Playing dumb: on the price of our integrity

We should be sceptical – if not wary – of "anti-capitalist" figures who happily bend to a corporate paycheck

I was disappointed but not surprised when my Instagram Discover page showed me a post from Jia Tolentino announcing she had broken her “RIGID personal sponcon ban” to “collab” with Airbnb. Over four Mondays next month, she will give personal book recommendations to the eight people who paid £48 ($65) for the sold-out “Airbnb Experience” of spending time with her at a bookstore in Brooklyn each night.

This post sits next to another from Tolentino – who has made her name as an anti-capitalist writer on staff at the New Yorker since 2016 – that she shared on August 14, announcing she would be fasting for Gaza as “spiritual atonement” for the “definitive horror of our times” committed by Israel over the last two years. Airbnb is not only one of the main targets on the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) list, it is also a key player in the global housing crisis and has been accused of eroding worker and tenant protections – including by Tolentino herself in 2015.

Albeit limited, the backlash to Tolentino’s partnership with the landlord app was immediate. Of the 150 or so comments on her post since Monday, there are only a small handful which don’t explicitly denounce her decision and voice shock and disappointment at the betrayal of her principles. A flavour: “an airbnb ad right after a post promoting parentsfast4gaza is kinda crazy but get that bag i guess”; “Constant cultural commentary on the commodification of everything and then this?”'; “I thought you were sensible and keen on the Palestinian cause. airbnb is on BDS. Please reconsider. You guys can’t always say something and then do the opposite. So disappointing”. When I posted about it obliquely on Instagram, I had several DMs from friends saying they thought it was a joke.

You have to guess Tolentino is willing to weather this incredibly predictable response because she is getting paid a large amount to play dumb; a sum we can assume is the price of her integrity. But should we really be surprised? Tolentino is ultimately part of a hypocritical tendency amongst public figures who have happily courted an anti-capitalist public image only to shed it – seemingly in this new reactionary era – for the right number.

For a while, there was – and in small numbers there still is – a trend in writing which on the surface was a good thing: a widespread pushback against the hyper-consumerist, hyper-individualist barrage of trends confronting us for the last decade. A growing chorus of writers and public figures (even influencers) were explicitly arguing against capitalism in the mainstream. But even at its peak, this trend felt fairly superficial, with most writers using it to make wishy-washy, obvious points (“corporations aren’t your family”, “your worth is not your productivity”) and then failing to offer much else.

Without wanting to self-quote, I wrote this in November 2021 for the New Statesman in a review of Emily Ratajkowski’s memoir, My Body, on Tolentino’s role in this trends and its limitations:

My Body is part of a trend of politically engaged, supposedly anti-capitalist writing. Though the distance between Ratajkowski’s underestimations of her own power and the enormous amount she actually wields is unique, similar fallacies abound in other works. Many modern essayists – such as Jia Tolentino or Anne Helen Petersen – acknowledge the systems at play, but stop short of considering any action that might address or resist them. This approach is almost always highly personal and often concludes with the writer actively continuing to participate in capitalist systems. In “Bc Hello Halle Berry”, Ratajkowski shows her husband a screenshot on her phone that reads: “Fuck capitalism, but until it’s fucked, keep getting that bag”.

What we now appear to be faced with is something that goes depressingly beyond this thin flirtation with a backbone – a mask-off moment of “getting that bag”, where Tolentino is among many public figures brazenly preaching these views while operating in openly direct conflict with them. While Tolentino’s phoniness here feels especially galling, you can see the flimsiness of the anti-capitalist-for-convenience ethos on display in much more egregious cases: the influencers who cultivated left-wing, eco-warrior personas now running fast fashion brands; the supposedly benevolent CEOs discouraging work-life balance. EmRata has not shunned the modelling world since My Body, walking the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show last night.

The obvious thing to note here is the hypocrisy and gratuitousness of adopting these principles publicly – building a career and following around strict adherence to a set of beliefs – and then shedding them for a convenient paycheck. Also doing so with the absurd, irony-tinged suggestion that it isn’t hypocrisy at all.

But the other problem that arises is the influencer-fication of writing and public thinking. There could be a long read on this, but on a basic level, there is a growing temptation for journalists – thanks to social media and really, originally, thanks to Twitter – to see themselves as celebrities, and to enjoy what spoils come with lucrative brand deals and fan adoration (do you have readers or do you have stans?). It might not surprise you that the type of personalised, parasocial event Tolentino is running with AirBnb is already common amongst BookTokers and literary adjacent influencers, and Tolentino (though not seriously) could be telling herself that online figures do this all the time. There are risks when we outsource our beliefs – about ourselves, each other, the world – to those who are easily seduced by this bait; whose words we treat as gospel when they are actually very fallible, if not plainly shifty.

No one can escape the capitalist forces that dictate all of our lives that, even in the most optimistic reality, will take years of collective action to undo. But while the line may be blurry for some writers between journalist and celebrity, the one between principles and hypocrisy, in the meantime, is incredibly clear. We can’t make gods out the people who trade on admonishing those who don’t see that line – all while they cover their eyes and claim blindness as they cross it.