You Invented Being a Fucking Nerd

Beckies, Stacies, and Why Mark Fisher Needs to Keep His Ghost Out of Our Castle

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I really did think Becky and Stacy were going to stay contained to two essays, but apparently adulthood gave both of them Substack, and now I have to deal with the consequences. I want all of you to know. I resent you for enjoying this series. Somewhere in the middle of trying to explain why everyone online is so desperate to prove they have better taste than everybody else, Mark Fisher limped back in without my consent (this is called a double entendre). So this is the finale: Becky, Stacy, TikTok, Substack, one extremely normal trans woman with a Stanley cup, and me becoming progressively more annoyed that any of this requires Hegel. (Hegel in an article about Beckies and Stacies, can our tech feudal overlords please just take us out now?)

1.

A trans woman I know, married for six years, lives in a subdivision with a two-car garage and a wife who works in HR, spent an evening last spring at a queer function explaining to a group of people with much cooler haircuts than hers exactly why the state's new Medicaid pre-authorization policy for gender-affirming care was going to eat the working-class girls first. She had the billing codes memorized. She knew which surgical CPT codes had been folded into which policy revisions, which regional Medicaid contractor had quietly changed its interpretation of medical necessity in March, which appeals process had a functioning deadline and which one had been turned into an infinite paperwork loop. She was, in the most literal material sense, the most politically useful person in the room on the subject at hand. She was wearing a Target dress. Her nails were done in what I can only describe as HomeGoods Season Rotation Pink. She had a Stanley cup. When she left, she was going to go pick up her wife from a Pilates class.

Two women in the room, both of whom had recently written Substack essays about the aesthetics of trans-feminine refusal, spent the walk to the after-party critiquing the way this woman had transitioned. The medical part was fine. The problem was aesthetic and cultural. She'd become, they said, too legible. She dressed like a mom, she'd bought a house, she had made an actual joke about carpool at one point, and one of them used the word assimilationist twice while the other one settled on bleak. From there they continued on to a party at which several people would be doing bumps of ketamine off the same iPhone case, congratulating each other for having escaped the American nuclear family.

I've been thinking about that walk for months. The two women are ordinary in a way I recognize, because I've been ordinary in exactly the same way, and I'm not particularly interested in going after them personally. What I've been thinking about is the trans woman with the Stanley cup, and the fact that the analysis she gave that night, the specific one about billing codes and appeals timelines and which trans girls were going to get chewed up by the pre-auth system first, was materially more radical than anything anyone in that scene had written in the past six months. Being a suburban wife isn't, on its own, radical. It's the assumption underneath the sneer that concerns me, which is the assumption that a woman's aesthetic legibility as an ordinary married American reveals her politics. That assumption was produced almost entirely by the visual and cultural habits of the people making it. Their politics had eyes and no ears. They could see that she looked like she probably had strong opinions about pillow shams, and they couldn't hear that she was, in the meantime, the only person at the party who actually knew how the state was about to kill some of us.

I keep getting stuck on that. Unfortunately, I also keep getting stuck with Mark Fisher. Consider the second half of the title fair warning.

Both of the pieces this one completes are already out there. If you haven't read The Psychology of the Becky or the Stacy essay, you don't have to, but the short version helps. I've been arguing for a while that the girls who figured out how to be safe in the cafeteria at fifteen didn't stop figuring that out when they turned thirty. They just got better at it. Becky was the anxious girl who studied the rules until she could pass for someone born with them, because being caught not knowing them had cost her something once and she wasn't going to let that happen again. Stacy was the girl the rules organized themselves around, whose desirability and social fluency gave her the authority to define what the current rules were at any given moment, at the cost of being watched constantly for any drift out of alignment. Both of them are grown now. They both have Substacks. God help us.

What happens when Becky and Stacy grow up is that the same skills follow them into political life. The anti-mainstream has become one of the most predictable mainstream positions available in the English-speaking left, and the performance of political sophistication has drifted alarmingly far from any material commitment. The woman with the Stanley cup keeps exposing it when she turns up in scenes designed to exclude her, which she does often, because she is a trans woman with a wife and a job and she doesn't think of any of this as ideological.

Also there will be a part where I admit that I do this too. Sorry in advance.

2.

The suburban trans woman is not a person the queer left knows what to do with. The available scripts don't cover her. There's a tragic-victim script that needs her to be visibly suffering, and a vanguard-freak script that needs her to be visibly strange, and a trans-radical script that needs her, at minimum, to be visibly refusing something legible. She refuses nothing. She just went to work, got the hormones, got married, put her deadname behind her, and now she has a wife who is a slightly annoying woman with strong opinions about backsplashes, and the two of them are together forever unless something spectacular happens. She is a woman. That's the entire event. The queer intellectuals in her general vicinity are still theorizing about what a woman is supposed to be able to become, and she just walked into their party with one.

The queer scenes I've moved through for most of my adult life have a specific way of registering her as a problem. It's rarely stated outright, because stating it would sound conservative and everyone in the scene knows better than to sound conservative. It comes out sideways. Somebody makes a joke about "the wives." Somebody uses the word cis-passing as if it explains something. Somebody makes a knowing comment about Reformed T4T. Somebody, at some point, uses the phrase "she's basically a straight woman now," which is worth pausing on because it is what people say when they mean she has stopped being available for the specific forms of intimacy and status the scene is built out of. She's no longer in the roster. Her attention doesn't accrue to anyone here. Her sex life is happening in a bedroom none of us have been in. She has left the group chat that was never called a group chat.

