Stop Engaging With Morons
With the lols and witty replies we're just making them stronger.
Hi,
I wanted to share a Webworm I sent out to paying members back in April, because the more I think about it, the more I wish I’d sent it to everyone.
It’s about online rage and how goddamn easy it is to be a sucker.
But first (and I hate saying this because I am a New Zealander and we hate this shit) if you ever want to pay some money for Webworm, please do — but only if it causes you zero financial hardship. The fact is, paying members are what keeps most of Webworm free to read (and also keeps at 100% ad free — what I am typing right now is as much of an ad as you’ll ever see here):
That button gets you a full membership for $3.50 USD ($5.72 NZD a month), or less if you sign up for a year. You get more stuff, free tickets for events, and can take part in the very smart, rowdy, fun Webworm comments section (like the AMAs I do here).
PLEASE KNOW THAT MADE ME FEEL LIKE PINHEAD FROM THE HELLRAISER MOVIES, A CREATURE WHOSE MAIN CHARACTER TRAIT IS BEING IN INTENSE PAIN. NOT ONLY THAT, IT MADE ME FEEL LIKE THE BADLY CAST PINHEAD FROM HELLRAISER 9 WHO WAS ONLY CAST SO THEY COULD GET IT DONE IN TIME SO THE STUDIO DIDN’T LOSE THE RIGHTS!
Okay.
As I said, I sent this piece out in April — one of Joshua Drummonds columns that full members get. I was reminded of it today, because I stumbled on this tweet from conservative commentator Addison Smith:
Addison appears to have gotten engaged to a human woman, and took the opportunity to share this news by tweeting about the LGBTQI+ community. Pretty quickly, the tweet had nearly 30 million views and “He’s gay” was trending in the United States.
“He’s gay” was trending because the left got annoyed at his stance (I certainly did), so began viciously mocking this man for clearly having male penises on the mind while proposing to his girlfriend.
The thing is — he was happy about the mocking. Of course he was, because 28 million people were thinking about him. He went so far as to tweet then retweet every piece of press that was generated:
The fact is — by reacting to morons all we’re doing is giving them life. “But isn’t that what you are doing here, David?” I hear you asking. Well look, maybe — but I’d argue Webworm is not boosting his engagement in any way. Webworm is a place to reflect about how we’re living our online (and offline) lives.
But I’d argue every social media account replying to the bullshit spouted by a Brian Tamaki or a Addison Smith or a Sean Plunket is just making them more relevant.
We need to stop.
Because they’re all just doing a bit.
The Bit
By Joshua Drummond
(formerly available here, as a podcast, to paying Webworm members).
A few weeks ago, Webworm favourite Sean Plunket tweeted.
This in itself is not surprising. I don’t want to get David sued so I’ll choose my next words very carefully: Sean Plunket is a hollow shell of a man, with a seething mass of ravenous worms where his brain used to be, and an infinite well of pure poison in his gut.
He tweets a billion times a day, and X (née Twitter) is his favourite place. All of the former is literally, objectively true, is in no way a joke, and readers should definitely take it seriously.
But what Sean tweeted was, in a strange way, newsworthy. Not merely because it was wrong. It’s because it was so wrong it twisted back on itself, like a one-sided Mobius strip of incorrectness, and became something else entirely.
This was the tweet:
Can you tell what’s wrong with that tweet?
It’s not the unnecessary apostrophe in “exploit’s”, although that is indeed wrong. Ignore, too, the essential wrongness of the premise: the entire job of political cartoonists is to make political points.
No, what’s wrong with that tweet is that the cartoon in question is not by @domesticanimal (the incomparable Sharon Murdoch) and it was not published in Stuff. It was drawn by @rodemmerson, who is Rod Emmerson, who is an editorial cartoonist working for the New Zealand Herald, and it appeared in the New Zealand Herald.
There is no way for Sean Plunket not to know that.
It is possible that I am giving too much credit to Plunket, who has (as we have learned) replaced his brain with a writhing agglomeration of parasites swimming in a shallow, sunless sea. It is entirely possible that he’s not capable of distinguishing between New Zealand’s two major print journalism outlets, or of recognising cartoonists of different styles, genders, workplaces, and names.
But I don’t think so.
In fact, it is my belief that the slithering grubs occupying Sean’s former brainpan are sentient.
Sean Plunket is Doing A Bit.
And the Bit is bait.
Let’s look at Jordan Peterson, who is a master baiter.
We’ll play “Two tweets and a lie.” Two of the following tweets are real. One is fake. Can you guess which?
Did you pick it? The Elmo one was fake.
Here’s what Jordan Peterson really said about Elmo, which is only marginally less deranged:
Again, I think it possible that Jordan Peterson works himself into a frothing rage when he sees a sign encouraging people not to be profligate with paper towels, but I don’t think it probable.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think that Jordan Peterson is a pretty smart guy! He’s a highly successful academic, an author, and most lately an extraordinary self-promoter — if I was being unkind, I’d say he’s made the transition to god-tier grifter. Some heavy caveats are due: I am sure that Jordan Peterson really does dislike trans folks, really does detest lifesaving, gender-affirming surgery, and really does know very little about climate change.
