Peerless Peers - or "Legacy" · 8:00pm Jan 15th, 2023
I think I wrote a while ago that the problem with mass media is that you only get exposed to the success stories. You don’t get to see the piles of unsold screenplays, unbought pilots and unpublished novels. It's definitely something I've written around for a while, but I'm not sure I've focused on it specifically.
I started writing this in a public library. I’d lost my keys, so I needed to wait for my roommate to get off work before I could get back into my apartment. I wrote this surrounded by more books than I'd ever be able to read, thinking about Tacitus.
Recently, reading Brett Devereaux's wonderful A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, or ACOUP.blog, he made a point about the 'dark ages'. We don't have a lot of work from that period because little of it survived - not because things stopped being made. That's a filter our knowledge of classical authors has to pass through, our knowledge of Aristotle and Pythagoras and, of course, Tacitus.
From our knowledge, Tacitus is considered one of the greatest Roman politicians and thinkers, which is justification for his work being known into the present day. But the reality is that we don't know how many better minds there might have been; Much of his work was copied into the present day because it was good for teaching latin.
That’s the reason for the filter. Our knowledge of his contemporaries is limited because that work wasn’t copied. Parchment and papyrus both rot. The work that survives into the modern day is because it was painstakingly reproduced for centuries, in an unbroken chain. The lapse of just one generation to copy an entire work by hand would result in that work being lost forever.
So, a large reason works like Tacitus specifically survive is because they were curriculum.
When his work outlives the rest of his contemporaries there’s an expectation the reason is because he was exceptional. He must have been great for his work to survive. Don't get me wrong, the man could write a banger line; 'They would make a wasteland and call it empire' is still one of my favourites. What I mean is that his work surviving because it was used to teach Latin speaks to a deeper reason these people survive the historical filter.
Take a more recent example. Shakespeare was a great playwright, but why do we know his name before any other from his period? He could write a damn good play, but was it that good by comparison to his peers, that his work gets remembered over all others? How much of the reason he’s still relevant is because he’s still taught in English classes? Certainly, I’ve seen much better scripts that will be unremembered within my lifetime, but I expect Shakespeare to still be taught in highschools a hundred years from now.
The reason I'm saying this is because when we learn these names, their reputations in history, there comes with it a seed that if we become great enough, if we are talented enough in the right place, at the right time, history could remember us. What I realized is that there’s no amount of fame or talent that guarantees this for you.
So here’s where we get to George M Cohan. A hundred years ago he was one of the most famous Americans alive. Known as 'the man who owned Broadway', he wrote, produced and starred in more than 30 Broadway musicals. Wrote more than 50 shows, published more than 300 songs, and was still headlining into the 1940s.
The biography about his life, Yankee Doodle Dandy, ranks in the US Film Academy's top 100 movies of all time. Released in 1942, and the movie ends with a scene where a bunch of teenagers run out of petrol for their car outside his house. None of them recognize him, or any of his songs, and instead sing back to him ‘Jeepers Creepers’. Cohan was still alive and performing at the time of release. I'd still bet only two or three of the people reading this have heard of him.
Probably because it's a bit awkward that he was a best selling minstrel show writer. Content warning, all the racism.
Lol. Lmao.
What I'm trying to say here is that it isn't a level of fame, in and of itself, that gives you a legacy. It's possible to become a world-famous, household name and then fall into obscurity within your own lifetime. I'd be surprised if, in a hundred years, kids will know the names of Stephen Hawking or Bill Gates, whereas they'll probably know the name Hitler in the way we still know the name Napoleon.
But because we do know these names, these great people who made their mark on history, it still inspires within a certain kind of person the realization they could be remembered the same way. The problem with wanting this kind of success is that it’s impossible to know if you have it. In my opinion, this is a way worse problem than it being impossible to get. We know Van Gogh managed it - but he committed suicide in part because of how sure he was that he hadn’t. He mentions in his suicide note the struggle of being a living artist competing against the dead.
