A Miscellany For Nanci Griffith's Birthday

“Seductive,” My Ass

This is a perfectly fine review, by Molly Fischer, of some recent books that debate the hypothesis “Young people’s brains are being cooked by smartphones.” I’m not being sarcastic; it’s a good piece. But Fischer does the same thing that everybody who writes about this possibility in any mode other than Full-Blown Panic Mode does: she keeps talking about it like it’s a pleasant delusion, an easy copout. She calls it “seductively intuitive” and then says, a little more generously:

It would be too dismissive to call the concern over teens and technology a moral panic, as some skeptics have done. But, if it isn’t a moral panic, it has at least become an irresistibly gripping cultural drama—a story operating on the level of emotion rather than data. Parents are daunted, exhausted, and afraid.

I mean. At worst it operates on the level of emotion as well as data, and that could also be said of lots of ideas that are, well, true. My belief that the current elevation of ICE into a militarized federal secret police is a very bad thing operates at the level of emotion rather than data, because I have enough fucking data at this point and now I’m mad and want to smash something. That’s how it’s supposed to work. The overall impression you get from the article is that Fischer is saying something like: “The phones? Ah, my friend, if only it were that easy. Wouldn’t it be lovely if it were The Phones.”

Whenever I encounter this rhetorical move, I think: What?! No, it wouldn’t be lovely. It would be incredibly bad news. It would be like finding out that air gives you cancer, or microplastics make you infertile. It would be like finding out that lead paint makes children stupider and more aggressive. It would suggest that the problem is everywhere and basically unbeatable except by a kind of focus, organization, and political will that are incredibly hard to muster at the best of times. It would mean that reducing youth depression will require radical changes to our daily lives, equivalent in terms of difficulty to giving up cosmetics, red meat, and cars simultaneously.

Smartphones are so ubiquitous that even to hate on them, I now have to pick one up, open Notion, hit the little microphone icon, dictate a note with a particularly clever malediction upon them, and post that note later on here or on Bluesky or into the pages of a book manuscript. I mean I don’t “have” to, but the effort involved in doing it another way would feel like teaching myself to use only water that I draw from a well daily using wood buckets. It’s absolutely terrible fucking news.

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The Dystopia That Wasn’t

Lately I have been thinking — and this may become the subject of a full-length essay, or I may decide that it is too trivial, too ephemeral for that, in which case these scattered notes will be the idea’s final form — that the most impressive, and yet most seemingly useless, self-consciously “left” artistic projects of my adult life thus far is that imaginary country, which we collectively elaborated via our jokes and riffs and posts and podcasts over the course of about nine years (say 2015-2024), in which the harshest economic austerity and the most brutal foreign policy imaginable were not only accompanied by, but found their indispensable justification in, a rhetorically-maximalist, policy-minimalist version of identity politics, which in this vision — this brilliant work of the dystopian and satirical imagination — was going to combine with HR jargon, customer-service bullshit, Tumblr misandry (though that sort of fits under “identity politics”), and Newspeak to tell you why your lost benefits, the suppression of your union, or the triple-tap drone strike on your front porch were your fault.

If you were on X, The Everything App, during the two Bernie campaigns, or ever listened to an episode of Chapo Trap House, you know what I’m talking about. You know the style of joke I mean, which mixed the real with imaginable extensions of the real: We’ll bomb you but the bomb will have a Pride flag on it. Our CIA will run ads like this. Our Democratic Party explained their increasingly testy relationships with unions by saying “Well, you know, it’s not like there isn’t a long history of racism and sexism in the labor movement” (the Democratic Party having had no such problems). When it declared this or that part of Michigan or Kentucky a sacrifice zone, it did so while saying something like: “Why is it always white men who think they’re entitled to a ‘job’ where you just show up for ‘work’ every day and the check just automatically ‘shows up’ in your bank account? Women of color have always known that tomorrow isn’t promised and that you need to hustle. It’s time we taught these guys some hard truths about life.”

On a good Chapo episode, you could get riffs on these sorts of things, much faster and tighter than I can manage, sometimes at a density that recalled the golden years of “The Simpsons,” all focused on that country. Those guys would just throw out jokes that Robert Coover would have labored six months over in 1977! That’s how inviting, indeed obsessively engaging, a target this imaginary country was: this place where Lena Dunham donned a pantsuit and a pair of comfortable shoes to stomp on a human face forever; where abortions were free for those who could afford them; where critics of President Obama’s drone-bombing campaigns against utterly poor (mostly brown) countries were motivated by fear of a successful black president. It’s not like this had no basis in reality! That last example is something that actually happened. And the style really emerged, really enjoyed a full grotesque flowering, when Bernie ran for President, both times. The simple fact is that Bernie was farther to the left in his commitments, plans, and vision, on precisely the sorts of issues that his identity was supposed to blind him to as compared with a Clinton, Kamala Harris, or (yes) Elizabeth Warren, and had been so for far longer, than any of his viable rivals. Both times. Period. This was never hard to look up. Bernie Sanders advocated abortion on demand, without apology, covered by the state, when Hillary Clinton was making noises about “safe, legal, and rare” and Elizabeth Warren was a registered Republican. Bernie Sanders recognized transgender identity back in the ‘80s; Harris persecuted trans prisoners pretty much right before she became a national figure. Which of these people is going to hold the line, whatever line you’re concerned about? It’s pretty obvious. So let’s talk instead about how Bernie’s fans are white men (statistically, they were the young, of all races and genders, but never mind). It was shameful and depressing.

