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Self-definition.
Autonomy.
Inclusivity.
Wellness.
Safety.
Empowerment.
Justice.
Fairness.

These are the values of the West right now, in the U.S. and elsewhere. And let’s be real—they’re stupid. Vapid. Trite. Dubious and dubitable. Wilting and impotent.

Read them again. It’s high school social life elevated to the level of cultural framework and Weltanschauung. There is no room in it for heroes, great men, great moments, or battles against evils of any kind, including the evil of mediocrity.

Tragic and suffocating.

The elites in the West, like the elites everywhere, since time immemorial, culturally constituted themselves as the non-plebes. “Who am I? I am a non-plebe. Who are my friends? My friends are the other non-plebes. That is what we have in common.”

This is necessary because elites, possessing vast social, geographical, and financial empires, and possessed of the proactively destructive nihilism that comes with owning everything yet finding meaning and immortality nowhere, are beset by too much individual specificity and bile to constitute themselves as a community in virtually any other way.

They’ll say this isn’t the case, but I knew them—well—and associated with them—deeply—for decades. Every little thing that rolls off the tongue or is planned into an event is a matter of distinguishing between the the “us” of the elite and the “them” of not-elite.

— § —

Independently, for the most part, enter the industrial revolution. And modernization. And then, modernity. And an unprecedented and ever-increasing level of reach and control, in the most abstract sense, for each individual endowed with the best resources (of every kind) of the times.

Those individuals so endowed, of course, being the elites.

And in true human fashion, they couldn’t resist the temptation to make use of this new ability to influence the world through technocommunicotransportautomatology in such a way as to try to remake it in the image of their own preferences, often inadvertently as a matter of deploying distinction.

Activisms and initiatives and committees and this and that and so on to “improve” things in such a way as to make the world generally safer for those of non-plebe preferences. Down with the fraternal lodges. Down with the rotary clubs. Down with the labor unions. Down with the nuclear family (not to mention the extended family). Down with even the corporate “family” and so on.

Ever more progress, ever more invention, ever more reach as a result.

— § —

Then, the final unforeseen change—the network.

For half a century the plebes found themselves less and less able to constitute identities or communities of their own. It was neither their wont nor their habitus to be intellectual about such things; for those who work and work hard and don’t expect too much of life or the world, it tends always to be a matter of intergenerational knowledge.

But now—for the plebes—”who am I?” becomes a tough question. “My father was a Boy Scout only now the Scouts aren’t an option. My father was an Elk only now the Elks aren’t an option. My father was a member of the local, but the local was dissolved. My mother was a leader in the rotary club, but the rotary club was dissolved. My mother was a homemaker but now family is frowned upon. My mother worked loyally for her company team forty years until retirement, but now I’ll switch jobs every two to five.

“Where does that leave me? Who can I be?”

Into the vacuum and to answer the question comes the network, and suddenly the elites are as visible to the plebes as the plebes always were to the elites, and two things become clear.

First, the elites define themselves as the not-plebes, in the most condescending ways, and tend to evidence a wide assortment of beliefs and cultural practices that are, though diverse, also common in their vanguardism, nontraditionalism, and general hedonism, all of which are generally regarded to be reprehensible outside elite circles and at the same time part and parcel, indeed the gritty cultural and material detail of this non-plebe identity.

Next, the one thing that the plebes still have—and can have—in common is that they are, conversely, not elites.

Voilá!

Community found.

— § —

Government is downstream of politics is downstream of culture, and the cultural reality of the present is now that across the developed world, societies are split into two groups who constitute themselves on the basis, in each case, of not being members of the opposed group.

What is that?

Precursor to civil war and the redrawing of borders. Coming to a whole bunch of societies near you during the next generation or two.

Because you can’t put the genie back into the bottle again.

This is a consumer society—elites sought it, deployed it, and now it’s here. And Brexit, or Trump, or populism, or whatever else have you—these are not “ideas” that you can “debate people out of” in some way, or “roll back” or “fight against.”

