It's been going on for longer than social media was a thing.
Note how so many Civil Rights Era activists, people who once did genuinely heroic things, they faced down Bull Connor and his dogs, but were turned into harmless machine politicians and Team D apparatchiks with comfy and unchallenging sinecures.
Look at how fire-eating Sixties radicals were neutered into tenure-seeking academics and mild-mannered advocates of "working for change within the system".
Or, if you prefer to examine non-leftists, look at how the Tea Party was co-opted into another Team R fundraising opportunity and source of grift for insiders.
Granted, social media makes the process easier. But if the Establishment is good at nothing else, it is very good at determining whom to buy off, whom to co-opt, whom to ignore, whom to neutralize.
This opens up one of my key questions, relevant both for video games and for play-acting activism on social media: In the absence of these technologies, what would the same people be doing with that time and energy?
How many of those 10 people-years spent in those few days would have been put to more productive use versus spent on another form of distraction? Some, I think—I suspect (but would like to see some research to support) that highly engrossing video games are good at getting some people to spend more time than their higher selves want to on the games. Certainly I’ve had that experience, and I think it may be more frequent than staying up way later with a book than I’d originally intended. I’m just curious about how big the difference is on average at scale.
Similarly with social media—if it had never come to be, how much more time and energy would the current users Freddie writes about channel into actual organizing work vs. annoying a handful of friends or barmates with their overwrought theories; writing, consuming, and performing on-the-nose slam poetry; journaling furiously; etc.? I suspect there is an actual amount of real loss of productive organizing to new technologies, and I’m curious about how big it is.
I’m curious about how you see those activities as more productive than social media. Either way, it seems to me, it’s people putting a bunch of energy into trying to perform for and/or persuade a fairly niche, mostly self-selecting audience with very little chance of changing the real world.
There is a similar brouhaha in sports media going on regarding the arguably slightly less than 100% sensitive way in which Adam Schefter initially broke the news of Dwayne Haskins dying over the weekend. The sooner our brains and society can evolve passed taking this technology so seriously the better.
Wow I didn't even know there was controversy there until just now. Good Lord, people. I swear too many people wake up every day literally looking for reasons to be offended. They're waiting for someone to say something even mildly pRoBlEmAtIC so they can jump down that person's throat and get attention for it.
I think it was in very poor taste to announce the death of someone by noting their lack of professional success recently. I just don't know what to do with my mild distaste of that. I certainly don't think anyone should be "punished".
People are calling for him to be fired from ESPN. 🙄 There’s just no sense of proportionality anymore. In a sane world we could say “That was insensitive” and he could say “oh sorry, deleting” and move on.
I have no idea what the controversy is; I'm sure it's over something as minor as you all are saying. It leads me to the same question I always have, though: why does this guy not skip Tweeting or FB posting entirely?
I'm not 100% insensitive to the people flying off the handle over nothing (call it 98% insensitive, though). This is a new medium, and we're still grappling with how to position it in our lives and what the proper reaction to opinions broadcast on it should be. But this guy wasn't surreptitiously taped saying something in a private conversation that was later taken out of context. He chose to say something to the entire planet in a permanent medium that seems to be designed to do nothing but cause bloodbaths over innocuous comments. We know this is what happens; we've seen it repeatedly.
So why participate at all? What are you all getting out of it? I've never been on social media. I don't feel like I've missed anything, my friends and family assure me that I've never been excluded from anything because I wasn't on FB, people on the internet tell me that I'm better off not joining at this point. So why do you all keep participating?
I don't know the answer to your last question, my guess is that social media is simply very addicting and gives every yahoo under the sun a voice...in other words a false sense of self-importance.
As to why companies routinely use it, well that's just simple marketing. It's basically free advertising. No where else has social media's insanely wide audience with almost zero up-front cost.
Adam Schefter's life - and it's a great one - is entirely based on tweeting. He's part of a group of journalists whose sole job is to preempt official press releases by a few minutes. Ethan Strauss has written wonderfully on this. If he can't tweet he's got no case to be a millionaire.
I LOVE House of Strauss. It's a great Substack. Folks, if you haven't checked it out you should - I'm not a sports guy at all, and it's some of the best writing out there
Right. I mean if he’d said it at the guy’s funeral or titled an official obit that way, then may the powers of the media decide what to do with it. As it stands, that was insensitive. Is the guy’s family spending their time reading tweets about it right now though?
The real tragedy of Twitter is that kids no longer pick "mind reading" as the superpower they wish they had because if someone is on Twitter you already know everything they're thinking and it's usually boring or dumb or mean.
Got to agree. Mind-reading used to be the top choice? I don't want to know what people think. I've never wanted to know what people think. I'd really like to fly, though.
Right, I don't really believe that time travel is possible, because it leads to too many weird paradoxes. But it would be fun, and it's not really any less likely than the other super-power options.
It's not fun if it turns out that attempting to mess with the past is impossible because something bad happens to you if you try it ... multiple time-lines (which would be consistent with many-worlds picture of quantum mechanics) seems more likely, but then you might never find your way back to your own time-line ...
I think various short stories and "The Twilight Zone" have proven that, like wishes, resurrection, and time travel, mind-reading never works out the way you'd want.
Agreed. We also live in the woods with enough acreage that we don't need fences. Broadband makes having a career/biz and living in green space possible. Win-win.
On those pick-your-superpower quizzes, invisibility usually ends up being that choice that means you are the next American Psycho. Best to play it safe with flight.
Invisibility turns out to be so boring that the Fantastic Four comics had to give Invisible Girl other powers, like projecting force fields.
Inivisible Girl is married (or was back when I read comics, a LONG time ago) to Mister Fantastic. Nobody ever wishes for his power of body elasticity, but ask yourself this: why exactly is he called Mister Fantastic? Is that what Invisible Girl calls him??? Think about it ...
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I remember in the mid-90s when Marisa Bowe launched word.com, we thought, what a killer domain name. This will be something huge.“What rough, but cool and hyper-literate, beast…?”
