Ill winds and silver linings

Social media is horseshit, but with all that horseshit there may be a pony

Something some us like to say, but many of us hate to hear, is “it’s an ill wind that blows no one some good.” We don’t hate to hear it just because the saying, being poetical, takes some work to comprehend. (It’s like “begs the question” that way.)

Rather it’s mainly because pointing out silver linings or bright sides — which, shadings and subtleties to one side, is how the saying is generally used —  is what you do when you’ve given up on your primary objective: Sure, you’ve admitted, this thing is bad/cause is lost, but there has to be something good in it, even if it’s not good for me. Not only are you then resigning to make do with a negative situation, you’re positing a positive outcome for someone you may not even wish well.

This is even worse when we’re talking about social media, which is widely perceived and decried as a sort of pigeon-warring enterprises where good ideas are pitted against bad ones and the bad ones have an enormous advantage and will tend to convert good to bad.

I understand. I look around and see how many aspects of our politics and our society are insanely out of whack, and then I look at, for example, Twitter and see the absolutely batshit arguments advanced there, and there really does seem to be a connection. I also think we’re past the point of chicken-and-egg reckoning — whichever was first, both look to be hurtling together toward doom and taking us with them.

So what’s the good in this ill wind? That it gets a reaction from people who are not nuts, and that this reaction is visible in a way that, before the era of social media, wasn’t possible.

In other words everything people say about how social media ruined everything is true, except when it isn’t.

You may have heard of Peggy Noonan’s stupid column about how all the mean Columbia protestors wouldn’t give her the time of day even though she asked nicely. (In this column she doesn’t even engage the genocide the kids are protesting. It’s quite beside the point, which is how young people today have gotten above themselves.)

I didn’t read it when it came out because I was still on vacation and because her previous column — about how artists are making art that makes her feel bad so they’re not doing their job — was such horseshit that I didn’t think I could stomach another so soon after.

But last weekend New York Times poobah Peter Baker came to Dame Noonan’s defense (see header pic) against the unhelpful college brats, and a bunch of people ran to comments and quote-tweets to let him know how ridiculous he and Noonan were (see tweet comments or just put Noonan Baker in the Twitter search field).

I was delighted because I’ve been following Noonan for decades and knew her to be a daft passive-aggressive nightmare of a rightwing propagandist — from her loony 9/11 columns to her Jesus-y tone poems to her Just The Tip Trumpism to her No Labels boosterism. (Here’s a good all-rounder on her awfulness if you want to save time.)

But often over the years, as I detailed Noonan’s offenses against reason I felt I was in the wilderness singing my song to the wind and the rain because before social media days, and even when blogs had their brief season in the sun, it was still the prestige press and its patsies that mattered, and all of them, left or right, showered praise and Pulitzers on Noonan, and the yapping of little dogs like me didn’t count for anything.

So I was pleased to see that other sensible people — some of whom are big names with decent followings — had caught her act.

But, you may ask, does it really matter that some sane people are answering this foolishness, even ratio-ing it, when Twitter is widely considered to be rigged by Elon Musk to amplify rightwing sentiments and depress contrary ones and generally undermine the democratic order? What can such small victories as this possibly mean when under Musk Twitter is blasting fash virus round the clock and (presumably) infecting new customers every nanosecond?

Some people think that Musk is trying to supplant the current establishment — which, like its avatars Joe Biden and the prestige press, ain’t so hot themselves and are showing signs of structural weakness — and replace it with a new order in which his neo-Boer adherents get all their understanding of reality from his gibberish and such ancillary gibberish as he is pleased to present to them rather than from what we are accustomed to call legitimate news sources. Makes a certain dystopian sense, right?

But Musk, like Trump, isn’t anti-establishment — he’s establishment to his core. (Also like Trump, his enterprises rely on the establishment for their success. Where is Musk without government contracts, or Trump without decades of government inaction and complicity?)

No, Musk is not trying to create a new order — he’s just trying to move up within the establishment by promoting a more overtly fascist program than was previously on offer, which he has reason to believe will elevate him by drawing millions of hitherto-untapped morons to follow his program and make him a bigger deal than he currently is — certainly a bigger deal than he will be if his other business enterprises collapse, which they seem to be doing.

He does this to win the intra-establishment bragging rights and power-positioning that are mainly what billionaires like him and Bezos and Koch, who otherwise have everything a person could possibly desire, use to feel extra super special good.

Now, Musk is just one member of the establishment. There’s all sorts in it: Politicians and press lords and clerisy and clergy. They do not collaborate or conspire, but rather adhere to common codes enforced by tradition and mutual interest. Thus, since long before there was internet, they have by quiet agreement enforced a consensus reality, about (for example) how much liberty for peasants and how much tax on the rich is too much. (As you have surely noticed, the numbers for both have been dropping awhile.)

They mainly agree on other things, too. At no time over the past several decades, for example, was any movement to defend Palestinians against Israeli depredations going to get a fair shake from them. And college students who get above themselves by publicly supporting the principles they learn in class are always to be derided and dismissed, as Noonan did.

The establishment does make changes, though, when forced to — and by “forced to” I mean when they see money in it. And like anything that disrupts consensus, it also disrupts equilibrium. The toffs get along fine until someone drops a gold piece on the ballroom floor.

We have seen that already in, for example, the way the prestige press gave up on the old-fashioned Tiffany news resources and standards that were once the source of their credibility and adopted the who’s-hot-who’s-not rubrics of the popular internet. When that happened, the people at the apex of the prestige press — like Peter Baker — were not swept away in a purge; only the expendables went overboard. The prestige de la prestige adapted and thrived while retaining their piss-elegant contempt for outsiders and interlopers. And from their lofty positions they continue to tell us what a mistake it is for student protestors not to trust their movement to the tender ministrations of their buddy-pals like former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan.

But unlike in the old days, when the only means their opponents had to register their discontent was Letters to the Editor, there are now all these little windows, like the portals of the Laugh-In joke wall, through which contrary opinion may be glimpsed right next to the original absurd received opinion.

And because the prestige pressies pissed their credibility away years ago, there’s nobody around to demand that everyone stop laughing when Baker and Noonan are depantsed by the internet at large. (Musk may rush to the defense of Proud Boys and white supremacists, but the prestige press is grabbing for the same gold coin he is, so he’s not doing them any favors.)

Now maybe — just maybe — more people than would otherwise have heard are getting the word that these people aren’t all-powerful and you don’t have to be frog-marched by them into the consensus that the behavior of the Israeli government in Gaza is acceptable, and you don’t have to be scared that if you find it instead vicious, genocidal, and contrary to American interests and principles, and say so, you’ll be called an antisemite. I mean, you will be called an antisemite by bad-faith bullshit artists, but you don’t have to be scared because you are not (as they meant, and once had to power, to make you to feel like) the only one. Far from it.

From there each must make their own choice. But at least the chance is there.