Wednesday, May 3, 2023

Honor Levy


In a previous blog post, I touched on poasting as a creative avenue.  I will take that statement even further and say that it is the last great artistic sphere.  It is important that people who want to create adapt to this.  A creative who has excelled in formatting her writing for the online world is Honor Levy.  Being only a couple years older than us, she didn’t even need to adapt her artistry for the internet; it was born of the internet.  This is encapsulated in a piece written in 2020 for New York Tyrant titled
Internet Girl.  In reading this we can really see how big of a vibeshifter she is as it is kind of mother to all these other “girlblogs” that sprung up in the wake of covid.  Levy’s podcast with co-host Walter Pearce Wet Brain, also released in 2020, can be seen as not only vibeshifting but prophetic.


Internet culture is kind of like Reaganomics in that there are certain niche groups who will coin words or images and then this trickles down to more mainstream circles.  A favorite Honor quote of mine from the podcast is “all culture is downstream from reactionary incels”.   This is pretty much entirely true.  Knowing this, Levy writes in a totally new fashion tailored to the high speed of the contemporary world.  In her officially published articles we get a sense of this but they are much more comprehensible to the average viewer than say her tweets or substack posts, which, to the untrained eye, appear very “schizzed”.  I believe she is to come out with a book this year, and I am curious if it will be in her more professional style.  Lots of people say that Honor Levy and the circle she runs in, irl or online, is insular and reactionary, but truly anyone can gain acceptance within if they just post good enough.


I used the term vibe shift which itself has become a meme at this point, but it is a powerful phrase that is apt in some situations.  It is tired at this point especially due to more mainstream platforms coming out with articles about it or the “zeitgeist” and in doing so somewhat misunderstanding what they attempt to describe.  I’m not going to describe anything right now as it requires so much context that you Had To Be There For, I am simply trying to impress upon readers the impact Honor Levy has had on internet vibes.  She gets it!  That’s how it boils down.


Levy tetters the line of pro-C as she has made money off of some efforts but it is definitely not the traditional idea of “professional”.  As for her motivation, a lot of it can be considered extrinsic but the writings are so personal there must be an aspect of an intrinsic need to get these feelings out.