“Interact with a void as if it had a soul” — is that not Ambrose Bierce’s concise definition of prayer?
Sorry, sorry; I only jest! In fact, believe it or not, this has been a longstanding concern of mine as well. I was always troubled by the cavalier attitude toward artificial intelligence displayed in the popular entertainments of my childhood. While other boys were cheering Luke Skywalker’s adventures, I was wondering whether his familiarity with C3PO and R2-D2 constituted a dangerous erosion of the distinction between persons and things. Were the robots merely sophisticated appliances, or was Lucas insinuating that they possessed souls? And what were the implications for the ontological foundations of human dignity?
My friends seemed indifferent to these questions. Indeed, when I raised the subject during recess, they frequently told me to “shut up, dork.”
Matters grew worse in 1982, with the premiere of Knight Rider. Here was a grown man who not only conversed with his automobile but treated it as a friend and confidant. I tried to explain to my classmates that such behavior contributed to the labefaction of moral order. They replied by stuffing me into a locker.
Even then, I recognized the irony. In their eagerness to defend the supposed humanity of a talking Pontiac, they had lost sight of the actual human being in their midst. Unfortunately, my attempts to explain this through the ventilation slots were not well received.
It has taken long enough, but I am gratified to discover that Leith and Gaskovski have finally arrived at the conclusions I reached in elementary school. I only wish they had been around to offer a little moral support at the time. I might have spent considerably less of my childhood without my underpants yanked up to my ribs.
I dont mean this as a joke. I dont mean this as a provocative metaphor designed to generate engagement on social media, although I am aware that it will generate engagement on social media, because the internet is a machine that converts provocation into dopamine with the same mechanical efficiency that a sausage factory converts pig intestines into breakfast. I mean it as a literal, formal, generic classification. Nietzsche’s books belong to the same literary genre as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, Daring Greatly by Brené Brown, Atomic Habits by James Clear, and the spiral-bound manifestation journal that your cousin Gemma sells on Etsy under the brand name “Luna & Sage” and which has a 4.8-star rating from 2,300 women who describe themselves in their reviews as “currently on a journey.”
It’s a funny conceit, but this essay makes the category of self-help so elastic that it becomes meaningless. Any writer who encourages readers to reconsider their lives becomes a self-help author by this standard, whether it’s Epictetus, Montaigne, Thoreau, or Ted Kaczynski. Another obvious objection is that Rhonda Byrne famously promises that the universe will cooperate with your aspirations. Nietzsche promises nothing of the kind. The absence of any cosmic guarantee is central to his philosophy. If this were about trying to correct academic distortions in the name of accuracy, there was a much easier and obvious way to go. But an essay arguing that Nietzsche belongs to an ancient tradition of philosophy as a way of life wouldn’t have nearly the comic appeal of announcing that Nietzsche was Tony Robbins in a walrus mustache.
I honestly have not given it much thought before now, but my provisional description of the “self-help” genre would be a particularly American belief, motivated by optimism and democratic egalitarianism, that with enough know-how and can-do spirit, each of us is capable of creating the life we want. (Already, this presumes that we have the honesty and self-knowledge to accomplish it, an assertion Nietzsche would guffaw at.) Nietzsche, by contrast, certainly believed human beings could be transformed, but he didn’t necessarily believe that transformation would make them happier, more sociable, better adjusted, or more comprehensible to their neighbors. Nor did he assume that everybody deserved an equal invitation to the enterprise. We take for granted that a writer addressing humanity is, by extension, addressing each of us as an individual. Nietzsche entertained no such democratic obligation. His readers of the future were an imagined spiritual aristocracy, not an untapped market for personal improvement.
What if he regarded our intensely individualistic culture as one of the most successful manifestations of herd mentality in history? After all, everybody is encouraged to be unique. Everybody is entitled to self-expression. Everybody is expected to discover his authentic identity and live his best life. Yet the methods, aspirations, and even the vocabulary of this supposedly independent self-creation are standardized to the point of cliché. We tend to equate individuality with freedom of choice. Nietzsche was deeply suspicious of precisely that understanding of freedom. A person who obediently follows his appetites, preferences, and fashionable enthusiasms may imagine himself independent while remaining entirely governed by forces he scarcely understands.
What we call personal growth often involves becoming better adjusted to the social environment we already inhabit. We learn to manage our emotions, improve our relationships, communicate more effectively, establish boundaries, and pursue satisfying lives. Much of this is perfectly sensible, and Nietzsche himself might have benefited from a little more proficiency in some of these areas. But there’s no reason to assume that he would have considered successful adjustment to modern bourgeois society a particularly admirable achievement. Quite the opposite.
We’re so reflexively accustomed to treating culture as a resource for personal development that we can be tempted to translate his philosophy into that idiom. His ideas become techniques. His provocations become refrigerator-magnet affirmations. His contempt for complacency becomes a motivational challenge. His exceptional individual becomes the ordinary consumer striving to reach his full potential. But one of the most genuinely transformative experiences Nietzsche can offer is the discovery that a philosopher may not consider you, your happiness, or your self-improvement particularly important. And the resulting affront to your self-esteem might be more intellectually valuable than another encouraging reminder of your limitless potential.
“Philosophy as a way of life” does a better job of summing up his varied and evolving interests, from poetry, psychology, and philosophy proper to religion, metaphysics, language, music, and culture, to say nothing of his scintillating prose. Stuffing all that into a contemporary definition of “self-help” makes for a good joke but absurd reasoning. The academics with their focus on minutiae may be like Lilliputians examining Gulliver tied down on the beach, but a reduction of Nietzsche to a peddler of encouraging platitudes is Procrustean in its violence.
