Against Lit Bros and Substack Elitism

The Courage to Stand Alone

Photo by Papaioannou Kostas on Unsplash

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Social cliques and Cool-Kid groups—In-Groups, It Kids, whatever you want to call them—have always been around, probably existing from the dawn of agricultural civilization in the Middle East 10,000 years ago and, actually, most likely long before that, say 300,000 years ago when anatomically similar bipedal hominids with more or less our current brains were roaming around in small nomadic tribes.

These groups are natural because human beings, like almost all animals, are communal creatures: We tend to band together for certain causes, needs, necessities, etc. Generally speaking, this is a necessary and good thing. Think about world war, for example, if no one felt the need to band together for the greater cause of democracy, freedom, anti-Naziism, anti-communism, whatever it may be. Society would essentially implode, in the same way that it would implode if everyone wanted to be an “artist” therefore doing away with the cornerstones of any society: Construction workers, plumbers, electricians, architects, doctors, lawyers, politicians, etc.

However, I myself—one of those weird, quirky “artists”—have always hated with a passion this dynamic in my own personal and career life. Much of this dislike stems from genes: My parents have always been very independent, rarely participating in groups of any kind, almost always more interested in solo or one-on-one meetings and endeavors. And I very much carry those genes.

As an individualist in the purest sense, what has always worried me the most about groups and cliques is that it tends to almost always alter independent and critical thinking, and it necessarily creates a sort of hierarchy where some are accepted and some are rejected, either consciously or unconsciously. The acceptance or rejection has much less (if anything) to do with the quality of someone’s art/work/writing, and much more to do with whether the amorphous vibe of the group “likes” or “dislikes” as a whole any one person or individual.

In other words, most of the time groups—and the bigger the group the worse this phenomenon becomes—delegitimize individual freedom of choice and agency and replace that with groupthink. There are always unspoken, understood “rules” of who is cool, who is not and how these are segregated and separated.

Coolness as a concept has always bored me and for several reasons. For one, coolness is by definition a form of acting, social performance, virtue-signaling within the group. The group broadly agrees to certain basic guidelines which might be related to fashion or a type of writing or certain topics or about drinking or drugs or about literary style or about politics or really almost anything. Beyond this, though, coolness has always fascinated me because underneath it is deep insecurity. There’s a kind of what I’ll call social or psychological fascism involved in being “cool” and part of a group. It reeks not only of conformity but also of steely soft power.

Being cool means you’re playing a role, speaking and behaving in certain prescribed ways in order to satisfy the eternally hungry needs of the group. You can’t criticize anyone within the group, obviously, because that would be antithetical to the whole premise. Every writer in the group is the next Denis Johnson, Raymond Carver, Gabrielle Tallent, etc. Ergo: Coolness also requires lying. The art suffers at the expense of belonging to one idea/concept/voice/scene.

I remember struggling with this idea of social cliques from more or less as far back as I can remember. It is, of course, a universal human phenomenon and it occurs in every segment of society, from workplace to relationships to school to politics, to art, you name it. Even in first or second grade I recall who the “cool kids” were, ad I understood sharply that I was not one of them and never would be. This carried through into elementary school, high school and beyond. Even as adults there are certain aspects of this tribal realism which are never changing. Human beings are after all tribal in nature. Look at our fragmented politics.

Naively—and I don’t really know why—I magically expected Substack to somehow be different, to somehow manage to transcend human tribalism and be free of Cool Kids, Lit Bros, Scene Kids, Cliques, etc.

This was, of course, a grave miscalculation.

There is tribalism on Substack, obviously, as there is on every online platform, social media or other. The internet broadly has a kinetic effect in this way and makes it much, much easier to band together into groups.

Enter the Lit Bros.

Many young-ish men on the platform—say between 25 and 45—have begun doing generally cool things on Substack, like starting new literary magazines, going full-bore DIY, trying desperately to finally rip literature back from the old dying angry hands of Big Publishing and placing it back into the hands of The People, much like Walt Whitman, Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski were doing in their various eras. Inevitably when doing this people (mostly men but not exclusively) have, of course, organically formed loose groups.

However, over time—Substack has been around since about 2018—these loose groups have, like a dying star morphing into a black hole, started to condense and collapse in on itself. In other words: These groups have often become smaller, more rigid, more insular, and more exclusive. Again, I don’t think any of these groups are having behind-the-scenes conversations about who is cool and who is not, who gets in and who doesn’t. That would be satirical, hyperbolic and paranoid. (And also very not cool. Coolness doesn’t want to be talked about directly.) What I do think, though, is that these groups have simply begun to coalesce over time and to condense into their core form.

