It was a lingering winter; all the streets
were melted ice and ash, and two young men
fresh from the matinee of Scriabin
stumbled home to stain their Cambridge sheets
and argue over tonal innovation:
Ludwig denied it; David found it quite
interesting as maths—to stop a fight
he turned the topic to a renovation
of their rooms; a year before, in Norway, they
had seen a form of rigorous design,
like a truth-function formed by Wittgenstein
himself—but neither one of them could say
quite what he meant; they passed into a silence
as necessary as it was immense.
The Life of the Mind
The Culture
Culture, Economy, Education, The Life of the MindToday, as Summers notes, the economy seems mostly back to normal — but joblessness is still endemic. Growth simply isn’t producing enough jobs. This is a more severe and more urgent problem than inequality. Moreover, fixing it is necessary, though not sufficient, to making real headway against inequality.
Ezra Klein thinks that the American left—bizarrely, he seems to include the Democratic Party in the category, but that is the least of his category errors, so we’ll leave it be—is overly concerned with the problem of income inequality and insufficiently concerned with unemployment. There is a sense in which he is correct. Too much economic discourse focuses on the narrow caste of people who, because they are mentally disordered, deranged, and in deep need of our pity and the best psychiatric treatment that our doctors can yet provide, waste their lives not in the pursuit of human joy and affection and invention and transcendence, but in the weird, obsessive accumulation of hundreds of millions of electronic credits. “Yes Mr. Lebowski, these unfortunate souls cannot love in the true sense of the word.” Marginal efforts to solve all of our ills by sending the taxman to shake a few more rubles from these sad gangsters are indeed doomed to fail. Most of their wealth is illusory, a product of the speculative machinery of the financial markets, soap bubble wealth, one good solar storm from evaporation.
I mention this because these billion-dollar fortunes are part of the same illusion that causes Ezra Klein and Larry summers to wonder “whether the country’s growth machine [is] so fundamentally broken that adequate demand required credit bubbles.” This is a question? Of course demand requires credit bubbles. Also, what is this growth stuff?
When a society financializes its economy as thoroughly as ours has, growth is nothing but a bubble; it is the computerized manipulation of electronic currency to cause numbers to get bigger. Growth in the sense of extracting more resources and making more things and hiring more people as the population increases is like Manifest Destiny, like the frontier. Eventually, you run out of Indians to swindle and massacre, and all the cars and TVs are made by robots. It’s the closing of the frontier, in the Jackson Turnerian turn of phrase. Economists call these phenomena “gains in productivity,” which just means that the fake pile of fake money that is our fake economy is self-inflating fast enough to make it appear that each little still-employed economic ant makes a larger share of the wealth. You take the big pile of money, divide it by some man-hour construct, and suddenly it appears that few workers are making all the wealth quite well, thank you very much. We need fewer people to make all this pretend money. For all the Tom Friedmans who lament the lack of “skills”—and really, has anyone ever managed to mention what any of these skills actually are, I mean, specifically—the larger problem is demand for workers. We just don’t need that many of you guys.
So Klein’s solution, the broad, technocratic consensus on both the left and the right, is that we need to figure out a way to create more jobs. The Democrats want to over-hire more road crews, and the Republicans want companies to use the windfall of reduced taxes to hire more phony middle managers, and then all that unnecessary employment will make it rain like a cash-heavy bar owner at a strip club. Regardless of the mechanism, though, all these jobs have one thing in common. They are fake.
Well, here is a quote from that congenial lunatic, Bucky Fuller, that’s been making the rounds lately:
We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
He said this in the seventies, so you can only imagine how true it is today. The increased automation of industrial production has reduced the necessity of employing lots of people. A few of us may invent the internet, or whatever, and be free to make our billions and cackle greedily over them in the lonely attics of our tacky mansions. Meanwhile, per Fuller, we ought to just give most people money to go to school, not so that they can Develop the Skills of Tomorrow Today in order to Win the Future against the Chinese, but so that they can do chemistry experiments or read Russian literature or ponder the mysteries of the Trinity or learn to throw pots. If Ezra Klein can make, say, what, a buck fifty—probably more?—to blog, then why can’t we just agree to pay everyone who takes cute pictures of their cat or makes lists of their favorite recipes fifty or sixty grand a year? Thesis: maintaining an interesting Tumblr is more closely related to labor in the classical sense than writing macros as an “analyst” in a Fortune 1,000 firm.
