Fran Lebowitz Schools a Bunch of High-Tech Content Marketers

Fran Lebowitz was an unintuitive yet inspired choice to close out the 2017 Intelligent Content Conference, a gathering of data-driven content marketers on the bleeding edge of their field. Fran is an enigma of the publishing industry and of New York City (Manhattan, to be exact) life. Following early success as a columnist for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine and two celebrated books of essays that showcased her acerbic wit (Metropolitan Life, 1978 and Social Studies, 1981), and a quirky children’s book in 1994, she has not published a word ever since. Not that she retreated from public view — she is a fixture of the New York social scene, does a fair amount of public speaking and even did an acting stint as a judge on Law and Order.

Why would a successful published author with obvious talent and a sharp eye for the absurdity of our times — not to mention plenty of strong opinions — just stop writing?

I for one would have eagerly bought more of her books. When I was in high school in San Francisco in the late 80s, my friends and I dreamed of escaping what we thought was a provincial backwater (this was obviously pre-tech mania) for Fran’s life of bohemian sophistication in New York. Yes, we were going to hang out at Café Borgia in the Village, smoke and read and have real literary conversations, make fun of CATS (the musical) and tourists and bridge-and-tunnel people (although Fran herself is proud to have grown up in Morristown, NJ). We were so obsessed with Fran that we called ourselves “The Frans” and still call each other Fran to this day.

Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publications. — Fran Lebowitz

Despite having actually made it to New York, I never quite broke into the Vanity Fair dinner party circuit, so needless to say I was pretty excited to share a room with her and several hundred other people at the keynote yesterday (many of whom, as she pointed out, were “born after her current book contract was signed”). As it turns out, she IS working on her next book — and has been for the last 40-ish years. “Sometimes people say they ordered it on Amazon and it didn’t come. If you get a copy, can you send it to me? I need it.”

Fran’s olympian case of writer’s block, if that can be assumed to be the problem, was not why the conference organizer booked her, however. What was most pertinent about Fran for this crowd is the fact that she does not own a computer or smartphone, does not email, or engage in social media of any kind. Her dislike of machines runs so deep that she has never even owned a typewriter, preferring to write (or not, as the case may be) in longhand. She is, therefore, the ideal alien observer of our current culture, what one audience member called “the lone B in a massive A/B test.”

When asked about her aversion to technology, she made clear that it is not a “stance.” She said that if technology can cure cancer, great. But she does not believe that technology is helping us communicate better. “You spend all day writing, writing, writing to each other — for free! If the phone had been invented after these devices, you all would have thought, ‘Wow, this is amazing! So much easier, you just talk into it!’”

Polite conversation is rarely either. — Fran Lebowitz

She pointed out all the things we’ve willingly given up — our evenings, our weekends (“nobody can find me on the weekend”), real conversation. Asked what she thought of “user-generated content” from a woman who worked for a Trip Advisor-like site, Fran replied, “you mean the general public? You know, they’re called the general public for good reason. Not the exceptional public, or the brilliant public. People used to just bore their relatives.”

After delivering an epic rant on the demise of our democracy under the current administration for which I hope there will be a complete transcript, Fran got to the point: “Look. I believe in experts. Whether you’re the secretary of state or a cab driver, you should be better than anyone else at what you do.”

It warmed my heart to see this ballroom full of millennials and people from actual provincial backwaters respond so enthusiastically to my favorite angry woman, who ran out of f*cks somewhere between 14th and 23rd Streets in 1982. People were laughing out loud and reacting to her luddite pronouncements as if Amy Schumer herself were scandalizing a room of born-again Christians.

It would be supremely un-Fran to try and derive meaningful connections between her story and the practice of content marketing, and bulletize them into key take-aways. So I won’t. But I think the reason they invited Fran to speak was to point out to us that all of the AI and analytics and multi-channel marketing technology in the world will make no difference whatsoever if we don’t start out with something to interesting to say. And to have something interesting to say, you have to be an interesting person, who listens to other interesting people.

In Lauren Vargas’ talk earlier in the conference about “Reimagining the Digital Ecosystem,” she applied principals of urban planning to our digital organizations. In order to stop the “sprawl” of data, she argues that we need to concentrate it in centers that allow a certain amount of chaos within clearly defined borders.

When it comes to the content sphere, perhaps we need to start containing the sprawl into a digital Manhattan, where a constant interaction of ideas allows the best content to flourish. We’ll need voices like Fran’s — strong, smart, opinionated, informed, and funny — to save us from bland strip malls of ideas and dangerous echo chambers.

The fact that Fran wrote two successful books forty years ago and has been dining out on them ever since suggests another important lesson. Fran said it best when she proposed “The Architecture Mother” as an offshoot of the Stage Mother (Metropolitan Life):

Other mothers have children who pay attention, who realize that form should follow function, and that there’s such a thing as considering the reflective qualities of glass before going out to play. Other mothers can relax once in a while because their children listen the first time without having to be told over and over again, until I’m sick of hearing myself say it, “Less, less, I mean it, less! And I’m not going to say it again!”

If you could make one piece of content so remarkable and unique that you could unplug all your devices and simply bask in your own awesomeness for the rest of your career, what would it be?