gatekeeping is good.

Recently, Jeff Bezos — owner of the Washington Post since 2013 — intervened at the last minute to prevent the Post’s editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris. This obviously prompted a great deal of pushback from journalists, editorial writers, and readership alike, but the specific piece of this situation we’re here to discuss today is the public response.

A lot of people, when confronted with a situation where otherwise talented and committed writers and reporters are trapped in the yoke of this or that media oligarch, will suggest — not unreasonably — that those writers and reporters should “just go independent.” These suggestions have increased in frequency in the last few years, as platforms like Substack, Medium, and Patreon have triggered a Blogosphere renaissance that has enabled new business models for independent media that simply did not exist in decades past.

In response to these suggestions, Becca Rothfield — a book critic at the Post — wrote an article on her Substack explaining her skepticism of the idea that an “influencer” model of media (where individuals are producing and distributing writing directly to the public, largely unmoderated by the gatekeepers of some larger organization) could replace an “institutional” model (where writers work with and under the discipline of editors, fact-checkers, and occasionally even private security details as part of an organizational unit).¹

To be clear, Rothfield is no friend of oligarchs (and she and the Post’s union have implored you to write a letter to their CEO Will Lewis to tell him that this endorsement debacle was a bad idea), but she does express what I think are reasonable objections to voices that argue that turning every reporter and writer into a free agent — responsible for their own accounting, editing, fact-checking, marketing, personal safety and legal defense — will solve every crisis in American media. Molly White, a tech reporter that actually is working fully independent right now, wrote an article discussing her experience battling the lawfare of Web3 grifters that shared similar concerns.

The question of how to respond to the worsening disintegration, delegitimization, and corruption of mainstream American institutions has loomed large over culture for quite a while now, and in light of the results from November 5th, I doubt it will go away any time soon. But the discourse that Rothfield and White are engaging in here is not limited merely to the world of news reporting, media criticism, or opinion writing. It extends to every nook and cranny of American society, where we are all being forced to ask the following question: if the institutions are dead, what should we do instead?

Speaking for myself, even though I am currently a one-man show and functionally engage in an “influencer” model of distribution, I don’t really view that state of affairs as ideal. Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that after October’s From The Superhighway issue dropped, the Down The Ladder Patreon became the “Falchion Studios” Patreon. There were a number of reasons for that change, but chief among them is that I’m not interested in slugging it on my own for the rest of my life.

I hate the currently existing dominant institutions and gatekeepers that currently control American society and culture, but I am not opposed to the idea of having institutions and gatekeepers in general. In fact, I believe that having good institutions and responsible gatekeepers is extremely important for the long-term health of any social unit — and it is because of that belief that I have such nuclear contempt for the current gaggle of bootlickers and bag-fumblers that pass for public intellectuals in modern America. I don’t intend for Falchion Studios to be merely a business name for my personal online presence in the long-run, even if that is functionally what it is right now. Instead, I see Falchion as a sort of “pre-institution,” and structure my own projects, quality standards, and production pipelines with the expectation that they will involve other people at some point down the line, who will, in various ways, moderate and edit the content I produce. I would hope most people in my situation are doing the same.

As some responses to Rothfield’s piece have illustrated — notably, this one from Sam Khan — that is not always a popular position.

There is a certain casual libertarianism that can seep into discussions like this. Many people, even those who are left-of-center, frequently the mistake of applying the arguments they use against the currently existing gatekeepers that control American culture against the idea of having gatekeepers in general. The reason that move is a mistake is that it totally ignores the reality of how literally any human culture reproduces itself. For every group of human beings that have collectively committed themselves to certain goals, there is set of behaviors that advance those goals, and there is a set of behaviors that detract from those goals. Therefore, social groups clearly have an interest in encouraging behavior that advances their goals and discouraging behavior that hinders their goals, and, more importantly, they have an interest in preventing people who are opposed to their goals from entering the group. In other words: gatekeeping.

That is an observation so obvious that I feel stupid even writing it down, but in practice, this observation is often not only ignored but actively suppressed in the interest of “democratizing” culture. There’s a perfect example of this sort of argument in the wild in the aforementioned Sam Khan post, written in opposition to Rothfield’s original piece:

A platform like Substack multiplies by some logarithmic absurdity the volume of expression in the written word. It releases founts of creativity that, for decades or centuries, were buried.

