Don’t expect this to arrive at some destination. It’s an ungraded exercise.
I’m from the television addicted generation, a boomer (b. 1951—d. TBD). So, when Sherry was busy and the dog had been walked and I was on a thirty-minute hold with the oven and a loaf of bread, I went down into the basement where I have a TV, and opened the YouTube channel (we boomers still think in channels).
There on the menu of algorithmic pre-selected suggestions was a year-old podcast, Briahna Joy Gray’s Bad Faith, featuring her, Freddie DeBoer (whose substack I read regularly), and Pascal Robert (a Haitian-American Marxist I’ve also followed from time to time, who was mentored by an old friend—the late Bruce Dixon). I first became familiar with Gray when she was spokesperson for the 2020 Sanders presidential bid.
Gray and Robert (pronounced row-BEAR) were trained as lawyers, and DeBoer holds a PhD in Philosophy. All three are stationed in the urban Northeast. All three are on record as being critical of the left to which they belong. The title of the episode, then, follows: “Is ‘Wokeness’ Killing the Left?” The title is clickbait-stupid (such is marketing in the attention economy), but it’s actually a very thoughtful conversation, a bit over an hour long, and I’d recommend it to anyone who has the time and inclination, even though they drifted off at one point into the morass of gender ideology with a collection of equivocations, evasions, and dogmatic pronouncements. (My own jeremiad on “woke”—as political terminology and tactic— is here in English, and here in Spanish.) The podcast episode was a lefty conversation, decrying the negative impact of liberal PMC-DEI shenanigans on the (actual) left’s appeal to working class people (with the usual complete blind spot about working class [and black/brown] religiosity.)
That’s not what’s on file for today though. At around 16:40 in the podcast, DeBoer is holding forth on the incredible whiteness of woke (my phrase, not his), and the phenomenon he calls “borrowed offense,” when he prefaces as evidence in support of his observations, “If you were to go on Twitter and count up all the tweets, I guarantee you the dominant majority of people complaining . . . are white.”
Twitter is presumed here to be representative of political reality . . . even reality itself.
I have no way of estimating, much less proving, the truth or falsity of this presumption. What I can say is that, in having lived for substantial periods outside of Northeastern urban environs, in the US and abroad, and in having lived most of my life prior to the hegemony of digital media, this is not always the case. If it is now the case that digital platforms determine reality to such a presumptive degree, then we are in very deep shit.
My own rebuttal—purely intuitive—is that this matrix doesn’t have the capacity (thank God) to override the Real, even though it obviously rides herd on the imaginations of urban intellectuals, influencers, and other very online people. (Yeah, I know, I know, I’m posting this on Substack ffs . . . if you feel compelled by whatever psychological tic to write things, this is the playing field nowadays.)
I don’t for a minute doubt the power of the matrix. Donald Trump became “45” as a Twitter troll. He’ll likely become “47,” given the absolute mule-brained stupidity of the US Democratic Party.
I’m a pretty pessimistic guy in some respects. I’ve been accused of doomerism for stating pretty grim, but obvious, facts; and yet today I’ll sound a guardedly optimistic note, based on another obvious and brutally ontological fact: Reality can’t be overridden. Not by digital matrices. Not by “systems.” Not by politics. Not by pharmaceuticals and surgeries. Not by linguistic policing. Not by monopolies. Not by any of the Archons of power.
What DeCerteau saw, while walking city streets, was everyone overriding power not from above but from below, with their out-of-boundary hacks, as they exploit, in a purely tactical and often ad hoc way, the unguarded and unsupervised cracks and insterstices that escape management’s surveillance and control. My hypothesis is that nature, including our own, operates “from below” in an analogically similar way, but far more powerfully, because it’s backstopped by an impenetrable ontological wall.
Power always seeks to overcome nature—which it appears to for a time, and only for a time—and nature always bats last.
Every person reading this, and every person in the world—here’s one of those brute facts—was born dependent, relying on oxygen, glucose, water. We eat. We excrete. We itch and scratch. We wiggle our fingers and toes. We sleep and dream. While writing these last 765 words, I’ve yawned, stretched, been in and out of the bathroom, walked a dog two times, chatted and planned with Sherry, cooked breakfast, brushed my teeth, washed veggies for lunch, made a bed, scratched at hard to reach places on my back, blown my nose twice, rubbed my face and eyes, lotioned my hands (winter dries me out), picked at a split fingernail, spaced out watching birds through the window, cleared my throat, dragged a trash can back from the street, had my heart beat (over these four or so hours) 15,600 times, drawn and expired breath around 2,000 times, drank three glasses of water and one cup of coffee, and swallowed a slice of homemade bread with butter, an avocado with lime juice, and two eggs. None of that shit required me going online, and all of it was more inescapably necessary than checking Twitter, Facebook, email, or Substack (all of which I also did, but that took about fifteen minutes while I drank coffee).
