The Three Kinds of Hacks—A Response to Emily Zhou

I read Emily Zhou’s “Theory of the Hack” and came to the following two conclusions:

1. I am, one hundred percent, a hack.

2. I am, one hundred percent, not a hack.

In the spirit of (A ∧ ~A) → B, I am also a genius, and I am also utterly talentless. Even my mistakes are brilliant; alas, they tend to clash. Or something like that. Or something not at all like that. You get the point. (Or don’t.)

This is not mere sophistry about ex falso quodlibet. This is how hackism works. Is a hack a good writer? A bad writer? Hacks defeat the question.

There are three levels of hack; the higher one goes, the harder it is to make sense of all this. The ordinary hack—the darling—is a talentless or middling writer who finds some luck, acquires social status within the literary world, and therefore has their work viewed charitably because of who they are. (This doesn’t last forever.) The upmarket hack—the lead title; the checkout-aisle author—is the skilled manipulator of perceptions who knows exactly what they are doing. They are often extremely intelligent; they are seldom good writers. Upmarket hacks understand the value of momentum and publish frequently; revision is for editors, it’s wage work. Last, the ascended hack is the highest and rarest kind of hack, but also the least rewarded. They show exquisite fluency with craft, not-craft, anti-craft, glam-craft, shit-craft, and craft-of-craft, delicately dancing on the fractal boundary between the exceptional and the abysmal, daring you to be the first to admit that no one knows what the fuck is going on. There might be twenty such people active at a given time, but no one really knows, because they are usually ignored. Consider Norm MacDonald, the brilliance of whose “cranky uncle” schtick is in no way undermined by the fact that he really was the cranky and weird person he presented himself to be. Ascended hacks are the closest thing to genius that can survive human social processes, but they are also indistinguishable from unexceptional people the world has no qualms about writing off, and they know both of these things.

An ordinary hack does not understand craft. An upmarket hack understands craft but does not respect it—as publishing does not, why should he? An ascended hack respects craft the most, but isn’t afraid to show it by fucking with it.

In this light, let us assess some of the observations made by Ms. Zhou about the hack, and analyze the degree to which they apply to each tier. The following quotes are partial; read the piece linked for full text.

1. The hack is not the same thing as a bad artist or a writer, or someone who makes what they know to be bad work for money.

I agree. Ordinary hacks are bad writers, but not all bad writers are hacks. Upmarket hacks don’t intentionally make bad work—they work as quickly as possible, and view textual quality as no more important than any of the other production values (e.g., cover art) that influence an entertainment product’s success. Ascended hacks—the ones who might also produce truly good art as an eccentric hobby—might intentionally create bad art, but to mock the public—not for money, as the upmarket hack’s game is less demanding and more lucrative.

2. Good art and fine writing stands the test of time; great art and great writing is eternal. But only the hack provides the true image of their era’s excesses, shortcomings, and blind spots.

Absolutely. A “literary scene” has nothing to do with literature; it is something literature must overcome. Great writers write about all sorts of things—present social conditions, yes, but also futuristic technologies and mythological beasts. Cormac McCarthy didn’t write fantasy, but he could have. Tolkien could have written about dentists having midlife crises. Hacks, on the other hand, have optimized not only their creative outputs but their lifestyles around “the scene” and signs of fluency in it. They write about the people around them (other yuppies-in-denial climbing the first rungs of traditional publishing’s career ladder) and those they are trying to impress—the result is a remarkably boring product.

3. The hack thrives in a degraded media environment.

I agree, but I wonder if there’s ever been a media environment that was not degraded.

4. The hack is sincere.

The ordinary hack is sincere because of ignorance. The upmarket hack performs sincerity with such skill, it becomes preferred over the real thing. The ascended hack mixes sincerity and insincerity in a way that might be more sincere than regular sincerity.

5. The hack is prolific.

Oscar Wilde said the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. The hack understands short attention spans. The hack understands that, in traditional publishing, talking fast makes you smart and talking loudly makes you correct. Silence and obscurity are death. As I said before, revision is wage work—leave it to the editors.