Underneath all this is the fact that transsexual women in Amerika have historically been prevented, by force and by design, from having what she has. From the medical gatekeeping that required us to prove we would live as legible normative women in order to receive care, through the housing discrimination that made stable domesticity a lottery, through the employment discrimination that made a boring middle-class job a rare achievement, through the family estrangement that made a wife who would show up to your mother's funeral improbable, through the everyday violence that made walking to the store an act with stakes, the ordinary suburban American life has been structurally withheld from us. There are trans women my age who grew up watching their older sisters die in efficiency apartments. The mundane life is a life a lot of us were told, in a hundred small and large ways, that we could not have. When one of us gets it, she is, whether or not she means to be, sitting on top of a historical achievement that a hundred years of medical and social violence tried to prevent.

She is also, sometimes, boring. This is a feature. Ordinariness is what boring people get to be. Every marginalized population produces a small class of people whose political demand is essentially that they be allowed to become as boring as everybody else, and it's a real demand, and it isn't defeated by the fact that boringness isn't, in itself, revolutionary. Nothing is revolutionary in itself. Buying a house is not revolutionary. Being married isn't revolutionary. Wandering around Target on a Saturday afternoon looking for a very specific type of drawer organizer isn't revolutionary. But being allowed to do any of those things, when for most of the twentieth century the medical establishment considered you a rare deviant category and the state considered you fraudulent by default, is a historical shift that is not visible to somebody whose theory of the radical is built entirely out of visible refusal.

The queer intellectual sees, in the suburban trans woman, assimilation. That is the word she reaches for. What she often means, on inspection, is that she can't tell what the woman is protesting. What she often means, further, is that the woman is not protesting anything for her benefit. The suburban trans woman isn't producing content. She isn't recognizable as a political actor to somebody whose politics runs on being able to recognize one on sight. She's just living.

I've read enough centrist trans commentary to know how easily this argument slides into a defense of the good normal trans woman as against the bad theatrical one, and I refuse that entire framework. I'm not arguing that ordinariness is preferable. The mistake is treating visible aesthetic transgression as a proxy for political seriousness, and that's been running the aesthetic upper end of trans-left culture for at least a decade. The suburban woman with the Stanley cup can be a political idiot. She can also, as in the case I opened with, be the person who has done the actual work of understanding how the state is about to eat some of us. What somebody looks like walking into a room tells you very little about what she thinks or what she'd risk.

3.

I'm on Substack, which means pretending I could write any of this from outside the platform would be dishonest.

Substack has produced something historically specific. It isn't the first medium that let writers sell their opinions to a self-selecting audience, and it won't be the last, and it's not uniquely evil. What it's done, more efficiently than any prior medium, is monetize the feeling of being unusually intelligent for disliking normal things. You subscribe to a writer, in a lot of cases, because reading her makes you feel like one of the people who gets it, and she writes, in a lot of cases, in a mode that flatters you for having got it. This isn't a description of every writer on the platform, or of every reader. It's the pressure sitting over the whole thing. The confessional does well. The cultural sneer does well. The political explainer that flatters your existing politics does well. The sneering confessional political-cultural explainer that flatters your politics while making you feel wounded and knowing does especially well. I have written in most of these modes. Some of my most-read pieces are among them. This isn't a self-exempting essay.

Substack rewards a very recognizable version of adult Becky. Not every writer on Substack is Becky. Some of the best writing on the platform is coming from people who are actively working against its pressures. But the person Substack was built to reward is somebody who has spent a long time studying which cultural objects the people she wants to be around currently despise, and who has developed the skill of publicly despising them slightly better than everybody else. She's smart, and she reads. Her taste is remarkable mostly for how efficiently it predicts the taste of her milieu six weeks in advance. She thinks she's independent because she was one of the first people in her feed to hate the thing everybody now hates. She is Becky in her thirties, doing what Becky always did, which is anticipating her cohort's next opinion and calling that anticipation discernment.

The sneer isn't always wrong. Sometimes the mainstream cultural object really is bad, sometimes it's politically bad in ways worth sneering at, and I don't want to pretend I disagree with all of the specific complaints. The Marvel movies are, in fact, imperial propaganda with a labor problem. A significant portion of the current romantasy market is organized around consent violations the genre refuses to metabolize. The nonprofit-industrial complex does produce writing that reads like it was assembled from the sadder half of an HR manual. These are correct observations, and I have made several of them myself. What happens on Substack is that the observation becomes the product, the product becomes a status good, and the status good sells the reader the feeling of being on the correct side of a cultural line she is paying, monthly, to keep intact.

This is where somebody usually accuses me of being a hypocrite. Correct. I am a hypocrite. I benefit from this economy. I check my analytics. I know exactly which of my essays over-perform relative to length and which under-perform and I have opinions about why. I have, in the past, written a headline sharper than I strictly needed to because a sharper headline gets clicked. Every writer on the platform who has been on it for more than eight months has done a version of this. The question isn't whether we participate. We do. The interesting part is what Substack rewards over time, and it rewards Becky, because Becky is the person whose talent is anticipating what a self-selecting audience is about to want to feel superior about.

This becomes politically ugly because a lot of the writing produced under these conditions is claiming to be left-wing. Some of it is, in the ordinary sense that its author would probably vote for a socialist if one were on the ballot and would probably show up to a picket if one were down the street. But an enormous quantity of it turns the reader, and the writer, into members of a class defined by our correct taste. It's the taste that does the work. The politics is the wrapper. This is what liberalism has always done, since liberalism first became a bourgeois cultural project in the eighteenth century: it distinguishes the cultivated from the unrefined and then treats cultivation as a moral qualification for citizenship. What Substack has done is put that project inside a distribution technology that pays the person doing it eight dollars a month per reader.

4.

