Twitter mob gets fantasy novel cancelled.

Status
Not open for further replies.
Actually, the bigger problem is that anybody takes these kinds of complaints from them seriously in the first place.

What do we "do" about irrational nonsense complaints? Ignore them, which worked well enough previously in history. There's no clear reason it wouldn't still work. That means *not* empowering this nonsense by cancelling novels or altering business practices/products that are intended for the non-complainers anyway. Taking them seriously is the big mistake here.
The author herself made the decision. We still don't know if she's canceling or if she wants to delay to let this die down (and/or to edit things).
Except these mobs actually have a lot of coercive power over authors, journalists, professors, and so on. There's no denying the power of millions of angry moralizers patrolling the most important space of communication in the modern world.
Okay, but we're not talking about "millions" of people here. We're talking about a relatively niche group of people: YA Twitter.

Most of the fire tweets in this whole thing have a couple hundred likes/RTs, if that. (The one in which one of the ****-stirrers specifically named Zhao has...66 likes.) The review bomb was pretty small, too. Calling this a mob seems pretty accurate, but don't overstate the number of people here or the extent of control that they have. It was very damaging personally to the author because of her deep involvement and investment in that community, and that is a real form of power that they held over her, but inflating this into a gigantic swarm of moralizing scolds controlling all speech in the country is absurd.

"Coercive power" seems more appropriate when talking about, say, actual lawsuits filed with spurious claims of defamation, or physical threats delivered online, rather than this particular form of outrage mob.
 
I'm not denying that they have power. I'm just saying that this kind of behavior is hardly surprising.
Yeah but you commented on it in a trivializing manner that suggested mw was wrong to make a thread about it. Which is my disagreement.
The author herself made the decision. We still don't know if she's canceling or if she wants to delay to let this die down (and/or to edit things).

Okay, but we're not talking about "millions" of people here. We're talking about a relatively niche group of people: YA Twitter.

Most of the fire tweets in this whole thing have a couple hundred likes/RTs, if that. (The one in which one of the ****-stirrers specifically named Zhao has...66 likes.) The review bomb was pretty small, too. Calling this a mob seems pretty accurate, but don't overstate the number of people here or the extent of control that they have. It was very damaging personally to the author because of her deep involvement and investment in that community, and that is a real form of power that they held over her, but inflating this into a gigantic swarm of moralizing scolds controlling all speech in the country is absurd.

"Coercive power" seems more appropriate when talking about, say, actual lawsuits filed with spurious claims of defamation, or physical threats delivered online, rather than this particular form of outrage mob.
Maybe millions weren't ganging up on this one author, but at any given time many more are coercing people elsewhere. And I don't agree "coercion" is an inappropriate term. Communities of outraged moralizers have always held great power to control those they come into contact with. That's the power of moral systems and crowds. Their worldviews induce a reality where bizarre transgressions must be halted whenever found. I don't think this author would believe they weren't the subject of intense coercion.
 
The author herself made the decision. We still don't know if she's canceling or if she wants to delay to let this die down (and/or to edit things).

Yes, and it would help if authors and others do not give into this junk.

Okay, but we're not talking about "millions" of people here. We're talking about a relatively niche group of people: YA Twitter.

Groups like this have spammed false flags on YouTube (without consequences, which is strange since they're making fraudulent claims) and there were both bounties and death threats related to the Covington story (the school was closed outright due to safety concerns - this is non-trivial coercive power).

Twitter being complicit in much of this and allowing some outright threats/calls to violence as "not violating terms of service" nuke its credibility, but the outrage mobs doing this garbage are themselves a problem too. If they're just blathering leave them be, but for some of this stuff they need to see lawsuits/criminal prosecution. "I will give you X if you go assault a minor" is not a valid thing to post, and I'm pretty sure it's also not legal.

How much of this did the author in question consider, having taken a peek at recent events? I don't know, but it shouldn't be ruled out.
 
Yeah but you commented on it in a trivializing manner

Well, that's because when you get right down to it I do believe it is trivial. Here's an idea, if you're concerned about Twitter being controlled by outrage mobs or whatever, just get off Twitter. Stop investing so much in a space that is literally engineered to addict you to it so that a private company can make money by selling your data to advertisers.
 
