Why I'm Better at Culture Than You

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It has come to my attention lately that most Substackers don’t write about fish, and even fewer of them write about shrimp. I do not know how many write about the state of exception, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the number is zero. The most prominent state-of-exception blogger I can find on the internet is myself, and the only time I’ve ever mentioned sovereignty or political theology or bios or zoë or Schmitt or Agamben or whatever was in a parody of the presidential debate where I had Trump and Harris argue about critical theory.

If you want to make it into the Substack major leagues — and who better to ask than the world’s #1 state-of-exception blogger? — you have to give the people what they want. Tragically, the people don’t want to read counterintuitive takes about fish reproduction. Nor do they want to hear about how you should give all your money to shrimp welfare. My most popular article by far has been an acerbic post about the king of all Trump reply guys, Jeff Tiedrich, where I dubbed him the “Most Least Remarkable Person on the Internet” and said his followers all eat his farts. Even though I wrote it nearly three months ago, it’s still driving subscriptions and generating rave reviews like this:

(To be fair, I’ve never heard of “Glen” either.)

My other most popular articles have all been satire pieces that traded away their last semblance of nuance and cogency for the much higher value of Owning People Online. Somehow, I’ve never lost subscribers from writing these articles, even though I’ve made a deliberate attempt to offend as many mainstream political tribes as whose writing style I can mimic and I’ve been exceptionally trollish when replying to comments that I don’t think offer much in the way of insight or humor.

All of this has taught me that I can write basically anything I want and I’ll never face any negative consequences for it, since the worst I can ever do is plateau. Sovereign is he who decides on the United States of Exception, I guess. If I’m satisfied with the size of my audience, I don’t have to do anything and I can just keep writing about fish. But if I want to grow my audience (so I have more people to read about fish in the future), all it takes is to fire off a few hundred words about the inane cultural drama that most people can’t get enough of. This is, thankfully, one of the easiest things for me to write about because I don’t have the sufficient cultural competence to know what The Discourse has to say about any particular topic, or what a good argument looks like, or what I need to say for people to like me or dislike me. When I talk about politics and philosophy, I have to worry about saying something stupid and making smart people angry. But when I talk about culture, I don’t really care what my audience has to think. Actually, I think it’s very funny to provoke people into anger, since it’s amusing to watch the comment section blow up with a few hundred people who don’t know what to say other than you’re a fucktastic chucklefuck.

Even though I’m a proud cultural incompetent, however, I nevertheless seem to have a killer instinct for having Good Opinions about The Culture. Most of my takes are thoroughly ill-informed, but they at least sound right, and most people don’t ever have a good rebuttal to the claims I make, and it looks to me like I’m driving The Discourse in a much less incendiary direction than I ever hoped for. At the end of my article about Tiedrich, for example, I included a dig against fans of the CBS series Young Sheldon, which apparently was the most popular American television series of the past decade. This elicited a word of disagreement from

Bentham's Bulldog

, which is to date probably the strongest he’s ever pushed back against anything I’ve written. But it mostly went over well. To be honest, I’ve never seen Young Sheldon, but I think I know enough about The Big Bang Theory (a show for horny Boomer men and their incessantly put-upon wives about autistic grad students having sex) and the cultural disposition of the average American consumer (whose age and IQ are both 70) to say that it’s worthy of mockery. I have a similar opinion about family sitcoms, Trump-era SNL, reality TV, every game show host except Bob Barker, romantic comedies, Friends, chain restaurants, Adam Sandler, Facebook, and country music.

You might think this just makes me a cultural elitist. And to be fair, I do think that Middle America should be paved over to make room for something more useful, like an NFT farm or a giant network of crypto miners or an app where you can make an Obamacare appointment or whatever. (I’m a born and bred Midwesterner, so I’m allowed to say this.)

But I have a much more nuanced cultural perspective than the charge of elitism gives me credit for. Unlike most elitists, I think the classics are drab as hell, and I enjoy my fair share of slop — just better slop than the average person, and for better reasons. I think Twilight is the greatest love story of the 21st century, and undoubtedly better than Romeo and Juliet. I agree with Sam Bankman-Fried that it’s implausible to think the greatest English writer of all time was born in 1564. And even though I recognize that Twilight has critical flaws like wooden acting and under-the-radar Mormonism, I still think it does a better job than any other work of fiction of which I’m aware at capturing what it’s like for someone to fall in love with a man. In Romeo and Juliet, the pitfalls are all social. In Twilight, the forces that conspire against Bella and Edward are supernatural, and therefore more fundamental, and ironically more realistic.

Twilight, in a word, ventures to capture the alluring yet self-destructive proposition that is romantic love, and it succeeds on a much more deeper level than Romeo and Juliet. Stephenie Meyer is to Shakespeare as Lana Del Rey is to Taylor Swift.

A slide from a “hot takes” presentation I gave earlier this year.

I do not know exactly how to summarize my cultural attitude here other than yas queen skinny legend versace boots the house down slay queen hunty mama and i oop daddy werk charli xcx snatch my wig, but I think that captures it. For some reason, the same force that gives me and a fair share of other homosexuals a sixth-sense for Good Opinion Having, which makes us qualified to write catty tracts about things we barely understand, is also what drives us to listen to enough Troye Sivan that he can be our top Spotify artist for two years in a row, even though we know “Rush” is hot garbage — “hot” here being its sole redeeming quality.

It might sound very self-aggrandizing to say I’m simply predisposed to having Good Opinions, but if you don’t believe me, take it from the expert Good Opinion Haver himself:

It’s no coincidence that all the world’s biggest names in media, finance, entertainment, and Substack blogs about the state of exception are disproportionately homosexual men. In a meritocracy, people with a knack for humor and insight simply rise to the top (or the bottom, as things may be).

Am I serious about all this? At this point, you might be wondering if this whole article has been tongue-in-cheek. But so what if it has? Does it really matter? As long as you were entertained, I think I proved my point. Out-of-the-mainstream, incisive culture writing is just entertaining, and it sure seems like homosexuals are the best at it. Gore Vidal, anyone?

At any rate, writing like this has been enough for me to get nearly 1,000 people to start reading a blog about the state of exception whose main focus is, in fact, not the state of exception but rather aquatic animal welfare. I think that’s impressive enough to prove something. And I’d like to think that something has more to do with how impressive I am than how guileless and easily deceivable the rest of you are.

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