It remains important to me to think: today, I might blog. And to think: I have a place to do it in.

So why don’t I more often? That is the thing on my mind today.

————

Reason #1: Because I am storing up some of the thinking that went into this blog for other, as yet unseen, purposes. First, for the Aydelotte Foundation, which I presently co-direct. We’re going to go live in the spring with a new website, and I’ve been writing a lot of content for that, much of which would previously have been grist for my blog mill. Second, I’m working on a long-form manuscript that in some ways arises out of fifteen years of blogging, and that’s absorbing some of the energies that would have gone into this space.

Reason #2: Because the way we’ve come to read in our present public sphere is both boring and terrifying. This N+1 essay in their Fall 2018 issue helped me understand a lot of my own distress. There seems to be almost no appetite now among public readers for interesting, stylistic or exploratory writing. Readers swarm over everything now, stripping any writing down into a series of declarative flags that sort everyone into teams, affinities, objectives. There’s no appetite for difficult problems that can’t be solved or worked, or for testimonies that give us a window into a lived world. No pleasure in the prose itself, and thus none in the writing of it.

Reason #3: Because we seem to arrived at a point where justice means visiting extreme precarity on everyone who says anything rather than making it possible for previously suppressed voices to speak safely. This is a familiar inflection point in struggles for social justice: we despair of a transformation that emancipates and so we settle for a transformation that at least tries to spread the misery. That might even be the right thing to do, for a variety of reasons. Making the powerful fear the consequences of speech that discriminates or hates or creates fear may be all we can do for now. There have been plenty of opportunities for the powerful to instead take a more hopeful and constructive interest in the voices of people who were long excluded from the public, in sentiments that have been unheard, and that opportunity was long unpursued. But the consequence in our current public discourse is that almost everyone is one day away from having someone paint a bullseye on them, deserving or otherwise. There can’t be any pleasure or joy in public writing in our present mood. Moreover, the kind of provocative hooks that I used to really enjoy setting into my blogging feel risky and I don’t have the same taste for risk that I used to. I feel vulnerable and tentative and melancholy even when the visible sociologies of my life and my writing should suggest otherwise.

Reason #4: For all that amateur blogging has faded, there is still a tremendous volume of online writing, and its speed has accelerated. By the time I have thought through my take on something that’s at least a bit timely, it’s been thoroughly masticated and spit out in online conversations. The last thing we need is more roughage to block up the digestive systems.

Reason #5: As I’ve said before, I know too much now and that is producing some of the expected inhibitions–it feels as if almost anything I might say would be taken to be subtweeting even when it’s not.

Reason #6: Everyone I respect who writes online feels smarter and clearer than I feel I am myself. I feel less confident in what I think I know and more conscious of the vastness of the things I do not know. That I know that this is a common feeling does not particularly relieve me of having it.

Reason #7: It’s hard to feel like there’s a point to public writing at the heart of Trump’s ascendancy. Certainly there’s no point to even trying to speak to self-identified conservatives who have aligned themselves with Trump: the will-to-power mendacity and moral vacuity melts anything like honest engagement like a butterfly tossed in a furnace. But it is not merely Trump and his followers. When is the last time you can recall seeing anyone who was meaningfully persuaded by arguments or evidence that contradicted or challenged a belief or position they had previously articulated? When I see people telling me that the only way to deal with people who hold dangerous, untrue or morally bankrupt views is to engage them in a persistently reasonable way, to have a dialogue, I can’t help but think that this is just another untrue idea. Or at least it is a kind of religious dogma by self-anointed rationalist thinkers. It is not an evidence-based proposition about how people shift their values or come to hold new thoughts or ideas. It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about people with whom one has personal or familial standing or total strangers, whether this is about a neighborhood or a nation. What passes for reason and evidence among educated readers and writers often feels as if it is just a value system local to them, and no more likely even so to lead to thoughtful changes in perspectives or beliefs among them. I feel no more likely to persuade a person who is in every respect a peer to change a view they have committed to, no matter how strong my arguments or evidence might be, than I am to persuade a stranger with completely different values and social location. And yet, I feel I am persuadable: that I change what I think about specific issues and arguments quite frequently in response to what others say and argue. Perhaps I am wrong even about myself; perhaps this is an unearned vanity. If I am right, then it feels as if I have chosen the worst strategy in Prisoner’s Dilemma: vulnerable to persuasion in a world that increasingly sees persuadability as a vulnerability to be exploited.

And yet, I remain hopeful about blogging. I am not sure why. I am not sure when. This remains open for business, nevertheless.

But I have gone quiet for other reasons as well. I am struggling to understand what the good of writing in public is at a time when I’m prepared to encourage others to do so.

When I began blogging in a pre-WordPress era, I was already a long-time participant in online conversation, all the way back to pre-Usenet BBSs, including the pay service GEnie. So I think I held no illusions about what were already problems of long-standing in online culture: trolling, harassment, mobbing, deception, anonymity, and so on.

Nevertheless, I started a blog for two major reasons. First, to have an outlet for my own thinking, as a kind of public diary that would let me express my thinking about professional life, politics, popular culture and other issues as I saw fit, and perhaps in so doing keep myself from talking too much among friends and colleagues. I don’t think I’ve succeeded in that, because I still overwhelm conversations around me if I’m not thoughtful about restraining myself.

