Against Credentials

Denunciations

Elsewhere on this platform, I’ve had my credentials (lightly) questioned, so I wanted both to explain myself — and to take issue, very strenuously, with this whole notion of credentialing.

My ‘credential’ — the credential I trot out for anybody I think I’m not going to spend much time with — is working for around ten years in the sort of big-budget documentary industry, first as an associate producer and then working my up to full producer on projects for Netflix, Showtime, Paramount+, A&E, etc. People are usually kind of impressed with this, but for me it has nothing much to do with anything, and their interest — people tend to start asking a lot of questions about this, whereas they show no interest at all about freelance writing — betrays, I think, a misunderstanding about credentialing that applies to all kinds of other lines of work.

I got into documentaries because I needed a job. It was very much adjacent to what I wanted to be doing, but, through an historical accident, writing paid nothing (print journalism was in freefall and creative writing, as the most successful writer I knew somberly explained it, “isn’t a profession”), and, through streaming, documentaries had entered into a gold rush. In retrospect, that moment really was just a confluence of different industry events — streaming was arriving, channels had realized that they could cut costs by featuring unpaid real people on screen as opposed to paying actors, and reality TV had shown the way for everyone — but that wasn’t how it was perceived at the time. We were in a cargo cult and no one could imagine any better way to make a living.

Cargo cult, Vanuatu

The giddiness around documentaries — the ability to be creative, and work on worthy topics, and make decent money, and get hooked up to a mass market — obscured how non-sensical so much of the work actually was. People from outside tended not to realize how compartmentalized the work was — each profession within the industry represented its own guild and each guild was only ever really interested in optimizing its own position. The sound guys were only ever interested in sound, the camera operators only ever in their gear and in exactly what was in their frame, the editors only in exactly what was in front of them. This compartmentalized, CYA system, produced staggering amounts of waste. The tendency of the field units was to “shoot with kalashnikovs” — just filming all day long, whether or not there was any chance that what they were filming would make the cut, but showing off how hard they were working and indicating that their bases were all covered. That deluge of footage produced a pile-up in post, but that didn’t really bother the editors since they could hire more assistants and create more work for their guild. The only people this really bothered were the line producers, who were responsible for the budget, but they were fairly easily mollified — the game, usually, at the higher levels was to go to the network for an “overage” and the logic was the Robert Moses-ian idea that once you dig the first pothole no one will stop you: once you were taking enough from the networks then they really were committed to working with you.

This hyper-specialization also produced a particular, insular mindset — nobody knew anything beyond their own domains, and nobody wanted anybody else to know anything within their domains (I remember how upset the editors would be if anyone else wandered into their suites, or the sound people if anyone touched their gear), and usually that meant that the well-being of the project itself would fall somewhere in the middle. “In the end it’s always just me and the DP like racing across a street to get a tripod,” I remember one of my directors saying, “while all our highly-paid PAs are sitting there on their phones.” But that statement revealed the other side of the coin — the directors and executive producers liked how divided it all was. That meant that they were the only ones able to put the different pieces together.

As I moved up in documentary film, I came into greater and greater contact with what I came to think of as “the fear-based production personality.” This was very disquieting to me and it took me a long time to understand what was going on. People in their 20s in documentary were, basically, confident and fun to work with. People in their 30s — the producers, and those in positions of power — weren’t. They were yes-men, obsessed with CYA and with busy-work, and they were, often, incapable of making decisions (in jobs that were only and entirely about decision-making). For a while, I thought that the issue was basically the freelance economy — that people had such little job security that, to feed their families, they had to hang on for dear life. Then I realized that the problem was deeper than that. It was that fear was something like a job requirement — it signaled to the higher-ups that you cared about what you were doing, and also that you were malleable.

But the fear-based personality wasn’t just a kind of psychological defect, it also profoundly impacted the way the work was done. On the most high-prestige project I worked on, there must have been only about four people doing actual work. Everybody else — dozens of them — were just looking over shoulders. There were endlessly multiplying production managers and production coordinators “looping each other in.” There were “supervising producers” in to manage the ever-coagulating workflow. There was legal review, and production insurance, and risk assessments — everybody working backwards from some (highly hypothetical) lawsuit or accident, making sure that they themselves weren’t liable, and collecting their fees along the way.

This experience led me to articulate a few, I believe, iron laws of production:

• The higher you are in the food chain, the more constrained you are

• The greater the prestige of the project, the less satisfying it is to work on

• The larger the organization the more conformity becomes the only virtue

I am dwelling at length on my own experience because I believe that it is transposable to just about anything in the, kind of, prestige economy — in modern academia, in journalism, in politics, in high-end corporate work. Everywhere workers find themselves facing the same set of circumstances — hyper-specialization and precarity — where the incentives are overwhelmingly to be polite, to placate, to CYA, and to conform, and all at the expense both of one’s final product and one’s dignity.

