On the Politics of Attention in 2025

The individualization of media continues, at what cost?

Call it the test kitchen–ification of food media. The dreaded pivots to video of the media business in the 2010s culminated in the runaway success of Bon Appétit’s Test Kitchen, where recipe developers were turned into online cooking superstars. Every regular viewer chose a favorite. This success imploded in 2020, as so many things did, when then–editor-in-chief Adam Rapoport was outed for racist behavior and Sohla El-Waylly opened up about pay disparities.

But its ripple effects can still be felt in the individualizing of social media–driven allegiances to certain so-called “creators”—not a Test Kitchen creation, but it enabled a further normalization—and of course, it’s not limited to just something as everyday as food.

In food, though, the ruthless competition and drive toward burnout might be most apparent. The market forces demand endless recipes, performative vulnerability, relatable content, cookbooks—the works, ideally packaged for maximum appeal to brands with marketing budgets and unquestioned ethics! (If the label is good, the ethics must be, duh!) And it’s a form where there’s been a lot of tension between those who came up on social media and those who did so the “old-fashioned way”—slower, through traditional media, paying the dues. It’s a form ripe for audience fracture and is antithetical to truly collaborative energy: We want to make this person’s vodka sauce, not just vodka sauce.

Such attachments to individual recipe-makers have been a thing for a long time, of course: It’s worse now. That’s not a radical statement. Most things are worse, and the plausible deniability of a commercial break being lost to “#ad” is one of them. Food media did begin as a way to sell women things, but there’s no reason we have to keep doing it this way.

These market demands are accepted, in a no-nonsense fashion: “Business culture is human culture.” Build the platform. Do the advertisements. Throw the parties and success will come—but what is success anymore? It’s exhausting, a road to nowhere. Not even the slightest flicker of a question, of the notion that perhaps we should take all these tools and build a better collectively run media: Collaboration rather than competition; changing the terms of the game so it’s not a constant reification of hierarchies that privilege whiteness and value only capital. Writer-owned outlets have emerged as one piece of this puzzle, but the tools of the game, of the share? A subscription-based model is only as good as everyone’s bank accounts; it remains that every dollar must be fought for, in the battle of eyeballs and clout. Obviously, I am here, part of this. I am thinking through the possibilities.

These possibilities have been amply analyzed and critiqued in other cultural forms: Angela McRobbie’s Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries and Kuba Szreder’s The ABC of the Projectariat: Living and Working in a Precarious Art World have both deeply informed my thinking on this subject, and I’ll publish an extended bibliography later this month. But media critique hasn’t quite been meeting the moment, especially not when it comes to the creation of food content.

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In the digital age, when we individualize, misinformation more easily spreads. Inside Climate News reported on how social media has transmit climate change denialism. While I like to disagree with things I’m reading, watching, or listening to, this doesn’t mean I want to watch Fox News or Joe Rogan (these will not be very productive experiences, because they will simply stoke me into rage and/or utter confusion, yet author Rachel Connolly made a compelling case to do so recently). But I will read The Wall Street Journal.

I want to feel the friction of civil disagreement: It’s through this friction that I understand what I believe. Yet the fracturing, the individualization: They make one choose an echo chamber to buy into, unless it is—hello!—one’s job to invest in many forms of media and take in a wide swath.

This fracturing and individualizing also has its upsides, that can’t be denied: It’s allowed me to thrive as a writer; it’s seen the launch of great writer-owned outlets like Hearing Things, Defector, and Best Food Blog; and it’s allowed for people to dig into niche topics and find their people in a way the old Internet once did. It’s allowed people to make a living while big media collapses and the gatekeeping becomes ever stricter, to protect what’s left. But I think it’s wildly naive not to examine its many downsides.

In Kyle Chayka’s piece for The New Yorker on the launch of journalist Taylor Lorenz’s newsletter “User Mag,” ex-Vox video producer turned YouTuber Johnny Harris summed it up:

Still, being an independent creator requires not only a willingness to perform but also a knack for the grind of entrepreneurship. Harris, the video producer now running YouTube channels, told me, “Suddenly you’re the sales team of a media company and the journalist and the project manager and the fact checker,” Harris said. “It’s way too much to expect people who just want to do good journalism to be able to do well.”

This drives home what I think of as, beyond the challenges of misinformation and the replication of existing hierarchies, one of the most under-discussed aspects of individualized media: the burnout mentioned above.

I watched TikTok influencer, podcast host, and bestselling author Drew Afaulo post candidly about needing a break because of vitriol and demands, and it’s not the first time I’ve seen an influencer break down in such a way. The more people look to individuals—even well-compensated individuals with management teams—the more reliant internet culture is on learning from or being entertained by “content creators” whose faces are key to their work, the more the audience is asking people to exhaust and exploit themselves. “There’s no blueprint now to how to be successful,” says the influencer Tefi Pessoa. “There’s a million different ways, and they all feel like so much pressure.”

The pressure, the demand, the notion that one’s creative and intellectual labor—when one’s self is the focal point, especially—are boundless is especially rooted in the fact that writing and influencing online are feminized jobs. As laborers, artists, writers, editors, independent curators, designers, small food business owners, and even the content creating influencers who make people want a Miu Miu purse—we all have so much more in common in terms of our precarious work conditions. Influencers are as dependent on corporate algorithms and fickle appeal as writers were once dependent on magazines. The thing is, many of us writers and editors—poorly compensated financially yet rich in cultural capital—have lived through the pivots and the seemingly endless cycles of layoffs: We should be smarter, not clinging to whatever scraps tech companies toss at us.