The second was to see if I could participate usefully in what I hoped would grow into a new and more democratic public sphere, one that escaped the exclusivity of postwar American public discussion. I think I did a good job at evolving an ethic for myself and then inhabiting it consistently. That had a cost to the quality of my prose, because being more respectful, cautious and responsible in my blogging usually meant being duller and longer in the style of my writing.

In the end, I feel as if both goals have ended up being somewhat pointless. It’s not clear to me any longer what good I can contribute as a public diarist. Much of what I think gets thought and expressed by someone else at a quicker pace, in a faster social media platform. More importantly, the value of my observations, whatever that might be, was secured through combining frankness and introspection, through raising rather than brutally disposing of open questions. This more than anything now seems quaintly out of place in social media. I feel as if it takes extreme curation to find pockets of social media commentary given over to skepticism and exploration, through collectively playful or passionate engagement with uncertainty and ambiguity.

More complicatedly, the more I am tied to my institutional histories and imagined as being a “responsible agent” within them, the harder it gets to talk frankly about what I see. It was comforting to think that almost no one read my blog and almost no one cared about it, in some sense. Now I’m only too aware that if I speak, even if I’m careful to abstract and synthesize what I’m observing, I can’t help but seem as if I am testifying about the much larger archive of real experiences and painful confidences I have been entrusted with. If I abstract too much, I find that friends and colleagues politely gaslight me: I can’t have seen what I think I’ve seen. But I can’t be more direct, and I don’t want to be. Trying to observe real stories and real problems with some degree of honesty can curdle into the settling of scores, and can tempt people–older white men especially–into a narrative of institutional life in which they are always the heroes of the story. Some stories and experiences explored honestly end up with everyone muddling through with good intent; others end up implicating everyone in certain kinds of bad faith or short-sightedness, including the people doing the exploring.

This brings me to the second goal: to be part of a new and more democratic public sphere. I have been for thirty years a person enthusiastic about the possibilities and often the realities of online culture. I am losing that enthusiasm rapidly. It’s not just that all the old problems are now vastly greater in scope and more ominous by far in the threat they can pose to participants in digital culture, but that there are new problems too. The threat to women, to people of color, to GLBQT people, is bigger by far, but even as someone who has all sorts of protections, I find myself unnerved by online discussion, by its volatility and speed, by the ways that groups settle on intense and combative interpretations and then amplify both. I remember only dimly that for a long time I saw myself as trying to create bridges in conversations to online conservatives. With a blessed few exceptions, those conversations mostly felt like agreeing to trust Lucy to hold the football steady one more time, like being the mark in a long confidence game whose goal was to move the Overton window. What did I think I was doing talking to David Horowitz, for example? Or writing critiques of ACTA reports as if anyone writing them cared remotely about evidence or accuracy? And yet I’m not feeling that much more comfortable about online conversation with people with whom I ostensibly agree or among whom I have allegedly built up long reservoirs of trust. That sense of trust and social groundedness felt very real as recently as five years ago, but now it feels as if the infrastructures of online life could pull any foundation into wreckage in an instant without any individual human beings meaning or wanting to have that happen.

I almost thought to critically engage a recent wave of online attacks on a course being taught by my colleague here at Swarthmore. I even tried one engagement with a real person on Twitter and for a brief moment, I thought at least the points I was making were being read and understood. But the iron curtain of a new kind of cultural formation snapped down hard within three tweets, and it was difficult for me to even grasp who I had been talking to: a provocateur? an eccentric? a true believer? The rest of the social media traffic about the issue was rank with the stink of bots and 8chan-style troublemaking. Even when it was real people talking, even if I might be able to have a meaningful conversation with them in person if I happened to be in their physical presence, nothing good could come of online engagement, and many bad things could instead happen.

So I need to think anew: what is this space for? What’s left to say? Public debate, per se, is dead. Being a diarist might not be, but I will need to find ways to undam the river of my own voice.

When we’re dealing with large-scale voting patterns, a certain amount of sociological musing is completely appropriate, because that’s what the patterns make visible–that this group of people likes a certain person more or less, etc. At that level, sociological thinking is explanatory and it is also an important part of arguing for or against particular candidates in terms of reading what they mean and what they will do.

But when we bring that into an address that’s meant to speak to particular individuals to whom we are connected via social media, it feels, first of all, reductive: as if those individuals whom we have chosen to be connected to are no more than their sociologies. More importantly, the arguments we have at this point feel straight out of B.F. Skinner: many writers in social media treat other people as if they are something to be conditioned–to be pushed this way or that way with the proper framing. With the punishment of scolding and call outs if they’re being sociologically bad, with praise and attention if they’re expressing the proper selfhood. We begin to be the master of our own little Skinner boxes rather than as human beings in rich conversation with other human beings. We begin to think of each other person in our feeds as a person to be punished and rewarded, conditioned and shaped. We stop thinking of our own reasons why we believe in a particular candidate, why we think *or* feel what we think or feel. More importantly, we stop thinking of the reasons why someone else feels or thinks that way, and stop being curious about those reasons if they’re not being shared or enunciated. The difference in their views starts to be merely exasperating, the manifestation of an enemy sociality. Disagreement starts to be like an untrained puppy making messes in our space: we give treats, we hit noses with rolled-up newspaper. If the puppy doesn’t learn, we euthanize. We start thinking of “frames”, of rhetoric as the way to run our Skinner box. We don’t persuade or explain, we push and pull.