Indirectly related to this post: I have enjoyed Soderbergh's films in the past but I thought Kimi was an absolute snooze fest, even though I initially was looking forward to it. I so intensely dislike movies that consist of people interacting with computers and other electronic devices. Is it that directors find it to be a challenge to craft films that lack human interaction? Or do studios think it will make movies more relatable to their smartphone addicted audiences? It's just awful.
For a far better film on the subject of people lurking and peeping out of their own apartments, I would recommend The Voyeurs (2021). And I should point that if you are one of those people for whom Alexandra Daddario is a relevant interest, you will find Sydney Sweeney to be every bit as relevant.
I really liked No Sudden Move, but otherwise I haven't enjoyed anything of his since The Knick. He likes to publicly say that he makes movies fast and doesn't care what people think of them after he killing himself making Che and everyone thought it was boring (Che was very boring).
Translation: the actress in this movie has big tits, you should see it. What a lovely way to start the day, with a nice dose of objectification of women. Thanks for that.
I like this because I think Freddie and many of his readers would agree that mass social media-driven opprobrium *has the capacity* to be truly damaging, and is always a pain in the ass. But there are green shoots and we shouldn't give the mob more power than it deserves by failing to recognize its limits.
When one grows up with social media infused into every segment of your daily life, it's no wonder some people think it is a legitimate aspect of reality. We now have entire generations of youth who think tweeting to the nameless void is little different than an actual conversation at a bar or coffee shop. I miss those dorky early days of Facebook where the most annoying thing was someone sharing their latest Farmville escapades...
"Stop taking social media so serious. Nothing here is real. Look at this chicken 🐓🚗 it is bigger than the car."
- best Tweet I've seen in a long time (which isn't saying much because I've never used Twitter)
I think the social networks of the internet genuinely revealed the extent of the crimes of Jimmy Saville. Previously the institutions that should have been on top of it had failed miserably and it was only the anonymous sharing of stories online that led to irrefutable testimony being corroborated.
The power still does not lie with those individuals telling their stories though, but relies upon journalists to pick up the baton and do the corroboration on important stories.
This leads on to your groomer comment. It is not meaningless. It might be overused and it's importance may be getting diluted but the importance of safeguarding is often being disregarded. "Groomer" is less like "toxic" and "gaslighting" which are rhetorical flourishes and more like "fascist", "bigot" or "nazi" which are serious and real claims, the validity of which can be observed.
Take this substack today. It shows how it's been a year since the story broke of sex offenders escaping scrutiny by changing their identity.
Still, one year later, the Disclosure and Barring service offer the facility for individuals to do this.
No-one argues against background checks as an important safe-guarding mechanism. People are arguing that a certain group should be allowed to "kill" their previous identity and move to a new one though.
Groomers are no longer only the people who take advantage of these loopholes to persist in sex offending themselves, but those who enable them by disregarding the important safeguarding implication and advocate to remove safeguards purely to affirm the sensitivities of a group.
Look I'm guessing you guys are sensitive now because the groomer thing has become a weird conservative rallying cry recently but I assure you this is a bipartisan phenomenon
Sure, but while "groomer" is overused, grooming remains a real phenomenon. I agree with John that the term is not meaningless, at least not always, even if it often is a rhetorical flourish.
“Groomer” means someone who builds relationships with children for the purpose of sexually abusing them. Now it’s used for everyone with an opinion about what is appropriate for kids—someone who thinks it’s okay for a gay teacher to mention his husband for example. That’s what has made it a meaningless insult online.
There's a weird phenomenon that regularly happens now where millions of people scrutinize a public relationship, even to the point of "shipping" real life people.
Tabloids have done this for a long time, but I think tabloids, even for celebrities, were fairly easy to ignore. But now you can have your relationship trending on twitter, with actual fandoms sprouting up to scrutinize your every behavior, public and private.
I am sensitive to the fact that it's been several years of people (on the left) pointing at genuine safeguarding issues which are now dismissed within months of the slur being adopted by 4chan.
We do not dismiss "transphobe" as a meaningful and important word just because anyone who can define a woman as an adult human female is meaninglessly dismissed as one.
Who's "we"? The problem is that, as with the term "racist", overuse has diluted the term to the point where its only impact is on the left while anybody on the right just rolls their eyes when they hear it.
Being genuinely labelled as racist is hugely significant and people are fired over accusations of racism every day. Nobody accused can roll their eyes out of it.
This is as it should be. "Groomer" is an equally important and valid accusation to make and should carry as much weight.
On the flip side, both can be overused of course. But to see people who I thought I shared ideals with on the left diminish the weight of the word purely because of it's adoption by the right has been disappointing.
Just this morning I saw some Evangelical propaganda, usual "loved Jesus or suffer eternally in fire" type bits, pasted on the backs of stop signs and bus stop signs near a school. Pretty sure that if the new definition of "groomer" is to be applied even-handedly, the guys who put it up qualify. And if this specific one doesn't, it should be easy to find another example.
No, it is not. I mean may be to you and may be to me, but do not underestimate the extent to which the characterization "groomer" is causing havoc in my world (libraries). Identifying books as grooming vehicles is a serious problem for library collections.
FWIW, I think you're wrong about "the social networks of the internet genuinely revealed the extent of the crimes of Jimmy Saville." What happened, as I recall is that a lot of women went to the police, and the internet had nothing to do with it. There had always been rumours about Saville (he wasn't allowed to attend "Children in Need" for example).
A lot of women didn't go to the police. They mostly lived with it themselves. Some went to the police and were brushed off. Saville had friends on the force and a powerful lawyer.
It was on friends reunited that people who had gone to specific hospitals in the past congregated and told their stories about Saville with anonymity. BBC Journalists spoke to these women, but their story was buried by the BBC. The journalists handed the story to ITV because it was too important. Once ITV aired the story, the police were embarrassed into doing more.
Any police investigation that occurred was closed down long before he died and got fawning coverage as a national hero.
The Journalists that took the rumours and provided the receipts that police had failed to explained how they took testimony from Friends Reunited to approach the women posting and convinced them to go on the record.
