Disintermediation, Dollars, and Dopamine

Or: why I admire Richard Hanania

There is surely no figure the extremely online comment-o-sphere feels more violently ambivalent about than

Richard Hanania

. Ideologically speaking, Hanania and I differ on many points, but I’ve always admired him on one front: his internet game. Specifically, he seems to have cracked one of the most mind-bending aspects of writing directly for an engaged readership, namely audience capture. So much so, that in my mind one of the most potent but personally uncomfortable manoeuvres an internet creator can make, in avoiding being captured by their audience, is named for him: “hananiating”.

Before I explain what I mean by hananiating, I need to talk about audience capture. The term emerged to describe a now-common dialectic, between internet-famous individuals and their collective audience. It’s a feedback loop, in which the creator publishes content, receives feedback in the form of appreciation, viral reposts, more followers and perhaps also money for the content, and will adjust the content in response to a developing sense of what the audience as a collective wants.

GS Bhogal characterised the dynamic, and its often cartoonish results, thus:

When influencers are analyzing audience feedback, they often find that their more outlandish behavior receives the most attention and approval, which leads them to recalibrate their personalities according to far more extreme social cues than those they'd receive in real life. In doing this they exaggerate the more idiosyncratic facets of their personalities, becoming crude caricatures of themselves.

Not long ago, I described the OnlyFans porn performer Lily Phillips as a particularly disturbing instance of this kind of capture:

Anyone who gains prominence online as a focus for a specific cluster of ideas, sensibilities, dreams, desires, hopes can be affected by audience capture. My friend Katherine Dee at

default.blog

would call this, more succinctly, a fandom, and has argued (I think persuasively) that in the digital age all of culture is now fandom.

As Bhogal observes, the creator/audience fandom feedback loop can create intense pressure to grow ever more extreme in the way you present your digital persona. This pressure turned Nikocado Avocado, a mild-mannered, health-conscious vegan vlogger, into a loud, obese, grotesque glutton; it turned Lily Phillips into a dead-eyed vehicle for the spreadsheet egregore. In politics, meanwhile, it provides a constant encouragement to commentators from their audiences, to become ever more radical.

All the internet incentives push in the same direction. In an attention economy, you can forget weighing the arguments and reasoning things out. No one will read it if you try, so better to come up with something drastic that goes viral. Shoot the migrants; abolish all borders; babies can be trans; abortion up to birth. It doesn’t really matter what “side” you’re nominally on; if you’re chasing virality, you’d better be arguing an extreme case. This dynamic is one of the reasons political discourse has become so crazy. Everyone is competing for clicks and eyeballs; attention spans are declining; it can feel as though the only way to get noticed is to be more radical than the other guy. That’s how a ten-minute internet phenomenon such as Nicholas Decker can go viral for advocating political assassinations:

When Must We Kill Them?

In this maelstrom, anyone who has even a bit of a platform faces extraordinary pressure to Nikocado Avocado themselves. And this obviously includes what the 18th century called the Republic of Letters. Whatever was believed in earlier times about the cultural role of an author, under digital conditions the same fandom dynamics apply between a writer and his or her audience. Someone recently characterised Substack as “OnlyFans for intellectuals”, and while I don’t think the outputs are quite comparable (though I would say that, wouldn’t I) in the sense of inviting an intense relation between creator and audience yes: the parallels are there - as is the egregoric quality of the feedback you receive.

Whereas in print publishing the cycle of publication and audience feedback was relatively slow, and mediated by publishers, distributors and the like, in the twenty-first the loop is lightning-fast and brutally direct. I feel the difference even between writing for a magazine such as UnHerd, and writing here for Substack. If UnHerd readers don’t respond well to a given column, I register it, but in a muted way; if my Substack readers hate something I write, I feel the chill directly. The resulting confluence of disintermediated feedback, the dopamine hit this provides when you get it right, and the still more potent feedback mechanism of direct payments (or their withdrawal), makes this an extraordinarily powerful collective shaping force on a creator.

So how, under these conditions, are any of us meant to retain any agency or sense of our own organic opinions? How do I reckon with the temptation to become my own caricature?