A more niche but recent example would be Mark Fisher. His work Capitalist Realism is considered a seminal anticapitalist work, and is frequently one of the first works people will link you to as a way to introduce you to the ideas. Fisher also committed suicide thinking his work would never find an audience.
Why romanticize that it was this shared need that drove these two to create work I so deeply admire? That desire also saw them end their lives. Even if I were to still believe that great work is worth the suffering within your lifetime, I have to confront that the suffering ends the work, and doing great work does not alleviate the suffering.
The internet makes all this way worse. Now our personal heroes really are in our immediate peer group, in ways that TV and movie stars and rockstars never quite were. This was always a problem, this is not something the internet caused, it’s fuel on a fire that’s been burning as old as written record.
The parasocial relationship has existed for as long as people could have a one-sided relationship. A leader of state has to deal with their entire country having a strong opinion on them, and they’ll never meet most of them. That’s as true today as it was when the first head was put on the back of a coin. We talk about cult followings now, but ancient pharaohs had that shit perfected since Narmer, 5,000 years ago.
When we do hit the era of TV and radio, the idea of 'groupies' becomes something taken for granted. It's just taken as part of the mythos of being a rockstar that strangers want to have sex with you. Talking about 'who your celebrity exception is' is taken for granted as a fun bit of banter. On the one hand, that's insane. On another, people do show a lot about themselves in their work, and what they reveal can be incredibly attractive, legitimately. There is a solid basis to that one-sided attraction, and that kind of thing long predates the internet.
What I'm really trying to say is that there's enough in people's creative work to identify with them, and conceptualize them. And that's enough to see them as a peer that you can compare yourself to, set a standard. If we can take it for granted that one sided relationship is enough to form a basis of a crush, for sexual attraction, we can take it for granted they’re a standard we can set as competition.
What the internet really changes with that is that more and more do we see behind the curtain. We can see our favourite creators blogs and intimate thoughts, we have a deeper look into the advice they give and their methods for success. We have access to far more of these people too. More kids want to grow up to be Youtubers than astronauts, and there’s far more of them than could ever have been held by legacy television. And as community engagement becomes more critical to that success, parasocial relationships just become social.
That was as far as I got into this blog, when I wrote it in the library. I was thinking about the fact that I don’t know who the best golfer in the world is, after Tiger Woods. I don’t know who the best cyclist is since Lance Armstrong. But those ideas weren’t strong enough for me to want to finish this, so I put it in storage for six months.
I wanted to come back to it because yesterday I watched a movie called The Menu, and it was the piece I was missing to finish this.
The Menu is a horror-comedy about being an artist and realizing that was a mistake, and being extremely mad about it. I don’t want to spoil it too much except to tell people that, if they relate to any of the ideas I’ve put here so far, you’re going to love it and you should watch it. I think it might still be in theaters, but I know it’s already on Disney+.
I’ll link one scene, both because I love it, but also because it so perfectly captured what I was thinking about when I started writing this. Content warning for suicide, but it happens in the last four seconds of the video. You can avoid seeing it by stopping before then.
For those who don’t want to click it, I’ll transcribe the most important part here:
“Do you like this life? This life that you dreamed about?”
“No, chef.”
“And do you want my life? Not my position and my talent. My life.”
“No, chef.”
And that’s it, right? That’s the whole of it. Because what we essentially see here is that wanting this insane thing, the idea of legacy, for the perfection of your art, is something that’s going to make your life profoundly unhappy while you push for it. Even if you do achieve it.
I’ve written 60,000 words in the last 45 days. Most of them I wrote in December, which is historically the worst time of the year for me - it’s my worst bipolar depression swing, I give up on doing anything the entire month. But I got 40,000 words of a new original novel done, what I used to need mania to pull off.
I changed how I viewed making art last year, tried to detox myself from how I used to see writing. Getting a job outside of writing definitely helped me do it, because it untethered needing to succeed at writing from financial security for me. So, writing just became a vehicle of self-expression to me again, something I desperately need. Which is probably why I felt comfortable writing ponyfic again when that was what I needed to explore something.
