Platform Shift
How American publicist Kaitlin Phillips made the Internet work for her
I read a profile of the American publicist Kaitlin Phillips last year that’s been rattling around my head ever since. It describes how Phillips became one of New York’s most discerning tastemakers by doing free publicity for artists she likes while making her money doing work for companies like A24, watch manufacturers, and tech clients. Per profile writer Amy Larocca, Phillips describes the artists she represents for free as “very niche famous people,” or people whose work she finds compelling that she thinks other people will like too. She uses publicity as a way to monetize her taste while advancing her artistic sensibility and creates the life she wants to live for herself in the process.
I think Kaitlin Phillips was one of the first to understand digital platforms require writers to be influencers and make that work for her instead of being a victim of it. When Google and Facebook took the advertising revenue that funded magazines and forced artists into multilevel marketing schemes like YouTube, Instagram, and Substack, Phillips understood their algorithms couldn’t replicate taste. “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier,” Pierre Bourdieu writes in his 1984 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, and no one wants Spotify’s recommendation algorithm to classify them as “a slavish follower of robots.” This means there’ll always be a market for human curation. Phillips is careful not to compromise her taste even as she sells it: when she recommends a French wine you can hold up to the sun so it resembles the color of a raspberry or a book about a man who incorrectly imagines he’s ruined his underage lover’s life, I know she means it.
Phillips’s work got me thinking about how tastemaking shifted from magazines to social media in the digital age. Per Daisy Alioto, magazines “were [once] containers for someone else’s taste, and when you read them you were inhabiting that taste.” They sold aspirational lifestyles through products and writing that let readers feel close to “the glamorous mystique of Joan Didion, the wild lore of Hunter S. Thompson,” and the “decadent, drug-fueled” ennui of Bret Easton Ellis and the Brat Pack. Now, people inhabit others’ tastes through Instagram or BookTok instead. The crucial difference between then and now is how the money from aspirational lifestyle sale is distributed. Whereas writers could once sell articles to magazines for solid wages, they now have to compete with content creators who upload work for free. The platforms on which we do this are indistinguishable from multilevel marketing schemes. Ninety-nine percent of us post on them in the hope we’ll be the one percent who make a living wage.
But just because the money flow’s shifted doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways to make these platforms work for us. Phillips found a way to do that. She realized “the rules everyone else plays by are kind of made-up,” used Twitter, Instagram, and n+1 to cultivate her life as the Manhattan doyenne of a scene full of interesting people, and found companies willing to pay her for it. She even created a permanent table for herself at her favorite French bistro. Not all of us can do this—I think Phillips has both what writer Allegra Hobbs calls “a very useful instinct... for precisely which parts of herself to share and how,” and a remarkable work ethic—but it’s comforting to know it can be done. Per writer Becca Schuh, restaurants are systems, magazines’ content management schedules are systems, and computers are systems. “Everything’s an easy job when you know the system,” she writes. Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok are systems too. We can’t all win tech giants’ multilevel marketing game, but until the day comes we can take back our money from them there are other ways to sell our influence.
Housekeeping
I was invited on 1of200’s podcast with Paris Marx and Kyle Church to talk about New Zealand media’s nationalist exceptionalism in the run-up to our October election. In a nutshell, New Zealand exceptionalism is the soporific idea that we’re too civilized to inflict the atrocities on each other that people commit in other countries across the world. It’s stupid, arrogant, and profoundly intellectually unsound, but editors at major New Zealand outlets like The Herald and The Spinoff sell it to audiences like comfort food to children nonetheless. Give it a listen if you’re curious.
Reading Recommendations
A few years ago, I used to select magazine stories for a recommendations website called Longform.org. I’d read between five to twenty magazine stories a week to select some for the website. Over time, I developed an instinct for distinguishing between technically masterful but emotionally lifeless writing and writing which had what writer Emily Gould called “a quality of aliveness... that’s the opposite of trying to get an A+” in journalism. I still read a lot and I’ll post work I particularly liked here.
Veronica Fitzpatrick’s Bright Wall Dark Room essay on James Spader is my favorite piece of film writing on erotics. Her line “the appeal of a bad boy is less about a Ferrero Rocher-like opposition between rough exteriority and private softness than it is about a fantasy of power: specifically, yours” helped me articulate the appeal of emotionally distant lovers to myself and others. It made me realize that appeal lies in its contradiction: the fantasy you can surmount a longing made of endless distance, which lets you, per Fitzpatrick, stay “safe in the loneliness you know.” Its segue into how James Spader carried the can for audiences’ unattainable desires made for the best essay I’ve ever read on him. Veronica’s other work is similarly good: you won’t go wrong reading her Bright Wall Dark Room archive.
I’m really enjoying Hera Lindsay Bird’s poems, especially “Wild Geese by Mary Oliver by Hera Lindsay Bird.” Its lines: “You do not have to be good/ Being good isn’t even the point anymore./ I just don’t think it’s real/ to think of geese and feel so beautiful about yourself/ and so far away.” struck me as an incisive rejection of what Lauren Oyler identified as narcissistic writing, or the tendency to make “any observation about the world lead back [your] own life and feelings, though it should be the other way round.” I agree with Hera’s worldview: “This life is a hard life and/ It crushes people/ But it’s also weird and full of heat,” or the idea that the world’s indifferent to us and contains beauty and terror simply by merit of existing. Her invocations of natural splendor—“crocodiles asleep in their red tent of hunger”—remind me of God’s address to Job in the Book of Job, in which he uses lyric poetry like the “horse leaping like the locust,” or “the eagle making its home in the fastness of the rocky crag,” to situate him in the vast natural world and highlight how narcissistic the question “Why do I suffer?” is. Hera’s work is also very, very funny: she makes me laugh til she ends poems with lines like “we walk down the street, with the grass blowing back and forth/ i have never been so happy” and my eyes well with tears, as she buffets my proverbial car sideways and blows my heart wide open.