For the past maybe two years—I’ve been on Substack since August, 2022—I’ve been generally courting some of these groups. I felt that I wanted, even needed, to be a part of these small literary circles. I read and reviewed some of their novels. I messaged them privately. I sometimes sent my novels to them. A few reviewed my books to mixed results. Most of these guys were in their late twenties, early thirties, some in their early forties like me.

But I noticed slowly, over time, that these guys in various groups were pumping up each other’s work incessantly, quoting one another’s prose and reviewing each other’s books as if they were all geniuses and The Next Big Thing. And yet, my novel never came up. They never tagged me. They never restacked my posts. They never reached out to me privately. Some followed me and a few were free subscribers, but that was about it.

When I read some of their novels, and when I read some of their posts, I had mixed feelings. Some of the writing was good, but some of it was not very good. Sometimes a book was decent—not great and not terrible—but the praise coming from others in the group was way out of proportion to the actual quality of the work. At last I realized the obvious: Oh, these people don’t really care about serious literature or about writing or about lit criticism or genuinely ripping literature back from the hands of Big Publishing: It’s all just yet another big, common Circle-Jerk.

These groups weren’t involved in honesty and sincerity, they were, like almost all social cliques, labelling who was cool and who was lame. It was seventh grade all over again. I suddenly felt deeply embarrassed for having tried to relentlessly join these Lit Bro groups. I realized how serious and sincere I am, especially about writing, and the understanding came to me that I don’t have any interest in being a part of those social clubs, these Inner Chambers of Coolness. I am too much of a free-thinker and individual, too interested in actual Art, too obsessed with writing and craft to care that much about trading integrity for the act of joining some tribal affair. To me that feels mediocre at best, devious and dishonest at worst.

In the end what I decided to do was to simply cut my losses and move on. I found about eight folks who I’m often seeing on Substack and who are sort of the pivotal movers and shakers in a couple of these groups and I just muted them. Easy, right? I just don’t see their content anymore. It’s not because I disagree with their views or because I want to live in some sort of “safe bubble” away from conflict: It’s really just because every time they post I feel irritated and resentful. And that’s not healthy for me.

*(And yes, this is also about “me,” not just them in many ways. I own that. Also, I don’t think they or anyone else “owes” me anything, including praise, good book reviews, re-stacks or anything else. I do wish these groups were more open, inviting and welcoming and less insular. But again: We’re dealing here with human nature.)

Which brings me to my final point here. Clearly, it is absurd to place all the blame onto these Lit Stacks. Part of the issue is me myself. I am deeply affected, highly sensitive to certain things, and being excluded, especially when it comes to writing, my lifelong passion, is a major pillar here. It’s true: Were I a less sensitive and more self-confident man this whole phenomenon would probably bother me much less, perhaps even not at all. I carry a lot of insecurities in my psychology, as many humans do, and particularly many artists and writers do, and that stuff goes way back to my complex childhood, genes, my innate personality, my drives, ambitions and goals, and much more. I admit it openly. So in these ways my reaction to the Lit Stacks is, at least to a decent degree, my own fault.

There have, to be fair, always been writing cliques: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Ford Maddox Ford, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein in Paris in the 1920s; Hunter S. Thompson and the other New Journalists of the 1960s, such as Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, etc; the Beat writers in the 1950s like Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and Burroughs; etc. But then there have always been highly individual writers like Orwell, Henry Miller, Bukowski, Franzen, DFW, Ottessa Moshfegh, Zadie Smith, people who are loosely part of broad groups but are in essence their own people.

I have always been one of the latter, and I always will be. I have been part of writing groups and workshops in the past, and I’ve tried briefly joining writing or book clubs, and I always hate them. I’d rather get my editing guidance from a couple honest, objective writer friends who can beta read, or from a paid and trusted editor than from a writing group with 15 different views. I want to stand on my own two literary feet, and, in my opinion, you simply cannot do that in a group. Because the psychology of the group closes in on its members as time goes by, and anyone who deviates from this course is outed and becomes not cool. It’s just the nature of groups and how they work, at least in the human form.

I aim on Substack and with my writing to be as honest as I can be, to tell the truth to the very best of my ability. I don’t want to feel compelled or socially bullied into thinking a certain way or claiming that any novel is the next The Sun Also Rises when it clearly isn’t, and by a longshot.

For me, what I seek is deeper than the shallowness of groups. What I seek is artistic, spiritual, cosmic. I seek literary communication. I seek connection and perhaps broad, very loose community. I seek my own path. I seek truth, dignity and honesty according to my own conceptions of these words. I reject political labels and groupthink.

What I want, what I really, truly fucking want, is to own my own life, work and art. I mean that literally but also symbolically, metaphysically.

May the Lit Stacks live and carry on. But thankfully without me.