They’re a product. A product by which people are constituting their identities and communities. And people can’t be “un-sold” on products that they love. That’s not a part of the cultural milieu into whose cognitive-colonial geography they were born.

Once someone has “bought into” a product and the identity that it is, they’re not just going to stop. You can’t “unsell” people on iPhones once people get a whiff of them. Your only option, instead, is to come up with something better—an iPhone plus, or in this case, a Trump plus or a populism plus—that delivers all of the benefits that they now embrace, not least of which is identity and community—plus something else that you’d like to give them.

— § —

Is there some “populism plus” that can be pushed out into the market that people will prefer, and that somehow walks us back from all of this?

Possibly. But I doubt it.

And in any case, the elites are busy talking in high-minded terms about rolling things back and winning arguments and the traditions of democracy stretching back two thousand years.

Not a single one of them, ironically (given their otherwise generally accepted expertise in marketing and sales at grand scale), is thinking of these things as products being consumed by hungry consumers who are constituting identities through them in opposition to non-buyers (e.g. the very same elites).

So if I was a betting man, I’d bet on the eventual collapse of the West.

(N.B. I love that I’m no longer an “academic” and can just say things like this without feeling bound by the need to turn any 900 word thought into a 400 page argument complete with 100 citations. The intellectual liberation that comes with leaving the academy is surprisingly robust.)

I have been remodeling my basement since sometime last year—October of thereabouts.

The basement had been a kind of dungeon since we’d first moved here. Dark, musty, with deep red carpet. Dim lighting. Yellow walls. Low ceilings. Too much ancient, degraded furniture. Asbestos in the ceiling that was often falling onto the floor. The sort of place, in other words, that a sane, middle class (even lower-middle-class) person didn’t want to go.

It was mainly used by Shandy, our aging pit bull, who was on his last legs then.

At some point in late October or thereabouts, I’d finally had enough, at least in part, and one night in a fit of pique I descended into the basement and started putting things into large contractor trash bags, then moving all of that old furniture out of the main room, into the adjoining bedrooms that have long been left idle and are generally not nicely habitable.

The room got emptied out.

Then, in February, once Shandy died, I decided to turn the largest room in the basement into a gym of sorts. I bought a room’s worth of padded flooring, intending to lay it down over the ancient carpet and just use the room for exercise and for punching things.

But of course if heavy breathing were to be involved, the rotting asbestos ceiling would have to come down first. Well, despite equipment, that didn’t go as smoothly as planned out the gate much equipment was purchased and much intensive work was done. And then, having done all of that over many weeks, I looked down and decided that the carpet was likely contaminated enough as a result that with ceiling now clean, the carpet would have to go, too. So, the carpet came out.

Then, with floor and ceiling out and concrete underfloor sealed off and secured, it seemed ridiculous not to paint the walls.

And so on.

A small project to move some clutter became a larger project to make a mini-gym became a full-on asbestos remediation project with HEPA equipment and head-to-toe Tyvek bunny suits and P100 full-face respiratiors and negative pressure and airlocks and on and on and on.

— § —

Until this weekend, the project had been stalled for several months.

Stalled because it was in a “clean” state. Old, formerly asbestos containing surfaces fully remediated. Airlocks and gear mostly down and stored. No chemical smells, not too much junk laying around. Air quality sensors showing everything clean, and large HEPA filtration system keeping it smelling nice. It was such a relief to have it in that state, and it’s felt so generally cheery that I’ve felt a kind of resistance to plunging the space back into a DIY nightmare.

In particular, I didn’t want to tackle the next step—the books. Yes, the walls were lined with yards and yards of books, floor to ceiling, of every possible vintage a kind, from Plato to Petrarch to Chinese dictionaries to forensics 101 to the little stack books that I wrote myself to full sets of National Geographic stretching back a decade before I was born.

All taped off behind plastic through all of that remediation work, yes.

