Where is the gradient coming from?
vibe panopticon, Girlboss Hell
For a few years, I stranded myself in Girlboss Hell. I was trying to develop myself and my writing classes as a brand. I gave it my all for about three years, and during this time, I bought business coaching packages. I did workbooks. I posted every single day on Instagram to grow my followers only to gain about 5,000 bots. I tried to position myself as a teacher even though, oops, I hate teaching.
The walls of Girlboss Hell are pastel gradients. The doorways are all arches. The fixtures are all brass, duh. Everyone is running a “heart-centered business.” (Nobody mentions that the most successful heart-centered businesses revolve around teaching other mom-preneurs or gal-preneurs or Bad Bitche$ how to create their own heart-centered business.) The Canva templates, oh god. The totally unironic deployment of corporate Memphis blob people imploring you to trust your intuition. My intuition was saying, very plainly: I HATE IT HERE.
And not, let me be clear, because I think money is evil/writers can only be poisoned by money/courting influence is wrong/doing business is wrong. Books are, eventually, products. Writers who don’t seem to be selling anything in a conventional sense are selling their disregard for convention as a tool for a reader’s self-identity collage just as much as they’re selling the words in their books. Even though my time in Girl Boss Hell felt like being a weirdo hanging out at the periphery of a party that lasted for years, I am grateful that it gave me an opportunity to think about myself in relation to business and ask myself why I thought my only real value to others would be as teacher/nurturer/help-meet, and realize why the underlying resentment of accepting that position would make me crabby and not so great at the brief.
No, my deep, gut-level I HATE IT HERE was about something else. An unquestioned, obligatory-seeming feel that everyone in those coaching calls seemed to resonate with. Something just slightly (but only slightly) more than an aesthetic. A psychological pose, maybe, tinged with an approachable sense of the esoteric but never far from a Starbucks tumbler or a marble background flatlay or a Lululemon skort.
Have you ever been in a room where everyone is being so eyebright and earnest that it makes you feel like an Edward Gorey character marring the pages of a pastel notebook? My time in Girlboss Hell, under the gradient sky, felt exactly like that.
I first noticed the gradient in the packaging for Moon Juice, an LA-based company that sells what are basically adaptogen potions and expensive smoothies. My relationship with Moon Juice is deeply ambivalent in the sense that I buy and use some of their supplements, and I like the bullshit that they’re selling, but I also find that it’s an unreliable signal. Others like me—literary dirtbag girls who don’t brush their hair, own two bras, and enjoy shiny crystal truck stop roses unironically—are not necessarily drawn there.
The gradient promises a haptic blur: At first, it seems that your eyes are failing to focus on a specific figure, which instead reveals itself to be a field of color. There is no place, no navigation. It’s a handy visual metaphor for both unbounded optimism and dissociation. And, as such, the perfect way to market a supplement to anyone interested in the transcendent rather than the merely clinical properties of, say, magnesium.
Then, of course, it started popping up in all kinds of book covers, sometimes within the ironic sweep of an airbrush or the grittier stippling of spray paint, sometimes as a visual form of vaporwave antigravity. For example, Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill, Sarah Gerard’s True Love, Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, Patricia Engel’s Infinite Country, Mira Sethi’s Are You Enjoying? Raven Leilani’s Luster. I could go on.
It’s almost as if millennial pink was still scratching some itch, but we knew we were supposed to put it aside. It’s almost as if we knew that endless minimalism was beginning to look like cowardice but we weren’t sure how to embrace color without it feeling like too much risk.
Vox orients the trend at the intersection of James Turrell and bisexual lighting. I would add another important visual forbear: The smoggy, saturated LA sunset. You know it’s made of poison, but it makes you feel kind of eternal anyway.
If you’re going to be a bootstraps girlboss, you need a content creation strategy. And your strategy is: lots of it.
Content creation sucks because its most basic premise is that whatever you make—whether it’s a painstakingly lit video or a painting you spent weeks on—is just stuff. Stuff to draw eyeballs to draw advertising impressions. A dumb carrot at the end of a shitty stick.
Of course, you can reject the concept of content and make things which are considered, beautiful, detailed, and instructive. But they’re going into the same trough as the rest of the life coach IG captions and braggy vacation pics and frothy, anxious GLOMAR statements about current events written by people who are so afraid of any potential offense that they fail to say anything at all.
So at some point, you’re ready to compromise a little with the quality. And when you are, all roads will lead you to Canva.
