This dovetails with my belief that many of the most irritating among these people would be perfectly happy living normal lives with normal, non-reactionary opinions working for some midsized newspaper or second-tier magazine. As those careers no longer exist, we're all thrown into this white noise machine where the key to being able to pay rent is either being unutterably brilliant or just extraordinarily loud and good at self-promotion.
This is only tangential, but I think a “crisis of overproduction” is a really useful way to think of the current media environment. By media I mean both news media and basically all of the entertainment/"content" industry. There are simply so many creators and so much money to be made from consumers' attention that the competition inevitably becomes vicious.
By the way, I showed your podcast to a friend, and she asked that I recommend the Clue movie to you. Technically, it's from the 1980s, but it is very zeitgeisty.
I would never apologize for such a beautifully written brilliant piece of largely original cultural criticism. Incoherent it is not. With a bit of the 19thC material you’ve read (not including, alas, Philippe Nord) I can see exactly what you’re seeing, but not as brilliantly. I feel I should recommend you to a book editor, but mine have been turning me down so my recommendation might be as useless to you as one from the Tucker Carlson Right. I’ll settle for being proud to know you.
Have you seen the movie which one of the Red Scare people just put out? It's everything you describe here: 'provocative' in a highly perfunctory way, nostalgic for several different eras of film without developing upon or recontextualizing any of their tricks, and ultimately just sort of...empty.
This is really on target. I think we give far too little thought to the economics that drive these kinds of provocateurs and how responding to them can give them exactly what they want. I do struggle with where that leaves more responsible commentators though: it can't be denied that the Greenwald/Red Scare/Alex Jones/etc crowd has a significant audience and a (regrettable) influence on public life. To ignore them and their toxic nature seems like burying our heads in the sand, but to fight them is to help line their pocketbooks and incentivize them to more of the same. What do you even do with that?
fantastic article. I always appreciate when you write on the reactionary currents from this slice of media, society, whatever you want to call it. The provocateurs are quite skilled, like you acknowledge, so it’s difficult to articulate a lot of why it’s annoying at best and something much darker at worst.
I didn’t realize that Bari had approvingly shared Deboer’s article but I do remember him saying in a post several months ago that Bari was “clearly smart”, which I think is a very generous characterization by someone like Deboer who supposedly puts so much weight on prose and the craft of writing. But I suspect that Deboer was actually thinking of exactly what you describe here: Bari has had an incredibly financially successful writing career. If that is the goal, it’s hard to argue she hasn’t conducted herself smartly. Same with Greenwald. It’s about the brand and the money (moves everything around us, etc).
Also hilarious for Deboer to declare Red Scare “cool”. The most enthusiastic Red Scare partisans online are socially awkward right wing VCs that work at Thiel Capital and aging rich guys like Greenwald. No one in their twenties gives a shit about them.
I wrote this in the wake of Matt Walsh's absurd "Save AOC's Abuela's Ancestrol Home' stunt. There is some thematic overlap with your thoughts, here, which I think are quite on point.
Working theory: the rise of the journalistic category made possible through the use of Substack and Patreon depends upon a couple of insights from behavioral economics:
First, as Apple's app store established, people will buy virtually anything for a price between .99 and 2.99, especially when all it entails is the click of a button; the reality of money and an actual cash transfer hardly enters the mind. Likewise, a lot of people will subscribe to the newsletter of their favorite journalists and cultural commentators for $1-10 dollars a month. Sometimes the price makes the subscription even more enticing insofar as premium content is promised.
Second, insofar as many of these same writers are ubiquitous on Twitter, their personal brands and livelihoods depend upon courting controversy and inspiring both loyalty amongst their faithful readers and hate amongst their ideological detractors. The Twitter feuds, the dunking, the argumentative back and forth through articles--all of it inspires the same irrational and ultimately short-lived moment of nirvana that explains why people buy band t-shirts in the parking lot after a concert. The readers are excited, they want to show their support for an author who's giving the business to their fellow political/cultural nemeses, and because the credit card information is already conveniently stored within Google Chrome, it's easy enough just to click through and subscribe. It's as much a moment of catharsis as it is a "fuck you"--a monetary equivalent of flipping the bird to the writers you hate and the "other team."
