Some Rules for Online Living I Try to Follow
/One of the intellectual principles I find it most helpful to live by is the assumption that most people most of the time (myself very much included) have not drilled down into the root problems of any dispute. An especially glaring contemporary example of this tendency is the relative lack of sustained interest in the effects of technology on society in an age of hyperconnectivity. Sure, you’ll get the occasional back and forth between a grumbler and an optimist — “Back in my day” vs. “It’s always been like this, except now it’s better” — but these disagreements do little to really think through the implications of life under technological rule. That’s why I’m especially appreciative of the work of L.M. Sacasas, to my mind the best thinker about technology we have today. He’s not an alarmist, but neither is he a techno-cheerleader; instead, using the deep wisdom of thinkers like Jacques Ellul and Ivan Illich, he gets at the heart of how technology shapes and reshapes us.
One of Sacasas’ pieces that has most stuck with me is his “10 Points of Unsolicited Advice for Technology Writers.” It’s brief, snappy, and very insightful about the pitfalls writers face when thinking about tech. It’s a bit of an odd choice for me to like, though, since in general I tend to despise lists of rules about writing. This list is a bit different, I suppose, since it’s really more about thinking than it is about actually writing. Anyway, I revisited this list recently, and as I’ve ruminated on it I’ve started thinking, somewhat laterally, about what unsolicited advice I’d give people, gleaned from my own experience, about how to use the Internet and Internet-adjacent tools.
A few caveats. First, I’m not a tech thinker, though I’m someone who’s spent a lot of my spare time thinking through issues with tech. So these “rules” are largely the result of gradual, careful testing and tweaking. Second, as always with lists like these, these rules are not hard and fast. They’re intended as general guardrails, not ironclad corsets. Finally, these are weighted toward my own preoccupations/uses of social media and the Internet, which tend toward books, culture, etc. If you’re just on the Internet to learn woodworking, God bless you (you’ve made the right choice).
1. Drill down deeper.
As noted above, this is one of the plagues we face today; as with many thinking-related problems, this one isn’t exclusive to our age, but has been exacerbated by social media, etc.
You can apply this rule in so many ways. One application relevant to just about everybody: don’t joyously or enragedly share an article that you haven’t read. Inflammatory headlines have a way of, well, spreading like wildfire. Resist the urge. In a related application: don’t take one article as a definitive rebuke of the other side, or a final bulking up of your own position. Beware of posting tweets or cartoons from other people whose basic message is “It’s simple really, let me tell you why I’m right and the other side is wrong.”
2. You Don’t Need to Have an Opinion on Everything
This flows out of #1, and is perhaps best considered as an especially difficult corollary of that first dictum. Because we’re constantly flooded with information about the world, and because 90% of that information is presented to us as AN ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL THING TO BE CONCERNED ABOUT, it’s almost a survival tactic simply to adopt the ideas of whichever side we’ve determined is the correct one. But why in the world should your beliefs about economic structures lead inevitably toward a particular opinion on, say, Britney Spears’ issues with her conservatorship (I’m not falling for your trap, Internet, so I’ve deliberately chosen as my example that rare instance of bipartisan agreement)?
It’s not that ideas are not connected; they often are. But if you assume that because “your side” agrees with something, that it’s inevitably correct, then you’ve shut down your ability to think. This gets more complicated when you realize that a general principle, while correct, might not apply to every given situation. That’s why I’ve reached the conclusion that it’s best to be silent on most things (on social media). Realize that most issues, even important ones, are beyond your ability to reason through. Pick up a few issues of special importance to you and take the time to actually think them through and consider them from a variety of angles. Only then should you open your mouth.
3. There’s More than One Way to Be Wrong
Lest you think I’m going soft in my pre-middle age and going in for hippie nonsense about “everybody being right,” let me offer an alternative explanation for why we should carefully consider alternatives to our own point of view: everyone is wrong, most of the time, but someone else’s wrongness might illuminate your own.
Many, many people struggle with this rule on social media. Simply because you can point out the flaw in someone else’s argument does NOT mean that your own position is correct, yet we consistently act as if DESTROYING the argument of an opponent means that we are the winner and have proven our own position. For any problem, theoretical or policy-based, there are many, many more incorrect answers than correct ones.
What, practically, does this mean? It means that we should spend less time salivating over the wrongness of others, and more time refining our own thoughts (which, yes, means testing them out mentally against the objections of our interlocutors). It means being less hasty to assume that people who are wrong are either hopeless rubes or world-historical baddies; it means greater charity toward others and greater skepticism toward ourselves.
