the geist of the zeit

The Need for Little Deviant Acts

By in foolosophy, gender, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Sometimes to act against one’s better judgment when it comes to questions of custom, to give way in practice while keeping one’s reservations to oneself, to do as everyone else does and thus to show them consideration as it were in compensation for our deviant opinions: many tolerably free-minded people regard this not merely as unobjectionable, but as ‘honest’, ‘humane’, ‘tolerant’, ‘not being pedantic’, and whatever else those pretty words might be with which the intellectual conscience is lulled to sleep: and thus this person takes his child in for Christian baptism though he is an atheist, and that person serves in the army as all the world does, however much he may execrate hatred between nations, and a third marries his wife in church because her relatives are pious and is not ashamed to repeat vows before a priest. ‘It doesn’t really matter if people like us also do what everyone does and always has done’ – this is the thoughtless prejudice! The thoughtless error! For nothing matters more than that an already mighty, anciently established and irrationally recognized custom should be once more confirmed by a person recognized as rational: it thereby acquires in the eyes of all who come to hear of it the sanction of rationality itself! All respect to your opinions! But little deviant acts are worth more!

— Nietzsche, Daybreak

The Lady of the House has a business event coming up. The pre-registration form has a required space for your “preferred pronouns.” One day soon, we’ll all face this choice. I can skip this particular event, but eventually, some intake form at the doctor’s office, the DMV, or any other piece of what Wesley Yang has called the Vertically Integrated Messaging Apparatus will force us to type something in that field. This is how they getcha — the new trend just becomes part of the no-man’s-land of digital bureaucracy, where old-fashioned notions like responsibility and accountability dissipate on the breeze. What are you going to do, ask to speak to a manager? “That’s just the way the template was designed, sir; I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do to change it, and besides, our tech person is on vacation…”

Most of us are polite and averse to causing a scene. Faced with a choice between embarrassing the Lady in public in front of her friends, or accepting the “he/him” addition to my nametag, well, I’m afraid I’d probably suffer the insult to my dignity. And it would be an insult. I would feel like I’d ratified the absurd notion that I, 215 pounds of chiseled muscle and a glorious beard, could honestly be mistaken for a woman, that I should have to explicitly state my manhood. I can’t whore out my imprimatur to some insane fiction, as loath as I am to start a fight over something so stupid. I can’t dignify this fraudulence with a response. And yet, as I said, we’re all going to face it eventually. Is there a way to thread that needle? Could we enter “n/a” into the form, or maybe “c/o” for conscientious objector? Or maybe the Bartleby option — “I would prefer not to.” Repeat as many times as necessary.

Shopping List, Enemies List

By in fresh hell, the geist of the zeit No Comments

The best-case scenario, it seems to me, is that the threat of mutually-assured destruction finally intimidates corporations away from political pandering in advertising. More likely, perhaps, is that this kind of raging partisanship will just become the way we live now, with fanatics scanning advertisements for political subtext the way they used to for Satanic symbols. I feel pity and revulsion for people who are so warped that even shopping becomes politics by other means.

Pardon Me, But That’s Bullshit

By in technology, the geist of the zeit No Comments

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Ben at Flying Totems:

Updates in tech are often a matter of taking something good or at least functional and making it worse. You’ve probably noticed this. So I hope that at the very least this one is equivalent to the status quo.

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Matthew Crawford:

But the counter-productivity of today’s “tech” that I have in mind is not of this sort. It is not an unintended consequence, due in part to collective action problems (e.g., the congestion caused by everyone else also using a car). Rather, the very business model of tech, often, consists of adding layers of control to activities that don’t need them, and then locating that gratuitous, extra control in systems that need constant updating. The rents collected are various in form, some of it taking the form of hostage-taking, since the dysfunction that comes with failing to maintain and update the extra layer of bullshit can cripple any operation.

But the bulk of the rents are paid in the frustration and uncertainty that accompany tasks that were once simple and easy. Of course, this isn’t really rent, as it doesn’t benefit anybody. But neither is it a cost that registers anywhere in the system. It’s just part of the vast, subterranean economy of shadow work we do to make things more convenient and legible for some IT system that is profoundly stupid, compared to human beings when they are allowed to go about their business without being harassed. We also do emotional labor to keep ourselves on the non-felonious side of the very natural, Unabomber tendencies that are the only rational response of a self-respecting person to being constantly fucked with in this way.

