Read on Twitter
An absolutist abt free speech shd be thrilled abt Twitter, where so many millions speak UNPAID truth to power—esp to the ruling class w/ paid platforms at the New York Times.
But no — rabbly Twitter with its vertigo of views & dialects is Orwellian & worse than autocracy??
But no — rabbly Twitter with its vertigo of views & dialects is Orwellian & worse than autocracy??
What might be most demoralizing about Stephens is that a polyglot w/a Pulitzer & degrees from Chicago & LSE seems to have dropped ALL of his intellectual commitments in favor of shadowboxing with phantoms who called him names. There's a Howard Hughes factor.
Once again I'll mention a professor whose class I took in grad school to hear about his life's work on sincerity, high modernism, Wordsworth. But I got to him too late. It was the 90s. He was mad at feminists, cdn't stop ranting, & sounded like a bitter brain-hijacked ex-husband.
Just stay on your subject, posh intellectuals!
No one cares that some animal cut you off in traffic or made a TikTok about your hair!
But SOMETIMES we care about political economy or Wordsworth — the things you actually KNOW about.
No one cares that some animal cut you off in traffic or made a TikTok about your hair!
But SOMETIMES we care about political economy or Wordsworth — the things you actually KNOW about.
In 2013, I was canceled. Fired at Yahoo, blackballed at NYU, for writing a piece considered anti-science. I agree w/Stephens that it HURTS to be trolled into dust, turned into a laughing stock, called a bedbug/brain-damaged, &—in my case—actually fired. As in income zero.
Here's my somebody-done-somebody-wrong song: https://twitter.com/page88/status/957308105519398912?s=20
Soon after I wrote a book about the internet. All I wanted to do from my pulpit was prosecute this HURT & make it noble, invoke some ideology or other that made the trolls not just mean—and effective in costing me my job—but "Orwellian" or even "misogynistic."
But that is...bad faith.
Someone has you to their house to hear what you have to say, and all you do is complain about the assholes who took up all the armrests next to you on the plane? And how they're fascists?
If I were Stephens's corner coach for when he's in the Twitter coliseum, I'd say:
1. Take the pain and cultural dysphoria to therapy.
2. Go back to political economy, however rightwing you like it, for the New York Times.
1. Take the pain and cultural dysphoria to therapy.
2. Go back to political economy, however rightwing you like it, for the New York Times.
