Writer's Diary
3/26/26
Instagram feels like, even from a distance, a bunch of lasers aimed at a bunch of mirrors, and the lasers are going hotter and hotter, but people are so addicted to it that they would rather get burned, have their eyes lasered out, their hair lasered off, be laser-castrated and de-laser-castrated, than leave the laser mirror system. Because it’s so delicious, so wonderful in those moments where the lasers don’t hit you, but rather illuminate you or hit your enemies while illuminating you. How wonderful when that spiritual lottery ticket hits. How evil, frankly.
Different social media spheres increasingly seem totally self-contained. Information does not get in or get out. On Substack, I’m popular. On BlueSky, I’m a class enemy. On X, I’m still somewhat anonymous. On Instagram, my persona is refracted in a million different ways out of my control. In a way, it’s good that they’re balkanized. I couldn’t even tell you what’s on TikTok, by the way. But on the other hand, it’s distressing that there are so many mushrooming channels. One becomes hypervigilant, combing through intelligence like a CIA officer.
The pre-2012 world was vastly superior to our own because, despite its many relative flaws, you could still be a human being living on a human scale, dealing with technology but not serving it. Now we are batteries plugged in. Our emotional energy is being stolen by demons and so is our intelligence. I know some of my readers here are puzzled when I say that the point of writing on Substack for me is to turn the work into books, and I’m grateful that some people enjoy the experience of opening up the Writer’s Diary on an app.
And certainly I’m trying to do the best possible writing I can for this app, in the sense that I’m still trying to write in the old way. I was a thoughtful observer of fleeting impermanence, the philosophical bent. But, and there’s ample and new research to back this up, the brain maps a text differently off a computer screen or away from a Kindle screen. There’s a constant drain when the laptop is open or the phone or the iPad. We’re all doing the best we can. I think the best use case for Subject, by the way, is as a staging ground for the real world, as a kind of detox center for the reader and writer. Rehab before you’re sent back into libraries, bookstores, conversations, letters.
E. says that I’m too porous, that I let everybody in without asking enough questions, that I’m too vulnerable by extent to too many people who I’ve somehow, maybe out of some deep guilt, given power over my person and to some degree my work and my finances. Maybe that was the cost of my little strange rise through the New York literary and theater world. I had delivered this Barry Lydon-ish life from the moment I got off the bus at Port Authority with two bags in 2011 in order to get to eventually be publicly talented. Now I have the strongest urge to close doors, to close points of access, in a sense to disappear or change my name.
Publicly Talented is a great line