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Both of the companies I order nutritional supplements from have recently redesigned their websites. Company A did that in March. Since then, the products I already had on monthly subscription have been duplicating. That is, they send (and charge for) two bottles instead of one. Each time, I write and explain what happened, and to their credit, they remove the charge and tell me to keep the extra bottle. I don’t mind getting free supplements, but I’d just as soon avoid having to save receipts and write extra emails.

Company B just did their redesign this week. I placed an order on Monday, on the old system. When I hadn’t gotten a shipping confirmation by Wednesday, I went back to log in to my account, only to discover the redesign. The new system wouldn’t let me log in, so I wrote to ask what to do about it. Yesterday, I got a barely-literate email explaining that, yes, we have a new website [I noticed that, thanks], and you will be required to create a new account, and sorry, none of your previous order history will carry over. I wrote back right away: OK, so does that affect Monday’s order, or is that in limbo now? I still haven’t gotten an answer to that one, still haven’t gotten a shipping confirmation. Eternal optimist that I am, I thought, well, maybe this new system will solve the previous problem that Company B was infamous for — failing to update their site to accurately reflect whether a product was in stock or not. I’ve lost count of how many times I ordered something that was advertised as being in stock, only to get an email at the last second before shipment saying, “Sorry, product X is currently backordered.” Sometimes I wouldn’t even get that, just an invoice with the product quantity zeroed out, at which point I’d have to email for a refund or a replacement.

If the 1993 Michael Douglas movie Falling Down were to be rebooted, I’d suggest that the road construction scene could be replaced with one in which he takes his RPG to an IT call center instead.

I’m aware, of course, that we all get more curmudgeonly as we age. It may be that these kinds of petty frustrations were always there in some form, and the only difference was that we had more patience and energy when we were younger. Either way, this learned helplessness seems to be a common experience three decades into online life. I expect things to break down frequently, and I don’t expect to encounter anyone who can even take responsibility for the problem, let alone fix it. The petty frustrations multiply like gnats in the summertime.

A Sign of the Times, Going Forward In Reverse

By in the geist of the zeit No Comments

James Lileks:

Turns out we can’t even have a debate about debating. Members of the debate team at James Madison University have decided that “free speech should not extend to requiring us to platform or amplify ideas that are exclusionary, discriminatory, or hostile.” Apparently, debate meets will now resemble a Soviet show trial but without so much suspense over the outcome.

In seventh grade, I needed to choose a second exploratory class to accompany band, and I wanted to avoid woodshop and home ec. My friend Richard said I should join him in debate class. “All we do is hang out in the library during class!” Sold. As it turned out, debate, along with introductory philosophy, was one of the only classes that I consider worth my fourteen-year stint in the educational penitentiary. To my surprise, I not only enjoyed it, I happened to be good at it. (If I remember correctly, “second constructive speaker” was the position I excelled at.)

One of the topics we debated was vivisection. I had to argue the pro-side. My mom, who is very sentimental about animals, had angrily said that if I was assigned that position, she would refuse to drive me to the university libraries where I did most of my research (ah, the days of going down into a library basement to scroll through microfiche.) She relented eventually, I made my case, and our team lost that one anyway, so I guess it all worked out. Still, I remember feeling…disappointed, I guess, that I, a twelve-year-old, should need to patiently convince my mom of the value of open debate and honest inquiry (let alone the necessity of a good grade). I suppose I had already began to assume that this was just something that all adults knew and practiced. Nearly forty years later, I still have trouble disabusing myself of that notion. And yet, here we are. I remember kids in my class clamoring to take on the most hot-button topics there were, like abortion and apartheid (I can’t recall, but we may have actually done the latter). Evidently, we were braver than today’s college kids.

Keep Sleeping

By in political philosophy, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Christopher Rufo:

Of course we can define “woke.” We can define it as “left-wing racialist ideology.” We can define it as the attempt to achieve “critical consciousness,” which is a neo-Marxist term, meaning awakening the subject to his own oppression, then recruiting him into left-wing revolution. Or, if we use it as a stand-in for an ideology such as critical race theory, it simply means that “the United States is an oppressor nation that divides classes along the lines of race and then endorses active discrimination in order to create racial equity or equality of group outcomes.