But before then all of those hundreds (thousands?) of books had been sitting there in the room for years as the dust gathered and the asbestos ceiling fell down, piece by piece over time, and rested in bits on top of the books.

There was no chance I’d throw them out. Zero chance.

Which meant that the plastic sealing the shelving and books off from the rest of the room would have to be removed and the books themselves remediated.

All of them. One by one.

— § —

Funny thing about books, something that I learned on my vast trek through the asbestos jungle.

Books are amongst the most dangerous substances on earth.

Many of them actually contain asbestos, since it was a popular material both for enhancing structural integrity in flexible materials and for imparting fire resistance, both of these being very useful characteristics to have in places containing tons and tons of highly flammable paper in controlled semi-arid conditions, all just sitting around waiting to burn.

And it’s not just asbestos that often comes up in clouds when old books are opened—it’s silica, dust, and other forms of particulate matter that also tend to cause life-ending lung disease.

Librarians—librarians—are working in one of the most hazardous white collar fields in existence. They have death rates from COPD, lung cancer, mesothelioma, and other forms of lung dysfunction that are many times higher than the general population.

To work in and around books is a heroic act; they literally put their lives at risk in order to preserve knowledge and make it available to everyone else.

I’d spent many years in and around and in love with books before learning this. And learning it has changed my relationship with them in some deep, unspecifiable way.

For those of us that read books, we also take our lives into our hands every time we crack one. There is actually real and present danger in the knowledge that we consume. It is metaphor come to life.

Or, at least, it once was—before the era of e-books and Audible took hold with sincerity.

— § —

And so it was that early today I headed back out to the home improvement store to get more Tyvek and more P100 cartridges for my respirator system, both to go along with nitrile gloves and yards and yards of one and three mil sheeting and duct tape, all for use in The Book Project.

I suited up, taped and sheeted up, got the air pressure and the HEPA running again.

I pulled the plastic sheeting on the shelving off, yard by yard, and worked off the duct tape that had already begun to degrade into sticky, uncleanable goop and got it all into contractor bags.

Heavy breath, heavy breath. The sound of oneself as Darth Vader.

And there were all the books, sitting there, dusty as ever, after all this asbestos adventure. So ironically protected all of this time from the asbestos project even as they sat there already bathed in their own time-accumulated pile of asbestos. It’s still not clear to me just what the point of sealing them off was, other than “to do things right” in a domain in which they tell you that not doing things right will lead to your death.

I had an area in the center of the room set up as a catch area with enclosable plastic sheeting of its own and I had buckets of wet wipes and the full triple-phase HEPA industrial vac with brush attachment ready to go.

And so we began.

Pick up a book. Vac the spine and all of the sides. Flip through it to release any particles. Vac every surface again. Get the cover and spine with wet wipes. Dry with shop towels. Place book on stack in holding area.

— § —

I return here to the sense of irony.

For the better part of a decade I’d lived with this basement room full of books and returned to it often to retrieve one of them, blowing off or knocking off any dust and ceiling debris that had accumulated on top of it before carrying it upstairs, not thinking about it at all.

And before that, when we lived in New York, they were on shelves that were mounted on walls that were almost certainly built with asbestos-laden drywall, next to radiator pipes whose wrapped insulation I’m almost now positive was asbestos-containing material, constantly shedding particulate matter everywhere, including on the books.

And now, here, late in the game, I’m gingerly cleaning them all off, one by one, in a highly technical hazmat environment that looks like something out of a horror movie, fully covered from head to foot in hazmat gear, breathing like a monster through a respirator and peering through steamy goggles at—

Dante
and then
Plato
and then
Proust
and then
Horkheimer and Adorno
and then
E.M. Forster
and then
Hammurabi
and then…

…each one a murderous enemy, an assassin that they say may have already killed me, or my ex-wife, or my children, or anyone else that came into contact with them.

Reality? Fiction? Who knows. The quality of information that one obtains in this age of information is different from the quality of information in years past. All information is now emotional information. Everything is now a threat to “safety,” to be handled with extreme care.