I think there’s a reason why formal debate named “ad hominem” as a logical fallacy. It’s not that arguments are not in fact a result of the personalities or sociologies of the people making them. We’ve all had to argue with people whose arguments are motivated by spite or some other emotional defect or are defenses of their social privileges. But it is that allowing ourselves the luxury of saying so during the discussion short-circuits our capacity to engage in future conversation–it becomes the default move we make. We start to have conversations only when someone who is a shining paragon of virtue in our eyes steps forward. (And that person increasingly may become someone who is emotionally and sociologically identical to ourselves.) One by one human beings around us vanish, and so too does evidence, inquiry, curiosity. We end up in a landscape of affirmation and disgust, of reaction to stimuli–e.g., as we Skinner box others, so too are we Skinner boxed.

Just one small example: Adam Kotsko on whether the Internet has made things worse. It’s a short piece, and consciously intended as a provocation, as much of his writing is, and full of careful qualifiers and acknowledgements to boot. But I think it’s a snapshot of this particular set of discursive moves that I am thinking of as a trap, moves that are more serious and more of a leaden weight in hands other than Kotsko’s. And to be sure, in an echo of the point I’m about to critique, this is not a new problem: to some extent this is a continuous pattern that stretches back deep into the history of Western Marxism and postmodernism.

Move #1: Things are worse now. But they were always worse.

Kotsko says this about the Internet. It seems worse but it’s also just the same. Amazon is just the Sears catalogue in a new form. Whatever is bad about the Internet is an extension, maybe an intensification, of what was systematically bad and corrupt about liberalism, modernity, capitalism, and so on. It’s neoliberal turtles all the way down. It’s not worse than a prior culture and it’s not better than a prior culture. (Kotsko has gone on to say something of the same about Trump: he seems worse but he’s just the same. The worst has already happened. But the worst is still happening.)

I noted over a decade ago the way that this move handicapped some forms of left response to the Bush Administration after 9/11. For the three decades before 9/11, especially during the Cold War, many left intellectuals in the West practiced a kind of High Chomskyianism when it came to analyzing the role of the United States in the world, viewing the United States as an imperial actor that sanctified torture, promoted illiberalism and authoritarianism, acted only for base and corrupt motives. Which meant in some sense that the post-9/11 actions of the Bush Administration were only more of the same. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. But many left intellectuals wanted to frame those actions as a new kind of threat, as a break or betrayal of the old order. Which required saying that there was a difference between Bush’s unilateralism and open sanction of violent imperial action and the United States during the Cold War and the 1990s and that the difference was between something better and something worse. Not between something ideal and something awful, mind you: just substantively or structurally better and substantively or structurally worse.

This same loop pops up sometimes in discussions of the politics of income inequality. To argue that income inequality is so much worse today in the United States almost inevitably requires seeing the rise of the middle-class in postwar America as a vastly preferable alternative to our present neoliberal circumstances. But that middle-class was dominated by white straight men and organized around nuclear-family domesticity, which no progressive wants to see as a preferable past.

It’s a cycle visible in the structure of Howard Zinn’s famous account of American history: in almost all of Zinn’s chapters, the marginalized and the masses rise in reaction to oppression, briefly achieve some success, and then are crushed by dominant elites, again and again and again, with nothing ever really changing.

It’s not as if any of these negative views of the past are outright incorrect. The U.S. in the Cold War frequently behaved in an illiberal, undemocratic and imperial fashion, particularly in the 1980s. Middle-class life in the 1950s and 1960s was dominated by white, straight men. The problems of culture and economy that we identify with the Internet are not without predicate or precedent. But there is a difference between equivalence (“worse now, worse then”) and seeing the present as worse (or better) in some highly particular or specific way. Because the latter actually gives us something to advocate for. “Torture is bad, and because it’s bad, it is so very very bad to be trying to legitimate or legalize it.” “A security state that spies on its own people and subverts democracy is bad, and because it’s bad, it’s so much worse when it is extended and empowered by law and technology.”

When everything has always been worst, it is fairly hard to mobilize others–or even oneself–in the present. Because nothing is really any different now. It is in a funny kind of way a close pairing to the ahistoricism of some neoliberalism: that the system is the system is the system. That nothing ever really changes dramatically, that there have been in the lives and times that matter no real cleavages or breaks.

Move #2: No specific thing is good now, because the whole system is bad.

In Kotsko’s piece on the Internet, this adds up to saying that there is no single thing, no site or practice or resource, which stands as relatively better (or even meaningfully different) apart from the general badness of the Internet. Totality stands always against particularity, system stands against any of its nodes. Wikipedia is not better than Amazon, not really: they’re all connected. Relatively flat hierarchies of access to online publication or speech are not meaningful because elsewhere writers and artists are being paid nothing.

This is an even more dispiriting evacuation of any political possibility, because it moves pre-emptively against any specific project of political making, or any specific declaration of affinity or affection for a specific reform, for any institution, for any locality. Sure, something that exists already or that could exist might seem admirable or useful or generative, but what does it matter?

Move #3: It’s not fair to ask people how to get from here to a totalizing transformation of the systems we live under, because this is just a strategy used to belittle particular reforms or strategies in the present.

