Three Telltale Signs of Online Post-Literacy

0. Overture

Sam Kriss and I were sitting on a bench in a graveyard in London a few days ago (the only of the weathered and mossy headstones whose inscription I could make out bore the name of “Marx”, if not of the Marx), reflecting on just how insane the last few years have been. While we agreed that several recent signs suggest the worst of the frenzy has passed, at one point I ventured the prediction that a Trump restoration might bring with it a new and even more forceful wave of illiberal autophagy on the left. Sam argued that this is unlikely, since the same people who were prostrating themselves and confessing their unconscious racism at struggle sessions throughout the Summer of Floyd have for the most part wandered off so far into individualistic self-care that, like the student Maoists of 1968 who by 1973 or so were wearing crystal pendants in the hope of absorbing their energy and enhancing their erections, so too the great majority of the preening evangelists of the Fifth Great Awakening of 2020 will likely only retreat further inward, or rather sink further downward, into their scented-candle me-time bubble-baths, should we have to endure another round of Trump.

I suppose we’ll see, but in the meantime I find I still have more to say about what we’ve been through so far. As I have often written in this space, I feel as though I came out of the pandemic a different person than when I went into it. An important part of this experience is that 2020 was the year I finally understood that there are no grown-ups, that nobody knows what the hell they’re doing, other than looking to survive in a world that makes no sense. I don’t know what the key moment was for me. Perhaps it was Nancy Pelosi on her knees wearing a kente cloth and a comically solemn mien. Perhaps it was the slapdash construction of a cult of personality around Anthony Fauci. More likely it was the accumulation of several such minor moments as these. But at some point around that time it hit me just how completely nonsensical the ideas and aims that human beings organize themselves around are and always have been. I was seeing, in real time rather than in history books, how easy it was for so many people to turn on a dime and to change, in unison, their way of talking and acting, simply in order to continue fitting in. I was never particularly disappointed in the youth — they’re the youth! it’s their role in the world to try out new ideas and to see what sticks. But my coevals, who found it so easy to go along with the new ways of speaking, and to pretend with straight faces that this is how they always had spoken, suddenly seemed to me as if they’d been body-snatched. It was horrifying.

I remember one particularly low moment in early 2021 when someone on social media, in one of the countless variations we were seeing at the time of opposition to “cultural appropriation”, proposed that no “white people” should be speaking Spanish. Have you ever been to Latin America? one wanted to ask this person. Have you ever been to Spain? Do you think fourth-generation Croatian-Chileans should instead go on speaking the language of their great-grandparents? Do you know who the Visigoths are? Do you know anything at all about anything? But whatever. This was just a kid, whose “positionality”, if I recall correctly, rooted him somewhere in the US Southwest, where Hispanophones typically are racialized and othered in a very local and context-specific way. So fine, any decent person would react, let’s just let it slide.

The problem, for me, was that so many of my colleagues and peers in the academic humanities, in the face of daily cascades of such absurd proposals as this one, just kept insisting, like cops at a crime scene with a bullet-riddled body lying in the middle of the street in broad daylight, that there was “nothing to see here”. Some other kid would insist online that, say, heteronormative patriarchy is a recent by-product of capitalism, to bring up another particularly depressing and common example.¹ And rather than pointing out that in Central Asian pastoral-nomadic societies virgin-rustling has often been as common as cattle-rustling, where men regularly get together to kidnap brides for their sons; or that in medieval Europe, which is to say under feudalism and not capitalism,² the poetic genre of the fabliau érotique consistently depicted scenes of heterosexual marital infidelity as if no alternatives even existed — rather than pointing out such things, about which it is an academic’s duty as an intellectual to have at least some inkling of an idea, my progressive coevals just kept insisting none of this was happening, that “the kids are alright”, always as confoundingly straightfaced as the establishment Democrats who kept insisting for so long that Joe Biden is looking as spry as ever.