But really, this gets us back to those accumulators of immense fortunes, both individuals and corporations. Because we are addicted to primitive forms of exchange that are probably necessary to the allocation of goods in an environment of actual material scarcity, there is a sense that, by hoarding so many dollars, the very rich are preventing the poor from getting the currency required to acquire the things that they need. True, but in the long term, the solution is to recognize that we are actually a post-scarcity society; conditions of material deprivation are artificial products of the very economic system that is supposed to allocate goods. Thesis: inequality and poverty are failures of the supply chain. The problem is not the hoarding of money, but the persistent connection of money to things that we can easily produce and distribute to everyone without some conniving Whartonian middleman.
As in, Jerk
Books and Literature, Culture, Economy, The Life of the MindDave Eggers’s The Circle has won a lot of critical praise from traditional book-review types and a lot of derisive snorts from those of us—I count myself, somewhat embarrassingly, among them—who have both computers and business degrees for its comic ignorance of how computers function, what the internet is, or how these corporations are created, funded, and managed. But, although it’s easy enough, and fun, to giggle at a book whose near-future information architects say “in the cloud” with the same skittish incomprehension as your mother or your sixtysomething boss; although it’s easy enough, and fun, to plunk Eggers into the dour, self-reverential gentlemen’s club of Twitter-hating Franzens, forever clearing their throats and folding back their broadsheets in the Anglosaxon gloom of a midday liver lunch with the brocade curtains pulled; the less funny, unfortunate truth about The Circle is that it isn’t just an obtuse book, but a bad one: badly written, poorly conceived, and deeply uncharitable.
The main character is a young woman named Mae, freshly rescued from a dull job at a public utility somewhere in the Central Valley and plopped in an entry-level position in the novel’s eponymous Google-manqué. She rises through the company, and although the narrative frequently stops to mete out in actual, numerical detail the various impressive scores she receives on the company’s 100-point internal grading system, our principle experience of Mae via a limited third-person voice that never exits her rather limited head is a skein of never-ending idiocy and incompetence. Eggers clearly set out to write her as a naïf whose unfolding experience and awareness of The Circle both prompts and mirrors our own, but he accidentally wrote her as one of the shallowest dummies you’re likely to encounter this side of a Tom Friedman column; you wonder how she made it out of high school, let alone how she managed to get hired by the choicest tech firm in the world, connections or no.
She wanders around bedazzled by everything, and the prose reads like an unapproved merger of bad Young-Adult writing and SkyMall catalog copy. More skillfully done, this sort of thing might come off as satire, but here it just reads as clumsy writing, and when errors pop up, you can’t quite tell if they’re meant to be mocking Mae’s misunderstandings or if they’re just errors. There’s a particularly odd passage in which, while taking us on one more interminable tour of the company’s campus and all its myriad wonders, we encounter, “Another Circle team [that] was close to dissembling tornadoes as soon as they formed.” Does Eggers mean disassembling? Would that actually make any more sense? Would it be better writing?
Nitpicking copyediting issues is trivial and a little unfair, but there’s a broader problem here, a problem that the giggly eviscerations of Eggers’s internet non-comprehension hint at: the texture is all wrong; The Circle’s ersatzness is . . . ersatz. There are piles of detail—the naming conventions of buildings, the layout of the campus, the many projects that many teams in many departments are working on, etc.—but there’s not the slightest sense that any of these things exist except as convenient ideograms for Big Google Company Doing Big Google Company Things. A really good workplace novel, a really good workplace satire—Then We Came to the End; On the Floor—hauls the essential unreality of working life out of the weird blandness of working life as much as out of the particulars. Eggers famously (notoriously?) bragged that he hadn’t done any research on tech firms when writing this book, which is clearly not true. If anything, the book suggests an unhealthy infatuation with the self-presentation of those very internet companies, all happy-happy people playing ping-pong in the artisanal cafeteria while dreaming up the next disruptive inflection point in human history. Eggers exaggerates all this to a point light-years beyond absurdity, but he never manages to land a convincing blow because his target is itself an illusion.