This was a hot topic several weeks ago, but, tortoise that I am, I’m only now ambling over to examine it up close, having considered it from afar. The precise definition of “woke” is unnecessary, of course. We all know it when we see it. Only pedants, activists and academics care about such squabbles. But if idle speculation on irrelevant topics is wrong, then baby, I don’t want to be a blogger.

Anyway, I’ve seen several people define it along these lines. Wilfred Reilly has one of the most frequently-quoted versions:

a “woke” person, or “social-justice warrior,” is someone who believes that (1) the institutions of American society are currently and intentionally set up to oppress (minorities, women, the poor, fat people, etc.), (2) virtually all gaps in performance between large groups prove that this oppression exists, and (3) the solution to this is equity — which means proportional representation regardless of performance or qualifications.

To which I say: OK, but how is this anything other than the basic logic of affirmative action applied as widely as possible, and how is that anything new? In other words, what, if anything, makes “wokeness” unique, not just another way of saying “left-wing”? If a mainstream liberal Rip Van Winkle nodded off in 2003, he would awaken in 2023 to find himself regarded as a conservative, if not a “fascist,” without changing a single thing in his outlook. This dramatic shift is what people are referring to when they say “woke.” What explains this?

Look over the last decade or so, at all the significant trends and events. Race riots? Those were happening before I was even born. Spoiled rich Ivy League students acting like Red Guards against their hapless professors and administrators? Likewise. Political correctness? Nothing significant about it has changed since the first wave of my youth. Cancel culture? I think that’s just what you get when you combine the vindictive, vengeful parts of human nature with the power and reach of social media. Even transgenderism is just the hastily-attached caboose on the civil rights train, a desperate attempt by the St. Georges of the left to avoid retirement after winning the gay rights battle. How much of this is anything but typical left-wing politics, amplified and magnified to the extreme? It just seems to reappear each generation now, like a plague of locusts.

If you ask me, and even if you don’t, the thing that gives this era its particular character is the increasing illiberalism of the left, driven primarily by what Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff called “safetyism.” I don’t particularly care for the term, but I’m not sure what to replace it with. Call it the therapeutic mindset, the victimhood revolution, the glorification of fragility, weakness, and mental illness. Whatever it is, you find it behind all the most characteristic pathologies of our time. How did the left, in the name of anti-racism, come to embrace racially-segregated dorms and graduation ceremonies, something that would have pleased an old Klansman? How did the left, which created the Free Speech Movement sixty years ago, come to disavow the concept and openly embrace censorship in the name of preventing “harm”? How did the left, which made “question authority” into a bumper-sticker slogan, come to embrace the increasingly-fluid integration, or even collusion, between corporate, tech, and government authorities as revealed in the Twitter Files?

I don’t think any of it would have been possible without the safetyism mentality which permeates everything now. Black students have to be kept separate from white ones, not because they’re inferior, but because they need to be protected from the micro, nano, and picoaggressions they’d be subjected to from their white peers. Unfettered free speech carries the high risk of mild discomfort or annoyance for anyone exposed to ideas they don’t already agree with. People who don’t have advanced degrees or the proper cultural conditioning can’t be trusted to make political decisions unsupervised, lest they elect a reality TV star to the presidency, or vote to leave the European Union, so elite guardians have to secretly monitor their media diets for harmful levels of “disinformation.” Even transgenderism is frequently presented like a demand in a hostage situation — if you don’t “affirm” them in their delusions, they’ll supposedly be at heightened risk of suicide, and it will be your fault if that happens.

Say what you will about the pre-Awokening left, it generally claimed to be working toward providing downtrodden people with dignity. The woke left has given up all pretense of that. There is no dignity in being an object of pity and condescension. There is no dignity in an identity constructed entirely on a sense of fragile victimhood and emotional incontinence. There is no dignity in accepting perpetual infantilization. This is the most significant thing that has changed in recent years, the willing exchange of dignity for a sickly sentimentality and endless resentment. This is the climate of opinion under which we live now.

I’m Holding Out For a Hero. He’s Gotta Be Strong

By in battling personal entropy, gender, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Where have all the good men goneAnd where are all the gods?Where’s the streetwise HerculesTo fight the rising odds?

