Re: the Substackfication-of-journalism stuff I’ve been writing about lately, this interview with Ted Gioia is fascinating.
And I now see that the always-smart Megan McArdle has weighed in. One small dissent, though: She writes, "There are some reasons to think that Substack might survive a march of the incumbents” — and by “incumbents” she means (a) the major social-media platforms and (b) the major newspapers and magazines, because both (a) and (b) are getting into the newsletter game. But I’d argue that in relation to paid newsletters, Substack is the chief incumbent. The genre has been around long enough for me to say that, I think.
expectations
A few times over the past several years I have written to organizations of various sorts to ask them not to politicize their public presence, or at least to tone the politics down. (Some of these companies have been right-leaning, more of them left-leaning.) These have been products or services or institutions that have no intrinsic political slant, but their owners have insisted in bolting on their politics to everything they do. I have asked them not to do that, because the 24/7 politicization of culture gets really wearying. And in every single case their reply to me has been the same, in only slightly varying words: “If you don’t agree not only with our politics but with the emphasis we place on our politics, then we don’t want your business.” To which my first thought has always been: Wow, you guys must be really making bank.
But my second thought has been: Maybe you should have the integrity to make public, right on your website, your expectations for your customers: What political positions do you demand that people take before you’ll condescend to accept their money?
UPDATE 2021-04-29: I have to confess I did something a bit mischievous the other day, after the whole big scuffle broke out about Basecamp’s banning political debate from its internal communications. Several small tech businesses with which I have accounts went absolutely ballistic about that decision – really, you’d have thought the Basecamp founders had endorsed Hitler or even Donald Trump – and said that in protest they were closing their Basecamp accounts. So I thought it would be fun to write to them and say that I was quite disturbed about their attack on Basecamp and didn’t know whether I could continue to do business with them. (I know, I know, it’s a trick unworthy of my sterling character.) Within mere minutes of receiving my messages all of them wrote back to say that they didn’t want my business. I didn’t reply, because I thought I had taken it far enough, but I wonder: Were they expecting Basecamp to respond to them any differently they they responded to me? The whole song and dance is ridiculous: “I don’t want their business!” “Well, I don’t want your business.” “Then I don’t want your business.” Maybe everyone involved should just, I don’t know, get into some business that doesn’t involve … business.
three characters in search of forgiveness
In his online notebook, my friend Adam Roberts is reflecting on a certain kind of fictional character, the Murderbot kind, the Winter Soldier kind, and reflecting also on a certain intensity of fascination with them. I have to say that I’m not totally sure I understand Adam’s account, but if I do understand it I don’t think I agree with his conclusion. That is, I don’t think people who stan for Murderbot and Bucky Barnes are associating their own sins with those of the characters. I think they’re trying out a little thought experiment to answer a question: Under what conditions might forgiveness of great sin be possible?
And I think this is an important question because, as I never tire of saying, our society “retains an inchoate sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness.” In my reading, the interest of characters like Murderbot and Bucky is that their stories outline the conditions for forgiveness, which may be stated briefly thus: You may be forgiven for something if you can show that it wasn’t really done by you. When Murderbot killed 57 people, it did so under commands it could not have overriden; ditto with all the killing that Bucky did. You have to be able to redefine yourself not as acting but as acted-upon.
Here’s another fictional character who fits this description: Hamlet. When in Act V he confronts Laertes — Laertes who is hot for vengeance because this man murdered his father and drove his sister to insanity and perhaps suicide — he has a story for him:
Give me your pardon, sir: I’ve done you wrong; But pardon’t, as you are a gentleman. This presence knows, And you must needs have heard, how I am punish’d With sore distraction. What I have done, That might your nature, honour and exception Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness. Was’t Hamlet wrong’d Laertes? Never Hamlet: If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away, And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes, Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it. Who does it, then? His madness: if’t be so, Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong’d; His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy.
That is, Laertes should pardon Hamlet precisely because Hamlet has done nothing that requires pardoning. His will was overriden by his madness. Like Murderbot programmed by nasty human beings, and Bucky Barnes re-programmed by Communists, Hamlet has had his executive center taken over, in his case by madness. Therefore: “poor Hamlet.” Not “Poor Polonius” or “Poor Opehlia” — poor Hamlet. He’s the real victim here.
So, four hundred years avant la lettre, those are the circumstances in which our culture can most easily imagine forgiving people: When they can spin the story, accurately or inaccurately, to cast themselves as victimized. But if they can achieve that, then they can be forgiven anything.
What happens, though, to those of us who performed our wrong while in our right minds?
