I feel called out by Hotel Concierge, but at the same time, I’m starting to see through HC’s and Scott’s respective writing styles.
HC is easy. HC is channeling TLP.
Scott writes in fits and starts, and in the latest flurry he started to cut corners that laid bare the ever-same skeleton of his essays, and then he wrote posts that were just a single idea, without any additional scaffolding.
Once in a history test I wrote a nested outline at the beginning of my essay on the causes of World War One. I should have completely erased it, because I did not finish the structure in time, so I just crossed out the outline and skipped two sub-headings. My teacher knew what I had left out, and deducted points accordingly. To this day, I’m certain if the outline had been completely unreadable, not just crossed out, I would have gotten a B instead of a C. I’m not bitter about this after all these years, but there was a lesson to be learned, and I learned it: Do not make the negative space in your concept map too obvious if you want to impress people. The systematising mindset is not your friend here.
HC has ten good ideas in five posts, but only six if you don’t count duplicates, and none of these are new, not even the duplicates. I think I’m being so hard on these people because the quality of their ideas fluctuates wildly, while their writing stays the same. My writing fluctuates too. I am not a wooden persona. I am a real boy.
I think there’s a lot of similarity in the writing styles of hotelconcierge, kontextmaschine, raggedjackscarlet, TLP, and to some degree balioc (though quality varies widely.) bal said it could be called “working class intellectual”
It’s writing that’s completely secure that the author has no need to convince you, you’re here to listen or not and that’s not their problem. It’s cynical about almost every political movement, and looks at internal sources of happiness rather than external. And it’s built on a foundation of a lot of non-topical knowledge, that makes for entertaining stories and feels less caught up in the current culture wars.
Man thinking of myself as “working class intellectual” feels all kinds of wrong, not least ‘cause in cultivating this highhanded writing voice I always thought of it as aristocratic
Though university graduate/Wikipedia-dwelling essayist Karl Marx was pretty much this exact type and if that guy doesn’t count
The concept of the “organic intellectual” might come closer, distinguishing self-selected types analyzing things as they are experienced (particularly from their structural position in society) from the credentialed intellectuals committed to The Discourse as an interpretive lens and peer group
Honestly though, “accumulating a broad store of non-topical knowledge from here, there, abroad and ago, so that you can bring it to bear on society today” really was the point of the liberal arts tradition and the public intellectual, and if it seems so alien today maybe there was something to all the fears of their decline
I agree with the last paragraph here.
This is relatively boring as levels of analysis go, but I think the common thread here is a certain response to the nature of the blog format: short-form, but with a self-selecting audience. You don’t really have enough time to present a detailed analysis of a suite of examples (the way many academic books do) – if you did, you wouldn’t put that piece of writing on a blog. So your examples have to be quick and to-the-point, like in an op-ed.
But unlike an op-ed writer, you aren’t constrained by the boss’ demand that you be comfortably readable to a wide audience. So how do you give your examples more idea-motivating force when you can’t go into depth? You make them obscure (so the reader says “wow, I didn’t know that and it startles me, so maybe there’s something to this idea”), or lay them on very thick so the reader has the feeling that numerous disparate cultural stars are being revealed as part of one constellation.
Hotel Concierge and TLP are frustrating to me because they lay on the references very, very thick even when the underlying concept is often simple and/or banal. The implicit argument is something like “dude, if you were aware enough to juggle all these worldly things in your head at once, you would agree with my interpretation.” So you try to juggle them, and it’s a little dizzying, but there is the nagging feeling that the interpretation came first and the references are textual adornments, intended to have just this dazzling effect.
There is a legitimate, nontrivial way to use seemingly disparate examples to briefly illustrate a concept – namely, “this concept makes sense of all of these things, which suggests that it’s widely applicable.” SSC at its best does this. But SSC also sometimes tries to generate argumentative force by mere piling on of examples – like when a large number of hyperlinks in a short space is used to argue “this happens all the time.” (They may really just reflect one of those mini-manias that are always afflicting writers on deadlines – if there is one thinkpiece saying a thing, you can bet there are ten, or will soon be.)
I’m sure there are historical examples of similar forms? (“Pamphlets” in 18th/19th C?) Marx again seems relevant – there is something familiarly “internet” in the way he would figure out his beliefs by yelling at people he disagreed with (cf.)
In my “Why are nrx blogposts >10,000 words long?“ list of influences, I had a group of miscellaneous people I could not categorise properly. Are Eric Hoffer and Jane Jacobs “working class intellectuals”?
…yes. Absolutely.
I mean, way more than any of the bloggers listed. Hoffer is pretty much the archetype of “working-class intellectual.”
[Note how, for example, both of them were actually embedded in the working class rather than in the academy when they did their most famous writing.]