Title: “The Meme Economy, or, A Personal Journey Through 21st-Century Capitalism”
Author: Kyle Chayka
Publisher: Kyle Chayka Industries on Substack
Date: January 29, 2021
Form: Essay/newsletter
Keywords: Capitalism, Digital Media, Video Games, Labor
When I’m editing work that seeks to introduce a new term, I’m at my most skeptical. This comes out of a longstanding readerly distrust of works of humanities scholarship that try really hard to sell you on a term. Often these attempts appear to be motivated by a questionable (if understandable) desire to be cited: the fantasy that, someday, a future scholar will pick up their term in a phrase like “what [X scholar] would call…”
Such terminology frequently seems unnecessary: often it’s an idea that’s already been expressed by other people, and often it’s an idea that’s sufficiently specific or lacking in transferability that it doesn’t seem to need a name—you can just describe it. And though the charge that scholarly writing is too full of obscure jargon is, I think, overblown (all specialist fields, all communities of people who share an interest, have their own terms!), my hunch is that it’s worth being wary about adding to the supply. (For a slightly different take on this question, Eric Hayot has a good two-page chapter in The Elements of Academic Style where he sets out his “anti-anti-jargon” position.)
But sometimes I’ll encounter a new piece of terminology that’s clearly not there to be cited: a term that’s single use only, that works within its own particular context but would disintegrate on contact with the outside world. Here’s a sentence from an essay by Kyle Chayka about the weirdness of contemporary capitalism and the GameStop stock story from January 2021:
“GameStop illustrates what we might call the Ragnarok Santa Hat Theory of Digital Capitalism.”
That “what we might call” is usually a red flag for me: it’s a “new term alert” phrase. But here, the actual term—“the Ragnarok Santa Hat Theory of Digital Capitalism”—is so comically overblown and hyperspecific that it’s clearly not a vehicle for a fantasy of someone someday discussing “what Kyle Chayka would call the Ragnarok Santa Hat Theory of Digital Capitalism.” It’s kind of a parody of the scholarly move I’ve expressed my skepticism toward.
More importantly, though, within the context of Chayka’s essay, it’s clarifying and helpful. The essay’s first section describes Chayka’s experience trading time-limited loot (Santa hats) within an early-2000s MMORPG called Ragnarok Online. And he uses that example as a way of getting at a bigger claim about the particular foibles of digital capitalism, a claim that’s also borne out by the GameStop story. The sentence I quoted is and isn’t an act of term-coining. It is that, but mostly it’s something else: a way of connecting the essay’s jumping-off point (“GameStop illustrates…”) to its main piece of evidence (“…the Ragnarok Santa Hat…”), and both of them to the big-picture topic at hand (“…Theory of Digital Capitalism”).
(There’s also something interesting to be said here about how theories emerge from all kinds of odd places. The Ragnarok Santa Hat Theory of Digital Capitalism isn’t all that far from the Oedipus Rex Theory of Psychosexual Development. But that’s beyond the scope of this post.)
The takeaway: Terminology can be all kinds of obscure and unwieldy when you’ve laid the groundwork for the reader to understand it, and when it serves a clear function—in this case, tying together relevance, evidence, and topic.
This is a post from Editorial Letter, by Philip Sayers. Editorial Letter is a newsletter about writing better arguments; you can read more about it here. Email me by replying to this newsletter or at pcgsayers@gmail.com.