Niche literary podcasts and the spatially-distributed Parisian salon
Digital exit and geo-arbitrage for novelists
When I first began writing in 2011, I didn’t have any literary friends who had any interest in writing fiction. Simultaneously, it didn’t really occur to me to seek any of them out because I was laser-focused on manuscript development and in cultivating my own skill as a writer.1
Although I enjoyed writing a great deal—for me, it’s always been a meditative, flow-state activity—the idea of a literary community never even occurred to me until a couple of years ago.
In retrospect, I think this was mostly because there was a vacuum for writers of the type I wanted to be: I was mostly interested in androgenic fiction, and around the time of the early-to-mid 2010’s, it felt like these types of writers simply ceased to exist in the literary establishment. Thus, the possibility of literary fraternity probably never even occurred to me.
Relatedly, I’ve written extensively about my own, more abstract variation of the existing debate around the “Longhouse” thesis of cultural homogenization which has extended into elite literary culture as well.2
In my version of this thesis, it’s less a phenomenon driven by feminization of culture outright than by deeper structural forces related to psychodemographic tipping points in general.
To summarize: once you have a marginally dominant majority group within a cultural institution like a publishing house, there’s a “tipping point” beyond which they tend to increasingly crowd out competing aesthetic viewpoints, particularly if their aesthetic and moral vision is the prevailing one (I would argue this is a feature of social groups in general, not just AWFL’s). When you combine this “tipping point” dynamic with contemporary secular purity culture which fixates on the idea of moral contamination via affiliative social networks, the end-product is a sort of bland homogenization.
As a result of the situation, I had little motivation to attempt to engage with a literary community that would almost assuredly be deeply hostile to my work as a novelist. I shudder to think about the disaster that would’ve unfolded had I followed through with my original desire to pursue an MFA while working on INCEL.
It would’ve been positively literary.
One of two things would’ve happened:
I would’ve been immediately pressured into abdicating my own personal creative project and androgenic fiction more broadly, and I would’ve left the program out of protest.3
The same thing would’ve happened, but I would’ve capitulated, mutilating my own work in order to squeeze into the purity coffin of acceptability, becoming just another bland Asian-American writer with nothing to say other than recycled platitudes espousing the superior moral rectitude of the West and its Liberalism.4
Working alone and in a state of near-total disengagement from literary culture writ large, I intermittently abandoned my novel a year at a time, working on other, more palatable projects before circling back to reattempt its completion on several occasions. Only a couple of chance conversations and encouragement from close friends led me to follow through to completion—it could very easily have died on the vine.
With the benefit of greater hindsight, I now understand the importance of community as a form of encouragement. Whether or not you are successful in achieving your personal goals as a writer, sustaining motivation over the (typically) multi-year period it takes to complete a serious literary work is difficult even when you are intrinsically motivated. For me, it doesn’t typically feel like a slog, but sometimes it is.
Encouragement is therefore one of the key currencies of human motivation, and vital for inculcating the growth of an artistic sphere. Thus, to my great benefit, around ~2020 or so I started to pick up on an energetic simulacrum of this.
Enter the niche literary podcast
I returned to the INCEL manuscript in January of 2020 and began the process of re-drafting. I’m a slow, obsessive writer, and this process took another couple of years. It was always a battle to find the time and energy to work on it while waging (this remains the case for all of my writing).
Around this time,
started to gain more and more traction with his self-published modern horny-Raymond-Carver stories and I noticed that he began popping on more and more podcasts. Roughly simultaneously, & Matt Pegas’ New Write podcast took off. Exposure to these voices helped to propel me to the finish line for my own personal project.In my view, the most interesting thing about the podcast format is how closely it approximates an actual conversation with someone you know directly. This is likely a function of technology: wireless earbuds approximate the act of being present to a physical conversation IRL, and even now I still listen to hours of podcasts a day during dead-time (while working out, walking, eating, and so on: at this point, it’s probably too much). I tend to find podcasts more engaging than audiobooks since they activate a parasocial closeness that very closely simulates the feeling of connectivity.