And so comments like Clinton’s “breaking up the banks won’t end racism,” or policies like Warren’s “let’s do Obama’s neoliberal Race to the Top but for hospitals” (Race to the Top didn’t work for schools so why would it work for hospitals?), did look like anticipations of a newly bad version of America. And you could read Robin DiAngelo arguing against the possibility of human solidarity from “the left” (!) to the acclaim of well-heeled liberals everywhere and, it seemed, anticipate where it was all going. And the style combined condescension, moralism, and hypocrisy in the sort of proportions that just irresistibly attract you if you have even a lightly satirical imagination. (I think the best joke I ever made along these lines was when Amber Tamblyn wrote a MeToo editorial that was headlined “I’m Not Ready for the Redemption of Men” and I pointed out that it would make a great title for an investment prospectus from a private-prison company, aimed at, like, Megan Ellison or Chelsea Clinton or somebody. I was right! I cooked!)

These few years later, I no longer think things were ever really headed that way. I think it was mostly a mirage. One, because the same floating craps game of Democratic consultants who adopted that cynical strategy and style is also, as a group, characterized by its willingness to throw every Identity you may want to get Political about under every privatized Google bus they can find, as soon as that’s advantageous to them. MeToo ended the moment the other 2020 Dem candidates coordinated around Biden — who had, and I suspect still has, a sexual harassment allegation against him that passed all the same (rather minimal) epistemological tests for automatic belief that many Dem surrogates had just spent three years advocating for, sometimes in defiance of common sense. That was where the tide turned. I’m obviously not saying that I’m sure Biden did it¹, nor that the rhetoric of epistemological closure around MeToo was ever justifiable either as policy or as rhetorical strategy,² nor that it didn’t make sense to vote for the “oh shit sorry thought you were into this plz like me” sexual aggressor over the “you’re not into this??? good!!!! also I’m going to kidnap people off the street and sell them to El Salvador” sexual aggressor in a binary contest with a binary outcome. But, as a matter of cold historical fact, that’s what happened. Once Bernie was out of the way, the consultant types all immediately reverted to their Clinton-era bullshit about The Groups, they spent the summer of 2020 pretending blathering about I Understand That I Will Never Understand while preparing to blame any lost election on prison abolitionists and Too-Woke People. It was all a mirage. The people who promised us that dystopia weren’t even really promising it. They were just shepherding you to the most conservative Dem they could shepherd you to which is what they always do. The Kill Men or Punish Whitey or Make Straight Marriage Illegal caucuses, to the extent these really exist, were never going to get anything from the consultants, anymore than Sean O’Brien and the Teamsters are gonna get anything out of Trump.

Second, and this is the harder pill to swallow: Even if we’d gotten that dystopia, it would be so much better than the dystopia we have gotten as to be unimaginably so. For the next several years, absent a truly dramatic collapse of the regime, we are going to be building a secret police, to be deployed against Americans — which I’m emphasizing not to say “this matters more when it happens to Americans,” but to say that without our seemingly-anemic homeland dissent, there’s no real check on the sorts of depredations we have always committed against poorer countries — to a degree that is legitimately new. If and when the regime does collapse, simply stopping further construction of that police state will be a huge political chore. Only people toughened by having to live in a total hellscape would have the persistence to do it. Luckily, I guess, we’re getting that hellscape.

The Clintonian Dystopia never came, and compared to what we got, I wish it had. That’s my point. We wasted our time and we got too worried about the wrong thing. It’s easier to just be awful to people than to be awful and hypocritical and you’re probably underrating the risk of “just awful.” That’s also my point.

The funniest dystopia is not always the one you get. The other dystopia would have been much funnier than this one.

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Unrelated

Did you know that July 6 is Nanci Griffith’s birthday? Go listen to Storms (1989). Great record.

1. Although the accusation as worded by Tara Reade has a certain stamp of authenticity — particularly the part where Biden retreats, withdrawing his hand from her underwear, and says “I thought you liked me!” It sounds exactly like him: the self-pitying tone, the narcissistic concern with how he looks, but also the fact that, deep down, he actually didn’t want to subject her to anything she didn’t want. Whereas Trump probably only used to get hard when subjecting people to what they didn’t want.

2. Why tell everyone that they have to default to belief under particular circumstances, when you could just say “Take every accusation seriously”? That one’s easy to defend because it’s true, and it has basically all the same implications: you have to do a real investigation, you can’t just ignore the accusation because the accuser is somehow imperfect, etc.