I don't use twitter, but it seems this author does.
Edit: I have bunch more to say in response to the social media aspect. For one, social media is integral to publishing and media nowadays, so authors and journalists will typically always be active. Which is troubling because social media has such toxic recurring outrage cycles over stupid stuff. Two, yeah, it's a feature, not a bug, of social media. I'm sympathetic to the idea that the insanity endemic to social media is analogous to the obesity epidemic. When companies engineer and optimize for attention and consumption, they can become very good at manipulating the innate features of our cognition. Three, it's really not totally the fault of twitter, fb, etc because this is largely just what people are like and high reward-density things tend to become dominant on their own without much coordination. Plus, we're talking about a very, very long trend of optimization for reward density, connection, and the coercive social forces that accompany them. It's just hard for me to buy into a "see, the corporations are the real problem!" narrative and feel satisfied that I've identified the forces at work.
 
Last edited:
Maybe millions weren't ganging up on this one author, but at any given time many more are coercing people elsewhere. And I don't agree "coercion" is an inappropriate term. Communities of outraged moralizers have always held great power to control those they come into contact with. That's the power of moral systems and crowds. Their worldviews induce a reality where bizarre transgressions must be halted whenever found. I don't think this author would believe they weren't the subject of intense coercion.
I said more appropriate, not that it's inappropriate in this particular context, and I also said that yes, this particular mob does possess a form of power. Please read the posts to which you respond more carefully. :)

I think that your line of thought is a little confused here, but I don't fundamentally disagree that large groups of poorly-informed people can muster outrage on social media that has serious consequences. That's a generally-agreed-upon fact. I'm curious as to which specific moralizers you're complaining about, though, and why you think that this blow-up in the YA Twitter community points to the wider problem.
Yes, and it would help if authors and others do not give into this junk.
They usually don't. Here's a bit from another one of Rosenfield's articles on the community:
The Toxic Drama on YA Twitter said:
It’s rare that a title will be pulled in response to anger on social media. In August 2016, E.E. Charlton-Trujillo’s When We Was Fierce was yanked from shelves on the eve of its release amid accusations that it stereotyped its black characters; several months later, Harlequin Teen delayed YA fantasy The Continent after author Justina Ireland lambasted the book for employing white-savior tropes. But for the most part, those who spearhead the campaigns against problematic books seldom receive an official response.

Harlequin declined to comment for this piece, but another publisher at a big five imprint has a simple reason for staying out of the fray — “I truly don’t find those conversations of value, and I hope an author would feel the same” — as well as a message for readers like Sinyard who feel their campaigns deserve a response: “Get upset! I would say, continue to go get upset. It’s entirely your right. But if this were my author and we were having this conversation, I’d say, don’t respond, or block them. It’s not their position. It’s not their role. They are a reader. If they don’t like it, fine. As a publisher we are here to curate, defend, and protect fiction — the author’s ability to create as he or she feels fit, to tell the stories that he or she feels fit, and to not let the book be affected by outside opinion except those who are close enough to advise on story. “

As for the potential of these campaigns to affect a book’s sales, that same publisher is unconcerned. “There’s that line — there’s no such thing as bad press — and at some point people will buy it just to take a look at it so they can join the critical parade.” (Even The Black Witch, which took one of the worst online beatings in recent memory, scored a No. 1 rating in Amazon’s department of “Teen & Young Adult Wizards Fantasy” a few days after its release and has been overwhelmingly well-reviewed since.)
Groups like this have spammed false flags on YouTube (without consequences, which is strange since they're making fraudulent claims) and there were both bounties and death threats related to the Covington story (the school was closed outright due to safety concerns - this is non-trivial coercive power).

Twitter being complicit in much of this and allowing some outright threats/calls to violence as "not violating terms of service" nuke its credibility, but the outrage mobs doing this garbage are themselves a problem too. If they're just blathering leave them be, but for some of this stuff they need to see lawsuits/criminal prosecution. "I will give you X if you go assault a minor" is not a valid thing to post, and I'm pretty sure it's also not legal.

How much of this did the author in question consider, having taken a peek at recent events? I don't know, but it shouldn't be ruled out.
I agree that, in general, speech on social media is insufficiently regulated by the social media companies and that threats need to be taken more seriously. A social-media threat is serious business, not casual.

I'm not sure that anybody made specific threats here, though. The overwhelming issue is reputational damage and emotional distress. "kys" is pretty rare in these circles. These authors are writing books for children, and what cuts the most is an accusation that they are somehow causing the children emotional harm or educating them improperly. Being accused of being a racist or a Nazi sympathizer on astonishingly thin evidence is, for them, extremely distressing. Seeing people demand that their creation be changed because it is hateful is the sort of thing people lose sleep over.

These are meaningful problems. The community that produces these problems is toxic. But, in general, we're a long way from death threats.

I'm struggling with the specific connection between your post and this particular event. It seems like most of what you're talking about has to do with a separate incident in a different field. "Groups like this" does an awful lot of heavy lifting in your post, and I don't think that it can handle all that weight.
 
