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An ouroboros doing itself no favours in 1617, as depicted by the Lutheran alchemist and physician to Emperor Rudolf II, Michael Maier
A lot of writing on Substack is about writing on Substack — particularly how to do it. How to do it profitably. How to ensure your work is seen. How to stand out. How to structure your writing and grow and on and on. This week alone, several newsletters on this topic have landed with a thud in my inbox. This isn’t one of those — they’re useful to writers but not necessarily to readers. I’m here to serve the latter as well as my own preferences and, to be frank, they can get a little boring and repetitive.
Procedural tips for writers can be really helpful — so I’ll share some of those in a post on Substack Notes to accompany this column. My readership isn’t one of the biggest by any means and growth is both gradual and a constant challenge but one of the things I like about Substack is the relative modesty of people’s goals here. For the most part, writers seem to want to be read, to make enough money (if possible) to enable them to keep writing even if that means merely protecting free time so it can be used to write. I’ll be honest - the pointers I’ve shared are mostly about what not to do. There are a lot of people shooting themselves in the foot here in an attempt to grow.
As usual though, Peak Notions isn’t about procedural knowledge. I’m more interested in the overarching ideas which generate that sort of knowledge. The ouroboric foot-shooting speaks to a much wider tendency which governs our collective behaviour not just on Substack but across social media more generally. There really is one thing at the centre of all the online ugliness here and everywhere else, and we could — if we wanted to — just stop doing it. At least on an individual basis.
We’re all online all the time, and while Substack Notes in particular is a much gentler and warmer environment than most social media platforms, we import behaviours from the wider internet and sometimes things get weird. Perhaps more accurately, a bit shitty. We get a bit shitty, here and everywhere else online. As Peak Notions grows I’ve noticed a particular flavour of growing interpersonal chicanery — what I would consider bad online etiquette in various kinds of exchanges — cropping up here and there.
The umbrella that sits over and gives rise to all of it across social media — from abusive messages to negative attention grabs to cynical attempts at marketing one’s ‘brand’ — is bad faith. Bad faith is the beating, haemorrhaging heart of interpersonal engagement online. It’s the primary cause of online alienation. It’s the most powerful impediment to connecting meaningfully with other people, and consequently to desirable outcomes some people care about (growth on Substack among them).
As our tedious but ubiquitous friend Kant might put it, it’s the use of another person as a means to an end. This might sound like a trivial point but it isn’t — at the heart of every weird, awkward, shitty interaction on the internet there is someone attempting to use another person as a crowbar to jimmy open some door or other. The door to their own self-esteem. The door to their perception of success, growth, fame, attention or relevance. The use of others as marketing tools, emotional venting mechanisms, or targets. The use of others as a rhinoceros uses an obliging tree when its dehydrated, cragged behind gets itchy.
This leveraging can go in both directions as we all know from those dismissive, rude or simply hostile back-and-forth exchanges which came to characterise Twitter. The ones in which two or more parties exert themselves until they are purple in the face to make the other person look wrong and stupid at the cost of making themselves look… ultimately wrong and stupid. Always though this sort of thing is a failure to recognise the humanity in another person. Always it is an attempt to use them as a means to some form of personal gain, even if that gain is feeling the validity of our own righteousness. It’s worth saying that I’m not talking about robust online debate, or a firm but polite response to someone else’s rude comment. It’s the vicious, ego-driven stuff. The stuff that makes social media less pleasant for everyone.
I’ve often thought that Kant seemed like the sort of person, if you ever met him, who would, to quote my aunt, “give your arse a headache” Just absolutely no fun at all. The sort of person who would never have watched Saturday morning cartoons even if they’d existed when he was small (he died in 1804). The sort of person who wouldn’t ‘get’ sarcasm at a party so that you’d have to explain your joke about alpacas and then he’d say something irrelevant like “actually alpacas have a much shorter life expectancy than humans” and you would fantasise, just for a moment, about slowly pushing his face into the nearby birthday cake. However, he was right that we should treat other individuals not as means, but as ends in themselves.
People possess intrinsic dignity and value (even people who are a bit dull and unrelenting like Kant himself — even that person who reheats last night’s dinner salmon in the office microwave). It is dangerous to treat others as mere instruments for achieving our goals or outcomes. It diminishes us. When we engage with people online, we are frequently doing this — instrumentalising others. It’s easier to do in digital spaces because the humanity of the other person feels theoretical rather than real to us. We condense their whole personhood into a single comment they made, a blog post they wrote, or a need we want them to fulfil for us. A need to look clever. A need to feel less doubt in our own ideas. To market something. To be seen. Whatever.
Apart from the inherent and clear philosophical problems with this, it generally doesn’t achieve the outcome we ultimately desire. When we seek to elevate ourselves online — even in small ways — by using other people as instruments to that elevation, they know we are doing it. If it’s done in a public online space like a social media feed, other people see it. We all live on the internet, and this bullshit — while so incessant that some people may consider it either standard or even expected — isn’t subtle. No one likes to be used instrumentally. It won’t generate good will and very few people possess the accursed skill (or the specific internet savvy sociopathy) to do it both invisibly and successfully, thank goodness.
This may all seem trivially true but if that is the case, we forget it every time we engage in bad faith online (and we all do it quite a lot). So what can we do? We can stop. We can go into interactions with people online — from a comment under an article or a response to a Tweet to emailing someone — with good faith. We can ask ourselves ‘Am I attempting to use this person as a means to my own end?’ and be honest in answering. If the answer is indeed yes, we can ask how we might achieve that end without using that person solely as a means. We can consider how we might engage with them, or solicit their help, advice or interest (if we need to) without trying to open a door by ramming their head through it. There might (read: definitely will) be a way to engage with them in good faith.
We can also protect ourselves from bad faith interaction online. If someone engages with us in a way which, on serious consideration, seems more likely than not to be an attempt to open a door with the one fragile cranium we have been given to go through life with, we can simply opt out. Disengage. Ignore. There is no answering bad faith with good, and there’s enough bad in the world already. Bad faith actors on the internet should be met at the door with the thing they most fear — utter silence. At least until they learn to knock.
Isnot this medium a subset of Phone? Which machine-phone-has the bias of communicating unintended barbs already, so that we require face time bona fide to quickly, in an hour with a relative and less w friends and all lingering doubts are erased? I find the I net requires a clean room, to decompress as if our ability to find coded messages in say an abandoned campsite means we usually find misapprehensions about how people are exceeding us in 1,2,3 meaning, beauty and irony. But if so, they wld not be writing there. Hygiene is the word, to me it says if I speak out in class online, then am available for 2 hours to clarify misunderstandings. Aspirationally yours, Nathanohio.
Thank you for a clear exposition of how we mess up on social media. I don't always find bad faith so easy to spot. I also love the obiter dicta; Kant, the alpaca and that pithy expression from your aunt. Great stuff.