Another part of what’s helped with that is internalizing more about what success actually does to the people I admire and identify with. Warren Ellis got outed for having 80 secret girlfriends at the same time, Joss Whedon gave an incredible interview that reads like a supervillain monologue, and Dan Harmon, well. He’s a years long case study on how, if you have mental health issues, there’s no amount of self-awareness or therapy that’s going to insulate you from the damage that fame and popularity can do to you.
The only winning move is not to play, essentially. I used to dismiss the fear that getting what I wanted would only make me unhappier as sour grapes, but now? I think while there’s a lot of truth that if you’re going through hell you should keep going, but if you’ve entered a hell of your own choosing then it might be a better idea to turn around.
The post-internet landscape for being an artist means your peer group is global, and you’re mostly going to be comparing yourself to the most-successful at whatever you do. And even that is going to feel reasonable when you get it in your head that you’re competing with those people for a place in history, for a chance of being remembered after you’re gone. It can be really easy to get stuck with the idea that’s the only thing that matters, from a long view.
It might not be a conscious thing, something you deliberately think about. It can just be a kernel at the back of your mind, a bit of jealousy and hope. For me it existed as a powerful motivation, and even something that got me through the years of my worst depression. There was something comforting in the fact that it didn’t matter how bad my life was, if my lifetime was ultimately irrelevant to what I could accomplish. And I definitely used to see shooting for anything less as weakness.
But I can’t name any of last years’ 340 Olympic gold medalists, and I can name a lot of people who are miserable for having what I wanted. So what’s the point of wanting it, even if I had any control over getting it?
H. Beam Piper, awesome author, gun collector, and all around self-educated man of letters, who committed suicide two years after I was born. He laid down an astonishing universe populated by equally entertaining characters, but yet he also was competing with ghosts long gone, measuring himself with a yardstick that could never match his own talent. I have every one of his books, and have read them repeatedly.
It's worth repeating that the term "dark ages" isn't a moral judgement, at least not anymore. Its darkness is in the sense of being unknown.
When I was a kid, one of my goals in life was to get something named after me in the textbooks. An equation, an algorithm, whatever. I just wanted that sort of immortality. Then I got into grad school and learned just how random it was and how unlikely it was given that my field doesn’t name things after people as much anymore.
After that, I got into ethical AI and did my dissertation on the topic, and my goal shifted to wanting to make the world a better place, even if it was just in some small way. Didn’t matter if my name was remembered as long as the impact was lasting. I think that was very big and selfless of me and a moment of great personal growth.
Now, I want to make as much money as I can so I can buy all the Pipp plushies. I think that’s also a sign of my personal growth.
It's worth noting that we do in fact have access to the work of most of Shakespeare's peers and while analysis of art is inherently subjective, this is actually something that can be studied if you really feel like it.
We have, I shit you not, SO MUCH information from 17th century Britain. This was when literacy was booming and the available of cheap printing meant an explosion of the written word in forms that were really easily preserved. A friend of mine did his PhD thesis on the pamphleteer revolution there in the early 1600s; if you've ever seen a person standing on a streetcorner handing out literature in the English-speaking world, that's where this first took off. We have mountains of preserved pamphlets on everything to accusations that tavernkeepers were watering down their beer to really high-quality stuff used in ancient campaigns for seats in Parliament or the question of Catholic Emancipation.
If your play was good enough to be preformed at all, it probably still exists in a folio somewhere. SOMEONE printed it and preserved it. Not just the semi-big names that anyone who is moderately well-red will know, like Marlowe and Johnson; there were REALLY obscure dudes putting on REALLY obscure plays who you can walk into a bunch of archives in the UK and pull a full copy of their works off the shelves.
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Yeah, THAT'S what turned Joss Whedon into a supervillain. Not his abominable treatment of coworkers and employees, not his relentless abuse of Charisma Carpenter, not his ridiculous sexual antics. It was the social media what done it.