Thus, even before I published my novel and set up my own literary platform on Substack and Twitter, I already felt as if I was a participant in a literary community.
Later on,
and would add to the Dissident Right/DR-adjacent literary sphere.The main reason I find myself interested in podcasts like this is the absence of self-censorship. There’s a joke about men who are interested in reading as invariably being “hoe-scaring political extremists” but that’s less salient to me than the usefulness of Aesthetic Overton Window expansion more broadly. In this regard, I self-identify as a true American: freedom isn’t an abstraction to me; it’s something I seek to cultivate in the strongest way I can down even to the spiritual level.
To summarize my orientation, I’d say that I’m not super interested in the object-level debate of politics in various niche online circles, but I am interested in the artistic possibilities that emerge out of the chaotic landscape that they create by virtue of their own existence. This is why I try to avoid writing about xyz contemporary political issue unless I feel it’s super-pertinent to literary fiction.
The point of the (platonic) Parisian literary salon wasn’t that you’d meet people and you’d all perfectly cohere on fundamental values or political viewpoints: the point of this was spontaneous, recombinant conversations and intellectual conflict. This requires mixing with others on both trivial and fundamental axes of discordant values.
That doesn’t mean that one can’t draw the line somewhere—for example, I’m not going to interact with someone who’s advocated the pre-emptive nuclear genocide of my race5—but so long as someone isn’t openly and actively derogating me as sub-human, I’m generally open to engagement. Anything less than that would amount self-debasement, and sadly there is no shortage of that when it comes to Asian-American artists operating under the aegis of the Global American Empire. I do my best to avoid this.
Broadly speaking, I’d group these alternative literary podcasts into two categories:
Dissident right or DR-adjacent literary circles.
“New wave” literary circles.
(some are perhaps in between)
I think both are interesting, with the latter category being something I’ve only recently been introduced to. I greatly enjoyed my appearance on
and , which only deepened my sense of connection to this idea of the spatially distributed literary salon.6 I’m also a huge fan of the guys, who produce incredible “core episodes” around dead literary figures, connecting their novels into a meta-narrative centered on the life story of each invidual artist.You could also argue that Substack itself (not just these podcast networks) is increasingly the platform-equivalent of the liteary salon for this emergent wave of new fiction writers, and I very much hope that this remains the case (even in spite of the state-mediated risks around centralization).
Convergent techno-authoritarianism and exit for literary artists
The number one thing that protects alternative literary artists from cancellation and state repression is that our work is so marginal that formal and informal systems can’t be bothered to bring the heel down on our throats. You see this whenever one of the crabs makes it out of the bucket and some prestige MSM hit-piece instantly appears around them. NYT even went after Scott Alexander, an extremely earnest and palatable guy.
I don’t think of myself as a dissident political figure in any respect but I do think that I’m a dissident aesthetic figure in at least some sense, and in the era of the increasingly totalizing Western state, my expectation is that the digital panopticon will eventually come for all of us.
My sense is that defining trajectory of Western polities is that we are on the path of convergent techno-authoritarianism. I feel that every outsider artist ought to be at least broadly aware of this.
For a great articulation of this thesis as it pertains to speech rights in particular, read
excellent “There is No Liberal West,” a short piece which I think every writer and novelist should examine closely. Not everyone is going to have the resources and the backing of a Houellebecq if and when an automated state-backed AI legal agent has decided that your niche short-story is “promoting hatred or disinformation” or whatever euphemism is currently being deployed to justify your repression. At this point writers in the UK are even being de-banked.The core evolution that I foresee is that AI is going to decrease the price of censorship and state-backed ideological (and aesthetic) repression. This has very serious implications for artists because eventually, when intelligence is “too cheap to meter,” this means that censorship will also be “too cheap to meter.” Whatever the exact timeline is, effective AI agents seem to only be a couple of years out. Massive publishing platforms will inevitably deploy them.
In this scenario, being a niche literary podcast or a niche novelist in an increasingly techno-authoritarian algocracy is going to become increasingly untenable. Even if US state capacity is utterly wrecked they’ll just subcontract this out to Palantir or some other shitheads in silicon valley.
