When I opened TikTok a few weeks ago, I scrolled up on a video from one of my favorite creators, Alexia (@prettyweirdg0rl), expressing her disappointment with the platform she was currently posting her video on. She explained that TikTok had "lost its magic for her" because she has witnessed the decline in quality of think pieces and discourse. Alexia signed up for the app and made her own content after seeing thoughtful, engaging videos that had migrated onto Twitter. Now, that genre of content is unappealing because of the way people regurgitate information, trying to pass it off as new by challenging themselves to be as rude and acerbic with their delivery as possible.
She notes that TikTok’s algorithm rewards creators who have both “correct” and “incorrect” takes: the right opinions get engagement and views, while the wrong ones invite viewers and other creators to come back at you with equal if not more viciousness. Alexia admits she's been part of this trend at times but criticizes how discourse has shifted. “People don’t engage to be challenged anymore," she says. "Instead, they want academic jargon to justify their views, wrapped up in a sassy, easily quotable, and vaguely insulting package."
About a week later on YouTube, I watched a video from Khadija Mbowe. In the video, titled The Internet is Hateful, Petty, and Run by Algorithms, they open with:
“Can I be honest? Can I be mean? I hate being online these days… Everything is run by nameless, faceless, algorithms run by tech companies whose sole goal is to drive engagement and attention so they can get money and as a result they feed off of people's emotions more than anything; and a strong emotion that gets people talking, gets people responding, gets people reacting every time is anger, is rage, is hate, is all of the things that fall under the pissed off, irritated umbrella.”
They admit that they chose the title because they were aiming for something that would elicit an emotional reaction and motivate potential viewers to click on it. Mbowe sounds beleaguered in the video, which is a huge departure from how I was introduced to them when I started watching their videos in 2020. For years, their videos opened in a bubbly tone, and they’re often singing, but that’s out of the cards today.
They parse out the differences between being a hater and being a critic, discussing why they think being a hater is so much more appealing to people in general. The difference between a hater and a critic, in Mbowe’s eyes, is moderation. Those with consistently myopic, narrow, negative views of everything around them are more haters than they are critics. “Hating doesn’t have as many layers, even if the emotional layers are there. The responses are very quick.” Much like Alexia’s video, they reiterate that hating gains traction online. It’s easier and more popular to hate on something than to think about it critically or even ignore it altogether. Being online also means you can do it anonymously.
But the video that made me want to write this post the most was @tellthebees (aka Josh) TikTok on how BuzzFeed and Tumblr ruined online discourse with the proliferation of personality quizzes in the 2010s. The internet at that time was all about taking personality quizzes, curating, and building a personality online. One of the most prominent personalities on Tumblr – later Instagram and Twitter — was the social justice warrior. The neutrality of the term is lost to time; it’s now a derogatory term wielded by both people on the left and the right to describe someone who is, according to a 2017 definition from Urban Dictionary1,
“a person who uses the fight for civil rights as an excuse to be rude, condescending, and sometimes violent for the purpose of relieving their frustrations or validating their sense of unwarranted moral superiority. The behaviors of social justice warriors usually have a negative impact on the civil rights movement, turning away potential allies and fueling the resurgence of bigoted groups that scoop up people who have been burned or turned off by social justice warriors.”
There were people on the internet, specifically on Tumblr, who were using their platforms to educate others about social justice movements, including the Civil Rights and feminist movements, along with concepts like ableism, fatphobia, colorism, and more. They challenged users to think critically about the history they were taught in school, most of which erased the accomplishments of BIPOC and queer people and the way we move through the world with the knowledge we have. There were other people on the internet who read this information, used it to get into fights online, and postured to perpetually have the moral high ground not only due to their sagacity of social justice history but also because they belonged to the groups social justice movements were advocating for.
Josh calls this “the over-identification of social justice concepts outside of praxis,” meaning that the people online wielding these identities don’t do anything in the real world to advance social justice causes. The identity (nonbinary, disabled, queer, person of color, etc.) is used as a cudgel to virtually beat your opponent over the head with in order to “win” an online argument. This is how online discourse stopped being about simply agreeing or disagreeing with someone’s opinion and started being about coercing someone to agree with you because if they don’t, they’re an ableist white supremacist bigot.
