Hello Dave. I don't hate the Internet. The only place I am allowed to be as intelligent as I want to be is here. With my friends it is impossible. So this is a real lifeline. I owe a lot to the Internet. Like you I have a grudge against intellectuals. Partly because they make me feel inadequate but also All they seem to do is fall out with one another. But I don't hate the Internet.
I don’t really have a grudge against intellectuals at all and am actually reasonably well grounded in theory. I’ve just always thought that people, in general, are smarter than a lot of us give them credit for and that if I can understand something, then there’s a fair chance that a hell of a lot of other people can, if it’s explained in the right terms. I remember Paul Morley talking about this once and it really struck a chord. I’ve always found journalism a more democratic form of analysis and idea transmission than academic work. Why explain concepts or give information to a closed circle of peers when you can get them out to loads more people? That said, you quite often need academics and nerds and obsessive nutters – Venn crossover very high for all these groups – to do a lot of the digging, in order to have the granular detail to reframe. So, yeah, no real antipathy here, just a different approach to things.
The thing that chafes me regarding both camps, though, is the rank egotism of believing yourself to be the person whose ideas need to be out there in the world - feeling that you deserve that attention and people to look to you for those explanations. It’s a horrible manifestation of neediness and something I was really bloody guilty of for a long, long time and am glad to have left behind. Given that I’m as bad as anyone else here, I can recognise strong elements of it in the woke left – which I largely don’t have any problem with – particularly online, and much, much more in alt-right provocateurs like Miller and weird, manipulative Pied Piper characters like Land. The former are generally people who want to create communities based around - sometimes quite proscriptive - ideas of what they believe to be right. The latter are abject narcissists in different ways. Miller just wants to be heard, regardless of where he has to go to achieve that end. Land just wants to lead, preferably into some fucked up singularitarian abyss, but it wouldn’t matter where really. A lot of people were surprised by his shift into techno-capitalist eugenics and all that shit, but I and quite a few others weren’t because it was all written out from the start.
I honestly don’t give a toss about either of them on a personal level. I’m against them and everything they represent and couldn’t care a flying what their pathologies are or what brought them to where they are. Nina - who I’ve recently exchanged emails with - and was always very fond of, I’m actually quite upset about. I’ve seen people headed down unpleasant political paths before and it’s often quite a rapid descent. That’s largely because it generally involves people who live in their heads and need to be part of a community of thought, so once that idea of self and the validity of one’s own ideas - which are, and particularly in these cases, everything that a person is - are under attack, they often tend to double down and stick by the people that offer that validation and sense of community. You can almost hardly blame them for it, given the circumstances. But for the fact that you actually can, because it’s all about choices. Still, it’s a difficult trajectory to change and I get that.
Anyway, this is not really going anywhere, so I’m just going to sign this off to Nina, rather than anyone else here, and say that I’m too fucking old to cancel anyone when there’s a chance of getting them back, that there are better people to hang out with and talk to, better ideas to discuss, better ways to emerge from uncomfortable situations that you’ve made for yourself than chucking everything away. Some of those better people might even be here. Looking at you Eden and a few others.
