I mean to be clear here I namedropped Daisey because I do think he's a pretty important encapsulation of the distinction: dude went to Shenzhen and then fabricated an entire one-man show about being the great white savior of exploited Chinese manufacturing employees and then (+1)
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Replying to @Nymphomachy @arthur_affect and
(cont) threw an absolute tantrum online when Ira Glass investigated his claims after putting his program on the line to vouch for him and discovered he made up literally all the meaningful details Because "his heart was in the right place" and he was just trying to "make change"
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That's "Facts matter vs facts don't matter" culture, which honestly is orthogonal to "snark vs smarm" When it's the self-identified snarkers on the wrong end of it they think that "Facts matter" culture is SUPER smarmy
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
Cf. any time a screenshot dunk goes viral on Twitter and someone tries to go "Okay but in context what he clearly meant was"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
It's funny because before that happened Daisey's overall career was absolutely Team Snark by any reasonable standard, like the Gawker stuff about mocking hipsters and techbro culture and "writering"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
Before the stuff came out about the story of the worker with the disfigured hand being fabricated, if you made broader fact based criticisms of his piece you'd absolutely get shat on for smarm ("Actually the Shenzhen suicide rate is lower than the US overall")
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
I mean, again, I say this as a big fan of DFW, it's ironic that he brought up his cruise essay because it was fake in exactly the same way Mike Daisey's monologue was fake and he openly admitted it but nobody cared in that instance because cruise companies are cringe anyway
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
Daisey's defense that "Look in the world I come from of literary essays and dramatizations no one really cares if the stories you use as illustrations actually happened" is one of those awkward "It's true but he shouldn't say it" things
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It seems like the kind of thing that only needs to be true if you're a boring white dude?
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Well I mean Daisey did actually go to Shenzhen and even though nothing that happened there changed his mind about Foxconn being an abusive company there was also, reasonably, nothing super dramatic that happened that he could use for a story
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Just like nothing actually that interesting or that bad happened to DFW when he went on a cruise for "research" into the darkness at the heart of American consumerism Which isn't that big a deal except the essay he wrote about it became part of the literary canon etc
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Unsurprisingly corporate juggernauts with massive PR arms are really good at preventing the sorts of Eureka moments prior muckrakers used to stir up public outrage, because it's their job.
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Well the cruise company (Celebrity Cruises) *was* really pissed off by the DFW essay and tried to do PR damage control but they were SOL because they were wrongfooted by the whole thing They weren't equipped to respond to this kind of general dark Freudian literary criticism
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