But his more bizarre tweets only make sense if you accept that they’re a way to guarantee attention while defusing attacks on his character and intellect.
He’s Doing A Bit.
The Bit is bait.
And you’re the fish.
Evidence: check out any of Peterson’s tweets. Underneath, or quote-tweeting them, will be a near-infinite supply of Peterson opponents trying their best to dismiss, denigrate, slam, repudiate, cancel or otherwise own him. Some will be very funny. Most will be very dull. The point is, they’re there.
And every single one of them is helping Peterson build his profile, and signal to his fans that he’s pissing off the right people. The liberals are annoyed! He must be great.
Let us turn to Elon Musk.
Elon Musk is, if you saw Wait But Why’s four-part hagiography when it was published in 2015 and read no further, the world’s raddest man.
But if you do read a little further — for example, nearly anything he’s tweeted in the last three or four years — Elon Musk seems to be the stupidest person alive.
A list of Musk’s foibles, beyond merely halving the value of Twitter by purchasing it and (somehow!) making it much worse, is beyond the scope of this article. There are endless articles showcasing in agonising detail just how idiotic he is and how his latest business move will doom him, any day now, and yet he persists in being one of the world’s richest men. So we’ll settle for his most recent boondoggle:
Riffing on the number 88, in case you didn’t know, is a Nazi thing.
And just as with Sean Plunket’s fury at the wrong cartoonist in the wrong paper and Jordan Peterson’s beef with toilet paper and Elmo, there is no way for Elon Musk not to know what he’s doing.
Out on my limb again: I think that Elon Musk is clever, actually! Possibly not to the extent of the Wait But Why guy, whose piece is the dick-ridingest dick-ride in the long and storied history of dick-rides, but you do not manage to acquire and maintain a vast fortune by being a complete fool.
I think this extremely online man knows perfectly well what “88” symbolism means, and if he somehow didn’t, he can either look it up, hear from one of the highly paid people whose job it is to tell him things, or read even one of the replies from the people who are so thirsty to own him (on a website that he, in fact, owns.)
Musk is Doing A Bit.
And the Bit is: offending as many ideological enemies (best recognised by the catch-all codeword “woke”) as possible while communicating his real beliefs.
This isn’t really new. Musk has moved from flirting with fascist rhetoric to publicly agreeing with and promoting far-right conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement.
But the art of the Bit is to blend overtness with irony. On one hand, tweeting out a well-known code for “Heil Hitler” is the opposite of subtlety, but on the other, it’s so over-the-top that it’s deniable. Only a crazy person would do that! So it must be a joke! Because otherwise it means that the occasional world’s richest man is barely better than a neo-Nazi, and that’s crazy. Right? A CEO could never just drop that sort of thing into the discourse, the thinking goes, because the share price of his companies would plummet and he’d get fired by his board.
So it can’t be real, and thus his share price doesn’t plummet, and he doesn’t get fired, and he passes on unscathed, on to the next outrage.
Let’s look at a company called Topham Guerin.
Topham Guerin is a PR company founded by two former Young Nat members, Sean Topham and Ben Guerin. The Young Nats is the youth wing of the New Zealand National party, and it functions as a kind of combined club and asylum for the most cringeworthy young people in New Zealand. It was in this foetid stew that Topham and Guerin first learned their craft. Today, their well-paying job is to propel horrible people to power with boomer memes.
Topham Guerin’s entire reason for existence is Doing A Bit.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Take Sean Topham’s. Their MO is to produce content at a truly alarming pace:
“In the peak point during the campaign we're posting 30 posts a day and more than 200 or 250 a week - that means you have to generate and publish a new piece of content every 20 minutes.”
If you assume this sort of run rate means they’re incapable of producing good content, you’d be right. Unfortunately, that’s the point.
They’re flooding the zone with shit.
The other agencies that use Topham Guerin-like methods are all doing the same thing. And the shit they’re flooding the zone with is bait; calculated to resonate with their base and infuriate their online opponents. Examples are below, with a bonus picture of twerking MP David Seymour, who is also all about The Bit.
That’s probably enough about how these people and organisations are Doing A Bit. I want to try to explain why the Bit matters.
See that screenshot of petrol price graphs? They may look boring, but not so long ago they had New Zealand political Twitter all a-tizzy. The right-wing National party was firing them out, and online lefties were losing their minds because the presentation was so misleading. The axes, people pointed out repeatedly in quote tweets and replies, were all wrong. They were cherry-picking. It was all so unscientific, such an abuse of data, so counterfactual.
And when National saw fit to fire out graphics featuring the uncool font Comic Sans, lefties lost their minds. How could the Right be so out of touch?