I'm not someone who considers himself well versed in Continental philosophy, or indeed philosophy at all, either! But I am somewhat familiar with a particular aspect of it as concerns history, and I know that it's been brought up in that exact context on this forum before. Frankly, I think the root cause is pretty simple: as with any continuing myths about source material, the root error comes from refusing to engage with the source material itself.
I'm sorry, I'm unsure if I understood your position on the intellectual influences of this phenomenon correctly. Are you saying that the error comes from a misunderstanding of the original works by continental philosophers? So you would agree that their thinking has influenced these people? Or are you saying that claiming that their thinking has influenced these people is the error?

While I agree that having strong opinions about philosopher's thinking without having read their material is an understandable critique, but that is not an argument against the possibility of them having an influence on this phenomenon.

Of course, most people can hardly be expected to try to muddle their way through, say, Acts of Literature, let alone in the original French. This should, however, presumably mean that most people should not have much of an opinion on the text! They should certainly not have as strongly-held a one as I've seen before from certain forumers. Unless you've read the thing, your opinion is on shaky ground. Everything else is an elaborate and often stupid game of Telephone.
Isn't the university an elaborate game of telephone by your definition? Listening to lectures is having faith that the lecturer understand the source material, and gives you the basics of the person in question's thinking? After lectures you are expected to know of the source material, often without having actually read the source material. Material that is often times very confusing to boot.

The way I see this, from my puny understanding of the subject, is that these crowds have drank from the fountain of such continental philosophers as you mentioned, even if the fountain they drank from was just an American plastic copy of the original. They seem overly interested in Foucault's normative power, about how forms of knowing or representing influence people's thinking and power structures that follow, in Derrida's deconstructionism to find, often in bad faith, some forms of bigotry in a given text and a sort of viewpoint epistemology that developed in the academic feminist circles in the 90's, and from the sort of vague "death of the author" thinking where the intentionality of the author, as it is often or always impossible to recover, should be discarded whole handedly, and the interpretation of the reader is all that matters. On top of that there is the status that you gain from your tribe when you find someone to call out and call a nazi or what ever, because said person misspoke something, or "dog whistled" something. Often not even knowing what the thing they were "dog whistling" was, or even what a "dog whistle" is.

Well, that's because when you get right down to it I do believe it is trivial. Here's an idea, if you're concerned about Twitter being controlled by outrage mobs or whatever, just get off Twitter. Stop investing so much in a space that is literally engineered to addict you to it so that a private company can make money by selling your data to advertisers.
I wouldn't be so cavalier about this. Twitter is the market place of ideas of today. If there is a group that harrasses all other ideas away, that will have real world consequences.
 
I wouldn't be so cavalier about this. Twitter is the market place of ideas of today. If there is a group that harrasses all other ideas away, that will have real world consequences.

Twitter is not "the" marketplace of ideas today by any stretch of the imagination.

It's just hard for me to buy into a "see, the corporations are the real problem!" narrative and feel satisfied that I've identified the forces at work.

It's "the capitalist mode of production" that's the problem, not "the corporations"
 
I would hardly call this fantasy. It's a Young Adult novel set in a fantasy setting. YA novels target children or people with the mental prowess of children. It's like the Chicken Tendies of literature. Always be aware of your target demographic. If you target demographic are people who exclusively eat tendies, you can expect them to behave that way :)

Except these mobs actually have a lot of coercive power over authors, journalists, professors, and so on. There's no denying the power of millions of angry moralizers patrolling the most important space of communication in the modern world.

The average reader doesn't have any power at all. You're conflating three different topics here. It's never one cautious reader that starts a horsehocky storm, it's always either a celebrity or an internet persona, because those are the only people who get copious amounts of retweets. That's how memetics work.

However you are right to some degree. There are hundreds of YA "influencers" out there: Booktubers/Twitter accounts who form the tastes of thousands, promote certain books or end careers (this is true of music and other art, too). If anything doesn't adhere to their arbitrary standard it is stigmatized. That way only the least creative, least risky, least interesting and ambitious trash gets spread around.

The problems in anglo universities are related to this, but a whole nother issue that isn't worth bringing into this thread.
 
I would hardly call this fantasy. It's a Young Adult novel set in a fantasy setting. YA novels target children or people with the mental prowess of children. It's like the Chicken Tendies of literature. Always be aware of your target demographic. If you target demographic are people who exclusively eat tendies, you can expect them to behave that way :)

You stole my analogy! :mad:
 
I would hardly call this fantasy. It's a Young Adult novel set in a fantasy setting. YA novels target children or people with the mental prowess of children. It's like the Chicken Tendies of literature. Always be aware of your target demographic. If you target demographic are people who exclusively eat tendies, you can expect them to behave that way :)
A fair analogy.

