I have to be off of social media for extended periods of time for various reasons of mental and emotional hygiene. Everything on the internet, as they say, is designed to upset you. Bluesky is the worst of all. I’m sorry. I guess it’s better than Twitter in some important respects, especially recently, but Twitter at least used to be fun. Bluesky is just a really efficient machine for inducing psychosis and suicidality. Thinkpieces have been written about how rancid the vibes on Bluesky are, how humorless and literal-minded the posters, how grating and unrelenting the discourse. A huge part of this that hasn’t received as much attention, as far as I have seen anyway (admittedly not far), is the absolutely degraded form of pseudo-political doomposting that dominates the platform and what its popularity might mean. Like it or not, a lot of people spend a lot of time online. It may be finally time for a serious reckoning with the phenomenon of Posting.
Authoritarian creep is tending to blur the distinctions between leftists (who learned the politics from posting) and liberals (who learned their politics from MSNBC and posting). There’s also a real equivalence emerging at the level of discursive form if not necessarily content. It’s impossible not to notice (by “notice” I mean register instantly as crushing depression) that, at the level of posting, which is to say the way that most people “engage politically,” libs and the left are doing the exact same maneuver, regardless of what specifically they’re talking about. The maneuver is to identify something emblematic of a contradiction in capitalism, to point at it and to go “Look! There’s a contradiction here! And it’s Morally Bad!” Which, you know, it is. And I think I understand why this tendentious exercise has basically replaced the practice of critique. It’s because of posting, the “success” of which depends on provoking extreme emotional reactions. The platforms all do and exploit this in one way or another. You can tell yourself you’re doing it more leftistly, I guess, or in service of some greater goal. But if you’re creating content at all, if you’re posting at all, you’re playing the game, and that’s all.
The stakes of the game are dopaminergic and emotional. The game drives the formation of political opinions and ideas, hence the devolution of sensible critique into reflexive lizard-brain moralizing and take-farming. Frederic Jameson called this kind of approach (offhandedly) the “wages of sin.” Writing of postmodernism (as he so often did, amirite?), he said that conceptualizing the phenomenon of postmodernism in terms of moral judgments is a category error – that is, if we are trying to think of postmodernism as a historical phenomenon, which is to say dialectically, and not as the appearance of evil in our day. It brings me no pleasure to say this, but I think the left in America today is too integrated into the circuits of emotional valorization to move away from this voluntarily. As far as I’m aware, the CIA doesn’t sponsor critical theory conferences anymore, and so entire livelihoods are sustained by rehearsing the appalling moral badness of the contradictions confronting us today, for audiences (not for peers, comrades, or organizations). These audiences ask nothing of critique but to be validated in their emotions, presuppositions, and resentments. Intellectual culture is so degraded that people engage Marxism as content and consume leftist podcasts and short-form videos explaining progressive ideas as therapeutic “comfort” material, no different than a season of The Office. Except the comfort is in feeling bad, not good; since no other game with no other stakes is conceivable in the leftist imagination, saturated as it is with sponcon and fearful as it is of ritual group denunciation and tattling, it is possible to construe subjecting yourself to moral condemnation of upsetting news as ascetic revolutionary sensibility.
But the actual point of critique, I still insist, is not to correctly identify how horrible the contradictions are and wallow in moral righteousness like a pig in shit. The point is to identify the productive, or potentially productive, aspects of the contradictions within the present situation as well as the destructive ones. This is the only point from which an intellectual project capable of informing a real praxis of mass politics can possibly proceed. We are stuck, in other words, because we are materially and emotionally (one and the same online) committed to a dead-end, undialectical analysis. To quote liberally from Jameson:
“In a well-known passage Marx powerfully urges us to do the impossible, namely, to think this development [the historical development of capitalism] positively and negatively all at once; to achieve, in other words, a type of thinking that would be capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously within a single thought, and without attenuating any of the force of either judgment. We are somehow to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst. The lapse from this austere dialectical imperative into the more comfortable stance of the taking of moral positions is inveterate and all too human; still, the urgency of the subject demands that we make at least some effort to think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress altogether.”
I know a lot of people are going to be as reflexively off-put at the notion of “thinking catastrophe and progress altogether” as they are reflexively reactive to the daisy chain of bad headlines online (keep honking – I’m reskeeting). Increasingly I feel that this is not my problem – maybe someone’s problem, but not mine. I have written and am continuing to write a lot about how we can understand and exploit the contradictions within MAHA, too (please stay tuned and subscribe to Protean to read the feature I am writing for their upcoming print issue), and I can feel the side-eyes from my peers on the left and within public health for doing so. But who needs another explainer about vaccines, another knowing eye roll, another breathless email denunciation, or more Serious People being Seriously Concerned? These are all varieties of Posting, not politics, that engage standpoint epistemology in an intensely off-putting way, “as a [blank]” – and the harsh reality is that nobody fucking cares. I don’t personally think it’s morally sus to identify contradictory aspects of the wellness grift that has taken over the federal health bureaucracy, but the moral status of this activity is totally besides the point. It is The Way if we want to seriously advance the cause of human dignity and freedom in our actual lifetimes.
We are on the back foot right now, big time, and I don’t know who needs to hear this but now is the moment to be thinking about what the process of recomposition will look like. The contradictions internal to MAHA and the Trump administration will collapse it, and a lot of other stuff with it besides. The collapse will be extremely destructive. At some point, though, we must imagine ourselves no longer on the back foot, with some power, and if we find ourselves with some power do we know what we want to build back up? Nobody seems to really be thinking about this. One possible reason, easier to swallow, is that nobody is thinking like this because everyone is caught in a reactive emotional exploitation cycle on the platforms, on either side of the content wall, producing or consuming. Another possible reason that is more depressing and feels more true is –perhaps nobody is thinking seriously about what productive ends could come from this process of decomposition and recomposition because we can no longer even imagine a world where we have any power or agency.