The eight dollars a month buys a relationship. Not to me exactly, and not quite to the other subscribers, though some of that happens in the comments. What it buys is a shared relationship to a circulating set of signs, which is what Debord was describing in The Society of the Spectacle (1967) when he argued that the spectacle is a social relation mediated through images rather than a collection of images. The distinction is the whole point. What matters is how people relate to each other through what they look at together, and our capacity to organize ourselves outside that field has been substantially degraded. Debord's second move is the one I keep needing even though I find his prose dreary: recuperation, capital's ability to take signs and gestures produced in opposition to itself, absorb them, drain them of political force, and resell them as commodities or as style. The 1960s counterculture got recuperated into perfume ads within about a decade. The rebellion becomes an image of rebellion, the image becomes a product, and the product gets bought by people who feel, buying it, that they're participating in the rebellion.

Recuperation is the concept that will not leave you alone once you have it, because it applies to every visible aesthetics of rejection currently in circulation. Anti-capitalism becomes product design, radical feminism becomes girlboss marketing, Marxism becomes a t-shirt slogan you can buy at a mall, and trans radicalism becomes a brand campaign for a hormone-delivery startup that will invoice your insurance. The aesthetics of hating AI is undergoing its recuperation in real time as we speak, and Mark Fisher himself has been recuperated to the point where the tote bag exists, and yes, I have seen the tote bag, and yes, I laughed. Capital doesn't particularly care whether you buy the mainstream product or the product whose branding assures you that mainstream products are spiritually degrading. It got your money either way. If you are wearing a t-shirt that says EAT THE RICH and Urban Outfitters sold it to you, you can work out on your own what has happened to the political content of the slogan.

What Debord didn't fully anticipate, because the technology wasn't yet there, was what happens when the counterculture's own participants start doing the recuperation themselves. Nobody needs a corporation to buy up the iconography first. People voluntarily reformat their political identity into a set of commodifiable signs so they can be recognized by other members of the counterculture at social gatherings and on the internet. The recuperation, on Substack, is DIY. Nobody's making us do it. We do it to ourselves, in real time, for free, because being recognized as a certain kind of politically serious person by other people who want the same recognition is one of the few forms of belonging available to a generation that has lost its material infrastructure of political participation.

I can watch this happen in myself, in real time, around AI. My hatred of AI is real. I write for a living. I write in a specific voice that took me a long time to develop. Generative models are trained on writing like mine, without my consent and without compensation, in service of a product whose commercial success would materially reduce the number of people paid to write. The training data was scraped from the open web by companies with venture funding and no interest in the labor conditions of the people whose work made the corpus valuable. The energy costs are real. The concentration of infrastructure in a handful of Amerikan corporations with worrying political alignments is real. The plagiarism is real. The devaluation of skill is real. The class dynamics are, if anything, understated in most of the discourse: the people whose jobs are being restructured first are the ones whose skills were already being underpaid, and the beneficiaries of the restructuring are the people who already own most of the capital in the country. All of this is true.

Now: the hatred of AI has become, in the specific scenes I occupy, a taste marker. There is a way of hating AI that indicates your class position and your cultural affiliations and your intellectual seriousness, and there is another way of hating AI that indicates you're a boomer who is also mad about smartphones. The correct-affiliated hatred has its own language and its own reflexive set of jokes. If you are a certain kind of writer in a certain kind of scene, hating AI is expected of you in a specific style, and if you produce the correct style of hatred you accrue small amounts of cultural credit in your feed. This is happening at the same time as the material critique, sometimes even in the same tweet, and the two get so tangled that it becomes difficult to tell which is which.

Hating AI is doing two things simultaneously. It is naming a real material harm. It is also working as a way to tell everybody what kind of person you are, and to let people from the same social world recognize you. The problem is not that she is wrong to hate AI. She isn't. The problem is that performing the hatred correctly tells us almost nothing about whether the material critique goes any deeper. Somebody can produce all the correct jokes about ChatGPT and vote against every meaningful labor protection for writers. Somebody can never say a word about AI and be organizing her state's freelance writers union. The sign and the substance have drifted apart, which is what always happens when politics gets turned into aesthetics.

My prediction is that this specific culture around AI hatred will look historically strange within a decade, in roughly the way that the specific 1990s panic around video game violence looks strange now. The material issues will remain material issues. Copyright, labor, energy, monopoly, deskilling, surveillance: those don't go away. What goes away is the particular texture of the performance, the jokes, the way saying you hate AI works as a class signal. Some technology will replace this one in the position of Thing You Are A Good Person For Being Angry About, and the current generation of jokes will retire, and we will all look back on them the way we now look back on the guy in 2003 who spent a lot of time being publicly appalled that people had ringtones.

None of this means the hatred's wrong. Hating something correctly isn't a politics.

5.

A teenager who does a trend on TikTok knows it's a trend. She heard the song because everybody heard the song. She learned the dance because everybody did the dance. She bought the shirt because it was in the video with the dance. She's participating in mass culture and she knows it, and the participation is largely the point. There's an uncomplicated honesty to that. It's the honesty of the cafeteria, which everybody in the cafeteria knows is the cafeteria. Nobody's confused about the fact that the popular table is the popular table. That was Stacy's whole domain, and the honesty of the domain was one of its virtues.

In the Substack scenes I've been describing, TikTok gets treated as evidence of civilizational collapse, and what Substack tends to sell instead is the fantasy of having exited the cafeteria. The Substack subscriber often believes she is subscribing to a writer as a way of escaping the algorithmic mass culture that TikTok represents. But Substack also has an algorithm, and it also has trending posts, and it also has a discourse pattern that moves in cycles, and if you have been on it for more than a year you can predict, within a couple of weeks, when the next round of essays complaining about the current object of complaint is going to arrive. The people who left the mainstream cafeteria in disgust have built a new cafeteria, one where the cool kids are the ones with the best paragraph rhythm and the most current cultural sneer, and the rules of who is popular are just as legible, and the operation of the popularity is just as coercive. It is, in most of its social mechanics, the same room. It has better language. Its clique dynamics are identical.