There are two possibilities for Joss Whedon. The first is that an enormous number of people who used to work with and under him are engaged in massive after-the-fact conspiracy to destroy him, a conspiracy so thorough and complete that Whedon himself is in on it and admitting to all kinds of stuff that never happened because he's been so thoroughly gaslit he believes they did.
The second is that this is a garden-variety case of a powerful Hollywood douchebag abusing said power and the people around him went along with it and said nothing because that's a great way to end up destroyed.
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I would probably add here that people are multi-faceted, and it's very possible to have nothing but good interactions with someone that other people will only have negative interactions with.
Going back to Warren Ellis, the line from the Guardian piece that stands out to me the most is; "Warren Ellis made the industry a lot safer for women, except if you were targeted by Warren Ellis."
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Yeah, this is actually, in my understanding, a major distinction between "people who are just assholes" and "people who are deliberately predatory."
Assholes are vaguely unpleasant to just about everyone; even people who they're required to treat with respect and deference, like immediate superiors at work or, say, police, or judges, or whatnot, will often be able to tell they're kind of a jerk after any kind of extended period interacting with them.
People who are actually predatory are a lot more self-aware of what they're doing and are making some very deliberate choices in who gets to see them do what.
It's like how when you're kids and the schoolyard bully is known to be a real problem by everyone, including parents and teachers, but the kid who is torturing squirrels in the woods flies under the radar because "he's so quiet and polite." Yeah, no shit he is; he doesn't want to get noticed. The bully is just a thug; he doesn't bother to hide it because why would he, that's his base personality and to a large degree he may not even be aware he's doing anything wrong. The squirrel torturer knows that people like him end up on watch lists.
I've had to learn the hard lesson that I will never be a brilliant programmer or a brilliant sysadmin.
I've learned to accept to do the things I mostly want to do, do a decent job at it, and to just make a living doing it.
And I'm much happier for it.
The cultural shelf life of groundbreaking literal world class theatre is absolutely terrifying. Of all the "greats" that the layman would know, I honestly think they're just "pretty good". And if I did a deep dive and found the greatest talents? It would just be frustrating I would basically never get to see the play performed in person, would never be able to talk to them about anyone, etc.
There was a big twitter thread the other day responding to the lamentations of modern art not being classical oil painting... pointing out that there are tons of contemporary artists doing classical oil paintings that are on average waaaay better made and more relatable than stuff you'll see in museums, but you'll just never know because no one really cares. Equally terrifying to think about, at least the first time.
As an aside, I do like how when i read that book talking about Shakespearean identity theories (90% of the book) then the very mundane debunk (10% lol) the answer for why we only have 2 signed Shakespeare docs and a bunch of missing plays when that seems insane from our point of view where history is very very well documented, is literally just because we don't have a well preserved document record from that place in England until about 20 years later. So people's intuitions are not at all far off that it should seem like we have all the documents from that era, they're just a teensy bit off on timing; hence the conspiracy theories.
One of the things I am reminded of by this blog post is the original point of Sturgeons law. Often given as simply 90% of everything is crap, it misses the context of the initial remark. Sturgeon was a science fiction author defending his genre against accusations that bar a few worthy exceptions, Asimov etc, that all science fiction was was awful mass produced pablum. And the thing is Sturgeon admitted that was true! but the breakthrough was that every human endeavor, no matter how much you cherish it the vast majority of the output is crap that will be forgotten. And some people find that disheartening but to me it is a call that it is fine to make crap because yeah odds are it will be and that is fine. I dunno if this added anything but I just felt that maxim come back to me.
and to be honest they have better odds to create something important, because well ...there still working search function! And how many astronauts we can seriously have before it turned into "Garbage collectors but in spaaace"? (if manned spaceflight to survive at all).
so, Long live The Archive and r/datahoarders, may future generations have enough cpu for running recoll over it!
