Manufacturing Contempt
In which I have a small bone to pick with Ezra Klein. Also, Dippin' Dots.
In a recent New York Times opinion column about Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, Ezra Klein, after cataloguing the platform’s many flaws, writes:
…the answer probably seems obvious: Log off! One can, and many do. But it comes at a cost. To log off is to miss much that matters, in industries where knowing what matters is essential… Attention is currency, and Twitter is the most important market for attention that there is.
I like Ezra Klein a lot. He’s inquisitive, empathetic, and dialectical—all qualities in short supply in our contemporary media landscape. But in the sentences I’ve quoted, he succumbs to techno-fatalism, implying that Twitter’s position in society is fixed, when in fact, it’s people like him, who, at least to some degree, determine the platform’s cultural significance.
Here’s a climate analogy: just as economic elites are responsible for a wildly disproportionate percentage of carbon emissions, cultural elites—a class to which Klein, with his 2.7 million Twitter followers, belongs—play an outsize role in driving traffic on social media platforms. Everything that he and others like him post has a ripple effect, implicating in the surveillance economy all those who engage with his content. That engagement, as I’ve written before, makes companies like Twitter and Meta more attractive to advertisers, even as that engagement is achieved through algorithms that incentivize and reward our worst instincts as humans. If media elites are troubled by this state of affairs, they are anything but powerless. Indeed, they can help to reshape digital life by being more intentional in their online behavior.
We are in an attention arms race. Achieving detente will require the courage (lol, “courage!”) of those in possession of long-range weapons—i.e., journalists and other cultural figures with large social media followings—to stand down. I would ask them: if you’ve got a column in the New York Times, which just announced that it’s reached a whopping 9.1 million subscribers, why must you wander the scummy halls of Twitter, shilling your wares? (The same argument and set of questions applies to musicians, actors, and other celebrities.)
It’s possible that Klein actually believes that he and others remain on the platform for fear of missing out on important information. But I’d wager that at least part of what keeps them tethered to their feeds isn’t the pursuit of better journalism, but the fact that they are addicted: both to the constant intake of information, and to the possibility that a tweet may go viral, thousands of new followers will materialize, and that their value in the marketplace will increase. For in a culture dominated by the spirit of capitalism, no amount of wealth, power, or fame is ever enough. Or maybe it’s just a weakness for impulsively broadcasting our most astute cultural observations and then lapping up the dopamine-laced feedback.
Klein’s argument also reinforces the media gospel that the frenetic pace at which events are disseminated and consumed online is salutary. It is not. While there are some types of current events—protests, war, natural disasters—whose reporting benefit from the real-time updates afforded by social media, there is a whole lot of news that unfolds slowly. Unfortunately, the warp-speed metabolism of Twitter cannot accommodate such a languorous pace, so while we wait for Joe Manchin’s next move in the sluggish-even-by-Tarkovsky-standards melodrama Build Back Better, we are granted the consolation of so much conjecture, speculation, and gossip.
It’s one thing when that conjecture is about the psychosexual implications of MAGA bros donning lingerie. It’s another when, say, it’s about the likelihood of the United States stumbling into a second Civil War, a topic which has of late become its own cottage industry, not only on Twitter, but within mainstream legacy media. In my view, this is wildly irresponsible. Recent research demonstrates that distorted (i.e., inflated) perceptions of an ideological opponent’s willingness to engage in political violence increases one’s own willingness to do the same. Many in the chattering classes have carved out side projects fanning those very flames.
But why? In the unholy marriage between Twitter and news outlets, the prenup states that the latter party has to keep churning out content so that Twitter’s users have something new to click every time they refresh their feeds. One of the paradoxes of Twitter is that while it has seldom posted a profit since going public in 2013, it nevertheless serves as a crucial middleman for frictionless capitalism: if a tweet is seductive or salacious enough to induce clicks, it doesn’t matter if the linked piece is read or not. A user’s attention must be captured just long enough to generate the click. The best way to do that? Headlines that arouse “activating” emotions: rage, fear, disgust. And so, we might most succinctly understand Twitter as a warehouse for the manufacture of contempt.
One last point: when Klein restates the tired bromide that “attention is currency,” his framing concedes the game. I can understand why he does this. It is taken as axiomatic in our society that commanding the attention of as many people as possible is a good thing, and from a strictly economic standpoint, this may be true. Attention may indeed generate profit, but it does not follow that this leads to spiritual or social fulfillment, at the individual or communal level.
Indeed, the more attention we devote to seeking the attention of “the public,” the less time we have to invest in relationships with those in our immediate midst: our friends, our families, members of our community. Ours is a society in which the values of capitalism are so deeply engrained that it requires a willful shift in outlook to recognize that success in the attention economy is often won at a personal cost. Another way of stating this: the attention economy implicitly reinforces the nationalization of everything, at the expense of the local.
I’m not suggesting that everyone delete their accounts, though that would certainly be a best-case scenario. Instead, I suggest using this litmus test (which I am *trying* to stick to, myself): am I posting strictly to capture the attention of my audience, or do I have something crucial to express, something that benefits the public good? Now granted, these lines can be blurred. But if you’re a journalist doing a thread about Madison Cawthorn’s sexual predilections, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that maybe you have better things to do with your own time, and that of your readers.
Postscript: it feels somehow appropriate that I’ve been typing this in a hotel room in Palo Alto, a stone’s throw from the campus where many of the most powerful players in the attention/surveillance economy got their start. Tomorrow, I’ll play at Stanford before heading south to LA, and then on to Denver. A midwest run begins in Minneapolis next Wednesday.
Looking forward to seeing some of you soon! Current tour dates can be found here.
Manufacturing Contempt
I get it. And I appreciate the absolution, for lack of a better term at the moment. You’re championing a righteous cause in a fairly positive manner. Whatever pangs of guilt I may feel, they are entirely of my own making.
I feel a wave of guilt and shame every time I read a new installment of your take on the negative effects of social media. I know in my heart that you’re mostly right. But then I think about what I did this evening — saw a transcendent performance by Joan As Police Woman in Bushwick that I surely would have missed if not for social media — and the urge to log off fades. I have managed to cut way back, looking at Facebook once a week or less and splashing around in the Twitter cesspool only when I spot a notification of something “important.” But giving it up seems unthinkable.