Frank Warren turns profits on PostSecret readers' sorrows

nicely done ernie

Look Matt, You're undermining yourself. I'm sure on some level you're aware of it, but please, let me spell it out. As I understand it, your primary criticisms of Frank Warren and the whole Postsecret project rest on it being a blind and egoistic emotionalism which is encouraged in the guise of therapy, but is actually based upon exploiting private lives for capital gain. Ok. Fine. But then don't go engaging in an egoistic emotionalism yourself with a melodramatic rant that seems, at least from my point of view, critical for the sake of Matthew Martell's "postmodern self-obsession ritual." Every sentence seems to scaffold around the conviction that the author as hero is much better than those plebs who went to Warren’s supposed circus of the absurd. You scoff at students you characterize as "lethargic," you sneer at the blogging engine Warren uses (Blogger! How pathetic!), and perhaps most revealingly, you absolve and condemn those who send in postcards in the same breath. ("I don’t hate the people who send their secrets into Warren in hopes of having them posted on his site. If that’s the way you want to go about letting out your internal turmoil, that’s your prerogative." and "God knows any sort of human contact will be more therapeutic than gazing at the illustrated angst of a collective of digitally isolated people on a site full of “secrets," etc.) Your method, in short, can only destabilize your findings. Setting aside your blatant disregard and perhaps total ignorance for what actually happened at the event, i.e. people standing up IN FRONT OF PEOPLE to read their own secrets, I suspect that you're missing the point of PostSecret. First of all, it's an art project. I agree that it serves as a sort of weird post-catholic confession booth, but jee-sus, I imagine the intent with even the most "emo" secrets is to demonstrate that every person you encounter, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, shares a common suffering in some manifestation or another. Though you tried to cover your ass here by supposedly leveling complaints against Warren, you’ve couched them amidst snide comments carelessly directed at everyone who’s ever felt such a pain and not had an outlet for it. I know it's trendy and all to mock how people feel, but ridiculing a basic human capacity for empathy disgusts me. And I’m tired of it. Forgive me if I’m being harsh, but I let the spectator get away with a lot. It’s sooooooo easy to condemn and be the appropriate level of subversive for a college newspaper, but for once, just once, it would be such a refreshing change to see some honest journalistic investigation or speculation emanating from the opinion pages. Why is there escapism in the online age? Why do people use this blog as a confessional? These are the sorts of questions that would be worth exploring, not the fruitless and anti-intellectual scolding I usually see. And yeah, postsecret is a little weird and all, but I’m sure Warren’s not an evil guy. He’s an artist who happens play the dual role of archivist, and has managed to make a living by tapping into a surprisingly rich cultural current. As a creative sort of person myself, as you are yourself, my fondest hope is that my idle speculation would spawn some goofy project that so many people would find meaningful, and manage to pull in a living wage on the side. I'm sorry, Matt, I know you're a good guy, and I know you’re not doing this out of spite, and you’ll admit to everyone who asks that you're a pretentious ass. Just don’t do this anymore and we’ll be square. ‘Kay? Thanks, Ernie