The teenager on TikTok, honestly participating in mass culture and honestly telling you she is, may be doing a less compromised thing than the thirty-year-old on Substack who is charging her audience a monthly fee to feel like she has escaped it. The teenager is not lying. The teenager knows what game she is in. The Substack version often does not. That's not a defense of TikTok. It has its own problems, most of them concerning the corporate ownership of the platform, the algorithmic manipulation of attention, and the compressed timeline on which trends turn political concepts into decorative jargon within a week. The story about TikTok being the site of stupid mass consumption while Substack is the home of intelligent independent thought is a story Substack tells about itself, and I don't believe it, and neither should you.

Stacy grew up too. If Becky's adult habitat is Substack, Stacy's is the institution, in a loose sense of the word that covers editorial staffs, nonprofit boards, agent lists, gallery invitations, curator circles, festival juries, publisher acquisitions meetings, and the group chats where the actual currents of a given scene get decided months before anyone posts about them. Stacy grew up and became somebody whose opinion on whether your work is embarrassing has real effects on your career. Her authority feels invisible from where she's sitting, which is important, because that invisibility is what lets it function.

Adolescent Stacy was watched constantly. Grown Stacy still is. Her authority depends on staying desirable and staying synchronized with whatever her scene is presently doing, which is a job that never turns off. She can't become embarrassing. She can't make the wrong friends publicly, and she can't get caught liking something her scene has already decided is beneath it. The work of maintaining the position is enormous. From outside it looks like effortless taste. From inside it is a full-time occupation of monitoring the very small distance between where cultural opinion is and where it is about to move, and moving first, before somebody catches her on the losing side of a line she helped draw.

Stacy has never been a villain in my writing and she isn't one here. She is a woman doing extremely hard emotional labor inside a court that will forget her the second she stumbles. Her power is real and it's also fragile, and the fragility is what makes some of her behavior so recognizable. She has to keep signaling, and she has to move first, and if she doesn't stay ahead of where the conversation is about to go, someone else will take the position she occupies, because the position isn't really hers. It's the scene's, and she's currently the person filling it.

What Stacy does, in adulthood, is administer the value of what Becky produces. Becky writes the essay. Stacy decides whether the essay is worth sharing. Becky develops a take. Stacy decides whether the take belongs to a person we're currently listening to or a person we're currently through with. Becky studies the rules. Stacy is one of the people who, without ever formally deciding anything, contributes to what the rules currently are. The two of them aren't adversaries. They are structural complements. Stacy needs Becky to keep producing the cultural output that the scene consumes. Becky needs Stacy to occasionally recognize her, because without recognition the effort was wasted. Both of them are exhausted, in ways they cannot easily talk about, because the exhaustion is the sign that the game is working the way it's supposed to.

6.

Both of them need somebody else to tell them it worked. That isn't a personality defect and it isn't specific to them. Hegel got there first, in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807): self-consciousness doesn't come into being privately, it comes into being relationally, through another consciousness confirming that you are what you think you are. No identity is achievable on its own terms. Every claim to be a certain kind of person is, secretly, a claim that needs somebody else to ratify it. Things get famously grim a few pages later, when he works out that this recognition can be coerced, extracted through domination, bent into unequal shape by whoever has more leverage in the exchange, and that's the part everybody remembers. The earlier move is the one I need. You don't become who you think you are without somebody else recognizing you as that person. There's no self that doesn't require the other.

Which is a problem for the anti-mainstream position specifically. The person who declares that she has escaped the mainstream needs the mainstream to exist so that she has something to have escaped from. Her contempt for normies requires normies as its object, and her declaration that she doesn't care what anybody thinks requires a definite audience of people whose thinking she can be publicly not-caring about. If that audience doesn't respond to her not-caring, she'll typically respond by getting louder about not caring, until it does. Social media formalizes this to a degree that would have delighted Hegel: the person who has retreated from the discourse posts about her retreat, the person who is not going to engage announces her non-engagement, and the person who is above the fray positions herself just far enough above the fray to be visible from within it.

I'm describing myself here. Bundle of Styx exists in an economy of recognition. I've chosen my aesthetic and my political language, and even my publication schedule and the specific rhythm of these sentences are choices I've made in view of how they'll be received. I'm recognizable in a marketplace and I benefit from that recognizability, and I wouldn't have the readership I have if my writing weren't identifiably mine at a glance. My independence, whatever it is, doesn't consist in having escaped this. It consists, at best, in being clear-eyed about the fact that I haven't.

The queer intellectual scene has its own version of the recognition problem. It has organized its identity around the refusal of certain mainstream cultural objects, and it therefore requires those objects to remain in circulation so that its refusal has content. If the suburban trans woman with the Stanley cup were, tomorrow, the only remaining trans woman on earth, the queer intellectual scene would have no way of describing itself. Its self-description depends on the existence of trans women it can define itself against. This is why the scene reacts to her with irritation. She's a threat to the scene's ability to know what it is. She isn't doing anything to it. She's just existing in a way that doesn't require the scene's approval, and that alone is intolerable, because the scene's authority is built out of exactly the approval she's stopped needing.

7.

There is a reason the anglophone left is currently so good at managing cultural signs and so much worse at building collective material power. We lost.