I didn’t hate everything about documentaries, my ostensible credential. I did like the prestige that came with them. I felt cool doing them, hopping around the country and burning through expense accounts. I liked the balletic feeling of showing up at some strange airport with a crew I hadn’t met before and with everyone instantly and dexterously sliding into their allotted roles. More importantly, it was in many ways very good for me — it showed me what the guts of organizations looked like, how things could get efficiently done (and, to its credit, the documentary industry did always turn out a product) and how games and cheats and ubiquitous selfishness could riddle organizations with inefficiencies. And, most importantly, it gave me the opportunity to meet all kinds of different people. The shoots always seemed to be in small towns. We would descend, and then somebody or other — heroin addicts, wildfire or tornado victims, social workers, whoever it was — would suddenly become the star of the hour, with cameras and mics raining down on them and with PAs transforming their home or office into a makeshift studio. Meanwhile, there would be a rapid-fire intercultural exchange with all the local techs and fixers who were enlisted for the shoot. And then as quickly as we came, we would leave again. We would always be annoyed whenever the shoot subjects reached out to us after the moment in the sun allotted to them. And the vast, vast majority of everything we did with them — usually, everything that wasn’t the exact right on-message bite for the point we wanted to make with the film — would disappear onto the cutting room floor. I had the feeling that most of our techs never really thought twice about the people they were meeting. But, for me, this was by far the best part. More and more on shoots, I found myself craving the quiet moments when I could write down everything as fast as possible before I forgot it — so much of the work was largely a charade to benefit the different guilds involved, but the glimpses of all these different sub-cultures were real and deeply reshaped my own thinking.

So what I got from documentary film wasn’t really credentials — it didn’t make me, say, a film expert, and the hyper-specialization made it so that I never so much as played around with somebody else’s camera or edit software. It did give me experience, but the experience was more along the lines of soft skills, organizational knowledge, and then a diversity of impressions that is unique to documentary field producing.

When, as I’ve increasingly been doing these days, I get into fights with people about credentialing, this is what’s behind the point that I’m making. Just the fact that somebody has worked in one place, or one profession, for a significant amount of time tells you very little — it lets you know that they were able to hold down a job, that they adapted at least to some extent to the survival ethos of whatever guild they were a part of, likely that they picked up a degree of specialized knowledge. But the more that a person stayed in one place, and rose through the ranks (which is to say, the more they are ‘credentialed’), the less inclined I am to trust them, actually, when it comes to general statements. The fact that they have been part of one institution or industry will have tended to limit their experiences and their horizons; they will have an institutional loyalty that will be hard for them to shake off, and all the more so the longer they spend in their field; and, if they have risen to senior positions, they will be constrained (maybe even more than they realize) by the politics of their discipline — they will be extraordinarily careful about not saying anything that might potentially offend a colleague, they will have gripes that will tend to relate only to the particular issues of their position, and they will have a reflexive tendency to advance the talking-points of their profession. As the very interesting Carroll Quigley puts it, decline occurs when “social instruments turn into institutions, that is, when there is a transformation of social arrangements functioning to meet real social needs into social institutions serving their own purposes regardless of real social needs,” and that switch to the self-protection of a guild is almost inevitable in enclosed, matured industries.

Laurence Peter of the Peter principle

Against the fetish of ‘expertise,’ what I suggest instead is the ethic of ‘beginner’s mind.’ As Shunryu Suzuki writes, “If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s there are few.” ‘Beginner’s mind’ does not contradict experience. Experience always gives more skills and tools. As George Gurdjieff puts it, the old soldier will always be faster and better than the recruit at rifle drill. But the true masters of a field have a way of going back to the beginning. Great actors are careful never to ‘anticipate’ — to always react absolutely in the moment however well they know the material. Chess players have a saying, “a move that only a beginner or a grandmaster would make” — meaning that, at the highest level, the best players find bizarre or unaesthetic moves that break the pattern-recognition that middling players are used to but that the grandmasters, with their more elastic thinking, are able to find. And the same goes for commentary of any sort. Having credentials doesn’t give you much. Being right before isn’t much of a guarantee that you’ll be right again. And the credential, as often as not, will tend to enclose you into a particular way of thinking as opposed to really approaching the problem from all sides and with fresh eyes. As Siegbert Tarrasch put it, “it is not enough to be a good player, one must also play well,” and in chess, as in acting, as in anything else, we are always, always, at the beginning, in the position of having to figure it all out, and reliant, in the end, always and only on our own resources.