February 2019.
My regard for Eric Alterman cannot be higher. When he took aim at Facebook for its exploitation of users’ data, it was an opportunity to roll out a short-form version of my spiel on social media. On this topic, consistency is categorically not the hallmark of a hobgoblin-infested small mind.
Here’s Eric Alterman’s article:
Eric Alterman, “The Social Menace,” The Nation, 28 January/4 February 2019, 6 (www.thenation.com/article/archive/facebook-spies-alterman/).
Here’s the unpublished letter:
Thanks to Eric Alterman for his incisive assessment of the arrogance, avarice, and mendacity of Facebook’s top executives and of the platform’s toxic impact on the nation’s politics.
Equally troubling is Facebook’s sociocultural effect. Years ago, a friend – a recent Facebook hire – pressed my wife and me to join the nascent social media behemoth. I demurred because the enterprise seemed narcissistic, an invitation to drown in the trivial. My Facebook-free existence has been in no respect inimical to personal fulfillment. Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of boundless “connectivity” paradoxically leaves people atomized as, stricken by “fear of missing out” and grasping for “likes,” they tap, tap, tap and curate their lives for a faceless electronic throng rather than living them. Immersion in social media is not inherently bad but there are so many better things to do.
April 2021.
This existential question begs to be the first matter addressed on this blog because, by all rights, this blog should not exist. I’ve been called a Luddite and that’s fair enough, if the charge targets my insistence that neither the laptop nor the cyber realm become master rather than servant. My low regard for social media is the corollary to this.
A decade or so ago, My Better Half and I shared a pleasant lunch with a pair of marketing consultants at Facebook who were ultimately hired by the tech behemoth and prospered there. They made the case for our opening accounts by emphasizing the value of “connection.” I told them that the project struck me as narcissistic. They were taken aback and offered no good riposte. This “connection” they lauded seemed to me ersatz, cold, sterile, quasi-anonymous. My assessment of the medium has not wavered in the interim. I have never been on MySpace, let alone Facebook or Twitter, and suffer no feeling of deprivation. Blogging, likewise, has held no allure for me. The master-servant thing makes the compulsion to post materials frequently a dire prospect to contemplate. So, I’m a reluctant, nearly accidental blogger.
What changed my mind? The country’s disconcerting, disquieting, disorienting politics has much to do with it. To whatever degree someone whose formative years were passed in the Bluegrass can be considered Southern, I’m a Southerner whose political leanings tend toward progressive populism. For me, as for many, the ascent of the Orange One to the White House in 2016 was a watershed. His term in office, if nothing else, was clarifying. The rot in the American political system, already evident to any thinking person, was made manifest for anyone caring to look. One of its political parties has descended into an intellectual void, its leadership bordering on collective sociopathy, its contempt for one-person, one-vote democracy undeniable and even flaunted, and its raison d’être stripped to bald retention of power. Then there is the other party. It long ago lost its way. It strayed from its roots and compromised its values. It forgot whose interests it was supposed to serve. It became paralyzingly feckless, fearful of its own shadow. His Orangeness’s reign revealed just how long overdue is the day of reckoning for the neoliberal consensus that has shaped American political life for a half century and has benefited the few while immiserating the many.
With The New and Now Former Occupant came the deluge: trampling of democratic norms, bullhorn bigotry, open and seemingly joyful corruption, brazen nepotism, clownish authoritarianism. Like many, I was “activated,” determined to do my small part, whatever was within my scope, to push back against the depredations of the Trump regime. I attended marches and protests, such as the Tax March in Washington, DC, in April 2017; a counterprotest here in Richmond in September 2017 when the “New Confederate States of America,” a sad, ragtag band of neo-Confederates, made an appearance at the Robert E. Lee statue on Monument Avenue and just as quickly cravenly decamped; a protest in Richmond’s Capitol Square in June 2018 against The Xenophobe-in-Chief’s immigration atrocities; or a rally in front of the Richmond’s federal courthouse in November 2018 to demand the continuation of the Mueller investigation after the jettisoning of the vile Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. Had I accepted an invitation from the Richmond Peace Education Center to jump on the bus, I would have been in Charlottesville in August 2017 when Heather Heyer was murdered by a neo-Nazi loon. And I began to write letters to the editors of some newspapers and magazines and put together a handful of opinion pieces.
When these odds and ends began to reach print, The Better Half commenced a full-court press for me to start a blog. She has always been my unquestioning and unflagging supporter – the exaggerator of my virtues and the minimizer of my defects. She has also been my self-appointed publicist and forwards whatever I write to friends and acquaintances. She claimed from the outset that people wanted to read this stuff; I had and still have doubts about this. The rationale for my deafness to her pleas was that blogging would be tantamount to preaching to the choir, that the readers would be people predisposed to agree with me. The only reason to write was to reach those who disagreed. Print newspapers and magazines were the best media for this.
Then She Who Must Be Obeyed – thanks Rumpole – made a compelling argument. She reminded me about my submissions that never saw the light of day. Truth be told, some of these “misses” are more interesting than the “hits.” A blog can be a place for any genuinely interested people to have a look at them, a repository, an archive. For someone by nature and education archivally minded, this has an appeal. I also discovered that creating a blog is neither difficult nor expensive. So, Joanna darlin’, you wore me down. You win on this one and, whatever becomes of it, it is largely for you.
July 2021.
A season has passed since my original drafting of the remarks above. In the interim – in the interstices scattered through the requirements of quotidian existence – letters to the editor and old essays were resurrected from the bowels of my laptop, introductions were written, photos and images were scavenged, and blogposts were assembled. During this final week of July, the website will be coming to life and initially will contain more than seventy posts, a small mountain of content. This is probably not how these things typically begin, though I’m no aficionado of the form and am happy to be corrected on this.
As the blog – ugh, what a wretched neologism – is becoming public, the pangs of hypocrisy I’m feeling are perhaps unavoidable. The finished product seems narcissistic and it’s fair to ask how deeply I’ve become mired in the navel-gazing tarpit that is cyber realm. Then again, how could the endeavor not assume narcissistic contours when the task was to revisit, organize, and comment upon what I’ve thought and written about over the past few years? Be that as it may, the project was a spur to introspection, so it couldn’t have been devoid of value. Whatever the case, it’s time to push the launch button.
A Word Regarding Copyright and Paywalls.
Reluctant to offend the gods of copyright, I haven’t included the texts of letters and essays that were published and instead have given links for their online versions. Some items may be hidden behind paywalls, though most should be accessible. Since I’m bibliographically minded, full library citation has been included for the locations of letters and editorials that have appeared on the printed page.