The Devil sighed: “That man wasn’t clever enough for me to get round him; he hadn’t enough brains. He was so stupid that he defeated me completely. What a problem, trying to tempt a moron! This one couldn’t make head or tail of my suggestions!”
I saw this remarkable video the other day of the Devil addressing a crowd at the crossroads. She was an attractive young woman, eloquent and impassioned, promising to save the assembled multitude from a terrible fate. Dark forces were conspiring to deprive them of their ability to think for themselves, she warned. Fortunately, effective resistance would consist of indulging favorite hobbies. The crowd roared its approval. “Of course you read books, my darlings,” she murmured. “That’s what separates you from the others. They surrender their minds to machines, but you retain your intellectual independence. You have nothing in common with those people. You know better. You’re one of the good ones.” The free-thinking individuals were immensely pleased. They cheered every word before heading out to the gift shop to put more romantasy novels, ghostwritten political promos, and sassy laptop stickers into their officially-branded “Reading Is Resistance!” totebags. Only one man refused to be taken in by the Devil’s wiles, the hero the age deserved:
There have been a few briefly-popular 80s/90s bands coming through town recently, playing small clubs. At one point, there were some former 80s main-event wrestlers doing a show at a nearby high school gym. When the spirit is willing and the dignity is weak, why not? Greta seems to be heading into that stage of her career now. Before long, I expect to see the scowling face of the Omnicause on the activist version of OnlyFans, offering to come to your Midwestern town to protest a City Council proposal concerning stormwater drainage and the possibility of relocating the crosswalk on Birch and Main. For a platinum-tier subscription, Banksy might even contribute a stencil to the occasion.
This ridiculous cretin came to fame by refusing to go to school in the name of protesting climate change. Countless adults, evidently enamored of the idea of a children’s crusade and weary of their own responsibilities, decided to genuflect before her as an example of moral clarity (and favorable press coverage). To the best of my knowledge, nothing has been solved to the climate fanatics’ satisfaction, and we’re all going to die from Gaia’s wrath eventually if AI doesn’t get us first, but Greta has shrewdly expanded her professional activist portfolio to stay newsworthy. She spent a while protesting over Gaza, to similarly ineffectual results — as far as I’m aware, there’s still a “genocide” happening there. Undaunted by her complete inability to make any meaningful difference, she’s now getting involved in whatever they’re rioting about in France at the moment. Why does the world’s most famous dropout care about conditions in French high schools? Shouldn’t we all be quitting school and our jobs to heal the Earth before it’s too late? To ask the question is to answer it. Celebrity protesting is a safe career path, concerned above all with extending its own longevity. None of it matters, and none of it is expected to matter. It’s all kayfabe. The senior-citizen wrestlers at the local high school would nod approvingly. Groucho Marx sang in Horse Feathers, “I don’t know what they have to say / It makes no difference anyway / Whatever it is, I’m against it!” Greta could alter that to “Whatever is againstist, I’m for it.” What’s she protesting? Whaddaya got?
Many of you have heard the phrase “too many chiefs, not enough Indians,” and I trust you have already denounced yourselves and reported to the proper authorities for cultural sensitivity re-education. I would like to offer an Old Testament variation: too many prophets, not enough Nehemiahs. In the Book of Nehemiah, Jerusalem’s walls are in ruins, and rather than spending his days denouncing the wickedness of those responsible, Nehemiah organizes the work of rebuilding them. He negotiates for resources, assigns responsibilities, deals with opposition, and supervises the actual construction. According to Nehemiah 6:15, the wall is completed in fifty-two days. His story involves precisely the sort of practical difficulties that disappear when political activity is reduced to denunciation. And denunciation is all that our modern would-be prophets are interested in. Everybody wants to be a prophet, pointing and excoriating, especially when the mortal risk is much reduced from the olden days. We can’t have climate justice without social justice, Thunberg says. Well, that’s awfully convenient. It means you don’t have to juggle priorities or trade-offs. You can protest mass ecocide on Monday, QUILTBAG oppression on Wednesday, and educational policy on Friday. It’s all connected, after all; nothing is too trivial in the struggle for cosmic justice. And since utopia is the only acceptable solution to any of it, since all problems must be solved all at once for true solidarity, there’s no danger of putting yourselves out of work. The play is always going on, and the play’s the thing.
And Niemand descended from his mountain and came to the marketplace, where he found a great multitude of lonely men and women.
“Behold my terrible burden!” cried one. “I question what others blindly accept! My thoughts are dangerous! I am unwelcome at parties and unbearable in group chats! Such is the price of thinking clearly!”
And seven thousand people applauded him.
Then another stood forth and cried, “Woe is me! For I have read many books, and ordinary conversation has become intolerable to me! Everywhere I encounter ignorance, incuriosity, and a want of empathy! How it saddens me to dwell among such people!”
And three thousand people applauded her.
Niemand was astonished.
“Truly,” he said, “I have never seen so many lonely people gathered in one place! Tell me, brothers and sisters, what dreadful truths have you discovered that have made you strangers to your fellow men?”
And the first replied, “That most men do not think for themselves!”
“And how did you discover this?”
“I read it on the internet!”
“And you?” Niemand asked the second. “What have your books taught you?”
“That ordinary people are narrow-minded, incurious, and incapable of seeing the world through another’s eyes!”