My grandfather spent an entire career in the military smoking tobacco and sanding rust and debris off of ships’ hulls with power tools wearing no protective gear whatsoever. I sat and watched over and over again as a child while my father changed the family car’s motor oil with his bare hands and old coolant ran down the driveway and then down the storm drain, never to be seen again.

I spent an entire life reading these books, before I suddenly put on the full hazmat uniform to vacuum and then wipe them down one by one with expensive, specialized equipment, hour after hour on a September Sunday.

— § —

Somewhere in the middle, I began to feel anger. The books began to be dropped on to the pile rather than gingerly stacked.

And then, somewhere after that, I began to feel rage, and there was a period of minutes during which books were being flung, hard, across the room, against newly painted walls.

It was after most of the fiction and after the books I wrote myself, somewhere around undergraduate textbooks, that the rage took hold. Forensic anthropology. Sociology. Religion and culture. Advanced German grammar. Somewhere in there.

And well beyond mere anger. But what was I angry at?

Hard to say. Hours into a project like this one, with all of the mindless tedium and the mental latitude that it thus grants, it’s difficult to know precisely what’s on one’s own mind. Like eyes, thoughts can “glaze over” with time and repetition.

It took me a dozen or two books, and in particular, seeing one of them essentially explode into loose sheets all over the floor, to arrive at that moment at which one asks oneself—

“Okay, what’s really going on here? What’s actually on my mind?”

— § —

All of the real problems that I confront in day-to-day life have a kind of brute materiality about them.

Health. Clutter. Yard. Rot. Asbestos.

Yes, money is a problem and I’d like to have more of it. And yes, in my line of work, this involves a lot of “knowledge economy labor” and so on and so forth—but at the end of the day the uses for the money, the reason to care, the precarity that drives me—is frankly and unavoidably and admittedly embodied in real stuff.

The virtual world is a strange and extensive edifice erected in the end to cope with utterly non-virtual problems, not least of which is mortality itself and everything that seeks to forestall it.

Here in my hands even were the books, the immaterial knowledge that we hold aloft with such pride and what am I doing with them? I am carrying them back and forth across the room and vacuuming little white bits of death off of them with a dirty giant machine full of miles and miles of filtration matter.

Matter.

It’s enough to make a person laugh out loud.

No, no, it’s not that the knowledge isn’t important. It’s that as a culture we’ve skewed so far in one direction that we are in effect all living a lie. We are liars, to ourselves, and to everyone else.

We are bodies. Little, soft, weak, terminal bodies. That’s what we are.

And all of the doctorates and gender changes and awards and Instagrams in the world won’t change the fact that we live as meat and will die as meat and that our happiness is bound up more than anything else with that thing that we don’t want to see about ourselves—

that we are only and just what we are, standing in our shoes or sitting on a chair, respirating and digesting other meat. And so is everyone else.

Until we make peace with that, we won’t be happy, and nothing will be better.

The enlightenment somehow set out to erase half of creation and we’ve carried on the tradition in our little epoch, imagining that God is a God of knowledge, and creation is a matter of theory, and so on.

Creation isn’t just ideas. Creation is things. Being.

For us at the very least, and for everything around us, being is a material state.

How utterly profound is that in our epoch? It almost stretches beyond our ability to conceive of such things, which says something about the era in which we live.

Descartes ought to be arrested. He is the author of much suffering.

— § —

So many books, so many indices to people.

People that wrote them. People that have read them. People that have taught them. In many cases, people that I’ve known and known well. People, in fact, like myself, once.

So many elite braniacs setting out to make the world A Better Place.

And yet, for all the good they set out to do—for all the good I set out once to do—so much more good than all of them put together has been done by, for example, the little group of teachers at my local martial arts dojang who take children under their wing, teach them face-to-face to use and master their bodies and the feelings that are in fact part and parcel of those bodies.

Yes, I was tossing the books across the room because of the question that Johnny Rotten once asked.

