As I write, all of the ICU beds in McLennan County, where I live, are occupied. The vast majority have covid. Of those who have covid, 93% are unvaccinated. The beat goes on. And on. And on.
hubris
A conservative doctor recently told me that after January 6th he “unplugged.” He stopped watching cable news. He stopped listening to talk radio. And lest he be tempted to engage in political arguments online, he deleted social media apps from his phone. He described the change as wholly positive for his life. He was happier, and his blood pressure was lower.I hear what David and Russell are saying here, but I think there is an important unacknowledged assumption in their comments: that these emotionally and spiritually healthy people would bring their health to social media — that they would somehow change Twitter, say, without themselves being changed in the process. But as I said a few years ago, “I left Twitter because I watched people who spent a lot of time on Twitter get stupider and stupider, and it finally occurred to me that I was probably getting stupider too. And after some reflection I decided that I couldn’t afford to get any stupider.” And I could have noted not just Twitter users’ increase in stupidity over time but also their corresponding decrease in charity.I had two immediate thoughts. Good for him. Bad for us. Here’s a good man who has good things to say who simply decided, “It’s not worth it.” No, not because anyone could cancel him. (He has a thriving independent practice). But because speaking his mind carried with it an unacceptable emotional cost.
As my friend Russell Moore put it in a recent newsletter, “What then ends up happening is a kind of self-cancel culture as the emotionally and spiritually healthiest people mute themselves in order to go about their lives and not deal with the pressure from those for whom these arguments are their lives.”
I think when we decide whether or not to invest time on a social media platform, we need to ask Michael Sacasas’s questions about technology, some of which are:
When we use technologies, those technologies change us, for the better or worse — or, sometimes, both at once. And often they change us because the people who make them want us to be a particular kind of person — the kind of person they can monetize. The kind of person on whom they can be parasitic, for their own financial benefit. Once more with feeling: social media companies need engagement, and hatred creates engagement like nothing else, so the regular Two Minutes Hate on Twitter and the incessant “hate raids” on Twitch are, for those companies, features rather than bugs. I’m sure that if they saw an easy way to get engagement solely from peace, love, and understanding, they’d intervene, but if hate gets engagement, and we can sell ads against engagement? — Then bring on the hate!
- What sort of person will the use of this technology make of me?
- What habits will the use of this technology instill?
- How will the use of this technology affect my experience of time?
- How will the use of this technology affect my experience of place?
- How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to other people?
- How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to the world around me?
- What practices will the use of this technology cultivate?
- What practices will the use of this technology displace?
- What will the use of this technology encourage me to notice?
- What will the use of this technology encourage me to ignore?
You think you can resist those technological affordances, simply decline to become the kind of person the social media companies want you to be? Maybe you can. But the Greeks called that kind of confidence hubris, and understood that what follows hubris is Nemesis.
We have countless ways to communicate with one another that do not involve the big social media companies. Let’s use them!
Or 0.07% of those vaccinated.
This is so depressing, bc it reflects that we can’t cover any sort of public health numbers responsibly. It’s not just crime that gets fearmongered. It’s everything. Which means it’s an even more intractable problem.
— John Pfaff (@JohnFPfaff)
Now I’m wondering how many people read this and think, Yeah, but seven percent is a lot! In short, we still need the School for Scale. Also instruction in decimal points.
The issue of Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter The Imperfectionist reminded me of something he wrote several years ago that it’s always useful to remember: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time.
too lazy for long marches
The phrase “long march through the institutions” is often attributed to Antonio Gramsci, but in fact it was coined in the 1960s, by a German Communist named Rudi Dutschke. But the misattribution is understandable, because it’s a very Gramscian point.
When Gramsci coined the term hegemony, he did not mean mere “domination,” which is how the term is often used today. When poorly informed people talk about “American hegemony” they mean American military power; when more knowledgeable people use that phrase, they mean it in a Gramscian sense: A military/political power that is immeasurably strengthened by cultural dominance. Hegemony arises from the control of forces far greater than those of the state. “In the West,” wrote Gramsci, “there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.”
Gramsci’s purpose in thus describing the situation was to explain that a frontal military attack on the existing order by revolutionary forces was unlikely to succeed because of the strength of the structures of civil society. A direct attack, a “war of movement,” could only be successful if it were preceded by a patient remaking of civil society, a “war of position.” Thus the need for what Dutschke called a “long march through the institutions.”
You sometimes hear Dutschke’s phrase from conservative commentators frustrated by the success of the left in making just such a march through American civil society, through the media and the arts and the universities. They are correct that this has happened, but they rarely draw the appropriate conclusions from it. Instead of imitating the patience and persistence of the leftist marchers, they long for a strongman, a Trump or an Orban, to relieve them of the responsibility for reshaping civil society. If reshaping those institutions seems hard, then why not dream of someone powerful enough to blow them up and start over? Dreams of an omnicompetent strongman are the natural refuge of people too lazy and feckless to begin, much less complete, a long march.
Proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terrible, in its action — such was the South at its best. And such at its best it remains today, despite the great falling away in some of its virtues. Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism — these have been its characteristic vices in the past. And, despite changes for the better, they remain its characteristic vices today.
— W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941)
I’m wondering if we could theorise Twitter itself as a huge, sprawling and continually refashioning sequence of aphorisms. And, as a regular user I know that, more often than you might think, a tweet does hit the sweet spot that Lockwood captures so well in her Part 1: a tweet that is funny, or clever, or thought-provoking, or poignardesque. But most of Twitter, the vast majority, is drivel. Chaff. Irritable gestures, smugnesses, narcissisms, randomness, phatic fumbles of the finger on the iPhone typepad. But still all aphorisms. The form of the website mandates that. Which gives us a huge unspooling aphoristic megatext that is neither pedagogically worthwhile, metaphysically tantalising nor even deconstructivistically labyrinthine. That is, rather, just banal. Banal on an epic scale. A huge ongoing drama in which the aphorism has become the main vehicle for the radical, collective banalism of life today. Perhaps the reason ‘we’ (for certain metrics of ‘we’) are so addicted to Twitter is precisely because it satisfies our yearning for an aphorism of banality rather than an aphorism of profundity; an aphorism that closes down rather than discloses, that glues us together in our shared pettiness.I think what Adam is trying to say is that Twitter is the natural habitat of the banalphorism.