So it's no surprise that Jesse Singal, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Tracey, Glenn Greenwald, and a dozen other Substack/Patreon writers stir the pot as much as they do. It pays too well not to. But today a new manifestation of basically the same phenomenon emerged. Matt Walsh, right-wing podcaster and contributor to Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire outfit, started a GoFundMe for AOC's grandmother, whom the representative noted days ago on Twitter has a home that has been in need of repair since Hurricane Maria. In what has turned into a trolling effort par excellence, Walsh now has thousands of people donating (again, ostensibly to AOC's grandmother, already more than $100k in just 14 hours) to caricature the representative as the perfect leftist of the radical right's imagination--so dedicated to taking other people's money to solve system-level problems that she can't be bothered to take money out of her own pocket to help her family. Call it performative philanthropy, caustic charity, degenerate generosity--these trolls have now established beyond any reasonable doubt that people will happily take a sometimes non-trivial amount of money out of their own pocket just to say "fuck you" to their political enemies. Every day, more and more people on Twitter and other social media platforms become a part of this shit show.
Just another way "late capitalism" makes us worse? Or democracy not surviving the internet? Either way, we are fucked.
'it’s all pretty dingy if you take a closer look: it’s just in the service of petty grubbing for money, status, power, and recognition.'
My man the incredible thing is: you don't even need to look that closely! The second or third day he came back, waaaaay back in *checks notes* March of this year, Freddie put out the first of his 'Nitro Edition' posts in this vein. The day after that, he published a post literally titled 'Behavior is a Product of Incentives', complete with subscriber numbers. They've already told us the play!
I think John’s political-economy-of-histrionics approach is interesting and useful for understanding the gaggle of table-thumpers mentioned (I can only stomach the occasional toe-dipping into their output, but it mind-numbingly never seems to change, so toe-dipping is probably enough). An overproduction crisis in Wordland is very real in a technological environment in which anybody and everybody can be a broadcaster without even leaving the house, and competitive pressures can drive the monumentally self-regarding personality into ever greater episodes of attention-seeking sophistry, lies and stupidity.
I also think it’s probably wise to not bother trying to frame these culture war media entrepreneurs in any left/right paradigm - almost by definition they lack foundational political principles beyond parochially American boilerplate about individual rights. The endless and monotonal screeds about “free speech” are illustrative of this parochialism and maximally individualistic concept of rights and freedoms. In essence, the libertarian nihilists of John’s piece fall squarely in line with the exclusively individual concept of rights that has always defined US jurisprudence, or at least that has defined it for the last half century or so.
A final point possibly worth making is the suffocatingly narrow range of journalistic interests reflected in the output of these entrepreneurs. If one’s worldview and principles are defined by the things one regards as problems (or even of general interest), this crowd appears to believe the future of the world hinges on campus scandals, NY Times editorials, cable news punditry, YouTube videos, and whether Julian Assange is released. The “State” is only the “national security state” in this world, so from them you will never learn anything about the perpetual real-world battles and trade-offs between unregulated capitalism and institutional efforts to mitigate it (labour codes, environmental regulations, building restrictions, public health care initiatives, public housing efforts, etc. etc.) In other words, there is no Politics, there is only “Politics” - the scandal, the takedown, the discourse, the game. It’s all really just a highbrow digitized recycling of the pre-internet tabloid model and, of course, just like the old tabloids they have a much larger readership than the quality publications that actually do journalism. Greenwald, for one, is endlessly bragging about subscription volumes, which is like bragging that Barry Manilow sold more records than Frank Zappa.
> to wear publicly the mask of cruelty if everybody was
> patently inconsiderate and pretended to be gentle
I read that to mean '[…]as if everybody were patently inconsiderate[…].'; was I correct in that?
I've long noted that one of the appeal of Mr Trump is that he presents a world in which it were impossible to better oneself in any way not associated with gaining power or money. His image presents to the 'rejects of all classes' that even if they had notional billions of dollars more they would want nothing but what they already want, and _moar_ likewise. —or so be a real Coastal Elite member about it, that there were no such thing as 'higher things'. For example, he presents himself with pride as vengeful because he's selling a world in which no-one were not, and he just more honest and effective at going about it; who can doubt that one of the reasons he can so firmly believe that the election were stolen is that he would, of course, steal an election if he thought it would help him….
Similarly, those who would firmly and definitively end peoples' careers over their ideas and utterly silence them are primed to see their opponents as already doing the same when they are not.
This is so interesting; the only thing I would debate is the title. It’s an incredibly valuable analysis of the political economy of reactionary journalism. But I think the political economy of reaction itself is less about Grub Street than about what Alex Pareene called small-town big shots, and their racial, sexual and economic anxieties.