“Do you ever feel that you’ve been cheated?”

Because for all the years I spent reading those books, a bunch of little flecks of dust sitting on top of them—dust dug right out of mountains—are infinitely more powerful. They can’t be fixed with theory or policy, only with big motors and big gears and big filters and the big movement of big amounts of air and moisture.

And because for all my degrees, it’s warping bathroom floors and leaky roof tiles and broken toes that now rule my life, day after day, and that in fact rule the lives of everyone—even those wealthy enough to pay others to hide such facts. I spent twenty-five years of my life learning things. What I didn’t learn in all that time was what bedevils me now—how to ensure that a toiled won’t leak, tidy a driveway, keep vegetable matter and mold from overtaking the foundation of a house, or keep my joints moving well.

And all the vast tide of books in my asbestos-laden library of knowledge are silent on such matters. Entirely silent on them.

— § —

Do you ever feel that you’ve been cheated?

Sometimes I have the urge to reach out personally to the other Ph.D.s and ask them what they think about things.

What’s going on…

Because Ph.D.s are supposed to have an opinion, no?

— § —

Thing is, I have one of those, too. I’ve read the books. A lot of books. An awful lot of books. And journal articles.

Did you know I had over 2,000 journal articles in my library while I was writing my dissertation?

I read them all.

Oh yes, I read them all.

I was erudite and such even before I embarked on my Ph.D.

Did a graduate degree at the University of Chicago before the New School, don’t you know.

What do I know?

Bupkis.

That’s the problem.

— § —

That urge to ask the other Ph.D.s… is misplaced.

What I’m looking for is one of: (1) enlightenment, (2) salvation.

They can grant me neither.

If they could, I’d be granting same myself.

I’m not.

— § —

It’s 2019.

Western Civilization is dying.

Ontology <-> =/= Gummi Bears.

Things are crap.

The books are all obsolete

and the people are all inadvertently, yet catastrophically, evil.

What is to be done?

— § —

What Is To Be Done?

Quick note:

Look at any online directory. Ad platform. Link exchange. Set of articles on building an online identity. Look at anything at all that has anything at all to do with online life.

What category of web properties is missing?

The category of “personal” content. The notion that an individual exists and might want to say something as an individual, as apart from products, industry vertical, community, party, etc.

Paradoxically, in this age of the transcendendental importance of individual autonomy, what we lose sight of is the quantity of the individual as apart from some binding to a larger group.

— § —

“So what’s your game, mate?”

“I don’t know, mate.”

“Your loss, mate.”

The hardest parts of life are the stretches in which nothing in particular is pending.

No deaths of family members, no unemployment, no cancer tests, no paid off mortgages or trips to Africa for safari, no births of children nor arrivals of new furniture sets, etc. Nothing in particular.

I suppose I might think differently if I weren’t divorced, but I am divorced, so I think what I think.

And what I think is that stretches of time in which neither crises nor victories seem to float on the air are dispiriting, at least as a divorced person. You’ve lost your partner in planning (let’s be frank, very possibly you never quite had them in the first place despite wishing you had, for those of us that are divorced) and if you’re divorced you’re likely not of school age any longer.

In short, there is a dearth of plans, of anticipation, and yes, even of fear that is difficult to bear.

It can feel as though you’re on a very long train ride to your own end times, and (this is risky to say but I’ll say it) there are times when you do that thing that all children tend to do—say to yourself (given that nobody else is listening), “are we there yet?”

— § —

I suspect that divorce is easier the younger you are. I also suspect that there are distinct psychological dimensions to it that are not to be taken lightly.

For example, though (as the crystal-wearing set, of whom I am not a member, might say) “forty is just a number,” the fact is that it is an important number. Divorced after forty has a particular flavor that is not especially pleasant, and this is not entirely a matter of personal taste.

The fact is that for others, too, the attributed identity and characteristics of an “over forty divorcée” are not at all the same as those of a “thirty-something divorcée,” despite the fact that the actual ages involved in such a comparison may be very near to one another indeed.