The only funny part about all this is that the arguing is all adult vs. adult. The kids ain't give a damn. The Twitter bios of something like ninety percent of the people involved in these mobs are adult ones, and the actual target audience generally views the whole scuffle as faintly gross, if they're aware of it at all.
 
I agree that calling this thing "left" is a bit misleading, but has it not grown out of some of the things that the more lefty academics have been working on for the past couple of decades, like decolonialism, various fields with "studies" at the end? Just pushed to their logical extremes?

It is interesting how this sort of ideology is tangled in very much bourgeoisie concerns about who gets to climb the corporate ladder.

I just find it funny how it was the right in the 90's and 00's who were telling me what to think and say, but now it's these people, be they on the left, or what ever. And they think that the right was bad, but they are just their mirror image.

It's funny reading YouTube comments from accross the political isles. Everyone says the same thing about the "Other", only the nomenclature changes.

No.

Just no. This is akin to making Nietzsche responsible for Nazism and the Holocaust, it's just dumb teleological backwards thinking. Current SJW'ism is so far removed from both the continental tradition and the various -studies you refer to (I've actually done post-colonial studies in uni. it was literally just colonial history with an interdisciplinary and multifaceted twist..) that making a causal connection is simply fraudulent. You cannot blame Marx for Stalinism and you cannot blame Butler for Twitter feminism. Those ideas go against everything those thinkers ever promoted. It is not the logical conclusion at all, it is rather the antithesis.

I can't talk for every subject and every degree. I have not taken many intersectional feminist theory courses and am not planning to. There is no doubt that some things are going wrong in the humanities, I will be the first one to admit this. But to call this a logical extension of some of the greatest and most revolutionary thinkers of the 20th century is insulting. Foucault would surely gouge his eyes out at the current state of anglophonic humanity departments had he not died of aids. Again, I can only talk from my personal experience, having read many of the authors people refer to as pivotal for the SJW movement, and none of them match in any way or form the crude, disgusting essentialism and race-realism of SJWism. Infact, essentialism and race-realism were the things that the cultural scientists at that time were trying to get away from.. Like I said, the antithesis.

My interest was piqued until I saw "YA Twitter". This is par for the course and, as Lexicus described it, is fairly dominated by reactionaries now. YA Twitter is closely linked to YA Tumblr and is largely populated by literal children or people who cater to the aforementioned children. The space is almost entirely focused on American politics and lived experiences. It's a completely different beast in the literary world today and yes, it's a problem, and yes, most people see it as a problem, including those darned lame-o lefties.

I'm surprised by the postponement. Since she had a trad-pub, she could have forced it through and been mostly fine. Then again, it's very compelling to want to be liked by the people you're supposed to be engaging with online about the art.



Pure fabrication. About as accurate as saying people who only eat chicken fingers at Michelin restaurants is now the party line of the gourmet cuisine industry.

It's so eerie how similiar our posts are. I really should read the thread before I reply, sorry!
 
Last edited:
I agree that, in general, speech on social media is insufficiently regulated by the social media companies and that threats need to be taken more seriously. A social-media threat is serious business, not casual.

I'm not sure that anybody made specific threats here, though.

If you have an established environment where people can make threats freely so long as they're on the right side of the mob, consideration of potential threat is a reasonable caution for this case.

"Groups like this" does an awful lot of heavy lifting in your post, and I don't think that it can handle all that weight.

I do broadly group "reaction mobs based on feelings without evidence" together. They have different flavors and degrees of severity, but these different flavors are all trash.

If evidence doesn't matter (such as the case highlighted in OP where a non-racial story somehow "denies the experience of black Americans"...or literally anybody's experience in reality), the framework for that person's decision-making/actions chosen is *necessarily* irrational and does cause some (admittedly variable) measure of harm.

I wouldn't be so cavalier about this. Twitter is the market place of ideas of today. If there is a group that harrasses all other ideas away, that will have real world consequences.

Consequences that are often outright stated as intentional, for that matter. It's deliberate, targeted silencing to which twitter is often selectively complicit. It is naive to disregard the possibility that an author would consider this.

These are meaningful problems. The community that produces these problems is toxic. But, in general, we're a long way from death threats.

Actually, I doubt we're all that far. It doesn't take much for triggered outrage to go there. Author telling a few people to shove it with their baseless nonsense and publishing the book anyway would already open up chances for that. Not that it would necessarily happen, but it could.
 