“And have you tried seeing the world through theirs?”
But the woman was busy ridding herself of “the ick.”
Then Niemand spoke again.
“Beware, my brothers and sisters, lest you mistake your contempt for insight, and your vanity for independence! Perhaps the man who finds you tiresome is not an enemy of thought. Perhaps he merely wishes to finish his dinner. Perhaps the woman who avoids you at parties is not afraid of your dangerous ideas. Perhaps she has heard them all before.
“And perhaps your great loneliness is not the price you pay for possessing extraordinary wisdom, but the story you tell yourselves to make ordinary rejection seem extraordinary.”
At this the multitude grew angry.
“Who is this insolent fellow?” they cried. “Does he not know how difficult it is to be different? Has he no sympathy for independent thinkers? Does he not respect our courage?”
And they cast Niemand from the marketplace.
But before departing, he turned and addressed them one last time.
“Of all the thoughts you call uncomfortable, my brothers, there is one you have not yet dared to think: What if I am not exceptional?”
And no one applauded him. No one let that sink in.
“It’s not a competition” says the man selectively tallying encomiums as if it’s a competition.
I realize it’s overkill to seriously analyze a post like this. It’s like using a howitzer to swat a housefly. But I still think it’s instructive to notice at times just how thoughtless much of our speech is. I hold myself to this same standard. If I can help it, I prefer to err on the side of silence rather than blurt out something inane.
For starters, here we are, back at the same stupid “gossip” problem again. Hens clucking about what all the other hens are or are not clucking about. “No one is talking about how great Annie Dillard was (the ones who are don’t count).” “Annie Dillard was just as important as Wendell Berry, but y’all aren’t ready for that conversation.” If you want to praise Annie Dillard, THEN PRAISE ANNIE DILLARD. What exactly is stopping you from getting the Annie Dillard Appreciation Party started? Why is your first instinct to waste time bitching about all the people who aren’t appreciating her loudly enough? What are you, the Discourse Supervisor? You don’t do any useful work, you just look around to see what needs doing and then nag other people to do it?
Dillard got full-scale obituaries from both the New York Times and the Washington Post on September 16, the day after she died. The Times called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek a “modern classic”; the Post described her as a Pulitzer-winning writer hailed as a twentieth-century Thoreau. Good thing “it’s not a competition,” or we’d already have some awkward questions to answer. Does an NYT obituary count more than twelve Substack posts? Does a long appreciation count more than a brief RIP? What’s the crying-emoji-to-word-count exchange rate? What about people who praised Dillard extensively while she was alive and didn’t feel compelled to write an obituary? Are we counting readership, number of pieces, word count, emotional intensity? Surely this can’t all be based on some reflexive “vibe” you got from your highly-selective social media feed, because that would be embarrassingly dumb.
You could imagine asking him directly, “Okay. What, in your view, would count as ‘enough’ or ‘the proper amount’ of recognition and tributes?” And you know full well he wouldn’t have an answer, because it’s not an empirical question. It’s an impulse, based entirely on the fact that the two writers died a couple weeks apart, and on the competition that he himself invented even as he decries it!
The post says only a few sentences, but to make those sentences cohere, a whole set of unstated propositions has to be doing work underneath them. You can infer those propositions because the visible claim depends on them. They’re like the wiring behind the wall of the post that makes the lights come on at all. So let’s label some of those wires:
My feed is representative of public attention.
The volume of public response two days after Dillard’s death can be meaningfully compared with the accumulated response more than two weeks after Berry’s.
Unequal attention implies an injustice or distortion.
I can recognize “insufficient” recognition without specifying what sufficient recognition would be.
Other people’s praise (or the lack thereof) is more interesting than offering praise myself.
My irritation at the distribution of attention tells me something about the culture rather than about my feed, my follows, or my expectations.
None of this is made explicit, but we all intuitively understand it’s there. Even in his comments, some people are noticing the implied competition he denies implying, while others are happily taking the cue to treat it as a competition and argue about whether they liked Berry or Dillard better. I’ve often felt, when watching some kerfuffle or another, that the problem is that there are multiple assumptions packed into the explicit statement, they aren’t being made clear, different people are noticing different assumptions and reacting to them in particular, and everyone is talking all at once without being careful to delineate. This is why any public discussion involving more than, say, three people is intolerable. I have no hope it could ever be otherwise, especially when you account for the likelihood that every fourth person is too stupid to usefully contribute even to a clear conversation. But we as individuals can at least aim to think more carefully about what we say, and if in doubt, err on the side of silence.
“We have to give up the fantasy of being fitter than the fascists,” Adler-Bolton told attendees. “Fitness is a measure of relative disposability under capitalism.” The left, she argued, should not try to “beat fascists at their own game” by becoming “fitter, more eugenic.”
“In fact, the more dysgenic the better, I think,” she said.
Harrison went after GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, saying that “The political deployment of GLP-1s is fascistic.” Harrison further argued that we live in a world “fixated on genociding fat people” and that the Western world is “waging war on fat flesh with diet culture as a primary weapon through body fascism.” The clips, which were posted by Stu Smith, a Manhattan Institute researcher who frequented livestreams of the conference, predictably went viral on Twitter and were roundly mocked.
