Meets An Immovable Object (Seeing Like An Affiliate Marketer Part 8)
Product reviews constitute the most popular mode of cultural criticism. Susan Sontag suggests as such: film reviews, she alleges in "Notes on Camp," serve as the most important mode for disseminating the camp sensibility. Reviews are the niche of criticism that concerns itself with shaping consumer tastes and desires, and such a niche must define cultural reality in a society composed of consumers. Were we a society of scholars and monks, then academics like Sontag would define our culture, but we are consumers, and so arguments about what to buy are the arguments which define us.
Maybe this is what keeps bringing me back to affiliate marketers. In reviewing products, they conduct cultural criticism, just as I conduct cultural criticism in this newsletter. But I don't think their writers would consider themselves in the same field as Sontag, and their editorial focus espouses quietly a layer of ideology that I deem pernicious, namely one in which products answer all problems. As such, they perform their profession without truly knowing what they are doing, and they do harm by it. "Forgive them father, for they know not what they do," said Christ upon the cross, and I look upon an affiliate marketer's writing staff, oft composed of talented and funny writers, and say much the same.
They espouse (though, somewhat insincerely) a belief that products can solve all woes. I disagree. I have outlined this disagreement before by noting that such a world view discounts free alternatives, and that their underlying business model makes them unable to suggest these solutions in good faith.
But what happens when affiliate marketers try to tackle problems whose scope far surpasses that of products?
The Strategist has a section for recommending books, aptly called Reading Lists. Here, the product-adled cultural criticism of affiliate marketing hybridizes with cultural criticism of a more traditional variety; Sontag always was recommending books.
The majority of these reading lists treat the major issues of today. After the Atlanta shootings, The Strategist published The Best Books About Asian American Identity, According to Experts and after the murder of George Floyd they published a reading list which included such classics of prison abolition as Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Davis.
Affiliate marketers have, on occasion, demonstrated real value, and I hesitate to totally discount these lists. I kicked off this series by noting that something as silly as a Spike Lee Funko Pop can, in the hands of a good writer, turn into an excuse to consider the cultural legacy of a director, even if this pretext is a tad commercial. These reading lists do allow The Strategist to platform some important thinkers. For their reading list of the best books about Asian American identity, they drafted the following experts to make recommendations:
Journalist Tammy Kim, a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times and co-host of the podcast Time to Say Goodbye; erin Khuê Ninh, an associate professor of Asian American literature at UC Santa Barbara; political strategist, storyteller, and artist Tanzila Ahmed; editor and writer Shawn Wong, who is also a professor of english at University of Washington; Jafreen Uddin, executive of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop; David Palumbo-Liu, a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University; New Yorker writer Hua Hsu, who is also an associate professor of english and the director of American studies at Vassar College; New Yorker writer Jiayang Fan; poet and critic Cathy Park Hong; and poet Mai Der Vang.
These are smart people given access to an audience that they don't traditionally have. Few associate professors in Asian American literature get a chance to talk to such a wide audience as The Strategist's readership. Every so often, for-profit media will, on accident, do legitimate good in this world. I do think the world bettered when we listen to poets and professors rather than marketers, on intellectual grounds if not always moral ones.
But, it is moral grounds on which these articles rest, and they are morally facile. The surge in liberal interest in anti-racism has lead to a number of anti-racist reading lists, a genre which certainly includes The Strategist's articles. This has lead to an important backlash against the anti-racist reading list as a means of remedying social ills. I think this article by Melissa Phruksachart best articulates the moral failings of reading lists. I encourage reading it in detail, but I think that the first sentence speaks brilliantly:
There is a long tradition of white people thinking they can read their way out of trouble.
Anti-racist reading lists appearing in The Strategist further confirms this point. My biggest issue with affiliate marketers is that they believe that consumers can always buy their way out of trouble. Watching the anti-racist reading list appear on an affiliate marketer's website serves as strong evidence for Phruksachart's suspicions. The idea that one can read away one's racism is really a belief that one can purchase away one's racism. Reading away the racism of one individual may feel morally absolving to that reader, but it has little impact on the lives of Asian women. What Asian women need in the wake of Atlanta is money to avoid survival jobs like massage parlors and sex work. They need racist police officers to get fired, and need a culture that does not fetishize and dehumanize them. As cultural critics, The Strategist might have been able to speak to the last of these points, since cultural critics make a habit of portraying what a culture ought to be and how it can get there, but looking through the list, none of these books are advertised as addressing the cruel objectification that Asian women deal with. The Strategist cannot even define explicitly one of the major cultural beliefs that abetted the Atlanta shootings, and yet we are to believe that buying these books will change anything?
At best, these booklists may pump some interesting ideas into the heads of those who are not marginalized, and I am happy that this panel of Asian academics and writers got their time in the sun. Furthermore, the reading list was written and compiled by an Asian American woman, and so I impute no malfeasance, or lack of understanding of the cultural specificity of Asian American life, onto this list. The issue here is that our writer, Lauren Ro, conducts cultural criticism without having much a background in it, without even necessarily knowing that she is doing cultural criticism. As a writer for The Strategist, she focuses mostly on maternity and early childhood products; she is a recent mom. This is not to say that a background in cultural criticism is requisite for talking about the Atlanta shootings. Neophyte cultural critics can often analyze with erudition cultural phenomena in which they are situated. But Ro's article is not up to snuff, and expecting something summative from a less-seasoned cultural critic would be unfair to Ro.
My umbrage is directed at The Strategist. Despite the good work that Ro did in compiling this list of experts, the entire list is cynical. In some ways, it serves as the mirror reflection of when The Strategist compiled a panel of experts to discuss the best can of marinara sauce. There, we had a problem so minor that addressing it with products was likely to yield little benefit. Here is the opposite: racism is a problem inordinately larger than what products could solve, and non-Asians shall not be able to buy their way out of this trouble. But The Strategist has no fiduciary contract with its readers. The products it recommends do not need to solve problems. The Strategist makes its money so long as their readers click on the affiliate link and buy the product. The Strategist doesn't make money by solving problems. It makes money by getting readers to buy things. And in this case, it has found a way to make money off of the Atlanta shootings without providing much value to Asian American women.
Buying is, for the affiliate marketer, an unstoppable force. In the case of the above reading lists, I don't think that The Strategist realizes that racism, though not an immovable object, has spent centuries being budged but slightly. If it does realize how outgunned the suggested products are on this topic, then it doesn't care. That they write the most publically accessible cultural criticism, and cannot seem to understand how the particular problems of modern marginalization may outclass the power of purchase, is grim.