Purity for Thee, Convenience for Me! (Patreon)

Note: This is a cross-post from my Substack, arriving here 24 hours later so that there is advantage to subscribing there but no loss for my loyal patrons here. The way my Substack works is that every public essay has a follow up piece under a paywall for the part I wanted to say but either didn’t have space for or, more often, didn’t want to deal with drive-by goblin-screaming by bad-faith internet vultures. This piece, somewhat unusually, follows on from two: Take My Life, Please: The Media's Will They/Won't They Love Affair with American Fascism Prepares For Its Terrible Wedding Night and Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

A little over a year ago, I started this digital space with an essay on, well, digital spaces. It was two months after Musk had taken over Twitter—oh halcyon days of innocence and youth! Everyone I knew, followed, was professionally connected to or wanted to be, whose politics I agreed with, whose morals I admired, all of them were very busy at that moment in time, very loudly proclaiming that they could not possibly stay on Twitter given Musk’s obvious econo-cultural malfeasance and vividly telegraphed nasty intentions.

It felt inevitable. A sorrowing sort of twilight moment. We were sure we’d lose track of each other, because it was just so clear no one could possibly support that new incarnation of Twitter being run into the ground by braying, slobbering, panting jackasses in jackboots.

Because purity is so important, you see.

We simply cannot support anything or anyone who slips up a bit ideologically, even a little bit. There’s no such thing as a necessary moral compromise, don’t you know? No situation ever has or ever shall occur in which a good person might make a politically fraught choice in order to further the cause of progress. Every stance, every word, every action, must exist in perfect virtue, without one single solitary speck of ethical contamination, a thing which a real living human person can definitely do. Every position and policy must hover at the absolute bleeding edge of tomorrow’s most enlightened progressive thought. Doing otherwise will bring fury raining down from the digital heavens. Managing to thread the needle will be rewarded with absolutely nothing, certainly not votes or political support or even a slight nod of acknowledgement.

Because obviously I just can’t vote for Joe Biden. Yes, the alternative is grinding, authoritarian far-right fascism. I feel just peachy about letting that happen (to other people, I literally cannot imagine it ever affecting me, why yes I am the working class proletariat salt of the earth, you’re too kind), but I will not, not ever, NEVER OH NEVER SHALL I check a box next to someone who…has had to suck it up and quietly work with people they don’t like and profoundly disagree with in order to accomplish any version at all of the things I keep saying I want!

AND I’M ABOUT TO TELL YOU ALL ABOUT IT FROM THE PAID ACCOUNT I NEVER DELETED ON ELON MUSK’S CRATERED HEARTLESS NAZI-INFECTED HAZMAT DUMPSITE TWITTER WITH A STRAIGHT FUCKING FACE.

No, no, I hear you. I get it. It was just too hard to leave. So many followers painstakingly collected. So many important accounts still online. So many celebrities and politicians and municipal weather stations. The alternatives never fully materialized or were too confusing or too slow to accrete users, and cross-posting is such a pain, darling.

I know that sounds sarcastic, and, well, it’s not not sarcastic. But it’s also the truth. It was too hard to leave. Those audiences were clawed out of the ether over a decade and incredibly difficult to recreate elsewhere. Important accounts, not just journalists or politicians or cultural icons or your mom, but infrastructurally important accounts pertaining to local government, storm trackers, warzones, emergency services, and every other thing we do actually need immediate information out of regularly, never did leave in any significant numbers for any significant amount of time. Mastodon is aggressively and deliberately user-unfriendly, Threads was launched half-baked by someone no better for society than Musk and never hit critical mass. BlueSky is still in the perpetual dev-friendzone of closed invitation-beta. And cross-posting manually because an emerald-goblin disabled the API and executed hundreds of small businesses for no reason does suck all available ass.

But when I wrote all those sorrowing twilit thoughts about the character arc of the internet, I never imagined for a second that almost no one would actually leave Twitter. That a year later most everyone would still be gritting their teeth through an obliterated user experience and chattering away like they always did, only with more porn in the replies. Oh and turns out it’s apparently even okay to pay for a blue check now! You can even pay and not display it so that you, progressive darling, can benefit without social consequence and there’s no reason at all to every wonder why such an option would exist now but never before!

FUN!