My first thought when I saw this story, minus the part about it being done in protest, was, “Oh, no, not him, too!” I’ve enjoyed reading Silverberg’s site for a while now and was briefly dismayed to think that he would jump on this trend. Now, I can say bravo. We’ve seen in just the last couple of weeks that women’s attempts to boycott competitions that allow men to participate will be met with draconian punishment, so maybe it’s going to take women’s sports being completely overrun by men to finally bring an end to this lunacy. See you later, fellows, I’m going to go win some women’s powerlifting competitions and join the U.S. women’s national soccer team.

Insult to Injury

By in battling personal entropy, gender, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Caroline Downey:

Andres isn’t humbled by his natural advantage, as one might expect. Instead he has gloated about competing in the women’s category and insulted female powerlifters for poor performance in certain upper-body exercises.

“Why is women’s bench so bad? I mean, not compared to me, we all know that I’m a tranny freak so that doesn’t count. And no, we’re not talking about Mackenzie Lee, she’s got little T-Rex arms and she’s like 400 pounds of chest muscle apparently,” Andres said in a November Instagram video.

“I mean, standard bench in powerlifting competition for women, I literally don’t know why it’s so bad,” Andres crowed in the video. “My son, he weighs 45 pounds. His max bench is like 33. I’m legit seeing some women in competition who are doing something like 50 pounds, and I just don’t understand it. I don’t understand why so many women are skipping bench and focusing on everything else.”

Wow. The absolute balls on this bitch!

A Penny For Your Silence

By in socmed, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Ed West:

They benefited from the mystery of celebrity, living in that golden age when we didn’t know what famous people thought about the world. Remember that time, before social media, when we weren’t aware that most of the musicians from our youth were complete cranks, who wouldn’t put a vaccine inside them because of some YouTube video they’d seen, despite spending most of the 80s and 90s shoving coke up their nose and God knows what.

What a lost Eden that was. Now, sadly, we have Twitter, which has given us so many insights into the workings of famous peoples’ minds.

I don’t go in much for nostalgia, but this is one case where I wholeheartedly agree that things were better in the past, even the relatively recent past, when reticence was much more common. Sure, even in the 90s, Oprah and her talk-show epigones were creating the atmosphere for today’s climate of exhibitionist oversharing — as I said, there never has been a golden age. But it was also a time when a popular musician like Mark Sandman could manage to opt out:

After earning a BA in political science from UMass Boston, he spent a period of time traveling — at one point working on a giant fishing boat out in the state of Washington. Details like that about his personal life and his past were hard to come by. There were things he just wouldn’t talk about on the record. And in the age of the confessional talk-show interview, I grew to respect that. “I like to keep the personal personal,” is how he once put it. “I try to be a pretty private person.” He wasn’t trying to hide anything, except perhaps his age, because he was older than your average rock-and-roll star. In fact, the only time I ever pissed him off was backstage at the Conan O’Brien show in 1995, when after listening to him tell me about a Rolling Stone reporter’s desperate efforts to find out his age I joked that I was going to dig up his Newton North high-school yearbook.

Only twenty-eight years ago, it was still possible to keep something like that a secret from prying journalists! And yet, it seems like a lost world.

Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Sensitivity Readers

By in books, fresh hell, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Jeff Zymeri:

Children’s horror author R.L. Stine has accused his publisher of editing references to weight, mental health, and ethnicity in over a dozen of his books without his permission.

Certain titles from the Goosebumps anthology, second only to the Harry Potter books in terms of popularity, have been re-released as sanitized e-books by Scholastic, a new report from The Times has revealed. The move comes after huge controversy enveloped the British publisher of Roald Dahl’s books for hundreds of similar changes, leading the publisher to agree to continue printing the original versions alongside the new bowdlerized editions.

On the one hand, it’s no surprise to see the kind of person behind these initiatives. I mean, they can’t all get make-work jobs in academia or human resources departments, and we’ve got a huge surplus of the severely educated with no practical skills, so I suppose this is the best we can do to keep them off the streets. On the other hand, couldn’t they have gone into a more honorable profession, like prostitution or drug-dealing? At least those provide a useful service. What kind of lowlife dreams of growing up to work at Winston Smith’s job?

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