The underlying battle between centralization vs. decentralization is something that
talks about a lot on his podcast appearances, where he argues that the world is going to bifurcate along two poles: competent, un-obfuscated techno-authoritarianism (Singapore, PRC) vs. incompetent, obfuscated techno-authoritarianism (Britain, Canada, and eventually the US).Optimistically, he posits a third pole that will be crypto-backed/affiliated, and this is where my other idea of geo-arbitrage comes into play.
While it remains the case that there’s undeniably a special and unique literary energy that comes out of NYC and geographic concentrations specifically, I wonder if it might be possible to replicate these communities abroad, if and when the system really does “come for the artists” at some point down the line and others are forced to expatriate.
Expat communities have been formed in every era of history, and writing about something aesthetically controversial in one polity but from a physical location where it’s an utterly irrelevant topic (e.g. SEA) might become a viable pathway for the regeneration of artistic communities in the event of increased repression.
Note that this is equally true for the aesthetic American dissident and the aesthetic Chinese dissident. You can imagine a community of avant-garde English-language novelists writing in, say, Thailand or Malaysia or El Salvador or wherever, so long as they reach a critical mass of some kind.
In such a dire scenario where that level of geographic exit would be practically necessary, the Western distribution of these works would unfortunately already have been widely suppressed by monopoly platforms like AMAZORG, but that, ideally, is where crypto-publishing platforms like Canonic might well come in.
In any event, the choice to exit (or more accurately, the choice to never even enter) a mainstream literary institution has paid off for me personally. For some of you reading this, I hope that the path laid out by others is as equally rewarding for you as it has been for me.
I think we’re in for a hell of a ride.
For the purest distillation of this thesis, check out Justin Murphy’s “Writing is a single-player game.”
Scroll down to “Critiques of contemporary literary culture”
Just imagining the hypothetical reaction to my manuscript in an MFA writing group in the ~2016-2018 era has sometimes makes me laugh out loud.
More on this later. I’ve been working on a longer piece about the position of culturally elite diaspora writers in the age of the genocide in Gaza: “Blood for the Blood God; Cum for the Cum God.”
Ten points if you can guess who did this on Twitter recently.
For a list of my podcast appearances, click here. I’ve got another 1 recorded (yet to be released), and 1 lined up (yet to be recorded). Absolutely love doing these!
Yes, you are absolutely right that globohomo's objective is to unleash a woke AI to scan everyone's internet, phone, text histories and assign people a social credit score -- the WEF said this is happening by 2030 -- and if your social credit score is "bad" then you will be cut out of the financial system and your assets stolen from you. This is coming. Regardless, failure to resist is to acquiesce to the slaughterhouse being implemented for humanity.
Also, you wrote "I don’t think of myself as a dissident political figure in any respect but I do think that I’m a dissident aesthetic figure in at least some sense, and in the era of the increasingly totalizing Western state, my expectation is that the digital panopticon will eventually come for all of us." It was Charles Baudelaire who stated, "There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions." Even though you write prose, ARX, you are a poet. And it was Ernst Junger who wrote that any resistance to globohomo must begin with the poets.
I respect and understand your perspective: indeed, I’ve had these very thoughts.
That said, I am simply not afraid of this happening. I am only pseudonymous on Substack because I am a teacher in a public high school, and I want to discuss and debate politics and religion and controversial subjects openly on the internet in order to refine my views. I maintain political neutrality in my classroom, and I don’t want my students tracking down all of my writing and feeling like they can’t connect with me or trust me because they support Black Lives Matter or Kamala Harris and I roughly support rightist causes. Remaining anonymous helps me feel responsible as I spend time reading and discussing controversial books online.
I am not hiding from the thought police. They can come and get me anytime; I’d be proud to be a martyr in this war, and I think more of us should feel emboldened in this same way. There are truly millions of people who hold controversial beliefs. They should be—and obviously are—scared of us. Stop worrying.