Ain't just Jimmy Saville. The Elan School and others got away with some horrific stuff for decades, and their owners made a mint.
What broke them up was the internet and survivors getting together.
I understand that the Mormon church and also the Jehovah's Witnesses face a similar problem. Prospective converts, at least those who speak English and use this "internet" thing, they run a search and they may not always be necessarily enthused by what they see. Or at least it takes a lot of explaining away.
I must admit I thought this didn't square well with your anti-canceling posts from the past, but now I understand. Proportionality and consistency! If only we could have those everywhere in life.
jonathan haidt has a good article on all this in the Atlantic today. He parses the effects of cancel culture on non-famous, non-powerful people and how that is affecting social cohesion and democracy. he spreads a far wider net as well. It's a good article but ends with the usual pleas for government to do something to ameliorate the harms of social media . . . though he does make the good point that it really comes down to us in our millions using our own inherent genius and innovation to directly deal with problems we are aware of in the places we live. (Like filling potholes in streets when the city won't do it, as a very simple example.)
As usual Freddie reveals the problem with the progressive, young leftists. They can not tell the difference between enacting true social change and making posts. Haidt traces this not only to social media but to them being a generation of children exposed to over protection, not being able to play outside without supervision, or walk to school on their own, and so on. Their lament, that words are violence, that ideas are physically harmful, and so on come directly out of that way of thinking and parenting. It is a problem facilitated by both the left and the right for decades. They have been raised in bubbles and in consequence their social immune systems never developed.
I used to believe (based on some flawed sort of historical awareness) that the 60s in our time would come once more from the left (as it had in the 60s and the 20s). But it isn't and is not going to. those times were notable by large social protest movements that directly worked for structural change and identifiable outcomes (unions, women's right to vote, end the war, civil rights). They also were accompanied by great movements in art, literature, music, and comedy. It was clear then that the powerful, the rich, and the corporations were a problem and people set out to limit their power. We are not living in such a time. it is regrettably far more similar to the era prior to the civil war when social cohesion devolved into partisan attacks and physical violence and the inability of government at any level to function for the good of the whole.
I now see the nascent contemporary 60s movement coming out of what has been called heterodox thinkers. it is still relatively small but it is growing. and it is gathering members from both left and right who all have in common a belief in thinking, examining issues deeply, self-reflection, and liberal democracy. They are also slowly and continually confronting the extremes of both left and right, as well as their incredibly infantile belief systems and behavior. The exhausted middle is beginning to respond to this, most often with relief.
Ecological reclamation does not only apply to ecosystems.
Really liked what you had to say here, I think you touched on a lot of relevant points in a concise and logical fashion. I especially liked your phrase 'social immune systems', what an apt descriptor. Can I steal this from you? :]
"Like filling potholes in streets when the city won't do it..." -reminds me of that Parks and Rec episode where Ron does exactly this.
I drive a Smart car. It’s less long than a Hummer is wide. I’m told, though this may be apocryphal, that NYC passed a law specifically to prohibit smart car owners from parking nose to the curb. Even though…
Holy sprawl-a-rama how many words is that (Haidt) article? It is good, though.
But I'm old-fashioned, and don't think social media alone is to blame for the national malaise. Some explanation is due to the shareholder-centric, extractive capitalist model that envelopes it. Capital has hollowed out the economic foundation, and cut off a path to the middle-class, or otherwise precluded a productive future, for many former factory workers and indebted graduates alike, leaving a lot of people angry and looking for someone to punch.
"As usual Freddie reveals the problem with the progressive, young leftists. They can not tell the difference between enacting true social change and making posts. Haidt traces this not only to social media but to them being a generation of children exposed to over protection, not being able to play outside without supervision, or walk to school on their own, and so on."
I've been wondering: is there really a difference now vs. then *except* for the fact that with Twitter we can actually *see* the thoughts of all the people who are not particularly interested in material change activism? There have always been a ton of people who will talk about what they think is just or moral or efficient, but that's all they'll do. They don't volunteer to do material work. Now that we have Twitter, so we can see a broad swath of thoughts, we can simply more easily see what was always there.
SHB, your words "large social protest movements that directly worked for structural change and identifiable outcomes" really struck me. I find that few of the struggles I see, online and in real life, involve any perceptible movement towards concrete goals.
What kind of measurable good comes from mourning the erasure of non-binary people? How many people does "checking your privilege" feed? What kind of health care does "trans women are women" provide? Whose children are better educated when "problematic" people are canceled?
Liberal discourse is constantly roiled by these social justice concepts which don't always have a discernable point of contact with the real world, so we're all fighting over what are largely abstractions. Maybe I'm just too old, but I prefer to save my energy for bail reform, ending the war on drugs, voting rights, and other matters that we KNOW will make people's lives better. What kind of social justice is better than that?
It’s very convenient for the ruling class that the party that once represented working people and advocated for meaningful change (ie, things that cost money, like Social Security and decent wages) was transformed into the party that is constantly hashing and rehashing privilege and microaggressions and structural blah blah: Things that distract and anger people, without involving demands for expensive social and economic change.
It’s not so much that the leaders of “the left” lost their way, but rather, around the time of Clinton we _had_ no more of the old-fashioned New Dealish left-ish people in government, and the sold-out jackals who occupied Congress had to distract “the people” with something.
What better than to pit people against each other with endless discussions of identities and privilege and who is most deserving of a very few high-visibility goodies? You end up with an insulting, ridiculous scenario in which Biden announces he will choose a black woman for the Supreme Court. That should offend every decent person no end.
We are all in the handbasket, accelerating toward our destination.
"I now see the nascent contemporary 60s movement coming out of what has been called heterodox thinkers. it is still relatively small but it is growing. and it is gathering members from both left and right who all have in common a belief in thinking, examining issues deeply, self-reflection, and liberal democracy. They are also slowly and continually confronting the extremes of both left and right, as well as their incredibly infantile belief systems and behavior. The exhausted middle is beginning to respond to this, most often with relief."
