Is Everyone Clip Farming?
011: news + letter - on performative reading, intuitive copying and substack bots!
1.
Hi everyone! Happy Sunday!
Well, f*ck. Very eventful week.
Here’s what happened in literature this week:
You can read more about it in last week’s Certified post.
On the 23 May Sotheby's will offer at auction a set of all four of Shakespeare's Folios as a single lot, estimated at £3.5–4.5 million.
About 750 copies were printed in 1623, of which about 230 are known to survive.
2.
SHE’S CLIP FARMING!
I was so happy to see the performative reading discourse happening on Substack once again. It’s one of my favorite things to talk about.
It’s safe to say that many of your favorite celebrities have book clubs but don’t actually read the books they’re promoting, and also many of your favorite influencers are, indeed, carrying a copy of ‘The year of magical thinking’ around just to get photographed in it (which reminds me of that one Addison Rae picture, yes, the one with the Britney Spears book), but it’s NOT safe to say that everyone around you is being performative when reading a book at the subway. Not everyone is “Clip Farming”.
CLIP FARMING: (Internet slang, Twitch-speak, derogatory) To act, or to produce or exploit a situation, with the goal of gaining online attention, especially repeatedly and/or inauthentically.
Not everyone is trying to be pictured with their copy of ‘On the Road’ and trying to end up on Pinterest. We’re so chronically online that, sometimes, we forget that we actually don’t live inside our phones and not every single thing people do is meant to end up on the internet. Actually, most things we do on our daily basis are not internet material.
Seeing someone reading a book at the subway feels unusual because it is unusual, people don’t read books anymore. Don’t believe me? (You obviously do), here’s some stats:
A Gallup research showed us that Americans say they read an average of 12.6 books during the past year, a smaller number than the platform has measured in any prior survey dating back to 1990. U.S. adults are reading roughly two or three fewer books per year than they did between 2001 and 2016.1
Amanda, what’s the relation of these stats with clip farming?
Oh, they’re veeeery related.
We're so used to seeing people scrolling on their phones that someone reading a physical book (?????) in public (!!!!!!) almost feels like a big, flashy statement, even if the person in front of you is just… reading a book, I guess…
We’re currently living in a very curated world now. I mean, some of you are literally living inside of Pinterest. Social media (especially Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest, duh) has made people hyper-aware of how things look first, not hyper-aware of the action itself. Reading a book in public, especially literary ‘sad girl classics’ (also a product of our culture) or a visually interesting one can be read as an aesthetic choice, not just reading as an act itself. CLIP FARMING!!!!!!!
Also, books often act as shorthand for who we are or who we want to be (might discuss that on another Sunday). When you read in public, especially a certain kind of book, it can feel like you're signaling something about your taste, intellect, or even politics, as everything feels like a political act nowadays, so it can feel like other people might interpret it as a performance, even when it’s not and you’re just enjoying the damn book. Some friends of mine actually don’t shop at book shops anymore because they’re afraid of being judged by their choices when handing the book to the cashier. That’s a reflection of the paranoid society we’re living in. Scary.
This ‘The Truman Show’ kind of performative aspect of modern life (thanks to phone cameras, the idea of always being seen and being filmed), made us internalize this sense that we’re constantly being watched or evaluated. It’s almost like a spider sense. So anything outside the norm (scrolling on your phone while looking at it with a poker face in public) might feel like a performance, even when you’re just doing something as simple (and as sincere) as reading a book at your local Waffle House.