So a dumb character stumbles through a poorly conceived fictional company until—spoilers—she arrives at her Winston Smith moment and loves Big Brother. Except she always loved Big Brother; her moments of doubt are petty and procedural; she always gets over them, and quickly. She must betray her friend and mentor, Annie, but the betrayal is such a foregone conclusion, so telegraphed, so obvious the moment Annie’s own first doubts emerge that you mostly wonder why it took so long to get there. Mae has already abandoned her family. Oh, and she drives her ex off a cliff, literally. That scene has a quality of slapstick. Intentional? In a book so hasty and thoughtless, it’s hard to tell. Anyway, she loves Big Brother. The Circle has turned—in about a year—into a force of global domination, and Mae is, like, cool with that. Eggers’s ideology appears to lie with her dead ex, but he’s dead, and in any event, his speeches mostly sounded like bad college-paper op-eds. I suppose Eggers made him insufferable in order to make him more complicated, to make the point that unpleasant people and cranks and kooks can be right, too, but the guy mostly comes off as a bozo. And despite living for years now with revelations about government spying and subversion of the online world, about a complex interplay of antagonism and collusion between spy agencies and tech businesses, this is a straight-up evil corporation; the hapless government is just hapless. Mae isn’t manipulated; she isn’t tortured; she isn’t a skeptic converted or corrupted by The Circle’s promise of wealth and power; she’s nothing that would make her interesting, and she doesn’t change. Eggers sets his come-to-Jesus moment in the middle of a megachurch.
But what bugs me the most, and what makes this book worth reviewing as an artifact of an attitude, is the unfair and uncharitable way Eggers writes the rest of us idiots, who appear here only as a vast, unthinking mass eating whatever shit the internet shovels at us out of some desperate, pathetic, mewling, self-worshipping desire to be loved, or something. One of The Circle’s supposed-to-be terrifying slogans is “Privacy is theft.” Well, no. Privacy is respect. But sharing (“Sharing is caring” is another scare-phrase here) is human; the desire to know and to be known is one of the bases of cognition, conscience, and sentience. There’s nothing wrong with lampooning narcissism, and the internet enables plenty of it, but this evident belief that there is something fundamentally disordered about rating your favorite restaurants or poking your friends is a load of snobbish, patrician garbage. If modernity and modernism are the history of human atomization, of the centrifugal forces of technology and economy flinging our communities and families ever farther away from each other, of the dislocation of the human mind and the human soul, then how do we find ourselves in an era when some small part of our old communities—gossipy, yes, and sometimes without secrets, and very judgmental, and yet, because we know them, very often good—can be regained, only to find that many of our writers, who are supposed to be concerned with things like the mind and the soul, hate it, and think that we’re children and fools for wanting it, even if our desire should indeed be tempered with reserve.
I am not a technological utopian. I don’t think that “information wants to be free” is an adequate ideology for the perfection of the human condition. I also don’t think that governments should be in the intellectual property racket, and I think Google and the like ought to be broken up, although I’d probably give them a pass until I got done with the banks. I worry about my privacy, both the privacy that I sign away when I log onto gmail or Amazon and the privacy that’s wrenched from me by the panty-sniffing fear salesmen in the US government. I would gladly eat my own eyeballs before reading another restaurant review on Trip Advisor. I find Instragram slightly upsetting, but I’m willing to admit that’s probably just me getting a little bit old.