6. The unstoppable confidence of the hack, which hinders their improvement, is phenomenologically indistinguishable from the confidence, the fluency, that true geniuses have.

Possible; hard to tell. The world is full of arrogant people who know they are not geniuses. Ordinary hacks have high opinions of their abilities, but are mirroring everyone else’s inflated view. Upmarket hacks don’t value literary genius; they’ve mastered the business, and they’re paid well for doing so. Ascended hacks doubt they are geniuses but live secretly (or not so secretly) in fear that they might be.

10. The hack sees their work as a job. They are a professional, and like to remind you of it.

This is spot-on. I think it applies very well to all three levels of hacks. Ordinary hacks value professionalism because they’ve been told to do so. Upmarket hacks have learned the mores of bourgeois publishing, and conform with the grace of a ballerina. Ascended hacks might flirt with absurdity and unprofessionalism, but will gladly remind you that you are also absurd and unprofessional at your job, which you no doubt are.

12. […] The hack has a paranoid schizophrenic’s associational mania, and is likely to see their project reflected in the most bizarre and incongruous objects.

This, I think, applies most to the ordinary hack in late stages of the career. While upmarket hacks can achieve longevity, ordinary ones fall out of favor and compensate by becoming more pretentious and more self-important. Some do seem to go insane. It is inaccurate, however, to say that upmarket hacks are schizotypal. They know exactly what they are doing.

13. This pathological seriousness might be why the hack tends to have very thin skin. […] The hack namesearches on social media; the hack’s elaborate opinions on The Scene can always, in the end, be boiled down to an opinion on how they are treated within it. They will never reveal this, and might not even be fully aware of it.

This is true, but also not limited to hacks. Oddly enough, it dovetails with my observation that bourgeois publishing has not only made serious nonseriousness—authors must comport themselves seriously, but also accept nonserious results if that is all publishing is willing to give them—a social language, but perfected it to an impressive degree. Ordinary hacks exemplify the serious nonseriousness (and, of course, do not know that they are not serious people.) Upmarket hacks are, though perfunctory in craft, thoroughly serious in their business. Ascended hacks protest publishing with nonserious seriousness and are mostly ignored, because few understand the distinction.

14. Conversation with the hack in person tends to have a heightened quality. Again, it can be hard to differentiate this from conversation with exceptional artists, writers, and thinkers, which is like breathing pure oxygen. To distinguish, look for the aftertaste. The hack often intimidates, both because they are often successful and because they have a certain intensity about them—they often misinterpret what you say, and tend to run away with trains of thought. At the same time, the hack is conscious of being in a professional interaction in which true vulnerability is a weakness, even when this is not the case. The hack will change the subject at odd times.

In general, I am not sure I agree. Most exceptional artists and writers are extreme introverts. They are the opposite of the life of the party. Most of them cannot handle group settings or loud environments at all. Conversation with them might be “like breathing pure oxygen” for other artists, but ordinary people—including the ordinary people who acquire power in artistic and literary scenes—find them difficult, reclusive, and annoying.

This analysis of the hack, however, is spot-on. Hacks understand the importance of leverage and social status—especially in publishing. They are exceptional at making themselves seem interesting in the moment; they are so good at pitching, you suspect them of being on cocaine. And yes, they love to change the subject.

15. It is generally unsettling to come across the work of a true hack, in the same way that reading about altered states of consciousness or extreme mental illness is unsettling.

Variable, but often true. The ordinary hack diverges because that is what high social status among humans leads to: callousness, infantilism, imbecility. You expect to find nothing (because, after all, you are reading the work of a high-status human) and instead you find something warped and disturbing inside: a screaming baby with a bugbear’s face. With upmarket hacks, this is reversed. The upmarket hack has converged according to a social acceptability gradient. You are disturbed because you expected to find something—something socially acceptable, because of the upmarket milieu—and found nothing. There is no inner message. You are only seeing the product of incentives. It is disappointing but, in the end, feels like it should not be surprising, and the reason you feel bad is that you should not have expected anything better.

