Do you ever have this experience of reading something interesting or thought-provoking, or which makes you go yes, this is exactly what I’ve been thinking and this guy put it into words, and then stop and wonder, gulp, I hope this guy isn’t a Nazi?

I exaggerate (or maybe not these days) but what I mean is that you really can’t take a discrete piece of work at face value on the internet. People with agendas are good at both promoting and concealing them, and you have to be conscious of how a single individual piece fits into the whole body.

I’ve written about this before: how being cautious of the influence other people are trying to have is important, but also how it can cross the line into paranoia. How you can strain to detect a dog whistle that isn’t really there. But also, I think it’s naive to pretend that you can just sever an idea from the context that its promoter understands it to fit into.

I’m not giving examples because I want you to imagine your own, and I think you probably can.

So, on that theme, one of the things that’s notable—and often frustrating—is that it’s very difficult to figure out what the provenance of a person or their work is on Substack, or on social media, or on independent blogs. Traditional media certainly has some biases or slants or blind spots, some more than others, but you at least broadly know what those angles probably are. (I’ve heard people say maybe we should’ve stuck with yellow journalism and explicitly partisan newspapers, so that at least you could know you’re being given an angle. But most smart readers can figure that out.)

When you combine the sort of detachment or abstraction of the internet with these platforms that level everyone, however, it can be tough to tell what the quality/provenance/etc. of a piece of writing or its author is.

For example, I was reading an interesting piece by an anonymous guy who claims to be a real-estate professional in Texas, about the nature of the labor and housing market, and the detachment of the white-collar class from the places they live, etc. etc. So far so good. And then he slips in this line about “…the election of President Biden (obviously I don’t mean to imply he was really elected, but we’ll just say that to be quick)…”

Is that a bit of snark? Is it supposed to be funny? Is it the ironic “I’m saying this thing to make fun of the people who say it” thing? Or is this guy so deep in right-wing world that he not only thinks the 2020 election was stolen but that of course it was stolen? And if that’s what he meant, then the whole bit about modern cities as kind of suspect and the rootless professional class without fealty to the places it lives suddenly becomes…less innocent. Can you really say “Well it doesn’t really mean that” if the author himself understands and intends it to mean that? (“That” being anti-Semitism, if you aren’t attuned to this stuff.)

And it’s a lot of work to dig through someone’s archive and social media presence and try and figure out what exactly their angle is. And some people will clearly have an angle but refuse to acknowledge it, or pretend they don’t, or that it’s all in your head. But they’re also kind of winking.

Then there are these homesteader/Catholic traditionalist types, who wax poetic about walking to the end of the dirt road for the mail, or waking up with the dawn to feed the chickens, or how nothing in the world is more important than holding a small child in your lap, and you can feel the aching beauty of this world, and then you find out they want to bring back the Papal States. Not to mention that they spend a hell of a lot of time posting on the internet for people who have five times more chickens than children, and a lot of both. Maybe they don’t really have any of it. Maybe they’re liars. Or “creative nonfiction” writers.

In other words, it’s often hard to tell whether or not you’re reading some clumsy random person’s stream of consciousness, or someone inserting a bit of sarcasm or snark or cheekiness that misses the mark, or something that isn’t strictly true but intends to sketch a vision, or a very well-disguised diatribe that ultimately points to some kind of bigotry. Something which, like an ersatz Holy Communion, conveys something to you that you cannot detect but which nonetheless changes you.

It is necessary to be aware of all this while writing and reading on the open web. But it also makes you insane.

Social media in particular is—like any vice—something which in order to use well must be resisted. There’s a certain dishonesty in a lot of social media posting: angling, workshopping, fudging, splitting the difference. One of the things I’ve begun to realize is that this eventually poisons your ability to think. You start to see real life as some kind of pale imitation of the internet, instead of the other way around. You stop being able to hear anything as earnest or straightforward. Your brain is always looking for the puppet strings or the man behind the mask.

Social media gives you this sense of outsized importance; it makes you a petty god of an imaginary world. Don’t like someone? Block them, and they disappear. Don’t like a topic? Mute the word, and it ceases to exist. I don’t like reading about cancer, so I’ve muted the word “cancer.” Et voila! I’m getting close to muting the words “Donald Trump.”

You look out at the earth with vengeance and smite the wicked. The world is clay for you to shape. Your plaything. Social media makes you irritable and arrogant at the same time. It makes the real world, which is not clay to be shaped by your whims, frustrating by comparison. I think in a real sense it makes us more violent and angry. The only way to truly “mute and block” someone in real life is to kill them. It is not enough to ignore them; you want not to have to share a planet with them. The social media analogue of murder is, perhaps, for some, a sort of gateway drug.

There are certain people (people I’ve met, or our vice president) who sound very much like trolling social media accounts come to life. You can tell from the tone, the topics, the outsized importance they seem to give to things that might have been big trending social media topics but which are not major real-life issues. There’s just a certain “I can’t define it but I know it when I see it” quality to the way these people talk and comport themselves.

I wrote once, rather in jest, that the most dangerous invention of the 20th century was not the atom bomb, but the internet. I’m only half-joking now.

Related Reading:

Do You Hear What I Hear?

Me Or Your Own Eyes

Talk Is Cheep

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