A while back, a friend sent me a link to a site named Petrihouse.com, which claimed to launch an ‘incubator for writers’, with a pitch sounding something like ‘Always wanted to be a writer, but never had the time to actually put your thoughts to paper ? Come to Petrihouse, a writing camp where you’ll be surrounded by friendly, interesting people and aspiring writers like you ! Wake up in the morning, write til your brain is fried off, we take care of the rest to help you become the writer you’ve always known you could be !’
The website had a ‘Think this is for you ? Tell us something about yourself and we’ll be in touch !’ area to type something in, and claimed to launch the writing camps in summer 2014.
I found the concept so cheap, unproductive and symptomatic of a society where phony people try to extract money from people too shit to get things done by themselves, that I sent them a little essay, for kicks. Here it is :
“The “think and it is so” philosophy is a fallacy. It takes advantage of a society-instilled longing to be meaningful, an ingrained belief that one can accomplish anything they really want to if they set their minds to it…with the goal to keep people docile and consuming. You might think you’re good, you might work hard at your craft, and you might just as likely hopelessly suck at it. It is part of being clever to recognize when to give up on what you think you’re made for, and figure out what you’re actually decent at. And that could be nothing. And you might as well deal with it now.
While in your ego-inflated bubble of non-creativity (because you suck) and procrastination (because you’re lazy), you’re most likely looking for effortless ways to improve your capacity to perform. For that, a bunch of products and services are made available to you. You want to be a writer ? Cool, you need a Mac then ! The keyboards are just nicer, faster to type on. They’re also lighter to carry around to Starbucks, and you need that coffee to get your creativity going (and because it looks cool to be writing at Starbucks). Hey, that’s alright. I’ve done it also. Not on a mac though.
But let’s say that in spite of the coffee and Mac, you still cannot get strong enough focus to write. Your attention span has long ago been burnt to ashes by the short-bursts-of-information culture (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Buzzfeed…), and you now just cannot quite concentrate on your ‘passion’ long enough to come up with anything substantial. Well I am sure you will find a service providing you with a retreat, allowing you to get in touch with your thoughts and focus on your writing. They’ll put you up in a nice place, you’ll have a room of rudimentary comfort (like all the great writers did at first - Spartan comfort and creativity go hand in hand, everyone knows that), food, friends and guidance ; and everything around you will be set to facilitate the creative process that you never quite had the chance to enjoy thus far.
Basically, all the things you should have done by yourself, had you had any plausible talent and dedication, you can now pay for. It used to be called ‘getting a grip and getting to work’, or ‘going on a holiday to write shit’ ; it is now a business model, invented by people who understood that you can take advantage of trendy white people stuff (‘I’m gonna be a writeeeeer’) to make money in a way that does not produce anything.
Thank you, Petrihouse, for allowing talentless, undedicated people to spend their (parents’) money on a service they could have better found booking a bungalow on a beach in Thailand, had they had the required smarts to be decent at writing in the first place anyway. You’re securing the future with a steady stream of fucking awful thoughtcatalog.com level articles, in the name of making a quick buck. On the back of dumb people. Awesome.”
I did not get a reply, and the website has since been taken off. We’ll never know if the next Céline was to get started at writing camp.
