On the Politics of Booktok

Fascism, Algorithms, and Escape

I think we’ve all had that guy friend that started a photography side hustle. Maybe not friend friend, but you know the type – he had enough money to invest in halfway decent gear, regularly puts out a call for models on his Instagram stories, says he’ll shoot any style but definitely prefers boudoir or nudes, and, without fail, he posts his photos and the audience cannot help but quietly laugh at the painful obviousness of the fact that he has no natural or learned talent. He doesn’t understand shadow and light. No clue on framing and composition. Edits are either overdone (think Instagram in 2010) or completely absent. He’ll say he prefers the raw image, but the audience knows that the learning curve was a little too steep and he didn’t want to waste his precious hours watching tutorials when he could’ve spent them DMing women about how much he’d love to provide a space for them to explore their sexual nature. His photos tell a story – not one with an eye for detail or attempts to capture something elusive or precious, but a story of how ogling is more fun than seeing. He is a photographer, but he doesn’t know how to take a photo. He doesn’t know what photography is . . . or what it can and should be.

There’s been a litany of complaints about how political Booktok and Bookstagram have become in light of Trump’s victory this week. Comment sections littered with pleas to “let us have our source of escapism,” and “why can’t we just agree to disagree.”  These readers want to be left alone to enjoy their non-political books about a young woman that leads a revolution to overthrow a tyrant king or the witch that slays those damned dragons that cannot stop themselves from accumulating everything of value or something more relaxing like the cute and comforting love between two teenage boys. These readers spend hours and hours looking at pages without reading. They’ve devoted their finances and entire persona to becoming a reader, but they don’t understand the stories they’re ravenously consuming. They cling to escapism, not because they want to quiet their minds from the cacophony of breaking news stories of cities being washed away in floods and the screams of children massacred in a genocide, but because they’re escaping from thinking. They pour over pages and pages and don’t know what they’re reading. The might be able to define the words on the page, but they certainly don’t understand what a story is  . . . or what stories can and should be.

The wannabe boudoir photographer and the wannabe reader don’t understand that art is active. Art demands attention and criticism, care and skepticism. Devotion to art is a devotion to considering the form – what it can and should be and how your arrival at the place of consumption relies on the histories of artists that have struggled to create and manifest something beautiful or haunting into something you can spend time with. Art cannot be passive.

Earlier this year, I read They Thought They Were Free: the Germans 1933-45 by Milton Sanford Mayer. Written in 1955, Mayer interviewed ten ordinary men about what it was like to live in Germany during the rise of Nazism. The interviews provide a fascinating perspective on how distanced the ordinary person can become to the tides of history. Of the ten subjects, nine were swept up in the swells of nationalism. The outlier was a teacher.

These other nine ordinary men created Nazism. Of course, I do not mean that they were the arbiters of the ideological driving forces behind the camps, but every single one of them was passive during the rise of fascism until it captured them. Fascism hinges on the passivity of the collective. A gregarious, charismatic leader cannot create fascism. Fascism is a movement placated on seizing opportunities to subsume an unhappy population. Fascism takes passive populations stewing in their anger and resentment and fuels them to the point of enthusiastic genocidal insanity against a population manifested as a scapegoat for social inequalities. The communists and socialists. Homosexuals and transgenders. Jews. Disabled people.

Zone of Interest was one of the most lasting pieces of media I’ve consumed over the last year. The movie is about the boring lives of a Nazi family living on the borders of a concentration camp. Birthdays and pool parties experienced in the foreground while the background filled with rising smoke clouds and distant screams. The movie shatters the idea of genocide as some mythical force. Instead, it’s something that happens when people do nothing – when we passively watch the world engulfed in flames.

The fires of World War II didn’t start in the concentration camps. The birth of the Nazi movement in 1933 started with the fires that burned books. Research on trans and queer identities and stories, scientific discoveries by Jews, and the political and cultural writings of leftists burned as kindling for the movement until the masses were ready to burn the authors themselves. Education and learning radicalizes people. And until our passive culture is ready to attack the radicals, they’ll work on attacking the radicalization tools – books, schools, and the community and internet spaces where education flourishes.

Escapism is passivity. It is a denial, disregard, or misunderstanding of reality that will capture and transform you into something horrifying.

This year, I’ve read two books about the internet that I can’t stop thinking about: Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari, and Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka. Both books deeply resonate with me as someone who spends way too much time on social media consuming stuff that, if I’m being honest, is pretty boring. The solutions to the problems that Hari and Chayka write about have to do with intentional escape – sometimes choosing to abstain from these places entirely, and sometimes choosing to seek out and create content that flies in the face of what our metrics show is valuable. And I think the problem of feeling like you’re wasting your life on social media platforms (that we watch in real time decay by enshittification ) can be solved by confronting our own passivity.

Places like Booktok and Bookstagram should be more political. Instead of consuming and creating slop, we need to use these platforms to confront passivity. We have to destroy the idea of non-political spaces because the reality is that while we know nothing in life is non-political, the ability to waste our days watching and creating content that isn’t overtly political provides spaces for people to sit with their passivity. We have to attack passivity. We cannot let it thrive. Our future depends on people understanding how being passive is the greatest tool fascism has to capture and destroy us.

These book spaces can be powerful tools to confront our future. Earlier this year, I helped participate in the Gaza Evacuation Book Auction that went on to raise $185,000. I auctioned off the winner’s choice of a book to talk about on my podcast and social media. The winner was Clayton Page Aldern, author of The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Minds, Brains, and Bodies. Aldern’s work expertly walks the reader through the some of the cognitive impacts that a warming world will have on us. Key signs of intelligence like emotional resolve, concentration, and understanding all worsen when it’s hot – simply put, a rise in temperature makes us passive, stupid, and angry. On our heating planet, the road to fascism will be biologically simpler than it was in the past.

I recently wrote about what it has been like watching natural disasters from my phone. And for those of you that have been following me for a while, you’ll know I’ve struggled a lot with being a content creator. From my start on Booktok in 2021 through the summer of 2023, I tried making 2-3 videos a day. Always working to build an audience through sheer grind culture that the algorithms demand. And maybe it’s burnout or a guilty conscience with adding gigs of data to cloud networks that are now needing to rely on building nuclear power plants in order to keep up with the deluge of slop we’re throwing onto the internet, but whatever it was, I stopped and tried figuring out what the fuck am I doing. And I haven’t arrived at my perfect solution, but I know whatever I do online, I need to be more intentional. I need to think about what I’m putting out there and not be a passive entity into my own makings as an influencer. And I’m saying all of this, because I’ve seen your posts asking the same question, what the fuck am I even doing??? And although I understand the need to escape from it all and the desire to destroy your smart phone, maybe escape isn’t the solution. We create the online world in which we exist. And we need to understand that we can create it differently.

We need to talk deeply about books. Online, with friends, in book clubs. We need to make sure we are not passive readers, passive consumers, passive byproducts that make the reality of our algorthmic culture that leads to our doom.

 I think the solution is clear: fight the passivity.

Take more time, create less, and be intentional.

Make the type of content that sustains you.

Make the type of content that confronts your own and your audiences’ passivity.

Make this a space where we feel like all of our labor has value.

Make Booktok and Bookstagram political.