Can you give some examples from either side? I'm not disagreeing here, just wanted to get a sampling.
Freddie repeatedly points out that change means consistent efforts over a long (usually) period of time; after which you may not get exactly the change you wanted anyway. Throwing up virtue signaling tweets is easy, and the likes/retweets you get give you a way bigger (and immediate) dopamine rush than years of slogging for change. The brain (channeling my Kahneman here) then just asserts "I (via my tweets) made a difference!!", (another dopamine rush) and the tweeter moves on. Rinse, lather, repeat.
I got kicked off of Twitter for calling Trump a retard. Canceled by for using a WOKE slur against the MAGA God. Best thing that ever happened to me. Twitter is the Devil.
"I suspect that these leftists tweet so much not because they think tweeting gives them power but because they are convinced that the real world never will. Change seems impossible, so let’s tell jokes."
This is what Terry Eagleton thought about the pomo, since the 60's/70's it was becoming clear that neither the Soviet Union nor the nationalist movements could bring about real (material/economic) change, erstwhile radicals became disillusioned and started to find 'revolutions' in the 'fissures', gender/race/sex/humour etc. Why they became disillusioned? Because Capitalism seemed too powerful of a force to change, it seemed that the world might come to an end but the 'system' will keep going.
I do not know who this person is, but what stands out is TWITTER IS NOT POLITICS. People do it from their phones. They have no skin in the game. Grass roots door knocking, showing up at candidate forums--that's politics. I've been a delegate to state conventions and met all the presidential candidates. I met Ralph Nader. Twitter is not in the same dimension. I can't have conversations abt politics with people who are only twits.
I've come to realize that social media was probably a mistake. It's not without its positives, but its been a net negative for society at large. And it's only made my anxiety and depression worse.
I am not a leftist, but it seems to me that much of the left prioritizes the symbolic over the concrete. Actually, this is common to the PMC in general, but since the PMC is the hegemonic class, their symbolic gestures carry more weight than those of someone without class power.
The problem comes when the PMC run into problems that don't care about their symbols and wish-fulfillment, things like "the COVID" or "the Taliban", forces that cannot be blackmailed, silenced, bargained with, or distracted with some shiny object. Forces that don't give a shit about the class power of the PMC, that is, its ability to decide what is and is not normative.
Faced with such forces, the PMC and their nostrums ("By this Sign, I thee deplatform!") fall flat on their faces.
Great point about symbolism. The impacts of defunding police forces, the reality of seeing trans women compete in high level sport, and the impact of pushing solar and wind energy sources too quickly are more examples of how reality collides with symbolism. I think in the past progressive activists were very comfortable being the voice of dissent without having actual power. Now they are the majority in the room and they have power and they are learning the difference between saying something and doing something.
Without opening additional cans of worms ATM, it's a lot easier to stay pure when you don't have real power. No need to make tradeoffs, to prioritize and then tell otherwise deserving people that they are going to have to wait some more, no need to make tactical alliances with sometimes unsavory partners or play power politics.
I think this is completely true. If words are violence, then words aren’t even symbolic. So if your activism is all on social media, from your standpoint it’s not symbolic — you’re on the front lines. And since the words serve as lightning rods to gin up emotion, there has to be constant churn, as in the Steven Pinker idea of the euphemism treadmill. For example, hardly anyone uses the phrase “rape culture” anymore. Is that because things have changed that much? No, it’s because the word no longer carries much emotional freight. On the other hand, “transphobia” continues to trend and certainly carries a bigger emotional charge than “anti-Semitism,” despite the historical baggage. (And yes as a Jew I’m rightly ragged off by that.)
It's been going on for longer than social media was a thing.
Note how so many Civil Rights Era activists, people who once did genuinely heroic things, they faced down Bull Connor and his dogs, but were turned into harmless machine politicians and Team D apparatchiks with comfy and unchallenging sinecures.
Look at how fire-eating Sixties radicals were neutered into tenure-seeking academics and mild-mannered advocates of "working for change within the system".
Or, if you prefer to examine non-leftists, look at how the Tea Party was co-opted into another Team R fundraising opportunity and source of grift for insiders.
Granted, social media makes the process easier. But if the Establishment is good at nothing else, it is very good at determining whom to buy off, whom to co-opt, whom to ignore, whom to neutralize.
This opens up one of my key questions, relevant both for video games and for play-acting activism on social media: In the absence of these technologies, what would the same people be doing with that time and energy?
How many of those 10 people-years spent in those few days would have been put to more productive use versus spent on another form of distraction? Some, I think—I suspect (but would like to see some research to support) that highly engrossing video games are good at getting some people to spend more time than their higher selves want to on the games. Certainly I’ve had that experience, and I think it may be more frequent than staying up way later with a book than I’d originally intended. I’m just curious about how big the difference is on average at scale.
Similarly with social media—if it had never come to be, how much more time and energy would the current users Freddie writes about channel into actual organizing work vs. annoying a handful of friends or barmates with their overwrought theories; writing, consuming, and performing on-the-nose slam poetry; journaling furiously; etc.? I suspect there is an actual amount of real loss of productive organizing to new technologies, and I’m curious about how big it is.
I’m curious about how you see those activities as more productive than social media. Either way, it seems to me, it’s people putting a bunch of energy into trying to perform for and/or persuade a fairly niche, mostly self-selecting audience with very little chance of changing the real world.
That’s why I’m not on Twitter at all: I am the greatest.
All is perception... That is the point of tweeting. To curate perception.
There is a similar brouhaha in sports media going on regarding the arguably slightly less than 100% sensitive way in which Adam Schefter initially broke the news of Dwayne Haskins dying over the weekend. The sooner our brains and society can evolve passed taking this technology so seriously the better.
Wow I didn't even know there was controversy there until just now. Good Lord, people. I swear too many people wake up every day literally looking for reasons to be offended. They're waiting for someone to say something even mildly pRoBlEmAtIC so they can jump down that person's throat and get attention for it.
I think it was in very poor taste to announce the death of someone by noting their lack of professional success recently. I just don't know what to do with my mild distaste of that. I certainly don't think anyone should be "punished".
