The Deliberate Shallowness of “Writers’ Blokke”

Why popular publications ban criticism and infantilize their audience

What does it take to run a successful online publication? We can get a sense of the mindset needed by having a look at the writers’ guidelines for “Writers’ Blokke.”

The older guideline says, “You can write about almost anything but do try to avoid topics on sex, drugs, murder, and politics unless the articles are insightful and beneficial for the readers. Instead, topics on positive things like health, fitness, food, love, self-improvement, poems, short stories and rainbows and sunshine. You get the picture.”

The updated guideline for 2022 warms to the theme:

As has been mentioned before, we accept most any topic but please do stay clear from submitting articles about politics, religion, sex, or anything that can be a sensitive topic for others.

We want to create a safe and good environment on here and while there are articles or ways to write about those topics in a good and positive way, more often than not, it just becomes too sensitive and things can get out of hand.

Any other topic should be OK, again, providing the article isn’t a negative one that bashes other writers/publications on the platform.

Apparently, then, the mindset you need as a publisher is one of fostering relentless positivity that borders on banality.

If you’re into philosophy like me, of course, you can forget about writing at Writers’ Blokke. Nothing about politics or religion? Nothing that touches on a “sensitive” topic? Nothing “negative,” which is to say critical? That virtually eliminates philosophical and intellectually serious writing.

But that’s neither here nor there because what we should learn from these guidelines is the reason why philosophy and intellectual seriousness are in short supply in online writing.

Online editorial wisdom

We should view the matter from the publisher’s perspective. The question is about what most people want to read. If most readers would prefer to read upbeat, platitudinous, pandering fluff pieces that don’t challenge anyone but indulge in our First World narcissistic craving to be flattered and amused, the prudent publisher would eliminate negativity and present just “rainbows and sunshine.”

More precisely, however, we can observe that most people on the internet don’t want to read anything at all. Few folks online would prefer to read an article than watch a video, listen to a song, or play a game. Just a few clicks away from any article, for example, you have an ocean of pornography at your disposal. So an old-school writer’s philosophical criticisms and insightful commentaries are competing with bouncing boobs and buttocks.

Thus, from an publisher’s vantage point, the problem is that you need to lure to your publication folks who should be working instead or who would rather be entertaining themselves with mindless fare.

• Question: How do you convince someone to tax his or her brainpower by reading an article, when that potential audience member has many more clamorous entertainment options on the internet?
• Answer: You publish only the most bland, trite, vapid articles, so the audience can hardly tell the difference between your publication’s contents and those of YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Pornhub, or Facebook.

If you want to run a successful online publication for readers, you need to recognize that most folks on the internet are young, and few of them want to be readers in the first place. Thus, you need to convince the potential audience that reading can be as fun and as superficially harmless as zoning out with online reality TV or with addictive social media banter.

Writing for shallow entertainment

Still, this approach is bound to be shallow and self-destructive. For one thing, it rather defeats the point of writing and of publishing nonfiction. The competition between reading and watching videos for entertainment is like the competition between Democrats and Republicans over which side can sell out the populace with more sociopathic glee. You know in advance which side wins out on those terms of realpolitik.

But Writer’s Blokke also says, for example, that it wants “to create a safe and good environment on here.” Yet when you dumb things down for readers, you’re not doing them any favours. You’re trying to addict them. And if it turns out that the societies in which these audiences can be lured are subject to severe philosophical and sociopolitical criticisms, your bland publication will only be encouraging more of that bad behaviour, by flattering and reassuring the audience.

What’s so “safe” about consumerism? How is the consumer lifestyle “good” for any “environment”? How is shallow self-improvement better for the reader than more fearless self-exploration? These happy-talking publications are selling snake oil. The puff pieces and listicles are like cotton candy: consuming them treats you to an addicting sugar rush. As Neil Postman said, the plan seems to be one of “amusing ourselves to death.”

Of course, entertainment isn’t wrong in itself — not unless you’re a puritanical ascetic who thinks all pleasures should be renounced. But it’s worthwhile sometimes to step back and to try to understand what’s happening. As many critics have wondered, the question is whether we’re using social media and the internet or whether those outlets are using us. Are we in control of the experience or are we being distracted, addicted, and exploited by the big tech companies just long enough for them to farm us for our data?

Banning criticism to sustain the consumer’s illusions

Again, we can understand why the more successful publications tend to cater to this lowest common denominator. The challenging content deliberately rubs the audience the wrong way, and most folks who agree to read something when they could be indulging in more mindless activities on the internet will insist at least that the articles not add insult to injury by committing the reader to an edifying agenda.

Online readers are doing the writers a favour just by deigning to read since with the advent of broadband, the internet hosts streaming videos and music which dazzle, amuse, or numb us and which are much more inviting. Reading feels like homework and isn’t obviously as fun as bingeing on the more visually or orally stimulating media.

It wasn’t always like this. In the 1990s, it took minutes for a modem to load a single picture. Text was king because it could appear instantly by taking up little bandwidth. Now the playing field has been evened, and a single mouse click can take you to an article or to a picture, song, movie, or video stream.

Thus, we mustn’t blame the messenger. The editor of Writers’ Blokke is only conforming to the reality of the online environment. True, this is likely a self-reinforcing process since those low-brow expectations are established in part by the content creators who exploit our natural weaknesses. This is a well-known problem with democracy and with capitalism: when we liberate society and partake in open competitions for our attention, we enable free-riders and demagogues to pollute the discourse.

There are exceptions, such as Jessica Wildfire and Umair Haque who are relentlessly critical in their popular writings on Medium. But most viral articles on that platform are hackneyed bursts of inoffensive chatter and drivel.

Moreover, criticism can indeed become toxic, and anonymity on the so-called intellectual dark web facilitates conspiracy theories and radicalizes us, using big tech’s algorithms to create negative feedback loops and walled gardens, and exploiting cognitive traps such as paranoia, anxiety, and the Dunning-Kruger effect. You’ll find these toxic spaces on Reddit, 4chan, Twitter, and comment boards.

The potential for criticism to get out of hand is no excuse, though, for banning critical thought on a platform. That’s like saying that because anger can cause violence, we should build a safe space in which anger is forbidden.

Indeed, the happy-talking parts of the internet are likely helping to create the toxicity by shunting that negative energy to the corners of the web that cater to this black market. Banning philosophy and criticism likely exacerbates the audience’s infantilization that’s rampant in consumer culture.

Instead, we might try to understand how free competitions, the internet, and the human mind work, so we can discipline ourselves as responsible citizens.

We might suspect, then, that the editors who join in the downward spiral ban intellectual seriousness not just to cash in on the audience’s weaknesses, but because the editors, too, suspect that their motives and their publications are unseemly, and they’d rather not be reminded of that fact with exhaustive demonstrations of their complicity.

These editors are like their reluctant readers: both retreat to convenient illusions which the internet increasingly sustains.