They Still Cry for Christopher Hitchens
How Twitter is being murdered, by whom, for what purposes - this is obvious to everybody who has a passing interest. It is a lazy, teenage-grade media stunt to rifle through internal documents to prove that ‘cancel culture’ is real, and if you’re boring and sad enough, you can find out where it was illegal, even if you make the laws up. Everything points forward to the most boring future imaginable - a Twitter that works less well, on which Trump can’t be banned.
Journalists and commentators can pick apart all that. I only write a note here as someone who read a few too many macho-voice journalism books between 2000-2008 - by some of the same players in this balding psychodrama.
I would only want to say to Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi is that yes, there is a really grating liberal orthodoxy online, and it's boring - but ... you made it. You weren't on the sidelines. You made it happen. You naturalised the voice of total invective and total distrust in the Bush years. It's not hidden from view. You wanted acolytes and love and followers in those years, and you got it. The Twitter shitposting voice that emerged in the early years - you were both pretty influential! Sorry you don’t like it. The journalist class that you now hate all flocked there to cavort in the garden which you helped plant. Sorry!
Taibbi and Greenwald both got a fierce contact high on the martyr's death that Christopher Hitchens died in 2011, a secular humanist with an Oxbridge rolodex. A man who turned his mostly leftward cynicism but cranked rightward three times, like a breaking clock in a Poe story (or Peter's three refusals to say he knew Christ) - Rushdie's fatwas, NATO in Bosnia, and the Clintons. The three crimes, as he would say.
Greenwald and Taibbi looked up to Hitchens, first as opponent but then a martyr -if the anti-war movement could dismantle Hitchens, then who would be next? There's not much criticism any of us without the high class and caste education could do top pick apart, because he was at least, a figure with diverse views (who now burns in hell). They saw those three breaks, of which Hitchens was talking about incessantly from 2004-2011, as the betrayals of the leftward of his truer, nameless nature.
In retrospect, he passed on his bleeding wounds to many nameless sons. A sense of permanent injury is easier to personally take on that the risk than you end up like him, hated for supporting a war. As it turns out of course, it's all pretty ripe stuff - the Clintons are more rotten than we knew in 2006-2011, NATO's politics is completely hidden from the world public but we ended up needed it regardless, etc.
I will disagree with many on the left by saying that the ‘woke mind virus’ does actually exist. There is a general, rapid, fast-moving growth in the arming against injustices both real and imagined. The right are scared of it because they know it can't be controlled or contained like a politician can. So they do what tbey’ve always done - burn the imaginary source of the degeneracy.
But Twitter was never the source, nor is it even the third or fourth most integral element of its online infrastructure.
Deep in the discourse-archaeology of this moment, the invective writing that helped set the standard, establish the patterns, lay out the vision for a future beyond political parties is, in part, owned by the derelict and unhappy sons of an Empire laying in ruins.
They wanted people to leave the centre-left political parties and they did. They recognised how cheaply and quickly the levers of power can be tickled, if not pulled. And yet we still bomb Palestinians, gay people are still murdered, injustice still grows faster than the speed of our recognition of it.
No, they weep for a discourse that never happened, a politics that can never be and never was. They cry out for a simpler time when it has never been more free and easy to speak your mind - you just have to have one before you speak.
Killing Twitter in its current form stops nothing in the medium term. It's all coming down. All of it.