People are calling for him to be fired from ESPN. 🙄 There’s just no sense of proportionality anymore. In a sane world we could say “That was insensitive” and he could say “oh sorry, deleting” and move on.
But then no one gets to be outraged!!
I have no idea what the controversy is; I'm sure it's over something as minor as you all are saying. It leads me to the same question I always have, though: why does this guy not skip Tweeting or FB posting entirely?
I'm not 100% insensitive to the people flying off the handle over nothing (call it 98% insensitive, though). This is a new medium, and we're still grappling with how to position it in our lives and what the proper reaction to opinions broadcast on it should be. But this guy wasn't surreptitiously taped saying something in a private conversation that was later taken out of context. He chose to say something to the entire planet in a permanent medium that seems to be designed to do nothing but cause bloodbaths over innocuous comments. We know this is what happens; we've seen it repeatedly.
So why participate at all? What are you all getting out of it? I've never been on social media. I don't feel like I've missed anything, my friends and family assure me that I've never been excluded from anything because I wasn't on FB, people on the internet tell me that I'm better off not joining at this point. So why do you all keep participating?
I don't know the answer to your last question, my guess is that social media is simply very addicting and gives every yahoo under the sun a voice...in other words a false sense of self-importance.
As to why companies routinely use it, well that's just simple marketing. It's basically free advertising. No where else has social media's insanely wide audience with almost zero up-front cost.
Adam Schefter's life - and it's a great one - is entirely based on tweeting. He's part of a group of journalists whose sole job is to preempt official press releases by a few minutes. Ethan Strauss has written wonderfully on this. If he can't tweet he's got no case to be a millionaire.
I LOVE House of Strauss. It's a great Substack. Folks, if you haven't checked it out you should - I'm not a sports guy at all, and it's some of the best writing out there
Right. I mean if he’d said it at the guy’s funeral or titled an official obit that way, then may the powers of the media decide what to do with it. As it stands, that was insensitive. Is the guy’s family spending their time reading tweets about it right now though?
Well stated. Social media is cacophony, it makes me ill.
The real tragedy of Twitter is that kids no longer pick "mind reading" as the superpower they wish they had because if someone is on Twitter you already know everything they're thinking and it's usually boring or dumb or mean.
Is mind reading ever the right pick though? Isn't it always going to be flying or superhuman strength?
I would never have picked it—especially after seeing What Women Want starring Helen Hunt and Mel Gibson. But people deserve the choice.
Ok. I choose Helen. Because come on.
Got to agree. Mind-reading used to be the top choice? I don't want to know what people think. I've never wanted to know what people think. I'd really like to fly, though.
I'll take time travel. So many problems could be solved by going into the past and making adjustments there.
Depends on how your theory of time travel resolves the grandfather paradox.
Me, I'll take flying.
"Look!" "Up in the sky!" "It's a bird!" "It's a plane!" "It's MarkS!!!"
Yes, it's MarkS, strange visitor from another planet with POWERS and ABILITIES far beyond those of mortal men ...
Right, I don't really believe that time travel is possible, because it leads to too many weird paradoxes. But it would be fun, and it's not really any less likely than the other super-power options.
It's not fun if it turns out that attempting to mess with the past is impossible because something bad happens to you if you try it ... multiple time-lines (which would be consistent with many-worlds picture of quantum mechanics) seems more likely, but then you might never find your way back to your own time-line ...
I go out of my way to avoid knowing what people think, with rare exceptions. Like Erin. 😜
*holds envelope to forehead* “heart of gold, kind of a doofus.” *opens envelope* “what makes Jeff G a Jeff G”
#NotAllJeffGs
I think various short stories and "The Twilight Zone" have proven that, like wishes, resurrection, and time travel, mind-reading never works out the way you'd want.
No! It's invisibility--right? Got to be!
A lot of people seem to wish they had a universal mute button.
Actually, this one is possible. Just go live in the woods or a remote rural area and turn off your computer! :-)
Yes, which is why we live in the woods. The world comes to us on our terms.
If I wish to engage the world, I go out and interact with it. Otherwise... good fences create good neighbors.
Agreed. We also live in the woods with enough acreage that we don't need fences. Broadband makes having a career/biz and living in green space possible. Win-win.
I've got a universal remote controller.
It doesn't control the universe, not even remotely.
On those pick-your-superpower quizzes, invisibility usually ends up being that choice that means you are the next American Psycho. Best to play it safe with flight.
I see a lot of advantages to this but it's now coded as being a bit pervy so I shy away from it.
Invisibility turns out to be so boring that the Fantastic Four comics had to give Invisible Girl other powers, like projecting force fields.
Inivisible Girl is married (or was back when I read comics, a LONG time ago) to Mister Fantastic. Nobody ever wishes for his power of body elasticity, but ask yourself this: why exactly is he called Mister Fantastic? Is that what Invisible Girl calls him??? Think about it ...
The right pick is the power to have unlimited powers.
No way. Try that in Dungeons & Dragons with a Ring of Wishes and you'll wind up in an endless time loop, always wishing for more wishes.
I'd use my anti-endless-time-loop powers
"boring or dumb or mean" -- more like "boring, dumb, and mean".
The Twitter trifecta
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I remember in the mid-90s when Marisa Bowe launched word.com, we thought, what a killer domain name. This will be something huge.“What rough, but cool and hyper-literate, beast…?”
Indirectly related to this post: I have enjoyed Soderbergh's films in the past but I thought Kimi was an absolute snooze fest, even though I initially was looking forward to it. I so intensely dislike movies that consist of people interacting with computers and other electronic devices. Is it that directors find it to be a challenge to craft films that lack human interaction? Or do studios think it will make movies more relatable to their smartphone addicted audiences? It's just awful.
For a far better film on the subject of people lurking and peeping out of their own apartments, I would recommend The Voyeurs (2021). And I should point that if you are one of those people for whom Alexandra Daddario is a relevant interest, you will find Sydney Sweeney to be every bit as relevant.
