another deBoer--"the irresistable force vs the ironized object"

If you're not familiar with what some academics have called the California ideology then you probably don't want to read David Roberts and Peter Murphy where they defined it in Dialectic of Romanticism (which I admit I did); in that book Roberts and Murphy proposed way, way back in, ahem, 2005 that there has been a conflict within the U.S. between what they called the Chicago school and the California school.  You don't have to read that book, though, because other people have been defining the California ideology in more recent terms, which is very roundaboutly how I get to a new and probably self-destructing post by Fredrik deBoer.



https://fredrikdeboer.com/2020/07/10/the-irresistible-force-vs-the-ironized-object/

Gideon Lewis-Kraus does yeoman’s work in this piece on SlateStarCodex and the deepening rift between media and Silicon Valley, but I’m afraid it is destined to fall on deaf ears for the media half of that equation. That’s because the media as presently constituted can only interpret the world through the tribal lens Lewis-Kraus describes.

It happens that I don’t care much for the rationality movement. It is, as they say, ideology at its purest, a set of assumptions about the world that are not recognized as assumptions and thus go unexamined. It is one of those little ironies that a movement dedicated to rooting out cognitive biases can’t recognize that seeing all argumentative conditions as cognitive biases is itself distorting. Rationalists are forever drawing chalk lines around where the boundaries of the argument should be and declaring that the world, never recognizing that it is precisely the habit of the world to transgress those lines and thus leave the debates that happen within meaningless. And the rationalist movement is home to a particularly virulent strain of anti-communism and thus our antipathy is mutual.

But I do read SlateStarCodex, have found it very useful at times (particularly in regards to mental health and medication) and have personal affection for Alexander, who is someone who has tried very hard to model cordiality and openness of a type that is essentially unheard of in modern media. In other words, I consume and enjoy his work but do so with skepticism; I accept his priors in an effort to understand him without for a moment mistaking those priors for the truth. In a similar way to the one modeled by Lewis-Kraus, I recognize both good and bad. This is, I’m afraid, difficult for many people in a time of culture war. Indeed I think that is a basic point Lewis-Kraus is making.

What is the culture clash between Silicon Valley and media about? Silicon Valley is of course filled with all kinds of buzzword philosophy that I hate, innovation and dynamism and creative destruction and other horseshit euphemisms for the pure and unapologetic acquisitive urge, the urge to increase power and property at any cost. Meanwhile, the media’s culture is being snotty and telling jokes all day on Twitter and Slack.

Please don’t misunderstand me: I don’t think that being snotty on Twitter and Slack is emblematic of contemporary media culture. I don’t think telling shitty jokes on Twitter and Slack is a part of media culture. I mean that contemporary media culture is literally just and only that, developing a sardonic personality on social media that you carefully curate in order to secure your place within the media social scene. If you don’t believe me, simply observe professional journalists and writer types on Twitter. They get up in the morning and tell stale jokes intended only for their peers, they take their lunch and tell stale jokes intended only for their peers, they stay up later than they intended telling more shitty jokes as the sickly light of their cellphones colors their apartments. The sheer collective effort that journalists expend every day on performing ironic detachment to each other is mind-boggling and easily eclipses the amount of energy expended on, say, reporting on or commentating about the world.

Media has always been insular and inside-dealing, I reckon, but the digital age has intensified these problems immensely. What was once restricted to in-person jibes with people within your own place of business has become a 24-7 open mic night for people who aren’t talented enough to actually be stand up comedians. [emphasis added] The urge to replay high school is simply too strong, and so people whose ostensible job is “reporter” or “staff writer” become instead professional jesters for each other. If you invented a filter that eliminated all tweets intended to amuse other journalists you’d find media Twitter’s output would shrink to a trickle. I can’t even imagine how bad Slack must be.

Silicon Valley types, by contrast, believe in things. Shitty things! But things. Tangible values about progress and culture. The Californian ideology plus the blockchain or whatever. There’s content there. It happens that the content has led to a great deal of genuinely rapacious behavior and I think the world would be better without it. But there is a tangible worldview with which to seduce the undecided. The media has none of that. The old school media values of truth telling and muckraking have long since been abandoned by the media itself, as real values require sincerity and media culture abhors sincerity. You can’t sit on Twitter all day telling shitty jokes about how nothing matters and then turn around and say “but also we’re the guardians of truth and democracy.” [emphasis added]

If Silicon Valley has captured the value of media for shareholders and is slowly strangling the industry to death, righting the course will require people within media who are willing to stand up and say, “Here are my values. They are what they are. I embody them without irony and thus I am vulnerable. If you value these things too you have to fight to save our industry.” Such a position would require a willingness to leave blank sarcasm aside and to start writing again for the world instead of only writing to appear clever to other writers. Can the media make this kind of move? I don’t see how they can; the social capture of the entire industry is just far too acute.

(Were this post to emerge into the consciousness of media people, would they engage with its arguments the way that, for all their faults, the rationalists would? Of course not. All media people would see would be another opportunity to perform for each other and again define who’s an insider and who’s an outsider.)

Lewis-Kraus’s piece, like any good piece of such length and complexity, shows by turns both sympathy and skepticism towards Alexander. And yet I expect that it will only be viewed as a takedown by other members of the media. They have no other frame of reference; the idea of a value other than in-group signaling and jockeying for popularity simply eludes them. And this is why they can’t grasp the deeper point of Lewis-Kraus’s essay, which is that Silicon Valley is dangerous to media in large part because of the inherent advantage of principle vs irony. Peter Thiel, that fucking goblin, crushed Gawker, and not the other way around. Irony, it turns out, is no defense.

Are media people still cloaking themselves in layer after layer of irony, as if it will protect them? Honey, they’re doing nothing else.