Recently at a writer’s conference—AWP in Seattle, for those who are curious—I bumped into a colleague I knew from grad school in the cavernous hall of the book fair. He said he just took a job at a program that had a Ph.D. program in creative writing; no longer would his fiction workshops have to deal with undergrads whose stories were more informed by young adult fantasy novels, fan fiction, and pop culture gleaned from TikTok. At least, that is, for another three or four years, until the undergrads became his new Ph.D. students.
The point here, besides the obvious humblebrag which is merely par for the course, was that my colleague’s fiction students had no desire to study the art they presumably sought to produce. It wasn’t that they lacked an orientation to that wizened bugaboo, the Western canon; it was that they had no real orientation toward any tradition of literature at all.
One could wonder why the students were so eager to compose stories if they rather disliked reading them. Instead of reading James Baldwin or Raymond Carver, Alice Munro or Leslie Marmon Silko, say, they spent all their time scrolling their social media feeds. In those rare moments when they did bother to read, it was escapist dreck or infantilized drivel composed for teenagers at best, likely because their own sophistication as nominally adult readers hadn’t been sufficiently developed yet.
At least that’s what I inferred my colleague’s supercilious sigh suggested. Nor did his student seem inclined to develop an interest in literature, despite enrolling in his writing workshops. His attitude encompassed both disdain and bewilderment toward his former students. I hasten to add that my colleague was still in his thirties, a Millennial.
I, too, sense this growing generational rift. I could perfectly identify the phenomena my colleague referred to. Talking with other academics and friends across creative writing and humanities fields, I’ve repeatedly heard them describe a gulf between older notions of “craft” or “aesthetics” or “the serious contemplation of texts,” on the one hand, and whatever it is, on the other hand, that their Gen-Z students do when they navigate Instagram, YouTube, and Netflix videos.
It’s not just a matter of being naïve and untutored: for that, of course, is the perpetual condition of any student. No, rather, social media and internet culture has fundamentally altered the way that young people approach texts, the system of values that undergird their comportment toward art, and the lifestyle—the Lebenswelt—in which their behaviors are grounded. For thoroughgoing “digital natives,” their ideas of self-worth, their emotional responses, their political ideals, and much else besides is wrapped up in a different relationality toward not only texts and art, but to other people and communities. What, exactly, one may ask, is this new attitude, this emerging sensibility?
Defining a Sensibility
Perhaps it’s partly true that for younger folks, having grown up reposting tweets and scrolling TikTok feeds, a physical book appears like a poor interface for a similar kind of communicative undertaking. But this essay is not an attempt to wax futuristic about a coming post-literate society where new media replaces older ones. Literacy levels are much higher than a hundred years ago in most Western countries. It’s not as if students can’t read, at least on a basic level. It’s that their rationale for consuming artifacts pursues new pleasures, brings to bear a different awareness, and comes out of concerns distinctive to their generation.
Younger audiences are developing their own donnée—assumptions, habits, techniques, what-have-you—informed by the changing culture around them. Perhaps, indeed, their nascent taste constitutes a profoundly coherent response to the conditions in which they live.
In place of dismissing students as simply untutored, inexperienced, or having bad taste, then, this essay is an exercise in seeking to understand the perspectives of a younger milieu and even, at times, to defend their outlook. As Susan Sontag writes, “For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a sensibility can analyze it… to name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion”[1]
I suspect that this emerging sensibility of “Instacore” (as I tentatively deem it) evinces a larger paradigm shift at play across the arts—and the culture more generally—which is symptomatic of fundamental differences in worldview and ideology between generations. Whether this sensibility will prove a subcultural taste, a passing fad, or the harbinger of a long-lasting epoch remains to be seen. One thing this emerging Gen-Z viewpoint is decidedly not is postmodernism.
A sensibility is mobile and fluid, an artifact of delicate accretion like a coral reef vulnerable to the lukewarm waters it inhabits rather than some steely edifice impervious to its environment. It is more likely to be caught by a sidelong aperçu than a head-on argument. Thus, my meditation here takes the form of notes and vignettes, gut-checks and guesswork, rather than any more orderly seeming structure. If sometimes ambivalent, slapdash, and disheveled, that, after all, is the often nature of contemplation itself.
I hope, however, that I will both illuminate the sensibility of “Instacore” as well as the culture that has produced it. Defending the sensibility to the extent I am able can ironically act as a critique of the culture that produces it. My aim is to reveal the sensibility’s operational methods and principles, its deep-seated quotidian routines and values that otherwise might go unnoticed. To be sympathetic to the young is not necessarily to be sympathetic to the structural forces that formed them. Likely, their reactions contravene the values of my own era, the whole cosmology I’m rooted in, so that such attempts at understanding are inevitably exercises in self-alienation.
Poseurs vs. Impostor Syndrome
Once upon a time, Gen Xers used to insult each other by saying someone was a poseur. Today, the young people of Gen Z more often reflexively describe themselves as having impostor syndrome. Both appellations, however, may reveal a similar underlying insecurity. Gen X youth called out others for what they suspected they were secretly guilty of before others could attack them. For Gen Z, admitting to impostor syndrome may be an apotropaic ritual that seemingly embraces their poseur status as a gesture to (in fact) ward it off.