Josh’s video made me want to write my thoughts down here because I had the opposite experience with Tumblr. Reading long-form posts on the site about feminist theory, the Black Panthers, queer history, and how capitalism tries to quash those movements and erase that history from our memories was a catalyst for me choosing to study sociology in undergrad and then cultural anthropology for my graduate degree. I digested and metabolized the information I consumed on social media and I was hungry for more.
But I have to admit something: When I started my sociology course at university, I found myself being underwhelmed at the beginning – particularly during the introductory lectures on theory. I sat for hours dully scribbling notes on Talcott Parsons, Max Weber, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean Baudrillard. I begrudgingly did the readings, some only skimming to find the information I needed for my mediocre essays. My favorite part of the course was the tutorials, where I could hear everyone’s opinions on the readings and share my own.
I also made a huge mistake. Every year, I would ritualistically throw away all of my notes and readers, relieving myself of the burden of very expensive and very useful knowledge, “wiping the slate clean” for the upcoming year. What I naively didn’t understand at the time is that I would need that information later, not only for the duration of my academic career, but also just to make sense of the world around me in general. I underestimated how interested I was in social theory and human behavior. I knew I had an appreciation for it, but I diminished how useful I found that information until it was too late.
I had this mindset because humanities degrees are so devalued both culturally and economically. A sociology degree, for example, seems to offer limited career prospects, and we can’t all become lecturers or researchers. Some people, like Josh and Mbowe, turn to social media and self-publishing, using sociological analysis to dissect pop culture phenomena. Maybe we can even show potential uni students that the soft sciences are cool, actually.
Humanities studies are frequently dismissed because the theories are technically subjective. No one can say with 100% objectivity that Goffman’s theory of symbolic interactionism is true 100% of the time. It’s an insightful perspective that is applicable in an overwhelming number of instances and generally useful for understanding human behavior, but it’s not ironclad fact, which is something the “hard” sciences rely on.
Last year, I wrote about how STEM is eclipsing the humanities. It started with the mindset that a STEM degree is more valuable in the job market; now we’re currently in a phase where technological advancements (the T in STEM) are actively encouraging the suppression of critical thinking – the very essence of English and social science courses. Younger generations are good at making technically high-quality content with great editing and effects, but what about the quality of the arguments and thoughts they’re sharing in that content? Creators and viewers then tap into the unlimited potential of those once devalued, subjective humanities studies, which they think are about just having an opinion with no research or theory. A TikTok user might see a video by a content creator where they share intersectional feminist theory, and it resonates with them. Somewhere along the way, that resonation becomes the viewer’s credentials to speak authoritatively on every feminist issue under the sun. Before you know it, thousands are “yas queening” billionaires and centrist politicians while simultaneously arguing that they can’t actually do feminist praxis in real life because they’re (insert disenfranchised identity here), and how dare you question them.
In Mina Le’s elitism is the enemy of the people, she discusses the play An Enemy of the People, in which a doctor learns that the local hot springs – the town’s sole economic resource – are contaminated. He goes on a lone crusade to get the springs shut down for repairs to prevent injury or sickness, while the local government allays his efforts to get the truth out to the townspeople. In the end, the doctor speaks to the people in a town hall meeting, but he fumbles the bag, alienating the townspeople by veering into a tirade tinged with social Darwinism. She uses the play to make a larger point about the way we as a society, I think in this particular case young people, are interacting with and learning from each other. Le has offered a new perspective in my thinking about how we as writers, users, creators, etc., tackle the issue of growing fatigue in the face of online anti-intellectualism.
Like I said before, technological advancements have shifted the way we as a culture think and learn. But tech is committed to continuing the legacy of moving fast and breaking things. Well, now, things are broken. The tech culture that we live in, paired with a disenfranchised economy, has encouraged a level of DIY education. There are people who desperately want access to knowledge but can’t get it, or have limited access to it, which dwindles by the day as governments suck library budgets dry and pour it into already overfunded police forces, and as we watch affirmative action be clawed back. Then, there are people who have the means to receive a higher education and take it for granted, citing wunderkind dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, who are deemed by some metrics to be successful to the nth degree. If this whole college thing doesn’t work out, they’ll just try the Silicon Valley thing or the influencer thing, no biggie. At TikTok university, you can graduate without doing the reading; you’ll graduate with honors if you’re extra mean about it. I think some people use that nastiness to shield the fact that they haven’t picked up a book from their local library since the second grade or ever used their university login to read even one measly SAGEPub article.
What struck me about Le’s synopsis of An Enemy of the People is that the doctor was right, but the way he went about it was wrong, which is what turns everyone (including the audience) against him. It’s wrong and dangerous to look down on people because they don’t have the same credentials as you. But I think it is equally as wrong and dangerous, as seen recently with the pandemic, to refute and suppress (sorry to use this loaded phrase, gird your loins) facts and logic, especially when the people doing the refuting and suppressing have ulterior, commonly capitalistic motives in lieu of the credentials to match their opponent. Somehow, TikTok and Twitter social justice warriors have managed to do some sort of secret third thing.
As Le laid out succinctly in her piece, “the medium is the message.” You can’t get an exhaustive history lesson from watching Hamilton, you won’t be able to fully learn and understand structural functionalism from a 2.5-minute TikTok, and you won’t experience the joy or satisfaction of reading and understanding classic literature by asking ChatGPT for a summary or watching an “ending explained” video on YouTube. At university, there isn’t anyone more annoying than the person who comes into the discussion seminars and hasn’t done the reading. I was that person from time to time, I’ll own up to it! But at least I knew when to shut the hell up and listen to the people who did.
My theory is that the fatigue and critiques from the creators above reflect an element of dissatisfaction with users’ media literacy (and maybe just literacy in general. Why does no one in any comments section know when to use “woman” vs. “women”? Scary!). That dissatisfaction comes from a lack of couching ideas expressed in short TikToks or even 30-minute YouTube videos in theory, or at the very least, in reading and citing sources. There becomes an unending “why.” The conversation doesn’t come to any natural or satisfactory conclusion because, while the phenomenon discussed is fascinating, there’s no grounded explanation for the behavior, whatever it may be.
When I started my sociology course, my lecturers put a name to a lot of the ideas that I saw on Tumblr, ideas that I thought heavily about after reading someone’s longform post about intercommunal solidarity or critiques of second-wave feminism. In grad school, I wised up about how valuable that information was not only to me personally but to the world at large, even if it is devalued. I got a lot better at reading, which made me better at engaging with my peers and writing my essays. I paid more attention and clocked a lot of hours staring at my laptop, highlighting PDF files of works from Veena Das and Edward Said. It felt like a full-time job, and it was so satisfying. I experienced a deep catharsis releasing questions out into the void and reading the words of someone who sacrificed a great amount of time and care to give me answers. They clocked the hours to be able to speak authoritatively on something, and they were giving me the chance to do the same. That’s not going to happen on TikTok, sorry!
The question or conclusion of what we do about these issues is always the same, pretty obvious answers. On the consumer side, it’s “touch grass,” or spend less time on your phone and more time outside socializing or even inside reading or doing a non-tech-related hobby. On the creator side, you can add slowing down content output for quality-checking purposes, moving toward creating longform content, and creating a healthy relationship with your audience (to the best of your ability) so your mental health doesn’t suffer. Zoe Bee offers some of these solutions in her video essay on the death of media literacy. But she also touches on something else extremely important regarding the fundamental reason why we, as writers, creators, artists, etc., are so preoccupied with media literacy in this current moment:
“Media literacy is inherently democratic because when we’re all more media literate, we’re more open to understanding others' viewpoints, even if we don’t agree with them.”
Bee explains that when we come into conversations with “curiosity and humility and open-mindedness,” we can operate on a level of understanding that allows us to make informed decisions about the way we live our lives and even regulate our nervous systems. As creatives, we help paint a picture for readers and viewers, but as consumers, each of us has an individual responsibility to finish the painting with the resources and tools at our disposal. Learning doesn’t start or finish at university, TikTok, Twitter, or Tumblr; it is a lifelong endeavor. The lack of learning contributes to discontent and anxiety about our world.
I think we also need to call out more instances of anti-intellectualism; maybe a controversial take, but the faux-leftist posturing + the technology boom of the last 10-15 years mean that internet users do not know shame. It might be time to start calling out (or in, your choice) people for not doing the reading (and people who sob into their front-facing camera post-breakup, but that’s a different post for a different time). I’m not talking about people who never had the chance to do the reading for whatever reason; I’m talking about people who had and still have the opportunity to do better and did not. The girl who talked through every lecture2 and is somehow the foremost voice on intersectional feminism on Instagram, the business major or tech bro who thinks he can grift his way into humanities spaces because it’s profitable, the people who uncritically and rabidly defend the Marvel industrial complex.
