POS, not POSSE

(I thought about a non posse non peccare joke here, but it was too hard. Just want to go on the record about that.)

Here the always-excellent Mandy Brown writes about her recent experience with the POSSE model of writing on the web: Publish [on your] Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Write on your blog or your micro.blog and forward your posts, as it were, to the social media platforms.

Will it be weird, to write this way? Probably. I’m tossing the same words into (currently) three totally different networks, each with their own affect and moods and characters of the day. I’m keeping my distance, such that I likely won’t hear the replies (at least, not with any timeliness) or see the ripples my words make, should they make any at all. But maybe we need more weird — not in the very recent sense of the word, but in the sense of prophesy or potential, a spell or charm, the magic, the wild, the wyrd — that which is becoming, rather than that which has already passed us by.

I completely respect what Brown is doing here, but my own view is that the way to find the wyrd is through a slightly different method: POS, not POSSE. Skip the syndication.

I think often about some comments by Louis C.K., of all people, that Austin Kleon posted on his Tumblr a long time ago:

You have your number. It’s very dangerous to be liked by more people than should like you. It’s bad for them, and it’s bad for you. There’s gonna be a shock down the road for them, or you’re gonna dilute yourself and take yourself to a place where you can’t live with who you are. I think that you make an honest account of who you are and you live with the results. The results will be appropriate to who you are.

And I would add that it’s unhealthy to be read by more people than should read you. In my last sustained period on Twitter, six or seven years ago I guess, when I was still promoting my published writings, I remember often — quite often — getting replies or quote-tweets from people who had no idea what I was saying but wanted to comment on it in a way that corroborated or reinforced their sense of themselves, their social self-presentation, a social self-presentation that typically took the form of performative partisan self-righteousness. Most of them hadn’t read my work, of course; they had only seen a tweet (by me or by someone else) about something I had published. But even when they read it they didn’t understand: my ideas came from a place so distant from their intellectual and personal formation that those ideas were unintelligible to them. But still they commented.

That’s when I realized that sometimes it’s good to reduce the size of your audience — to make your work a little harder to find. That was the standpoint from which I was operating when Breaking Bread for the Dead came out, which didn’t help its sales! (Sorry, Penguin Press.) And I’ve continued along that path. When I write, I’m not looking for hooks to current events — for me, that’s now a reason not to write about something. I don’t promote my writing on social media, and I don’t ask anyone else to do so either. I’ve become the writerly version of the family in The Quiet Place, trying not to attract the attention of the uncomprehending and incomprehensible aliens.

Well, sort of. I don’t think of all my online readers as malicious invasive predators. But there are a lot of people out there in social-media world who hear everything but see and understand nothing. I’ll just tip-toe out of their range, thank you very much.

So: POS, not POSSE. I’m not syndicating because I don’t want to expand my audience. I’m just writing here on my own site (blog.ayjay.org and social.ayjay.org) and if you find me here, that’s great. Just be careful who you tell about me, okay?