The literary world I grew up in was vastly different from the present. There were once gatekeepers, rules, institutions, and force-multipliers for writers. It once made sense to describe national communities in the first-person plural. Today it is hard to see if anyone is having an influence. The following advice will seem obvious and I suspect most online writers figured this out years ago. Even an incompetent live-player quickly gets a sense of the field of play. Here it is anyway.
The central lesson is a bitter one. The world where individual cultural artefacts could shift the mass audience is gone. Volume dilutes the potency of individual texts and cultural fragmentation hinders their transmission. Abandon hope that a protest/book/concert can spark a revolution. Do you feel it? The change in air pressure? I feel the rabid competition for ever-shrinking slices of an attentional pie; the sense of a collective shrinking of attention span; the suspicion that cultural conversation no longer transmits legibly into the power-elite. These all come from basic sociological changes, and unless we attempt to reverse these changes we must accept the new rules:
Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds leaking whatever “truth” suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large.
The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in “truth.” [Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty]
What works in conditions like these? Here are four possible (mutually inclusive) strategies:
Invest in subcommunities. Find an existing community which shares your interests and has some sort of power; master its particular codes and literary canons; and then compete within the media-organs it used to coordinate its group consciousness. The smart writer chooses or stumbles into an incipient community and takes a gamble on it, using time and energy to get in on the ground floor. If you choose poorly, your community proves impotent or incoherent. Success, as in all fields, requires the courage to potentially waste your youth.
Create a subcommunity. Go Founder Mode and create your own community. With strong enough writing, and/or support from other established writers, you can draw together powerful and influential people. Very difficult and contingent on a scene emerging, although it does suit the drive towards personalisation and customisation in all consumed products. Supplement with meet-ups, reading lists, and forum spaces. Make the reader feel part of something. Liable to induce zero-sum game dynamics and a tragedy of the commons: there are only so many reader-hours to go around, and each additional success further fragments the Mass Superego.
Go stochastic. Think in aggregate terms: not 'this article will change the world!' but 'this stream will change the world!' Do what K-Hole recommends all brands do:
Smart companies know that one-time monumental purchases are less valuable than passive awareness of the brand 24/7, and that the real goal is to keep consumers continually in the brand flow. [K-Hole Issue 2]
X users are aware of this. You are not trying to persuade people, you are trying to change the ecosystem. Memes, long-form articles, non-fiction books; podcasts, tweets: all of it pushes the needle. Each post is meaningless; each blog is meaningless: what matters is the aggregate vibe. Like the advertiser and spin-doctor, your success is measured by vibeshift; artistic excellence, inspiring people, and correcting falsehood are merely tools in this mission. Vibeshift is then converted into power by lone nodes getting one-shotted: not anyone in particular, but a big enough distribution taking pills of some variety or another to trigger irreversible policy decisions. Money and the algorithm are your friends as we raise awareness together: its all part of the same stochastic brainwashing apparatus.
Go infinite. Cease looking at the world and gaze at the stars. Truth and beauty will prevail even if the present has gone insane. By writing so, you adopt an ancient strategy; in the words of Cass Sunstein, you work in:
small bands who keep cultural flames burning: flames lit by musicians, poets, novelists, sports, films... In North America and Europe, a lot of people see themselves a bit like Miller’s monks did: as socially marginal, perhaps, but as maintaining certain documents and truths, or perhaps as moving identifiable projects forward, even if there is not a lot of interest in those projects.
Cass Sunstein, A Canticle for Leibowitz
All of the above is intuitive to those searching for an audience. Its purpose is to remind myself that conditions have changed. I was raised in a world of legacy media - a world which is intuitive in a mass democracy - and often find myself drifting back. I think in terms of institutions, tracks, prestige, mainstream opinion, and permanent positions. I believe in debate, rational persuasion, and turning points in the mass audience. Outside subcommunities, these structures and principles matter less and less every week. We are leaving the era of "Mass Effects": power is concentrating, but how, where, and with what medium of consciousness remain in flux. We await the visionaries of 2027.