Gatekeeping

The Gate I Built

I’ve spent a working life just outside the rooms where work gets anointed. Not entirely outside — I wrote tech books that went out under Sams and O’Reilly imprints , among others, and built apps that shipped under other companies’ logos, CNN and Xfinity among them. I was in those rooms often enough. I just paid a toll at the door every time, and the thing that vouched for the work was never me. It was the imprint on the spine, the logo on the app. That’s most of the truth about me. Here’s the part I’m least comfortable with: for about four years, I helped build one of those gates myself. And the thing making it look ridiculous now is a different machine — one that does for free the exact trick my gate was built to measure.

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The Gate Was the Product

Nobody anointed this. No imprint vouched for it. No agent shopped it. No editor at a masthead you’d recognize read it first and decided I was worth a slot. I wrote it, I published it, and the only gate it passed through was the one between my draft and the internet, which is to say no gate at all. I mention this not as a sovereignty flex — plenty of unvouched-for writing deserves to stay unvouched-for — but because it’s the vantage point for everything that follows. I’ve spent a working life making things — books for publishers, apps that shipped under other companies’ names — plenty of it the kind of work that gets anointed, none of it under my own name. I’ve been in the rooms; I was just never the one they stamped. That’s a useful place to stand when you want to ask what the anointing was ever actually worth.

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