Performativity

Or How I Learned to Loved Audience Capture

It’s warm in my attic; the glow of too many monitors is gradually eroding the blue-light filter on my glasses. I write a lot these days because I am trying to systematically lay out some of the things I have alluded to on my show, Varn Vlog.

The originality of giving everything my surname as an alliterative title aside, I called “Varn Vlog” that because originally, I was in a hotel room during the Pandemic in rural central Utah, and I posted a rant from my tablet after reading a few books on the trip. I kept the title when the host of the now-defunct podcast, Giving The Mic to the Wrong Person, asked me to release audio of the rant to a Patreon. My original aesthetic was an anti-aesthetic: no lighting, no filters, a streaming service so I could do interviews, and a name I made for myself in the 2010s: blowhard podcaster on Marxism.

Now, I have read hundreds of books on the topic at this point. Both my ex-wife and my current one said I have basically given myself an ersatz doctorate in Marxism: going through as many historical books on the various internationals as I can, poring over Marx letters to contextualize the writings, etc. I did this, originally for me, and then as an educational project: I got tired of seeing historical figures with radical politics used as ventriloquist dummies. Since I had worked in left-wing publishing many times—first as an editor for obscure and removed from the internet The Green Triangle in 2007, then as a writer for some collective blog projects such as Symptomatic Redness, and (Dis)Loyal Opposition to Modernity, for the defunct and infamous North Star from 2012 to 2013, and then for Zer0 Books from 2014-2021—I had come into the “left” as insider/outsider. I had done the work, had both the formal and autodidactic education, but came from a different background than my audience. I also developed my identity as a “proclaimer of things left-wing” abroad. The irony is that podcasts were always a part of that for me. When I first got involved in “Left-wing podcasts”--most of the far left podcasts were Pacifica radio shows, Jacobin magazine was just coming into being, and I mostly went into the shows in the domain of a perpetual philosophy graduate student.

Ironically, this distance from a paying audience and the literal soil of the countries I spoke of served me well. I developed a reputation as combative and zealous, but also fairly consistent. Yet, the demands of the left-wing media sphere sucked me in more and more in the second half of the 2010s. I started knowing the gossip of Green Pointe and Silver Lake, not because I lived there, but because my contacts circled around that world. When I came back to the US, my then-wife was recovering from cancer, and I was a teacher at the same charter school as her, and then I was running off to promote my poetry collection and to do conferences. I hid my marriage since I had seen families doxxed, I hid the fact that I was the primary caregiver in my home, and I tried to hide the tensions with all the co-hosts on the various shows I did. None of it worked.

Increasingly, it felt like a dual life—a journey I had ventured on primarily to develop my interest, which had become a character of its own. A mask that I felt compelled to keep up. My audience viewed me as combative, so I would get angrier and angrier with my audience. My audience viewed me as an “Orthodox Marxist”—a concept that I think is actually an oxymoron if not outright meaningless—so I started insisting on very strict interpretation and hermeneutics. I felt myself become meaner, and what is funny to me about that now, it wasn’t when I was connected to the shadiest characters on the “left.” Nor was I still getting canceled despite my proxy to people who I felt where taking more and more “edgelord” positions. Attempts to cancel me had happened earlier in the 2010s, and temporarily worked.

What I noticed was that despite doing entire shows on the dangers of parasocial connections, I was actually conforming to my audience and getting into what was expected of me. My shows, to me, felt increasingly like they had the standard voices of the post-Micheal Brooks’ socialist left, and the sectarian projections I mocked were increasingly part of the daily question set.

That’s the funny thing about audience capture and character masks: they work better when they are interpolated onto you. If you think you are being sincere, the more effective the capture is.

Just like the people who often tell you the most about “logical fallacies, cognitive biases, and motivated reasoning” often cannot see their own logical fallacies, cognitive biases, and motivated reasoning, the person who thinks they are above audience capture is generally the most captured.