From roughly the mid-1970s onward, the political-economic settlement that had produced strong labor organization and mass social-democratic parties across the developed world was systematically dismantled. In the United States this looked like the destruction of the industrial union movement, the deregulation of the financial sector, the erosion of the welfare state, and the ideological triumph of a neoliberal common sense that framed markets as the natural default of political life. Elsewhere it looked similar, with local variations. By the late 1980s the collapse of the Soviet bloc removed the last mass alternative to capitalism as an available political horizon, and by the mid-1990s a Democratic president in the US and a Labour prime minister in the UK were competing to demonstrate their commitment to market discipline. The left had lost the mass organizations through which political identity had, for a century, been materially experienced. The unions were smaller. The parties had capitulated. The presses had folded. The reading groups had aged out. The neighborhood organizations that had once produced socialist consciousness had been replaced by nonprofits with grant-writing schedules.

What didn't go away was the desire for a political identity. The desire migrated. Since people could no longer easily experience themselves as members of a mass working-class formation with the power to strike a city and win, they began experiencing themselves as members of scenes organized around shared taste, shared media consumption, shared language, and shared opposition to a general enemy called the mainstream. This migration wasn't stupid. It was what was available. It was what fit through the door that had been left open. When collective material power is unreachable, symbolic distinction is what people reach for, because symbolic distinction is achievable in an afternoon.

The 2010s complicated the picture. Occupy in 2011, the Black Lives Matter uprisings that began in Ferguson in 2014 and returned in force in 2020, the Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020, the international feminist wave, the eruption of trans political consciousness, the renewed socialist organizing that briefly produced a genuinely mass DSA: these were real. Millions of people changed politically in that decade. I am one of them. It would be dishonest and stupid to pretend those movements were merely cultural. They were serious attempts to build durable political power. Most of them, for reasons that would require another essay to work through, failed to consolidate into governing capacity. Rent kept rising. Healthcare in the US remained an insurance company's revenue stream with a hospital attached. Union density limped upward from historic lows without reaching anything like the strength of the mid-century. And a right-wing counter-formation, which did have institutional patience, discipline, and access to state power, reorganized itself and struck back with force I don't think most of my generation has fully absorbed.

A generation of us became extraordinarily sophisticated at describing domination while remaining substantially incapable of stopping it. We've gotten extraordinarily good at naming everything that's wrong. Our ability to describe the structures that hurt us is remarkable. Our ability to hold territory, defend a strike, run a hospital, house a family, or protect a trans girl from being taken by the state, is uneven at best. And so the political energy that once would have gone into building the institutions that could have done those things has increasingly gone into maintaining a cultural identity that at least lets us feel like we're on the correct side of things, even when we can't do very much about them.

The court came back because the party didn't.

One result of that history is that the anglophone left largely accepted the right's preferred framing of politics as culture war. This isn't a symmetry claim. The right's cultural project is backed by state power, capital, church infrastructure, and long-term institutional discipline. The left has none of that at anything like the same scale. The asymmetry matters. But when the right insists politics is fundamentally about defeating the wrong cultural signs, and the left responds by defending the correct cultural signs, the entire terrain of political conflict has been pulled onto the right's ground.

Everyone becomes obsessed with media and representation, with which movies are secretly reactionary and which pop stars are secretly correct. Meanwhile the landlord raises the rent, the insurance company denies the surgery, the school board eliminates the position, and the state legislature passes the law that the sheriff will show up to enforce. The material questions don't stop being material because the discourse has moved on to something else. They proceed without contest, because the people who might have contested them are doing analysis of a music video.

This is where liberal elitism sneaks into ostensibly radical politics. Liberalism in its classical bourgeois form has always been a project of distinguishing the cultivated from the unrefined and then assigning citizenship rights based on cultivation. This is what the eighteenth-century liberal intellectual meant by refinement, and it's what the twentieth-century liberal intellectual meant by cosmopolitanism, and it's what the twenty-first-century radical intellectual sometimes means when she describes herself as politically serious. The words change. The move doesn't. Cultivation becomes a moral qualification for belonging. Taste becomes evidence of consciousness. Consumption becomes politics. The person who has the correct references becomes politically recognizable as a comrade, and the person who doesn't becomes suspect regardless of what she'd actually risk. The suburban trans woman with the Stanley cup becomes suspect. The nonprofit-brained white woman with the correct reading list does not. Anyone who's spent five minutes in a movement space knows which of the two is more likely to show up when it gets serious. It's not typically the one with the correct reading list.

8.

The correct reading list has an author. Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism (2009) argued that the ideological triumph of neoliberalism was so total by the late twentieth century that it had made the imagining of any alternative to capitalism almost impossible, and the book was correct about the phenomenon it described. Five years later, Ghosts of My Life (2014) gave us hauntology, adapted from Derrida, to describe the way contemporary culture is haunted by futures that once seemed possible and never arrived. It's beautifully written and it contains a serious diagnosis of a real cultural stagnation. In between came "Exiting the Vampire Castle" (2013), his essay in The North Star attacking the individualist and moralistic status game on parts of the online left, now most famous for the pile-on it generated, whose central charge, that punitive individualist moralism was replacing collective political action, was correct then and remains correct. Fisher was serious, he was intelligent, he was frequently correct, and I am now going to spend several thousand words explaining why I want to throw Capitalist Realism across a room.

The problem is not that Fisher was wrong about the general shape of the cultural situation. He was often right. The problem is that Fisher's account of cultural stagnation was inseparable, on inspection, from a particular structure of taste, and that taste happened to belong to a British intellectual man born in 1968 whose cultural formation ran through post-punk, rave, modernist high literature, mid-century experimental cinema, and a specific twentieth-century British left cultural world. Fisher's diagnosis of what had been lost was extremely detailed about what he in particular missed. His diagnosis of what had failed to arrive was extremely detailed about the futures he in particular had expected. His analysis of cultural vitality was very sharp on the cultural forms he had cared about at seventeen, and increasingly imprecise about the cultural forms that were being produced by people who were not him, in scenes he did not know.

