The Hate-Read Crisis

On rage bait and the crisis of hating in American letters

Every piece of viral writing over the last few months has been bad. That is neither a putdown nor some great revelation—those essays that have gone viral have done so explicitly because they are bad. Their obvious flaws, and their writers’ preening self-righteousness, invite easy critique from (and often inspire genuine rage within) their readers. People like to critique things because it makes them feel smart, so they share their critiques with the world; social media users are also, as the algorithm has divined, inherently masochistic, meaning they derive joy both from the pain of reading bad writing and the false moral superiority that comes with mocking this writing to a group of strangers on the internet. My describing this trend does not as such exempt me from participation.

This cycle—the cycle of hate reads—is nothing new, but in recent months it feels as if it has reached a fever pitch. Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter made sharing writing functionally impossible (a writer’s promise of “link in bio” only marginally less depressing than their faithful response-bot’s P░ U░S░S░ Y░), almost every piece of inescapable writing has come from The Cut. Amidst the hardest time in recent memory to share and find writing, The Cut has more or less singlehandedly defined the terrain of viral essay discourse. On any given week, reading and having an opinion about one of The Cut’s rage-bait personal essays is the price of admission for whatever remains of the literate internet. It’s something like methadone for a network of take-addicts, a cheap and transient imitation of the experience of formulating and expressing opinions.

I say that these hate reads are cheap not to malign the editors at The Cut or to add my voice to the legions of those dumping on the specific pieces—seriously, we get it—but to suggest, rather, that the editors here know exactly what they are doing. To the extent that they’ve found a way to make any writing inescapable in 2024, their strategy is brilliant. People have compared the recent spate of derided essays—specifically, but not exclusively, the divorce lady, the lady who was scammed out of $50k, and the person who thought they were sophisticated for marrying a Harvard Business School student—to the bygone era of xoJane, a personal essay cottage industry in and of itself that somehow convinced writers to admit things about themselves that someone with shame wouldn’t confess to under prolonged waterboarding. There’s a parallel, surely, particularly with respect to the fact that The Cut’s splashiest recent pieces have been predominantly written by women (to which, I feel the need to acknowledge, yes, misogyny is obviously a factor at play when essays like these are discussed; that these writers are women doesn’t obviate their pieces’ embarrassments, but it does mean that people should at least interrogate their consensus dismissals. I also feel the need to note that the contemporary embarrassing essay is by no way the exclusive purview of female writers. To cherrypick but one recent example, Jordan Castro recently wrote a screed excoriating professors for basically not being Catholic enough, in which the only professor actually quoted to concretize his point was the disgraced Jessica “Jess La Bombalera” Krug, the white woman from Kansas who made a career out of claiming she was Black. Embarrassment recognizes no gender binary). But The Cut is tapping into a particularly modern current. Put simply, the editorial team has keyed into the fact that writers in 2024 largely feel cheated out of something they were promised, and will scream that fact to the rooftops. They have also figured out that readers, an increasing proportion of whom are would-be writers themselves, loathe this entitlement.

Let’s call it a generational truth: people feel ripped off. Milennials rightfully understand that the lives they were promised—the lives of their parents—have been rendered structurally impossible; Zoomers didn’t even get a promise. A justified rage swirls in the zeitgeist. But among writer types, those nominally tasked with crystallizing and interpreting this zeitgeist, this rage takes on a particularly unbecoming character. The writers who have debased themselves in The Cut possess a certain pedigree; they, by nature of their self-perception and credentials, feel they were promised more than others. The modern publishing and writing landscape all but guarantee that they have received less. The writer who produces a hate-read speaks not in the language of universal rage, but in the specific register of unmet exception. In other words, they are entitled. It is this entitlement that allows them to write so unrepentantly, to so casually express complete absurdities; one imagines a Cut editor licking their lips sifting through pitches. The entitled style’s lack, as a prerequisite, of self-awareness is what makes these pieces so easy to pass judgment on, to roll eyes at, to mine for hopefully-viral screenshots.

Yet at the same time these personal essays are sacrificial lambs for our substantially unscratched hating itch. There is no reward in taking the bait. Because, as we all intuitively feel, entitlement is all around us. Things are getting worse, and the worst people are getting richer, because the people in control of funding things know at a certain point consumers don’t have much of a say in what they’re given. The local independent theater is screening Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire; planes are falling apart in the sky. None of this is new. But the point remains: there is an undercurrent of being, for lack of a better word, over this shit, and the boring, greedy, unimaginative people who have created it, that is largely unvoiced. Dumping on rage bait offers the fleeting sensation of rightness, of feeling intellectual and moral superiority over the architects of culture, but the dopamine passes as soon as the conversation moves on. There’s a trade-off at play: you tweet that a piece sucks, The Cut gets another viral essay, and the writer gets a book deal for the humiliation ritual.

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The question lingers: are there writers capable of voicing hate, or must writers consign themselves to being the targets of cheap hatred? If the recent buzzy newsletter series Hate Read is any indication, society will have to accept the latter. Hate Read, recently launched through the wildly popular Substack Deez Links, is a self-proclaimed “pop-up newsletter” in which “a dozen of our favorite writers from the internet rant and review (sic) about stuff they hate—anonymously (parentheses theirs).” Hate Read’s mission statement is simple: there are plenty of awful things in culture, that plenty of writers hate, and that some combination of Stan culture and editorial incentives in a precarious writing economy forces them to stifle their dissent. If you accept the premise, then Hate Read’s early rollout suggests that quieting these “hater” writers is the first societally productive feat that Stan armies have ever undertaken. The early dispatches have been a bland combination of under-cooked contrarianism, over-confident prose, and a single-minded preoccupation with the sorts of petty dramas and complaints harbored exclusively by New York media types. As is far too common with New York- or Los Angeles-based creatives, these writers indulge the narcissistic delusion that their dissatisfactions within the hyper-niche world they have built for themselves are both universal and attention-worthy.

Hate Read is a masterclass in media-class solipsism. In one popular essay, a writer imagines with blistering condescension the life of somebody who works a non-media job, projecting that they have necessarily abandoned some grander dream (of which, presumably, the righteous writer themselves remains in pursuit) and have attempted to fill their spiritual void through rock climbing. In another, a writer indulges a meandering tirade against menswear that lamenting a status quo in which you “can’t tell how cool anyone is or how rich anyone is or what anyone reads.”¹ A writer complaining about “media parties” caricatures a series of “types of people” that reads something like experimental fiction: “you, who care about your career too much and treat being a writer as some kind of altruistic personality trait; you who use words like bildungsroman in conversation but cannot identify the difference between prejudice and racism; you men who talk about being allies to third wave feminism but have never once Venmoed a woman back in your life.”

I use the unspecific “writer” for each because, of course, these posts are all submitted under pseudonyms. Perhaps the truths they illuminate are so verboten that they would be blacklisted from their industry—god forbid somebody cross cultural behemoths like Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry in public! More likely, is hater extraordinaire

eli

of

Constantly Hating

’s diagnosis: “people want the subversive clout of hating without any of the backlash.” Eli (whose commitment to full-throated hating that is precise, unpretentious, unsparing, and actually controversial rivals titans like Andrea Long Chu) continues: “this blog is a series of milquetoast writers trying to rebel against their hall monitor impulses, you're still the honor student, don't front.” Surely, there are plenty of justifiable reasons for internet anonymity.² But it’s hard to escape the feeling that Hate Read’s pseudonymity is but a coy signal—you’d know who these writers were if you were at the evidently intolerable media parties. The idea that this is all a put-on is, by my read, more generous than the alternative, one in which writers feel it is too personally and professionally risky to critique Miley Cyrus or climbing gyms.

Of course, this series has grown quite popular, reaching in recent days a virality rivaled only by, well, The Cut. And, as with most viral essays, they have largely been met with derision. But if hate-reading The Cut is a well-designed but ultimately hollow experience, hate-reading Hate Read (forgive me) verges on the sincerely depressing. If Hate Read is what popular, contemporary writers look like at their most fully uninhibited, then perhaps The Cut’s editorial feat is less impressive than I’d imagined. Perhaps, as grim as it may be, entitlement, petty grievance, and blinding solipsism is the dominant mode of American writing today?

As publication after publication is shuttered by venture capital firms and culture writers continue in lockstep to rubber-stamp the slop du jour, it feels increasingly difficult to actually find someone articulate, in writing, meaningful and shared grievance. Writers feint in the direction of hating on Twitter, but only to the extent that their non-specificity does not jeopardize potential connections or employment streams. Those gifted both a platform and the shroud of anonymity squander their opportunities to complain about a caricature they developed in their minds after seeing someone walking through New York City. The entitled mindset prevails: I, the dream-chaser, deserve the world, and it’s everybody else’s fault that I haven’t gotten it. Call it a structural problem, call it a pathology, call it a failure of imagination, but for the foreseeable future it will be on the rest of us to hate. If that means excommunication from media parties, whether real or virtual, so be it; I’ve read that they suck.

1. In full fairness, the menswear essay includes an eyebrow-raising, if slightly unspecific, dig at Blackbird Spyplane, which is the closest any of these essays come to sincerely “hating” on something. Credit where due. My own thoughts on the matter, though nobody’s asking, is that I had a very hard time getting on board with that newsletter’s voice, and still struggle with it occasionally, but feel the voice’s central sin verges more on cringe than appropriation. I also think the insight, passion, and wit justifies the means.

2. I, of course, write under a pseudonym, but that’s because I have a precarious day job I care about—one that does not involve media parties—and I’d rather my employers not read, like, a schizoanalysis of the Brooklyn Nets. My fear is Google, not Vanity Fair editors, and if a subscriber ever made their way to New Orleans, I’d be happy to treat them to a drink.