Category: politics

Information hygiene

[This post is also available as an issue of my newsletter, Leaflet.]

In the early onset of adulthood, one often samples reckless hedonism—drinking away weekends, maxing out credit cards, counting peanut butter swirled into spaghetti as “dinner,” punctuating relationship conflict with cigarettes—but the obverse of utterly unimpeded freedom is that one is free to die alone in a cancer ward if one really wants to, and at some point, there is usually an accommodation with prudence and fear, and one sets about acquiring boring, sensible habits. Never drink juice or soda, for instance. Just buy baby shampoo, because then you don’t have to find a new brand every six months. One even becomes grateful for habits like brushing one’s teeth that come as it were pre-installed.

Information hygiene is one such regimen. It was probably easier in the era I grew up in. Sources of information then had distinct edges and well-known, widely agreed upon reputations, in part because information was almost always delivered in a physical form. By and large, in those days, the only way to read a news article in, say, the Evening Gazette of Worcester County, Massachusetts, was to read it in the ink-on-paper Evening Gazette. In a pinch you could catch the bus into Worcester and read an old article on microfilm in the library downtown, but in general if you were reading an Evening Gazette story it was because you were holding the Evening Gazette in your hands. And well before that, you knew—either because you grew up knowing or because you had quizzed the neighbors when you moved to town—that the Gazette was ever so slightly more liberal than the Worcester Telegram, the only local alternative, which was the morning paper in the area, and you knew that both papers were pretty reliable about facts and a little stodgy. (Not perfectly reliable, however. When the Gazette ran a candid photo of me one spring day, sitting on a swing in our backyard reading a collection of short stories about vampires, I was shocked to see my name misspelled, our address garbled, and the vampires miscategorized as “homework.”)

Nice people didn’t read the flimsy magazines for sale in supermarket checkout lines. (By the way, these were not the glossy perfect-bound tomes you find in supermarkets today, blandly commemorating World War II, or vegetarian recipes, or a pop star who has through death recently achieved embourgeoisement. These were more ludicrous, meaner in spirit, and much cheaper-looking.) This wasn’t because nice people thoughtfully upheld the values of curation and fact-checking. It was because of class war. It was understood to be a little soiling to be seen even leafing through such magazines. It was understood that Tom Brokaw delivered real news, and that the Evening Magazine TV show that preceded him didn’t (despite that one segment on Chippendales dancers that did have some special news for me in particular, one fateful Thursday). At 5:30pm we knew that what was coming out of the television wasn’t serious, and at 6pm we knew that it was.

Channels of information are not so sharply delimited today. A talk-show host you follow tweets a line from a Washington Post story: you can’t simply say you learned about it on a talk show, or that you learned about it by browsing Twitter, or that you learned about it from reading the Washington Post. It’s all mixed up. And partly as a corollary, the reputations of channels of information are no longer so clearly demarcated, either. Even people like me, who consider The Washington Post to be reliable in matters of fact, have to keep in mind that a line from one of its articles that’s been cherry-picked by a media personality might acquire a slant on Twitter that it didn’t have in its original context—that the line might even have been selected with the intention that it will be misunderstood. Moreover, nowadays there exists a community of readers in which the consensus is that the Washington Post is a duplicitous lackey puppet of some dire neoliberal conspiracy. A third novelty of our environment: the consumption of information is for the most part invisible. Is it déclassé to read TMI Feedzweb? Who cares! No one sees you reading it. And even if they could, the shame and scorn that once enforced information hygiene have been so overthrown that nowadays reading downmarket sleaze probably qualifies you as edgy, in a downtown, post-moral kind of way.