Nevertheless, the style of wearing one’s anxiety is different today. To wit, Gen X would call out those who were not real rebels and punks, but half-hearted pretenders, closet conformists. Impostor syndrome for Gen Z is felt most acutely, by contrast, when they suddenly leave the cozy confines of dorms and classrooms and face the corporate “real world” in a full-time job. For Gen X, that very corporate maze of cubicles was anything but a proving ground for authenticity.
For Gen Z, on the other hand, their measure of feeling self-competent and genuine (see the verb “adulting,” for instance) involves assuming grownup duties instead of simulating them with mere play-acting and kid stuff—punk hijinks and college pranks. The “real” is located in entirely distinct realms for each: for Gen X, “real” was seeing through the corporate conformity and suburban doldrums to the soul-crushing fakery it portended. For Gen Z, adult responsibilities, more put off than off-putting, are what counts as the “real.”
Authenticity has long been the credo of youth; but in what authenticity consists, at an age when one’s identity is still incipient and ill-formed, is anyone’s guess. Still, the ideal for Gen X was to resist the bland strangling ties of business suits, to strike out on one’s own with a romantic and revolutionary zeal, overturning societal norms, even if this proved at last illusory or self-destructive.
Authenticity for Gen Z is quite different: it’s finding employment that correlates to their knowledge, skills, and personal values. It means finding the right niche among the available social roles. And perhaps that’s a more mature and realistic view, if dowdier and duller than a primal scream or mindless thrashing about in a mosh-pit. Gen Z wants to feel they live up to roles they take on, and their take on things is that a job which isn’t meaningful is ultimately demeaning. A role is not only a façade; it is also a function. It’s a having a purpose in the larger social life in which one is immersed.
All Art’s the Art of Self-Promotion
Increasingly young people choose creative-adjacent professions—e.g., publishing, museum curation, film tech—to reconcile artistic urges with economic realities. They don’t want to write the Great American Novel; they want to be the agent who sells it. Likewise, they don’t readily distinguish between art-making per se and networking, producing social media, and resume-building. In the neoliberal marketplace, art is self-promotion: they have become coterminous activities.
One is no longer an artist, one is a content creator, influencer, guru, brand ambassador. Such roles elide the daily drudgery that so frequently is required in making art and replaces it with a sheen of celebrity and acting in a managerial capacity (if only of oneself). The economist Paul Krugman predicted all the way back in 1996 the rise of what we might call the micro-celebrities that populate our influencer culture today:
The 500-channel world is a place of many subcultures… there are people who will pay for the thrill of live encounters not only with divas but with journalists, poets, mathematicians, and even economists.[2]
Even back in the late 90s, artist could no longer depend on earning money from their creations, whether those were music albums, novels, or software. This applied to knowledge, too, in that—like artists and musicians—the expert or writer had to depend on another outlet for their income. Books didn’t earn much; music was pirated; patents were owned by the university or company one worked for.
What developed was a celebrity circuit: panels, workshops, retreats, book signings, artist talks, concerts, touring appearances, and other forums. This vast array of gigs and side-hustles became more lucrative for artists and experts than their supposedly main area of proficiency. Their book or patent or album was the springboard that allowed them a platform, a speaker fee, or a fandom.
This new circuit rivals if not surpasses the late nineteenth-century with its entertainment circuit featuring public lectures, popular sideshows, itinerant preachers, and the Chautauqua movement. Is the book tour a way to publicize one’s book or is the book merely a marketing device for one’s tour? Authors, especially the more notable ones, often make more on their talks, retreats, corporate workshops, and motivational speeches than they do from any advance or royalties.
Increasingly, as Krugman’s prescient comments hint, the “knowledge economy” has given way to the “celebrity economy,” and the production of the book (artwork, research, album, etc.) is merely a way to gain a platform to host a self-promotional encounter, which is where the money’s at. The artist becomes a brand; add-ons and ancillary items get plugged and shilled. The “influencer” trend only exacerbates this condition. The ads themselves become the content, the supposed content promotes more ads. Ad and content merge indistinguishably. In 1959 Norman Mailer titled a book of his essays and interviews Advertisements for Myself; today, it’s hard to find a book to which that title wouldn’t apply.
In some cases, this subcultural celebrity circuit becomes not unlike a pyramid scheme: the more famous artist holds a retreat for novices to teach them how they, too, can professionalize themselves to the point where one day, if they’re lucky, each of them might hold retreats for future novices. Whether this is the age-old model of an artist offering an apprenticeship or whether it’s just a scam artist offering “pretenderships” might depend on one’s point of view. The scheme, such as it is, necessarily depends on the fact that most of the novices will never end up as future gurus with disciplines of their own. Otherwise, the system collapses.
That’s not to say all hope is illusory. But it’s unrealistic hope—first and foremost—that is being pedaled in the more abusive instances. Though, in a celebrity economy, it is celebrity that is most important, the sheen and sizzle, the glitz and glamor. Less at stake are genuine skills or knowledge. Celebrity, like charisma, is an aura; it’s entirely its own end and is self-reinforcing.
This piece is part of a three-part series by Randi Foyl. Please tune in next week for the rest of their essay on the aesthetic of Instacore.
[1] Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation. (New York: Dell Publishing, 1966), 275-292. Available online at: https://monstrousculture.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/sontag_camp.pdf
[2] Krugman, Paul. The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches from the Dismal Science (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 203.