— § —

In short, there are a great many things that I could I suppose be productively doing, if productivity is measured in terms of simply having this rather than that, a little more rather than a little less, a little tidier rather than a little more cluttered, and so on.

But (and this is where I admit to perhaps still being in the throes of a mid-life crisis whose countours were only compounded by divorce) that sort of thing is difficult to get excited about.

After all, just a few short years ago you dreamed of changing—and of traveling—the world, and you turned down job offers from the United Nations, and you held in your hand rooms full of starry-eyed students looking to you for advice on What is To Be Done and How I Ought to Proceed in It All, and so on.

Now, you are on a long, straight, eventless train ride toward that final destination that by nature isn’t (and can’t be) an Experience of any kind for ontological reasons, and so it is that you’re hard pressed to lift a finger.

Because if all you’re doing is folding socks and pulling weeds, well hell, you have the next ten, or twenty, or thirty years to do that, and nobody’s looking anyway, damn it—so the rewards are rather small, particularly in juxtaposition to the unfortunate fact that is this particular ticket on the tracks and the wish you have (which cannot be granted) to switch to a different set of them.

— § —

I don’t know.

It’s easy to be envious of others. I try to avoid that.

It’s also easy to be jaded. I try to avoid that, too.

Or to be down on oneself. Also something to be avoided.

It often feels these days as if I’m trying to avoid things more than I’m trying to pursue things.

Hell, “feels?”

Let’s be honest—the job at hand since well before my divroce has almost entirely been about what I can avoid. How to manage life, in general, so as to avoid all of the Bad Things.

That has not changed.

I suppose that’s life in general, at least for people worth their salt. There are of course, the great majority of others who go and adopt the bad things as their own and revel in them. I’m tempted to say that’s almost the entirety of our society.

And sometimes it’s tempting to join them.

But thus far, I resist the temptation, for the most part.

— § —

I don’t know.

— § —

I’m not ashamed to say that over the last few days of monitoring developments in the Brexit affair, it’s not the actual politics that have made the largest impression on me but the figures and personalities involved.

I think John Bercow has become a minor hero of mine. I’ve just been to YouTube to watch him address the Oxford Union for an hour, and I enjoyed in very much.

Yes, this is the sort of thing that I do when I’m not working and the kids are not here, rather than—say—painting my basement, fixing my yard, or starting my own business.

— § —

I wrote in a review once that got rather good reviews in turn that the thing appreciated most about J.D. Vance’s book was that it illuminated the fact that choices matter. Even little ones. Even every day.

I think that’s also the sort of thing that Jordan Peterson has been talking about.

Perhaps it’s time that I go and read one of these people again, because I’ve arrived at that point at which I am doubting that, considered objectively, choices matter all that much at all, and as a result, I am struggling to bother to make them.

Yes, we live in a society in which once you’re past a certain age, you simply don’t matter.

No, I’m not going to become an activist about this. I think that’s as it should be, and that one of the gravest sins of the Baby Boomer generation is that they refused to Go Gently into That Good Night (and still do so, in fact).

But an intuition about what is right and proper and good on the one hand does not of necessity change the experience of living through the actual circumstances of what is right and proper and good on the other.

— § —

My time is nearly past. In another ten years it will be.

Did I do what I set out to accomplish?

No. But then I suppose (I say this now, with the benefit of a touch of the wisdom that comes with age) very few could have in my own case, and furthermore and for what it’s worth, very few do in the general case. And that’s the way it is and the way that it always has been and that, too, is right and proper.

— § —

What we need today, more than anything else, is clear-eyed truth-tellers.

I think at this point, my greatest ambition is simply to have the courage to be one of these.

From all indications thus far, it will require much more courage than I’ve managed to muster to date. And I’ve done a lot of things that (by my own standards at least) required more courage than I’ve often thought I had. Yet so it is that I must manage to travel farther still.

Wish me luck.

