The Order(ing) of Things
Thoughts on listmaking—and a list of my own.
The appointment of Gilbert Cruz as “Canon editor” at the New York Times earlier this month, just a week after the majority acquisition of BuzzFeed by under-the-radar mogul Byron Allen, seems like an important moment in the history of the literary form known as “the listicle,” around which the Times and BuzzFeed have performed a morbid dance for more than a decade.
In 2014, the Times appointed a soul-searching committee that resulted in its famous “innovation report,” which NiemanLab correctly identified at the time as “one of the key documents of this media age.” The report has two main antagonists.
The first is Jonah Peretti, who co-founded the Huffington Post and later BuzzFeed, from which he is now stepping down as CEO. Peretti is an interesting figure. He developed a theory of virality intended to demonstrate capitalism’s ability to absorb critique, which was the sort of post-Situationist problem we all thought about before 2008. But, unlike a lot of his contemporaries, Peretti got to test his theories not once, but twice. They turned out to be true but corrosive, despite Peretti’s best efforts. BuzzFeed tried to bootstrap its way from slop to civic virtue with BuzzFeed News, and—why not?—it had worked before. Simon & Schuster’s first book was a collection of crossword puzzles.
And in 2014 everyone thought it might work for BuzzFeed, including the Times. That was because of the work of the report’s other antagonist: Clay Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, who popularized the idea of disruptive innovation. As annoying and abused as the idea became—as is the fate of every idea from Fanon to Foucault in the permanent September1 of online culture—Christensen’s central insight is obviously true, as seen from the inside of almost any enterprise. There will always be opportunities that are not worthwhile for incumbents—not worth the squeeze—that are profitable at smaller scales, and these might eventually develop into serious challengers to incumbents. What is surprising is that this was surprising to Christensen’s audience of MBAs. The bombshell was that, as a manager, you could make all the right calls and still lose, because—get this—revealing conceals. Babbitt discovered Heidegger and he was shook.
The same year as the Times report, Jill Lepore wrote the New Yorker takedown reserved for wisdom that has become too conventional, but it was largely dedicated to gotchas where the fate of particular firms was concerned, which aligns with Christensen’s interests as a professor of business rather than economics. Business schools are to economics as self-help programs are to neuroscience. The former assume that all firms are good, should be happy, and might be immortal. From this “firmist” perspective, the Times won by heeding Christensen’s warning before it was too late. Right?
The Times poached BuzzFeed news head Ben Smith to replace David Carr, BuzzFeed got out of the news business to be become a meme factory for wicked generational burns, and the book review editor just got reassigned to … make viral lists? Oh, I see. Don’t follow the firms. Follow the ideas as they rip through the firms and, thereby, the culture.
There is nothing new or inherently malignant about lists, as the appearance of Marx’s numbered theses on Feuerbach on BuzzFeed’s platform in 2015 wryly hinted. The earliest writing systems were means for making lists, and the first HTML spec already offered two flavors: <ul> and <ol>. Listmaking and writing are intertwined.
But what are these lists we’re talking about? A list is just a form. A series of items, either ranked or unranked. It’s the ranking where things get weird, and not just because we might disagree with the order. A ranking of a list of things by a known quantity—inventory or sales—is pretty straightforward, if increasingly hard to come by.
No one believes, for example, that the New York Times Best Sellers List is a descending sort of books by a column marked “units.” The sort is almost certainly performed on a column representing the result of some secret equation. Amazon Bestseller Rank (BSR)—upon which Small Press Insights is built—is also built on unit sales in some proprietary way. Bookscan presents and allows you to rank by units, but is then only as good as its panel of retailers who report sales. That’s the state of the lists that, one might argue, have real incentives to purport to represent reality.
The classic BuzzFeed list, on the other hand, has no methodology and purports nothing. It is one person’s opinion, presented in the manner of one of the lists above. While I think everyone knows this, some residual seriousness surely arises from the format alone.
But the sort of list that the Times is now leaning into—let’s call them “Canon lists” using their terminology—are somewhere in between. They aren’t entirely new, of course. The expert poll method fuels lists—usually published by magazines or associations chasing “earned media”—from the greatest films to the worst presidents of all time. They now seem to be on the verge of becoming a primary form of cultural critique. And what are these lists ranked by?
