Losing People to Nuttery and Conspiracies
Hey folks,
A warm welcome to new subscribers. This week’s edition is a meditation on something that has been eating at me all week. The old adage about friends is that “you’re better off with four quarters than with one hundred pennies.” I’ve realized that’s especially true when one of the friends goes off the deep end. I hope you enjoy this week’s Takes & Typos.
Partly due to the increasing curmudgeonly-ness of my 40s and accelerated by moving 7500 miles from what I’ve always called home, my circle of friends has contracted over the last few years. I now enjoy canceling plans more than making them and I increasingly find myself feeling less talkative in social situations.
My wife recently compared the mid 2010s go-go-go version of Nate (Adult Civics Happy Hour + union rep + Teachers United + Lincoln Center + Tacoma Roots + travel & speaking) to cooking in a sizzling wok over an open fire. Now with fewer side-projects and commitments, life feels more like cooking in a sturdy, well-seasoned castiron pan. Part of that is aging, but part of it is intentional. I am choosing to do less stuff and be more choosy about where and on whom I expend my energy.
This week I found myself thinking about two people in particular, who I used to consider friends but I no longer mess with. Both of them are examples of the peril of being too online and falling into cult-like relationships with fringe ideologies. One of the recurring themes in this newsletter is the extent to which the internet empowers and amplifies bad actors. We’ve talked about how crypto scammers, pig butchers, right-wing grifters, and violent white supremacists have used technology to scale their reach.
The internet is an amazing tool. Imagine the process of subscribing to a newsletter like this in the times of yore. Worse, imagine me going some place to get copies and addressing & envelopes for hours on Sundays. The internet enables connectivity which is awesome but it empowers the worst human instincts and actors among us.
That’s what happened to my friend. Let’s call him “Bert.”
A few years ago, Bert got very into personal finance YouTube. I am withholding names of the YouTubers he watched because I have no interest in producing more Berts. The hosts mixed a healthy dose of reactionary conservative politics with their financial advice. Social media and the YouTube algorithm then took Bert through several stages. He became a Gold Bug, obsessed with investing in and collecting precious metals, because he was convinced we were headed to Weimar Germany-esque hyper-inflation and monetary collapse. Then he got into FOREX trading (swapping foreign currencies), again fearing the US dollar falling victim to inflation. It was around this point he started posting and linking to more and more right-wing content, conspiracy theory videos, and articles. I got to watch this unfortunate descent in real-time on the website now known as X. His fear of inflation made him paranoid about banks, so then he got way into crypto and NFTs—no, like really into it. It was about this time he started posting borderline antisemitic memes. He next started talking paranoidly about “Jewish bankers” and “global finance.” I stopped seeing him post when I left Twitter. I had known him since the 90s but I really didn’t know him anymore.
That entire saga unfolded in about 24 months.
Another friend, we’ll call him “Ernie” went from being a stereotypical DSA-aligned online socialist, who spent the Obama years complaining about identity politics taking primacy over class struggle, to a virulent anti-trans bigot trafficking in some of the most reactionary takes the worst of the right-wing commentariat has to offer. I don’t want to dwell on his situation because it’s more frustrating than anything. He’s burned bridges with me and countless other people. Seeing smart people act foolishly is deeply vexing to me.
I say all this because I realized this week that at other points in my life, I would have done the emotional labor. I would have spent hours arguing and trying to persuade Bert and Ernie away from their stances. I would have sat down over drinks, or around a campfire, or spent time carefully writing replies to their posts on my phone. I would have put in the work. But I don’t have that energy any more. I just don’t have it in me. Part of me thinks this makes me a bad friend or a bad person but a much larger (and louder) part of me just feels too tired to help grown ass men not make fools of themselves on the internet. I get paid to teach teenagers, not adults. I also understand that this approach applied at scale, in the long term, is deeply problematic and results in more and more people falling into online crankery.
I wish I felt different about my role in fighting that, but I am glad I don’t.
Do you have a Bert or an Ernie you’ve had to let go of? If you have a similar story, I’d be interested in hearing it. Just hit reply on this email.
Recommendations and Bits for the Week
Last week, I wrote about the work-life equilibrium that Hope and I have found here in AD. One teacher wrote that he actually found that same feeling during the remote learning period of the pandemic. J.N. wrote “Our union pushed for increased planning because of all the new mechanisms for delivering instruction. I didn’t really need it for that, so what I got was a massive increase in time to prepare lessons and give feedback. Nothing else has ever come close to the impact that had on my practice.” He added “I’ve tried to tell this to anyone who will listen, which of course makes no difference, lol.”
I’ll add that one of the things teachers in the international game talk about when comparing schools is “direct contact hours”—these are how many hours you are standing in-front of a classroom delivering instruction, as opposed to planning said instruction, grading work from it, or collaborating with colleagues to improve it. In the US it is generally higher than it is elsewhere. At Lincoln, I had about 23 hours; here in the Gulf I have around 17 (although that number excludes some supervisory requirements I didn’t have in the states—cuz it ain’t all rainbows).
This Monday, I am interviewing Brian Panowich, the author of the Bull Mountain trilogy for an upcoming episode of the podcast. If you’ve read any of his books and have questions for me to ask, blow up my inbox. I think his books are tremendous, each better than the next, and am looking forward to having him on the show.
Lastly, Hope and I are in the midst of a rewatch of The Bear. It is absolutely my favorite thing on television. I have never felt more invested in a set of characters as I do the fools in that kitchen. The show is a masterpiece and in our rewatch we’re noting the seeds the writers planted throughout the series leading to events later in each season. The show is highly rewatchable and rewards careful viewing.
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See you next week!
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