This dovetails with my belief that many of the most irritating among these people would be perfectly happy living normal lives with normal, non-reactionary opinions working for some midsized newspaper or second-tier magazine. As those careers no longer exist, we're all thrown into this white noise machine where the key to being able to pay rent is either being unutterably brilliant or just extraordinarily loud and good at self-promotion.
This is only tangential, but I think a “crisis of overproduction” is a really useful way to think of the current media environment. By media I mean both news media and basically all of the entertainment/"content" industry. There are simply so many creators and so much money to be made from consumers' attention that the competition inevitably becomes vicious.
By the way, I showed your podcast to a friend, and she asked that I recommend the Clue movie to you. Technically, it's from the 1980s, but it is very zeitgeisty.
You should make this public to get more subscribers and because it wips
I would never apologize for such a beautifully written brilliant piece of largely original cultural criticism. Incoherent it is not. With a bit of the 19thC material you’ve read (not including, alas, Philippe Nord) I can see exactly what you’re seeing, but not as brilliantly. I feel I should recommend you to a book editor, but mine have been turning me down so my recommendation might be as useless to you as one from the Tucker Carlson Right. I’ll settle for being proud to know you.
Have you seen the movie which one of the Red Scare people just put out? It's everything you describe here: 'provocative' in a highly perfunctory way, nostalgic for several different eras of film without developing upon or recontextualizing any of their tricks, and ultimately just sort of...empty.
This is really on target. I think we give far too little thought to the economics that drive these kinds of provocateurs and how responding to them can give them exactly what they want. I do struggle with where that leaves more responsible commentators though: it can't be denied that the Greenwald/Red Scare/Alex Jones/etc crowd has a significant audience and a (regrettable) influence on public life. To ignore them and their toxic nature seems like burying our heads in the sand, but to fight them is to help line their pocketbooks and incentivize them to more of the same. What do you even do with that?
fantastic article. I always appreciate when you write on the reactionary currents from this slice of media, society, whatever you want to call it. The provocateurs are quite skilled, like you acknowledge, so it’s difficult to articulate a lot of why it’s annoying at best and something much darker at worst.
I didn’t realize that Bari had approvingly shared Deboer’s article but I do remember him saying in a post several months ago that Bari was “clearly smart”, which I think is a very generous characterization by someone like Deboer who supposedly puts so much weight on prose and the craft of writing. But I suspect that Deboer was actually thinking of exactly what you describe here: Bari has had an incredibly financially successful writing career. If that is the goal, it’s hard to argue she hasn’t conducted herself smartly. Same with Greenwald. It’s about the brand and the money (moves everything around us, etc).
Also hilarious for Deboer to declare Red Scare “cool”. The most enthusiastic Red Scare partisans online are socially awkward right wing VCs that work at Thiel Capital and aging rich guys like Greenwald. No one in their twenties gives a shit about them.
I wrote this in the wake of Matt Walsh's absurd "Save AOC's Abuela's Ancestrol Home' stunt. There is some thematic overlap with your thoughts, here, which I think are quite on point.
Working theory: the rise of the journalistic category made possible through the use of Substack and Patreon depends upon a couple of insights from behavioral economics:
First, as Apple's app store established, people will buy virtually anything for a price between .99 and 2.99, especially when all it entails is the click of a button; the reality of money and an actual cash transfer hardly enters the mind. Likewise, a lot of people will subscribe to the newsletter of their favorite journalists and cultural commentators for $1-10 dollars a month. Sometimes the price makes the subscription even more enticing insofar as premium content is promised.
Second, insofar as many of these same writers are ubiquitous on Twitter, their personal brands and livelihoods depend upon courting controversy and inspiring both loyalty amongst their faithful readers and hate amongst their ideological detractors. The Twitter feuds, the dunking, the argumentative back and forth through articles--all of it inspires the same irrational and ultimately short-lived moment of nirvana that explains why people buy band t-shirts in the parking lot after a concert. The readers are excited, they want to show their support for an author who's giving the business to their fellow political/cultural nemeses, and because the credit card information is already conveniently stored within Google Chrome, it's easy enough just to click through and subscribe. It's as much a moment of catharsis as it is a "fuck you"--a monetary equivalent of flipping the bird to the writers you hate and the "other team."
