Celebrating: Discovery
A roundup of captivating writing, news, and ideas that are worth your while.
Welcome to this edition of Discovery—the Celebration link roundup—where we celebrate great writing, explore new ideas, keep abreast of newsy items, continuously reframe our understanding of the world, and also laugh at memes!
If you’re feeling like this winter has been especially taxing on your well-being—and if those feelings are compounded by an inner critic that scolds, “you should be acclimated to all this by now,” you are very much not alone reassures this HuffPo piece, “It’s Not Just You. A Lot of Us Are Hitting a Pandemic Wall Right Now,” which explains how our internal fight-or-flight survival mechanisms have reached the overload point. In short, it’s normal to be burnt out right now.
On a similar note, National Geographic’s post, “‘Zoom fatigue’ is taxing the brain. Here’s why that happens,” illustrates some ways that constant video calls can wear on the psyche. As someone who enthusiastically attended zoom happy hours and dinners in the first half of the pandemic (in addition to my many ongoing work-related zooms), I’ve noticed I’m not alone in allowing most of those social zooms to lapse. It’s partially because I do deeply miss the non-verbal cues of IRL interaction which, as the NatGeo post points out, “lay the groundwork for emotional intimacy.” Video hangouts reduce socializing to only the words being spoken aloud; I crave the full experience.
Another odd pandemic-induced phenomenon is that I find myself missing a very specific argument my husband and I would have back when we had places to go: bickering over the reliability of GPS. My position has been ardent, unwavering belief in Google’s omniscient satellites in the sky that steward us from point A to point B. Trust the robots, I say. My husband’s countering view is that said satellites are dumb about the many ways humans and meteorological anomalies can interfere with their recommended routes—city traffic, weird weather, people arguing in the middle of the street, etc. Can you relate? I found myself pining for this fight recently when I read this story about how a Tahoe man got stranded for a full week in the snow because he was led dangerously astray by GPS. Vindication for my husband. He wins. And I’m not even mad; all I am is left with a full-body yen for any destination to which we can argue en route.
Dipping my toe even further into the realm of our current dystopia, I’ve been trying for a while to write a piece about how calls for “civility” are too often actually veiled demands for obedience wrapped in the syrupy language of kindness and positive vibes. (It’s a similar deal with the word “unity”—which, as Dan Pfeiffer points out in this substack post, is constantly distorted “with unfair expectations, bad faith arguments, and general stupidity.” And, besides, lots of us are not at all interested in unifying with people in “Camp Auschwitz” t-shirts who tried to overturn an election.)
Calling for warm-blanket ideals like unity and civility would be OK if they weren’t almost always called for in bad faith; crying civility is an easy PR trick for actual villains to wield—an effortless way to frame any resistance to oppressive ideologies as “uncivil.” It annoys me, for example, that people who are vocally mad at white supremacists or who are upset that our former president incited an insurrection to overturn an election are rebuked for being “uncivil”—when in fact it is white supremacy and armed insurrections that are uncivil—and people who stand against those things are actually championing a world that is more civil to all people. But, once the civility bell is rung, those who dare challenge oppressive systems find themselves on the defensive because the tenor of civility is so alluring and has undeniable mass appeal. So we find ourselves in a situation where we either voice our opposition to injustice and get labeled “uncivil,” or we submit and obey, which was the true goal all along. I’m still perpetually chewing on this, and my civility piece remains unfinished, but luckily, Laurie Penny has written about this entire situation much more cogently and more completely than I ever could in her piece on Longreads, ‘No I Will Not Debate You,” where she makes the salient points that “civility will never defeat fascism,” and that many a plea for civility, paradoxically, “weaponizes tolerance to legitimize intolerance.” Bingo. Nail on the head.
Part of the reason I can’t seem to succinctly write about the wearying canard that the “real” problem with our politics is a lack of “civility” is because it connects to so many other cultural issues in our digital hellscape that continuously flabbergast me. The idea gets too big.
Most significantly, whenever I ruminate on the civility paradox, it inevitably leads to me thinking about the state of our extremely online discourse and my frustration about how algorithms have flattened debate entirely, not only leeching all the nuance out of our positions, but far worse, presenting all things as equal. This is partially why we see the ubiquity of the “very fine people on both sides” ethos wherein Donald Trump can easily equate murderous white supremacists and nazis with citizens who are gathered in opposition to nazis as two identical groups when they are, in fact, not identical at all. This false equalizing of every imaginable thing has occurred partly in response to the “attention economy” in which three enormous companies—Google, Apple, and Facebook—are in a perpetual war to hold our attention so they can serve us ever-more ads. These companies do not require that their users consume content that is true or fact-checked or substantive or good—only that they are continuously consuming any content of any kind. As a result, humans now spend most of our time in digital spaces where provable facts like the earth’s indisputable roundness are treated as equivalent in content and substance to the false assertion that the earth is not round; the two things—one true, one false— are presented as equal ideas. This also contributes to why millions can so easily become consumed by QAnon—a conspiracy theory that posits a global cabal of blood-drinking pedophiles is secretly running the world—because monstrous falsehoods are presented with equal reverence as are actual facts (in many cases more reverence because outrage and grievance breed more clicks, and thus, more attention, which fuels the engine of today’s commerce).