If you want to make an aspirational ideal out of being unfit and dysgenic, well, I certainly understand why you would be attracted to a political philosophy that guarantees the state, funded by able-bodied taxpayers, will take care of you from cradle to grave. I’m unclear, however, on the strategic wisdom of presenting your politics antagonistically. Why are gym-goers, or even just people who take GLP-1s, supposed to want to contribute to your upkeep and well-being after you just called them fascists? Your mom and dad may have patiently put up with your screeching tantrums throughout your adolescence, and that may have given you a skewed sense of what adults in general are willing to tolerate, but absent a widespread Christian ethic that places value on even the most repulsive and useless examples of humanity, I don’t know why you assume anyone else should feel sympathetic to you.
As soon as I feel or suspect someone or something wanting to take hold of me by acting on my sensibility — beggars, religion, politics, works, etc., trying to break my heart, convince me through fear or pity, through ways which bypass the mind — I rebel, I bristle and become merciless. These are not fair weapons.
A writer whose novels have been in print for generations, taught in schools and universities, adapted repeatedly for film, translated all over the world, and treated as a major twentieth-century English novelist. Somehow wandering the cultural wilderness awaiting discovery by Arjun Marigold on Substack.
There are a few things — some things — okay, many things — that make me want to reach through a laptop screen and punch someone in the throat. One of them is in this post. Can you guess what it is?
Let me put it this way. When my stepson was watching pro wrestling in the early 2000s, I was struck by how it had changed since my own childhood. The branding had become much more efficient. Wrestlers would have their obvious catchphrases followed by a whole line of merchandise built around it. Given that the spectacle wasn’t trying to impress anyone with being highbrow, and given that many of the performers were likely suffering from various degrees of traumatic brain injuries, there was minimal artifice in the promos. Everyone knew the catchphrase was coming, and the audience delighted in chanting it on cue.
Most significantly, the industry had responded to the internet age by becoming more ironic. The fig leaf of kayfabe, still present in the 1980s when I was watching Dusty Rhodes wrasslin’ with Ric Flair, had been taken away. The audience knew it was all a work, the performers knew the audience knew it was all a work, and everyone enjoyed the campy, self-referential spectacle regardless. Literary/humanities types would be aghast to be told that their level of self-awareness is somehow below that of the average wrestling fan, but it’s true, as evidenced here.
“Criminally underrated” is a cliché. A moronic meme-phrase. A catchphrase as fresh as four-day-old fish. No one should ever speak it in earnest. It is the thoughtless squawking of a mynah bird imitating all the other thoughtless mynah birds. Even worse, it compounds the inspidity with hyperbole — not just underrated, which would be a mere breach of decorum, possibly deserving of a civil suit, but criminally underrated. Charges should be brought against…whom, exactly? The literary establishment? Readers? Critics? Publishers? Hollywood? Posterity? All this, just to complain that “the object of my affection is not being praised at this exact moment in front of me.”
A wrestler at least knows he’s doing branding. The Rock wasn’t under the impression that “If you smell what The Rock is cooking” had spontaneously arisen from fresh contemplation on every occasion. The person telling you that Graham Greene is “criminally underrated,” however, may genuinely experience the phrase as his own observation. He is announcing refined taste while using the verbal equivalent of a foam finger. A wrestling crowd chanting “WHAT?” knows it is participating in a bit. A bookish crowd saying “criminally underrated,” “people aren’t ready for this conversation,” or “this lives rent-free in my head” often seems to imagine that it is independently producing fresh language. No wink, no acknowledgment that ten thousand other people have already deployed the identical prefab utterance that week alone.
I don’t just hate canned phrases, though. No, I also hate the stage management. The rest of Marigold’s post stands on its own. The scenes transport you to Vietnam, the characters feel real, the book was remarkably prescient about the coming war, and it was entertaining. Great! None of that needs to be prefaced by a pointless reference to what some imaginary group of other people may or may not think about it. If you want to discuss a book, then discuss it without throat-clearing and preamble. No one gives a wet, sputtering shit how you feel about how others feel about it. Online culture has made this reflexive because plain enthusiasm feels insufficiently consequential. “Here’s a book I love” sounds like one person liking something. “This masterpiece is criminally underrated” gives you a miniature drama: neglect, rediscovery, vindication, and, perhaps most importantly, the speaker as discerning rescuer.
And now what could have been an interesting conversation about something of substance has devolved once again into gossip and preening. Gossip is fundamentally about triangulation: not A, but what B thinks about A, and what C thinks about B’s opinion of A. Serious topics can be subjected to exactly the same flattening. Instead of “What is true here?” or “What is interesting about this?” you get: Who is talking about it? Who isn’t? Who is insufficiently alarmed? Who is insufficiently impressed? Who has failed to “center” the right thing? Who is “finally saying” what “nobody wants to admit”? The discussion turns from reality to the audience’s posture toward reality. The interesting object gets displaced almost immediately by an imaginary referendum, then everyone starts debating the referendum instead of the object itself.
This also owes to the fact that many people want to be involved in a conversation even when they have nothing to contribute. Talking directly about a poem, an argument, a technology, a war, a scientific finding requires knowledge and discrimination. Talking about how “people are reacting” requires much less. Any social media intern can do it. Mindless phrases like “no one is talking about,” “we need to normalize,” “the quiet part out loud,” “tell me you’re X without telling me you’re X,” and “louder for the people in the back” proliferate so easily because they let the speaker occupy the superior mezzanine above the conversation without contributing much to the conversation itself. Those are basically entrance music. You recognize the persona before any thought has even arrived.
I prefer the straightforward, unpretentious nature of wrestling promos. “Yes, this is my line. Yes, you know it’s coming. Yes, we are all going to shout it together.” The literary discourse would be improved by that level of candor:
“Graham Greene is criminally underrated!”
