"I want more of you here"
On being present in the attention (aka surveillance) era.
Sheets of fluffy snow are falling this morning. Quietness is snow's first magic. The birds hush. Echoes are muffled. People cozy up inside for the first hours. Then, as the snow stops, the loud snow plows screech their blades on the road, exposing a sharp black contrast with the snow. My dog barks at them. The birds, who normally blend into the brown and gray and yellow of the winter forest, become hyper-visible. The world looks draped in soft. The pine branches, normally a mass of green, become unique elegant fingers covered in a white lace glove.
Part of the intensity of this big unsettling we are living through has to do with being seen. Immigrants hide away from public life to keep their families and networks safe and intact. Some gender-nonconforming and trans people choose to "tone it down" in hopes of moving through the world more undetected for their own safety. Unhoused people are being jailed for being visibly not okay. Government employees work to shield their private political beliefs in hopes they can keep doing the job they trained for, rely on, and feel called to do well.
At the same time, attention from strangers and acquaintances has become the center of life for so many. Some earn their main income from attention to their writing or podcast or posting their workout-of-the-day while talking. People in occupations ranging from writers to academics to journalists to people selling random goods on the internet are told we have to have a strong following and a "brand" to earn an income. Young people in the US's #1 stated professional goal is to become an 'influencer.' One of my kids tells me she wants to be a YouTuber when she grows up. Note that we do not let her watch YouTube. Another came home from school after 47's first week in office and told me the big news around school was that 47 saved TikTok.1
I am an old now. I will admit, these things surprise me.
Before and during the pandemic years, I was sucked deep into Instagram and Twitter as ways to communicate and feel connected to other people before I realized how it was harming my relationship with myself, my kids, and even the random other people whose lives I was feeling overly connected to through the screen. Public health officials, political activists, and even mainstream thinkers and influencers like Chris Hayes are publicly reckoning with the costs of the attention economy to our political, economic, and personal well-being. Two attention-seeking sociopaths — who own attention-grabbing social media sites — are stomping around in Washington trying to break people's will to fight and get what they need to live. All the while, they gain more attention while doing it. We've got a problem and are starting to talk about it. For that, I am glad.
Over the last years, I've pried myself off scrolling social platforms like Instagram and turned the volume up on my in-person social interactions and my library card. I read stacks of paper books now like I did in the olden days. I try to text my random rant feelings into text threads with trusted people I hang with in real life rather than dump them onto social media. But these attempts are still somewhat fraught and imperfect. The subtitle of this here Substack is itself "off of the scroll platforms and into your inbox" but then Substack pumped a bunch of energy into making this a scroll platform. Sometimes, I wonder what's up with someone and go look at their Instagram rather than text them. I'm imperfect. I do not have it all figured out.
Age-old questions lurk underneath these big political, economic, technological, and personal tensions. What is it to be seen? Who gets to look and who gets looked at? How do I know what's true? How do I know others and be known? How do I earn the money I need to live? How do I get what I need?
For the last couple of years, I've been working on a book. A book that tells my own stories about homelessness, coming out, living with MS, falling in love, and becoming a parent. In some respects, it contains the most personal parts of my own life. I'm in a phase of writing said book where I send parts of it out to trusted friends and colleagues to read and give feedback. And the feedback I get most consistently is the age-old feedback for memoirists and poets: I want more of you here.
So now, I'm in a bit of a quandary as an introverted writer. I've been using the raw material of my own life as the source of my writing since I first started scribbling poems into notebooks as a teenager. I've written and performed plays and published CD's of my readings and blasted my personal stories to listservs with 100,000+ readers. I think of myself as a pretty open book for a tough guy. And, yet, I believe them. I believe they want more of me in the writing. I trust these people.
I am turning this over like a rock I found at a river on a day I went there to pour out my sorrows. What would it look like to have more of me there? How much do we need to know about how it feels to wander the streets all night in January before heading to work at your job to know we ought to do something about homelessness? How much do we need to know about what it feels like to be run off the side of the road by a car full of men yelling "faggot" at you to know that it happened, there's a bigger problem, and we ought to do something about it?
I know the purpose of writing is not just to get people to do something about it. But also, it is. Another purpose of writing is to invite others to turn over the river rock with me. "Hey, look, I came here to pour out my sorrow and I found this rock. Does it mean something? Can it hold this particular story? Let's have a look. Turn it over with me."
I am trying to hide out from the attention economy and also, I need it. I need subscribers to my other Substack to help offset the time I spend making it and not earning income. I need followers here and on the Instagram (that I haven't yet made public) to show an agent that I have a ready-made list of people to whom I can say "I have a book! Come read it!" And also, I feel a duty to stand in the silence made by the snow magic. To share some of my thoughts and feelings while holding others in the vault or in reserve.
Our attention drives so much profit for the few right now. It shapes our relations in profound ways. So my work, as the snow melts and the skunk cabbage rises out of the swamp to announce the coming buds and blooms, is to review my own presence. Where and how and do I want to have more of me 'here' — on the page. Where and how do I be present with those who are hiding for their own safety? How do I keep myself safe as a visible genderqueer person going on my third decade of dwelling in the visible gender in-between? How do I maintain connection through competing needs to be "here" and my need to be elsewhere?
I leave you with a video of the falling snow.
Truly, of everything he did in the first week, this will likely have the least impact on these young people’s lives in the long term. But that’s the point, isn’t it?