But it’s unkind and unperceptive to assume that people’s sometimes ill-considered flight to convenience is a mark of some vast inadequacy. Insofar as we encounter any citizens of the internet in Eggers’s book, they’re a horrifying stampede of gimme-gimme-gimme status-obsessed zomboids who will kill a man through an overabundance of likes. Yeah, well, maybe some of them are just busy moms with long commutes to lousy jobs in a shit economy. Maybe some of them are wannabe reviewers who got one too many rejection notes from McSweeny’s and decided to start their own blogs. Maybe some of them are gay dudes in Russia or activists in Myanmar who find pseudonymity convenient and safe. Maybe some of them just like taking pictures of their fucking food. Maybe some of them were forced to move across the country for work and this is just how they stay in touch. Maybe some of them are uncomfortable with the compromises they make to bank online or e-file their taxes. And maybe some of them are trolls and misogynists and scammers and crooks. But they are, in fact, people, for whom The Circle, in whose sympathies they supposedly lie, hasn’t got any time at all.
Update: I was not the first to this post’s title, or at least, the punchline. Credit and attribution where due.
A Fine Romance
Culture, Economy, Media, The Life of the MindIn our society, anxious self-scrutiny (not to be confused with critical self-examination) not only serves to regulate information signaled to others and to interpret signals received; it also establishes an ironic distance from the deadly routine of daily life. On the one hand, the degradation of work makes skill and competence increasingly irrelevant to material success and thus encourages the presentation of the self as a commodity; on the other hand, it discourages commitment to the job and drives people as the only alternative to boredom and despair, to view work with self-critical detachment. When jobs consist of little more than meaningless motions, and when social routines, formerly dignified as ritual, degenerate into role playing, the work—whether he toils on an assembly line or holds down high-paying job in a large bureaucracy, seeks to escape from the resulting sense of inauthenticity by creating an ironic distance from his daily routine. He attempts to transform role playing into a symbolic elevation of daily life.
-Christopher Lasch, from The Culture of Narcissism
Early in The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch says that Homo capitalus is represented by Robinson Crusoe, in his senescence by Moll Flanders. I like the formulation, even if it implies an ultimate penitence that seems unlikely. Maybe Roxana would be more apropos. The point is plain enough. Both characters are self-reliant, but the former makes while the latter is merely on the make. Well, then again, Crusoe had a slave. Take it away, J.M. Coetzee. All metaphors collapse under the burden of specificity. I think that this one, broadly taken, stands.
Lasch is a great crank. Contempt is the natural pairing for erudition, like a good Sauternes and foie gras. I hold his clunky Freudianism against him because I despise psychology as the pseudoscience of the very “anxious self-scrutiny” that Lasch condemns, but Lasch behaves more like a juge d’instruction than a shrink, and his diagnoses shade into the prosecutorial. If occasionally absent-minded, wandering off to land gratuitous roundhouses on the soft body of “radical lesbianism” and other such mythological pillowcases, his central thesis is sound: bourgeois society is the author of the very things it so “readily” subjects to “moralistic inflation.”
That is to say that in establishing an “etiology” and a taxonomy of contemporary narcissism, Lasch is careful (and indefatigable) in noting that all these narcissistic habits and attitudes are the natural outgrowths and ends of the habits and attitudes of bourgeois capitalism. You might say that’s obvious, and, well, uh, okay. That’s true. No one proposes that hook-up culture or texting or Urban Outfitters or whatever the New York Times and National Review are on about emerged, causa sui, out of the void, although you do find some people, especially on the National Review side of the thumb-worn coin, treating The Sixties like just such a Titan, first god from whom all the rest of our dire modern principalities declined.
Narcissism came out in ’78. Guys, The Free People Store opened in Philly in ’70. Lasch died in ’94. Well, people had been cybersexing each other on IRC since the late 80s. I started pic swapping on mIRC in the late middle 90s, just a few years after Lasch’s demise. To get back to the point of the prior paragraph, most modern moralizers acknowledge in an abstract way that the unspeakable vices of the youth and The Children, Who Are Our Future have history, lineage, and heredity, but they still approach the advent of Facebook with a google-eyed and hilariously un-self-realized crackpot Marxism. Everything represents a Definitive Break With The Past.
