Other letters
This newsletter will begin some meta-newsletter commentary drawing from another newsletter. It almost reminds me of the golden days of bloggy blogging about blogs. Sociologist David Beer, in a recent edition of his occasional newsletter, takes a look at the recent rise of newsletters and explains it as writers' reaction against algorithmic feeds. "Newsletters carry the appeal of bypassing algorithmic invisibility," Beer writes. "As people come to experience algorithmic filtering they are likely to feel they are more often on the losing side."
That seems true enough for writers. The newsletter promises a less obscure relation to an audience: If they subscribe, they will receive it, which is not something that having a "following" on social media platforms necessarily guarantees. But it seems less certain for readers, whose behavior has confirmed platforms' contention that users prefer algorithmic sorting over other, more passive-seeming sorts (like a chronological ordering of everything you claim to have wanted). People's constant moaning about email is also an expression of this; they seem to hate email because it can't be filtered as aggressively as other kinds of feeds. Newsletters, of course, come to your email and make a specific claim on your attention, requesting that you live up to the promise implicit in your subscribing, that you would make time for it and read it. But perhaps there is also a special gratification in deleting a newsletter without opening it: I feel like a master of time management when I delete a few newsletter emails without opening them — it's like closing a tab without any anxiety over why I opened it in the first place.
Beer suggests that subscribing to newsletters is an attempt at "unmediation" — removing the algorithmic mediation that imposes itself on other platforms and attempts to determine what you "really want." It is the "pursuit of the personal without personalization." It allows subscribers to reassert their own judgment and consume that reassertion every time a newsletter arrives, whether they read it or not. That suggests how the mode of circulation still affects our disposition toward the content, making "unmediation" another kind of "remediation." Algorithmic feeds set up the fantasy of escaping them, but then that escape becomes the primary meaning of whatever we've escaped to.