I find the sometimes-simultaneity of #2 and #3 the most frustrating of all the positions I see taken up by left intellectuals. I can see #2 (depressing as it is) and I can see #3 (even when it’s used to defend a really bad specific tactical or strategic move made by some group of leftists) but #2 and #3 combined are a form of turtling up against any possibility of being criticized while also reserving the right to criticize everything that anyone else is doing.

I think it’s important to have some idea about what the systematic goals are. That’s not about painting a perfect map between right now and utopia, but the lack of some consistent systematic ideas that make connections between the specific campaigns or reforms or issues that drawn attention on the left is one reason why we end up in “circular firing squads”. But I also agree that it’s unfair to argue that any specific reform or ideal is not worth taking up if it can’t explain that effort will fix everything that’s broken.

4. It’s futile to do anything, but why are you just sitting around?

E.g., this is another form of justifying a kind of supine posture for left intellectuals–a certainty that there is no good answer to the question “What is to be done?” but that the doing of nothing by others (or their preoccupation with anything but the general systematic brokenness of late capitalism) is always worth complaining about. Indeed, that the complaint against the doing-nothingness of others is a form of doing-something that exempts the complainer from the complaint.

——-

The answer, it seems to me, is to opt out of these traps wherever and whenever possible.

We should historicize always and with specificity. No, everything is not worse or was not worse. Things change, and sometimes neither for better nor worse. Take the Internet. There’s no reason to get stuck in the trap of trying to categorize or assess its totality. There are plenty of very good, rich, complex histories of digital culture and information technology that refuse to do anything of the sort. We can talk about Wikipedia or Linux, Amazon or Arpanet, Usenet or Tumblr, without having to melt them into a giant slurry that we then weigh on some abstracted scale of wretchedness or messianism.

If you flip the combination of #2 and #3 on their head so that it’s a positive rather than negative assertion, that we need systematic change and that individual initiatives are valid, then it’s an enabling rather than disabling combination. It reminds progressives to look for underlying reasons and commitments that connect struggles and ideals, but it also appreciates the least spreading motion of a rhizome as something worth undertaking.

If you reverse #4, maybe that could allow left intellectuals to work towards a more modest and forgiving sense of their own responsibilities, and a more appreciative understanding of the myriad ways that other people seek pleasure and possibility. That not everything around us is a fallen world, and that not every waking minute of every waking day needs to be judged in terms of whether it moves towards salvation.

We can’t keep saying that everything is so terrible that people have got to do something urgently, right now, but also that it’s always been terrible and that we have always failed to do something urgently, or that the urgent things we have done never amount to anything of importance. We disregard both the things that really have changed–Zinn was wrong about his cyclical vision–and the things that might become worse in a way we’ve never heretofore experienced. At those moments, we set ourselves against what people know in their bones about the lives they lived and the futures they fear. And we can’t keep setting ourselves in the center of some web of critique, ready to spin traps whenever a thread quivers with movement. Politics happens at conjunctures that magnify and intensify what we do as human beings–and offer both reward and danger as a result. It does not hover with equal anxiety and import around the buttering of toast and the gathering of angry crowds at a Trump rally.

Or to think that the problem is just Gawker, its history and culture as an online publication. There’s something to that: Gawker writers and editors have often cultivated a particularly noxious mix of preening self-righteousness, inconsistent to nonexistent quality control, a lack of interest in independent research and verification, motiveless cruelty and gutless double-standards in the face of criticism. All of which were on display over the weekend in the tweets of Gawker writers, in the appallingly tone-deaf decision by the writing staff to make their only statement a defense of their union rights against a decision by senior managers to pull the offending article, and in the decision to bury thousands of critical comments by readers and feature a miniscule number of friendly or neutral comments.

Gawker’s writers and editors, and for that matter all of Gawker Media, are only an extreme example of a general problem that is simultaneously particular to social media and widespread through the zeitgeist of our contemporary moment. It’s a problem that appears in protests, in tweets and blogs, in political campaigns right and left, in performances and press conferences, in corporate start-ups and tiny non-profits.

All of that, all of our new world with such people in it, crackles with so much beautiful energy and invention, with the glitter of things once thought impossible and things we never knew could be. Every day makes us witness to some new truth about how life is lived by people all around the world–intimate, delicate truths full of heartbreaking wonder; terrible, blasphemous truths about evils known and unsuspected; furious truths about our failures and blindness. More voices, more possibilities, more genres and forms and styles. Even at Gawker! They’ve often published interesting writing, helped to circulate and empower passionate calls to action, and intelligently curated our viral attention.

So what is the problem? I’m tempted to call it nihilism, but that’s too self-conscious and too philosophically coherent a label. I’m tempted to call it anarchism, but then I might rather approve rather than criticize. I might call it rugged individualism, or quote Aleister Crowley about the whole of the law being do as thou wilt. And again I might rather approve than criticize.

It’s not any of that, because across the whole kaleidoscopic expanse of this tumbling moment in time, there’s not enough of any of that. I wish we had more free spirits and gonzo originals calling it like they see it, I wish we had more raging people who just want the whole corrupt mess to fall down, I wish we had more people who just want to tend their own gardens as they will and leave the rest to people who care.

What we have instead–Gawker will do as a particularly stomach-churning example, but there are so many more–is a great many people who in various contexts know how to bid for our collective attention and even how to hold it for the moments where it turns their way, but not what to do with it. Not even to want to do anything with it. What we have is an inability to build and make, or to defend what we’ve already built and made.