In the previous edition of Discovery, I shared a piece by Shoshana Zuboff, “The Coup We Are Not Talking About,” where she aptly notes exactly what I’m obsessing about here, that “surveillance capitalism’s operations have no formal interest in facts. All data is welcomed as equivalent, though not all of it is equal.” This helps create the conditions for the word “civility” to be weaponized as it today—and for people fighting against injustice to be presented as equal to, or even worse than, those who are perpetrating the injustices. It’s exhausting. How did we get here?
Well, in an astonishingly prescient 2014 piece on the now defunct Deadspin, “The Future of the Culture Wars Is Here, And It’s Gamergate,” all this dizzying manipulation of the truth—and the sly reframing of disputes in favor of the privileged over the marginalized—that have come to define the last decade, are predicted and laid bare with painful accuracy. My mouth was agape reading this thing. One spot-on analysis of why the Gamergate imbroglio unfolded the way it did (sending women into hiding in response to being inundated with death-threats, while a bunch of white guys complained that they themselves were actually the ones being victimized by the gaming world—a world expressly built for white guys) is below:
It's exploited the same basic loophole in the system that generations of social reactionaries have: the press's genuine and deep-seated belief that you gotta hear both sides. Even when not presupposing that all truth lies at a fixed point exactly equidistant between two competing positions, the American press works under the assumption that anyone more respectable than, say, an avowed neo-Nazi is operating in something like good faith.
And another gem from this 2014 piece, so appropriate to the landscape of 2021:
Co-opting the language and posture of grievance is how members of a privileged class express their belief that the way they live shouldn't have to change, that their opponents are hypocrites and perhaps even the real oppressors. This is how you get St. Louisans sincerely explaining that Ferguson protestors are the real racists, and how you end up with an organized group of precisely the same video game enthusiasts to whom an entire industry is catering honestly believing that they're an oppressed minority. From this kind of ideological fortification, you can stage absolutely whatever campaigns you deem necessary.
WOW, right? I recommend reading the full article (it’s long but worth it) to get your synapses firing, drawing connections between then and now. It’s easy to draw a straight line connecting the cultural conditions surrounding the Gamergate debacle to the present-day intersecting/overlapping MAGA and QAnon ideologues—many of whom are upper middle class white people—who assume the “posture of grievance” as core to their belief systems even as they occupy privileged positions in our society.
On the topic of QAnon, the real-world dangers and fallout of their batshit beliefs have me transfixed and terrified and I can’t stop consuming information about it—including this Poynter piece about the challenges of reporting on QAnon wherein journalists express their hope that covering QAnon will “make people take it seriously,” because “this movement has roots in so many other disinformation groups and it’s not going anywhere.”
It’s too easy to dismiss the bonkers convictions of QAnon as laughable or harmless because they are propagated online, but the effects are not at all relegated to the digital sphere, as we saw firsthand when we witnessed armed Q believers flood the capitol. The real-life consequences of this movement continue to wreak havoc in the three-dimensional world as covered in this heartbreaking article that interviews nine children of QAnon believers who have lost, or are losing, their parents to this life-consuming conspiracy. Their plight is made more difficult because arguing using facts doesn’t help persuade loved ones under Q’s spell: “QAnon adherents are conditioned to interpret opposition as validation,” so, “trying to debunk their falsehoods often only pushes them deeper into the movement.” This stacks up with a universal truth about the human experience—that as social animals, none of us are particularly swayed by facts, whether we are in QAnon or not; this is explained pretty well in this New Yorker article, “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Mind,” and in this Farnam Street explainer, “To Be Persuasive, You’re Going to Need More than Facts.”
So, in summation, nobody has any idea what to do about Q or how to de-radicalize its congregants, but we should at least all be aware of how it nests into this cultural moment and is propped up by the lure of grievance politics. If you’re looking to keep your eye on it, follow Will Sommer on twitter; his tweets won’t put your mind at ease but he is covering Q closely.
Moving on—I loved reading this beautifully written piece by Anna Deavere Smith in The Atlantic, “We Were the Last of the Nice Negro Girls,” about forging her Black identity, leaning into defiance, and investigating what it means to perform “niceness,” through the lens of her time at a small, predominantly white, women’s college in the late 1960’s. Smith’s closing thought offers a perfect postscript to my ramblings about the shortcomings of “civility” above:
In our current moment of division, we cannot afford to go forward without looking back. We must excavate history to assess how we learned to restore human dignity that had been ripped away by plunder and slavery. How did we get this far? Not by being nice.
Finally, for a wee palate cleanser after all this somber seriousness (I did promise memes), this past weekend was Valentine’s day and this cartoon about true love made me chuckle.
That’s all the discovering for this week! Please feel free and encouraged to share this email.
With appreciation,
Amy