Social Networking, the latest broad technological enabler of both cultural narcissism and narcissistic moral peacocking about cultural narcissism is really too large and amorphous for the worriers to land any convincing blows. Newspapers hate bloggers and magazines whine about Twitter, although no one is really sure if these are social networks or New Media Platforms or micro-versions of mini-magazines. Lately, the pearl-clutching has moved on to the universal self-documentarianism of Instragramming and photo sharing in general, the pervasive criticism being that the succeeding generations of Our Society have become little more than gross exhibitionists and voyeurs.
I’m not sure who’s guiltier of anxious self-scrutiny, the Instagrammers or their discontents. There is something pitiable about a system of self-display whose single desirable outcome is approval. Oh, You Follow Me, You Really Follow Me. Look on my works, ye mighty, and LIKE. On the other hand, what is crasser, what could be more tawdry, than a bunch of adults gazing in priestly disapproval at the crypto-nubile attention-seeking of the young people who stand to inherit this wrecked, violent, wonder-less civilization.
The answer is right now composing a trend piece for the Times “Thursday Styles.” Having denied a couple of generations now any but the narrowest alleyway to the material heights that represent the sole remaining source of transcendence and object of veneration, shall we now complain that young people publicly style their lives like Vogue spreads? In a country that idolizes the likes of these assholes, will we regret that kids curate their existence in pale imitation thereof? Isn’t there a certain irony in people who write for wide-circulation publications and go on the teevee complaining about voyeurs and exhibitionists?
I am going to ruin the many hours you spent getting that lousy BA and define modernity for you. Modernity is the destruction of old forms combined with the retention of old prejudices. When I hear you complain about your sons and daughters wasting their time with sepia filters and party photos, I have just two questions: how much do you pay for cable, and are you hiring? Oh, are the answers a lot and no, respectively? I figured.
This isn’t to say that there’s anything to celebrate in Snapchat. I thank the internet for any number of successful, mutually pleasant, wholly salutary casual encounters, but even I think the world has made it a minute too easy and an ounce too cheap to show each other pictures of our genitals. But I actually find, amidst the preening and ersatz editorialism of the Instagram et alia generation a kind of social revanchism that I do appreciate. “Oh, it’s a small town. Everyone knows everything about everyone.” One of the worst habits of our society is its gratuitous secrecy, its capacious furtiveness. What I like about Instagram and Facebook and all the rest lies in the refusal to accede to the fussy insistence that, while it may be all right to get drunk at a party, it is wrong, wrong to let your boss know about it. Or your mom.
What bourgeois society valorizes as individuality and liberty is very often little more than a bland, greedy, nasty little sense of possession. It reeks of monetization. It disapproves of sharing. We have even coined the term: over-sharing. By which we mean something very similar to hastily foregoing the possibility of copyright. No, I object. If we can’t have a better world, we can at least keep in touch.
I’ll Show You The Life of the Mind
Books and Literature, Media, The Life of the MindOne of my fonder memories of Oberlin College was taking a really tough neuroscience class in my junior year. It was an intermediate level course that I had no business taking without organic chemistry and research methods and suchlike; I’m not even sure how I managed to get in. Despite its reputation as a place where the disaffected queer stoner second sons of not-that-rich Upper West Side professionals did independent majors in environmental gender veganism, Oberlin had a formidable undergraduate neuroscience program, and the courses were very hard. And interesting!
While not an intro course, it was technically open to non-majors (cf. me), and the usual lunatic sociologists and anthro kids in need of hard science creds gravitated to it. Although I was an English major, I’d been a big science nerd in high school, and I knew enough to know that I didn’t know shit about shit, so I sat halfway back and kept my mouth shut. Budding sociologists have no such sense or compunction, and they were forever interrupting the lecture on cell receptors or whatever in order to make wild extrapolations about human behavior and what one—I wish I could remember his name; I remember that he was shorter than me, and we may have made out one time at a Soccer House party—invariably referred to as “Society At Large.”