While I agree that having strong opinions about philosopher's thinking without having read their material is an understandable critique, but that is not an argument against the possibility of them having an influence on this phenomenon.

Isn't the university an elaborate game of telephone by your definition? Listening to lectures is having faith that the lecturer understand the source material, and gives you the basics of the person in question's thinking? After lectures you are expected to know of the source material, often without having actually read the source material. Material that is often times very confusing to boot.

The way I see this, from my puny understanding of the subject, is that these crowds have drank from the fountain of such continental philosophers as you mentioned, even if the fountain they drank from was just an American plastic copy of the original. They seem overly interested in Foucault's normative power, about how forms of knowing or representing influence people's thinking and power structures that follow, in Derrida's deconstructionism to find, often in bad faith, some forms of bigotry in a given text and a sort of viewpoint epistemology that developed in the academic feminist circles in the 90's, and from the sort of vague "death of the author" thinking where the intentionality of the author, as it is often or always impossible to recover, should be discarded whole handedly, and the interpretation of the reader is all that matters. On top of that there is the status that you gain from your tribe when you find someone to call out and call a nazi or what ever, because said person misspoke something, or "dog whistled" something. Often not even knowing what the thing they were "dog whistling" was, or even what a "dog whistle" is.


I wouldn't be so cavalier about this. Twitter is the market place of ideas of today. If there is a group that harrasses all other ideas away, that will have real world consequences.

They might have had an influence on this phenomenon, I wouldn't dismiss that claim out of hand. But if you twist what someone has said to fit exactly what you want to hear, then the connection is utterly lost, no?

I think you are justified in bringing up Foucault, since some of the Twitter / Tumblr crowd tries to use the power structure / power dynamics to justify their beliefs. The idea that representation is power of course didn't originate with Foucault at all, and is something I would personally agree with, and I really don't see how people can't. This is something you will also find in Edward Said and his companions. Possibly even a justified critique, albeit not for this specific book.

Derrida I don't really understand why you bring him up (and I think neither do you?). Can you put in laymans terms what makes deconstructionism relevant for the SJW/Twitter Outrage kind of ideology?

Intersectional feminism (what I think you are referring to) I honestly don't want to delve too deep into because I'm not well read. Judith Butler is definitely an SJW favorite, but honestly what I do know of her is Gender Performance Theory, and it is the utmost basic, unspectacular and generally obvious theory I've ever read. I believed in gender performance theory before I even knew it existed, and I am sure so did many other people. But Butler probably had a profound influence on online feminism, that much I'd agree with.

I think with Roland Barthes you did not hit the spot. If the intention of the author is irrelevant then surely there would be no point in attacking the author, or, as in this specific case: Her intentions of (consciously) marginalizing POC. Because those are some of the claims thrown into her face. If anything I think Barthes could be an antidote to what we're seeing here, a kind of positive nihilism that doesn't concern itself at all with the implications of the author and only sees the text as text. Because after all this is what this whole hate campaign was about, deep within. Attacking the author. The book is a scapegoat.

Most of what you say really isn't wrong, it's your other post where you said that these people are just "taking ideas to their logical conclusion" where you went off the rails. (I would really like to know what would happen if someone took Foucault to his logical conclusion, especially with his theory of biopolitics. imo it would be insanely dark.)

I saw a discussion on another forum, where many people just concluded that a lot of the people voicing criticism about the book were bitter women with unfulfilled fantasies, who were essentially just jealous of the author (who I must admit is pretty cute), and that YA twitter has a tendency to put people down for extremely shallow and freudian reasons.. I don't believe this narrative, and it's obviously pretty sexist and reductive, but there may be some grain of truth to it..

Also, who in the ever loving **** sees Twitter as the marketplace of ideas, besides Donald Trump? :lol: :lol:
 
Last edited:
Again, I can only talk from my personal experience, having read many of the authors people refer to as pivotal for the SJW movement, and none of them match in any way or form the crude, disgusting essentialism and race-realism of SJWism. Infact, essentialism and race-realism were the things that the cultural scientists at that time were trying to get away from.. Like I said, the antithesis.

Indeed, my experience on the other end - from within some of these SJW spaces- is that many people are simply using anti-racism etc. as a cover for their own deep misanthropy. Whatever the origins of the "serious" versions of these strains of thought in academic discourse, it has very little to do with anything that goes on in social media. That said there are sometimes productive and interesting discussions of theory on social media. The trick is finding spaces that occupy the sweet spot between insufficient moderation - turning them into Wild Wests - and Stalinist/Puritan moderating that enforces total ideological and behavioral conformity.