The unsettling effect an ascended hack can produce is entirely different. It is sometimes engineered and it is sometimes sincere; either way, you learn things about art, about your own judgment, and about yourself that you never asked for.

16. The hack takes advantage of the “casualized” forms available since Conceptual art, Postmodernism, and the internet have (rightly) loosened the boundaries of what is acceptable to present as finished work. The hack works best in traditions in which a stock retort to criticism is “you don’t understand what I’m trying to do.” […]

17. The confusion that would result from comparing the hack to any of the exemplary artists of disorder, radical reduction, and diarism I alluded to above is part of the point.
[…]

19. More generally, a certain lack of self-consciousness of their lineage gives away the hack. Even as the hack’s work is derivative, they are working outside of history, outside of any legible reference point, outside of anything that would require them to be held to aesthetic account.

20. The hack has, in short, achieved true originality, and reveals the shallowness of it.

I read this as an extended argument; at first, I found myself disagreeing, but I am now convinced of its validity. Shallow originality is everywhere—consider a license plate; nothing like it, with that combination of numbers and letters, has been produced, but it is not an interesting object.

The ascended hack observes that publishers and critics are so divergently self-important, their opinions are often irrelevant; this kind of hack breaks rules to make a point. Ordinary hacks copy the ascended ones, but tend to have better social polish, and a few will be lauded as geniuses. After this, upmarket hacks learn the new format and perfect it—now there is a set of new rules that must be followed.

21. The uncanniness of the hack comes in part from the mirror image they reflect back on every working artist.

This is absolutely true. The hack is what an unskilled and unoriginal person thinks an artist or a writer must look like. Hacks (excluding the ascended kind) are far better at living writerly lives on Instagram than they are actually writing. Their existence is terrifying to us, because we were all once unskilled and unoriginal, which means that our decisions about how to become skilled were made by an unskilled person. How do we know we got it right?

Observing a hack, it feels as if something has gone wrong, but diagnosing a root cause is impossible. How did a literate person, one who behaved professionally, one who had so many advantages and so much support on every level, produce so many bad books? Ordinary bad writers are just bad writers. Hacks leave us convinced that we must also be bad writers.

22. The hack is not tragic or comic—they work outside of a paradigm in which such terms make any sense. The hack is an ad man of ideas, lacking both the canniness to escape their confinement in the present and the desire to do so.

This holds.

The ordinary hack experiences a few years—maybe a decade—in the spotlight, then loses the fame as the attention moves on to someone else. One’s quality of life after this is up to financial planners. Most of these people, I suspect, end up just fine. There are other businesses one can easily enter with a few bestsellers to one’s name.

The upmarket hack is certainly not a tragic figure—no more and no less than one who survives on their business acumen.

The ascended hack might be tragicomic. Beneath the gleeful chaos, there is grief. Ordinary hacks lack awareness of craft. Text is a thing they are paid to produce, and they receive praise for it, but do not know why. Upmarket hacks have learned that, in publishing, craft and text do not matter. They will politely thank you if you compliment their writing, but it is no more meaningful to them than any other form of acclaim. Ascended hacks have learned all the same things about publishing, but are infuriated, and therefore live in protest of the fact, carrying lanterns in search of virtues they will never find. Show me an artist who sold a used tissue for a hundred thousand dollars, and I’ll show you someone who desperately wishes he could sell real art for a fraction of that.

The real tragedy has nothing to do with hacks, but with the conditions that produce them. Some books sell five copies and some sell five million. A self-published e-book on Amazon costs $2.99; a traditionally published hardcover costs $35. We all want to believe systems are in place that will discover great writers, rather than the well-connected and the self-promoters, but we still have seen no improvements over the age-old method of discovering a generation’s great writers: wait fifty years.