What we have is a reflexive attachment to arguing always from the margins, as if a proclamation of marginality is an argument, and as if that argument entitles its author to as much attention as they can claim but never to any responsibility for doing anything with that attention.

What we have is contempt for anybody trying to keep institutions running, anybody trying to defend what’s already been achieved or to maintain a steady course towards the farther horizons of a long-term future. What we have is a notion that anyone responsible for any institution or group is “powerful” and therefore always contemptible. Hence not wanting to build things or be responsible. Everyone wants to grab the steering wheel for a moment or two but no one wants to drive anywhere or look at a map, just to make vroom-vroom noises and honk the horn.

Everyone’s sure that speech acts and cultural work have power but no one wants to use power in a sustained way to create and make, because to have power persistently, in even a small measure, is to surrender the ability to shine a virtuous light on one’s own perfected exclusion from power.

Gawker writers want to hold other writers and speakers accountable for bad writing and unethical conduct. They want to scorn Reddit for its inability to hold its community to higher standards. But they don’t want to build a system for good writing, they don’t want to articulate a code of ethical conduct, they don’t want to invest their own time and care to cultivate a better community. They don’t want to be institutions. They want to sit inside a kind of panopticon that has crudely painted over its entrance, “Marginality Clubhouse”, a place from which they can always hold others accountable and never be seen themselves. Gawker writers want to always be “punching up”, mostly so they don’t have to admit what they really want is simply to punch. To hurt someone is a great way to get attention. If there’s no bleeder to lead, then make someone bleed.

It’s not just them. Did you get caught doing something wrong in the last five years? What do you do? You get up and do what Gawker Media writer Natasha Vargas-Cooper has done several times, doing it once again this weekend in a tweet: whomever you wronged deserved it anyway, you’re sorry if someone else is flawed enough to take offense, and by the way, you’re a victim or marginalized and not someone speaking from an institution or defending a profession. Tea Party members and GamerGate posters do the same thing: both of their discursive cultures are full of proclamations of marginality and persecution. The buck stops somewhere else. You don’t make or build, you don’t have hard responsibilities of your own.

You think people who do make and build and defend what’s made and built are good for one thing: bleeding when you hit them and getting you attention when you do it. They’re easy to hit because they have to stand still at the site of their making.

This could be simply a complaint about individuals failing to accept responsibility for power–even with small power comes small responsibility. But it’s more than that. In many cases, this relentless repositioning to virtuous marginality for the sake of rhetorical and argumentative advantage creates a dangerous kind of consciousness or self-perception that puts every political and social victory, small and large, at risk. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s marriage decision, a lot of the progressive conversation I saw across social media held a celebratory or thankful tone for only a short time. Then in some cases it moved on productively to the next work that needs doing with that same kind of legal and political power, to more building. But in other cases, it reset to marginality, to looking for the next outrage to spark a ten-minute Twitter frenzy about an injustice, always trying to find a way back to a virtuous outside untainted by power or responsibility, always without any specific share in or responsibility for what’s wrong in the world. If that’s acknowledged, it’s not in terms of specific things or actions that could be done right or wrong, better or worse, just in generalized and abstract invocations of “privilege” or “complicity”, of the ubiquity of sin in an always-fallen world.

On some things, we are now the center, and we have to defend what’s good in the world we have knowing that we are there in the middle of things, in that position and no other. To assume responsibility for what we value and what we do and to ensure that the benefits of what we make are shared. To invite as many under our roof as can fit and then invite some more after that. To build better and build more.

What is happening across the whole span of our zeitgeist is that we’ve lost the ability to make anything like a foundational argument that binds its maker as surely as it does others. And yet many of us want to retain the firm footing that foundations give in order to claim moral and political authority.

This is why I say nihilism would be better: at least the nihilist has jumped off into empty space to see what can be found when you no longer want to keep the ground beneath your feet. At least the anarchist is sure nothing of worth can be built on the foundations we have. At least the free spirit is dancing lightly across the floor.

So Gawker wants everyone else to have ethics, but couldn’t describe for a moment what its own ethical obligations are and why they should be so. Gawker hates the lack of compassion shown by others, but not because it has anything like a consistent view about why cruelty is wrong. Gawker thinks stories should be accurate, unless they have to do the heavy lifting to make them so.

They are in this pattern of desires typical, and it’s not a simple matter of hypocrisy. It is more a case of the relentless a la carte -ification of our lives, that we speak and demand and act based on felt commitments and beliefs that have the half-life of an element created in a particle accelerator, blooming into full life and falling apart seconds later.

To stand still for longer is to assume responsibility for power (small or large), to risk that someone will ask you to help defend the castle or raise the barn. That you might have to live and work slowly for a goal that may be for the benefit of others in the future, or for some thing that is bigger than any human being to flourish. To be bound to some ethic or code, to sometimes stand against your own desires or preferences.

Sometimes to not punch but instead to hold still while someone punches you, knowing that you’re surrounded by people who will buoy you up and heal your wounds and stand with you to hold the line, because you were there for them yesterday and you will be there with them tomorrow.

Nevertheless, I’ve followed many comics blogs since the mid-2000s, most of which have traversed the same arc as academic blogs or any other kind of weblogs: from a small subculture dominated by strong personalities who were drawn to online writing for idiosyncratic reasons to a more professionalized, standardized, and commercialized mode of online publication. Two days ago, a well-known male comic blogger named Chris Sims who had moved from maintaining his own early personal blog to paid writing on a shared platform blog called Comics Alliance wrote an apology for having bullied and harassed a female blogger, Valerie D’Orazio, back in that earlier era of online writing.

The timing of the apology, as it turns out, was at least partly a result of Sims breaking through from comics blogging to actually writing a major mainstream title for Marvel, an X-Men comic intended to be a nostalgic revisitation of those characters as they were in the early 1990s. News of his hiring led to D’Orazio writing about how hard that was for her to stomach, particularly given that his bullying was particularly aimed at her after she was given a similar opportunity to write a mainstream Marvel Comics title.

There’s more to it all (there always is), including an assertion by some that “Gamergaters” are somehow involved in stirring this up, but I want to take note of two separate and interesting aspects of this moment.

The first is an excellent reprise of the full discursive history involved in this controversy by Heidi MacDonald. Not only does MacDonald add a lot of nuance to the controversy while remaining very clear on the moral landscape involved, she ends up providing a history of blogging and social media that might be of considerable interest to digital humanists who otherwise have no interest in comics as a genre. In particular, I think MacDonald accurately identifies how blogging used to be a highly individualized practice within which particular writers had surprising amounts of influence over the domains that drew their attention but also had largely undiscussed and unacknowledged impact on the psychological and personal lives of other bloggers, for good and ill. In a sense, the early blogosphere was a more direct facsimile of the post-1945 “republic of letters” than we’ve often realized: bloggers behaved in many ways just as print critics and pundits behaved, with rivalries and injuries inflicted upon one another but also with relational support and mutuality. Where they were interested in a cultural domain that had almost no tradition of mainstream print criticism attached to it (or where that domain had been especially confined or limited in scope), the new blogosphere often had a surprisingly intense impact on mainstream cultural producers. I’m recalling, for example, how very briefly before I started a formal weblog I published some restaurant reviews alongside some academic materials on a static webpage, and immediately got attention from some area restaurants and from some local journalists, which I hadn’t really meant to do at all.

MacDonald underscores the difference between this early environment and now, especially in terms of identity politics. It really is not just a story of going from individual curation of a subculture to a more mainstream and commercial platform, but also of how much attention and discourse in contemporary social media no longer really reproduces or enacts that older “republic of letters”. Attention in the early blogosphere was as individually curated as the blogs themselves, and commentariats tended to be much more fragmented and particular to a site. Now commentariats are much larger in scale, much less invested in the particular culture of a particular location for content, and are directed in their attention by much more palpably algorithmic infrastructures. This is sometimes good, sometimes bad, but is at the least very different.

The second aspect of the Sims controversy that interests me is the very active debate in various comments sections about whether Sims should be forgiven (by D’Orazio or anyone else). This has become a common discursive structure in the wake of controversies of this kind. Not just a debate over what the proper rhetorical and substantive composition of contrition should be, but whether the granting of forgiveness is either a good incentive for producing similar changes in the consciousness of past and present offenders or is an attempt to renormalize and cover-up harassment by placing it perpetually pastward of the person making a pro forma apology.

One of key issues in that ongoing debate is whether the presence of self-interest so contaminates an apology as to make it worthless. E.g., if Sims has to go public in order to keep his job offer from Marvel intact, then is that a sign that he doesn’t really mean it, and thus that his apology is worthless?

I think the discussion about the dangers of renormalization, of quickly kicking over the traces, is valid. But here I’d suggest this much: if male (or white, etc.) cultural producers, professionals, politicians, etc., come to feel that their ability to succeed professionally depends upon acknowledging bad behavior in the past and committing to a different kind of public conduct in the present, then that’s a sign of successful social transformation. The presence of self-interest doesn’t invalidate a public apology, but instead documents a new connection between professionalism, audiences and success. That might turn out to be a bigger driver of change than waiting for a total and irrefutable transformation of innermost subjectivity.

I’m up against two problems that I see as pushing me in that direction. The first is I think much of online discourse has evolved towards a norm where referential links do not function as documentation of a critique or argument, but instead as the equivalent of walking in a saloon and telling another gunslinger to draw, as a form of picking a fight. I’ve never been that keen on that in my online writing, and I’m much less keen on it now.

Second is a problem that Frederik de Boer has written about, which is that you can write about your own experiences or observations from experience in general terms and find that readers who either have very different experiences find it difficult to credit your observations, and at the least believe those experiences are unusual or distinctive to you. In some cases, you see that readers who strongly disagree with what you are making out of those observations simply think you’re lying or exaggerating.

Often it’s impossible to provide further specifics without compromising other individuals or turning some aspect of your professional and personal life into a form of documentary evidence. It’s not ethical for me to say, “At a meeting on this date, a specific other colleague said the following really troubling thing to me or in my presence” in a blog entry. If it were one of a narrow class of really troubling things, I might be obliged to make a professional complaint through institutional channels, but never to talk about it here or anywhere else. That’s an important domain of “public privacy” to not breach casually, if ever. At the same time, many of us want to find a way to process what we hear and see and experience, to make it a legitimate part of how we think about life, work and politics. That’s why many early academic bloggers chose pseudonyms, and why even those of us who wrote under our own names chose to find ways to blur the specificity of our experiences in order to ethically think with and through those experiences.

That approach will always create a legitimate anxiety for readers: can you trust me? Even if you trust me, how can you evaluate the selectivity and sensitivity of the way I hear and see the world around me? How do you know when I’m describing something that happens only to me, or that only I’m primed to see, versus describing something that has yet to happen to you but might well be right around the corner in your own life?

I can only say that any observation rooted in intersubjectivity never reaches a point of final convergence on fixed truth. But I have learned in my life to credit a fairly broad range of experiences reported by other people, including some I never can have–and that doesn’t always mean having to believe that the person telling me their story saw everything that happened during that experience, either, or that I would have seen the same thing if I’d been there. People who are just outright making it all up are (in my experience) fairly rare. So make of my abstractions what you will–but just know that in many cases I’m keeping it general because I have to and I ought to.

But “privilege” as a concept essentially takes its cues from a deep body of pre-existing social theory and social history that dissects the origins and continuing maintenance of inequality. Much of that body of theory argues that in some fashion or another, inequality is functional to the individuals, groups and institutions that sustain it, that it is the product of self-interest. Part of the point behind that general argument is to aggressively dissent from other bodies of theory that see inequality as the natural outcome of meritocracy, competition, or intrinsic pre-existing differences between human beings, to argue instead that inequality has a history and is an active creation of social processes and institutional power.

It would be possible to argue that inequality is both a product of historical circumstances but not self-interested, e.g., that it is an emergent or unintended (if undesirable) outcome of processes and actions that were undertaken for other reasons. To the extent to which that is true, calling out privilege might be a genuinely educational gesture, and one where it’s plausible that the person named as privileged would have no vested desire to defend that status.

For the most part, this is not what progressive or left social theory would argue. The assumption is that the privileged benefit from their privilege, and therefore have every reason in the world to defend or maintain it. So what could possibly get them to do otherwise? Only one of two possibilities, broadly speaking. Either the mobilization of sufficient coercion or force by the victims of inequality such that they can compel the privileged to surrender some or all of their status, or the possibility of convincing the privileged that their status is either morally repugnant or is ultimately more of a risk to their long-term social existence than a more equal disposition would be.

If it’s about mobilization, the only benefit to privilege-checking is painting a bullseye on a target, of making a threat. At some point, making threats casually without the power to back them up is at the least futile, at the worst incredibly dangerous.

If it’s not–if there is some possibility of persuading a privileged person to assist in the abrasion or surrender of that privilege because that’s a thing they ought to do–it’s worth considering what that implies about the act of privilege-checking itself, and many other kinds of related communication.

If the “ought to do” is “because if you don’t eventually there’s going to be a revolution and you’ll be worse off than if you aimed for a soft landing from inequality”, then that’s just a deferred threat, to be taken seriously to the extent that the person making the argument can mobilize evidence about the inevitability of that outcome.

If the “ought to do” is because inequality is morally wrong and there is a hope that even its beneficiaries can see that, the question is: morally wrong how? Potentially for a range of reasons, some of them complementary. Morally wrong because perhaps a democratic society requires some form of rough equality to work, is premised on the notion that all people are created (and therefore should remain) equal. Such that anyone who professes to believe that a democratic society is preferable to any other ought to believe in the active maintenance of equality. But perhaps more because inequality’s consequences hurt people, both in absolute terms in terms of affordances and necessities they cannot access and relatively because they see others who have no greater merit or right enjoying vastly greater privileges.

E.g., privilege-checking arguably works only because or if it’s assumed that the person being called out is compassionate or can be morally moved to compassion.

Here we come to other problems. First, this doesn’t sit entirely well with the notion that the privileged are rationally self-interested in protecting their status. At the very least, to privilege-check as an invocation of shared morality implies that self-interest is never a sufficient explanation of social outcomes and even less of consciousness.

Second, the moral appeal only works if it is shared. It is undeniably true that members of marginalized groups cannot systematically discriminate against, that people of color cannot be racists or women be sexists, in the sense that this argument is typically made. Because to discriminate requires organized social power. It is not true, and is usually not claimed by activists to be true, that people cannot be cruel to one another as individuals. Power is no security against feeling personal and emotional pain, and relative powerlessness is no guarantee of interpersonal emotional virtue.

Early celebrations of online communication embraced it as a many-to-many medium, a wholesome democratizing alternative to the one-to-many structure of earlier forms of mass media. What that characterization obscured is that in some cases, the Internet functions as a many-to-one medium, magnifying and focusing the attention of crowds on individuals.

The problem is that such attention is often not compassionate in its imagination of that individual, even when it is coming from crowds who act in the name of a politics that requires a belief in the possibility of compassion even in those who have no necessary reason to feel it. If you call for people to worry about the injustice of inequality, to feel moved by the immorality of privilege, and believe that it is possible that this call will be heeded, then that requires an ethic of care. Anyone who worries about privilege has to be at least as compassionate as they hope the privileged might be.

In a many-to-one appeal, even if the many are just a handful of activists with little to no social power and the one is an intersectionally powerful person, it has to be possible to imagine that the awakening of compassion will be mingled with feelings of panic, sadness, and fear. The critique still has to be said, not the least because status, privilege and inequality are social facts that need to be spoken about with the same precision and clarity that we devote to talking about the chemistry of covalent bonds or measuring the absolute neutrino mass scale. But calling out privilege shouldn’t be an act that requires hardening the heart or relishing a hope for social exclusion. Which means also that it should be the exact opposite of a flip or easy rejoinder, never the progressive equivalent of a sneer or a call to silence.

