Fivedollarradio - Blog Posts
You’ve hit the nail on the head. While I have a conservative temperament, I don’t agree with a lot of traditional North American conservatism. And yet I’ve loyally read the works of a few conservative writers for years now, because they shared the qualities you listed. They’re able to articulate their beliefs so you can understand where they’re coming from, they try not to caricature their opponents and give credit where credit is due (sometimes), and they have a lively awareness of themselves and their blind spots. (Having a sense of humor about all of this is also a big help.)
I don’t think the solution is to follow a bunch of people from across the political spectrum to ensure that you’re not ensconcing yourself in an echo chamber, but to follow smart people. Period. People who aren’t afraid to criticize their own tribe. People who don’t speak entirely in buzzwords. People who’ve given some indication that there’s a brain in there, not just a collection of ideological talking points.
There’s something deeply distressing to me about how there’s been this steady push over the past twenty years to transform all forms of media from things you can physically buy and use as you see fit into things you essentially rent in perpetuity from publishers and hosting services. It’s like there’s this assumption that we can rent these things forever and never have to worry about the Internet ever going down or one of these digital landlords deciding to take them away from us whenever they want. Movies and PC games are my beat, but I've certainly had to stockpile a number of hard copies over the years due to rights issues or lack of interest keeping them out of the digital marketplace.
“Digital is about access, it’s about sharing,” Schwartz said. “But once you digitize something, suddenly the object is not human-readable anymore—not readable like a stack of letters in your attic. With digital you have to preserve the letter, and you have to preserve the software, and the machine that can read it.”
That means that as technology evolves, the types of data it can read evolves as well. Think about the floppy discs you almost definitely have in a box somewhere—or DVDs, to pick a more recent example. My current laptop doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive at all. I couldn’t watch my Mona Lisa Smile DVD if I wanted to. So you can see how delicate that media is.
Thinking a lot about this since Apple announced the demise of iTunes. One great thing about iTunes was the convenience of digital while still owning a physical library. I spent a good chunk of the 90s building a music collection. It defined me, which was the things worked then. It’s no coincidence that the transition from aesthetic to moral signal occurred alongside the transition from owning a physical to a virtual library. If the things we own can’t define us, then what does? When I was twelve or thirteen, I would have killed for something like Spotify where all the music I could ever dream of was at my fingertips, but there’s no hunt, no sense of personal value.
In Nagle’s defense, Kill All Normies was going to the publishers just as Milo’s star was starting to fall. Personally, I found that Nagle’s discussion of combined with the events surrounding his fall from grace suggested to me that he was ultimately an unknowing “useful idiot” for two parties at once. More traditional conservatives (or at least the more utilitarian ones focused on campaign strategy) saw him as a way to drum up support from a younger, traditionally anti-conservative cohort and get them to vote Republican. Meanwhile, people with genuine racist, white supremacist, or hard-right views wanted to use him both to drum up support from a new younger demographic and to use him as a Trojan horse to inject “alt-right” arguments into the political mainstream. After the election and he had served his purpose, neither of these groups had any more use or fondness for him, so away he went. (I may be speaking beyond the evidence, but I feel like part of the mainstream conservative turn against Milo was due to the fact that, for all their many sins, conservatives actually didn’t want to let potential neo-Nazis into the Republican Party.) As for your main point, I sometimes feel that modern American leftism has a problem with knowing how to criticize but not knowing how to rule. Even in places where leftists are in positions of authority, there is still a tendency to see themselves as rebels pushing against a white patriarchal conservative Other, even when the Other in question is far smaller and less influential than they are. It leads to situations where people are fighting battles that have already been fought and won, or in attacking people rather than trying to persuade or cajole them. (These are very fragmentary thoughts that I haven’t put much concerted effort into articulating, so take everything in this last paragraph with a grain of salt.)
Those who claim that the new right-wing sensibility online today is just more of the same old right, undeserving of attention of differentiation, are wrong. Although it is constantly changing, in this important early stage of its appeal, it’s ability to assume the aesthetics of counterculture transgression and nonconformity tells us many things about its appeal. It has more in common with the 1968 left’s slogan, “It is forbidden to forbid” than it does anything most recognize as part of any traditionalist right. – Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies
Thought it was a good idea to revisit this book. Even though it’s only a couple years old, some of it – the idea of Milo sustaining any sort of status or influence – seems quaint now, but this is what is most disorienting for older leftists. If the right is the underground, the cultural renegades, then we are its moral police, and we don’t do moral policing well. We lose too much by tightening the reigns and saying, “no, you can’t say this… you can’t THINK this.” I lived through the 90s version of political correctness (watch the movie PCU – I swear it’s documentary), and it was customary for even those on the far left to mock it. The left being any kind of moral majority is laughable.