attention, for how long, and what might encourage you to share. Why, you ask? Well, to get the most eyeballs on it and sell more of those pesky ads again, which is ultimately about getting the most money out of it and you, of course. This is a perfect example of when the metric is not actually about being the best but rather is about being the best at selling or promoting.
This demonstration of looking for nuance might feel long, drawn out, and a bit much, but it’s how it works in practice for me when analyzing my influences. If done well, it generally makes me more aware of the influences at play, less easily tricked, and open to the middle-of-the-road discussions rather than falling for the polarizing hot takes. Bear with me.
Babe.net and that vertical’s editor got what they wanted out of the Aziz Ansari story. The post garnered 2.5 million views in twenty-four hours and was covered everywhere—from The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic to TMZ, Variety, and CNN—and was critiqued, scrutinized, cheered, jeered, and retweeted about by, well, just about everyone. It caught the attention of the zeitgeist and was “the thing” for a very noisy time. Sides were taken—was this a bad date or was it bad journalism? Was it assault or was it predatory behavior? Was he an actual predator or just mildly (more than mildly?) skeezy? Was it an example of the pendulum swinging too far— cannibalizing the #MeToo movement and actual victims of sexual assault—or was this what the movement was about? Was this story something that should’ve remained private or was it fair game? Regardless of which side you were on (or because of which side you were on), it was feeding the machine. Different genders, different generations, and even different waves of feminists feasted on one another online, essentially putting more cash in Rupert’s pockets.
When I lowered my voice over coffee, I was having a heated conversation with a friend about how I thought the whole thing was just wrong on so many levels that I couldn’t even begin to dissect it (though I would try). Meanwhile, the young people at the table next to us were also speaking on the subject but in a brazen, unabashed tone I’d become used to associating with someone in a generation younger than mine. To them, this was right versus wrong, black versus white. All in stark contrast. As I eavesdropped, I realized that we agreed on fundamentals: Men should not behave in that manner and intimate encounters should not feel uncomfortable. But the similarities stopped there because, to them, any assertive and insistent behavior in the bedroom equaled assault, which is what the “news” website had implicitly suggested in the way they communicated their one-dimensional accusation. To them, Babe.net was a destination for news.
I might have quieted my voice at the time. But now I’ll dare to utter the words I felt influenced to whisper back then: Not all sins are created equal, not all information is valid, not all intentions come from the right motivation (and vice versa), and while callout culture can force gray area conversations around accountability, the influence of social contagion and groupthink needs to be dissected and challenged, even when it makes us squirm.
It’s incredibly important to redefine sexual dynamics in a culture that’s been under the influence of men since the dawn of time. Labeling anything black or white by leaving just enough gray is doing a disservice to both genders. I hate to pick on the Lean In movement again but it is a great example of being so unknowingly under an influence, that in a quest to disrupt the status quo, you unknowingly perpetuate it. The attempt to make the pendulum swing by helping women get a seat at the table with men missed the mark completely because the solution posited was to behave as a man would, within that existing patriarchal structure instead of to tear it down. Frat feminism and hookup culture are of the same ilk. The idea is to create a pendulum swing, but instead of owning their own impulses, girls attempt to behave the way (sometimes deplorable) boys always have, in a structure that was created by men long ago. In either event, women hide their true selves and authentic feelings in order to pass. Not surprisingly women/girls posturing as men/boys hasn’t worked out so well for us— or them. Either way, we are again trying to force ourselves into existing structures built on generations of influence rather than adjusting the structures themselves. The true solutions that mend the disconnect— whether they be about intimacy, communication, or enthusiastic consent to the temperature of an office thermostat, paid maternity leave, or work-life balance—happen in the gray.
When megaphones of influence impact a generation of its young readers, as in conflating a bad date and messy misogynistic sexual behaviors with sexual assault, we are in danger of false equivalences and false influences. We must wade into the messy, murky, complicated waters of gray area conversations, even if the weapons of polarizing absolutes make us want to retreat.
Today a fumble or an unpopular opinion can mean losing it all. When family, relationships, reputation, finances, safety, and privacy are all at stake, speaking nuances aloud may feel like too much to lose.
The risk may not feel worth the reward.
I’m not a very risk averse person. That’s probably obvious at this point.
Getting in the ring of life has always required huge personal risk. But being outspoken in our modern-day coliseum is even riskier today.
We have all been influenced by this.
Erasing things—words, books, people—may seem like an easy way to right the wrongs, but it’s not a strategy that helps create meaningful discourse and change. It doesn’t shift influence. The only thing that does that is talking about and learning from mistakes. By doing that, we can go beyond just standing up for our own selves when it comes to influence, and start imparting what we value as good influence. To do that, we must engage in debate and be open to nuance—and today, that’s a giant risk, making it a conundrum of epic proportions!
