Against Performance
The 2024 Worldcon in Glasgow was my first time attending a worldcon in person, and yet it didn’t feel like it. Having been part of the SFF community for a long time, online and off, by the time I got there, I ended up knowing so many people already. What I was not prepared for was how many people, strangers and acquaintances both, were familiar with me and my work. Top of mind for most were David Mogo, Godhunter (my debut; makes sense), Son of the Storm (first in series; also makes sense) and…that Publishing Rodeo episode.
You know, the one where I said I’m not on social media much these days because it’s labor I can’t afford. Apparently, this resonated so much with many artists that I got requests to expand it into a longer essay. So, here I am, doing just that, with a small history of why I made the decision to partially sidestep the circus.
Against the circus
Let’s start with an imaginary, why don’t we?
Imagine you work as a temporarily contracted worker for Company X. Your job is to design a good product Company X can then mass-produce and sell. Let’s say: toothpaste. The copyrights to this toothpaste remain yours, but only Company X is authorized to sell in specific locations and/or regions. You get a cut of profits from all sales, Company X gets its own. Everyone leaves happy. Right?
But let’s imagine there’s an unspoken rule, one not in the agreement signed between you and Company X. Which is that if your toothpaste doesn’t sell quite as well as Company X expects, they will not be re-hiring you to make another. Cool. So what are they doing to ensure it sells well, you ask? “Same thing we do for all toothpastes--get it in stores,” they say. But that’s not really true, is it? Because we all know stores have Front Stacks vs Back Stacks and Top Shelves vs Bottom Shelves and Spotlights vs Hidden Corners, and there is a direct correlation between where a tube of toothpaste is placed and its sales numbers. Company X doesn’t tell you the mechanism that determines whose toothpaste gets placed where. They let you assume it’s completely at the store’s discretion. They don’t tell you the mechanism for determining whose toothpaste gets selected to appear at the annual toothpaste conference. But they do infer that putting yourself out there will increase your toothpaste’s chance of making its way in the world. If you go stand in front of the store and nicely chat about teeth with a bunch of people coming in, maybe people will buy your toothpaste, you may sell more, and then you get to be in the Front of the store and in the Spotlight and on the Top Shelf. Maybe your toothpaste gets to appear at the annual conference.
There’s also an unspoken hint that if you don’t do it, that’s not playing nice, and it might just be mentioned the next time you’re hired to make toothpaste.
So you stand at the storefront thrice each week, talking about brushing techniques and how sugar destroys gums and how coffee stains teeth. Some folks appreciate you, listen, even buy your toothpaste. But it’s hard work. Meanwhile, on the other corner, there’s this dude who’s dressed in neon colours and dances really well. He’s also selling his toothpaste, but his dancing gets more eyes and ears. After the cheers, he asks people to buy his toothpaste. Many seem to oblige. This gives you an idea.
You dust off your guitar and show up at the store the next day. Rather than just talk about teeth and gums and tongues, you’ve decided to sing the words. You compose humorous rhymes, fun puns. People now know you as “the person who sings about teeth.” They recognize you. They buy your toothpaste sometimes. That’s kinda good, right?
One problem, though. All this time you’ve devoted to selling the old toothpaste eats into what you’d have spent trying to design a new one. You also struggle to accommodate this second job--singing about teeth is a second job! Your profit from toothpaste sales are decent, but on their own, do they pay the rent, childcare, healthcare, debts?
Also, weird thing: Company X was never truly clear that the mechanism behind the store placement, conference appearance, award list for Toothpaste of the Year and being offered a new toothpaste contract is a complex combination of variables, and has little to do with standing outside the store, singing your little teeth tunes. In fact, a few meeting-room decisions from Company X could’ve easily meant you may have never had to spend one second out there in the rain, playing guitar and recycling puns.
The truth hits you: Company X, just like any other company, runs on an engine of bottom-line numbers, historically inequitable systems and a lot of shots-in-the-dark. Out front, though, Company X maintains a camaraderie that lures new toothpaste-makers in and ensnares them with what it’s truly selling: belief in non-existent correlations and meritocracies that stoke the hope of your toothpaste becoming one of its greatest hits.
If you substituted “toothpaste” for books and “Company X” for any major global publishing outfit, then congratulations, you’ve just unpacked the global publishing ecosystem:
the circus, which loosely requires you to “perform” your role as author;
the false meritocracy, which suggests that if you “perform” your role as author well and long enough, it will translate into success and sales;
the historically inequitable systems that have dictated this a must-do, without taking into consideration how this affects authors differently, especially with an eye on privilege and proximity to dominant paradigms; and
the unspoken penalty, which suggests that if you choose not to “perform” as an author, misfortunes in your career will be attributed to this choice.
Against marketplaces and algorithms
Perhaps there was a time when most social media platforms were other things—a way of keeping up with the news, family and friends; communities of practice; marketplaces of ideas, etc. Now, if we are being honest, they are just marketplaces. Not the kind you linger for longer than needed: the OG enter late, exit early of IRL; a wild west where anyone with a platform and a megaphone—taken, not offered—can command an audience however they wish, even when it is sure to end in disaster (especially when it is sure to end in disaster).
While it cannot be overstated how much being on social media has contributed to who I am today (especially as someone whose most significant opportunities were sparked by online interactions), such platforms have tended to reward the loudest voices, often those with generally obtuse tendencies. I, on the other hand, have never desired a life lived out loud. I wish to put my energies into spaces that reward the quieter contemplations I find comfort in. Cutting through such social noise requires time and energy I do not possess, and therefore, persisting in these spaces requires a labor investment that, at this time, I simply cannot afford.
