At the same time, there's just so many fucking critics now Everyone with the money to put up the big walls has done so because the air is thick with bullets Who the hell actually does listen to all their critics, how would you survive that
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein and
Every mildly Twitter famous person has a dozen screaming trolls in their mentions every day "WHY WON'T YOU RESPOND TO CRITICISM"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein and
We don't say "smarm vs snark" much now but the current evolution of this is the fight over self-care discourse "Just log off for a while and run a blockchain on the trolls for the sake of your mental health"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein and
The thing being that advice is equally applicable if you're a queer teenager targeted by homophobes or if you're a Republican senator targeted by your impoverished constituents
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein and
It all really comes down, in the end, not to axioms about snark vs smarm or self care vs not, but "What are you defending yourself about? what are your foundational premises?" and we're not comfortable making arguments on premises so we focus on forms.
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Replying to @loudpenitent @mssilverstein and
Right, Scocca I think was reacting to a then-current trend where people were decrying "snark" or "irony" *universally* and saying this was often a deceptive defense of the powerful, which is true But the better argument is just that they don't mean it and don't do it
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Replying to @arthur_affect @loudpenitent and
We can argue back and forth over whether having catapults is a good thing for the world and if wishing they didn't exist so there'd be no more war between city-states is just defending the wealthiest cities But the real point is no one is actually disarming their catapults
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Replying to @arthur_affect @loudpenitent and
The flip side of this is that pretending that attacking rather than defending *automatically* makes you the good guy is just as blinkered and hypocritical a worldview, and one that way more people than Scocca admits seem to hold
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Replying to @arthur_affect @loudpenitent and
"On Smarm" predates Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed, which is about how, to modernize the argument a little, the Internet has given us all loaded guns and itchy trigger fingers and has no interest in inventing better bulletproof vests
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Replying to @arthur_affect @loudpenitent and
And trying to argue about the moral value of this in a vacuum is kind of impossible Like when Twitter mentions they're gonna roll out some armor - like being able to hide replies to "quell the ratio" - people immediately go "Oh so you want DONALD TRUMP to be bulletproof?!"
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And, yeah, I'm not gonna say public shaming is universally evil and we should be nice to all other humans at all times (the disingenuous Maximum Smarm worldview) But come on, WE ALL KNOW that going on the offense is pleasurable for its own sake in an ugly way
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Replying to @arthur_affect @loudpenitent and
And, moreover, that in the absence of an effective defense the offense *is* the best defense The best way to avoid getting canceled is to make sure someone else is getting canceled, to be uprange of the direction everyone's shooting today
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Replying to @arthur_affect @loudpenitent and
Ronson's observation that, however much you might dislike Justine Sacco as a human being, the Saccogate thing was incredibly hypocritical People IN THE VIRAL THREAD were making jokes WILDLY more racist and evil than the original ("I hope they do give you AIDS", etc)
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