I really liked No Sudden Move, but otherwise I haven't enjoyed anything of his since The Knick. He likes to publicly say that he makes movies fast and doesn't care what people think of them after he killing himself making Che and everyone thought it was boring (Che was very boring).
Translation: the actress in this movie has big tits, you should see it. What a lovely way to start the day, with a nice dose of objectification of women. Thanks for that.
No, you should see it because it's thematically similar to Kimi, and is a far better film.
I like this because I think Freddie and many of his readers would agree that mass social media-driven opprobrium *has the capacity* to be truly damaging, and is always a pain in the ass. But there are green shoots and we shouldn't give the mob more power than it deserves by failing to recognize its limits.
When one grows up with social media infused into every segment of your daily life, it's no wonder some people think it is a legitimate aspect of reality. We now have entire generations of youth who think tweeting to the nameless void is little different than an actual conversation at a bar or coffee shop. I miss those dorky early days of Facebook where the most annoying thing was someone sharing their latest Farmville escapades...
"Stop taking social media so serious. Nothing here is real. Look at this chicken 🐓🚗 it is bigger than the car."
- best Tweet I've seen in a long time (which isn't saying much because I've never used Twitter)
I think the social networks of the internet genuinely revealed the extent of the crimes of Jimmy Saville. Previously the institutions that should have been on top of it had failed miserably and it was only the anonymous sharing of stories online that led to irrefutable testimony being corroborated.
The power still does not lie with those individuals telling their stories though, but relies upon journalists to pick up the baton and do the corroboration on important stories.
This leads on to your groomer comment. It is not meaningless. It might be overused and it's importance may be getting diluted but the importance of safeguarding is often being disregarded. "Groomer" is less like "toxic" and "gaslighting" which are rhetorical flourishes and more like "fascist", "bigot" or "nazi" which are serious and real claims, the validity of which can be observed.
Take this substack today. It shows how it's been a year since the story broke of sex offenders escaping scrutiny by changing their identity.
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/does-this-look-like-closing-a-loophole?s=r
Still, one year later, the Disclosure and Barring service offer the facility for individuals to do this.
No-one argues against background checks as an important safe-guarding mechanism. People are arguing that a certain group should be allowed to "kill" their previous identity and move to a new one though.
Groomers are no longer only the people who take advantage of these loopholes to persist in sex offending themselves, but those who enable them by disregarding the important safeguarding implication and advocate to remove safeguards purely to affirm the sensitivities of a group.
Holy shit, I was a groomer and I didn't even know it until now. Crap.
Just don't agree about groomer. It's a completely ubiquitous casual internet insult now.
OK, what about "racist"? That too is a ubiquitous casual internet insult now. Is it meaningless?
Look I'm guessing you guys are sensitive now because the groomer thing has become a weird conservative rallying cry recently but I assure you this is a bipartisan phenomenon
Sure, but while "groomer" is overused, grooming remains a real phenomenon. I agree with John that the term is not meaningless, at least not always, even if it often is a rhetorical flourish.
“Groomer” means someone who builds relationships with children for the purpose of sexually abusing them. Now it’s used for everyone with an opinion about what is appropriate for kids—someone who thinks it’s okay for a gay teacher to mention his husband for example. That’s what has made it a meaningless insult online.
There's a weird phenomenon that regularly happens now where millions of people scrutinize a public relationship, even to the point of "shipping" real life people.
Tabloids have done this for a long time, but I think tabloids, even for celebrities, were fairly easy to ignore. But now you can have your relationship trending on twitter, with actual fandoms sprouting up to scrutinize your every behavior, public and private.
It may be a meaningless insult online, but real people in real life are using it to ban books.
I mean, toxic people, or gaslighting exist too, just far more rarely than the rhetoric would suggest.
"Mansplaining" is still a real thing too, but Twitter took all of about 2 seconds to turn it into "a man I don't like is talking"
I am sensitive to the fact that it's been several years of people (on the left) pointing at genuine safeguarding issues which are now dismissed within months of the slur being adopted by 4chan.
We do not dismiss "transphobe" as a meaningful and important word just because anyone who can define a woman as an adult human female is meaninglessly dismissed as one.
Who's "we"? The problem is that, as with the term "racist", overuse has diluted the term to the point where its only impact is on the left while anybody on the right just rolls their eyes when they hear it.
Society as a whole.
Being genuinely labelled as racist is hugely significant and people are fired over accusations of racism every day. Nobody accused can roll their eyes out of it.
This is as it should be. "Groomer" is an equally important and valid accusation to make and should carry as much weight.
On the flip side, both can be overused of course. But to see people who I thought I shared ideals with on the left diminish the weight of the word purely because of it's adoption by the right has been disappointing.
If you reject the identity of trans women that makes you, by definition, a transphobe.
But since it IS a rallying cry we need to take it seriously. Nabokov, for instance, a frequent target.
Except that reading Nabokov is sometimes like looking into a glass onion: e.g., Dolores could credibly be described as grooming Humbert.
Pretty meaningless, yes.
Just this morning I saw some Evangelical propaganda, usual "loved Jesus or suffer eternally in fire" type bits, pasted on the backs of stop signs and bus stop signs near a school. Pretty sure that if the new definition of "groomer" is to be applied even-handedly, the guys who put it up qualify. And if this specific one doesn't, it should be easy to find another example.
No, it is not. I mean may be to you and may be to me, but do not underestimate the extent to which the characterization "groomer" is causing havoc in my world (libraries). Identifying books as grooming vehicles is a serious problem for library collections.
Can you say more about this? I'm not sure what you mean.
Librarians are being accused of grooming children because of inclusion of LGBT books in libraries. https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida/2022/03/29/grooming-the-buzzword-in-lgbtq-school-debate-including-in-florida/
FWIW, I think you're wrong about "the social networks of the internet genuinely revealed the extent of the crimes of Jimmy Saville." What happened, as I recall is that a lot of women went to the police, and the internet had nothing to do with it. There had always been rumours about Saville (he wasn't allowed to attend "Children in Need" for example).