4. Avoid the Snark (and the Catchphrases)
Again, a sort of corollary to rule #3. Here’s one that doesn’t come easy to me, a consummate crafter of bon mots. I don’t actually mean avoid sarcasm entirely, but be more judicious in its use, especially when connected to an actual discussion of ideas. Dripping contempt for your “enemies” doesn’t just make them less amenable to hearing what you have to say (though it does do that); it actually shuts off your ability to think about why you believe certain things and reject others. Even on matters where you are fully convinced, you should have in your brain at all times a blueprint of why you have become convinced. Sneering at people occludes this blueprint and lets us off the hook, intellectually. On an unrelated note, the widespread infection of discourse with snark has led to an aesthetic dullness, where true wit has been replaced by a one size fits all mirthless chuckle. (A rule of thumb I try to follow, albeit stumblingly: a little absurdity or snark can be good in relation to abstract ideas or big concepts, but try to avoid making your target an actual human being).
I won’t say too much about the second part of this rule, as I plan to expand it into its own post at some point. I’ll just say briefly that the trotting out of certain words and concepts as a trump card in conversation not only leads to less productive discussions, but also harms our ability to think in subtle ways. Saying that some random quirk of modern life you don’t like is a direct result of capitalism, or claiming that the new idea you just encountered is “Marxism” (and therefore evil), is lazy, slipshod thinking — the sort that both left and right engage in more frequently (and vigorously) than bathing (sorry, sorry, I’m trying to remove it).
5. Keep Your Fandom in Perspective
This one is more culture-oriented. I’m frankly tired of people on both sides of the divide arguing over superhero movies, tv shows, video games, Tik Tok videos, and YA novels as if these corporatized troughs of slop were good for anything other than cramming your maw full of garbage. Wow, you’re really into Marvel movies? That’s fine, but don’t act like it’s a badge of honor, and for goodness sake don’t obsess over whether your favorite franchise has exactly the same politics as you do. And (doubly so) don’t act like your franchise is some grand carrier of unimpeachable aesthetic value.
Again, I’ll have more to say about this in a separate post, but I come from a long line of respectable cranks, of both the left and the right (Adorno, Dwight MacDonald, W.H. Auden, Iris Murdoch, to name but a few), who see in mass culture a cheapening of both art and discourse. I’m a little more forgiving than some, in that I think it’s generally fine to enjoy items of mass culture (and would be a massive hypocrite if I didn’t). But it’s very important to distinguish between those works of art (to borrow a useful distinction from Auden) designed for easy consumption, and those that have to be chewed over. This is not merely a generic distinction — books good, TV bad — though I think certain different media have been shaped toward ends unfriendly toward significance (and so it would be much harder to create a truly important, lasting television show than a novel, though it’s perhaps equally easy to create a disposable tv show and a disposable novel). It’s about the way that all aesthetic products designed for mass consumption have been stripped of value.
Practically, that means not confusing the two. If I’m watching Bob’s Burgers with my wife after the kids are in bed, or finding excellent iterations of my favorite memes, that’s a perfectly acceptable pursuit. I’ll laugh, and may recall a particular joke days later with pleasure. But it’s far from the same experience I have reading Middlemarch (as I’m doing in prep for Season 2 of the podcast). Not everything has to be the same, and sometimes the strain to make what is essentially a consumable product into something serious and important ends up stripping it of the actual pleasures it should convey. On the political/intellectual point: if you’re getting you politics from a tv show or a Twitter meme or a YouTube channel, or you need those media to parrot back your own ideas in order to feel secure, the battle’s already lost. Bail out and start again.
6. Monitor Your Time
Last for now, but certainly not least. I think most people struggle with time spent online, and understandably: it’s a vehicle for addiction in many ways! There’s no hard and fast rule about number of minutes per day here, other than to say that where you're at is almost certainly too much. The online world is not where we make our deepest connections (though I’m grateful for virtual friends), and it’s certainly not where we do our best thinking or loving or acting. Life online trains us to chase the easy approval, what Auden (him again) called the agreeable wrong.
A few years ago I traded in my smart phone for a flip phone, and it’s a decision I’ve never regretted. I still struggle with being “too online,” but I found that not having a portal in my pocket has helped in many ways. Maybe that’s a step you can take. Or maybe you need an app like Cold Turkey that will block sites for a set amount of time. Whatever you do, take time to be separate from the virtual world, to the extent that you feel its grip on you lessening.