Jia Tolentino - Trick Mirror

Goffman observes the difference between doing something and expressing the doing of something, between feeling something and conveying a feeling. “The representation of an activity will vary in some degree from the activity itself and therefore inevitably misrepresent it,” Goffman writes. (Take the experience of enjoying a sunset versus the experience of communicating to an audience that you’re enjoying a sunset, for example.) The internet is engineered for this sort of misrepresentation; it’s designed to encourage us to create certain impressions rather than allowing these impressions to arise “as an incidental by-product of [our] activity.” This is why, with the internet, it’s so easy to stop trying to be decent, or reasonable, or politically engaged—and start trying merely to seem so.

As the value of speech inflates even further in the online attention economy, this problem only gets worse. I don’t know what to do with the fact that I myself continue to benefit from all this: that my career is possible in large part because of the way the internet collapses identity, opinion, and action—and that I, as a writer whose work is mostly critical and often written in first person, have some inherent stake in justifying the dubious practice of spending all day trying to figure out what you think. As a reader, of course, I’m grateful for people who help me understand things, and I’m glad that they—and I—can be paid to do so. I am glad, too, for the way the internet has given an audience to writers who previously might have been shut out of the industry, or kept on its sidelines: I’m one of them. But you will never catch me arguing that professional opinion-havers in the age of the internet are, on the whole, a force for good.

In April 2017, the New York Times brought a millennial writer named Bari Weiss onto its opinion section as both a writer and an editor. Weiss had graduated from Columbia, and had worked as an editor at Tablet and then at The Wall Street Journal . She leaned conservative, with a Zionist streak. At Columbia, she had cofounded a group called Columbians for Academic Freedom, which, amongst other things, worked to pressure the university into punishing a pro-Palestinian professor who had made her feel “intimidated,” she told NPR in 2005.

At the Times, Weiss immediately began launching columns from a rhetorical and political standpoint of high-strung defensiveness, disguised with a veneer of levelheaded nonchalance. “Victimhood, in the intersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane,” she wrote—a bit of elegant phrasing in a piece that warned the public of the rampant anti-Semitism evinced, apparently, by a minor activist clusterfuck, in which the organizers of the Chicago Dyke March banned Star of David flags. She wrote a column slamming the organizers of the Women’s March over a few social media posts expressing support for Assata Shakur and Louis Farrakhan. This, she argued, was troubling evidence that progressives, just like conservatives, were unable to police their internal hate. (Both-sides arguments like this are always appealing to people who wish to seem both contrarian and intellectually superior; this particular one required ignoring the fact that liberals remained obsessed with “civility” while the Republican president was actively endorsing violence at every turn. Later on, when Tablet published an investigation into the Women’s March organizers who maintained disconcerting ties to the Nation of Islam, these organizers were criticized by liberals, who truly do not lack the self-policing instinct; in large part because the left does take hate seriously, the Women’s March effectively splintered into two groups.) Often, Weiss’s columns featured aggrieved predictions of how her bold, independent thinking would make her opponents go crazy and attack her. “I will inevitably get called a racist,” she proclaimed in one column, titled “Three Cheers for Cultural Appropriation.” “I’ll be accused of siding with the alt-right or tarred as Islamophobic,” she wrote in another column. Well, sure.

Though Weiss often argued that people should get more comfortable with those who offended or disagreed with them, she seemed mostly unable to take her own advice. During the Winter Olympics in 2018, she watched the figure skater Mirai Nagasu land a triple axel—the first American woman to do so in Olympic competition—and tweeted, in a very funny attempt at a compliment, “Immigrants: they get the job done.” Because Nagasu was actually born in California, Weiss was immediately shouted down. This is what happens online when you do something offensive: when I worked at Jezebel, people shouted me down on Twitter about five times a year over things I had written or edited, and sometimes outlets published pieces about our mistakes. This was often overwhelming and unpleasant, but it was always useful. Weiss, for her part, tweeted that the people calling her racist tweet racist were a “sign of civilization’s end.” A couple of weeks later, she wrote a column called “We’re All Fascists Now,” arguing that angry liberals were creating a “moral flattening of the earth.” At times it seems that Weiss’s main strategy is to make an argument that’s bad enough to attract criticism, and then to cherry-pick the worst of that criticism into the foundation for another bad argument. Her worldview requires the specter of a vast, angry, inferior mob.

It’s of course true that there are vast, angry mobs on the internet. Jon Ronson wrote the book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed about this in 2015. “We became keenly watchful for transgressions,” he writes, describing the state of Twitter around 2012. “After a while it wasn’t just transgressions we were keenly watchful for. It was misspeakings. Fury at the terribleness of other people had started to consume us a lot … In fact, it felt weird and empty when there wasn’t anyone to be furious about. The days between shamings felt like days picking at fingernails, treading water.” Web 2.0 had curdled; its organizing principle was shifting. The early internet had been constructed around lines of affinity, and whatever good spaces remain on the internet are still the product of affinity and openness. But when the internet moved to an organizing principle of opposition, much of what had formerly been surprising and rewarding and curious became tedious, noxious, and grim.

This shift partly reflects basic social physics. Having a mutual enemy is a quick way to make a friend—we learn this as early as elementary school—and politically, it’s much easier to organize people against something than it is to unite them in an affirmative vision. And, within the economy of attention, conflict always gets more people to look. Gawker Media thrived on antagonism: its flagship site made enemies of everyone; Deadspin targeted ESPN, Jezebel the world of women’s magazines. There was a brief wave of sunny, saccharine, profitable internet content—the OMG era of BuzzFeed, the rise of sites like Upworthy —but it ended in 2014 or so. Today, on Facebook, the most-viewed political pages succeed because of a commitment to constant, aggressive, often unhinged opposition. Beloved, oddly warmhearted websites like The Awl, The Toast, and Grantland have all been shuttered; each closing has been a reminder that an open-ended, affinity-based, generative online identity is hard to keep alive.

That opposition looms so large on the internet can be good and useful and even revolutionary. Because of the internet’s tilt toward decontextualization and frictionlessness, a person on social media can seem to matter as much as whatever he’s set himself against. Opponents can meet on suddenly (if temporarily) even ground. Gawker covered the accusations against Louis C.K. and Bill Cosby years before the mainstream media would take sexual misconduct seriously. The Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline challenged and overturned long-standing hierarchies through the strategic deployment of social media. The Parkland teenagers were able to position themselves as opponents of the entire GOP.