UPDATE 2021–04–28: My friend Leah Libresco points to this excellent and extremely relevant essay by Eve Tushnet:
If someone genuinely did not choose to do wrong then compassion for that person isn’t mercy — it’s justice. And conversely, if you can only have compassion on someone if you believe she did not choose her misdeeds, then you’ve defined mercy out of existence. You’re not forgiving — you’re saying there was never anything to forgive.
And I think this narrative, in which addiction destroys the will, exists precisely because we don’t trust others to have mercy on us or on those we love. A lot of people get jumpy when conservatives start talking about “personal responsibility” not because they think it’s awesome to be a self-centered overgrown infant, but because they think “personal responsibility” is code for a) conflating all forms of personal failure — mistakes, bad luck, a bad hand dealt at birth, inability to overcome massive societal injustice, misunderstandings, petty idiocy, and grave sin; and then b) punishing personal failure with contempt and cruelty.
Adam Smith had this cute little tagline, which I admit I am taking out of context, “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” Now first of all, mercy to the guilty is the only kind of mercy there is, see above for details. But we might also add, “Cruelty to the guilty creates pressure to declare everybody innocent.”
exhaustion
Freddie might be indulging in a bit of exaggeration for rhetorical effect here, responding to the “discourse of exhaustion”:
Listen. Listen to me and understand: you are exhausted because your species was a mistake. You are exhausted because life is pain. You are exhausted because for 200,000 years we evolved to run the plains like the wild animals we were, our social circles 10 or 12 people at most, and now our conditions have changed so quickly that evolution can’t keep up, so we sift through our thousands of human connections spellbound by the impossibility of maintaining them all as we sit in our cramped and sterile apartments in crowded cities that were never meant to exist. Once we were animals. Now we are something much worse.Let’s grant, per argumentum, that all this is true. It nevertheless is also true that I have never been as tired at the end of a school year as I am right now. Covidtide has been distinctively challenging for many of us, it just has, though I don’t claim to have a full understanding of all aspects of the phenomenon.
One of the small comforts of the past year has been reading the blog of Ada Palmer, a science-fiction writer and historian of the Renaissance who also deals with chronic debilitating illness, and in the course of learning how to deal with her symptoms has learned a few things that might be helpful to the rest of us.
Among other things, dealing with occasional incapacity has made her attentive to elements of the historical record that others might pass over. She especially notices all the quotidian things that stand between us and what we want to do, what to be. For instance, in a transcript of a talk, this reflection on Michelangelo:
In his autobiography he’s talking about this lawsuit that arose because of the della Rovere tomb project, in great detail, and then there’s a line that says Michelangelo realized that, while dealing with a bunch of lawsuits and Pope Adrian and such, he’d been so stressed he hadn’t picked up a chisel in four years. Because he spent the entire time just dealing with the lawsuit. (Anyone feeling guilty about being overwhelmed by stress this year, you’re not alone!) And we have four years worth of lost Michelangelo production, because he didn’t do any art that entire time, because he was just dealing with a stupid lawsuit. And that’s not the sort of thing that fits into our usual way of thinking about these great historical figures. We imagine Michelangelo in his studio with a chisel. We do not imagine him in a room with a bunch of lawyers being curmudgeonly and bickering and trapped in contract hell.And then — more directly connected to our moment — a comment on Isaac Newton:
Early in the pandemic the anecdote went viral that Isaac Newton came up with his theory of gravity while he was quarantining in the country from a plague, and many people (not jokingly enough) used it to say we should have high standards for what we produce in a pandemic, or that if we don’t set high standards it means we’re not geniuses like him. The true fact (historian here, this is my period!) is that Newton did theorize gravity while quarantining, but didn’t have library access, and while he was testing the theory he didn’t have some of the constants he needed (sizes, masses), so he tried to work from memory, got one wrong, did all the math, and concluded that he was wrong and the gravity + ellipses thing didn’t work. He stuck it in a drawer. It was only years later when a friend asked him about Kepler’s ellipses that he pulled the old notes back out of the drawer to show the friend, and the friend spotted the error, they redid the math, and then developed the theory of gravity. Together, with full library access, when things were normal after the pandemic. During the pandemic nobody could work properly, including him. So if anyone pushes the claim that we should all be writing brilliant books during this internationally recognized global health epidemic, just tell them Newton too might have developed gravity years earlier if not for his pandemic.If you’be been able to be as chipper and as productive in this past year as you normally are, consider yourself blessed. I sure as hell haven’t managed it.
how to read stuff posted online
Very few sites on the internet are meant to facilitate reading — most are, in fact, designed to inhibit reading. Imagine watching a movie and having the image regularly shrink to a tiny size, overwhelmed by a much larger advertisement which also plays its sound at double the volume of the movie’s sound — that’s what reading a corporate site is usually like. (I hope you will have noticed that I try to make this blog easily readable on large and small screens alike. Also, perhaps, that I have recently added a button to enable dark mode.)
