93. The Fellowship Life 🔗

Now that I've experienced the fellowship life once, I can kinda see why so many free agents (pseudo free agents?) make a whole career out of it, jumping from think tank to think tank, fellowship to fellowship 🤔

I suspect my berggruen gig 2019-20 was a weird one-off and this pattern is not actually doable for me since I'm not an academic or other sort of "institutional production" guy... these things tend to have a seeing-like-a-state syndrome. Gotta be legible in their specific way.

From what I can tell, there's 4-5 distinct "fellowship" circuits -- public policy circles, "art" and literary residencies, journalistic sabbatical circuit (knight etc), and the youngest, the internet one (mozilla etc, now including Web3 treasury sources)

What's common to all of them is, unless you know someone at the top who is able to evaluate idiosyncratic apps personally, you have to be producing in a sort of captive market of cultural production, in a particular format (trad media publishing, books, policy papers, acad)

Lots of MFA-lit type fiction novelists seem to write books specifically for that very particular racket (sorry, but MFA lit is a racket) via a series of fellowships 🧐... museum-anchored art is similar, but imo less of a racket and with more actually interesting output

"Aging Creator Dreams of String of Fellowships to Ride to Retirement in Sinecureland" would be a very fun satire to write 🤣

Well, no rest for the illegible wicked. Must hustle our way to the grave.

Would be nice if more institutional money had the tolerance for illegibility that berggruen does...

Most of these places, incidentally, are kinda 75-80% reserved for academics on sabbatical and/or revolving door influentials from adjacent institutions like fed govt btw.

So only about 20-25% at best is even available for genpop wildcard types... you're competing with tenured academics and fresh PhDs in a postdoc holding pattern for the most part

And the barrier to entry is actually higher. I'm not actually an exception. I didn't get the fellowship entirely on the strength of shitposts. It was a case of "we want you for your blogging etc, but it's your PhD that will actually allow us to get you past the gatekeepers"

It is almost depressing how much of a passport my PhD has been into all sorts of places where the substance of it was entirely irrelevant. It's the mere fact that I have one. Kinda like a security clearance. Feel bad for more talented/deserving people without this passport.

But the mechanism does work if you can access it. I made more progress on my book in the berggruen year than in the 5-6 years of nudging it along before in the interstices of consulting and blogging (been back in that mode since)

One reason I don't write proper "real books", besides having more of a taste for the essay length, is it's simply hard to work on longer projects in the middle of the boom/bust feast/starve indie hustle. Steady income is much more conducive to longer works.

My first book took ~3y while at a fairly comfy Xerox job... and working off material I'd developed during postdoc just before. This one's at 7 years and counting (I started research/developing it around 2013, soon after the first one)

... not counting the first couple of years where it was too ill-formed, but I think I made up the first outline for a potential book type thing in 2015

What's actually making slow progress possible now is that I'm serializing it on my substack, now at 5 chapters in. The steadiness of substack revenue creates something of the stability necessary to keep at it. I'm now guessing an ETA of 2025. studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/the-clockles…

None of these mechanisms is entirely ideal for me tbf. I'm probably too old and oddly enough "too useful" in some sense... my normal money-making methods are almost too pragmatic and effective for me to compete with more economically hapless subspecies of humanity.

If I were (say) a fine artist or avant-garde novelist trying to wrap those talents into a consulting package ("art for culture change!", "narrative leadership workshop!") it would be a different story. But my stock-in-trade is very pragmatic meat-and-potatoes consulting

I joke about mansions because that's actually the only logical endgame...

2x2: useful to useless, impoverished to independently wealthy... I'm somewhere just north-west of the origin. Submansion class in both uselessness and wealth.

ie, I have to become somewhat more useless and somewhat more wealthy to hit the enmansioned leisure class

If some of my current bets work out, that's where I'll land. I'll turn 48 later this year, so goal is to be a privileged, entitled, useless burden on society by age 50, in time to ride out climate change securely in my mansion

One of things I am somewhat wary of is when much younger people claim to be "inspired" by my trajectory without quite realizing the extent to which I'm still coasting on the fumes of my earlier institutionalized PhDified life. It's like my personal store of fossil fuel.

I'm basically an industrial-age trustie who didn't actually start drawing on the trust fund till age 33. Just not the family-wealth type. To do something like I've done starting as an undergrad-only free agent at age 22, with no inherited wealth, would likely be 10x harder