A lot of women didn't go to the police. They mostly lived with it themselves. Some went to the police and were brushed off. Saville had friends on the force and a powerful lawyer.
It was on friends reunited that people who had gone to specific hospitals in the past congregated and told their stories about Saville with anonymity. BBC Journalists spoke to these women, but their story was buried by the BBC. The journalists handed the story to ITV because it was too important. Once ITV aired the story, the police were embarrassed into doing more.
A lot of women did go to the police though. I don't remember Friends Reunited having any role here. Neither does Wikipedia, for whatever that's worth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile_sexual_abuse_scandal
A website (no longer available) was set up to find victims. This is how people came forward. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20325913
Any police investigation that occurred was closed down long before he died and got fawning coverage as a national hero.
The Journalists that took the rumours and provided the receipts that police had failed to explained how they took testimony from Friends Reunited to approach the women posting and convinced them to go on the record.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/nov/02/jimmy-savile-bbc-journalists-risked-jobs-reveal-truth
Ain't just Jimmy Saville. The Elan School and others got away with some horrific stuff for decades, and their owners made a mint.
What broke them up was the internet and survivors getting together.
I understand that the Mormon church and also the Jehovah's Witnesses face a similar problem. Prospective converts, at least those who speak English and use this "internet" thing, they run a search and they may not always be necessarily enthused by what they see. Or at least it takes a lot of explaining away.
I must admit I thought this didn't square well with your anti-canceling posts from the past, but now I understand. Proportionality and consistency! If only we could have those everywhere in life.
And maybe – no hear me out – empathy, mercy, and forgiveness.
I won't ask of others what I can't do myself.
Either requires maturity and wisdom.
I'm an immature moron and every now and again I can be proportional.
LOL! You crack me up.
jonathan haidt has a good article on all this in the Atlantic today. He parses the effects of cancel culture on non-famous, non-powerful people and how that is affecting social cohesion and democracy. he spreads a far wider net as well. It's a good article but ends with the usual pleas for government to do something to ameliorate the harms of social media . . . though he does make the good point that it really comes down to us in our millions using our own inherent genius and innovation to directly deal with problems we are aware of in the places we live. (Like filling potholes in streets when the city won't do it, as a very simple example.)
As usual Freddie reveals the problem with the progressive, young leftists. They can not tell the difference between enacting true social change and making posts. Haidt traces this not only to social media but to them being a generation of children exposed to over protection, not being able to play outside without supervision, or walk to school on their own, and so on. Their lament, that words are violence, that ideas are physically harmful, and so on come directly out of that way of thinking and parenting. It is a problem facilitated by both the left and the right for decades. They have been raised in bubbles and in consequence their social immune systems never developed.
I used to believe (based on some flawed sort of historical awareness) that the 60s in our time would come once more from the left (as it had in the 60s and the 20s). But it isn't and is not going to. those times were notable by large social protest movements that directly worked for structural change and identifiable outcomes (unions, women's right to vote, end the war, civil rights). They also were accompanied by great movements in art, literature, music, and comedy. It was clear then that the powerful, the rich, and the corporations were a problem and people set out to limit their power. We are not living in such a time. it is regrettably far more similar to the era prior to the civil war when social cohesion devolved into partisan attacks and physical violence and the inability of government at any level to function for the good of the whole.
I now see the nascent contemporary 60s movement coming out of what has been called heterodox thinkers. it is still relatively small but it is growing. and it is gathering members from both left and right who all have in common a belief in thinking, examining issues deeply, self-reflection, and liberal democracy. They are also slowly and continually confronting the extremes of both left and right, as well as their incredibly infantile belief systems and behavior. The exhausted middle is beginning to respond to this, most often with relief.
Ecological reclamation does not only apply to ecosystems.
And parents who likely had no idea what was going on online. Mine certainly didn't.
Have you seen the polls which show that people most engaged on social media are more likely to be the oldest children in the family?
Really liked what you had to say here, I think you touched on a lot of relevant points in a concise and logical fashion. I especially liked your phrase 'social immune systems', what an apt descriptor. Can I steal this from you? :]
"Like filling potholes in streets when the city won't do it..." -reminds me of that Parks and Rec episode where Ron does exactly this.
And met the love of his life while doing so.
My brother did that, and the city that had ignored the potholes for years showed up pronto to tell him not to.
Yeah probably for liability reasons, like someone could theoretically try and sue the city if the fix caused an accident or something. Who knows.
I drive a Smart car. It’s less long than a Hummer is wide. I’m told, though this may be apocryphal, that NYC passed a law specifically to prohibit smart car owners from parking nose to the curb. Even though…
Holy sprawl-a-rama how many words is that (Haidt) article? It is good, though.
But I'm old-fashioned, and don't think social media alone is to blame for the national malaise. Some explanation is due to the shareholder-centric, extractive capitalist model that envelopes it. Capital has hollowed out the economic foundation, and cut off a path to the middle-class, or otherwise precluded a productive future, for many former factory workers and indebted graduates alike, leaving a lot of people angry and looking for someone to punch.
But extractive capitalism has been going on for two centuries now. Maybe it's time for a different critical approach.
"As usual Freddie reveals the problem with the progressive, young leftists. They can not tell the difference between enacting true social change and making posts. Haidt traces this not only to social media but to them being a generation of children exposed to over protection, not being able to play outside without supervision, or walk to school on their own, and so on."
I've been wondering: is there really a difference now vs. then *except* for the fact that with Twitter we can actually *see* the thoughts of all the people who are not particularly interested in material change activism? There have always been a ton of people who will talk about what they think is just or moral or efficient, but that's all they'll do. They don't volunteer to do material work. Now that we have Twitter, so we can see a broad swath of thoughts, we can simply more easily see what was always there.
That may have a substantial effect though. I suggest reading Haidt's article.
SHB, your words "large social protest movements that directly worked for structural change and identifiable outcomes" really struck me. I find that few of the struggles I see, online and in real life, involve any perceptible movement towards concrete goals.