I think a lot has also been written on how the practice and theory (such as it is) of these groups, just purely by coincidence of course, closely resembles the moral logic of Protestantism. I was totally surprised for example when even the Atlantic ran a piece recently comparing some of the manifestations of "social justice" stuff to a religion and saying that it is ineffective because it isn't about organizing people into a political struggle, it's about deeming them morally righteous or not. I think this dovetails very well with what I've been reading in left critiques of identitarianism for a while now e.g. from Adolph Reed (author of the article I posted on the first page of this thread) and Mark Fisher (Exiting The Vampire Castle).

Reed in particular has an extremely powerful critique of "antiracism" in that 'marginality' in the abstract means nothing, and the conceit of modern "antiracist activists" comparing themselves to, say, the desegregation movement of the 1960s or the anti-colonial movements around the world is ridiculous because while those movements were obviously antiracist, they were also attacking specific policies and institutional arrangements using specific tactical approaches which were often the subject of intense intra-movement debate. They were not campaigning against "marginalization" in the abstract, they were not seeking, as a religious movement does, to expunge wrongthink at the level of the individual.

Anyway sorry for using your post as a springboard for my ramblings.

I've actually done post-colonial studies in uni. it was literally just colonial history with an interdisciplinary and multifaceted twist

I read an interesting article recently that argued that 'decolonialization' in the South African context is essentially an empty buzzword, probably the best quote was along the lines of "the intellectual project of decolonization is not a struggle for liberation but the struggle of an emerging elite to find a place for itself."

It was on Africa Is A Country, if I send you the link would you be interested in reading it (it's pretty short) and giving me your thoughts?
 
No.

Just no. This is akin to making Nietzsche responsible for Nazism and the Holocaust, it's just dumb teleological backwards thinking. Current SJW'ism is so far removed from both the continental tradition and the various -studies you refer to (I've actually done post-colonial studies in uni. it was literally just colonial history with an interdisciplinary and multifaceted twist..) that making a causal connection is simply fraudulent. You cannot blame Marx for Stalinism and you cannot blame Butler for Twitter feminism. Those ideas go against everything those thinkers ever promoted. It is not the logical conclusion at all, it is rather the antithesis.

I can't talk for every subject and every degree. I have not taken many intersectional feminist theory courses and am not planning to. There is no doubt that some things are going wrong in the humanities, I will be the first one to admit this. But to call this a logical extension of some of the greatest and most revolutionary thinkers of the 20th century is insulting. Foucault would surely gouge his eyes out at the current state of anglophonic humanity departments had he not died of aids. Again, I can only talk from my personal experience, having read many of the authors people refer to as pivotal for the SJW movement, and none of them match in any way or form the crude, disgusting essentialism and race-realism of SJWism. Infact, essentialism and race-realism were the things that the cultural scientists at that time were trying to get away from.. Like I said, the antithesis.

I'm not blaming anyone. Like I said in a later post, there is no need to blame Rousseau for Robespierre, even though Robespierre was influenced by Rousseau. But that doesn't change whether or not there was an intellectual link between the two. I will agree claiming that it is the "logical extreme" was probably an overstatement.

Where do you see as the intellectual influences of this movement as originating in?
 
I said more appropriate, not that it's inappropriate in this particular context, and I also said that yes, this particular mob does possess a form of power. Please read the posts to which you respond more carefully. :)
This is some hardcore cavilling. Responding to an instance of x in context c1 by saying x is "more appropriate" in some context c2 implies "less appropriateness" of x in c1. If it's faulty enough for you to point this out, one tends to think the "less appropriateness" was perceived as "inappropriateness." Why so? Because the act of correcting someone is a request for reform. Probably a request to desist from using x in c1. Hence the leap to "inappropriate." I'll make sure my posts compile next time.

I think that your line of thought is a little confused here, but I don't fundamentally disagree that large groups of poorly-informed people can muster outrage on social media that has serious consequences. That's a generally-agreed-upon fact. I'm curious as to which specific moralizers you're complaining about, though, and why you think that this blow-up in the YA Twitter community points to the wider problem.
I'm not complaining about specific moralizers (note that taboos to moralize about is an emergent property of like, i dunno, any social network). I'm complaining about a group behavior. A collective coercion (not inappropriate), as many coercions tend to be.

The average reader doesn't have any power at all. You're conflating three different topics here. It's never one cautious reader that starts a **** storm, it's always either a celebrity or an internet persona, because those are the only people who get copious amounts of retweets. That's how memetics work.

