theory of the hack

"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." — Emily Zhou

Last month Emily Zhou posted “theory of the hack”—how to spot one, what motivates them, what their funhouse mirror relationship to genius reveals about great art—on her Anecdata blog. With Zhou’s gracious permission, Discordia Review is pleased to share this valuable anatomy of hackdom with you.

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. The hack is something else, a social as well as artistic type that has existed since the beginning of capitalism, at least. Plenty of people seem to know a hack when they see one; fewer notice that any individual artist or writer worthy of the name has siblings everywhere, whose work shares certain aesthetic qualities and whose personalities are congruent with each other.
   

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. Thus the work of the hack has a unique historical value. The great artist is immortalized in hagiography and flattery, which smoothens things over and obscures the pit of failure and mediocrity that threatened the great artist at all times. The hack is immortalized in satire, which is written from inside the pit.
   

3. The hack thrives in a degraded media environment. The hack plays the game, and their cynicism is obvious to everyone, but calling out the hack would mean calling out the entire system in which they work. If the hack is a master of anything, it is usually in knowing how to toe this line. The hack is as shameless as the era itself—any greater excesses than this, and they would invite early the disdain that awaits them after they disappear or die.
   

4. The hack is sincere.
   

5. The hack is prolific. The speed at which the hack can make an object, develop an opinion, or make an event occur is their primary advantage over most other people. Not all who are prolific are hacks, of course, but the hack’s profligacy feels almost pathological, inexorable, and somehow separate from their personhood, like a reflex on a dead body.
   

6. The unstoppable confidence of the hack, which hinders their improvement, is phenomenologically indistinguishable from the confidence, the fluency, that true geniuses have. One imagines the inner lives of Bach or Balzac had certain things in common with those of the hack.
   

7. One is tempted to say, “but not those of Beethoven or Kafka.” But it does not matter whether any individual hack struggles mightily to produce their work, or is crucified daily with self-doubt. The trouble is in their taste: the standards used to evaluate the work have seemingly been calibrated incorrectly. They have climbed some alien Parnassus to get to their mediocrity, and usually have stopped early and declared that they are on the peak.
   

8. This sense that the work of the hack has of being evaluated by incorrect yet consistent standards gives it a case-study quality. Taken in aggregate, the work of the hack is valuable mostly as a portrait of the mind that produced it. The hack probably views this as the consistency of their style, or is incapable of distinguishing it from the work of their peers.
   

9. Then again, taste alone doesn’t explain it. The hack has often read all the great works of literature, seen all the great films, has baroquely personal relationships with canonical music, and otherwise cultivates themself like a hothoused Victorian schoolboy. (Their work often wears this learning like fancy clothes.) That there’s a self-aware aspect to the erudition of the hack, even in casual conversation, is a clue—but no one would be doing this much reading, listening, and watching if they didn’t really love it. Right?
   

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

11. Because the hack is a professional, they know that there are certain indignities, compromises, and strategic alliances that are necessary to career advancement. At best, they see this as a distasteful expediency; at worst, they see it as glamorous, a “perk.”
    

12. The hack is unremittingly serious, and often affects a world-weariness that feels canned, lifted from some old book. Everything, even jokes and memes and gossip, has to be linked back to the hack’s grand Project. The hack has a paranoid schizophrenic’s associational mania, and is likely to see their project reflected in the most bizarre and incongruous objects.
    

13. This pathological seriousness might be why the hack tends to have very thin skin. This is not always the case, but it is true more often than not. 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.
    

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.
    

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. The usual attitude upon encountering the work of a bad writer or artist is well-wishes for their improvement and excuses for the bad quality; the usual attitude upon encountering the work of the hack is an impression of total alienation, and a certain expansion of the possibilities of the human mind.
    

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.” Personal essays, Pop Art, automatic writing, appropriated and recontextualized work of others, shallow critique with easy targets, and ideas that were avant-garde twenty years ago are the favorite materials of the hack.
    

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. Indeed, the hack works best if their work is not directly compared to the work of any practitioner of their form, living or dead, except, of course, favorably.
    

18. The hack, of course, does not always work along these lines. Indeed, outside of a few big cities, hacks are probably usually at work on conventional novels, landscape paintings, and so on.
    

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.
    

21. The uncanniness of the hack comes in part from the mirror image they reflect back on every working artist. The hack is what happens when certain essential traits of the working, persevering artist or writer are grotesquely maximized—we must all have some of the hack inside of us, kept carefully in homeopathic amounts.
    

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.
    

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