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There’s a lot to dislike about the current state of social media, but Harron Walker’s singular voice has always made one good case for staying online. Now, Walker is reexamining her career as a digital media writer (and so much more) in Aggregated Discontent: Confessions of the Last Normal Woman (Penguin Random House), an essay collection that covers everything from the freelance hustle to the state of trans healthcare in the US with a dryly confessional, comedic voice guaranteed to make you burst out laughing at your desk.
Vogue recently spoke to Walker about letting Tom Wolfe guide her expectations of present-day digital media, her favorite blog she’s ever written, the ghostly specter of the girlboss, and attempting to resist universalizing in her writing. Read the interview here.
Vogue: Do you have a favorite media book or memoir?
Harron Walker: There’s this anthology of New Journalism from the late ’60s to the ’70s or so that Tom Wolfe edited, and it has work by Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion and a bunch of other people. The introduction is my favorite; it’s three stitched-together pieces of writing by Tom Wolfe that he wrote and sort of reworked into one long, 75-page essay that I always return to because it’s helped clarify so much about present-day media, and how all these things that I thought were contemporary are actually deeply rooted within history.
He describes this thing where every good reporter in media spends a year proving himself, and his reward for being the best reporter at the paper is to get promoted. He leaves the paper, he goes out of the building, he reports all the news, he gets all the scoops, he talks to everyone, and his reward for all that is to get promoted to being a columnist, and then he never leaves the office again. He spends his first year as a columnist geting all his thoughts out and writing all these brilliant pieces and op-eds and columns, and after a year of that, he has nothing left, so he’ll write about things he read in other newspapers or things he saw on TV. So many columnists who I find horrible are just like, “Here’s something I saw a 19-year-old say on Twitter, and their neopronouns made me confused and angry.” Like, why are you here? You two should never be in the same room, and one of you needs to leave. The essay just clarifies that this thing has always been an issue, it’s just a matter of changing technology.
What’s your favorite story you’ve ever written, and why?
I worked at Jezebel in two different stints, and the first time, in 2018, almost all of us were women. [At the time,] Deadspin had a majority-male staff with a few women on staff, and I guess in order to dispel this idea that these two websites were filled with people who have nothing in common—you know, “men’s site,” “women’s site,” whatever, we’re doing all the same stupid and smart shit— there would be this crossover week where we would work together on stuff. For mine, I don’t know why they allowed this, but I pitched something where I basically just was like, “I’m going throw a football to every man on the Deadspin staff, and if they catch it, they’re my dad now.”
To me, that is just emblematic of the last period in digital media when you could do dumb shit and people would like it or read it or engage with it or hate it, but with the…gigification, I guess you could call it, of media, where increasingly, everyone’s either a freelancer or is going to be a freelancer again shortly following a layoff, or their website shutting down, or whatever, I don’t think you can really pitch stuff like that. You can have something that fits a more conventional form, like a funny essay or a personal essay or a critical essay or a review or an interview or a profile, but it has to be digestible and legible to an editor. I miss that period 10 years ago, when we got to do so much stupid shit.
We’ve both done a lot of aggregated blogging. How do you think that experience has changed your relationship to news consumption?
That’s interesting. I think, at least for the period when social media actually functioned as news dissemination rather than the purposeful scrambling of information and spreading of misinformation, which is more the status quo right now, I definitely started to get a lot more of my information straight from social media—at least when it came to celebrity news and entertainment news. I was like, as someone who makes the blogs that are being promoted through these tweets, I know that basically all the essential information is here, and I don’t need to read 10 different websites saying the same thing in the same aggregated blog voice when we’re all ultimately sourcing from AP News and then putting our own individual, “voicey” spins on it that all start to sound like we’re singing in unison or something. It definitely made me yearn for whoever’s making decisions at every publication to make different choices for their online presence. I’m sure a lot of these decisions have to do with, like, What is the metric that the sales team is selling to advertisers? But I yearn for a time that is probably, like most forms of nostalgia, more made-up, where every single publication isn’t just competing to ultimately produce the same thing. It’s a very 21st-century problem: You’re flooded with more and more options than ever, but these options are actually making what we can experience more uniform.
What do you wish more people understood about the experience of writing online professionally, as a trans woman, in our current digital-media hellscape?
This is not, like, exclusive to trans women, but it’s maybe exclusive to women, especially if you’re a trans woman or a fat woman or a Black woman or a woman of color or a woman who is in any way speaking her mind or even existing and enjoying things. It’s like you have this PO box that you have to check for your job, essentially, where basically anyone can say anything they want to and you can put up as many filters as you want, but inevitably you might see something someone had to say about you or have to deal with online harassment. I guess the more in-group thing is that it’s definitely been a challenge for myself to consciously and intentionally write about trans stuff—and profiles of individual trans women in particular, which I’ve been doing a lot lately—while making sure that I’m writing from an “I” and not a “we” all the time. Unless I feel reasonably certain that I’m not overstepping by using a “we” statement, I try to avoid universalizing, because maybe it’s the narcissism of small differences, but sometimes you read something by someone who shares some aspect of your identity and is writing about that experience and one thing isn’t relatable or doesn’t map onto your experience, and the writer is suddenly beholden to everyone in the world who’s like, “That’s not what my life is like.” It’s like, I know. I wrote about my life. I don’t know if straight, white guys are out here in each other’s comments in that way.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