So it's no surprise that Jesse Singal, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Tracey, Glenn Greenwald, and a dozen other Substack/Patreon writers stir the pot as much as they do. It pays too well not to. But today a new manifestation of basically the same phenomenon emerged. Matt Walsh, right-wing podcaster and contributor to Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire outfit, started a GoFundMe for AOC's grandmother, whom the representative noted days ago on Twitter has a home that has been in need of repair since Hurricane Maria. In what has turned into a trolling effort par excellence, Walsh now has thousands of people donating (again, ostensibly to AOC's grandmother, already more than $100k in just 14 hours) to caricature the representative as the perfect leftist of the radical right's imagination--so dedicated to taking other people's money to solve system-level problems that she can't be bothered to take money out of her own pocket to help her family. Call it performative philanthropy, caustic charity, degenerate generosity--these trolls have now established beyond any reasonable doubt that people will happily take a sometimes non-trivial amount of money out of their own pocket just to say "fuck you" to their political enemies. Every day, more and more people on Twitter and other social media platforms become a part of this shit show.
Just another way "late capitalism" makes us worse? Or democracy not surviving the internet? Either way, we are fucked.
'it’s all pretty dingy if you take a closer look: it’s just in the service of petty grubbing for money, status, power, and recognition.'
My man the incredible thing is: you don't even need to look that closely! The second or third day he came back, waaaaay back in *checks notes* March of this year, Freddie put out the first of his 'Nitro Edition' posts in this vein. The day after that, he published a post literally titled 'Behavior is a Product of Incentives', complete with subscriber numbers. They've already told us the play!
I think John’s political-economy-of-histrionics approach is interesting and useful for understanding the gaggle of table-thumpers mentioned (I can only stomach the occasional toe-dipping into their output, but it mind-numbingly never seems to change, so toe-dipping is probably enough). An overproduction crisis in Wordland is very real in a technological environment in which anybody and everybody can be a broadcaster without even leaving the house, and competitive pressures can drive the monumentally self-regarding personality into ever greater episodes of attention-seeking sophistry, lies and stupidity.
I also think it’s probably wise to not bother trying to frame these culture war media entrepreneurs in any left/right paradigm - almost by definition they lack foundational political principles beyond parochially American boilerplate about individual rights. The endless and monotonal screeds about “free speech” are illustrative of this parochialism and maximally individualistic concept of rights and freedoms. In essence, the libertarian nihilists of John’s piece fall squarely in line with the exclusively individual concept of rights that has always defined US jurisprudence, or at least that has defined it for the last half century or so.
A final point possibly worth making is the suffocatingly narrow range of journalistic interests reflected in the output of these entrepreneurs. If one’s worldview and principles are defined by the things one regards as problems (or even of general interest), this crowd appears to believe the future of the world hinges on campus scandals, NY Times editorials, cable news punditry, YouTube videos, and whether Julian Assange is released. The “State” is only the “national security state” in this world, so from them you will never learn anything about the perpetual real-world battles and trade-offs between unregulated capitalism and institutional efforts to mitigate it (labour codes, environmental regulations, building restrictions, public health care initiatives, public housing efforts, etc. etc.) In other words, there is no Politics, there is only “Politics” - the scandal, the takedown, the discourse, the game. It’s all really just a highbrow digitized recycling of the pre-internet tabloid model and, of course, just like the old tabloids they have a much larger readership than the quality publications that actually do journalism. Greenwald, for one, is endlessly bragging about subscription volumes, which is like bragging that Barry Manilow sold more records than Frank Zappa.
> to wear publicly the mask of cruelty if everybody was
> patently inconsiderate and pretended to be gentle
I read that to mean '[…]as if everybody were patently inconsiderate[…].'; was I correct in that?
I've long noted that one of the appeal of Mr Trump is that he presents a world in which it were impossible to better oneself in any way not associated with gaining power or money. His image presents to the 'rejects of all classes' that even if they had notional billions of dollars more they would want nothing but what they already want, and _moar_ likewise. —or so be a real Coastal Elite member about it, that there were no such thing as 'higher things'. For example, he presents himself with pride as vengeful because he's selling a world in which no-one were not, and he just more honest and effective at going about it; who can doubt that one of the reasons he can so firmly believe that the election were stolen is that he would, of course, steal an election if he thought it would help him….
Similarly, those who would firmly and definitively end peoples' careers over their ideas and utterly silence them are primed to see their opponents as already doing the same when they are not.
This is so interesting; the only thing I would debate is the title. It’s an incredibly valuable analysis of the political economy of reactionary journalism. But I think the political economy of reaction itself is less about Grub Street than about what Alex Pareene called small-town big shots, and their racial, sexual and economic anxieties.