What kind of measurable good comes from mourning the erasure of non-binary people? How many people does "checking your privilege" feed? What kind of health care does "trans women are women" provide? Whose children are better educated when "problematic" people are canceled?
Liberal discourse is constantly roiled by these social justice concepts which don't always have a discernable point of contact with the real world, so we're all fighting over what are largely abstractions. Maybe I'm just too old, but I prefer to save my energy for bail reform, ending the war on drugs, voting rights, and other matters that we KNOW will make people's lives better. What kind of social justice is better than that?
It’s very convenient for the ruling class that the party that once represented working people and advocated for meaningful change (ie, things that cost money, like Social Security and decent wages) was transformed into the party that is constantly hashing and rehashing privilege and microaggressions and structural blah blah: Things that distract and anger people, without involving demands for expensive social and economic change.
It’s not so much that the leaders of “the left” lost their way, but rather, around the time of Clinton we _had_ no more of the old-fashioned New Dealish left-ish people in government, and the sold-out jackals who occupied Congress had to distract “the people” with something.
What better than to pit people against each other with endless discussions of identities and privilege and who is most deserving of a very few high-visibility goodies? You end up with an insulting, ridiculous scenario in which Biden announces he will choose a black woman for the Supreme Court. That should offend every decent person no end.
We are all in the handbasket, accelerating toward our destination.
"I now see the nascent contemporary 60s movement coming out of what has been called heterodox thinkers. it is still relatively small but it is growing. and it is gathering members from both left and right who all have in common a belief in thinking, examining issues deeply, self-reflection, and liberal democracy. They are also slowly and continually confronting the extremes of both left and right, as well as their incredibly infantile belief systems and behavior. The exhausted middle is beginning to respond to this, most often with relief."
Can you give some examples from either side? I'm not disagreeing here, just wanted to get a sampling.
Perfectly stated.
Thanks for the link to the Haidt article: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/
Loved this - “Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous.”
Freddie repeatedly points out that change means consistent efforts over a long (usually) period of time; after which you may not get exactly the change you wanted anyway. Throwing up virtue signaling tweets is easy, and the likes/retweets you get give you a way bigger (and immediate) dopamine rush than years of slogging for change. The brain (channeling my Kahneman here) then just asserts "I (via my tweets) made a difference!!", (another dopamine rush) and the tweeter moves on. Rinse, lather, repeat.
I got kicked off of Twitter for calling Trump a retard. Canceled by for using a WOKE slur against the MAGA God. Best thing that ever happened to me. Twitter is the Devil.
"I suspect that these leftists tweet so much not because they think tweeting gives them power but because they are convinced that the real world never will. Change seems impossible, so let’s tell jokes."
This is what Terry Eagleton thought about the pomo, since the 60's/70's it was becoming clear that neither the Soviet Union nor the nationalist movements could bring about real (material/economic) change, erstwhile radicals became disillusioned and started to find 'revolutions' in the 'fissures', gender/race/sex/humour etc. Why they became disillusioned? Because Capitalism seemed too powerful of a force to change, it seemed that the world might come to an end but the 'system' will keep going.
So.... if we trash capitalism, then .... movie star alternative lives are more possible?
The movie star is just as much of a product of capitalism as is a boring job.
I don't know why people think if capitalism ends, we'll all just be able to do whatever we want to do, and hordes of our peers will pay for it.
I don’t hear enough about Terry Eagleton. Highly relevant to the moment.
Chomsky said pretty much the same thing, though he made a partial exception for Foucault.
I do not know who this person is, but what stands out is TWITTER IS NOT POLITICS. People do it from their phones. They have no skin in the game. Grass roots door knocking, showing up at candidate forums--that's politics. I've been a delegate to state conventions and met all the presidential candidates. I met Ralph Nader. Twitter is not in the same dimension. I can't have conversations abt politics with people who are only twits.
And here I was thinking Ralph Nader and Twitter did come from the same dimension, just not this one.
So you’re saying Twitter is unsafe at any speed
I've come to realize that social media was probably a mistake. It's not without its positives, but its been a net negative for society at large. And it's only made my anxiety and depression worse.
I am not a leftist, but it seems to me that much of the left prioritizes the symbolic over the concrete. Actually, this is common to the PMC in general, but since the PMC is the hegemonic class, their symbolic gestures carry more weight than those of someone without class power.
The problem comes when the PMC run into problems that don't care about their symbols and wish-fulfillment, things like "the COVID" or "the Taliban", forces that cannot be blackmailed, silenced, bargained with, or distracted with some shiny object. Forces that don't give a shit about the class power of the PMC, that is, its ability to decide what is and is not normative.
Faced with such forces, the PMC and their nostrums ("By this Sign, I thee deplatform!") fall flat on their faces.
Great point about symbolism. The impacts of defunding police forces, the reality of seeing trans women compete in high level sport, and the impact of pushing solar and wind energy sources too quickly are more examples of how reality collides with symbolism. I think in the past progressive activists were very comfortable being the voice of dissent without having actual power. Now they are the majority in the room and they have power and they are learning the difference between saying something and doing something.
Without opening additional cans of worms ATM, it's a lot easier to stay pure when you don't have real power. No need to make tradeoffs, to prioritize and then tell otherwise deserving people that they are going to have to wait some more, no need to make tactical alliances with sometimes unsavory partners or play power politics.
TBH, I don't see that they are learning anything. Perhaps I am too cynical.
I think this is completely true. If words are violence, then words aren’t even symbolic. So if your activism is all on social media, from your standpoint it’s not symbolic — you’re on the front lines. And since the words serve as lightning rods to gin up emotion, there has to be constant churn, as in the Steven Pinker idea of the euphemism treadmill. For example, hardly anyone uses the phrase “rape culture” anymore. Is that because things have changed that much? No, it’s because the word no longer carries much emotional freight. On the other hand, “transphobia” continues to trend and certainly carries a bigger emotional charge than “anti-Semitism,” despite the historical baggage. (And yes as a Jew I’m rightly ragged off by that.)
This is very perceptive.