The AI influencer Aitana lives in Barcelona
Plus: the new polyamory memoir made me think about narcissism and memoirs (not polyamory)
Greetings from Barcelona —
This month, my mom was visiting from the U.S. On her last day, we took the bus to Barceloneta and walked along the beach. It had been raining all day, but in the afternoon it cleared and the sun came out.
My mom walked to the end of one of the piers while I lay down on one of the many fixed concrete seating areas near one of the many outdoor gyms, and basked in the warm winter sun. People walked their dogs, guys worked out on the gym, and others out for a similar walk lazed in the other chairs.
After, we took the subway to Gracia, where we drank a beer in the Plaça de la Virreina, sitting next to a centuries-old church while kids frolicked and blew gigantic bubbles. Their parents sat nearby with friends, sipping beer or vermut or espresso.
After the beer, we walked through Gracia, browsing bookstores, and admiring the dozens of independent shops. We ducked into a final cafe to have another drink, then we went to see a movie at the local theatre, Cines Verdi.
Life is good, we mused over and again. The food and drink are cheap, the public transportation is easy, the neighborhoods are incredibly liveable, the vibe is good, and the weather is beautiful.
I. Aitana Lopez, the AI Influencer from Barcelona.
I had to laugh at this: apparently, one of the world’s first AI influencers is a super hot pink-haired gamer named Aitana Lopez—who is from Barcelona.
Actually, the first thing I laughed at was the “Gamer at heart” label on her Instagram profile, which must say something about the target audience for this AI model.
But then, so does being from Barcelona, of all the cities (my thoughts on that in a moment).
According to the news reports, Aitana was designed by a modeling agency short of clients, or rather, short of cooperating clients:
"We started analysing how we were working and realised that many projects were being put on hold or cancelled due to problems beyond our control. Often it was the fault of the influencer or model and not due to design issues," Cruz told Euronews.
So, they decided to create their own influencer to use as a model for the brands that approached them.
Before long, Aitana was making around €10,000/month, which is how the story went semi-viral. Right now there are probably a million other agencies (or just guys in their basement) out there trying to experiment with the same, ahem, model.
But why Barcelona? In point of fact, it’s because the agency’s founder, Ruben Cruz, is from here.
Still, I like to think it has something to do with this city’s brand, which I’ve been thinking about a lot. It’s some overlap between exotic and accessible, which is exactly what you might want for a broadly popular fashion model. Barcelona is exotic in its internationalism, its position on the water, facing the Mediterranean, its reputation for nightlife, and beautiful people, its history, and in its dual identity as both an international town and the capital of Catalonia.
But it’s also an accessible city: there are plenty of people here speaking English, and failing that Spanish is a pretty easy language to get a beginner’s grasp on. It’s connected, it’s in Europe, it’s easy to get to, and it feels like a place one could visit and not get too overwhelmed walking around.
I think Barcelona’s essential draw is this: it’s got an exotic internationalism combined with an accessible language and location.
II. The new polyamory memoir makes one wonder about memoirs (not polyamory)
Last week I went down a rabbit hole after reading Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten’s funny response to the new memoir by Molly Roden Winter about her polyamorous marriage.
Winter’s book has led to a lot of think pieces about the cultural moment polyamory seems to be having (See, The Atlantic. Washington Post, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, and I’m sure many more).
But it wasn’t the discussion about polyamory that had me interested—rather, it was Alexander’s comments about memoirs and the people who write them. He observes that books of advice are “disproportionately written by defective people,” and that people write memoirs because they have had a bunch of problems in their lives that needed sorting out.
They write because the things they tried to do did not come effortlessly.
In contrast, people whose lives are 100 percent organized, perfect, and together usually don’t write memoirs.
For example:
Go to an elderly couple who have been happily married for fifty years, and they’ll give you vapid old-person advice like “Treat every day as a gift from God.” But go to someone who’s struggled with every one of their last thirty-seven relationships, and they’ll be full of suggestions!
And:
Memoirs aren’t necessarily written by people in terrible relationships. Just narcissists.
Maybe not all of them. But The Atlantic’s complaint was that [Winter’s book] seemed kind of navel-gazey. It was the work of someone who had fallen too deep into the self-help ethos of examining every one of their experiences to see if it was maximally resonant with their True Self.
