Midweek Update: The People I Don't Care to Know

This XKCD comic lives rent-free in my head:

It’s a familiar experience of being online. We cross paths with people we’ve never met and will likely never meet in real life, and yet the systems in front of us encourage us to engage. Someone is wrong on the Internet.

I think about this a lot because as journalist Kara Swisher noted in a recent podcast, “enragement is engagement.” Websites and social media platforms typically lure us in by being aggravating. The quality of the content is poor, but if you can find someone confidently being offensive to dominant sensibilities, then you may have found a useful revenue stream. While those voicing noxious opinions may choose to brand themselves as “free thinkers,” their material is almost always poorly researched (if at all), weakly supported, and rests on prejudiced beliefs forwarded by a majority faction to argue why they belong as that majority.

These people have always been around, but the Internet supercharges their reach. On the one hand, that is the cost of living in a free society with open platforms. I don’t think these people should be censored by the government; I just believe that they don’t have an inherent right to an audience if the audience has no appetite for those opinions. Where I get irritated is how our outrage mechanisms elevate their voices and further their reach.

I’m not going to name names because you can probably think of any number of examples on your own, and the whole point of this brief piece is to chastise their reach rather than perpetuate it. But the conflict is this: If we don’t criticize these people, they will have the marketplace to themselves and amass followers who are persuaded by their toxic beliefs. However, if we do engage, we have only broadened their audience and participated in the never-ending culture war.

I don’t watch FoxNews or visit The Daily Wire or any other right-wing publication, but its material keeps getting pumped into my Twitter feed by left-wing people with “Look at this awful thing!” It is the online equivalent of Bird Box.

And at some point, I hate that I’m even supposed to look. Not to shoot the messenger, but how vital is it that we elevate these particular voices? It’s not news that an arsonist is in the business of setting fires. News is when something breaks from the norm, and parading a carnival of grotesqueries and grifters in front of me only seems to give them the attention they crave. They’re not here to engage in good faith; they’re here to raise their profile, and pointing them out as odious only serves that agenda. Someone one is wrong on the Internet? Yeah, man. What else is new.

I know this isn’t a particular groundbreaking observation, but my hope is that as Twitter and Facebook fall apart and perhaps new social media sites take their place we can be a little wiser about our engagement. Our outrage is a finite resource. We can’t be mad about everything all of the time. We’ll burn out. We can do better, so let’s forget about those who must not be named not because they’re fearsome, but because they’re tedious.

What I’m Watching

Well, I finally reached my goal of watching 400 movies this year, so there’s that. But right now I’m trying to squeeze in all of the “awards” movies I can before I turn in my SEFCA votes (winners announced on Monday!) I’ve never worked in awards publicity before, but I do think they do themselves a bit of disservice by cramming everything in near the end of the year rather than making a point to spread it out. They all want to be the last thing you watch on the pile, but my pile isn’t based on chronology. It’s based on buzz. If my colleagues are encouraging me to seek out a certain film, then that’s the one I’m going to make time for.

I also watched Avatar: The Way of Water last night. Reviews are still under embargo, so look for my full thoughts in next week’s Midweek Update, but right now I can say I was down on the movie and it looks like I’m in the minority. Oh well. I’m glad other folks are digging it.

Elsewhere, I finally finished watching the fourth season of Formula 1: Drive to Survive, and I think I’ve had my fill of it. It’s not a bad show by any stretch, and I want to see this documentary style applied to other sports, but after four years, the storylines have become redundant: There are young drivers jockeying for seats; older drives are trying to keep their seats; Guenther Steiner is a colorful character who simply doesn’t have the resources to make Haas a competitor. I don’t think I need another season of this.

I also picked Sandman back up again (I had finished the first arc, so had a solid stopping point), and it is a very good adaptation of terrific comic book series. I’ll have more thoughts once I finish the handful of remaining episodes.

What I’m Reading

I finished reading Nita Prose’s The Maid and it was fine. Yes, it’s a cozy mystery, but it does very little to surprise or bewitch. I also feel like it treats its protagonist’s neurodiversity as a bit too childlike, and also seeks to maintain a social order that plagues its main character rather than questioning its oppressive nature.

I’ve now moved on to the graphic novel Lone Wolf and Cub (Volume 1), and it will probably be graphic novels from here to the end of the year if I want to meet my reading goal (I don’t get through prose all that quickly).

For shorter reads:

Ke Huy Quan’s True Hollywood Comeback by Delia Cai [Vanity Fair] - Yes, this is awards publicity for Everything Everywhere All at Once and I deeply do not care. Quan’s story is inspiring, uplifting, and I want nothing but good things for him.

Nicolas Cage and John Carpenter are cinema’s most studious eccentrics by Hannah Ongley [Document] - A terrific conversation between two cinema legends.

How The Muppet Christmas Carol Became the Ultimate Dickens Adaptation by Owen Williams [Empire] - Muppet Christmas Carol is holiday favorite in the Goldberg household. We’ve watched it almost every year we’ve been together and will see it on the big screen this week at the Plaza Theatre.

Why Is Marjorie Taylor Greene Like This? by Elaina Plott Calabro [The Atlantic] - It’s been said by others, but being a GOP politician is really just playing politics on easy mode. You don’t have to build a coalition or study anything. Just find a gerrymandered district, and say the craziest things you can think of to feed red meat to your constituents. To put it another way, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is in a solidly blue district, but she can’t go around promoting conspiracy theories like claiming Bush did 9/11.

Substack Recommendation

This week I’m recommending Alissa Wilkinson’s Commonplace Book. Wilkinson is one of the best film critics working today. I don’t always agree with her takes, but they’re consistently well argued and thoughtfully made. Since I can’t get enough of her writing, I happily subscribe to her Substack.

What I’m Hearing

When I graduated from college, I felt like a major loser. American culture bills the college experience as a non-stop sexual bacchanal, and I didn’t even so much as kiss anyone. Enter Neil Strauss’ 2005 book The Game, which purports to explore the world of Pick Up Artists, but really just proselytizes on their behalf. As a lonely guy who just wanted to be in a relationship, I drifted into this community, annoyed some women at a few bars by acting like a dumbass (I remember a protracted conversation over the stupid hat I was wearing in an attempt to “peacock”), and never got a single date. I then drifted out and now look back on it like an embarrassing photograph.

Listening to this episode of If Books Could Kill about The Game while driving my car made me want to go straight into oncoming traffic from contact embarrassment. To their credit, hosts Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri are sympathetic to rubes like me who were taken in by the book’s promises noting that it’s just generally hard to meet people, and it’s even harder if you’re predicating it on going to bars and clubs. The advice of pick up artists is sociopathic, misogynistic, and to be avoided at all costs, but in 2005-2006 (before meeting people online had fully blossomed and was still viewed as a last resort of the desperate) you could fool lonely suckers like myself in 2006. Anyway, you’ll likely feel less cringe than I did listening to this great episode.

What I’m Playing

It’s Marvel Snap still, but my interest is starting to wane (this article from Kotaku does a good job of summing up why). Honestly, once I’m done trying to cram in movies for awards season and we hit the holiday break, I’m going all in on God of War because I want to get to Spider-Man: Miles Morales before Fire Emblem: Engage and Hogwarts Legacy come out.

Come back on Sunday when I’ll have many thoughts about Darren Aronofsky’s new movie, The Whale.