I’m forever lamenting that if we don’t teach our young to think for themselves and use nuanced analysis to consider ideas, they won’t know any difference. What I really mean is that young people, like my sons, will take ideas at face value and for granted without understanding that there’s more than one way to view an issue. They won’t understand that change is possible with rigorous, real conversation.
We need to consider context, and influences of the past, before we simply disappear things. If we censor and shelve books written through the lens of a different time, or cast aside movies, culture, statues, and people because the content doesn’t align with our values or offends by today’s standards, the next generations will have nothing from which to learn. If we remove all triggers, prioritizing every sensitivity, they won’t be capable of sitting in uncomfortableness or have the resilience and perspective to observe something and assess what is and isn’t valuable about it.
We can hold two ideas in our minds at once: We can be critical of how it was, or how it is, and simultaneously prideful about how far we’ve come while remaining resolute in how much further we must go. We can look at the foundations, structures, and influences that allowed a given incident to happen in the first place, tracing the route of how we arrived to now, and make sure it doesn’t happen again. And yes, this can apply to the internet, influence, and gender dynamics but also among a million other arenas too.
History is a living lesson. Without examining it, we lose our most important guidelines for creating a better world, for not replicating the same mistakes. What we don’t fear, we don’t protect. In essence, turning a blind eye to our past makes us take our present for granted.
Before we had an online archive of, well, everything, mistakes lived in the past, often quickly forgotten after an apology. But cultures shift, times change, and people (thankfully) adapt. Mistakes and misunderstandings happen (along with some egregious wrongdoings), and sometimes they’re forgiven. It’s just that today, our technologies, our digital bread crumbs of indiscretions (even teenage ones), never disappear.
Nuance does not translate on social media or in viral headlines. It doesn’t sell. For example, differentiating between a Harvey Weinstein and an Aziz Ansari isn’t as interesting to amped-up hordes as burying them both. It’s more work to look closer. But if we allow all our positive influences to retreat in distaste, and if we replace our gray areas with polarizing diametric opposites, what’s left is usually only the influences with something to gain. In the same way, we must protect parts of our history in order to learn from them—we have to return to the coliseum of our modern world to fight the good fight for exchanges of actual ideas.
As the character Baal in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses phrases it: “A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.”
The silver lining of the rampant fear of being ostracized for saying something unpopular is that many of the artists who retreated for fear of being canceled created deeper work while hibernating. And now we’re starting to see it.
Ansari got his ass kicked in the coliseum. He withdrew for a bit. He seemed to have learned a lot, or so we hope. And then he got back into the theater.
“I don’t know, man,” he said in his comedy special after the fact, which was more like a performance art piece (fewer laughs, more message). “We just gotta figure out some way to have some empathy. We’re all kinda just trapped in our own little world. And unless we figure out how to talk to each other in real life again, it doesn’t matter what the problem is. I don’t know what the answer is. Maybe click on some of the stuff they click on for a few days. See what’s going on.”
Lately I find myself once again looking to him. On one hand, I find his behavior unacceptable. On the other, I’m aware of the cultural influences on him as much as on, for instance, that young editor at Babe.net. You can use the right language but not do the right thing. When Ansari appeared as the woke poster boy up front and the boyswill-be-boys misogynist in the back, it felt hypocritical for many—his date especially. And when the writer of the Babe.net article claimed feminism as a reason to champion her story, but called an older female journalist who criticized her work “someone nobody under the age of 45 has ever heard of,” making fun of her appearance and age and labeling her a “burgundy lipstick, bad highlights, second-wave feminist,” it made it appear like she was virtue signaling or unaware of what it meant to actually champion women’s rights and feminism. I don’t condone his, or her, actions. I do think people deserve second chances. Because making a mistake doesn’t sap you of all your value.
If we all welcomed opportunities to engage in challenging in-depth conversations à la Ansari, we could in turn become good influences, or good spokespeople, for things that need to be discussed. Exploring nuance as part of our ongoing endeavor to understand what’s shaping the influences around us would give us the courage to say the things only whispered in the wings, and not stand alone on a stage in a coliseum fueled by fear.
Folklore Everyone’s saying it, so it must be true.
Folktale If everyone’s saying it and it must be true, I am to believe it.
Folk Rebellion I understand the motivations of others, groupthink, and I make my own decision before jumping to conclusions.
*Raise Hell Think of a conversation you’re meant to have, but you keep it to yourself. Is it something you shy away from for fear of the unknown? If your instinct or opinion isn’t the same as others, what could be the benefit of wading into the messy waters of discussions without clear winners? If you have had the messy gray area conversations and they didn’t go well, what could’ve been done better? Did they happen online, anonymously? Or across the table from a person over a cup of tea? Are there people in your world, in which you hold influence, who will lose out in some way by your staying on the sidelines of the coliseum?
Preorder your book today and email me your order (and your address) to jess (at) folk rebellion (dot) com by Oct 9th and I’ll send you a surprise in the mail. Yes, snail mail.