An Ur-Theory of the Internet

The internet is not cool. There is nothing cool about it.

Facebook was cool, until it was opened to everyone, thus defeating its purpose as a graphical representation of the people college students and graduates know (ie a facebook); less cool until it allowed pictures to be tagged and thus stopped people from putting photos on Facebook;* and not at all cool as the repository for people's bumper sticker-length political musings, meme images that you would have been embarrassed to receive as attachments in an email from your dad 15 years ago, and attempts to position yourself as someone who reads the news.

Twitter was never cool, as evidenced by the ease with which "Tomorrow is [whatever day tomorrow is]" trends. It has also misguidedly convinced people that their thoughts are best expressed in 140-character bursts. Being inarticulate is not cool, especially if you are articulate.**

The rest of the internet is, more or less, television in the 1980s: wildly popular, with content ranging from boring to insulting, depending on one's preferences. 'This was a mildly amusing use of five minutes' is an argument advanced in favor of well-regarded content. What matters is advertising, and thus web publishing is based around those things that drive pageviews, and increase both the length of time spent interacting and the intensity of that interaction. Thus lists, listicles, nostalgia bait, advice columns--most of which now intentionally lead off with the most sensational questions, oral histories and interviews that are barely-edited interview transcripts, and posts that flatter or outrage the biases of that site's audience.

Mgoblog is my favorite site on the internet because it runs like a bespoke outfit: they clearly have goals about when to post new content, and attempt a set schedule week-to-week, and generally fail to do either. Brian writes his game column and publishes it when it's done. Ideally, that's at noon on Mondays, but if it's done at 11:00, it goes up at 11:00. If it's not done until 2:00, it goes up at 2:00. There's very little that feels that unforced anymore, though it certainly helps if you're already the largest single-team college sports blog.

Like tv in the 1980s, there are exceptions, both of the "things that are good considering what else is out there" and "things that are objectively good" variety, but they are rare.


*I cannot be the only one whose friends have a lot of pictures from 2006-2008 or so, and very few after. Or, at least, very few until they start having babies.

**I know many interesting people on twitter, and almost exclusively through twitter, and this is intended as no slight on them. I am just convinced that however interesting they are on twitter, they're more interesting in longer form.

This:

Perhaps the problem is that we stopped believing both in a better future and in design’s ability to further it. The thread is broken; terrorists have shoe bombs and bioweapons, and we’ve lost hope in the promises of flying cars and glittering cities hovering in the sky. The world’s climate and environment seem headed on a crash course to ruin. And so we cling to design that relentlessly references days gone by because we know what to expect—the scary challenge of the new has been removed from the equation. We seem to want design to give us the reassurance found in the recognizable. For those wishing to discover something new, however, all this unending nostalgia begins to provoke a feeling very close to nausea. Diana Vreeland wrote in Allure, “This book isn’t about the past. I’m looking for something else. I’m looking for the suggestion . . . of something I’ve never seen.” Shouldn’t we, too, keep trying to shape that unseen future? Shouldn’t we refuse to accept that it only resembles the past?

Rather than regarding this as a widespread trend that means Something About Us, it appears to me as saying something smaller, if no less significant, about the formation of personal identity: namely, it's really hard to form one, and it shouldn't be surprising if people often mistake having something for being someone. I was put in mind of this by an excellent reflection on the topic by Flavia:

It's recently struck me that I'm no longer trying to be "the kind of person who" does this or does that: the kind of person who lives in a house full of books; the kind of person who entertains on vintage china; the kind of person who knows Latin; the kind of person who always wears lipstick; the kind of person who lives in Manhattan; the kind of person who gets invited to give talks; the kind of person who makes complicated cocktails; the kind of person who knows stuff about stuff.

Now I either do or am or have those things--or I don't. But the things themselves don't signify in the way they used to: I still like mostly the same things and still have mostly the same tastes and the same interests as I did in my mid-twenties. But when I was in my twenties, it seemed to matter terribly much that I be the kind of person who owned demitasse spoons, and wrote letters on distinctive stationery; the kind of person who kept up on live theatre and museum exhibits; the kind of person who threw good parties. A friend once told me, affectionately, that my life was "governed by imperatives"--by which she meant not that I was driven or ambitious or had a life plan all mapped out (I didn't then and I don't now), but rather that I had a decisive sense of how I should live in the world.

As both an academic and a person who survived their 20s, it was interesting to observe how people (myself included) tried on various kinds of affectation in an attempt to see what would stick. Most of the affectations I tried did not stick, my personality having been contrarianly set by 18, it seems: read lots of books, drink much coffee, enjoy irony and sarcasm way too much, disagree with other people whenever possible. 

I can't help but notice, in this context, that almost all the examples of design mentioned in the original post are things a person can buy. Purchasing items as a shortcut to personality is pretty common: it shows up on Flavia's list, and it shows up on my own personal equivalent. The trend seems especially pronounced amongst young conservatives, ironically enough, who tend to think that their possession or use of old things will enhance their credibility: a person becomes that person by surrounding themselves with the appropriate accoutrements and, therefore, becoming the sort of person who uses them.

The saner way was suggested to me at an appropriate age (thank God) by, of all places, McSweeny's:

Some people manage to replace cool with the confidence that comes from experience and accomplishment, and, increasingly, the people in your life will start to value those things more as they themselves move on from their 20s. Coolness was a placeholder, something they leaned on as they assembled themselves. I’m not suggesting you undergo some sort of instantaneous transformation into “maturity” involving a fanny pack and a Land’s End catalog—30 is still quite young, you know—but I think you need to at least begin shedding the skin of your 20s. Hang on at your peril. There’s a 40-year-old out there who still wears shirts that allow him to show off his barbed-wire-armband ink. Don’t become him.