Crowd erupts.
“CRIM-IN-AL-LY UN-DER-RAT-ED!”
Then the T-shirts come out. Everyone has a cheesy fun time.
“Accel_” has 231 views. Left alone, his contribution to civilization is essentially zero. Then Wolf, who has a much larger and more sensible audience, screenshots him, and suddenly this nobody’s dumb remark becomes content. It’s dispiriting how often this happens. Ironically, the idiots and trolls end up controlling the discourse, because the 90% of sane people can’t resist quoting, retweeting, and making recurring inside jokes about it. The marginal pollution from one retweet is negligible. But millions of individually defensible decisions determine what everybody sees, until the information environment becomes disproportionately composed of things almost nobody actually endorses. A classic “tragedy of the commons” problem. Each individual is tempted to dump a little bit of sewage into the conversation supply, but then we all end up getting cerebral cholera. Mockingly, ironically, or earnestly, the bacteria get shared all the same.
In a room of twenty people, somebody acting like an ass for attention can encounter the devastating response of nineteen people simply looking away. Everyone can see everyone else looking away, so silence itself communicates a norm. Online, silence has no visible social presence. You cannot see the ten thousand people who encountered something and declined to engage with it. You see the fifty who replied. So the platform systematically hides successful norm enforcement and displays failed norm enforcement. On sites like Twitter, the audience is indefinite. Membership is nearly costless. A troublemaker can parachute into a conversation among strangers. Sanctions in one subcommunity may be rewards in another. And, most perversely, the mechanism by which you punish the offender —quote him, ridicule him, make him notorious — is the same mechanism that rewards him with engagement.
The deepest truths often seem to present themselves in paradox. Lao Tzu said that “the way that can be named is not the way,” and was mocked for adding 5,000 characters of elucidation. I, too, will risk accusations of hypocrisy and self-contradiction by attempting to name the way out of the trap. I just offered an example yesterday, in fact. Did you notice? On the surface, it may have appeared to be a semi-serious post about Paul Valéry, a conspiracy-obsessed priest, and my own youthful attempts at poetry. But if you look a little closer, you’ll notice a conspicuous absence, like Holmes’s dog that did not bark. That’s right: there are no references to a blonde bombshell’s nude ads for a gambling app. There were no mentions of high-profile court cases involving child murder. There was zero attention paid to any form of “-maxxing.” Now I’ve tarnished this post by referring to those things, even obliquely, but it was for a good cause. I wanted to stress that you can just refuse to engage with any of it. The catch is that no one will applaud you for doing so. The troll will never know that you rolled your eyes and went back to your book. Your friends will never see the devastating reply you chose not to make. There will be no little heart count beneath your silence. But the only way not to add sewage to the commons is to accept that nobody will know or care that you resisted. Online, restraint has no audience. That is both its weakness and its virtue.
The Lady of the House showed me this “Facebook reel,” which appears to have been recently declassified as part of a CIA MK-ULTRA program. I suggested that she quit watching these things for a couple weeks and see if her ADHD doesn’t resolve itself. Seriously, imagine proposing this as a psychological experiment. Subjects will be seated in front of a small illuminated panel. Their eyes will be drawn between faces, captions, jump cuts, emojis, scrolling comments, rapid-fire images, and flashing lights. Every few seconds, the emotional register will change: hilarity, disgust, outrage, amazement, pity, contempt, back to hilarity. Grimacing visages will model the appropriate reaction. Sounds of pneumatic drills, explosions, squealing hinges, and nails on chalkboards may be introduced at random intervals.
Repeat for several hours a day.
Afterward, when the subjects report anxiety, restlessness, depression, insomnia, inability to concentrate, and the sensation that reading three pages of a book now feels like dragging a corpse uphill through wet cement, researchers will solemnly announce that the causes remain unclear.
Once upon a time, the news was delivered by grave men in suits, which had its own absurdities. Now the equivalent is Facebook UI clutter, reaction emojis, progress dots, usernames, a man’s disembodied head pasted over a screenshot of a tweet, screaming the tweet aloud while subtitles repeat the screaming and six other pieces of interface debris crawl over the image like ants on a dropped popsicle.
This “story,” such as it is, concerns some Europeans visiting America during the World Cup and reacting with amazement to our barbaric abundance: the food portions, the Wi-Fi, the interstate rest stops, the fact that the average Buc-ee’s is roughly the size of Luxembourg and smells better.
That’s it. That’s the story. Some foreign visitors noticed that America is large and amazing, tweeted about it, went viral, and now a bug-eyed intermediary who appears to have eaten a bottle of gas station stimulants has been dispatched to read the tweets aloud to people who apparently cannot be trusted to find them, read them, or decide what to make of them.
An old blog might have handled this by saying, “Here are a few funny tweets from Europeans discovering America,” followed by links or screenshots. You could have looked at them at your convenience. You could have paused, reread, skimmed, laughed, shrugged, or decided that the whole thing was mildly amusing but not worth rupturing a blood vessel over. The object would have been placed before you. Your reaction would have remained your own.
The reel cannot tolerate that arrangement. It thrusts the item toward you, screams the proper emotional response into your face, and yanks it away before your eyes have finished focusing. “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?” the host bellows, while the tweet sits there on screen, perfectly capable of being read by anyone with a fourth-grade education and two uninterrupted seconds. But two uninterrupted seconds are exactly what the format cannot permit.