(There’s also all that blocking and muting. Before leaving Twitter, I took one look at my lists and figured that if I had to shut off this many people in an IRL space, I would simply leave that place and never go back. Curating a trimmed-down list to aid safer online interactions—which is how I lasted so long—is also labor I cannot afford.)
I have minimal desire to lead this double life, one of “normal” offline interactions—fallible and human as they are—and another of “performed” online interactions, where I must sift through the messiness of my not-so-great-for-the-interwebs feelings, thoughts and behaviors, in favour of something re-constructed, wiped down, pristine. “Succeeding” on a social platform (i.e. mapping onto their growth pathways) requires a steady stream of performance: whether that is goofing off in a short video, shooting off pithy or incendiary missives, or offering a treadmill of How-Tos in exchange for coronation of various titles—professional, scholar, activist. Whether this self we present is a curated version of our IRL selves or a completely made up one is moot. The game is performance.
Algorithms “punish” us for not posting more often, for linking away from the platform, for not posting videos and images, for using only a handful out of available features. But algorithms are machine choices determined by people's choices, made by those who have decided that the costs of tailoring social media to our own needs and desires—especially when that goes against the platform’s economic goals—must remain high. Enshittification, in essence, asks us to perform or lose. This is a game I do not wish to play.
Someone who once referred to social media as “smoking for your soul” also said: “If there is an algorithm between you and your fans, they are not your fans. They belong to the algorithm.”
Against historically inequitable systems
In a viral blog from 2021, author Kacen Callender talked about the pressures placed on authors to “perform” their authorship on social media and at other venues. As an author, I love events, and there’s no greater joy than connecting with readers. I love speaking on panels and enjoy Q&As and workshops. But I like doing these things as a person, not as a product. I don’t want to have to be in a book conversation just because someone believes it will sell my book.
I can hear the Don't do it if you don't want to coming on. True, author publicity is often presented as a choice. But remember what I said about historically inequitable systems and unspoken penalties? As much as this situation is presented as optional, it is not always so in principle.
Authors from historically underprivileged groups struggle to push back even when they are uncomfortable with performing their authorship. When you’ve been systemically kept out for so long, it takes a lot to speak up once finally in the room, especially if you’re unsure of further support in the event of backlash. Every author should be able to do what feels most comfortable to them, and still get support from. But with publishing leaving more and more of the publicity work to authors, there’s an unspoken risk of being perceived as lackadaisical on the performance front, which could lead to diminishing support for an author.
Against false meritocracies and unspoken penalties
Thanks to various credible sources, we now know that the publishing industry’s hesitation to debunk the narrative that performance = sales/success serves to obscure the empirical fact of publishers themselves being the biggest arbiter of which books get to sell the most and win awards and get on lists. Through publishing’s own mechanisms that decide who gets what kind of support--many of these methods not particularly empirical or meritocratic--publishers have the most significant impact on how sales pan out for authors. Publishing knows this, yet still emphasizes author social media activity in assessing the profitability of said author’s work. This is at best simple and at worst unfair.
When Naomi Osaka, a few years ago, decided not to partake in media/PR appearances in the French Open, my response was: Her tennis is enough. Yet I watched the discourse spiral, people demanding that she “perform” being a tennis star (i.e. join the circus). They wanted her to step outside of the actual tennis playing and demonstrate that she was worthy to hold the racket, and that she was not yet successful enough to want to step aside (i.e. that she must subscribe to the false meritocracy that her "performance” is a requirement for her success).
They didn’t entertain the possibility that she never wanted to be a product herself, but simply a good tennis player, and is fine with just that, thank you very much. They did not consider the possible mental health ramifications of demanding she do it anyway (i.e. simply because this inequitable system has required that others before her partake means she must succumb as well). Then came the unspoken penalty after: the only way to get what she needed, to keep herself from performing, from being a product, was to pull out of the tennis itself.
If you ask me, Osaka’s tennis should always be enough. And I think authors’ stories should be enough too.
Against shticks
Some days, I find myself randomly caught in Instagram’s Reelscape. Swipe once, twice, and you’re down the rabbit hole. Whenever I find the odd thing enjoyable, I look up the rest of the account’s posts. No surprise--it’s often all the same thing. Rows upon rows of the same shtick, some down to the exact pattern, story, dance, voiceover. A conveyor belt of the self.
Do these get tons of likes, comments, follows, shares and general recognition? Yes. Does this translate into economic value for the account owners and their sponsors? Likely. Does it require them to continue to produce said content at such a high quality and at a regular pace in order to maintain said value? Damn sure it does.
I worry that if expectations continue to be placed on author performance, then in time, we could easily become devoted to performing as one-shtick-wonders rather than focus that labor on creating new work. As it remains true that gaining regular and significant traction from social media requires a level of performance of sorts, then for authors, that performance will not always be of our work--it will also be of us.
Authors shouldn’t need constant and continuous performance as a prerequisite for success. Our job is to write, but these days that is often easy to forget. This statement from Michaela Coel’s 2021 Emmy acceptance speech comes to mind:
“ In a world that entices us to...be constantly visible, for visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success, do not be afraid to disappear, from it, from us, for a while, and see what comes to you in the silence.”
I write this for all who, like me, have opted to sidestep continuous and constant social performance. I write this to say: I see you, and I wish for everyone to understand your choices. Like Osaka, I want authors to choose themselves, and for the rest of the ecosystem to see us as people, not products. I want everyone to reject the ecosystem's gaslighting. I want authors to not let the unspoken penalties drive them into choices, but to use the understanding that comes from that to design a viable life and career for themselves. Because let’s face it: only a stroke of luck or an alignment of the stars or the perfect cultural moment can surmount historically inequitable practices and good old marketing money. Otherwise, you’re just standing in the street corner with a guitar, dressed in garish neon, and singing in the rain.