Canva is a subscription-based design software which provides templates, stock photos, and vector graphics you can dumptruck together in a jiffy to make your own endless carousel of infographics and pithy text posts. Suddenly, slick millennial pink/terrazzo print/corporate Memphis adstock was within reach for the girlboss toiling away without a design team or social media strategist. With InDesign, you had to learn a software and buy an expensive license plus learn enough about design to translate your own ideas and reference points into something satisfying. But with Canva, you just drag and drop.
There was initially something a little subversive about Canva (to me, anyway). Design is authority in the same way grammar is authority. It’s one of the ways that power is siloed in institutions and cliques, and particularly on the internet, having a polished thumbnail image for your YouTube channel or a row of branded story archive icons on Instagram makes you look like you might have at the very least hired a freelance designer.
But suddenly, for the low cost of a monthly subscription, you can make your own gold scribble and marble background text post. You can design your logo, or just use one of the stock examples. Endless beige arches to frame a picture of a hand holding a book in front of a white wall. And gradient, everywhere.
The first time I went to Joshua Tree National Park, I had the uncanny feeling that I was seeing the backroom where they made the Internet. Everywhere we saw photoshoots happening just off the main park road, or the silhouette of some influencer’s mountain pose on top of a pile of boulders in the distance. There was a line of people waiting to take selfies with the sign at the entrance. One cafe in the town posted warnings that people who were there just to plug in their phones would be kicked out. This was obviously a favorite place to engage in the manufacture of images.
The following year (2019) was the superbloom, and thousands of people packed Joshua Tree, as well as the parks at Anza Borrego and Lake Elsinore, to take pictures in the poppy fields. Blithely ignoring, often, that lying down in the poppy fields would crush the flowers and prevent them from growing back the next time. At some point, the production of an image curves back upon the image itself, introducing a recursive loop to the experience of place. The more poppy-field selfies people take, the more they want, the more the poppies disappear. Taking a picture is, or has become, a mode of consumption, and you can feel this in Joshua Tree because you can sense the amount of money swirling around, and you can see how the landscape changes.
Annual visitation numbers to the park hovered around 1 million from the ‘90s to the 2010s, but suddenly jumped to 2 million in 2015. In 2021, visitation jumped again to 3 million.
Also, coincidentally, this is what it looks like in Joshua Tree more or less every evening:
We use the internet as a place, even though it lacks all of the nuance and sensory proliferation of one. The pandemic accelerated that tendency. And I don’t totally mind it. I could continue meeting with my therapist while I was in Texas for four months during a writing residency. I could see familiar faces in my recovery meetings from across the country. I’ve made friends on the internet who I wouldn’t have occasion to meet otherwise. I think the default potential of any tool is neutral until it’s used, and the internet is a series of tools.
But turning the internet into a place operates in both valances—it also turns place into the internet. Every midsize-and-larger city in America will have the same businesses: the smoothie bowl place, the poke bowl place, the coffee place with the geometric porcelain pots of pilea peperomioid, the ax-throwing bar, the endless fucking parade of businesses called Sage + Apple or Salt + Time with logos composed of two crossed arrows (really easy to make these with Canva, btw). The vintage boutique called something like Blackout, with bell-sleeve ‘70s game show dresses in the window. The bookstore with the front table of fashionable femcel books that show up in every TikTok and reel, and “dark academia,” whatever tf that is. The hair salon with the row of R+Co products and a service menu including reiki. The store that sells entirely beige, oatmeal, stone, and ochre dresses or coffee mugs or candles or vibrators or macrame wall-hangings or sweaters or Turkish towels, who fucking knows, it’s all Xanax minimalism in there and impossible to say exactly what’s going on.
These aren’t even massive corporate chains. These are the so-called indie businesses, and that’s what I find most upsetting about it all. These are the businesses that somebody went out on a limb to establish. No one at corporate headquarters mandated this design, this content, whatever—it was all selected by hand. It was all developed by people. But all local vernaculars have collapsed into this one totalizing bougie posture, and nobody seems to notice or care that good taste, which was once the exercise of choice, is now at the effect of a recursive algorithm. A choice, but made among a severely limited field of options.
This is the point, usually, where someone tells me that I should just let people like what they like, that not everybody pays attention to the ways aesthetic decisions filter through culture, and I’m being perhaps a bit of a snob. If everybody likes their terrazzo claw clips, what’s my fucking problem? Trends have always rippled through the social submind, how else could I have found the perfect puke-green flannel at Gabe’s in 1996, etc? Sure, sure. All true. But I would argue that there is something different about the proliferation of a trend within a neurological ecosystem created by social media: all decisions lead to the same place, whether you know it or not.
Design trends are not necessarily sinister. So why does the dominance of the gradient feel to me like an odorless gas slipping into every room?