However you are right to some degree. There are hundreds of YA "influencers" out there: Booktubers/Twitter accounts who form the tastes of thousands, promote certain books or end careers (this is true of music and other art, too). If anything doesn't adhere to their arbitrary standard it is stigmatized. That way only the least creative, least risky, least interesting and ambitious trash gets spread around.

The problems in anglo universities are related to this, but a whole nother issue that isn't worth bringing into this thread.
No, that's how scale-free networks work. Memetics per se imposes no such requirement. And I don't see why you've read into my posts a rejection of the existence of hubs. Yeah, social networks have vast participation inequality. My annoyance with those effects was baked into my earlier post. Was saying "mobs" atomizing somehow?
 
Last edited:
I'm not blaming anyone. Like I said in a later post, there is no need to blame Rousseau for Robespierre, even though Robespierre was influenced by Rousseau. But that doesn't change whether or not there was an intellectual link between the two. I will agree claiming that it is the "logical extreme" was probably an overstatement.

Where do you see as the intellectual influences of this movement as originating in?

If you ask three people where the intellectual roots of SJWism and political correctness come from, you will get three replies:

The sensible person will point you towards Edward Said and Judith Butler, because they're taught in university a lot and are relatively easy to understand, and to misunderstand and corrupt. Those people are also cited by actual SJWs, so I think they're fair game to some degree.

The uninformed person will point you towards "postmodernists" and drop names like Lacan, Derrida, Baudrillard, etc, and reveal their ignorance.

The nazi will point you towards Frankfurt school, mostly Adorno and Benjamin, and claim that it was "cultural marxists" that started it all, even though it turns out Adorno was a horrible reactionary who hated the student revolts and thought Jazz music was obscene :lol:

I actually see the intellectual root of "PC culture" in totalitarianism, and the way totalitarianism showed us how easy to was to police speech. You don't even have to be as authoritarian as Stalin or Hitler, in fact it was regimes like the GDR where political correctness and policing of speech was most successful.


okay, so we mostly agree. nice.

Indeed, my experience on the other end - from within some of these SJW spaces- is that many people are simply using anti-racism etc. as a cover for their own deep misanthropy. Whatever the origins of the "serious" versions of these strains of thought in academic discourse, it has very little to do with anything that goes on in social media. That said there are sometimes productive and interesting discussions of theory on social media. The trick is finding spaces that occupy the sweet spot between insufficient moderation - turning them into Wild Wests - and Stalinist/Puritan moderating that enforces total ideological and behavioral conformity.

I think a lot has also been written on how the practice and theory (such as it is) of these groups, just purely by coincidence of course, closely resembles the moral logic of Protestantism. I was totally surprised for example when even the Atlantic ran a piece recently comparing some of the manifestations of "social justice" stuff to a religion and saying that it is ineffective because it isn't about organizing people into a political struggle, it's about deeming them morally righteous or not. I think this dovetails very well with what I've been reading in left critiques of identitarianism for a while now e.g. from Adolph Reed (author of the article I posted on the first page of this thread) and Mark Fisher (Exiting The Vampire Castle).

Reed in particular has an extremely powerful critique of "antiracism" in that 'marginality' in the abstract means nothing, and the conceit of modern "antiracist activists" comparing themselves to, say, the desegregation movement of the 1960s or the anti-colonial movements around the world is ridiculous because while those movements were obviously antiracist, they were also attacking specific policies and institutional arrangements using specific tactical approaches which were often the subject of intense intra-movement debate. They were not campaigning against "marginalization" in the abstract, they were not seeking, as a religious movement does, to expunge wrongthink at the level of the individual.

Anyway sorry for using your post as a springboard for my ramblings.



I read an interesting article recently that argued that 'decolonialization' in the South African context is essentially an empty buzzword, probably the best quote was along the lines of "the intellectual project of decolonization is not a struggle for liberation but the struggle of an emerging elite to find a place for itself."

It was on Africa Is A Country, if I send you the link would you be interested in reading it (it's pretty short) and giving me your thoughts?

sure, please hit me up with that link. I also appreciate the post about the connection between protestantism and SJWism, fascinating stuff.
 
Also the Barthesian framing of "accessing intention as fruitless," is true, but only inasmuch as the imperative of understanding authorial intent fosters an elitism, an intellectual-smugness, and an exclusionary attitude towards the non-literati among academics and critics. If you create an environment wherein only those with highly specialized knowledge and jargon, and with access to materials for the pursuit of biographical research can truly access the veritable "meaning" of a text, you've instilled a hierarchy of critique wherein only a select few are allowed to hand down "the official reading" from on high. Barthes's project, at least in part, was to restore the tools of criticism to the people.

