David Leonhardt has it a great write up of elites for the NYT today.
I was very sad to hear that the news that Chapo Trap House’s Matt Christman had suffered a serious medical emergency, days before the scheduled delivery of his first child. I don’t know him or the rest of Chapo’s people personally, but I’m very sorry that this happened and I wish the best for Christman, his friends and family, and especially his wife and son .
When I went to Twitter for news, I wasn’t expecting, but I wasn’t surprised to see a number of accounts expressing joy at Christman’s condition. There is nothing to be done about it; it’s the internet, it’s twitter. Some were engaged in all the tired talk of civility politics, and speaking ill of the sick or the dead, for which I could have no less patience at this time. I refuse to engage in this discourse, other than to say that the fact that some think the correct emotional orientation towards the serious illness of a podcaster they don’t know personally is a matter of significant leftist debate only shows the debate of pale sham left. has become in those surroundings. I’m happy to let others enter this bitter contest and wish Christman the best. I used to be involved in those pantomimes of left-wing intellectual struggle; I don’t miss it.
Looking at this section of Twitter – the part, I guess, that is the love left over from “Weird Twitter” and Bernie Sanders’ 2016 digital troops – was depressing and strange. I spent a good deal of time around that, or its precursor, in the mid-2010s. They were very toxic back then, full of invective and bad-faith cancellation and “irony”, to overuse a term much abused All of this has since metastasized, in perfectly predictable ways, as people have gone deeper and deeper into pits of blank sarcasm and incomprehensible meme politics that are tied to the symbolism of Marxism-Leninism, but which prove no earthly connection with any history that actually exists. communist tradition. And yet, despite this obvious continued descent, the site seems mostly stuck in amber; it features the same types of tired people making the same tired jokes in the same tired meme formats. I saw someone complain that Christman is a “sasadaist”; that’s not true, but besides my point here, it’s strange to see people acting as if Syria is a matter of deep intra-left contention in 2023. The civil war is more or less over, and Assad has won, the which is sad because Assad is a monster, but so were most of the people who could have replaced Assad. Either way, it really seems like a lot of people don’t want to let go of the mid-2010s, and so they’ve built a little Twitter renaissance fair, trying to keep that period alive.
As I suggested, I wasn’t surprised and largely unbothered by the fact that there was some ill-will from Christman. What struck me was the number of people whose reactions would be totally inscrutable to anyone outside that strange group, reactions that were expressed (like 100% of the missives in this space ) with an artificial confidence and an unconvincing cheerfulness, but they had real ones. communicative content that would be impossible for 99.99% of the human race to divine. These spaces are filled with people who have climbed up to the ass of performative irony that the basic operations of language are broken. And it’s not just that I, as a mostly disinterested observer, couldn’t analyze what they were saying. I doubt they understand it themselves, at this point. There’s nothing to understand, really, beyond the continued maniacal dedication to seeming the most carefree, the one for whom most things are Fun, actually. For some people, the social dictate to demonstrate a universal and unceasing and unchanging attitude of amusing superiority has simply overwhelmed their ability to have a human personality. John Updike said that celebrity is a mask that eats the face, and I think something like that is happening here.
And they’re getting big. I’m sure there are some precocious Generation Alpha kids who are really into Doing Irony on Elon Musk’s social network for geriatrics, but it’s mostly the same exact people who were doing it a decade ago. Some of his tweet counts exceed 100K which defies belief. Gen X movie bloggers, crumbling into their 50s, keep coming up with little tidbits, trying to inspire the tense amusement of a few dozen people who wouldn’t recognize them on the street. I find it deeply sad. The Buzzfeed classic oral history of Weird Twitter it is now more than a decade old, and the general impression of this piece is that the moment it describes had already passed. And yet there are plenty of people out there still trotting out the same tired tropes, trying to keep an anarchic dialogue alive many years after it has been drained of every last ounce of real subversion, for no clear reason other than an insignificant entertainment. this must seem pointless to them even at this stage. Bitterness surrounds the whole project. And, as I’ve done before, I’ll ask them again, how old will you be, exactly, before you stop sending sarcastic rants into the ether? Are you going to be in your 60s, “hunting” people on X.com, looking for all the world like the guy who’s too old to try to pick up girls at a dance club? What is the exit strategy here?
I’ve mentioned before that people sometimes assume that I would reject the Chapo Trap House project, but I’m not entirely sure why. I have a hard time listening to podcasts, personally, because of my meds, so I can’t judge the show. Also, I see my project as orthogonal to theirs, not in conflict. Even if it wasn’t, I’d say the people who create this podcast have done well to step out of the Twitter space and develop this project that goes beyond finding stupid crap to say in 140 characters that we all pretend it is. hanging with political meaning. This kind of affirmative act of creation is antithetical to the directionless nihilism that drives Twitter irony. Christman has become known not only for his podcast performances, but also for his video monologues, related to movies, politics and current events. And during them he demonstrates an alternative to the cancerous bitterness that people on Twitter think they’re inflicting on others, but are really inflicting on themselves: it’s negative, often discouraged, and yet never a feeling of self-pity that in silence. lurking behind all those non-stop mocking tweets, the palpable sense you get of people living in anonymity and anger and abandoned slang, the sense that they do it out of a throbbing resentment of everything they believed that they had to achieve and never did. did. Christman is frequently sardonic and usually depressed; he is not poisoned by irony.
Some commentators will surely complain that I am focusing on too small a part of humanity, that all this is irrelevant because hardly anyone acts this way. And that’s not bad. But I’ve been a part of, or been around, various online social cultures that became constant, empty, blank, angry, and fundamentally sad cults, and I’ve watched others get stuck in them and flounder for years and years. . I always thought that most people would grow old, but it seems that many of them never will. So I’m taking this brief opportunity to say to those who are still caught up in all of this, who get up every morning and check the app and find the right way to look snarky, superior, and unaffected, it all comes from the insecurity and pain – run away. get out now Get out while you can. These spaces will never improve; they were bad when I was there, and seem to have gotten a lot worse in the intervening years. No matter how many layers of pro forma irony you put between yourself and your life, and in particular between your heart and everything you thought you were meant for and never achieved, this performance will not help you, and less will save you. Most of the people still working in this corner have taken their hearts, at this point, and couldn’t escape if they wanted to. And I tell you to run away. Get out while you can.
If you have the choice to save yourself from poisonous irony and destructive online cultures, choose to do so. And beyond that, I can only say that I hope, with all my sincerest hopes, that Matt Christman and his family can emerge from this recent challenge safe and sound.
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