But you could, you know, just be a guy who knows a lot about a lot, who’s got some awesome stories because he’s lived almost a decade beyond the campus quad, and who’s shown some follow-through on the ambitions he spent so many years blabbing about in his 20s. You also could be in better shape than all the guys who bloated up in college, too. Not so “cool,” but cool and durably so.

This is very similar to the advice W.H. Auden gives in The Dyer's Hand. Identity formation is a long process, and there are no substitutes to putting in the time: but the reward is being yourself, and not someone else's idea of what you should be.*


*There is another post to be written about how most unsuccessful 20s relationships are attempting to be what someone else wants you to be, or attempting to make someone else something other than what they are. But that's for another time.

I more or less agree with this on the same-sex parenting study. It's worth pointing out the asymmetry between critiques of the study and responses to those critiques. The critiques tend to focus on social-scientific issues of study construction: the study can't be a good one because it stacks the deck by a. including any reported level of known same-sex parental interaction as functionally equivalent to being raised for life by same-sex parents and therefore b. moves over into the category of 'same-sex parents' a number of dysfunctional heterosexual relationships, thereby biasing the results. The responses to the critiques tend to focus on the political and social agendas of the people who are critiquing, e.g.

This is one of those instances where the CCOA's skepticism about social science doesn't serve him well: time spent with statistics and giving some thought to how to construct studies will, I think, make it evident that the critiques identify problems with the study that would exist regardless of what conclusion it came to. It would be interesting, though, to get hands on the raw data and attempt to re-run the study with a more neutral classification scheme. My guess would be that the highest level of dysfunction would correspond with people in a middle group--raised by putatively heterosexual parents except that one (or both) had unexpressed same-sex attraction, which contributed to tension within the marriage, or the end of the marriage. But the social and political implications of that would be much more complicated for all sides.

A small, pedantic point about the nature of conservatism:

Rod Dreher makes himself too easy of a target (having a bit too much of the journalist in him--he's far too likely to take "I talked to someone who told me x" as dispositive), so usually I avoid him. But he has a fear-mongering streak which occasionally goes too far. Witness:

Ross Douthat says we are going into an unprecedented social experiment — “the final, formal severing of marriage from procreation” — in which, liberal optimism notwithstanding, nobody has any idea how it’s going to turn out.

Which brings to mind several responses, the first of which is: duh. One of the key facts about the future in general is that no one has any idea how it's going to turn out. All we can say is that it will probably be different somehow. It's this uncertainty about future states that is supposed to drive conservatism: not a doctrine of no change at all, but a doctrine of slow and measured change. Turning from our current social and cultural mix towards "traditional marriage" is also a change and, as a change, one that is like to bring about consequences not anticipated by its advocates. So to claim a lack of knowledge about the future as the downside for one position on where marriage should go, and not for the other, comes off as bad faith, especially when the engine driving uncertainty is not the substance of the change but the fact of change itself.

Of interest, I am sure, to some of my readers:

Organic farmers have commercial interests and organizations aimed at protecting those interests, just like conventional agribusiness. If this campaign is any indication, they’re no more trustworthy than Monsanto, just far less powerful.

When not referring to carbon-based compounds, “organic” is a marketing term, not a scientific one. In the U.S., it refers to products grown or made without synthetic fertilizers and pesticides or a few other disallowed things including transgenic seed, as certified by one of the roughly 100 USDA-accredited agencies (source: USDA). It doesn’t mean it’s produced without any fertilizers or pesticides, which would make farming all-but-impossible anyhow. Many organic-permissible fertilizers and pesticides are actually worse than conventional ones in terms of how much energy they take to produce, how they affect the environment, how effective they are, and how they affect the health of farmers and people living downstream. Obviously, if you want to buy organic-labeled things anyway, that’s up to you, but I wouldn’t go around feeling smug about it or anything.

What really makes the veins in my temples throb uncomfortably is when people post things like the ad above with a tagline like “This is why it’s so important to know where your food comes from!” I don’t expect people to be experts on Bt, or any other aspects of farming and food production. Most people have more pressing things to do with their time than actually find out whether the organic berries at the store were grown using sodium nitrate mined in South America that leached perchloride into surrounding waterways, which might interfere with the human thyroid gland if it seeps into drinking water. Or if this or that brand of organic wine was protected from fungus with copper sulfate, which is toxic to fish and accumulates in the soil and in the breastmilk of vineyard employees (see: the section of Just Food titled “Chemicals” pp. 62-72).

But if you insist on posturing as an informed consumer, the least you can do is pay attention to the sources of your information and attempt to verify suspicious claims. Especially if someone has a clear profit motive for getting you to believe something or is trying to sell you on an idea by making emotional appeals, like gesturing towards oblique threats to pregnant women, google that shit.

Slate is a grand experiment in trolling the rest of the internet, and in general, I try to avoid taking the bait. But this is just too dumb: the Supreme Court shouldn't comment on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act because Congress and the President have already decided it's constitutional. No, really:

Passing a major, controversial piece of national legislation is a heavy lift. It requires the support of 218 members of the House, 60 Senators, and the president. It requires committee hearings and grandstanding, takes up hundreds of hours of cable news time and thousands of inches of newspaper columns, engages activists of all stripes, and requires intense negotiation, the expenditure of political capital, and the imperiling of electoral prospects. It should not also require the blessing of Anthony Kennedy.

I suppose it will be sufficient to point to the Defense of Marriage Act as a federal law passed under the same conditions. There. Now no one will like this argument.