What’s a boring adult to do? As I see it, there are two desiderata here: not to have your time wasted, and not to have your mind poisoned. I immediately, humbly confess that I have let a lot of my time be wasted over the past decade or so of Twitter use. My husband and I have print subscriptions to more than a dozen periodicals, but whole issues of these have been recycled unread into sock fibers and Patagonia jacket liners while I was clicking through to try to figure out why someone I was a little scared of on Twitter was so indignant about the intellectual misprisions of someone else on Twitter whom I kind of liked. I didn’t want to get attacked someday myself, you know. Was it worth it? Sometimes it felt like it was, at the time. I got to be a spectator at the front lines; I got to see the bayonets going in, to hear the flump of the bodies falling into the mud. But sometimes it didn’t feel worth it. Even hot takes that feel urgent while you’re reading them usually evanesce a minute or two later. I’ll never get back all those hours I spent reading about why it was unforgivable/imperative to call out as fascist politicians who up to that point had only gotten as far as openly longing to become fascist. In retrospect, what if I had just read the stories in each week’s New Yorker that looked interesting to me, instead of scrolling slack-jawed until I could tell which ones were being either denounced or overpraised by my disembodied frenemies?

I have a pretty good b.s. detector. While a denizen of Twitter, I prided myself on never having retweeted that picture of the shark swimming down the street during a hurricane, or, for the most part, any of its text equivalents. I don’t think my own mind ever got poisoned, in other words, but I did see minds poisoned. (“Who goes redpill?” is an article I would like to read someday.) The thing is that on Twitter there’s always a hurricane, and a shark is always swimming toward you through its chum-filled waters. Repeatedly batting it on the nose takes effort, and is that how you want to spend your one and only life? I love my friends, but it isn’t by and large for their news judgment that I love them, so why should I let them choose what I read instead of trusting the professionals at the New York Times, the Atlantic, n+1, the New York Review of Books, and so forth? I’m actually pretty happy when I find a site like Four Columns that is willing to send me a small number of smart review-essays on varied topics once a week. I wish Bookforum’s Paper Trail came out as a newsletter, but as a certified internet old, I know how to plug its feed into my RSS reader.

I wish I could say that I logged out of Twitter last week because I finally started listening to all my own arguments against myself on this topic. The truth is, I logged out because of disgust. Musk had recently been carrying water for Putin, so when Musk took possession of the site, I logged out on a wait-and-see basis. I had promised myself that I would quit if he let Trump back on, as he has signaled he will; I can’t face swimming in unmediated sewage again. The end came sooner, as it happened. A few days ago, Musk tweeted (and then deleted) a link to a conspiracy theory about the violent assault on Paul Pelosi that was so nauseating that I couldn’t bear to contribute even my tiny and insignificant content stream to a media company that he owns. I’m logged out indefinitely now. (Not deleting, yet; things are changing too fast.)

A couple of weeks ago, I listened to a podcast discussion about artificial intelligence (AI) between the New York Times reporter Kevin Roose and the podcaster Derek Thompson, who believe we’ll someday look back on the text-generating and art-making AI released this summer as epoch-shifting. Quite possibly! Some of the dystopian side effects that Roose and Thompson foresee may already be with us, though. Roose imagines, for example, that writerless news websites will spring up, full of articles penned by text-generating AI. In fact, the internet is already overrun with sites that pose as trustworthy sources of local news but have ulterior, usually political, motives—one such site was the source of the vile story linked to by Musk—and though these sites are not yet written by AI (as far as I know), they might as well be. AI could hardly be worse than low-rent paraphrases of wire stories, republication of corporate press releases, and rightwing dog-whistles. Roose also wonders how the nature of art will change once machines are able to replicate technical facility in any medium and any imaginable style, but much the same reckoning was forced on art by photography more than a century and a half ago. At the high end of the art market today, mere craft is already of rather little value. Donald Judd structured his whole career as an artist around being hostile to craft, deliberately designing artworks that could be manufactured to specification without any special skill. At the higher levels of the market, art now consists mostly of innovations in the idea of what art is, or the way it is understood. Recruiting AI into that project won’t slow anyone down even for long enough to hiccup.