What they should have been saying was: “None of this is helping, in any way. It is a deviation. You are doing nothing to make the world a better place.” Instead, what we got was silence, baldfaced denial and deflection. And even now, when that madness is subsiding, for most there has still been no reckoning, no acknowledgment of the harm done. I concede we never reached anything like the madness of true Maoism. Nothing was so bad that it would merit some sort of truth and reconciliation commission. But a bit of honesty about these excesses would sure be nice. At least a handful of people who got cancelled for absurd reasons did commit suicide, after all. A good number more lost their source of income, and a good number more than that faced social ostracism and alienation for ultimately trivial infractions. It could have been worse. I think the main reason it was not worse is simply that the technologies of control are different than they had been in China in the 1960s: you don’t need to parade university professors around in those weird dunce caps when you can just drag them online. This is somewhat easier to bear for the scapegoated individuals, but it is not for the sake of this ease that the system of surveillance and punishment went digital — it is rather for the sake of greater scalability.

Sometimes it seems to me the differences in our perceptions of those years come down not to political differences, but temperamental ones. We human beings are just so constituted as to find different things salient. As someone who cares in particular about language, it is not surprising that I should be particularly sensitive to efforts of others to curtail my expressive power, to limit what words I can use. If your identity and your happiness are not wrapped up in expressive freedom in this way, you might well honestly be prepared to shrug your shoulders and say: “Fine. If they don’t want me to say ‘unmute’ or ‘seminal’ or ‘Bombay’ anymore, or if they don’t want me to speak Spanish, I can respect that.” But I can’t respect that. ¡Lárgate de aquí! If you think language is for facilitating maximally painless and clear communication with your contemporaries in the aim of building a more just future, then being told by someone else how to speak can perhaps sound like a helpful suggestion. If you think of language primarily as the vehicle by which to sharpen your consciousness of the debt you bear to your language-shaping ancestors, then being told what you can and cannot say is, if I may speak just this once in the manner of my contemporaries, “literal violence”.

I have myself mostly managed to steer clear of the attack mobs, and I suspect this is not unrelated to what I have just said about language. I am a “language writer”, so to speak, not an “opinion writer”. The swarms of online surveillers typically only know how to detect clearly stated opinions, and the less linguistic jouissance the writer of these opinions displays in writing them, the easier job the surveillers will have of it. Another way of saying this is that those who read in order to find new targets of denunciation are so far along now in their convergent evolution with AI, that the best way to protect yourself from them is to conceal your writing under a shroud of irreducibly human style, much as a hunter learns to blend in with the exquisite vegetal surroundings of the natural environment.

Such camouflage was harder to wear within the 280-word limit on Twitter, which of course meant that the most fitting and obvious way to avoid the Maoists was to retreat into insincere shitposting — arguably the first truly new genre of artistic or literary endeavor in the 21st century, which perhaps will turn out to have been as explosive and revolutionary as, say, jazz was in the 20th. Certainly, when literary historians a few hundred years from now are trying to figure out who the most influential English prose stylist of the current era was, they will not be looking to Jonathan Franzen or whomever, but to dril. Our master shitposter has perfectly mirrored the breakdown of sense that characterizes our era — dril’s body of work looks like our moment no less than, say, an Otto Dix painting looks like World War I. As for me though, perhaps it’s a question of age, perhaps of temperament, but I am simply not cut out for shitposting. I have always been, even if well-camouflaged, nothing if not “sincere on Main”.

Sign 1: The Writer as Address-Maker

Substack, it has sometimes been hoped, gives us a Third Way, beyond shitposting and take-mongering — namely, the venerable old pre-internet art of the essay. Yet so many who have moved to Substack were already so fully poisoned by social-media before they arrived here as to be unable to prevent themselves from importing into this space the norms and expectations they learned in these other degrading venues. My own success in steering clear of all that sound and fury has much to do with the fact, as I keep saying, that in general I do not see my purpose here as one of taking up substantive first-order commitments on issues of the day. For some people, however, even declining to do so is itself a reason to seek to draw us in to their world of pointless take-mongering.

For example, one commenter recently asked me why I haven’t yet “addressed” the issue of Israel’s massacre in Gaza over the past several months. Here’s what I wrote in reply: