In the previous entry, I advocated for a “culture of criticism.” I recommended that people establish personal protocols to handle all the nonsense they will encounter when creating content on Web 2.0, nurture offline friendships with virtuous individuals who will lovingly criticize their character and propositions, and develop a taxonomy of judgmental feedback. Regarding my own taxonomy, I identify seven types of feedback, with the first three being criticism, critique, and brickbat.
In today's entry, I'll introduce the remaining four types, all found within the culture war:
On the y-axis, “cool” means having a detached, above-it-all disposition, which signals a sophisticated cultural awareness. Meanwhile, “uncool” is too obvious, conducted by people with emotional reactivity. On the x-axis, “social” means judgment is directed to an individual's social standing, leveraging their fear of social exclusion. Meanwhile, “individual” implies judgment is directed to an individual's psychological standing, leveraging their fear of individual disintegration.
As a rule of thumb, the Culture War Left engages in snark and cancellation, and the Culture War Right engages in trolling and harassment. Yet, this is shifting due to the change in culture war power dynamics since Elon Musk - now the apex troll - purchased Twitter. Presently, participants at both poles of the culture war engage in various forms of judgment. The avatars chosen for the 2x2 matrix mostly originated during the “Great Meme War” of 2015-2016. While all forms of judgment remain active, their intensity has lessened since the end of the “Covid Moment” and following Elon Musk’s purchase.1
Cancel culture2 and online harassment are both real and can be quite nasty. The former aims to cut someone off from livelihood and opportunity networks through social stigmatization and ostracization. The latter seeks to cut someone off from their sense of psychological safety, usually through attacking their self-esteem or, in extreme situations, conveying or outright threatening their physical well-being.
Cancellation targets social opinion, pointing out a person's apparent problematic character or propositions on social media or to their employer. Harassment targets one's opinion of oneself, usually through direct private messages and personalizing hateful comments to destabilize a person psychologically. Both cancellers and harassers want to control the opinions of those they disagree with. Cancellation is the judgment of choice by woke types, Antifa, and whatever psyop is behind The Current Thing. In contrast, harassment is the judgment of choice by extreme circles within the manosphere, incels, and Stormfront-tier white supremacists.
The proper response to unfair cancellation is to become cancel culture-proof by assessing one's platform risk and engaging in memetic mimicry when needed. The proper response to harassment is to increase one's privacy measures and protect one's personal information. However, in the absence of creating an online utopia that eliminates unfair cancellation and harassment permanently, one will need the courage to withstand the pressures of both, assuming they are wisely called to speak the truth that will result in such blowback.
The less harmful and more clever forms of culture war judgment are snark and trolling. The former often gets mistaken for sarcasm, a verbal irony where the speaker expresses the opposite of their true message. Sarcasm, determined by the tone of speech, is commonly assumed to be aimed at mocking someone. However, this is only sometimes the case, as sarcasm has broader connotations. Examples from “yourdictionary” include:
“Well, what a surprise.” (juvenile)
“That's just what I needed today!” (brooding)
“I work 40 hours a week for me to be this poor.” (self-deprecating)
In contrast, snark is a form of weaponized sarcasm, always used to signal one's cleverness, establish imaginary one-upmanship, and create the optics that extreme status differentials exist between the snarker and those on the receiving end of their snark. In essence, it is the mean girls in high school rejecting the dorks, conveyed through the following sentiment: “You are so pathetically uncool, obviously not worthy of my mention, but I'll give you pity by recognizing your pitiful existence.”
The term “snark” comes from Lewis Carroll’s 1876 poem The Hunting of the Snark, referring to a creature which can cause someone to “softly and suddenly vanish away, and never be met with again.” In contemporary society, snark serves as a symbolic means of social exclusion, symbolically vanishing individuals from communion. Those who engage in snark also engage in self-deprecating sarcasm, serving as a pre-emptive defense mechanism displaying false humility to avoid any communal-excluding criticism in return.
Snark is the weapon of choice for Chapo Trap House, BreadTubers, and Decoding the Gurus. The power of using snark in the culture war is its direct assault on people's oversized egos, often found amongst males in the “Intellectual Dark/Dork Web,”3 who are verbally impressive and have opinions on everything. This use of snark serves the spiritual purpose of a jester-esque comedy roasting.
The shadow of snark, especially when it's the primary tool in someone's cultural warfare arsenal, entails an undue attachment to the mean-spirited satisfaction derived from dunking on dorks, accompanied by an underlying jealousy stemming from not receiving the same degree of attention and praise as those they dismiss. However, the more developed snarkers are aware of this, as secular guru decoder
says: “Live by the snark, die by the snark.”Similarly to snark, trolling shows a level of culturally developed savviness far greater than the cancellers or harassers. Instead of pointing out the narcissism associated with a person's dorky attachment to their intelligence, mean-girling them into feeling like a loser, trolls cleverly point toward any phony signaling one does toward being a good person. In essence, they target “virtue signaling.”