This was more than ten years ago, and perhaps in the intervening years the state of the art has advanced and propounded a psychohistorical theory of the mind, but I rather doubt it. The giddy extrapolations of popsci writers from Brooks to Gladwell are so deliriously just-so, and the idea that the evolved architecture of the human mind has something to say about whether a human becomes a Democrat or a Republican so completely bonkers . . . Well. A dog evolved to be a remarkable omnivore, but it eats shit because she’s hungry and the shit is there, if you know what I mean. When a writer comes bearing a PET scan and a bill of particulars, you have the right to remain skeptical. It is probably a con.
I don’t know that I ever read any of Jonah Lehrer’s New Yorker pieces, but I did read Proust Was a Neuroscientist. You will not be shocked to learn that Proust was not, in fact, a neuroscientist. Proust was an astute observer of human behavior and a meticulous reporter of human sentiment. Somewhat later, some scientists described some natural, physical phenomena which may partially give rise to certain behaviors and sentiments. Lehrer, like a good popscicle, proposes that Proust’s observations somehow pre-post-retroactively anticipated the discoveries of modern neuroscience. You see the logical fallacy. It’s like claiming that Hebrews 11:12 anticipated the Hubble Deep Field.
What does neuroscience have to say about the fact that it was fake Bob Dylan quotations and a habit of cribbing from his own work that got Lehrer marked as a fraud rather than the fact that his writing was total bullshit? His books and their theses were fabricated, and through them he became a public intellectual. Then he lazily rehashed some blog posts and misattributed some guidance-counselor pabulum about creativity to Bob Dylan, and for that you’re upset about his still commanding $20K speaker fees? Listen, for $20K, I would be happy to tell you that “our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reason and the precise mix depends on the situation.” Hush, girl. You don’t say.
I am in danger of violating my own best dictum here: never begrudge another man his successful scam. Lehrer and I are nearly exact contemporaries. While he was constructing this elaborate and profitable ruse, I was being a Cool Kid and going to openings and hanging out late and putting off finishing my novel. Now, even disgraced, he commands a single speaker fee that’s bigger than my whole advance! (Dear WW Norton et al., I am not complaining. Love, Jacob.) This is because America prefers a fiction that purports to be true rather than truth expressed via fiction; it is why Proust Was a Neuroscientist is more palatable than Proust. And Lehrer is certainly very smart, smart enough to understand the profit potential in a well-coordinated campaign of public semi-abasement. Y’all are just jealous that he got there first.
Journalism—the neologism-profession that Leherer stands accused of mispracticing—is one of those items of modern life that’s always more sinned against than sinning, and that oughta tell you something. Its arcane professional conventions have the malleable orthodoxy of a child’s game, both infinitely changeable and totally inviolable, lest someone or other throw himself into the wood chips and start bawling. Lehrer was a lousy writer, and that merited success and accolades, but when it was discovered that he was unprofessional, the collective moral conniption commenced. What does that tell you?
Jacob Bacharach’s next book, entitled Physician, Heal Thyself, examines how the words of Jesus Christ anticipated some of today’s most challenging medical and public policy problems.
Heloise and Abelard
Justice, Media, The Life of the Mind, War and PoliticsPartly because he was a good sport in the comments, but mostly because I can’t turn down an opportunity to take potshots at psychology, I want to say a few things about Joseph Isenberg’s comment on my recent Bradley Manning post. Post here. Comment here.
1. Trans. Ishun?
I never did drag, but one year I went to the Oberlin College Drag Ball as Hegemonica Preshun. Get it? Anyway, what? Oh. I’m going to use the masculine pronoun to refer to Manning. That’s probably wrong, but I want this to be easy to read. Apologies in advance.