So what to do? Well, most browsers now offer some kind of reading mode, which helps a lot — though I have not found one that works on every site. Or you could use a read-it-later service like Instapaper or Pocket. I do these things.
Sometimes, though, I come across a long story or article or essay that I want to read without any of the distractions of being online. In that case I choose one of the following options:
(1) If simply attentive reading is the goal, I often use a service called Push to Kindle. It does a superb job of converting webpages so that they’re perfectly formatted for the Kindle. For instance, someone recently recommended to me a long SF story called “Folding Beijing” — that’s a perfect candidate for Push to Kindle. I downloaded it and will probably read it in the next day or two. When anything is over 2500 words or so I get really uncomfortable reading it on my computer, so I often use this service for the lengthy reviews in the London Review of Books — to which I subscribe, but the print in the paper edition is uncomfortably small for my aging eyes — and their extended analytical essays like Perry Anderson’s three recent reflections on the European Union — totaling 45,000 words, longer than my most recent book — are also best-suited for the Kindle.
(I’m trying not to buy anything else from Amazon, but I continue to use what I’ve already bought, putting off the Day of Decision until my current Kindle dies.)
(2) But if I need to interact significantly with the text — highlight and underline — then I use a different service, Print Friendly. It converts webpages to PDFs that can be saved and/or printed. I use this all the time when I want to make PDFs to send to my students, or when a post really demands critical attention. Example: Ada Palmer’s long post from last year on the ways in which the Renaissance was worse than the Middle Ages.
There’s a lot of great stuff on the internet. Not much of it is presented in ways designed for serious reading. But as you can see, that’s a problem that can be addressed.
first signs
Recently I wrote a post for the Hedgehog Review on the Substackification of journalism and whether it marks a permanent atomization of journalistic writing or whether it could be the seed of institutional renewal. Here are a couple of relevant data points:
- On his Substack newsletter, Scott Alexander has been running book reviews by his readers.
- On her Substack newsletter, Bari Weiss has been publishing essays by other writers, and explains that practice thus: "My goal is not to make a living publishing only my views — or ones that conform exactly to my worldview — on this Substack. (Trust me, it’d get boring.) My ultimate goal is far more ambitious. I want to run the most interesting opinion page in America, filled with fresh reporting and commentary.”
Substack began as a way of highlighting distinctive individual voices; it’s already turning into something more collaborative.
acoustic renown
Kleos means both “glory” or “fame” and also “the song that ensures that glory or fame.” The noun is cognate with the Homeric verb kluō, meaning “I hear.” Kleos is sometimes translated as “acoustic renown” — the spreading renown you get from talking about your exploits.* It’s a bit like having a large Twitter following. In the Homeric version of the Ethos of the Extraordinary … to live a life worth living was to live a kleos-worthy life, a song-worthy life. Being sung, having one’s life spoken about, your story vivid in others’ heads, is what gives your life an added substance. It’s almost as if, in being vividly apprehended by others, you’re living simultaneously in their representations of you, acquiring additional lives to add to your meager one.
The Ethos of the Extraordinary answered that all that a person can do is to enlarge that life by the only means we have, striving to make of it a thing worth the telling, a thing that will have an impact on other minds, so that, being replicated there, it will take on a moreness. Kleos. Live so that others will hear of you. Paltry as it is, it’s the only way we have to beat back uncaring time.Our own culture of Facebook’s Likes and Twitter followings should put us in a good position to sympathize with an insistence on the social aspect of life-worthiness. Perhaps it’s a natural direction toward which a culture will drift, once the religious answers lose their grip. The ancient Greeks lived before the monotheistic solution took hold of Western culture, and we — or a great many of us — live after. A major difference between our two cultures is that, for the ancient Greeks, who lacked our social media, the only way to achieve such mass duplication of the details of one’s life in the apprehension of others was to do something wondrously worth the telling. Our wondrous technologies might just save us all the personal bother. Kleos is a tweet away.
— Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex
* “Though the gods are incessantly mentioned [in Pindar’s poems], this ethos presents a life worth living in terms that are drawn far more from the world of men. What is desired is not the attention of the immortals, but rather the attention of one’s fellow mortals. The gods come prominently into the picture because they either promote or prevent this good — that is, the achievement that brings fame — from being attained, but the good itself isn’t defined in terms of the gods. The good belongs to the world of mortals; it’s their attention and acclaim one is after.” – RNG↩
follow the links
This is the sort of thing the world needs more of. Matthew Sweet saw a tweet claiming that a peer-reviewed study from a Stanford University scholar proved that face masks do nothing to prevent the spread of COVID-19. So he followed up, and learned that
- It was not a peer-reviewed study;
- The author is not associated with Stanford University or any other institution;
- None of the evidence it cites supports the claim about the uselessness of masks.
a bit of friendly advice
Here’s my suggestion: Assume that everything everyone says on social media in the first 72 hours after a news event is the product of temporary insanity or is a side-effect of a psychotropic drug. Write it off. Pretend it never happened. Only pay attention to what they say when three days have passed since the precipitating event.
Rome fell in a day
A couple of thoughts about the collapse of the so-called European Super League.
First, it’s impossible to overstress how badly thought-out the entire enterprise was. The twelve clubs who signed up to create the Super League did nothing to get any of their constituencies on board. They didn’t even inform their managers and players. The one refrain from the managers interviewed about this – the managers who had to go out and face the press and public while the people who made the decisions were hiding in their penthouse apartments – was that they didn’t know anything more than the journalists: They found out at the same time the journalists found out. Moreover, the massive loan these executives had secured from J.P. Morgan was essentially an advance on television revenues, and they hadn’t made or even attempted to make a TV deal. If no TV deal had been forthcoming, or an unexpectedly poor one, then all of those clubs would have been on the hook for paying back a loan that at least some of them simply do not have the resources to pay back. It was a pyramid scheme, and a badly designed one at that.
The second point is this: The chief makers of this fiasco are extremely unlikely to resign or be fired. (Ed Woodward is out, but he was on his way out anyway — I don’t think he would’ve been fired over just this, because Manchester United has been the least apologetic of any of the English clubs — and only Arsenal issued a straightforward apology that acknowledged the damage done.) There’s no way Florentino Pérez should still have a job, but I cannot imagine any circumstances in which he will get what he deserves; nor, obviously, can he. Andrea Agnelli remains confident in his excellent judgment and enjoys mocking his critics, despite being an absolute clown. And they can be so serene because they quite obviously do not give a rat’s ass about the clubs they work for or the game their teams play. They don’t care! It doesn’t matter to them! If, as a result of the stupidities of Agnelli and Pérez, those two great old clubs Juventus and Real Madrid had to close up shop, shut down altogether, do you think either Agnelli or Pérez would acknowledge any responsibility — or even lose five minutes’ sleep over the catastrophe? Of course not. It’s unthinkable. Somehow or another they would get a golden parachute and that would be just fine with them. Whatever wrath was directed their way by the press would mean absolutely nothing to them. This is what we mean by the word “shameless”: people cannot be shamed when they’re permanently content with their own behavior and care not a whit about the views of their fellow human beings.
It’s the fans who care, the fans who love the game and love their clubs, and they are the ones who are hurt by all this — and by the manifold corruptions that led up to it and that remain in place. And, as the Agnellis and Pérezes of the world know, this means that the fans will come back. The fans actually have the power to force change: if they were to stop attending the games — once attendance becomes possible again — if they were to boycott the clubs' merchandise, if they were to boycott the television sponsors, they could make something happen. But we all know it won’t play out that way. People don’t just love their teams; in a cruelly mechanical surveillance-capitalism world they need the emotional hit that comes from investment in the successes or failures of their club. It’s surely asking too much of them to demand that they take meaningful collective action. And that’s why at the end of all this Agnelli and Pérez, or in any case people very much like them, will still be running the big clubs. They have the freedom that comes from not caring about anything but their own bank accounts.
updates on this and that
In the wake of the jury’s determination that Derek Chauvin is guilty of the murder of George Floyd, I’ll just say that I stand firmly by what I wrote last August.
I wish to align myself wholly with what Tish Harrison Warren says here about the “whole life movement.” Preach it, sister, I’m here for it all.
In the wake of what appears to be the imminent collapse of the European Stupid League, I will just say that the most accurate and concise summary comes from Manchester City defender Aymeric Laporte:
— Aymeric Laporte (@Laporte)
And in other positive news, I have added to my repertoire of media ecology essays with this entry at the Hog Blog on Substack (and other new platforms) as Distributism for writers and artists.
Welcome back, friend.