There’s been a big conversation about all of this on the platform I’m publishing this post on. I guess if you’re a writer on Substack who has been thinking about how to utilize the platform, how it helps and hurts not only your own writing, but the future of Writing™, and writing as “content,” then there is no way around referencing the Substack piece of the summer, Emily Sundberg’s Machine in the Garden. But before we even get to that, we have to talk about its predecessor, The elite capture of Substack by Cydney Hayes.
In her piece, Hayes discusses the “vibe shift” on Substack and how it came to be: Notes, algorithms that suggest random posts to you, the broken, non-chronological order of posts from newsletters you subscribe to, pushing video content on a goddamn writing platform. Substack is adding all of these bells and whistles to a website that a lot of writers specifically started using Substack to get away from. Why? Because this is actually not a website to host your writing, this is—as if founders Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, and Jairaj Sethi are slowly unmasking, Scooby-Doo style—another hollow tech platform. They do not care if you are thinking; they do not even care if you are writing; they care that you are making content. For them. For money. As Hayes writes:
“But it’s false advertising to position this as a failsafe that will ensure that Substack doesn’t end up like the social platforms that ‘make people dumber, pettier, angrier.’ Every tech company starts out saying our product will change the world, and we’ve seen again and again how they turn artists into content creators and end up as screaming content farms where un-nuanced, easily digestible content dominates and corporate interests profit.”
Sundberg’s piece is now paywalled, so I won’t actually be referencing it verbatim; for those of you who weren’t chronically on Substack this summer, I’m sorry you’ll be missing this bit of context, but I’m also jealous you were able to keep your sanity. Instead, I’ll tell you what I noticed about the chatter around it.
I thought the essay was innocuous when I read it. I found it after three days of seeing Notes shaming an unnamed writer for looking down her nose at other writers, proclaiming herself as the foremost authority on writing. I didn’t see her as doing that, but instead making the observation that myriad newsletters on Substack are publishing frivolous listicles and depthless essays, then putting them behind paywalls. She was asking writers to reflect on what makes their work not only valuable but of a quality high enough to charge people money for it.
The other interesting thing I noticed was that a few days after Sundberg published that essay, my piece on girlhood essays was resuscitated with likes and restacks. In the piece, I question why people felt they had the right to snark on the genre, where women were reflecting on their own adolescent experiences and sharing that through their writing. I think that snark came from a place of misogyny and white feminism. I also said most of those girlhood essays were probably poorly written, but imagined those poorly written essays as a steppingstone to better writing or at least a way to process an experience. I ended my piece by encouraging women (mostly young women in this case) to write whatever they wanted and for critics to put up or shut up.
I think some saw my piece as an antithesis to Sundberg’s, quoting lines that pushed the thesis of “let women write.” And while my point was indeed that women should be able to write, it is also important that anyone committed to being a writer, whatever they are writing about, should also be committed to growing authentically in their craft and community. Maybe Sundberg said it a little more explicitly and bluntly, but I do agree with the sentiment. I also think that if we’re going to keep publishing on a platform that continues to develop against our best interests, we may need to grow against it, not with it. I’m not exactly sure what that specifically looks like, but I’m sure we can all workshop it together over a Substack Live or something3.
Right now, I can only tell you what it means for me. It means I’m going to be less afraid to integrate more reading and theory in my work for the sake of sounding boring. I’m going to try to make it Fun and Cool where I can, but sometimes it will just be what it is. And if you’ve ever read Slavoj Žižek or Donna Haraway, you know it just be like that sometimes. It means that it might take me longer to publish a few pieces, but that’s only because I want to get it right. It means that I want to hear what you have to say, so please talk to me in the comments or send me an email. As Beyoncé said (kinda), okay ladies, now let’s get information.
“Neoliberalism, the Far Right, and the Disparaging of ‘Social Justice Warriors’” Communication, Culture and Critique, Volume 12, Issue 4, December 2019, Pages 455–475
okay, yes, this one is personal
Joking! The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, I know this.