This is a common intellectual condition, and it's not a moral failing. Everybody's taste is somebody's taste. Trouble starts when the taste gets installed as the diagnostic standard. When the disappearance of the particular cultural futures that Mark Fisher was rooting for at nineteen is presented as evidence of the collapse of futurity as such, something has gone quietly wrong. Maybe the futures didn't disappear. Maybe they stopped looking like Mark Fisher expected them to look. Maybe he aged, which is what people do, and maybe the culture kept going without him, which is what culture does. Maybe the young people building the futures were doing it in scenes his sensors weren't tuned to. Fisher's own way of thinking about culture has trouble making room for that possibility, because he's trying to describe a general condition with evidence that is, on close reading, autobiographical.

Take his repeated returns to the idea that popular music has undergone historical stagnation. In Ghosts of My Life and elsewhere, Fisher argues that the specific rate of formal innovation that produced the succession from psychedelia to prog to punk to post-punk to house to jungle within roughly thirty years no longer characterizes the popular music of the past several decades. Fine. Grant him the observation. There are real economic and technological reasons a certain kind of formal innovation in popular music has slowed, and Fisher's account of those reasons is often serious. What the observation does not warrant is the emotional register in which he delivers it, which is the register of a man mourning the disappearance of civilizational possibility. There is an enormous difference between analyzing the political-economic conditions that once produced a particular experimental popular culture and becoming the guy at the party in his fifties explaining that music used to be better before you were born. Fisher was often, in his cultural writing, that guy at the party. He was that guy with better language. That's not the same as not being that guy.

Hauntology is where this becomes most acute. At its best it does real analytical work: it names the sense of temporal suspension that shows up in certain kinds of contemporary cultural production, the feeling that we're recycling images of the past because we can no longer produce images of the future. When he writes about the ghost of the future in the sound of Burial, he's doing extraordinary criticism. The problem is that hauntology also became a general license for Fisher to feel that his own aesthetic preferences constituted a diagnosis of civilizational condition. When it stops being a specific critical tool and becomes a way of saying the entire cultural present is a diminished repetition of a moment he happened to have been young during, it's stopped diagnosing. It's projecting.

The problem gets worse because Fisher's cultural politics can easily become an excuse for exactly the kind of taste economy this essay has been circling. Convince yourself that the culture has undergone catastrophic collapse and that the appropriate response is melancholic connoisseurship, and you've given yourself permission to spend the rest of your political life curating your alienation. Your politics is the refinement of your taste. Your capacity to identify how bad things are becomes proof of your seriousness. You accumulate cultural capital through your ability to be more precisely disappointed than everyone around you. Fisher himself, to his credit, didn't entirely do this. He was serious about mass politics, he was involved in various organizing efforts, and he was, until his suicide in 2017, actively trying to develop a positive cultural politics. But the reception of his work, the tote-bag Fisher, the Fisher who has become shorthand for a certain kind of intellectual seriousness among people who have read two of his essays and watched a YouTube video, has turned his work into exactly the kind of taste machine his own theory should have been able to see coming.

Fisher, of all people, should have seen this coming. He understood recuperation. He understood the way capitalism absorbs opposition. He described, at length, how the aesthetics of rebellion get stripped of political content and recirculated as commodities. And then his own name became one of the commodities. Capitalist Realism became cultural capital. His concepts became a reading-list signal. His photograph became a tote-bag illustration. His melancholy became a sensibility young intellectuals could adopt as a mark of seriousness. If you believe his theory, this outcome was more or less inevitable, and the fact that he didn't build his own work in a way that could survive its recuperation is a criticism you can level against him using his own tools. That's the devastating one. It uses his argument against him. It doesn't misrepresent him. It just points out that the blind spot was the theory itself.

Fisher's late writing, and especially some of the essays collected posthumously, developed an increasingly beautiful language for describing political defeat. The prose became more elegiac. The diagnoses became more searching. The melancholy acquired an intellectual dignity. Political defeat has an aesthetic use: if you're not careful, it becomes something you have language for, and so something you can inhabit instead of something you have to overcome. Fisher's own suicide was a tragedy, and his depression was serious. What I'm talking about isn't his personal condition. I'm talking about the intellectual style. There is a way of writing about the collapse of political possibility that makes the collapse more livable by making it more beautiful, and this style, in the hands of his readers, has produced a generation of intellectuals for whom political impotence has a soundtrack. That is not what he wanted. It is what happened.

Ask a left cultural theory one question: what does it produce in its readers? Does it produce more capacity, more organization, more courage, more clarity about material stakes, more people willing to show up when the situation gets ugly? Or does it produce a beautiful language for the sensation of already having lost? Fisher's work has produced both, and the ratio has shifted over time, and I think the current ratio is bad. The Fisherian cultural critic in her thirties, sneering at popular consumption from her Substack, believes she is outside capitalist realism because she consumes better films, better music, better books, and better theory. Her politics has become the refinement of her alienation. That is liberal distinction in a black turtleneck, and Fisher's own theory contains all the equipment necessary to identify it, and his readers have collectively decided not to.