In Girlboss Hell, or at least the corner of it I was occupying, authenticity was the coin of the realm. It was the way you reached your ideal customer: By being unapologetically you, the clients would find you and resonate with your struggles. Your problems and shortcomings were valuable in that they made you relatable. People want to see edge and mess: share it, share it.
I was familiar with this idea from 12-step meetings, where basically the only authority you have, the only reason anyone should believe that you know how to stay sober, comes from the truth of your own drunk story. If I say, Old Crow cost $12.13 when I lived in Iowa, and they kept it on the bottom shelf of the liquor store, and I used to hang out in a hole in the wall where the bartender was always, for some reason, eating pieces of a DiGiorno pizza she baked and then cut up with scissors and brought to work in a Ziplock bag, you would be like, OK. Sarah knows the dark life. And maybe you would recognize that at a certain point, when your drinking gets too expensive volume-wise, you have to go down a shelf in the liquor store. Maybe you would recognize how sometimes you cross this invisible threshold and find yourself in the company of people who do normal things in the most disconcertingly inexplicable way, such that something like eating frozen pizza out of a Ziplock bag becomes almost as ominous as Dennis Hopper’s “baby wants to fuck” scene in Blue Velvet. And then you might think, OK, if Sarah who has clearly visited the underworld in which I am presently living can become a person who doesn’t live there anymore, perhaps there’s hope for me.
In Girlboss Hell, they didn’t even know who Dennis Hopper was.
Everybody in Girlboss Hell wants to change the world with their somatic bodywork practice and their femme goddess sex coaching and their hula hoop classes and their yoni journey breathwork and their intuition intensives and their radical gritty … business coaching. What on earth was I doing there? I don’t trust people who think they’re going to change the world because I think it invites an opportunity to expediency and grandiosity. I think if you want to make money, make money without telling yourself that you are bringing the new light codes of abundance to the earth. You can let yourself want what you want without needing to turn yourself into a messiah. It was like everyone had been hypnotized. Or maybe I just felt that way because I had no idea how I had gotten there. I know it’s peak arrogance to say that everyone around me isn’t being themselves, because how the fuck would I know? But it wasn’t the first time I’ve felt weird within a subculture and years later discovered that everyone was following along with a script that didn’t quite fit them either.
The manufacture of images is a business strategy. Everyone is a brand, or is at least encouraged to think that way about themselves. Everything that happens is content. If your content is really great, other people will curate it as their content. If you’re lucky, you become one of the building blocks someone else uses to telegraph the size and shape of their interior landscape. Be a life coach. Come up with a slogan. Be real—but in a way people can recognize. Be real, but use the vernacular that has become canon, my brother in christ. So much this. Many such cases. It’s giving. It’s -vibes. It’s -core. Replicate the system which produced your desires, which you pursued, which led you to this latte and will someday lead you to a different one.
I guess what I’m getting at is that for me at least, the gradient has become a visual signal of the way the internet’s placeless vernacular has crept into actual places and people. The rise of placeless vernacular happens to coincide with the explosion of life coaching, the explosion of Instagram advice about attachment styles and text posts that encourage you to relate to the difficult people in the world as if they are all toxic. There is a candy sunset promise in all of this. What is it? What is it?
I want to watch you be free. But being free isn’t a default. It requires a relationship to place and a habitation within the moment—the actual moment. Freedom doesn’t exist anywhere else. There are no choices in the past or the future. You can distract yourself endlessly by forgetting this. And you will never be able to choose being free from the menu of an app.
And you know what else? My first thought when I see a gradient anything is Oooh pretty. In spite of all that.
A little bit of housekeeping: You might have noticed that I’ve added a subscription option to white noise maker. Paying subscribers will hear from me every week—sometimes essays like this one, but I’m also adding interviews, quests, poems, and video Q&As. And I’m also writing things that are a little closer to the bone. But I promise not to paywall all of the good stuff; all subscribers can expect a substantial monthly update, pretty much the same way we’ve been going.
Also! Paying subscribers can get a discounted rate (20% off) on my developmental editing services. (I’m not the one who can tell you how to write the best query letter, but I can see the ghosts in your book, and I’ll be more than happy to introduce you.)
Those who support me at the founding level will receive a copy of my first novel, Marilou Is Everywhere, annotated by hand with actual gossip from actual Greene County—who characters are based on, which places really exist, and everything like that. Actual gossip. Which I trust you will keep to yourself. So if you’re interested …
oh man, the glass has shattered. I'm seeing the fuzz all around now 😂 *scrolls through national book awards longlist* my god.