That’s the real value of Substack — and of new media as a whole. What we’re really on the cusp of is a whole different way of being — which is to be boundlessly expressive and creative, without first having to fight for access to column inches or a gatekeeper’s seal of approval. It’s what Whitman talked about when he described the “new, superb, democratic literature.”

Narrowly, I agree with Khan that this influencer mode of doing things is a “whole new way of being,” and I also agree that it has — in our current situation of acute institutional decay — been a useful stopgap measure to prevent the total annihilation of free and creative expression in American culture.

But Khan, like most people who engage in this kind of argument, way overstates the case — after the above quote, he goes on to rattle off a list of (true) historical examples of mainstream American media engaging in the kind of bootlicking and bag-fumbling I mentioned earlier, as if that is in any way a counterpoint to Rothfield’s original argument — which was, as a refresher, that there is simply no universe where a decentralized network of individuals working in relative isolation from each other is going to be able to match or exceed the productive capacity, organizational efficiency, or standard of quality that a well-functioning organization made up of those exact same individuals can provide. To quote Rothfield’s rebuttal to Khan:

My least politically correct opinion is that gatekeepers are a good thing because hierarchies of quality are real. Sorry! That isn’t to say I approve of the gatekeepers we have … but it is to say I am not entirely optimistic about the products of a totally unfiltered commons.

And, frankly, nobody should be optimistic about the products of a totally unfiltered commons - and there was a very recent explosive cultural flashpoint that illustrated why. Enter: the Kendrick v. Drake saga.

Video essayist F.D. Signifier has an excellent (but very long) explainer about the topic and the way it intersects with a wide variety of issues in an around Black politics and hip-hop. What’s important for our purposes today is that the essay makes it very clear how the Kendrick v. Drake beef was in many ways just a proxy war in a long-standing conflict between the “old heads” (see: gatekeepers) of hip-hop and the new wave of artists (and their much whiter fans) that emerged in the late aughts.

As Signifier himself admits, there are certainly many cogent critiques one can make of the “old-heads” and their worldview, and there’s very valid concerns over whether their dominion over hip-hop music and culture was justified, productive, or particularly enlightened. Surely, though, it was preferable to an environment with no gatekeepers at all, because it is only in that environment (i.e. one governed by the influencer model) that some Canadian guy can go around successfully appropriating the symbols and shibboleths of a community he is definitively not a part of, while simultaneously dropping bars like “whipped and chained you like American slaves.”² To quote Signifier:

In the second half of Drake’s career — from the Meek Mill beef up until now — he’s been at the height of his powers, but, ironically, has been much less inspiring as an artist and much more overtly problematic in his behavior while putting much less effort into seeking out and desiring the respect of his peers in hip-hop culture. And, with the power that he’s gained from this uniquely white fan base, he’s been far more dominant and powerful and problematic.

The unfortunate reality is that most subcultures, professions, and social movements are not going to have the luxury of having Kendrick Lamar defend from the heavens and get every nightclub in the Western world (and probably quite a few outside of it) to literally dance to the downfall of their enemies. Instead, the more likely result of permanently operating under the influencer model is the prevailing situation in hip-hop before Kendrick v. Drake: one where — absent any kind of institutional discipline to moderate it — anti-social, rapacious, or otherwise undesirable actors infiltrate the ranks of an existing social sphere and gradually dissolve it into nothing.

If you don’t like the existing institutions, that’s fine. Lord knows I don’t either — but if you care about the survival of your subculture, profession, or social movement, there needs to be institutions somewhere. The influencer model is not, and never will be a viable replacement for them. It is of utmost importance, especially now, that you don’t get so obsessed with burning things down that you forget to build them up again.

Footnotes

1. The “influencer” and “institutional” terminology are my own. In her original article, Rothfield used the terms “Substack” and “legacy” instead, but I suggested to her that those terms were too imprecise for the purposes of this discussion, and she appears to agree. ↩

2. I had remembered a huge part of the Kendrick v. Drake beef was the bar in Family Matters where he complains that Kendrick is always “rapping like [he’s] tryin’ to get the slaves freed.” To get the full quote, I just googled “Drake slave bars” and I found a completely different, somehow even more awful bar he dropped a few months earlier. If I had a nickel… ↩