The irony is that now it's not the creator who benefits from the work: it's whoever promotes and sells it afterwards. Shakespeare's in no position to benefit from hundreds of years of artistic appreciation for the simple fact that his immortality is a mere metaphor. But because he went viral (and hasn't dropped like a stone since), by definition he's what you grab if you want to signal your cultural power and influence.
He's not just a natural subject of literary study: his memory's become something others use as a talisman, medal, and badge. The irony is that his cultural strength comes from his memory being totally vulnerable to the whims and interests of others.
Like most things in life: it's never just the one guy.
Thing is: fame and legacy, like most external values, boil down to power. Carrots and sticks, basically, having more influence or outright control over other people's minds and behaviours, obviously or subtly. It can be done either through the obvious big bad bully behaviour, or through the subtler claim that you are a mighty contributor head-and-shoulders above others (heck, even their great benefactor and friend, because that's a form of power too).
The "carrot" kind of fame is likely more benign, but the simple fact is that you still end up casting a shadow over others by design, and what's more while playing a status game struggling for promotion and then struggling to keep it.
And the point of power isn't to be happy: the point of power is to be in power. Happiness at best is only for when you get a promotion, not for when you stay the same or get a demotion.
No wonder it's likely to either make people unhealthy or attract unhealthy people. In a group, it's a zerosum game. It's not a situation where trust is stable, because if you start failing, someone else starts succeeding. You become basically a poorer investment for potential allies and an easier target for potential enemies. And in the meantime you're up against many, many, many other people looking to win the same game. Even when you win, you might lose.
That said, people are attracted to "legacy" and other forms of social power for the same reason animals are attracted to food and drink. They either get their share or get pushed aside by those better at grabbing it. Anyone who doesn't grab the Shakespeare slice of pie in literary circles is liable to be shoved out of polite society's good books.
It's contests all the way down.
I think that's what people find hard to understand. We don't go after things because they're self-evidently keys to happiness or rightness, whatever we might think. We go after things a lot of the time because of urges, compulsions, obsessions, hungers, and so on that take over our minds, if only briefly.
It may have been that those urges et al amorally helped our ancestors survive in past environments (for instance, by pursuing group or subgroup power and gaining more status, food, resources, or reproductive success than potential rivals get). Or it may have been that they're reactions to new conditions in the modern world (for instance, subconscious coping strategies or acts of defiance, especially in overwhelming urban societies with uncontrollable and impersonal systems governing our lives). But the effect's the same either way.
So pursuing an achievement that's painful and self-defeating makes a bit more sense when viewed through that lens. It's not a simple attempt at happiness at all. It's a vulnerable social struggle down to the bedrock.
Actually enjoying writing requires a less lofty, less "ticket-to-greatness", and definitely a less rank-based social attitude, such as pursuing it as a private/personal act of healthy absorption with the art for its own sake (flow states, namely), or socially as a secure and collaborative effort with reliable support and backups from trusted others.
Of course, that last bit assumes you're not in a dysfunctional society to begin with, so take that with a grain of salt...
Is it wrong of me that my main takeaway from this blog is "Isn't the side of the coin with the face on it normally called the 'front' and not the 'back'?".
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The front of the coin is whichever side you're currently looking at don't @ me
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So a person's spine is on their front if you are looking at it?
Oh, wait, this is me @ing you, crap. You explicitly told me not to do that.
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I'd be deeply fucked if I ever had to set up a claymore mine, too
medalsofamerica.com/media/catalog/product/c/l/claymore-mine-pin-15159-e1065_lt_1.jpg?quality=80&bg-color=255,255,255&fit=bounds&height=1000&width=1250&canvas=1250:1000
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I mean, if you want to get really pedantic, the face side of a coin is called the "obverse," and the other side is called the "reverse," but I'm generally on team "I knew what the writer meant and that's good enough for me."
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Generally I only offer corrections when I legitimately can't parse what the heck they're talking about, and often it's not even strictly incorrect (the one I remember is the use of "portal" to mean what is probably not the magical kind and is therefore uselessly vague as a description)