Ha ha joke’s on me! I guess none of it actually mattered! I suppose some of it does, selectively, occasionally, since a whole bunch of folks JUST told me I couldn’t have a Substack because there were Nazis here and they told me that with a Tweet which is SUPER COOL AND FINE! Can’t vote against the biggest superpower the world has ever known falling into theocratic fascism because the State Department didn’t instantly cut funding to an allied country and thus end all possibility of ever influencing their actions on the sage, fully-briefed advice of someone with fifty emojis in their username who’s super sure that would fix everything immediately. But actually, individually, directly out of your own pocket, funding a platform actively being used to facilitate that fascist tsunami of shit apparently should not dent anyone’s virtuous progressive bona fides in any way.

No, I’m sorry, it’s completely goddamned morally incoherent to blow fire at people on our own side who even consider occasionally compromising philosophical principle to serve the greater good, while cheerfully supporting Elon “Intellectual Binfire” Musk’s ability to control public discourse and bend it toward the utter worst in all of us.

But of course I understand. I really do. After all, I haven’t left either. I can justify it all kinds of ways: I don’t engage the same way. I don’t pay. I mainly post on Mastodon these days, and copy-paste-cross-post like it’s 1999. But I’m an asshole, too. The difference being I have zero issue comprehending that life and politics are complicated and hard and no one gets out of either one without grey areas and compromise.

I just fucking can’t with the hypocrisy. TOTAL POLITICAL PURITY FELLOW REVOLUTIONARIES (unless it’s hard or the UI isn’t as good or my favorite comedian isn’t on it lol)! LET US VERY LOUDLY PROCLAIM the next most-radical thing because that’s what gets engagement from both directions! And yes, we’d all like to believe the desire for engagement is only about raising awareness and furthering the cause, but come, come, Mr. Bond, we are not fools. We all know the actual reason no one can really leave Twitter is that so much ego and income relies on it that they personally would suffer without its unique concentration of eyeballs and tattered shreds of media legitimacy.

So all these political voices, big and small, sit there comfortably and tell me what they will and won’t do in November because Biden isn’t perfect and doesn’t adhere to every opinion they have most recently formed, expressed, and monetized (which is not the problem, the internet destroyed journalism as a profession, I OBVIOUSLY am completely supportive of people getting paid when they spend hours upon hours creating the content that allows the platform to make astronomically more money off that content than any single user could imagine) while just willfully making their social studies teachers cry by refusing to entertain even the barest understanding of how the system that runs our entire lives actually works, except to blithely suggest shoving it into a hazmat barrel and launching it into the sun.

Because that’ll help.

But oh, yes, of course, voting for Joe Biden so we don’t all die in a festering corpse-ziggurat of pain that grows ever higher beneath a giant fucking cross somewhere in Florida is just so offensive, but I guess it’s praxis to pay actual non-pretend unrealized fairy gains money every month to support the guy who wants to build the cross as long as it serves our interests!

Because there it is. In order to serve their own interests, everyone understands that sometimes you don’t get to pick and choose too much when it comes to who and what you have to work with—and what horses you might have to trade—to get that done. We all know what electric companies are doing to the environment. Still pay to keep our lights on. We all know Nestle is an organization of pure semi-sentient lightless sludge scraped off the undercarriage of the howling nothingness of the universe, but you and I both know there is or has been a fucking Hot Pocket or Tollhouse morsels or a frozen pizza that definitely isn’t delivery somewhere in our houses.

That’s just life in this world we wrecking-balled into mom-first and we all get it until Democratic politicians have to barter and trade and suck it up and grit their teeth and get down in the mud to do anything at all because this doorknob of a goddamned country would rather stick its face in a volcano than simply not elect comic book villains who smile like they just sucked a migrant’s soul out of their body spaghetti-style.

Republicans refuse to do any of that because they’re those shadow creatures from Ghost and they only want to EAT HOPE not actually FULFILL THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. All that Democratic pushing and straining and forcing yourself to smile and have a drink with all the zipper-jawed giants from Attack on Titan at some Beltway hotel bar so that maybe some of us can cling to a right sometimes, only to get sandblasted into oblivion for every day, by people who suddenly can understand nuance and sympathize with how hard it is to get any kind of message out of the signal-to-noise landfill without engaging with entities that have no one but the void’s best interests at heart, when it’s their message, their platform, their goals at stake.

Every fucking year the morning after Election Day

SO WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU ALL SCREAMING THAT IT’S HISTORY’S GREATEST EVIL TO BE ANYTHING BUT 100% GALACTIC VEGAN WITH YOUR FUCKING MOUTHS FULL OF HOT CHIK-FIL-A?