We all die—memento mori. I’ll get there sooner than some—realistically within ten years, almost certainly within twenty. Maybe tomorrow, wtfk. Between my birth and now, though, I’ve seen so much stuff change that I gained a perspective. Everything I thought was irreversible has dissolved in time’s patient capacity. Ontology prevails, the rest is circumstantial. That life and death stuff, it was the same 10,000 years ago as it is today.
I said this is an optimistic diagnosis. It’s qualified optimism. If you’re someone whose bent on control or conquest, it’s pretty bad news, I guess. Read Shelley’s Ozimandias. Or Genesis.
The more time I spend online—which is where we read now, and I’m a reader—the more I get a sense of the delusion shared by many of these very online people that what they experience online is representative of reality, just as television warped our brains as boomer toddlers back in the day. And still, reality refuses to move, and everything that throws itself against reality—even when it appears, to our momentary and time-and-mortality-formed perception, to be more powerful than reality—is repelled or broken or swallowed up by and by.
This notion that what’s online is of paramount importance—and among online political commentators, that it’s a reflection of the all-encompassing importance of politics—can only be reinforced by the fact that many of these interweb mavens and influencers have now become dependent upon online discourse (and conflict) to make their livelihoods. Living in this milieu, then, risks forgetfulness of the fact that most people are spending most of their time doing other things. Their attentions are not focused on the things that very online people’s attentions are.
On this business of attention (and conflict, about which I shall now remove the parentheses). I’ll start with attention.
Plenty of critics out there have already brought to light the deleterious effects of media on human attention. I can safely leave that to others. Online is the simulated environment where distraction is King. It’s not a danger to attention, because attention—to real shit—is its antidote. Practical attention in the real right-now 4-D world. You know when I forget to eat and drink? When I’m fishing. Attention is not focus on a fucking dot. Attention is participatory. Light, wind, water, waves, visibility, vegetation, topography, bird activity, people activity, boat orientation, anchor placement, lure selection, line selection, presentation, retrieve . . . the practice and its telos is the field—not deracinated detail—of attention. (You know what ruins it? Competition and retail escalation.)
Practical attention gets displaced, turned around, flipped . . . when the goal is bringing attention to oneself, especially when that’s an essential intermediate objective for bringing attention to one’s “message” or “issue” or what-the-fuck-ever. (The podcast above needed a clickbait title.) This is the contradiction in politics as a redemptive monopoly, too. Which is my segue on conflict, which is a surefire way to attract attention. Politics is seldom deliberative. It is mostly war by other means (see the link above).
I know a bit about this, because I was a conflict junkie most of my life, a real moth to the flame, if you’ll allow me to mix my metaphors (more of them coming).
I recently returned to Twitter, with which I engage briefly, critically, and with a prior commitment to restraint. I always let my most oppositional interlocutors have the last word, for instance . . . if they want it. I’ll let the bystanding witnesses work out who got it right. It’s a way, again, of getting people to read what I write (I have like 500 followers, fwiw, so I’m a politically inert gas). On the other hand, I do not self-censor to achieve a wider readership, because we live on our Social Security and my military pension. It’s a very modest existence, but long-story-short I’m going to write whatever I want to without the gravitational distortion of money. At any rate, Twitter . . . it’s a shit show of conflict. Its is genetically conflictual. Online is a genetically conflictual space that sorts people into warring ideological tribes. Conflict is like sex to advertisers and other PR carrion birds. It’s catnip. It’s relief from the boredom of modern existence. It’s meth.
Illich said that modern development would make of us all “the prisoners of envy and addiction.”
That’s the pessimistic news. If you think conflict is The Most Important Thing, whether that’s a political redemption story, or a chasing probative masculinity story, or viewing life through the lens of The Housewives of Atlanta story, then this is pessimistic news indeed.
If you can lash down your unmoored attention to real life, though, and if you don’t live in the hell of a war zone, most of The Real is mostly pretty pacific. I haven’t been in any kind of physical conflict in years, and fewer and fewer non-phsyical altercations. Sherry and I have learned—as all couples do who happily last—marital diplomacy. With the people I meet in public, we either engage in courteous exchanges or politely ignore one another. Whole cities, even those marked by violent incidents, are still animated by and large by people who are not engaged in conflict. In real life, remaining in a constant state of conflict makes one ill—physically, mentally, or spiritually. It is NOT our natural state. That’s pretty good news.
And nature bats last . . . every time. (If that’s not enough for you, I have better news still . . . a story about God having our backs.)
I told you I wasn’t headed to any destination, so that’s all I’ve got to say about that.
You can have the last word.