Real life is not your Twitter Feed

And it's bad for your soul to treat it like it is

Over the past several years there is a mantra that has become increasingly central to my writing and thinking life when commenting on.¹ “Until you hear it spoken with your own ears, don’t write about it. There are exceptions to this of course-I live in the provinces, and even if they are inner provinces, still they’re not New York or LA, or even Chicago, and so things always come to me at a certain remove. More slight than it was before social media, and certainly than before 2020, but a remove nonetheless.

Hortensia Mi Kafchin, Angel in the Server Room

It’s getting so there’s only about five of you who still remember, but this used to be a much more rigidly weekly blog than it is now. When I was working on those posts I often found myself falling into the groove of being irritated by someone on Twitter and writing about it. The actual subject of the discourse is unimportant, the significance is the pattern, the addressing this or that inane commentary, bigot, bien-pensant or other source of digital irritation. For a variety of reasons I had something of a spiritual crisis at the end of 2023 which resulted in the blog lying dormant for a bit and eventually reemerging in the (hopefully) much less chatty and gossipy form it takes now, in which historical musings follow poetic analysis and missives about Jesus & cavemen. Part of this was a desire to follow more closely the words of the savior:

Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.

On the other hand, it’s hard to escape the feeling that a lot of online discourse is... perhaps less than human somehow? In that these are not genuinely held convictions necessarily so much as calculated efforts to jockey for position in the mimetic hierarchy, in the ravine of animals gnawing on each others skulls which certainly exists here if it does anywhere. The sense of the world one finds in Rene Girard or Pierre Bourdieu might be too grim for society as a whole, but it certainly describes microblogging! By dignifying it you reduce yourself to the level of those animals. It is, and I mean this in a genuine, spiritual sense, corrosive to your immortal soul. If you don’t believe you have one of those, fine-it’s deleterious to your psyche.

He does not desire in his mediator but rather against him. The hero only desires the object which will frustrate his mediator. Ultimately all that interests him is a decisive victory over his insolent mediator.

When people think about internet poisoning they tend to imagine something like the broadcast model: an intort vessel into which malign forces pour their corrupting discourses. This is in part why so much was staked on the censorship of “misinformation” in the last decade, in trying to re-establish some sort of epistemic boden on which the discourse could be sorted. I would argue instead, in the most insufferably Episcopalian way, that the dark side of the internet is more like the Un-man in C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra, is more like giving away more and more of yourself to a demon until there is nothing left but reflexive action, endless argumentation & stupidity.

In addition to being bad for you, it’s also just… not good cultural criticism! With a few exceptions, people who spend huge amounts of time online aren’t particularly representative of the general population. Slightly more than 20% of Americans are twitter users. Certainly one can argue that this is useful if one wants to keep tabs on those who are as Pound said of artists, “the antennae of the race” but nonetheless they don’t represent anybody just yet. This is a short life, and one should exercise judgement about just what one’s energy is being expended on.

The other danger to this approach is not just being wrong, or looking stupid, but what

Katherine Dee

once called something like “the cope of the very online.” One form of posters madness is the authoritarian impulse to go around bashing people on the head, imploring “BE NORMAL” as the blood coagulates on the aluminum. Repression only works for so long. This will not be the only time you read me citing this passage, but take heed of what Nietzsche whispers to the conservatives in Twilight of the Idols:

In the ear of the Conservatives. - What was formerly not known, what is known today or could be known - a reversion, a turning back in any sense and to any degree, is quite impossible. We physiologists at least know that. But all priests and moralists have believed it was possible - they have wanted to take mankind back, force it back, to an earlier standard of virtue. Morality has always been a bed of Procrustes. Even politicians have in this matter imitated the preachers of virtue: even today there are parties whose goal is a dream of the crabwise retrogression of all things. But no one is free to be a crab. There is nothing for it: one has to go forward, which is to say step by step further into décadence (- this is my definition of modern ‘progress...). One can retard this development and, through retardation, dam and gather up degeneration itself and make it more vehement and sudden: more one cannot do.

Listen to what uncle Ezra said after he tried it:

I sometimes hope that we could be past the peak of this kind of writing, due in part to the continuing enshittification of Elon Musk’s Everything Website Formerly Known as Twitter and the decamping of to Bluesky². On the other hand perhaps this makes it even more irresistible. With whatever might’ve postured as a center gone, the loudest voices are those least reasonable. On the other hand it has probably occurred to you by now that I am myself arguing as if the little people inside my phone and on the monitor represented something real. None is free of sin!!!!

1. The proximate impetus for writing this was a mix of people being very weird about Taylor Swift getting engaged and this very angry

Spencer

note telling off Noah Smith. (I haven’t actually read the Smith fwiw.)

2. This could be its own discourse post, but Bluesky is fine, it’s whatever. Loudly hating it is obnoxious in and of itself. None of us is free of sin!