The Vampire Castle essay was mostly correct, and it was pilloried mostly by people who were pilloried in it. Fisher accurately identified a specific style of online left moralism in the early 2010s in which political conflict was systematically routed into individualized moral judgment, in which people accrued small amounts of status by publicly identifying the moral failures of other left-adjacent people, and in which class analysis was displaced by punitive attention to the personal shortcomings of individual leftists. He was right. That style still exists. I've been on both ends of it. What his essay didn't, couldn't, or wouldn't do was apply the same attention to taste as a parallel status game. He saw the moral case. He didn't see the taste case. He was, in his moralism essay, positioned inside the same economy of cultural distinction he couldn't name, sneering at moralists in a mode that itself accrued cultural capital among people whose politics was largely their taste. The essay was correct and also self-implicating in a way its author couldn't, or wouldn't, admit. That's a limitation. It doesn't disqualify the essay. It does, I think, disqualify the intellectual style that has taken the essay as permission to sneer at moralists without noticing that sneering, too, is a status good.

His late positive project, insofar as I can reconstruct it from the fragments, was a call for the recovery of collective political consciousness in the face of what he understood as neoliberalism's individualizing pressures. That project's a good project. I want it. The mistake I'd flag is that his account of what a recovered collective might look like was still, on close reading, an account of a collective organized around a particular scene. The recovery he imagined was aesthetic before it was material. The comrades in his implicit imaginary all read the correct books. The music at the party would be right. Nobody would be watching a Marvel movie. If your account of a recovered left requires the aesthetic preferences of your specific milieu as a precondition of the recovery, you have described a scene, and a scene is not a movement. A movement is what happens when people who do not share your cultural world, and who never will, can be organized alongside you in defense of something concrete. Fisher wanted the movement. What his framework kept producing was the scene. That's my full complaint. Fuck Mark Fisher, with love and respect, and with a genuine appreciation for the seriousness of his work.

9.

If Fisher's blind spot was the taste economy inside his own theory, Debord's was that recuperation, once described, could be self-administered. In 1967 he was picturing corporations absorbing counterculture. What's happened since is that participants in oppositional cultures have absorbed themselves. Somebody with a Substack, an aesthetic, and a recognizable political language is running her own recuperation department. She takes the political content of a movement, reformats it into a set of postable signs, sells the signs to an audience organized around recognizing those signs, and receives, in exchange, both money and status. The corporation is redundant. She's automated it. This is, I think, the important update to Debord that his own life did not permit him to see, and it applies to me. I run a small in-house recuperation operation. I'm aware of this. Bundle of Styx is a brand. Its aesthetic is recognizable. Its political language is identifiable. If you subscribe to me, part of what you are subscribing to is a certain kind of feeling about your own politics. I know this. Knowing it doesn't exempt me from it. It just means the essay you are reading is being written by a person who is inside the thing she is describing.

What I'm selling, when I sell that feeling, is a classification. Bourdieu spent years surveying what French people actually consumed in the 1960s, the music and the art and the food, and what he found in Distinction (1979) is that taste operates as a system of social classification which also classifies the person doing the classifying. What you like reveals your class position. What you hate reveals it more precisely. Contempt is especially efficient: to express it you have to place yourself above whatever you're contemptuous of, and in doing so you tell the room that you know what mass culture is, that you're not part of it, and that you belong to a scene sophisticated enough to recognize the gap. Three pieces of self-presentation. One gesture.

The old bourgeois distinction markers used to run through classical music, fine dining, elite education, and correct manners. In some scenes they now run through obscure theory, niche music, alternative relationship structures, correct political language, ethical consumer choices, anti-consumer consumer choices, and knowing which ordinary pleasures deserve contempt. The objects have changed. The social mechanism hasn't. This is what I have been calling adult Becky. It is why the queer intellectual can be, in her material conduct, indistinguishable from the daughter of a country-club Republican, except that the country-club Republican was more honest about what her taste was for.

The suburban trans woman has been carrying more of this argument than she probably deserves. She isn't secretly wiser than the queer intellectual. That would be the mirror-image cliché of the one I'm attacking, and it would betray her by making her a symbol in a different direction. She's a woman, and she's variable in the way people are. Some days her analysis is sharper than anybody's at the meeting and some days she is politically confused and voted for someone I would not have voted for and cannot articulate a clear reason why. She might have spent no time whatsoever thinking about the questions I spend my life thinking about, or she might have spent an enormous amount of time on them and arrived at conclusions I disagree with. None of that makes her right about anything.

Reading her ordinariness as evidence of political capitulation is the mistake, made by people whose theory of politics has quietly become a theory of aesthetics. If your test for whether somebody is politically serious is whether she looks like the kind of person you would want to sit with at a queer function, you have a taste test masquerading as a political test, and your test will produce reliably wrong results. It will misidentify serious people as sellouts because they don't dress right. It will misidentify aesthetically appropriate people as comrades even when their material conduct is indefensible. It will select, over time, for a movement made up of the people who have the free time and the class position to develop the correct aesthetic, which is not the same population as the people who would defend it under pressure.

The suburban trans woman stands for the possibility of a trans life that is not being lived as material for anybody else's political imagination. She isn't producing herself for the queer scene or the transmedicalist forum. She isn't producing herself for the terfs to hate or the allies to celebrate. She's just being a woman with a wife and a house and a job, and the fact that her ordinariness is possible at all is one of the actual historical achievements of the trans political movements of the past century. That achievement was made by people who fought for medical access, employment protection, housing protection, and legal recognition, most of whom were killed or forgotten in the process, and the woman with the Stanley cup is what their work has permitted. She shouldn't have to justify her existence to a scene that has decided her existence is politically embarrassing. She is what the movement was for.

None of this means that ordinary suburban life is a horizon. It isn't. There are trans women who will never have any version of what she has, because they are too poor, too Black, too trans-visible, too unhoused, too criminalized, too disabled by the medical system, too far from any of the resources that made her life possible. Their fight isn't over. The material conditions that let one trans woman get a mortgage in a subdivision haven't been extended to most of us, and pretending otherwise would be a class betrayal. But a movement that treats her as a defeat has confused its cultural preferences with what it actually wants politically, and that confusion is going to make it materially worse at reaching the people it says it wants to reach.