The bolding above is mine, and—as a committed memoirist myself—the passage got my attention.
I don’t think I’m a narcissist (what narcissist does?) but I am undoubtedly quite introspective about my place in the world. Writing memoir can seem quite frivolous at times. Maybe I should concentrate my writing talents instead on solving some grave world problem?
But at least I’m not writing the kind of self-help advice stuff that Alexander finds so distasteful, and which I often find pretty shallow. As I explained last year in Why I write memoir:
I don’t give advice because I don’t think my own life is necessarily instructive of anything.
I am a data point of one.
It would be the height of hubris to suggest that because I did something some way, therefore now you should do something the same way. I am but a single example of how to do something, and probably a not particularly applicable one. That is why I write memoir.
It comes down to this: I can only speak for myself. Anything else feels dishonest.
So at least I am on the record there.
III. Feeling helpless
Still, in The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper argues that an overabundance of memoirs is the predictable output of a narcissistic society obsessed with personal fulfillment.
To make the point he paraphrases Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism:
Narcissism is a survival strategy: If we are fixated on finding fulfillment and endless self-reinvention, it is because our own inner lives feel like the only thing most of us have control over. The therapeutic cult of personal growth is a response to external problems that feel insoluble, a future that feels shorn of causes for hope.
The feeling of helplessness is certainly understandable in today’s world of dysfunctional institutions and seemingly intransigent political fights. We live in a tumultuous and confusing time, but then—most times have felt tumultuous and confusing to the people who lived them.
Yet I don’t feel helpless. Far from it (another reason I’m probably not a narcissist?). We can always affect change in the environment immediately around us. We can always make, build, create, write, whatever it is—and we can also do the opposite: participate in acts of destruction.
(For what it’s worth, I view screaming politics into the social media void as neither)
A big satisfaction of doing home renovation projects like the ones at my properties in Spain, New Mexico, and New Hampshire, is seeing the results of your labor, in physical form, every single day. A lot of people who work in offices, participate in endless meetings, or do knowledge work miss out on this kind of immediate physical feedback loop, which is a shame because it’s a near-perfect salve to the feeling of helplessness.
IV. A series of nonbinding commitments
One last point from the polyamory rabbit hole.
In The Atlantic article, Harper writes that Christopher Lasch thought of open marriage as “the logical end point of a narcissistic, survivalist culture”:
“The fear and rejection of parenthood, the tendency to view the family as nothing more than marriage, and the perception of marriage as merely one in a series of nonbinding commitments, reflect a growing distrust of the future and a reluctance to make provisions for it,” Lasch claimed.
In the end, I don’t have much to say about polyamory, but I have been writing about commitments for years—especially commitments to people, places, and communities. If digital nomadism feels quite empty after a while, it’s because digital nomads divorce themselves from those things. They’ve over-indexed on freedom and under-invested in everything else.
It’s not that you need to commit to everything all at once. But there is a middle ground. For me, a good example is buying property, especially fixer-uppers. I have committed my financial resources and my time, and I am invested in the community. But it doesn’t have to be forever. I could always sell it.
This feels much better than pure digital nomadism for me.
I'm pretty sure that if the memoir had been written by a man, it wouldn't have been called narcissistic or navel gazey, rather 'forward thinking' or some cliché like that. And to call the entire memoir genre a product of a narcissistic society, that's a stretch that sounds like click bait more than anything.
I do write memoir too (but my comment is completely objective, I promise ;) ) and I noticed my readers' perception: that I write to make sense of what I'm experiencing, or I write what happened to me the other day. Memoir is not a diary; it's not written psychotherapy. Memoir is a *literary* genre, and when done right is brilliant - like Educated, as you mentioned.
Also, this reminds me of a great essay by Melissa Febos, In praise of navel gazing. Here's a line: "Indeed, while male navel-gazing has been valorized as the kindling for many a Great American Novel, when the introspection comes from women, it is scorned as so much whining no one wants to hear about yet again."
Thank you for articulating my feelings about memoir and memoir writers. Which is not to say there aren’t ones I’ve enjoyed (books and people). In general though, my got response is to cringe. Like watching reality TV, which I can’t, or karaoke, which I also can’t do or watch.