Weaponized Moods, or ‘Twitter as a Nightmare We Will Never Wake From’
When I was fourteen I bought 'Philosophical Investigations.’ It’s a book that’s famous for three things apart from its ideas about mind and language: 1) Nobody that reads it can deny that Wittgenstein was probably the smartest person that has ever lived. 2) Nobody that reads it can deny that Wittgenstein was probably the purest person that has ever lived. 3) The book says that if you disagree with anything in the book it’s because you are confused or lying to yourself. I spent most of the year between fourteen and fifteen reading it and crying and throwing it at the wall and hiding it around the house hoping I can’t remember where I put the book. The internet is harder to hide underneath the sink, and though there may not be a Wittgenstein on it it’s full of people that perpetually make me go 'this person isn’t stupid or corrupt, I can tell, and they’re saying you got to be stupid or corrupt to disagree with them, and only someone stupid or corrupt would say a thing like that if it’s not true, and even if I’ll tell myself that I agree with them I’ll know I don’t really agree with them, and even if I tell myself they’re stupid or corrupt I’ll know they aren’t really stupid or corrupt, so really the best thing is not to be born and the second best thing is to die soon.’
When I was fourteen I bought 'Philosophical Investigations.’ It’s a book that’s famous for three things apart from its ideas about mind and language: 1) Nobody that reads it can deny that Wittgenstein was probably the smartest person that has ever lived. 2) Nobody that reads it can deny that Wittgenstein was probably the purest person that has ever lived. 3) The book says that if you disagree with anything in the book it’s because you are confused or lying to yourself. I spent most of the year between fourteen and fifteen reading it and crying and throwing it at the wall and hiding it around the house hoping I can’t remember where I put the book. The internet is harder to hide underneath the sink, and though there may not be a Wittgenstein on it it’s full of people that perpetually make me go 'this person isn’t stupid or corrupt, I can tell, and they’re saying you got to be stupid or corrupt to disagree with them, and only someone stupid or corrupt would say a thing like that if it’s not true, and even if I’ll tell myself that I agree with them I’ll know I don’t really agree with them, and even if I tell myself they’re stupid or corrupt I’ll know they aren’t really stupid or corrupt, so really the best thing is not to be born and the second best thing is to die soon.’
I get it the worst when I find some online-famous school of thought or art or politics or style ridiculous for its myopia but then learn that friends I love respect it, and I spend some time with it and I discover it articulates things no one else articulates, and these things are so real once they’re articulated, and the people who see these things best, whom I’m dependent on to give me the articulations of these things, are adamant that you can’t bring considerations from outside the world that they’re articulating to the conversation (or the conversation in your head). It feels at a real fundamental level like I can’t, not even in my mind, access the insights without taking up their terms, and I start crumbling into nothingness. And I’m not only talking about cultural-critique or avant-garde or Marxian or Wittgensteinian or social-justice types – try telling a Utilitarian that donates 90% of her income to economic development charities that 'autonomy’ or 'liberation’ or 'community’ or 'creativity’ or 'justice’ or 'respect’ are irreducibly important, you will feel so dumb. Dumb in the old sense, even. Like your words are trained defensive barks that don’t refer to anything. Before the twitter era this would happen to me maybe once a year but now it happens two three times a week. Twitter’s a damn sky full of black holes.
I think it has something to do with moods in the Heidegger sense – like, phenomenologically basic prisms that disclose some aspects of the world (or of experiences or of ideas or whatever) and foreclose some other aspects that are salient in other moods. When faced with extreme arguments from somebody that powerfully channels a mood, counter-arguments that aren’t immanent to that mood turn to ashes in your mouth. You still believe the things that you believe but you can’t find a reason for believing them, because their roots are all in parts of your experience that aren’t in the world this mood discloses, so your beliefs become this grotesque alienating fact about yourself. And twitter’s lousy with powerful oracles of new moods talking at you all at the same time, from every direction, and a lot of them of have something real and new to show you – it can be consciousness-raising on a bad dynamic, or revealing a new type of humor, or discovering the beauty of top 40 pop, or a new way to be self-critical – and most of them work the most cutting, narrow possible mood that will show it. A feral mood that unshows everything else, cuts off your access to anything else. So if I ever get a flash of 'oh that’s actually really cool’ when I’m hate-reading some recently trending radical, whether political or not, I’m ready to text [reducted] asking if she has Xanax to spare.
(Trying communication in these contexts has gone mostly just exactly like the conversations in my head – I think that twitter conversation’s actually a good representation of what conversations that aren’t wholly positive are even possible within the literary/intellectual/activist world right now. Tho obviously there is a two-way feedback process between the centrality of twitter and the transformation of the literary/intellectual/activist scene into something for which twitter’s necessary and sufficient: Mood’s the only intellectual content that you can communicate on twitter, so you’ve got to make a mood that’s cutting enough to take over the jobs arguments used to be for, and, mutatis mutandis, twitter’s everything you need once you move on from arguments to weaponized moods.)
But then again I don’t know that there’s any other way, and I don’t know that it’s not worth it.