Also Death of the Author emphasizes the very critical point that the artistic process is not a one-way street, nor does it complete at the point of production/publication. The auteur in the abstract might have had some kind of "intent," or larger metameaning, but that metameaning is pointless absent the presence of its receptive audience. If you only read the core texts of Harry Potter, and interpret Dumbledore's reluctance to confront Grindelwald as rooted in his deep-seated guilt over the death of his sister, and his uncertainty over just who cast the curse that killed Ariana, and the larger fear that Grindelwald did possess that knowledge and would deploy it to defeat Dumbledore, would that interpretation be invalidated by Rowling's revelation that actually Dumbledore was gay, and in love with Grindelwald? Would it be invalidated by Fantastic Beasts 2, in which it is revealed that Dumbledore made a blood pact with Grindelwald that physically prevents him from confronting Grindelwald? Is the correctness of your interpretation false for all time unless you read Rowling's press conference, and unless you see Fantastic Beasts 2? Does this mean that your interpretation of the books prior to learning this information invalid, and can never be validated unless Rowling releases this information? If you enjoyed that component of the original 7 books, is that enjoyment invalid absent that information? If you don't like Rowling's subsequent revelations about Dumbledore's character, does that mean that your dissatisfaction is now rendered invalid? Are you not allowed to retroactively dislike the book? These are some of the core tensions that rest at the heart of Barthes's critique in "Death of the Author," both in the form of enjoyment and interpretation only being valid when viewed through one, singular "correct" lens, and in the implication that a correct interpretation can be achieved only when one accesses ALL of the information necessary for such an interpretation. If the goal of consuming art is to achieve a perfect understanding of an author's intent, then suddenly, reading and enjoying Harry Potter is only possible, not just after reading all seven books, but also reading all of Rowling's press conferences, reading all of her Pottermore entries, watching/reading the Cursed Child, watching all the Fantastic Beasts movies, and waiting endlessly in the event that Rowling might release further details that will eventually invalidate previous information, and even then, maybe she never reveals those details, maybe she never writes them down, maybe there's some slight detail that only Rowling will know, and which she'll take to her grave, which completely invalidates any thought you might have on Dumbledore and his motivations prior to that never-to-come revelation. What's the point of reading the books at all, then?

Also there's the uncertainty about Rowling and her statements. Rowling might say that she always wrote Dumbledore knowing that he was gay, but how do you know that? How does she know that? Rowling can only ever comment on what she thought she was thinking at that time, and even then, her commentary is inevitably going to be colored by the cultural climate, by audience reactions, and by her own subsequent personal life experiences. Trying to get at "what an author intended" and "what an author knew," is always going to be a project in chasing a phantom, and will always be read as the capital A-Author's word through the lower-case-a author's word, through your own interpretation of the former two, through your own lens and biases. If J.K. Rowling says she intended Nagini to actually be a cursed Indonesian lady from day 1, do you take that as Word of God and assume it to be true? Do you read it cynically and assume she didn't intend it that way, but is just saying so to pre-empt criticism of the upcoming film in which that fact is revealed? Or do you read it as somewhere in-between, that maybe she had some vague ideas at the time that Nagini would be something slightly more than a snake (maybe even something in the vein of Crookshanks - a crossbreed of an everyday animal with a magical creature), and then later on discovered this Indonesian myth and retrofitted it onto her earlier idea? We don't know, and we'll probably never know. So if you take 10 people and they all have 10 different ideas about what Rowling meant - who is correct here?

What about, moreover, when texts are directly contradictory? In Book 5, Professor McGonnagal revealed that she has been teaching at Hogwarts since the 1950s, and attended Hogwarts in the early 1940s. Pottormore entries stated that she and Professor Sprout were classmates in the 1940s, which would confirm that text. It was also stated in the books that Professor Dumbledore was a professor of Transfiguration before he replaced Armando Dippet as Headmaster of the school But then, in the most recent film, we see Professor McGonnagal present at Hogwarts in the present-day of the film in the late 1920s, nearly 10 years before she was even born according to the original seven books. Moreover, in this scene, it is revealed that Dumbledore teaches Defense Against the Dark Arts, not Transfiguration, and that this is his beloved teaching position. So now we have to ask: which is the correct reading? Are the books the correct reading or the film? Are we supposed to read the film's scene as non-canon? an unreliable narrator? Did Rowling originally intend for McGonnagal to start teaching in the 50s and then change her mind? But that problematizes things further, as it demonstrates that an author's intent isn't absolute, but rather malleable? So now we need to figure out which version of J.K. Rowling is the author-ity? The one who wrote The Order of the Phoenix, or the one who wrote The Crimes of Grindelwald?
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom