Nostalgia for the Blogosphere

Some shameless navel gazing

I think perhaps one of the things that slows down my substack is that I am wanting to use it to write long and complex essays that encapsulate my thinking on the zeitgeist (or something). For some reason, I  don’t simply want to re-hash the news of the day. I come on substack to read people re-hash the news of the day. So I am not knocking the rehash (or to be more kind: the analysis of). 

Perhaps it doesn’t seem very useful as a person with a substack no one reads to do this. What will be useful to me is to write an essay that my future self will enjoy. Substack for me is more like a personal diary at the moment. Recording my panic about the horror of the day might be a useful historical document but I anticipate my audience (future me) will probably remember the broad strokes of its past hysteria while forgetting things which are more fine-grained. 

I used to blog years ago, and it’s a period in my life that I am bizarrely nostalgic about. I am primarily enthused about substack because of my nostalgia for the era of the blogosphere. 

This makes little sense because substack is not really producing the things I loved about the blogosphere. Among those things were 

1) Discovering that random people who were not writers but were working at donut shops or as psychiatrists were in fact unbelievably good writers. 

I loved the randomness of finding people’s blogs and admiring their writing. I loved the way people let it all hang out. It was like meeting someone at midnight in a bus station and hearing their life story. 

As a child, I used to wonder why we couldn’t call up strangers we found in the phone book and ask them questions about life. The early days of the internet made me think something like this was happening. And it sort of did, though with a lot more screaming. 

I haven’t found this sort of magical crossing of social boundaries on substack. It may never happen again, in fact. Most of the substacks are by noteworthy people who are writers so there aren’t any surprises that somebody you’d never expect to have so much to say would have so much to say. I am not going around looking at my fellow humans in the laundromat thinking of the intricate landscape that might be in their heads like I once did.

2) Reading blogs from people in other countries. This was especially amazing during the Second US Iraq War. There was a blogger named Riverbend. There was another blogger whose name I cannot remember. Reading about their everyday lives was something I cannot forget. 

There isn’t much of that here.

3) The odd interpersonal engagement of blogging. It was not like Twitter which, when friendly, resembles something like a snarky bowling league. It was much more like a bunch of people getting stoned in their dorm trying to figure things out. There was a surprising amount of friendly emotional support—people wanted to help other people get through life. 

Perhaps people were kinder in the days before social media and our current war of all against all. If there was one very dramatic shift that happened online it was the introduction of a continual prickly hostility. While ‘flaming’ was a thing, it was not the main thing. I often wonder how much this prickly hostility has bled into everyday life. 

Many of these blogs were not explicitly political even if they often got into politics. But as my prior substack post mentions, practically everything is political now. The political has eclipsed the personal in a remarkable way.

Blogs didn’t initially have firm categories; people weren’t branding themselves. 

Substack requires this. 

So substack cannot fully scratch the itch of my blogging nostalgia. 

BUT SPEAKING OF POLITICS 

I have been curious about political labels lately. I was discussing these with someone on Twitter—how peculiar they are. One often sees people trying to dodge the slipperiness of these categories. These people are leftists! Well, they say they are lefitsts! But they talk like Nazis! And THESE people say they are liberal but goddamn they love Republican talking points. The red-brown alliance, the neoliberal scum, etc.

So ya got yer many flavors of leftists, your progressives, your liberals, your centrists, your moderates, your rightists, conservatives, your never Trump conservatives, your paleo conservatives, etc. etc. 

People either embrace these like the Marxist Leninists or the Never Trumpers do, or they are applied to them, like the liberals who say they are leftists but are definitely not leftists (or so say the leftists who ARE leftists even if they also might be secret rightists).  The proud centrists, or the people identical to them who are outraged to be called centrists. The leftists annoyed that liberals are also called leftists. And of course, your white supremicist fascists who post pictures of themselves as chubby faced children because apparently they do not want to be called white supremacist fascists. 

As I do most weeks, I spent the week thinking too much about things that annoy me. About which some substackers have great stuff to say. (I was annoyed before I read these things.)

And I suppose the difficulty is being the sort of person who finds so many things people say annoying. I always got the impression I was not a leftist because the people I hung out with who were Marxist Leninists. Certain things sounded nice but I could never bring myself to go look at page 342 footnote 4 to figure out how to think about something that was happening right in front of my face. I got the the impression that I was not a liberal because I often feel the breath leave my body at the things peopel who are liberals say. I got the impression I was not conservative because I have consistently disagreed with them about virtually everything since childhood and their world view generally seems upside down. 

This made me realize that certain moments of reaction are very, VERY definining of my political outlook. This sounds *absolutely terrible* I realize. Yes, I read books. Hey, I read a lot of books. And what are the books I like? Well, generally they are the so-described left-wing books So certainly everything is not built of reaction. 

Except that it is. I decided to read the Communist Manifesto as a child because of a reaction to various things that adults said, and things I saw. These all made me decide communists were right. My entire educational history is built upon a reaction to something or other. And it’s gone on for quite some time.  I got a PhD, I got tenure all of this drawn along by reaction after reaction. 

Can it just be me? If you aren’t going to define yourself can’t you be defined through this? I have no desire to call myself a leftist. I don’t get any special feeling about myself if I say ‘I am a leftist’ like I belong to something. But how can I *not* define myself as a leftist when hearing someone be indifferent to the struggle of workers makes me blind with fury? 

It’s a bit like that song—"And we shall know they are Christians by their love, by their love. And we shall know they are Christians by their love." Except nobody gets defined by love. How many of us are drawn in and shaped purely by what is appealing than by what is intolerable?

It could be that we are in an age of reaction. We are a very individualist lot, here in America. Or perhaps people define ourselves always through opposition to others. 

Do people see themselves as part of a group of something or other? I do not see groups very often. I see people with similar reactions to ideas and events,  shaping one another’s reactions to ideas and events. Perhaps this is the heart of ‘us’ and ‘the other(s)’ Or perhaps it is simply a certain cultural version of that. 

How lovely it seems to be part of an ‘us.’ But as an inveterate and hopeless reactor to things, this is impossible for me. Still, you need friends, right? 

To reassure anyone reading this I am described by friends as ‘nice,’ ‘super duper ethical’ and  ‘the nicest person ever’ even though this is not the case.  I do not fight with people, even on social media. I react to what people say while hopelessly empathizing with them. My inability to join collectives is probably a product of my tendency to take up too many perspectives at once then slowly discard them one-by-one until almost nothing is left, not by misanthropy or an antipathy to people. 

I stumbled across a review of Star Trek “The Undiscovered Country” and now have to go watch it all over again

Is there anyone who is like me who doesn't have much attachment to the characters in Star Trek (except maybe Spock) and finds most of them annoying but somehow loves Star Trek anyway? 

As a child, I hated Bones and Kirk but watched very episode. Lord, how I hated Kirk. Even as an appreciator of ‘Star Trek’ I just couldn’t join the club

.