FROM INSIDE A CHIK-FIL-A?

Nuance exists when we don’t want to reboot our entire online existences, just…not when a basically okay left-of-center human person tries to govern instead of blowing up the entire system on purpose to accomplish nothing.

It seems like everyone gets it right up until the interests being semi-served are those of the greatest number of people possible in the problematic present-day thriving and moving toward more justice, equality, and freedom. Then, bafflingly, the only political party even halfheartedly attempting to do anything at all about that gets no slack or quarter, and the people who treat the suffering of others as a joyful Super Bowl and start making snacks as soon as they hear a child sniffle get a thousand chances to not be horrific clowndicks, keep assuring everyone that is in fact the vibe they were going for the whole time, then another few chances after that.

And then a few more, just in case even one of them ever felt like pretending to have the capacity to understand the most basic preschool unit on sharing and caring.

Spoiler: they emphatically do not feel like doing that, they never have, and the thing high-up conservatives genuinely do love about Trump is that he gave them permission to stop pretending they might. God, that part was so much WORK. What a relief! Looks like the only thing the right really embraced from leftist thought was that everyone deserves to be their authentic self. Whereupon they immediately stretched, sighed, and thought well, I personally am an authentically reeking fucking asshole, so that means repressing myself with basic manners is actually oppression, while wilding out on pure acidic cthulhoid-id all the time is amazing and virtuous and, honestly, really brave of me!

And everyone pretty much nods along, even the left, because we all just want Mean Daddy to love us, maybe.

Because America really loves conservatives. Much like a folder clearly labelled pornography on someone else’s computer, it’s not a pleasant thing to look at and we all spend a lot of time trying to forget what we know. Sometimes I think it’s the final demonstration of generational trauma. Over and over, so many of us run into the arms of ghouls who remind them so much of their mean parents their psyche just drops into a trauma hole and hopes if we can all just be good enough boys and girls (and only boys and girls) they won’t beat us to death.

They will, though. Joke’s on us, they’re into that shit.

And conservatives love each other. That’s part of why they’re such a powerful voting bloc—conservatives don’t do any of this constant political lensing and ostracism. If you’re even vaguely a heartless monster, you’re in the club. Tomi Lahren publicly supported abortion and still gets to play with the other evil reindeer.

But the left loves them too. Oh sweet gravy boat of Gehenna, the left loves conservatives. Because the only time regular average Americans will actually listen to far leftist discourse is when conservatives are following their bliss straight into an acid-nightmare of orgiastic oppression and violence. Then America occasionally pauses, thinks idk maybe a little socialism would be okay? For a treat? then smacks itself in the head, laughs, and gets right back to snarling over its feed-bowl.

Everyone just seems to be on board with maybe letting fascism happen for some reason. Maybe we’re all too exhausted and nihilistic to believe we can stop it. Even though we can, pretty easily.

And that’s why it galls me so much that hardly any leftist voice I follow has actually had the moral rectitude to leave Twitter, and spends their time their judging others for their lack of purity. You don’t need a tinfoil hat (maybe a tinfoil fascinator) to understand that using all manner of dark money to buy Twitter in advance of a hugely impactful election, then breaking nearly all the moderation functionality and opening the floodgates to all the banned goblins had a purpose. That purpose was to turn the “digital public square” into the world’s biggest garbage claw machine where the prizes are cruelty and lies, the claw only works for the owner’s friends, and if you lose, secular democracy dies.

Twitter is and will continue to be a major tool in pushing this election into the darkest timeline possible. And dancing the dance of saying the next most extreme thing because that’s when people finally see you is doing that devil’s party planning.

And I was assured that was exactly why we all had to leave Twitter. Ethically, we had to. We can’t be on any platform that platforms evil, right? We can’t support anyone who steps out of line on any issue, right? Right?

Guess not. GOOD TALK, INTERNET.

I don’t want to hear one more fucking word about not voting for Joe “Actually the Most Progressive President Any of Us Have Seen” Biden from anyone with basic human decency who also maintains a Twitter account. I will, oh we all know I will. But we’ve established they specifically understand no one is perfect, tools are flawed, supporting someone they don’t agree with is sometimes necessary, and when it comes to politics, the lesser evil is often the greater good.

Sure would be nice if they’d stop demanding purity from everyone but themselves.