one hawked over the tuah's nest
A ramble about social media algorithms, the creator economy, and the futility of trying to go viral for a living.
Look, or read rather, I’m just gonna come on out and say it. Something broke in me a little bit when I opened my feeds one day and it felt like the entirety of the goddamn internet hawk tuah’d in my face. It’s difficult to find the right words for the mixture of head shaking, frustration, exasperation, yet bleak acceptance that washed over me in the course of a week, but it feels like it needs to be named and discussed because it touches on so many of the problems we see play out on social media today and what fuels them behind the scenes.
Now, let’s establish something crucial right away, just in case your mind went where I think it went. I have absolutely nothing bad to say about Hailey Welch, her drunken tip about what to do with the tip, or her sudden viral fame. Being the farthest thing from a prude, raised in a sex positive household — which is uncommon for Eastern European immigrants, I know — and being a staunch defender of comprehensive sex ed in every appropriate public venue, I’m absolutely not disgusted by, or judging Welch.
At the risk of the Council of Men harshly sanctioning me, I’ll say that her suggested technique is not my personal preference, nor is it for quite a few men. However, we appreciate the spirit and enthusiasm, which is usually the biggest turn on for most of us heteronormative penis havers. Many minds have changed and many relationships blossomed thanks to a dirty joke or an enthusiastic proposal. This is probably why an otherwise unremarkable video went so viral given the right boost.
Same goes for her trying to cash in on her virality by going on podcasts and securing representation in LA while launching an OnlyFans, as is now expected of pretty much any content creator. You can’t be upset at a lottery winner cashing in her ticket. (Well, technically you can, but that’s just stupid and petty.) And hell, if I suddenly exploded on BookTok for a comment about performing oral on a woman and refused to cash in, Mrs. Fish would kick me out of the house on principle.
We’re millennials and we, like Alexander Hamilton, aren’t throwing away our shots, so I would very eagerly ride that train to give us a financial leg up before the world is once again sodomized by the fifth or sixth “once in a lifetime crisis” created or exacerbated by the billionaire gluttons milking Earth dry even if it kills them — and billions of us, of course — in the end. Gen Z very much shares the same bleak outlook, which is a very important tidbit to keep in mind for where this post is headed.
And yet, all that said, it felt as if this viral craze was being shoved down my eyeballs on every possible occasion because that’s just how the web works now. After hitting millions of views and getting enough engagement, the algorithm of every social app decided that anyone in the blast radius of the video’s tags would be very interested in seeing it. Creators who are always desperate for attention and relevancy had to jump on the viral train and reference the video somehow. For fuck’s sake, political outlets felt they had to get in on all the action.
to hawk, perchance to tuah, ideally at a profit
It’s like the perfect distillation of what late stage capitalism has done to the web. You can’t just have a fun viral clip for the sake of having a fun viral clip. There are empires to build, merch to hawk to instant fans, subscription services to start, and memes to make as everyone in the vicinity tries to jump on the hash tag one way or another — as I’m doing right now, quite aware of the irony.
An instant, monetized cultural phenomenon from a 14 second clip with which social algorithms carpet bombed onto our timelines is about as close as we get to having a monoculture these days, and we’ve already wore out the joke to the point where it’s just a transparent ploy for engagement and subscriptions.
We’ve gotten really good at doing all that because turning every single even remotely popular thing into a franchise takes all the fun and joy out of it, but under the current rules of the world in which we live, anything that can be monetized has to be. And this is the crux of the problem faced by every creator who isn’t a household name. There is an implicit pressure to turn every hobby into a business, especially if you have any talent. In fact, “if you’re good at something, never do it for free” quickly ended up as one of the foundational mantras of toxic hustle culture.
Of course, this is not to say that we should all just have hobbies and not worry about getting paid because many of us either can’t afford to do it, or have financial trauma left from the Great Recession or COVID that makes us feel anxious if we don’t try to monetize every activity in our spare time. With so many jobs treating all of us like shit — and not the fancy fertilizer shit used to grow something, mind you — but the runoff, doing round after round of layoffs while shamelessly advertising that they’re hiring for the same positions, trusting that we’ll have a steady, stable career feels naive at best, and dangerous at worst.
But then, we encounter the problem that the algorithms that now determine the vast majority of what we see and hear on the web today don’t care about anything other than engagement. Unless a lot of people hit like, repost, or comment, all that content will be dead in the water in a matter of minutes. Your only viable strategy is to keep churning out content on a regular, frequent basis to hopefully be in place when that next viral engagement moment happens and you’re now hawk tuah-ing your way to a six figure deal.
Suddenly the hobby feels like an unpaid, yet thankless job, and that talent feels like a rotting albatross around your neck because there is absolutely no guarantee this will happen to you too if you try hard enough. Studies trying to predict virality found that these moments are truly random without a massive boost from marketing companies or partner brands.
when you play a game you’re not meant to win
Social media today is like a talent show where anyone can participate, but there are no designated performance slots, everyone is on stage at the same time, and the winners are determined not by judges, not by your talent, but by how many random people filling through the giant stage react to your act quickly enough. Unlike in the past, who you are doesn’t matter. Everyone gets a shot at fame. Which also means that you are competing against everyone and if you have a genuine talent, it usually doesn’t matter very much.
Meanwhile, media outlets, eager not to miss out first share the viral content, then run stories about the creator cashing in a few days later, then ask why this creator is still around and when will their 15 minutes of fame be up a week later. It’s the predictable, exhausting cycle we go through, and I can understand all the creators slamming their heads into a wall, desperately trying to create a business so they can have just a tiny bit of financial independence instead of being treated like garbage at their day jobs, now looking at the hawk tuah thing with frustration and rage.
Why bother when your success is determined by random chance? What’s the point? What’s the way out? The world is coming apart at the seams as politicians try to use 18th century laws to implement 19th century solutions to 21st century problems, and your best chance at financial stability so you don’t have to spend most of your life in a rat race to further enrich the already obscenely wealthy while struggling to pay your bills, is what an algorithm decided to blast across social media that day? What sort of stupid dystopia is this anyway?
At the same time, I also see the technical problem. Because everyone can now try to become a professional content creator, there are tens of billions of pieces of content, far more than any person can ever consume in their lifetime. If we made anyone dig through them manually, with no help or guidance, they would be very lost and upset at best. We also don’t want to train these algorithms to be gatekeepers, defining the new monoculture because that’s fraught with technical and philosophical issues we are simply not equipped to solve.
So, in the end, nobody is really happy but they don’t actually have to be because we found a way to monetize any form of attention and that’s all the companies that run the web as we know it today ever wanted. Like comedian Bo Burhnam astutely noted years ago, our attention, poth positive and negative, was the only thing left for major tech companies to monetize, and the way they did it meant that we are creating the best way to do that ourselves.
The real question in the end of all this is why do we keep doing it? Why do we poke, prod, try, and hope when our path to success and reward is in no way commensurate with our efforts? And how can we finally bring the relationship between work, talent, and reward back to something actually resembling some degree of fairness?