I have always known that writing is a selfish activity. For me, it’s just a method to become more fully myself, and I take it as self-evident that you become yourself through the rejection of others. I know people will find that pretentious. But, again– it doesn’t matter what other people think; it’s for me. It’s just for me.

I don’t know. I made $18,000 last year. I live in the center of the country, surrounded by soybeans. My day job, being a graduate student in the humanities, earns me a place of assumed ridiculousness in the competitive culture of online writing. Within that world, I am as far as possible from being a big deal. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been straight-up big timed by people, how often writers or journalists have said some version of “you are not a big deal, and I am a big deal.” My name, in the competitive world of online writing, is essentially a joke. For years now, I’ve had the ability, when I need to experience a little humility, of plugging my name into the Twitter search bar and getting an earful. Each of these things, after a fashion, is the product of choices I have made. I live a lovely, quiet life. I am doing alright. It’s my privilege.

I have argued for some time now that the culture of online writing is mired in hierarchy, a social and professional hierarchy that influences writing in ways large and small, but almost always badly. This, I presume, is the “blah blah blah” to which Maria Bustillos refers. I don’t blame anyone for being tired of the argument. I just think it’s true, and I have never read a rebuttal. That’s not to say that I have never read an argument against it that convinces me. I mean I have never read an argument against it. And that’s a shame. Because it matters, it’s worth thinking about, and when Tom Scocca makes his egalitarian smarm argument, there is something missing, and it lives in that unexplored space.

Were more people willing to think about that hierarchy, they might better understand: their opinions are the weapon with which hierarchy is enforced, now. In the space that Scocca’s essay was operating, anyway. When Scocca goes after me on Twitter, he necessarily invites the kind of big-timing that he says he hates. That is how people assert their prestige, now. That is where people big time each other now. Twitter is where people go to Be Somebody. And that’s my complaint about the way in which Scocca’s piece became a phenomenon: an essay about how we’re all the same size became an object lesson in how we aren’t all the same size. He got an audience, and he got the protection that comes from that audience, precisely because online, we are not all the same size. Because we are embedded in hierarchy. I don’t think that Scocca is intentionally taking advantage of his elevated position in that hierarchy when he dismisses his critics, and when those dismissals are instantly amplified and validated by those who are most invested in status. I believe in his integrity, very much. But whether he likes it or not, his existence as a writer for prominent, influential, cool sites is dictates his position in that hierarchy, and he is able to dismiss me precisely because of the fact that we are not the same size. He may want an egalitarian world, but his essay doesn’t live in one.

So much about the world of online writing is premised on hierarchy and competition, on the deep belief that we are not all the same size, no less true for being so little spoken of. You will forgive me if I find it vulgar when an essay claiming that we are all the same size is celebrated by people who work endlessly to be bigger than other people, when in fact that essay becomes a tool with which they assert their greater size.

I have worked so hard to eject myself from that status hierarchy in part because I genuinely believe it is the only way to maintain perspective on it. I am still somewhat surprised, for all of it, that more people don’t see the value in the existence of some small handful of people who are not on the ladder, in order to better see the ladder. At this point, I have essentially given up any hope that the crowd can be made to see the crowd. Trust me: they really, really don’t want to talk about this. They go to great lengths to avoid thinking about all the ways in which they try to Be Somebody, to avoid thinking about what it costs to Be Somebody.

Writing has changed. What was once a way to be alone has become “social.” The takeover has been utter and complete. When I read, on the Hairpin, this interview with Linda Holmes, and she says “And social, of course. I mean, social media is your life if you do this kind of work. Social media is what makes you self-sufficient,” I know that this is one I could pick out of hundreds, hundreds of the type. And I wonder: does Holmes not see the way in which “X is your life” is the complete opposite of “X is what makes you self-sufficient,” particularly when what X really means is “the blessing of other people”? Do they realize how radically this has changed the very idea of writing? Do they understand what’s lost, when writing becomes inextricable from the need to constantly seek the favor of people, to constantly have to ask for approval? I suspect that people hate Dave Eggers and Jonathan Franzen so much because they are among the last generation of writers who are not required to play that game.

And it’s that sense of requirement that makes it hardest. I have only ever asked for the right to reject the crowd. I don’t need that choice emulated or agreed with; when you reject the crowd, the crowd rejects you too. But I have never been granted the simple luxury of disagreement. It can’t be that I have different values and that the disapproval of others is something that I am comfortable with, something that I could cultivate. Instead it’s insisted to me that this was never my intention at all, that I must merely have failed in the status system that they enjoy. That, more than anything: that it’s inescapable. The all-encompassing circularity. That response to complaints are either “come join” or “you’re just jealous,” both of which mean that there is no alternative. I really don’t think they see how relentless the pressure is to just join, to just fall in.

The very fabric of what it means to write and to be a writer has been changed, and people who spend their lives overthinking things refuse to think it over. I’m just someone who thinks that something has been lost, that’s all. And I will keep my own counsel on what it means.