The new middleman is not an editor, exactly, and not a critic. He is a digestive aid. He finds a tweet that has already gone viral, places his face beside it, reads it aloud in the tone of a man reporting shellfire, and supplies the emotional cues for viewers. The old web had explorers, cranks, diarists, obsessives, and link-hoarders. The platform web has feeders. You enter the app, sit still, and the belt begins to move. A European discovers ranch dressing; a man in a corner convulses; subtitles repeat what he is shouting; comments bloom underneath like mold. This, for reasons future anthropologists may decline to study, is called “content.”
And of course there is now a whole genre of videos in which a man watches another video while you watch him watching it. The original object is demoted to a little window in the corner while the reactor’s face occupies the sovereign territory. Surprise arrives pre-surprised. Amusement arrives pre-laughed-at. Outrage arrives already red-faced and pounding the table. You are not watching a thing. You are watching a designated reactor have an experience on your behalf. It would be merely repulsive if it weren’t sad: these videos reproduce the feeling of watching with friends, except without actual friends. A baby rhesus monkey in a laboratory clings to a sock-covered surrogate for a shred of comfort; the platform subject clings to a man’s floating head, pantomiming genuine emotion.
Stupid entertainment is an ancient and honorable human tradition. A potboiler may be stupid. A sitcom may be stupid. A novelty song may be stupid. But even the worst paperback in the drugstore rack has one great moral advantage over the modern feed: it knows how to shut up. A bad book may insult your intelligence, but it doesn’t seize your nervous system by the lapels. It doesn’t flash lights in your face, vibrate in your hand, split the page into six competing zones, or make the author’s floating head appear in the margin shouting, “BRO, THIS NEXT SENTENCE IS CRAZY.” It lies there, blessedly inert, until you pick it up. Even bad prose preserves a minimal dignity: the reader still controls the encounter.
The old complaint about television was that it turned people into couch potatoes. That now seems almost pastoral. A couch potato could at least sit still. The platform subject is something more agitated and less dignified: a potato wired to a car battery, twitching under fluorescent lights while a man in the corner narrates the event at the top of his lungs.
The Lady of the House began reading romance novels under the respectable flag of irony. “Oh, it’s funny, because the writing is so bad,” she said, as if conducting fieldwork among the primitives. But irony is a fig leaf with poor tensile strength. Before long, the leaf dropped. She was reading them openly, happily, without apology. Then came the minotaurs.
There is a romance novel in which a woman works at a facility where she “milks” minotaurs and falls in love with one. When I mentioned this, expecting at least a ceremonial shudder, she not only knew of the book but defended the nuances of its storytelling. A postal carrier I know then informed me that there is also a genre called “sentient object” romance in which women fall in love with inanimate objects. Doors, for example. Not metaphorical doors. Doors.
At such moments, one understands Emerson. Hell, one understands Moses. You turn your back on the people for a moment, and when you return, they are not merely worshiping the golden calf. They have written a three-book romantasy cycle about its emotional availability. The calf has trauma. The calf has boundary “issues.” The calf is touch-starved but learning to trust again. Or perhaps, in our degraded age, it is no longer a golden calf, but a golden minotaur. Moses smashed the tablets and had three thousand idolaters put to the sword. I am not unreasonable. I merely propose smashing the Kindles.
Say what you will about Paris Hilton, but she spent family money with the innocent joy of a golden retriever in diamond-studded sunglasses. She never asked us to believe that a shopping spree was dialectical praxis, never put on a cloth cap and pretended to be a proletarian. Piker has the rich boy’s ancient problem: he wants the money, the taste, the comfort, and the moral superiority of denouncing all three. Every expensive trinket must be offset by another call for the destruction of the system which produced it. One wishes he could work out the family drama in therapy, rather than staging it as revolutionary cosplay for Twitch.
One of the things Nietzsche despised in Socrates was the latter’s confidence that whatever mattered in life ought to be rendered fully conscious, fully explicit, fully defensible. Reason at any price. Whatever could not survive cross-examination in the bright glare of dialectic was made to look shabby or confused. But a lot of ordinary moral knowledge exists first as caution, custom, proverb, and taboo. It is condensed experience before it becomes explicit theory. Only later, if pressed by some bright interrogator, does someone try to unpack the logic hiding inside it. And sometimes the unpacking is clumsy. That doesn’t mean the intuition was empty. There is something shallow in the dialectical move that says, “Aha, you cannot define or justify this cleanly, therefore you do not really know it.” No. Very often the average person knows the shape of a danger before the intellectual has finished naming it.
Which brings us to our featured tweet. Pace Rob Henderson, who lamented this as another example of an undying “luxury belief,” I see this as reason for good cheer. It seems that prestigious media outlets are backing away from their enthusiastic advocacy of polyamory in recent years to something more modest: unrequited crushes on other people. You might say they’re microdosing polyamory now. Sure, they’re still self-centered boors (and bores) who can’t tolerate any restraints on their endlessly fascinating self-expression, but at least they’re being a little more passive about it now.
Of course, merely noticing other attractive people is banal. Almost everyone with functioning eyes already knows that. What makes this genre irritating is the way it tries to inflate that ordinary fact into a badge of enlightened sophistication. The point is not, “married people are still human.” The point is, “we are the kind of evolved couple who can metabolize this with chic candor.” That’s where the faint whiff of poly ideology lingers. Not full polyamory, just the moral vanity of wanting to seem less possessive, less bourgeois, less square than the rubes. It is polyamory for people who want the aesthetic of sexual adventurousness without the administrative burden, jealousy spiral, and wreckage.
