Against Bullshit

Hello from Seattle

I’ve been in Seattle the past week and every morning I wake up and think hmm I should write a newsletter and then the gorgeous weather, or the World Cup, or my family, or just about anything else carries me willingly away. Sorry/not sorry. It’s summer and I am touching grass!

I am enervated of late by the endless grind of online content, both its production and consumption. I hate the way it sucks my attention in spits and drops, redirecting what creative juice I can muster away from longer term projects, like the book I’m poking away at writing, even as by the time I get it together to dip a toe into the river of discourse the current has of course swept away whatever twig or leaf had grabbed my attention. I am feeling as my friend Zoe Zolbrod wrote recently, that “a sense of being surveilled and manipulated infects my daily consciousness, puts me in a constant mode of misgiving.”

The quote is from a piece Zoe wrote about Hagfish, the small independent press and editorial consultancy founded by former Chicagoan Naomi Huffman and her partner Julia Ringo. You can read more about Hagfish and its most recent release at Zoe’s newsletter, but I was moved to put my money down as a supporting member of the press by the following appreciation:

How stone cold COOL. How no-bullshit to make visible the financial reality that in the current literary economy you can make money more reliably by selling services to writers than books to readers. How counter to the culture to elevate overlooked existing brilliance rather than scramble for the next hot thing. How fucking sexy to disdain social media and act in keeping with that disdain, rather than follow the imperative to swallow it down. When I read earlier this month that Phoebe Bridgers had launched an analogue tour announced only via physical flyers and was requiring attendees to seal their phones upon entrance, my whole body tingled with thrill. That’s the way! But of course, Phoebe Bridgers is already famous. It’s a cool gesture, but there’s no real risk. To be a new, small media company and forgo posting and interacting on social media . . . my hat is off to Hagfish.

Who can afford to eschew social media? It’s the question of our day. And, today I wonder, might it be me, a small not-very-well-known writer, under some sort of dress-for-the-job-you-want logic? Might I be able to free myself from the bullshit machine and still thrive?

Of the many reasons I’m out west, the most tangible was the annual meeting of the Association of University Presses, where I spent two days talking to other academic publishing professionals about fun stuff like AI, digital publishing, marketing budgets, AI, publishing multilingually, the value proposition of scholarly presses, AI, cover design trends, and did I mention AI?

Monday’s plenary speaker was Kate Starbird, a University of Washington professor in the department of Human Centered Design and Engineering who spent twelve years, from 2012 to 2024 researching how bullshit gains traction online. She started out innocently enough, looking into the spread of rumors, and the pro-social ways in which communities come together online after a mass shooting or a hurricane, but very quickly — around 2016, surprise — realized she could not ignore the darker webs that push propaganda and disinformation in the service of malign social, financial, or political ends.

Her research is fascinating, data driven and bleak — even though it stops in 2024, just before the explosion of agentiv AI. You can learn more at the UW’s Center for an Informed Public, cofounded by Starbird and her colleagues, which is dedicated to leveraging that research in service of shoring up the foundations of democratic society. The machinery of bullshit creation is now embedded in our political structure, she notes, and we are living in a period of “epistemic disruption” of our relationship not just to text but to image, video, and audio. It is imperative to figure out how to fight back against the manipulation of our reality, and against coordinated attacks on our shared rationality, decency, and empathy. If we don’t anchor ourselves in our values, she exhorts, we WILL get swept away — as the systems of artificial intelligence and online discourse are designed to privilege the bullshit.

How do you do this? Just telling someone spouting bullshit they are wrong doesn’t work, as anyone who has ever waded into a comments section knows. But so much bullshit gets spread by a toxic collaboration between intentional bad actors and unwitting agents — people who are seeking the affirmation of the group or the confirmation of their own biases and experience. Starbird maintains that the latter can be turned by creating new frames of understanding, using the 2020 spread of claims of election fraud in Arizona, aka “Sharpiegate,” as a case study.

I fear I don’t have the chops to dig into her findings further — just trying to decrypt my notes is pushing it. But despite the grim collection of facts she marshalled into her PowerPoint, I was not utterly disheartened by her talk. Perhaps this is a case of my own susceptibility to confirmation bias, but I was reminded that as an editor of nonfiction I am in the business of truth. Academic presses, with their systems of peer review and accountability, are committed to the deep work of documenting history and culture. As mission-driven publishers we are all about aggressively pushing a system that privileges research over bullshit, and evidence over vibes. My work is often quite solitary, and it’s easy to forget I’m part of a larger community that still believes this work has value that can’t easily be commodified. We aren’t in it for the money, that’s for sure.

I’ve been in my current position almost five years and I’m finally seeing some of the developmental work I do bear fruit. Books I have acquired and edited are coming into the world, reaching people, spreading knowledge, garnering accolades. I don’t talk that much about my day job on here, but it’s exciting to be in a position to help other writers bring their truth to the world. I may not be in a place where I can afford to divest completely from social media, like a celebrity without a cellphone, but I’m proud to be a cog in this alternative, anti-bullshit machine.

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Diane and Melissa, keeping me from crashing to the floor! Photo by Paul Dickinson

Something else that came up in Starbird’s talk? The importance of engaging in activities that affirm our shared humanity. Which for me, duh, means dance. Earlier this month I performed for the third year running with Visceral Encore, an ensemble of dancers aged 35 to 80. Thank you to the friends who came out to bear witness to our months of practice! Your mileage may vary, but there is nothing like moving in unison with a bunch of other people to remind me that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts — a truth that plays out every day in dance class and in the public sphere. Just witness the hundreds of people outside the Obama Presidential Center doing the Electric Slide to Stevie Wonder yesterday.

Finally, you know who else devoted her career to fighting the bullshit machine? Our girl Sinéad. This time last year I was gearing up to go to Ireland for the launch of Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O’Connor Means to Us. Now here it is 2026 and the paperback edition drops in just two months. This book continues to connect with readers in so many surprising ways and I think it’s only beginning to find its legs. Publicizing a paperback is even more impossible than publicizing the hardback original, but just remember: every time you request it from your bookstore, recommend it to a friend, or leave a review online, you’re striking a blow for uncompromising women the world over. Preorder your copy today! And why not subscribe to Hagfish while you’re at it?