Looking Back – Fallacies Aplenty! (Happy Birthday, CT!)

What’s wrong with the world wide web today?

I am. (To adapt a Chesterton line of uncertain authenticity.)

Don’t get me wrong. It’s great! – it’s hopeful! – we are gathered here today to celebrate 20 years of Crooked Timber; meanwhile Twitter seems to be splintering. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, we agree.

Microblogging killed blogging. Sadly, there’s no way to put blogging back together by lashing together several microblogging platforms.

To repeat, it’s my fault, not Elon’s. Nobody forced me to stop blogging and start tweeting. It was the wrong choice, overall, morally, intellectually, culturally, politically. It wasn’t even a choice, of course. A drift.

If folks were less liable to make poor choices at the margins, Silicon Valley social media Masters of the Universe wouldn’t stand a chance.

So I stand before you today resolved to do better – be better. Get back in shape. Back to the land. Back to blogging.

I’m hoping none of the new Twitter clones achieves dominance. We’ll lose efficiency – but win back autonomy, alleviation of temptation, retardation of enshittification. One may hope.

Let’s recall what was great and good about blogging in its heyday. Let’s revisit a few good ones. (And, of course, no need to exaggerate OG quality of the medium. I could start a Substack.)

Blogging, at its best, was – is – about freedom. Write what you want – how you want, about what interests you, at any length. Bypass gatekeepers who would have it otherwise. Be yourself.

Nothing is stopping you from doing all that right now. Or rather, all that’s stopping you is the same thing that kept people from doing it in droves before ever there was an internet.

If I write it, who’s gonna read it?

So, to be exact, blogging once promised you could be yourself (or whichever self-presentation.) And: you’ve got a shot at winning readers, perhaps a large readership, maybe a giant readership.

The early blogosphere was not just a land rush into seemingly infinite space, it had that goldrush quality (which is avaricious but does glitter.) We bloggers dreamed of fame, if not fortune. We wanted, if not fame, community. It’s utopian to dream of healthy community AND being just exactly who you want to be. Yet that was within reach. That was a pretty darn good second-best to settle for.

The consolations of online community are older than blogging. But without reaching back to Usenet – can’t speak to that personally – blogging opened essayistic vistas. You could have YOUR site, like a ‘little magazine’. That was astounding and totally new. (Obviously zines were a thing, but putting together and printing and distributing a zine is hard and you aren’t going to hit it big like that.)

When it all started to pick up, around 2002, the sorts of words that appealed to me made mixed genres I couldn’t get enough of before then. Literally, I couldn’t get enough. I wanted humour-tinged, essayistic, with a personal voice, intellectual or literary or political, deep-dive stuff, with a dollop of pop culture over something hefty. I liked it a bit drafty. I liked stuff that asked a lot of the reader, in a way, while making it easier – less demanding – in other ways. I wanted to be edified and entertained. And graphic design flair, too. It should have quirky design elements. Something retro?

I remember reading “Lingua Franca” and just plain wishing for more. What if you could have “Lingua Franca”? Like, on tap?

I kid you not I used to reread Nietzsche’s Beyond Good And Evil because nobody had invented blogging. I read Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript like it was some weirdo’s blog.

The kids coming up today will never again need Nietzsche, of all things, to get Nietzschean knowingness. Grade-A hermeneutics of suspicion is now too cheap to meter. Nietzsche predicted that would happen, actually. He was very smart. It’s kind of a crazy thing to happen to a culture. What it does to your head.

Also, it used to be unusual for adults to know, like, a lot about Marvel comics – like, the names of the D-listers.

(All you olds know all this. I’m just explaining, in case Crooked Timber has readers under 30. There was a time when we weren’t hip-deep in ‘discourse’ every day.)

So in a weird way, my literary dreams came true. Who is ever bored anymore, as I was, unable to find something clever to read? But I’m lazy. I am. I’ve gotten lazy, intellectually – no, it’s true – due to a junky internet diet. Blogging, done right, is not lazy, however. It’s a form of discipline that complements yet more ambitious writing projects. It lubricates whereas Twitter too often dissipates.

I am getting some points crossed here. Blog posts are longer than tweets. Tweets killed blogs. But tweets didn’t turn off the spigot on long-form output. Yes, but there is something distinctive about that space between a tweet and an article. A post is a sweet spot. I don’t think I’m just an old man, nostalgic, remembering the world was better when more stuff was hitting that sweet spot.

Crooked Timber really was a sweet spot of sweet spots. Boy we did it right. No need to be modest about it.

One of the problems with Twitter is simply that clever negativity is good and necessary but not, in the end, sufficient. Also, a blog is YOURS, so you don’t want shit smeared over it. Twitter isn’t your responsibility, is it?

But all this is rather obvious, isn’t it?

Just as the blogosphere in the early years, early growth Crooked Timber, was a kind of a utopian dream (yes, there was an Iraq war on, I’m not dumb); so, if as late as, say, 2007 you had sketched for me the social media future, I would have laughed at the preposterously lurid, dystopian quality of it. An algorithm is going to pick what I see, not me? To drive me into a clicking, doom-scrolling frenzy, like some rat banging the paddle for pellets? And all for advertising – oh, and the ad industry will make Big Brother blush with the extremity of its data-hoovering? I would have confidently predicted: the Plain People of the Internet will never stand for it! But I stand before you today, a Twitter addict. (I did stay off the stuff for years, recognising the danger.)

Humans are adaptable and can get used to anything.

I wish for myself and for the social internet something more sanely humane. It’s too much to expect that humans will collectively muster the will to just … not be weak; to regularly reveal preferences for sanity. But we do know better now how things go wrong than we did in 2002. Our hermeneutics of suspicion about social media is grown more sophisticated.

The golden days of blogging aren’t coming back, but it does not seem unreasonable to hope to see, out of the wreckage of Twitter, intentional communities that are better. Something that encourages ourselves to work on ourselves in healthy ways, rather than just rubbing each other raw, feeding our tendencies towards unhealthy forms of information addiction. Essayistic communities in the etymological sense. Places to try stuff with words.

Let’s take a walk down memory lane. My CT archive.

One of the first things I noticed, browsing, was how many posts – many of them with highly humorous and intriguing titles – I have wholly forgotten. Like, totally doesn’t ring a bell, although the style is patently Holbonic.

Well, of course, I have written more than a 1000. I could feel regret, then, like some of these forgotten posts might have been something more. Nah. Nope. Mostly they did fine as posts. And people read them! What a lucky guy I was.

Another thing I noticed: mostly I wrote too many words.

Another thing I noticed: often I was trying to jolly along conservative arguments that were not deserving, even at the time, even of the condescending attention I paid them. Well, I’m not getting that time back. Neither are you, if you read those back in the day.

Another thing I noticed is I like to identify and name fallacies. I never really thought about how many times I did this. A lot, is how many. I doubt this is all of them.

The Steelwool Scrub. That’s the fallacy of assuming steelman arguments tend to have some degree of psychological truth. That is, if a good version of an argument for P exists, it’s unlikely someone believes P for an utterly not-good reason.

The Fallacy of Unnatural Deceleration. That’s the fallacy of writing in such a superior way that to admit your target was not an utter idiot, even if he is wrong, would be an unbearable rhetorical wrench. (An informal error, to be sure.)

A kind of ‘best of their days against the worst of your days, you won’t win’ fallacy that I didn’t name.

The cutest little fallacy in the world. (It’s really cute! It’s not even wrong.)

One bad apple spoils the argument barrel. That is, if a really bad argument for P exists, no argument for P can be perfectly free of that rottenness. Kind of the contrapositive of steel wool scrub?

This slope is so slippery I couldn’t even see where it started, only where it stops.

Normativity erosion.

A funny sort of Bayesian base rate meta-reflection. If some people say X is unlikely because Y is extremely unlikely, and other people say X is unlikely because Y is extremely likely, then X is likely to be likely. Not a fallacy, but an example of two wrongs point you right.

If it’s funny, must it be a little true? (No, that’s a fallacy.)

Fallacies critics of Corey Robin, on conservatism, fall prey to. (The unreasonable insistence that an account that idealises conservatism to make its varieties coherent must simultaneously idealise it to make them not-bad.) In general, my defences of Corey Robin are good! His critics were regularly off-base.

Weak Normative Panglossianism.

The Two-Step of Terrific triviality. Some years later someone else gave it a stickier name, so now the world knows it as motte-and-bailey. I was first!

Some thoughts on bloody shirts and ‘playing the race card’.

The personhood dodge. Trying to win the abortion argument for the pro-life side by pretending that belief in persons – what even is one? – is a lot of unscientific woo. Related to the doubtful assumption that unscientific things must be, per se, unreal.

Occam’s Phaser! Do not multiply zap guns in thought experiments beyond necessity. (Do not compound the silliness of your examples beyond necessity.)

Men of Staw, Men of Gold, line-of-sight reflections on ideal theory of politics. Basically, more weak normative Panglossianism reflections.

Whew. Let’s take a break. You now what was a good post that wasn’t about fallacies? This one. A review of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell holds up. I compare it to Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities. It also exemplifies the blog sub-genre, the book event. Truly, the world could do with more . Every book worth publishing should have a book event, to celebrate its birth.

Now, back to fallacies. I think my most useful concept, which is not a fallacy, but feeds fallacious thinking, especially of a ‘steelwool scrub’ variety, is ‘Vavilovian Philosophical Mimicry‘. I’m too tired from writing this post to explain it. But it’s a good idea.

Happy Birthday, Crooked Timber, you old thing!