— § —

In the meantime, I don’t know whether to also ask that you wish me the dedication to paint some walls or that you wish me the self-possession to not care whether I do so or not as I continue to pursue the kinds of knowledge that interest me.

Uncertainty, Aron is thine other name.

Anyone that knows me knows that I tend to read on all sides of an issue. And that I often hold unorthodox opinions on political issues in particular that straddle lines or thread needles as a result of trying to understand issues from the perspective of both sides of the “political tendency” aisle. I was pro-Gore, for example, in 2000, but at the same time pro-Bush when it came to the court cases. I voted for Obama, but later did not support Hillary, even as I also didn’t support Trump.

I’m not, that is to say, an ideologue, but rather try to understand and judge issues after seeking clarity from all sides.

Until today, I’ve not known what to think about the “social media censorship” debate. Conservatives have long claimed that they don’t get a fair shake, with progressives claiming that what’s being blocked or removed is largely hate speech. I didn’t have a strong opinion in either direction, I suppose, and continued to read arguments from both sides without having been convinced.

— § —

This week, I’ve been following the goings-on in Parliament int the U.K. regarding Brexit. The last couple of days have been particularly eventful, and I’d taken to reading hashtags on both sides of the aisle on Twitter to get a read on the perspectives on both sides from the British public.

What I got instead was an education on Twitter and social media censorship.

Pro-Brexit hashtags, including innocuous ones making no threats, showing no profanity, etc. have been simply disappearing, while the same is not true of pro-remain hashtags.

This morning, I tried to check in on several hashtags on both sides that had been seeing a large amount of activity over the last 24 hours. When it came time to look at the pro-Brexit sentiment, what I saw instead were blanks. No tweets for those hashtags. We’re talking a shift from thousands and thousands of tweets and active discussion to—nada.

I moved from the mobile client to a desktop browser session and searched again. I got a tiny handful of stale posts from several years ago. Everything more recent had disappeared. Simply gone. The pro-remain hashtags? Still incredibly active and deep.

I sat there in stunned silence for several minutes.

I don’t know whether the tweets in question have been removed, or the accounts, or neither and it’s simply that Twitter search is blocking searches for that keyword and returning no recent results. But I do know that actual work had to be done to hide these discussions, which were not hateful, not violent, not white nationalist, not racist, etc. Just politics and regular people voicing their opinions.

— § —

Where I stand on the social media censorship issue is thus evolving: it does, in fact, happen sometimes. And conservatives are right in saying that at least in some cases, it happens rather blatantly to conservatives. Interestingly, famous figures on that side of the aisle remain there and remain searchable.

This implies some amount of bad faith—the platform doesn’t want the public to realize that censorship is happening, which they surely would if very famous figures (i.e. Farage) started to disappear. No, this is a kind of stealth censorship—one that makes it look as though one side of the aisle has very little, if any, support, while making it look as if the other side of the aisle enjoys incredible popularity and support.

— § —

I don’t really know what to do with this information. I do know that I feel as though my eyes have been opened.

I had long ago changed my previously very sunny opinion about social media—the one that I’d held throughout much of my time in graduate school and as an academic. Since then, I’d come to realize that social media was much more a mixed bag, much more dubious, and much more problematic than I’d at first imagined, largely because of the way in which it changed social structure and social discourse, and because of a particular metaphysics that I’d not seen early on that appears in incompatible with certain aspects of a “good life.”

Now, I’m leaning even farther in that direction. Maybe the fiercest critics are right—rather than overselling things—in claiming that social media simply hides conservative voices, not necessarily the famous ones, but the numerous ones. Maybe that’s why the “Trump surprise” happened—maybe in fact social media is obscuring, rather than representing, the actual balance of public opinion on many issues.

No, I’m not positive. But on this issue, I am legitimately shocked. What I’ve seen over the last 24-36 hours is clear: Twitter went from showing two active sides on the Brexit issue to a state of affairs in which it appears that there’s only one engaged side on the issue.

Just. like. that.

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