Perhaps that means “check your privilege” is a phrase to retire because it invites that kind of ease, a lack of awareness about what that statement hopes for and requires. If it’s not an expression of an ethic of care, trying to radar-ping the world around it to find out who else shares or might share in that ethic, and not a threat with power behind it, then what it usually leads to is the moral evacuation of a conversation and the production of a sort of performative austerity, of everyone in a community pretending to virtue they do not authentically embrace and avoiding the positive or generative use of the forms of social power they might actually have genuinely privileged access to.

A part of Grasping the Nettle.

Or is it instead that we’ve become a nation of Batmen, with social media our trusty utility belt? Vigilantes on patrol against the sort of malice that no law could punish but that leaves people reeling and downtrodden? Who else will punish the asshole car dealers who try to get an innocent pizza delivery man fired if not all of us?

I don’t think there has yet been a definitive history of how we stopped being a society where children could roam away from constant parental surveillance and where adult bodies could be unseen and anonymous in plain sight, but I’m certain that this past moment is uncomfortably twinned with a world where brutal injustices were glossed over as normal and white men from “the greatest generation” could go to sleep at night unperturbed by, unaware of, the racism, sexism, and discrimination that was everywhere around them.

However you could have hoped to go forward from that moment, I think going towards a world of ubiquitious attention to public bodies and everyday speech while leaving much of the force of structural discrimination unperturbed is not high on the list of aspirational possibilities.

21st Century Americans are in many ways becoming a kind of democratic Stasi, reporting on their neighbors and colleagues, assembling dossiers of suspicious or questionable action and speech. This would be one thing if it were social pressure, but it isn’t just that. In many cases, if you call the cops or report to an employer, the target will be dealing with potentially ruinous consequences. Both the state and capital alike encourage, protect and extend mutual surveillance.

Nor is it just reactionary in its content. There will be no fable here of McCarthyism, nothing that lets this story sift neatly into defenders and enemies of an open society. My Facebook feeds are crowded with messages forwarded by progressive friends: look what this person said! Look what that guy did! Hashtag that creep, report that guy to his boss.

That at least you could account to the rough and tumble of political struggle, that you can’t pursue justice and be endlessly genteel and forgiving. But my social media, written by educated progressives, are just as much full of other kinds of negative attention to public bodies. A quiet undercurrent of disdain for misbehaving, unruly bodies that have the bad taste to be visible: fat bodies, slovenly bodies, flyover bodies, bodies that don’t spell and talk good, bodies that look funny. Bodies that eat the wrong foods, bodies that go to the wrong places. Bodies that like the wrong movies, bodies that do the wrong things. We no longer look to a single column in the newspaper to inform middle-class manners, no longer go to charm school. Bourgeois etiquette is done by swarm action now, by flash mobs. And when we swarm over a target, it’s the equivalent of Edward Snowden releasing his memos: it says, “You also are being watched.”

The problem with a lot of our ubiquitious surveillance is precisely not that it is overtly hateful and hating. Instead, what makes so much of it easy to pursue is that it presents itself as a kindness. Here is some advice about not reading the Internet so much! Here is a way not to die because you read your iPad before sleeping! Here is some food you should eat instead of what you are eating! Here is a movie you shouldn’t have liked, ever! Here is a book you should know better than to have read! Here are some bad people that I am sure you are not.

Our new Stasi enlists us out with concern and responsibility. See something? Say something! is the security-state version. Bystander intervention is the progressive, communitarian one. The libertarian complaint about nanny-states falls flat because of the narrowness of its understanding of where surveillance and regulation live (they live everywhere) and how they derive their power (the state is only the beginning of it). You can’t hide from surveillance because to hide from surveillance is to hide from sociality and all its necessary affordances. The Unabomber’s cabin is the only destination for “privacy” envisioned in those terms.

What I do think we can do to check what our new Stasi is doing to us, with us, for us, is to restore some sense of the gravity of “filing a formal report”, as it were. There’s nothing wrong with watching and photographing and talking about the vast social landscape around us. That is and has been a necessary part of being human in mass society. But we do not now act as if there is much of anything at stake when we draw attention to a body, when we circle a face in a photograph, when we link and hashtag and forward. We don’t check to be sure that we’ve got it right, we don’t worry much about what happens next. It’s easy to say that the car dealers were asking for it, but hard to take note that the mock Yelp reviews for the dealership quickly turn into a swamp of juvenile and often ugly sentiment that uses the excuse of righteous ire as a opportunity to perform with unbridled id on a stage of momentary notoreity. The we that follows in from hashtaggery is just as likely to be a mob with torches as it is a polite delegation of neighbors requesting that the lawn be mowed just a bit more often, please.

If we’re going to be spies, let’s accept our moral agency. We’re not reporting up a chain of command and leaving it the hands of our superiors. We are reporting to ourselves. If we believe we do that out of love and concern–or in pursuit of justice–then we need to be better than we are at following an ethic of genuine care, and better than we are in thinking systematically about what we mean by justice.

Another part of Grasping the Nettle.