The average married couple has already worked out, without an essay in a prestige outlet, that attraction doesn’t cease at the altar. They have also usually worked out something else obvious to those not blinded by ideology: where attention goes, feeling often follows. Some subjects are better handled with discretion than with performative openness. Not because they are Victorians, but because they are adults. Nobody is scandalized by incidental perception, as opposed to cultivated attention. You see an attractive person; you register it; life goes on. What raises eyebrows is when someone starts lingering over it, discussing it, theorizing it, and then publicizing that whole process as a mark of health or honesty. At that point, the issue is: why are you feeding this? Why are you watering this plant?
Ordinary people’s suspicion is often wiser than the essayist’s self-exoneration. They understand that not everything dangerous begins with an overt act. A lot of it begins with permission, rehearsal, indulgence, and narrative self-flattery. People know, even if they cannot state it in therapeutic jargon, that attention is not neutral. Attention is investment. Repeated attention is cultivation.
I have named you queen.
There are taller than you, taller.
There are purer than you, purer.
There are lovelier than you, lovelier.
But you are the queen.
When you go through the streets
No one recognizes you.
No one sees your crystal crown, no one looks
At the carpet of red gold
That you tread as you pass,
The nonexistent carpet.
And when you appear
All the rivers sound
In my body, bells
Shake the sky,
And a hymn fills the world.
Only you and I,
Only you and I, my love,
Listen to me.
— Pablo Neruda, “The Queen”
What self-centered candor misses is that many of the things holding ordinary life together are not strict factual disclosures but small ceremonial acts of respect. A husband who does not feel obliged to narrate every passing attraction to his wife is not being “dishonest” in any meaningful sense. When he calls his wife gorgeous even though she looks disheveled at that moment, he is performing a tiny courtesy, a way of signaling where his loyalties and priorities lie. Social life is full of such gestures. We say “sorry” when someone bumps into us in the grocery store not because we are confessing guilt, but because it’s a graceful way of acknowledging the awkwardness and smoothing it over. In the same way, a tactful silence in marriage is not repression but consideration: a way of saying, without pedantic explanation, that other people may exist, and they may even be beautiful, but they are not important here. Self-centered candor, by contrast, is crude rather than brave. It dissolves these little ceremonies of regard in the acid of explicitness, and then wonders why the world feels flatter, colder, and less loved.
Bibliomisia — hatred of books — is a silent epidemic in our society, ignored by social scientists, overlooked by the professional awareness-raisers, bereft of bumper magnets and national days of commemoration. Don’t believe me? Then listen to how proudly these people display their abusive tendencies, with no hint of shame. Don’t look away, I beg you. Bear witness with me.
As I went through Oliver’s many marked-up books, I understood that the art of annotation is, almost by definition, impulsive—you have to get your thoughts down now, right now—even if it means turning the book upside down to complete a thought. There’s no time to find a pad of paper, no time to turn the page, no time to pull out a journal. (Over his lifetime, Oliver filled more than 600 handwritten journals and notebooks.)
The margins of my books are filled with handwritten annotations such as “Absolutely not” and “STOP IT!!!!” and “girl get UP.” These are not necessarily critiques of the story; some are expressions of high praise.
…That’s the thing about books. If Barbara, or another character, is making me bang my head against the wall, I can just close the novel and move on with my life. But sometimes I like to salt my days with a person who simply grinds my gears. I might yell aloud to the empty hall; I might text everyone I know about a character’s foibles and idiocy (and tell them to read the book too). I’ve been known to, infrequently, throw my reading material across the room. Or I might just blacken more margins. Writing “I HATE THIS” inside a book can be another way of saying “I love you.”
There you have the whole pathology in miniature: the injury openly confessed, then immediately wrapped in the language of intimacy.
This is the classic logic of the abuser. Look what you made me do. “I only blackened your margins because I care so much. If you were less infuriating, less provocative, I would not have had to lose control and mark you up in purple felt pen.” Then the poor volume is shoved back onto the shelf, dust jacket pulled tight, and told to keep smiling for company. “No, no, everything’s fine. She just gets passionate about literature.” Meanwhile the endpapers look like a bathroom stall, and the title page bears the scars of “passion.”
We are asked to regard this not merely with tolerance, but with admiration. The annotator has become a romantic figure: impulsive, alive, too full of thought and feeling to restrain herself before the nearest clean surface. But this is only graffiti with better publicists. Spray-paint a train car and society still clings to certain outdated moral prejudices. Cover a novel with shrieking little exclamations and suddenly we are in the presence of intellectual vitality. No. A book is not your emotional support drywall. It is not there to absorb your all-caps eruptions. If “I love you” and “I hate this” have become interchangeable, that may explain a great deal about contemporary culture, but it does not contribute to the well-being of the book.
It is one of the many achievements of liberal modernity to have taught people that every appetite becomes noble the moment it is furnished with a vocabulary of self-expression. The old barbarian merely pillaged. The new barbarian announces that she is in dialogue. Her outrages arrive garnished with theory. What was once defacement is now “interaction;” what was once possessive ugliness is now “making the text one’s own.” I confess I am old-fashioned enough to believe that a book already is its own. I do not improve a cathedral by chalking objections on the pillars, nor honor a symphony by shouting commentary over the second movement. But the bibliomaniac of destruction — that is to say, the bibliomisiac — finds every finished object intolerable until it bears some trace of his own precious ego. He cannot read without leaving fingerprints on the texts.
