Harron Walker’s New Essay Collection, ‘Aggregated Discontent,’ Makes Reading About Media Fun Again

What’s your favorite story you’ve ever written, and why?

I worked at Jezebel in two different stints, and the first time, in 2018, almost all of us were women. [At the time,] Deadspin had a majority-male staff with a few women on staff, and I guess in order to dispel this idea that these two websites were filled with people who have nothing in common—you know, “men’s site,” “women’s site,” whatever, we’re doing all the same stupid and smart shit— there would be this crossover week where we would work together on stuff. For mine, I don’t know why they allowed this, but I pitched something where I basically just was like, “I’m going throw a football to every man on the Deadspin staff, and if they catch it, they’re my dad now.”

To me, that is just emblematic of the last period in digital media when you could do dumb shit and people would like it or read it or engage with it or hate it, but with the…gigification, I guess you could call it, of media, where increasingly, everyone’s either a freelancer or is going to be a freelancer again shortly following a layoff, or their website shutting down, or whatever, I don’t think you can really pitch stuff like that. You can have something that fits a more conventional form, like a funny essay or a personal essay or a critical essay or a review or an interview or a profile, but it has to be digestible and legible to an editor. I miss that period 10 years ago, when we got to do so much stupid shit.

We’ve both done a lot of aggregated blogging. How do you think that experience has changed your relationship to news consumption?

That’s interesting. I think, at least for the period when social media actually functioned as news dissemination rather than the purposeful scrambling of information and spreading of misinformation, which is more the status quo right now, I definitely started to get a lot more of my information straight from social media—at least when it came to celebrity news and entertainment news. I was like, as someone who makes the blogs that are being promoted through these tweets, I know that basically all the essential information is here, and I don’t need to read 10 different websites saying the same thing in the same aggregated blog voice when we’re all ultimately sourcing from AP News and then putting our own individual, “voicey” spins on it that all start to sound like we’re singing in unison or something. It definitely made me yearn for whoever’s making decisions at every publication to make different choices for their online presence. I’m sure a lot of these decisions have to do with, like, What is the metric that the sales team is selling to advertisers? But I yearn for a time that is probably, like most forms of nostalgia, more made-up, where every single publication isn’t just competing to ultimately produce the same thing. It’s a very 21st-century problem: You’re flooded with more and more options than ever, but these options are actually making what we can experience more uniform.