Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1026
Naomi Klein, diagonalism. Marc's stupid essay, Charlie's wise words, everyone trying to browbeat people into "making statements," my cat's thread addiction not the digitial kind.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am good. My Taylor friend bracelet (thank you Suzy) has suddenly started to interfere with my Apple Watch and it keeps thinking I took it off. First world problems.
Jane is better, thanks for your concern. Our bowels had a day of rage, and both of us are back on the mend. The new theory is it was some baby cukes. Who knows. God I love baby cukes. So she’s off to school for photo day.
Our stupid cat Roy ate about a mile of thread again, even though Emma religiously guards access to the thread and the sewing machine. This cat will find a way. He is obsessed. He absolutely needs to eat this thread so he can immediately puke it back up again. Also our refrigerator is dying. Yesterday was… a lot.
I am reading Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger and… holy moly. I had no idea what I was getting into. I mean I vaguely knew it was about the dark side of politics, conspiracy, and maybe a dash of social media but my god. I just got through a chapter that was one of the most revelatory things I’ve read about politics in years. She did not invent it, but she introduced me to the concept of diagonalism. I’ve known for a while that left-right is an inadequate heuristic for modern politics, but what replaces it. There’s the donut theory, the oroborous, etc. But Diagonalism works for me better. As does her incisive description of Steve Bannon et el’s coopting of causes on the left, his downplay of truly divisive topics like gun control and abortion, his welcoming of wayward lefties into his circle, his worshipping of the cancelled to give them a new home, how much of his strategy hangs itself on the ability to (semi-truthfully) say it transcends left-right.
Klein talks about watching her “shock doctrine” thesis get absolutely twisted in the modern era, and of course I can understand and feel this, having given so much of my life to social media. I could quibble with her a bit, I absolutely think that she implied in The Shock Doctrine that the powers-that-be manufactured, or at least tried to manufacture the shocks. She insists otherwise, but also gives a mea culpa acknowledging that if we took that away, it was a failure of communication on her part. Regardless, she’s right that her thesis has been twisted into conspiracy. It must be profoundly disorienting to see people so misunderstand one of your most important contributions.
And more than that, Bannon’s co-opting of words. The absolute k-hole of doubt they have managed to send most writers on the left, who are now all measuring their words, being more careful, abandoning terminology they worked so hard to invent. The absolute nuking of certain terms from the progressive cause, and the related nuking of the actual causes itself.
It is alarming stuff. Especially seeing a writer as talented as Klein struggle with it.
It can make you feel like there’s no hope in words anymore.
But I don’t really believe that, yet, because words and ideas are two different things and I think their strategy relies too much on the conflation of the two and that the ideas themselves are flourishing more than ever, even if under different… guises. Witness Marc Andreesen’s catastrophic “techno-optimist manifesto” yesterday, and the satisfyingly healthy pushback he got. It’s just a god-awful mess of words and sentences, belying an absolutely nihilistic view of humanity underneath a faux-optimistic veneer. Oh yes I have such faith in people that I believe profoundly the world will collapse if we, you know, focus on them.
“We invented vaccines”
My god.
Jonas Salk you are not, Mr. Andreesen.
BUT, the most bonkers part is his “enemies” list:
Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”.
Imagine the absolute dearth of imagination it takes to think that you can only thrive while poisoning the world. I wonder if this man has ever, in his life, spent more than two seconds looking at a tree.
I like the part where he says “we take responsibility.”
This dude is my age. C’mon.
But anyway, words. Words. Words. Naomi Klein’s brilliant dissection (using words) of the right’s tactics (using words) and her description of diagonalism are ringing in my ears as I find the social web basically unusable at this point, two sides of a conflict yelling at me that if I am not saying bonkers things, I am part of the problem. “Silence=Death” taken to the lala land extreme where somehow the world thinks, in the words of Charlie Wurtzel:
there's obviously no one right way to respond to a torrent of horrible, upsetting news or to cope with it but what's striking to me is how many people who are not politicians or public figures at all seem to feel they have to issue public statements on their own behalf about that news. it's been this way for a long time but it reminds me just how much social media has made many people act as if they are constantly running a comms dept for themselves
He’s not wrong but he’s also only describing one half of the equation: the other half being that social media absolutely demands this. Like my friend Doug says: “So and so demographic, YOUR SILENCE IS DEAFENING.” Yelling at all of us to take a reductive stand on a horrible, eternal geopolitical morass, with roots dating back to the onset of civilization, preferably in a pithy 140-word statement. But if you must, you can screenshot your note app. It is super important that chess clubs and tech conferences take impossibly simplistic stands. It is insane, it is absolutely insane that people are insisting everyone do this. It is absolutely insane that all of America is expected to publicly take a stand on a phenomenally divisive issue that holds the potential to further schism our political ecosystem, and bolster diagonalism and Steve Bannon.
I don’t owe anyone my opinions, and neither do you. I don’t owe anyone my opinions, even when I write 1,000 words a day about normie life. And I think this is where both Bannon and Klein show their blind spots: because writing about normie life is a political act. GMHHAY has always been a political act. It is a political act saying that you don’t have to let this stuff rule your life, even as you struggle to be a political person, to help make a difference.
Klein wonders: “did we even accomplish anything,” with all of this protesting and writing. It’s a reasonable question. And this morning I was thinking about plastic. The fucking shit is eveywhere, absolutely everywhere, poisoning us, our kids, our land and waters every second of every day all over the planet. And I think about my fantasy solution, the same fantasy solution Klein has — involves activists activisiming with protests and conferences until some sweeping change will be enacted. And she’s right the prospects for this on every issue are diminishing.
But then I think about the boring work that millions of idealists do around the world. The ones who reduce, reuse, recycle, of course, but also the ones at all levels of society and government, finding small ways to reduce the demands, to bend the economics a little bit.
There’s a paradox the left has to face which is that we still often win even when it seems like we’re losing, even when all our big, protesting, dramatic efforts fail. Solar prices are plummeting, and that’s the work of activists, yes, but also individuals and bureaucrats and wonks and… quiet people.
Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have but I have it, etc. etc.
Jane and I had an amazing bit of communication yesterday. When she was sick, I finally figured out what was wrong, around 7:30, when she ran to the potty and let out a storm. And I said “ohhh…. you have diahhrea (spelling unknown).” And she said “don’t make fun of me!” And I said “I’m not.” And kinda forgot about it.
But then at lunch Emma or Jane brought it up again and Jane was like “you made fun of me” and I was like “I did not” and Emma looked concerned and Jane and I were both feeling a bit aggreived…
… but then we just worked it out with words and in the end we both apologized to the other one for the misunderstanding.
It was a masterclass in good parenting and coherent communication and for like ten seconds I felt like the best parent ever.
Needless to say, it didn’t last.
I did do bedtime again, though, and that was lovely. We are expanding our K Pop horizons, lady groups only. St Vincent is also still in rotation and we did an older Taylor favorite, “You need to calm down.” And we did bed party. And she brushed her teeth without arguing. And she made a cat bed out of LEGO.
Man I missed that kid.
Justa mix today, old and new. Very excited about a new Polyphonic Spree. New Animal Collective has potential. A lot of these are bands I’ve never heard before. But they hold promise. Oh yeah new Juliana Hatfield too that is kinda exciting she used to work at that record store on Newbury street that Josh and… Scott? bought but she worked there way before that back when it sold all those bootlegs and she was so cute and I had such a crush on her. This was Blake Babies days, I think. Pre-solo. But my memory is going and those were… actually I may have journaled those years I should go look. Man I don’t even remember the name of the record store.
~once a year i go through a blake babies listening phase. it’s the best 🤣