Has your first edition been marked, dog-eared, or struck with handwritten outbursts? You are not alone. Every year, thousands of innocent books suffer in silence at the hands of “enthusiastic readers” who insist the abuse is really affection. At SafeShelf, we provide emergency rehoming for hardcovers in crisis, confidential repair services for damaged endpapers, and trauma-informed support for volumes with banalities scrawled in the margins. Because love should not leave visible scars.
At last, one more intolerable hardship of human existence has been lifted from our shoulders. Reading was already too much to ask of a modern person, of course — all those words, all that eye movement, the faint possibility of having to think. But apparently even watching a video is now an unreasonable demand. We have progressed from “help me understand this” to “please have the experience in my place and send me the synopsis.”
This is being sold as a way to “save time,” which raises the obvious question: save it for what? More summaries? More secondhand encounters with things you cannot be bothered to encounter? More efficient ways of avoiding contact with your own life? A video was already the shortcut. Now we want a shortcut around the shortcut. Soon the bots will attend our vacations, endure our sunsets, and perhaps even die on our behalf. The important thing is that we ourselves remain unburdened by the exhausting task of being present.
There’s a deeper problem, apart from the obvious comic squalor of it. Any intermediary decides what counts as relevant. If I ask for “the point” of Moby-Dick, I am really asking someone else to pre-sort the book for me — to tell me which parts were essential and which parts I may safely miss. But how do I know the supposedly “inessential” part is not the very thing that would have struck me most deeply? The odd image, the side remark, the tonal wobble, the long digression everyone else skips — those may be the real point for the person actually present to them. This is the telephone game elevated into a philosophy of life: more and more mediation, more and more compression, until people forget that the map is not the territory and the menu is not the meal.
Still, let us be generous and assume the dream is perfected. The bot watches the whole thing for me. It catches every nuance, every shift in tone, every expression, every implication. But then a small metaphysical difficulty appears. If the bot is having the full experience on my behalf, in what sense is that my experience at all? Is the bot me? If so, then what exactly am I — the management layer? The executive assistant to my own displaced consciousness? And if the bot is not me, then all it has really done is watch a video while I remained absent from it. In that case, what has been “saved” is not my time so much as my participation.
The whole thing begins to look less like efficiency than like a fanatical inability to tolerate unfilled attention. No moment may be silent, slow, or unrewarding; no stretch of time may simply be lived. Everything must be processed, condensed, accelerated, stripped to “the point.” But life is not an empty highway between you and the point. Life is the road, the weather, the delay, the scenery, the boredom, the sudden thought you did not schedule, the stray detail that lodges in the mind. A person can waste a staggering amount of time trying to avoid ever having to sit still long enough to notice that.
And so the grand irony: in the name of saving time, one adopts a whole philosophy of perpetual evasion — more tools, more summaries, more skipping, more fretful management of one’s own supposedly precious minutes — and ends by becoming the kind of person who cannot simply be anywhere at all.
For adults, we need warnings that clearly convey the serious risks. The lessons that took tobacco regulators decades to learn should apply to artificial intimacy governance from the start. Small print disclaimers about the effects of smoking have been rightfully criticized as woefully deficient, but large graphics on cigarette packs of black lungs and dying patients hurt sales. The harms caused by A.I. companions can be equally visceral. The groundbreaking guardrails that Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed into law last year, which require chatbots to nudge minors to take breaks during long sessions, are a step in the right direction, but a polite suggestion after three hours of A.I. conversation is not enough. Why not play video testimonials from people whose human relationships withered after years of nonstop chat with bots?
When I was a kid in ye olden days, reformers were forever trying to save us from ourselves. Smoking will kill you. Drunk driving will kill you and someone else. Drugs will melt your brain. We had assemblies with “scared straight” guest speakers, posters of tar-blackened lungs on the walls of health class, PSA’s, and (God help us) McGruff the Crime Dog records with bouncy little earworms about every substance known to man. The theory was that if we were properly educated, if the warning labels were vivid enough, if the videos were grisly enough, we’d make good choices forever after. And yet people kept smoking. People kept driving drunk. People kept getting high. Not because they lacked information, but because they were stressed, bored, lonely, impulsive, self-destructive, curious, or just plain human.
Now the new panic is emotional intimacy with AI, and the new solution is…warning labels and more regulation. “This is not a substitute for genuine relationships.” “ChatGPT can make mistakes.” And here some newly-minted reformer wants to make teenagers watch video testimonials from recovering chatbot junkies, like driver’s ed films of crumpled cars. But McGruff is the perfect emblem of the whole genre: you’re trying to solve a messy relational problem with a cheesy piece of mediated messaging. You even risk the pink-elephant effect — by foregrounding the forbidden thing (“crack cocaine!” “romantic bots!”) you plant it in the mind with an oddly vivid presence, while the adults congratulate themselves for having “done something.” It’s outsourcing the hard work of parenting and community to a cartoon mascot and a compliance checklist.
None of this is to say that nothing can or should ever be improved. But there is no design standard, warning label, or stern authority that can make life safe and painless. People will always try to jerry-rig comfort out of whatever’s available when their actual lives are starving for it. If you don’t want Johnny turning into a dope fiend, you can’t fix that with a McGruff album. If you don’t want Johnny “marrying” a chatbot, you can’t fix that with a disclaimer. The solution, such as it is, was never primarily informational. It was always relational. And wherever we go, there we are.
I do look forward to today’s cartoon characters producing an album warning kids to not fuck an android sexbot.