People were so busy pointing out the wrong that they failed to see that the wrongness — and their righteous reaction to it — was the point. National wasn’t just getting their message out; they were pissing off the right people. The always-online lefties annoyed at bad axes and uncool fonts were being co-opted as a virtue signal for the normies National was targeting. If those people are annoyed, then National must be doing something right.
In the book The Dawn of Everything, about how the ideas of North American indigenous nations helped spark the Enlightenment, co-author David Graeber explains an anthropological puzzle: societies with markedly different, often contradictory, ideas about how to live would often be found right next to each other.
An egalitarian society that held all property in common and despised slavery could be found right next to a slave-keeping absolute monarchy. Graeber, following other anthropologists, suggests a mechanism that explains this: schismogenesis. A tribe would see what their hated rivals were doing, and deliberately set about doing the opposite. They defined themselves principally by being unlike their opposition.
Today, online personalities, political parties, and their PR handlers are invoking the same mechanism. It doesn’t matter if the Right has no new ideas and their politics are a multi-decade dirge of misery and failure; so long as they’re upsetting the annoyable, annoying Left, they must be doing something right — right?
Conveniently, this also keeps the left distracted, with would-be revolutionaries mired in the Twitter trenches of an endless culture war, constantly reacting to their ideological opponents and signal-boosting their intentional idiocy instead of advancing their own ideas. (I am personally a big fan of the radical leftist idea of not cooking the earth with climate change.)
I think there will be pushback to this piece, and in my mind, I imagine it coming from thoughtful, decent people who do things like paraphrasing The Art of War to explain that Twitter is a “battlefield” that they “refuse to cede to the enemy.”
(I have read arguments like this often enough to realise that the people making them are not Doing A Bit themselves, but are quite earnest.)
It’s my vain hope that this piece will dissuade them from acting this way. You are not on the battlefield; you are the battlefield. The people lining up to own Elon or Peterson or Plunket or some other attention-whoring boogeyman are themselves being owned; every mean-tweet these culture warriors receive from opponents might as well be a crisp five-dollar bill. It’s all a bit, a vastly profitable bit.
The question remaining is: why can’t otherwise intelligent people resist the bait?
Let’s look at journalist Jon Ronson. His book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is about the halcyon days of Twitter’s Main Characters being hounded offline for making poor-taste jokes at conferences or while flying to less fortunate countries. But Ronson offers a counterfactual: people who won’t be shamed.
First among Ronson’s un-shameables is a man called Max Mosely, the son of notable British fascist Oswald Mosely. Max Mosely is not a fascist; but when the now-defunct News of the World tabloid obtained pictures of him participating in a German-themed S&M session, they tried to make out that he was. For this, he sued them, and won; and during the whole ordeal — including a court case where details of Mosley’s S&M orgy and bottom-shaving habits became a matter of public record — he managed to shrug off the public shame.
“He gave an interview to BBC Radio 4 in which he said that yes, his sex life was strange, but when it comes to sex people think and say and do strange things and only an idiot would think the worst of him for it,” Ronson writes. “If our shame-worthiness lies in the space between who we are and how we present ourselves to the world, Max was narrowing that gap to nothing.”
That’s what the world’s successful culture warriors have done. The Bit is about neutralising shame by embracing it. It is about making those who master the Bit seemingly immune to mockery and mistakes, because mockery is certain and mistakes are recast as jokes.
Looking back at Sean Plunket for a moment; I’m sure he might be capable of confusing wildly different cartoonists and media outlets, but he can now happily hide behind the claim that he was just kidding. It’s a joke, wholly intentional — can’t you tell, you moron?
The Bit is designed to make genuine critique impossible, because only fools and wowsers would criticise what is so obviously a joke, despite the joke being taken entirely seriously by both opponents and adherents. The Bit is about creating and utilising schismogenesis, because the more fervently your enemies call you an idiot, the more ardently your allies will believe you to be a genius. The Bit is about weaponizing irony to the extent that what you say makes no sense even as what you mean becomes ever more abundantly clear.
Let’s not look at Trump. But you can see how he fits the Bit, can’t you?
The reason that many — including, for most of my online life, me — can’t resist taking the bait is that we aren’t immune to shame. In fact, it’s the opposite: most of us feel shame, or the possibility of shaming, so intently that avoiding it is a driving force in our lives.
We try to shame the shameless because if it was us being mocked and denigrated and hounded it would work. We’d hole up, we’d decamp from online life, we’d apologise tearfully and publicly. Anything to stem that awful sense of opprobrium.
The shameless, on the other hand, have a superpower. They are able to surf the cancel culture wave all the way to fame and fortune. The result? Principled people, who would never accept money to promote the likes of the alt-Right, are being tricked into carrying water for the worst people in the world for free.
We need to learn to recognise the Bit, and stop taking the bait.
-Joshua Drummond.