The identity line
The other day Zeynep Tufekci made this observation on Twitter:
Twitter incentivizes nut-picking — select the craziest, weakest version of the argument of the opposing 'tribe' to debunk to cheers from your own. This can cause people to lose the argument broadly when the public eventually encounters the non-crazy version.
Based on my experience of my timeline, that seems right: I see a fair amount of quote-tweet dunking on people I've never heard of, sometimes blue checks, sometimes random people with ape avatars. Twitter generally has a leveling effect on profiles, making everyone seem equally dunkable. The sense that everyone is voluntarily putting themselves out there in search of some form of ego gratification seems to authorize a "public is public"/"everything is fair game" attitude or alibi for scoring easy points at someone's expense in front of an audience they never intended to speak to.
But it may often be the case that the "nuts" that are getting picked are deliberately setting bait, in hopes of having precisely the effect Tufekci describes. They are agitators, hoping to dupe others into retaliating, throwing them off their game, making them lose sight of the larger stakes. In reacting, the dunkers come across as dismissive, myopic, or in bad faith, punching down and in danger of coming across as fatuously complacent, eager to preach to their choir. In other words, dunk bait is an attempt to get dunkers to reveal their supposed elitism as well as everyone who "cheers" them by liking, commenting, and retweeting. It's meant to draw ideological opponents out and have them reveal themselves in an unflattering light, posturing for their in-group. It seems to reveal ideological conviction as nothing more than an identity line, a tribal ritual that is more or less arbitrary in its content — beliefs are just the uniform your team wears, the pretense for rooting for them and against the others.
The most obvious place this occurs currently is in discussion of crypto and web3; crypto shills make clueless, cringey assertions that soak up critique and recast it as the reverse image of their myopic "wagmi" optimism: It becomes "FUD" (fear, uncertainty, doubt) that anti-crypto people are said to be selfishly married to, against crypto's supposed promise.
Once the discussion about crypto is cast in those infuriating terms, critics have fallen into the trap in which crypto is a proxy for "optimism," and you are either for or against the future, on the basis of an emotional allegiance or personality disposition. It no longer matters that crypto is an environmentally destructive extension of the exploitative mechanisms of financial capitalism: The question instead is "Do you want to be one of those people who seem mad and outraged all the time, or do you have an open mind?"
A similar process has played out with the pandemic: Are you going to let the pandemic run your life forever? Are you going to be one of those nannies who tells everyone around them to be more afraid and to make more sacrifices? Or are you going to be open to the possibility that we can actually move forward?
This condition is sometimes described as "post-truth," in the sense that novelist Pankaj Mishra uses the word in this assessment, from a recent London Review of Books piece: "The post-truth age has dawned murkily in a chasm: between the way an elite represents the world in which it is flourishing, and the way ordinary people experience that same world." As some of the commenters on Tufekci's post note, Trump effectively deployed the agitator strategy to solidify and capitalize on that divide, acting the clown to make his opponents look like hysterical reactionaries when they responded to him, garnering for himself a reputation for "telling it like it is" that somehow remained untarnished by the cruel, crude, and absurd things he would actually say.
Mishra writes, "One damaging consequence is that many more people today are willing to suspend their disbelief in the malign fictions of far-right demagogues, podcasters and YouTubers. Corrective modes of knowledge that rely on new enquiry rather than log-rolling and confirmation bias have yet to become authoritative." But what "corrective modes" does he mean, and who really wants to be corrected?
It would be great if there were some other way to convince people that didn't rely on "log-rolling" (an exchange of favors that treats "belief" as something provisional and exchangeable like a currency) or "confirmation bias" (subscribing to a belief to confirm your existing allegiances, to preserve your acceptance among a particular group). But who wants to surrender the positive satisfactions that "dealing" and "belonging" provide in and of themselves for the uncertain rewards of some other kind of deliberation, some incalculable gamble that there might be "truth" that's not manageably dependent on who we know, who accepts us, and what our actions are worth to them?
In his book about 1930s American radio preacher and right-wing agitator Martin Luther Thomas, Adorno catalogues and taxonomizes Thomas's range of clown talk and how it worked on audiences. You could read section II, which describes Thomas's methods, as a comprehensive roster of crypto-promotion strategies. ("His platforms are either vague and abstract or childish and absurd ... " — that sounds familiar.) There's "the movement trick," the "fait accompli technique," the "unity" trick, the "democratic cloak," and so on. But Adorno opens the book by pointing out how the fascist agitator "characteristically indulges in loquacious statements about himself" while liberal propagandists appeal to a kind of lofty objectivity. The "cold" approach fails, Adorno argues, because "the detachment from personal relationships involved in any objective discussion presupposes an intellectual freedom and strength which hardly exists in within the masses today." Indeed, the coldness "intensifies the feeling of despair, isolation, and loneliness under which virtually each individual today suffers — a feeling from which he longs to escape by listening to any kind of public oratory." That is, people listen to the radio not to hear "truths" but to feel less alone.
That is even more the case with social media, given their parasociality and interactivity. Dunking and dunk baiting are strategies tailored to the Twitter environment and its set of incentives; they frame the experience of being exposed to arguments and points of view as having mainly identity stakes.The platforms then administrate social participation along those lines, calibrated and articulated through its suite of metrics, which conveniently also function as data to personalize algorithms and ads, harmonizing the user's ideological surround.
Belonging can then seem conditional on performances of conformity, but this also has the effect of giving nonconformity an occult power — "the non-crazy version" of terrible ideas can seem like last of the rationals mounting an honorable commemoration of facts as such, regardless of what they are arguing for, offering a way out of the trap of tribalism to a place where reason resolves all differences. But instead of then being guided by reason or even by allegiance, one is swayed by nostalgia for an ordered public sphere that has never existed.