As Jarett Kobek explains at Zona Motel, in the case of The Guardian’s recent tally of “The 100 Best Novels of All Time”:
Each appearance on an individual ballot is worth one point. Each relative position in a chancer’s list then adds a small bonus: 0.50 for a first-place vote, 0.45 for second, down to 0.05 for tenth. In formal terms: S(b)= ∑ᵢ [1 + (11−rᵢ)/20], where the sum ranges over every ballot on which book b appears, and rᵢ is the rank assigned to b on ballot i.
Compile all 1,720 votes, tally the results, and create an ordered list by decreasing S(b).
The list is, in other words, a complete abstraction. A ranking of a hundred books that no one person holds in their head, since it is derived from 172 people’s attempt to name only ten. So we have the BuzzFeed list, which is one person’s opinion, delivered with third-person authority, and the Canon list, which is many people’s opinions, again delivered in the third person.
But what makes both types of list work, from the point of view of their sponsors, is how they function as second-person address. “These are the books, you—dear reader—should be reading.” They are challenges meant to elicit a response.
In 2010, Peretti toured around on a remarkably cynical presentation about how to go viral, titled “Mormons, Mullets, and Maniacs.” “Mormons” refers to Peretti’s advice that you have to put time into spreading your content, while “mullets” refers to the ideal system of dynamic content promotion, where a lot of stuff is launched “in the back” but only the stuff that works makes it to “the front.” The “maniacs” are—well—us. The people who are triggered by lists. As Peretti’s deck says:
The web is ruled by maniacs like Perez Hilton, Ron Paul zealots, Apple fan boys, blog commenters, animal lovers, and other crazy people
Content is more viral if it helps people fully express their personality disorders
Couch potatoes don’t matter on the web, crazy people do
The Canon list—like the Church of England—is simply an attempt to justify expediency with a few flimsy principles.
Of course, all of this takes place against a crisis of culture or canon or criticism or whatever. How do we write about the things we love? First-person endorsements seem too thin—too much like mere “my truths.” And they are so easy to give they are readily compromised by promises of currency, both real and social. Third-person pronouncements from on high are elitist and therefore rejected. So we get these Frankenstein forms: The hot take promoted to expert opinion via the canny use of ordinals. The poll converted to Canon via formula.
Amid all this listmaking, I’d like to introduce my own list, which I am calling my Daemon List. It contains forty books, short stories, and essays—ordered chronologically—that I think about all the time. The list begins with Diderot and ends with Patricia Lockwood. Each entry has links to places where I have written about (or through) them. There are passages from each of them in my head and, if asked, I could explain why I think they are important to me and why I think they are good. You might think of them as my priors. My DNA as a writer and a reader. I’m not even saying you should like them, or that if you don’t you are mistaken. They are prerequisites not for being smart or cultured, but for being me, Jim Hanas. And, in turn, you can be assured that a view of these works is held by a single soul, like you yourself, rather than by no one.
As The Economist experiments with an AI-readable version of its website, the Daemon List is like that but for other readers and writers. I wish everyone had one, not of what they thought they should like, or want to be seen liking, but of the stuff they are actually made of.
Why Daemon List? Daemons in ancient Greece were personal guiding spirits. Socrates had one that told him when he was about to make a mistake. Today we might call it an inner voice. I chose “daemon” for this list because these are works that “speak to me.” There is an element of receptivity and a lack of power-driving or a need for proselytization. It is a first-person list that doesn’t pretend to be anything more, offered to you, the reader, in the second person.
“Maybe you’ll like these. I do.”
Can the Daemon List change? Of course. If anything, I think putting it out there will make it more likely to change, as it leads me to writers and readers who might contribute to it.
Elsewhere …
I had a wide-ranging conversation with Greg and Emily at Slant Books last week about the role of small presses in today’s book culture. (I mentioned Slant in a previous newsletter. They published Morgan Meis’s trilogy that the NYRB called “the most exciting new writing about the visual arts to appear in a generation.”) I enthused about a bunch of books that didn’t even make the Daemon List.
In the days before the consumer Internet, wizened Usenet habitués braced every September for a flood of newbies receiving access via their freshman VAX accounts. When AOL began mailing start-up CDs to every known address in the US, this kicked off what became known as a “permanent September,” which has never really ended. (As the inspection of almost any philosophy subreddit will easily confirm.)
Hanas unbound!
Just three weeks ago I was once again riffling through Et Tu, Babe, to consider using He's Got A Car Bomb as an audition piece, as I did a few times in the early 90s.