How We Feeling About Legacy Media?

Age of Unhingement™️ in the New Yorker !!!

Hi friends!

The zeitgeist remains as macabre as ever but I must say this has been a really great week to be me. If you haven’t yet heard the news, I was quoted in a New Yorker article amongst a group of people who were literally on my grad school syllabus and I shall be dining out on this for at least the next six months.

Welcome to my new subscribers who found me via the New Yorker (thank you for the link, Kyle!) I am so happy you’re here and I can’t wait to share my ongoing musings on this batshit era with you. The only way out is through and the only way through is together, ideally with likeminded people who aim to understand the chaos.

This was the first time I’ve been interviewed by a journalist and I was actually so nervous about the whole thing. I’m thrilled that my core belief made the cut: normalcy left the group chat a long time ago and clinging to the idea of it is making everyone mentally unwell. Reading the unhingement described as “spiritual infirmity” was everything. Infirmity makes me think of a deranged old man in a diaper, apropos for the vibes we’re dealing with.

One thing I found interesting — and I’m not salty about any of this so please don’t read it that way — is that I was referred to as a social strategist and not a writer and social strategist, which is what I asked to be called. As one of my older (but ageless) friends said, “being referred to as a social strategist in the New Yorker feels very modern,” and I am nothing if not a thoroughly modern woman.

Even so, I’m curious as to why someone who has professionally cranked out enough tweets and Instagram captions to fill at least a medium-sized book, has written videos watched by millions of people, has put her name next to the word writer on every slide added to a pitch deck this very week, and has (most importantly) taken out her demented little laptop to type 20,000+ words right here in this “Unhingement-themed newsletter,” is not considered, at least in the hallowed halls of the New York media elite, a writer.

me tap tap tapping this newsletter

The chasm between legacy and social media is something I am extremely familiar with. I can’t speak for the New York media world, that’s not my playground, but I have been in enough rooms here in Hollywood to have a really solid take on how the $1.75 billion disaster that was Quibi happened (old people with too much access to money have literally no clue how we all consume content other than that it’s on our phones).

It’s always a weird dance — the legacy types love to shit on social media and pretend an intern can run the account while knowing it’s essential to the success of their business. They know it’s the place where everyone finds out about… everything… and they’re obviously on it themselves. It’s also where they mine ideas and crowdsource takes, which is how I ended up in the New Yorker in the first place, when a friend of mine responded to a tweet.

Everyone’s attention span is shot to hell so we’re mostly just reading the headlines and watching George Santos Cameo videos anyway. Social media is paradoxically both a conduit to our collective madness and our salvation from it, at least when Santos delivers his affirmations that have been going viral all week. I know it’s wrong to love him, but what if it’s all just a magnificent work of performance art? That man is a star and he was born for the Stage of Unhingement™️.

What legacy media will always deliver is legitimacy. My horniness to have this Substack mentioned in the New Yorker cannot be overstated and I am so very grateful for it all. There are no bylines or credits on the content I create to make my living and that means I am easily replaced. I know the machines are coming for me and my colleagues and that was a major reason why I started this newsletter.

It is firmly my belief that while AI can (and will) take creative jobs, it will never possess vulnerability and truth, the essential parts of creating anything that leaves its mark on an audience. I had no clue who would find my writing or if it would resonate, but when I had doubts I just told myself that authenticity always attracts the same.

I’ve spent most of this year so focused on moving forward that it was nice to take a look back yesterday and see how far I’ve actually come since February when I was feeling moody outside the Starbucks I call my office and decided what I really wanted to do was start talking about how insane I think everything is. It did make me feel saner to talk about it but it makes me feel sanest to write about it.

Connecting with all of you has renewed my hope that there are still places on the internet to chronicle what’s unfolding without it all feeling like taking a stiletto to a hornet’s nest. These are unrelentingly terrible times but they’re also an opportunity for change, to figure out how to till new gardens and plant seeds in the fractured earth. What I know for certain is that if you try to do that inside the halls of old musty structures, it simply won’t work. 

It’s all just copy content, isn’t it? I love you, my beautiful readers! In the words of the great Smokey Robinson, happy Chanooka to all who celebrate. I’m lighting my menorah tonight with the hope that the suffering ends soon. The darkness right now seems endless but if we have even one little match, there can always be light.

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™️

Liz