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There also needs to be more conversation about the political, cultural, and economic ramifications of attention: Most people need a bit of escapism, but are there limits to it? (“Limits” are my obsession in a world that seems to suggest there are none.) There were plenty of negative comments when “Call Her Daddy” host and podcast mogul Alex Cooper launched a beverage brand in partnership with Nestlé that uses plastic bottles, but plenty of my own social media mutuals have loved seeing food influencers “get their bag” with Coca-Cola and Walmart partnerships.

Like… why? All of these companies are atrocious, on the environment and workers. Why would you endorse their endorsement if you have a choice not to give the “heart”? (I was 18 when there was a boycott of Coca-Cola on the grounds of human rights’ abuses in Colombia, and I’ve never forgotten.)

The pull of the parasocial is so strong, especially when you like someone’s recipes, and when content is demanded ceaselessly, there’s no time to do any research. This isn’t good, but people, audiences, will have to shift their expectations, their attention, before the conditions can change. How can it become unprofitable, undesirable, uncool to partner with the corporations that are killing the planet? By withdrawing attention.

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Writer Aja Barber has seen fit to use this as a moment of reckoning with who we’re giving attention and money, coining an idea called “newsletter equity” and pointing readers toward questions to ask themselves before they hand over their money to someone seeking their attention and cash: essentially, is this person endorsing a world I want to live in? Do they actually need money?

“One thing a lot of pieces miss is how influencers are the PR arm of businesses which harm people and planet,” she writes. “And if you have money for that, maybe you need to destroy your parasocial relationships and put your money towards the things that really matter.”

I think of Dionne Brand writing in Salvage: Readings From the Wreck: “Codes and algorithms, after all, are not neutral or value-free; they are embedded in, constitutive of, and produce sets of political and social relations—and, of course, literary ones.”

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There are reasons to be optimistic amid the muck, sure: People want print; people want privacy. Angelina Ruiz recently wrote about nostalgia for single-use devices like the iPod. There is simply too much to take in that people would like to slide a CD into a deck, scratches and skips be damned. At least they’re real. In my online world, all the year-end reading lists were shared as photos of handwriting on notebook pages. Wired and “Culture Study” have both recently asked whether “posting” is dead—it does seem like we’re in a sea change moment. How best to ride the wave? (Of course, take any predictions with a grain of salt: Wired predicted the end of blogging in 2007 and the end of the web itself in 2010.)

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I have just realized: I don’t want to see everything. I don’t want to know what people do until it’s a story, until the narrative has been constructed. Gatekeep the location, please. Tantalize me with a taste. Give me the tone, not the totality, until it’s ready. I’m coming back to this piece weeks later to edit it and I’m wondering if, here, I’m telling the truth. The work I do in this newsletter is never done; it’s an endless, ongoing writing toward.

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The newsletter form has been successful across demographics because it gives a quiet space somewhere between social media and print; it provides an outlet for an intimate reply not publicly shared and potentially driving unwanted attention. It gives a sense of the human interaction that’s now becoming a luxury, as tech, surveillance, and standards of efficiency are affecting even the most intimate jobs, like being a chaplain or a nurse. “We’ve begun to celebrate surveillance as a form of intimacy,” argues Zoë Hitzig at The Drift. I think that’s the crux of parasocial behavior: once real intimacy is gone, all we can do is watch and ask what brand of tights she’s wearing (it’s always Wolford) and buy the same tinned fish.

And so what I’m saying is that I think being aware of these patterns of behavior can help us break them and build something better. Next time you want to make a recipe, open up some old cookbooks and look for the simplest one. Start there. Better yet, ask someone how they make something. Cook from your memory of their instruction.

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One of my favorite movies is Olivier Assayas’ Nonfiction from 2018. Writers, editors, politicians, and actors discuss at length the effects of the internet and e-books on culture. Many of the specifics are dated already, but the overarching questions are the same. “The internet is a supermarket of ideas and everyone fills up their own cart,” says one character. And I am just one writer of many, hoping you’ll pick me off the shelf.

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News

Today, the weekly chat Salon returns. Join fellow subscribers to discuss what we’re reading, watching, and working on as we begin this new year. We’ll focus on the media we’re into, and I’ll share a list of my favorite print magazines and online sources.

On Friday, the monthly Recommends… for paid subscribers comes out, featuring all the reading, watching, and listening I recommend from the last couple of months, always with a playlist.

This month, the Desk Book Club is reading Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. We will have the Zoom discussion on Sunday, January 26, at 1 p.m. EST. I will send the link and my reading notes on Friday, January 24. You can buy all the 2025 Desk Book Club picks at this year’s partner bookstore, D.C.’s Bold Fork Books, for 20% off with the code in the header (or email me).

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Join me for the first of the Desk Salon Series, featuring author Anna Sulan Masing discussing her new book Chinese and Any Other Asian: paid subscribers have free access with the code in the header (or email me) and anyone else can buy a ticket for $10. There will be ten of these over the course of the year.

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There are plenty of workshops happening this month, and you can find them all at my website. Paid subscribers have 25% off to each, using the code in the header. (Or, once again, email me.)

Reading

In the moving, holiday, book-editing, and lecture-writing process, I’m not doing a lot of reading for pleasure. As I write this, on December 16, 2024, I cannot think of what I’ve read lately that hasn’t explicitly been for work—how depressing, and a reason to make a resolution.