It does indeed seem clear enough that Manning was troubled when he began to believe that he was transgender. A lot of his interlocutors, both supporters and oppressors, read into this some sort of grievous psychic trauma and mental break. “Troubled” is the euphemism either way.
But if we’re honest with ourselves in our own personal recollections, we recall that we experienced all sorts of developments in our persons and personalities as agonizing and troubling and traumatic, especially in our adolescence, which Manning was barely out of, if out of at all. Adolescence and young adulthood are a ceaseless, battering storm of psychic catastrophe . . . to adolescencents and young adults.
In fact, what’s remarkable about Manning is how swiftly he moved from the sense of world-ending dread in his realization to mature acceptance, from gloom to planning the surgeries and picking a new name. This occurred over a period of months while deployed in a war zone, while engaging, allegedly, in a massive act of heroic disobedience. What this suggests is not a “troubled,” depressed, immature, confused, ravaged young man, but rather a young man of extraordinary poise and self-possession–a person who over the course of just a few months in the most trying of conditions could come to a reasoned conclusion about altering one of the two or three characteristics that the broader society considers the most fundamental and unchangeable of your character and your being.
None of this is to say that Manning didn’t experience doubt, anxiety, fear, frustration, depression, and dread. He did, and he says so candidly. But we all experience doubt, anxiety, fear, frustration, depression, and dread. We experience them all in much less trying circumstances. We’re just worried that the boss might check up on our progress on that sales report, or whatever, or that our boyfriends are spending a little too much time on grindr “just to laugh at the profiles.”
What distinguishes Manning is not his self-doubt, but his self-possession.
2. ASL? Into?; or, The Anonymizing Influence of the Barcelona Chair
Because I grew up in the great flowering era of the chatroom and cut my fag teeth on mIRC back when AOL M4M was as distant as Skynet, I can’t understand the astonished commentary that springs up around the fact that Manning made a “tortured confession” to some dude on AIM, or whatever. I am sure I made many tortured confessions to any number of fat weirdos and priests and pic collectors posing as cuteboi81. If Manning had made his confession to some shrink he’d never met before, would that be so weird? Why? What about the transactional nature of that relationship makes the act of confession less absurd? They’re based on the same principle: it’s often easier to talk to a stranger, to confess through the lattice to the robed and hooded man.
And anyway, Lamo wasn’t a stranger. You’re buying into a pretense! You’re falling for the same con that ultimately snagged Bradley Manning. Forget your anachronistic feelings that These Kids Today and Their Instragrams do not have real friendships. Online relationships are real. They’re just epistolary. Manning considered Lamo a friend. Forget all that “I can’t believe I’m telling this to a stranger” shit. You just don’t understand how young gay dudes flirt and interact online. They’d chatted, flirted, got acquainted, talked about all sorts of things. It wasn’t anonymous at all.
Except that Lamo was a liar and a con man. If Manning were just some dude and a talented con man had insinuated himself into his life in order to rip him off, would you blame Manning for trusting someone anonymous? Of course you wouldn’t. You might suggest that he’d have to learn some hard lessons about trust, but you’d blame Lamo, the perpetrator of the deception, and you certainly wouldn’t read some kind of psychopathology into the nice, trusting young kid who got taken in by the scammer.
3. Yeah, But His History of Depression, Dude
When I hear the word depression, I reach for the nearest beverage in order to do a spit take. Was Manning depressed? Probably. But the DSM is next to the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the US Code in its titanic indifference to that which is actually human.
If every human behavior is the end outcome of some diagnosable disorder, then we are automatons. Do depressed people lack moral agency? Does “gender dysporhia” attack conscience along with cock and cunt?
As soon as some supposed mental illness enters the picture, sentience gives way to subroutine, and suddenly the great mystery of the human mind becomes a flawed decision tree diagram. People’s straightforward actions are imbued with a weird moral laxness; their convictions are suddenly “complicated”; their simple story suddenly not the “whole story,” and their motives suddenly in question.
Jacob Bacharach 