10.

Underneath all of this, there's a lot of sadness. The reason people work so hard to prove they're different is that contemporary capitalism has made almost everybody feel replaceable, and cultural distinction is one of the few available compensations. Becky worked out how to be safe by knowing the rules because her exclusion, as a girl, had a specific cost. Stacy worked out how to remain interesting because her authority, as a woman, is contingent on continuing recognition. The intellectual worked out how to sneer at normies because superiority is a fragile identity and it requires an object. The radical worked out how to build an aesthetic because politics has, for reasons I have already tried to explain, failed to give her enough material experiences of collective power to sustain her identity on the basis of that power alone. And I worked out how to be Tara Knight because being recognizable in a marketplace of writers is one of the few forms of stability available to a person with my class background who's trying to make a living by putting sentences together.

The desire to be special is ridiculous. It's also human. I have spent most of my adult life wanting to prove that I was unusually intelligent, unusually interesting, unusually difficult to dismiss, and I have built a career on it, and I can't pretend to have escaped the wound that produced the wanting. What I can do is refuse to package the wound as politics. The wound is that people, most of us, don't have enough of a hold on any material form of collective life to feel that we couldn't be replaced tomorrow by another sufficiently talented producer of content, another sufficiently correct young intellectual, another sufficiently on-message activist. Capital responds to that fear by selling us increasingly personalized ways to feel unique. Substack does that. Instagram does that. The queer scene does that. Bundle of Styx does that. The suburban trans woman, whether or not she means to, is doing a small quiet thing against that logic, which is that she has stopped participating in it. Her belonging is elsewhere. Her wife knows her name. Her neighbors recognize her when she takes the trash out. She doesn't need the scene to certify that she exists, and this makes her incomprehensible to a scene whose central activity is the mutual certification of existence through the exchange of the correct signs.

I don't think this makes her a saint. I think it makes her, on some days, materially freer than the rest of us.

Becky and Stacy grew up. Becky learned all the rules and put them to work in cultural production. Stacy learned how to administer the value of the rules and put that to work in cultural institutions. Both entered political culture in their thirties and discovered that adulthood had reproduced high school with better language and the same social mechanics. Becky became culturally sophisticated because sophistication was the adult form of the safety she had been chasing since she was thirteen. Stacy became the person whose recognition made sophistication valuable, because that recognition was the adult form of the authority she had first learned to wield at parties nobody's parents supervised. Neither of them is evil. They're both adapting to systems of recognition older than either of them, and the tragedy of the whole arrangement is that their adaptation gets mistaken for their politics.

Becky wanted to learn the rules. Stacy wanted to become the person who made them. The mistake we made was assuming either one had anything to do with freedom.

Then the suburban trans woman walks in with an unforgivable seasonal beverage, says something more materially radical than everybody there, and accidentally exposes the fact that the whole aesthetic theory of trans-left politics has been organized around the wrong axis. Becky cannot place her on the cultural map. Stacy can't govern somebody who isn't asking for the scene's recognition. The queer intellectual, whose theory of who is capable of political thought did not have room for this specific woman, is left with a small crisis nobody in her feed will help her resolve. And the woman herself doesn't particularly care, because she has to leave to pick her wife up from Pilates, and the theorization is going to have to proceed without her.

Nobody gets comfort they haven't earned. We're not going to fix this. The aesthetic left isn't going to stop selling distinction, because distinction sells, and the material conditions that made mass politics possible for our grandparents haven't returned. Writers who are honest about being inside the thing they describe will keep being useful, and writers who claim to have escaped it will keep producing brands. Suburban trans women are going to keep being sneered at by scenes that need them for the sneering to have an object, and the girls without the material means to become suburban are going to keep being betrayed by movements whose primary work is the maintenance of a specific taste. My own writing, this essay included, is one of the things being sold in the distinction economy, and I don't know a way out of that except to keep saying so.

One of the more radical things a transsexual woman can achieve, in this specific country in this specific decade, is the capacity to become an ordinary person rather than a public symbol of somebody else's politics. The queer scene wants a martyr or a warning, the right wants a case study, and the centrist press wants a heartwarming profile of somebody who has beaten the odds. The suburban trans woman with the Stanley cup is refusing to be any of those, and refusing without announcing that she's refusing, and the refusal is quieter and more interesting than most of what gets called radicalism in the queer press. I'm not where she is. I've built a career on being a symbol of a particular kind of politics for a particular kind of audience, and I'd be lying if I said I was ready to give it up. She might not know she's done it. She might be there anyway. I'd like to arrive where she is, someday, without pretending I've already arrived.

For now I'm going to close this laptop, and probably open TikTok, and probably watch something stupid, and if you catch me I won't deny it. See you on Substack.

Works cited:

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979). Used for the argument that taste operates as a system of social classification and that contempt for specific cultural objects classifies the person expressing it.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle (1967). Used for the definition of the spectacle as a social relation mediated by images and for the concept of recuperation, capital's absorption of oppositional signs.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009). Used as both source and target: source for the analysis of neoliberal cultural closure, target for the way that analysis licenses aesthetic distinction as political posture.

Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014). Used to examine hauntology and to argue that Fisher's account of cultural stagnation depended on the aesthetic formation of a specific British intellectual generation.

Fisher, Mark. "Exiting the Vampire Castle" (The North Star, November 2013). Used to credit the essay's diagnosis of punitive individualist moralism on the online left and to argue that its author's own cultural politics operated inside a parallel status economy the essay could not see.

Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Used for the argument that self-consciousness is constituted through recognition by another consciousness, and therefore that an identity built on distinction from the mainstream remains dependent on the mainstream.