Those who move in more arcane circles, such as the druid John Michael Greer and the esotericist Neil Kramer, view Donald Trump, arguably the first “troll president,” as having adopted the archetype of the sacred clown, or the Changer according to Greer and the Heyoka according to Kramer. This sacred trickster always does things upside down: laughs at a funeral, wears a coat in the heat of the summer, and rides a horse backward. The role of the sacred trickster is to inverse whatever moral order holds power by making fun of the seriousness of people who receive a narcissistic supply from appearing moral.
Pepe the Frog, the troll mascot of the culture war, was associated with strange and memetically magickal occurrences during the 2016 US presidential election.4 Culture war trolls using the Pepe meme are today found amongst 4chan, Frogtwitter, and Groypers. Like the sacred clown, the troll's power is the emotional triggering of others, provoking reactive outrage that exposes their moral hypocrisy, aiming to overturn the present moral order.
The shadow of trolling, particularly when it is one’s sole weapon in the culture war, involves deriving a power high from others' unconscious reactions, resulting in cruelty that precludes any redemptive opportunities, not to mention the profound cowardice associated with posting from anonymous accounts.
Snarkers and trolls both convey a sense of sophistication; the former is akin to a digital socialite among the cool kids, while the latter embodies the archetype of the “sigma male,” seen as too cool for the normies. The snarker leverages social shame of not fitting in, and the troll leverages emotional outrage by pointing out internal insincerity. I am focusing on the snarker and troll because they are the most tricky judges one will meet online, especially when one engages in creative public philosophizing, which inevitably leads to political musings.
A challenge: sense into what is more bothersome—snark or trolling? The one that invokes more fear is the one that has a greater opportunity for growth. If fearing receiving snark, there is an undue concern about being socially rejected, creating missed opportunities and invoking toxic shame. If fearing being trolled, there is an undue concern of being intrapersonally alienated, creating cognitive dissonance and invoking emotional disorientation.
Neither is anything to be overly concerned with, as both types who pathologically use such tactics warrant pity and compassion. However, if viewed from a less foolish perspective, snark and trolling can serve as sacred roles to trigger us in the right direction, pointing to our unrecognized parts that need to be welcomed into the whole.
Additionally, snarkers serve as a humbling mechanism for one's egoic attachment to their epistemics, and trolls for one's egoic attachment to their morality. While this is not their present intention, which is unexamined and comes from resentful motives, this is their true purpose. The snarkers and the trolls are here to keep us humble and will sniff out any egoic movements and indirectly purify one’s philosophizing.
Thus, go out there and creatively philosophize, write new intellectual and political treatises, and do not let the crabs-in-the-bucket culture warriors keep our souls down. We can experience their crabby pinching as helpful reminders that we are frequently wrong and unaware of our true motives. Whether such criticism is done in good or bad faith, they both remind us that the real reason we are called to create is a mystery.
I’d like to thank my personal culture war red team -
, , Yuval Dinary - for helping me think through this entry. I still remain uncertain about the social-individual distinction on the x-axis. If you have any critical insights, I would appreciate your comments.For other perspectives related to this entry, here are some posts from fellow Substackers I highly recommend:
“How to Be Unlikeable” by
from“Luxury Beliefs are Status Symbols” by
from“Humor and Humanity” by
from
Additionally, I recommend watching this conversation at The Stoa with
and on “The Nexus,” one of the best framings I’ve seen on cancel culture:Lastly, philosophical inquiry and journalling helps navigate the culture war less foolishly. If you’d like to inquire with me, and sense into your culture war dilemma, you can schedule a call here and read more about my practice here. To join Collective Journalling, become a Less Foolish member and RSVP behind the paywall. You can also show support for my work by subscribing, sharing, or leaving a comment.
What is Collective Journalling? This communal practice happens via Zoom and is 90 mins, with check-ins in the chat at the beginning and an opportunity to connect with fellow journalers in breakout rooms at the end. You do not have to stay the whole time. If you are in an antisocial mood, you do not have to interact with anyone, yet you can still enjoy the coffee shop-esque communal vibe. The session concludes with an optional sharing of a passage in the chat. Most of the time is spent in silence together, individually inquiring about what matters most. A lovely group of people has formed around this practice. The practice occurs on weekdays @ 8 AM ET. RSVP link is behind the paywall.
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