I attribute a lot of where we are as a country to the way that we talk to each other, and I question sometimes whether I'm improving or worsening it.
I'm getting leery of just writing polemics on social media that people agree with for this reason, suspicious of my own motivations and what effect it's having on my audience more than anything else.
As a people, I would assess that we're factionalized, somewhat stupefied, perpetually distracted and plagued by a somewhat insane tyranny of the minority; I think we've forgotten how to talk to each other, and we talk at each other instead. I think we prefer style over substance, spectacle over meaning; we praise moments of display more than periods of introspection or search for meaning. We wait for opportunities to say what we were going to say, instead of listening and responding to what people are telling us; and as a consequence, we miss it altogether or simply disbelieve it when people tell us what they are, when we should notice, and believe them.
Observational writing in this time is a fine art, like sculpture, that arrives at elegance through reduction. This is one of the reasons why I respect, say, Solnit's opinion, or Mystal's, or Lithwick's so much more than those of, say, Vaush; it's not just a difference in qualifications, it's also that their jobs are not just filling space with clout-building noise that people agree with. It's not quite purposeful, but relative scarcity puts what they say at a premium, I think. Their work also extends outside social media and just talking at people for handouts like a digital sidewalk busker.
As a Person With An Opinion Whom People Read, the most useful thing you can do with a social media platform and the ability to access larger platforms that reach a liberal audience is not self-promotion by saying things that people agree with; not in the times that we live in. In the space that I’m in - no one’s putting me on MSNBC to hold forth on things, I’ll put it that way - I’d argue I’m much more able to creatively misuse social media to raise awareness and get out the vote, instead.
“Hacking” social systems like that approaches ethical obligation. I would rather try first to seize control of the machine and make it destroy itself, so to speak, rather than immediately throw my body on the gears, as Mario Savio spoke of. In fact, some of the best ways to do that are more about operating the machine in a strategic manner than they are feeding more content into the machine to distribute (in a way that you don't have any control over).
So, a lot of the meme content and exhortative political content I'm going to start pumping out as elections approach isn't meant for you to agree with. It's meant for you to share, and for other people to share, thus committing you to defense of, and identification with, the basic ideas I'm putting out. That's (this sounds pretentious but oh well) 'tactical' outreach and meme work, and that's different than just ranting in a way that channels the anger you feel. It's also going to be noticeably different than what recent folks in this audience are used to, if you've started having me pop up in your feed since '20.
Anyway, I'm going to time-hack some going matters for the next few days and try to "clear the decks" for political work, like a re-evaluation of SIERRA or a funded advertising intervention like in 2020. You'll see some strangely unrelated stuff in this space for a bit, as a result.
First up on deck, all that material on Russian economic exploitation, grain theft and instigation of an international food crisis for the past month or so is going to get synthesized into something with a pointy end.