This morning, Tiffany Hsu reported for the New York Times about fears that manipulated videos and photos are spreading unrecognized on Tiktok. Again, to some extent, we’re already there, and we’ve been there for a while. When I watched a recent Tiktok of a deepfake Tom Cruise flirting with a person who seemed to be Paris Hilton, it was not at all clear to me that Hilton was real. I googled, and had to resort to an Entertainment Weekly article that explained what I had been looking at. In other words, I determined that Cruise was fake and Hilton real only by means of trusting Entertainment Weekly. This is startling for someone who grew up when fake photos were almost always too clumsy to fool anyone, but it isn’t a situation that exceeds humanity’s epistemological capacities. It’s photography that’s recent, after all; unreliability has been with us forever, and has been accelerating ever since printing presses became widespread. Welcome to the 17th and 18th centuries! How to distinguish truth from fake news was a major concern during the Enlightenment, and the answer philosophers came up with then was not to try to stop the spread of newsprint but to set up laws, institutions, and protocols that would make trust reasonable in a world where anyone was capable of ventriloquizing anyone else thanks to new technology. (Spoiler alert: Copyright was quite useful.) Maybe at the moment you have sharper eyes than I do and can see that Fake Tom Cruise’s head doesn’t attach to his neck at quite the right angle, but in another few iterations or so, AI will defeat even the sharpest human eyes. The only anchor to be found will be in regimens of information hygiene. In such a world, people in positions of authority who spread disinformation knowingly, or even just with reckless disregard for the truth, will have to be sanctioned as untrustworthy—or else we’ll all drown in an AI-generated video swamp. Or rather, they will have to be identified as untrustworthy and stigmatized as such by any community—by any subset of society—that is willing to adopt measures that further the spread of truth. There’s some bad news here: if you’re Diderot, you don’t really even hope that someday everyone in France will want to, much less be able to, distinguish truth from falsehood. All you’re aspiring to is a self-limiting network of fellow philosophes willing to adhere to a sufficiently rigorous information hygiene protocol. Your hope is that truth will be discoverable to the happy few.

It’s always been a mistake to think of news organizations as manufacturers of a product called news, and it’s a mistake, therefore, to imagine that AI might be able to manufacture the product more cheaply. What you are paying for, when you subscribe to a newspaper, is trust. Trust that the newspaper’s reporters will tell the truth about what their sources have said. Trust that they are doing their best to unearth and share all sides of each story. Trust that the editors will not suppress evidence that is unflattering to the rich and powerful, including the newspaper’s owners. Trust that if the newspaper does fuck up, it will publish its errors and leave intact a record of its mistakes. You are paying for a relationship, but it isn’t a personal relationship—when individuals fail in this department, alas, they tend to fail catastrophically—it’s an institutionalized relationship. Musk’s approach to Twitter so far gets basically everything wrong. He’s reckless with the truth, he believes in the myth of individual judgment while having terrible judgment himself, he erases his mistakes instead of going public about his errors, and he seems poised to gut what little mechanism Twitter has had in place for content moderation up to this point, which wasn’t great to begin with. Oh well! Parts of it were fun while it lasted.

Time to Let Go

Also available as an issue of my newsletter, Leaflet

Top Gun: Maverick opens with Tom Cruise sitting in a chair, out of character. He thanks the audience for leaving their homes to experience the movie on a big screen. When Peter and I went to see Maverick in a movie theater, the other night, I was surprised by how old Cruise looked. He’s much better preserved than most civilians, of course, but in an age of motion capture and CGI, it’s a choice for a star like Cruise to allow his age to be visible. It occurred to me that the movie’s preface might have an ulterior purpose: to give the audience a moment to adjust to what time has done to the man who has long played the hero of their fantasies.

Cruise’s age is decidedly diegetic in the movie that follows. His character, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, is still flying planes for the Navy, more than three decades after the fictional events of the first Top Gun movie, and Maverick’s persistence in his vocation is understood, within the movie’s storyline, to be both failure and success. Failure, because Maverick is still just a captain all these years later, having refused to, or having proved unable to, accommodate himself to the military as an institution. Success, because, after three-plus decades of just flying planes, he’s very good at it. The ambiguity shrouds Maverick the way his black leather jacket does. It’s the same kind of jacket he would have worn more than three decades earlier—maybe it’s even the very same jacket—and we remember how in those days it seemed to participate in his virility. On a man in his fifties, however, an article of clothing that was archetypally sexy a generation ago has a certain pathos. (I say this as a man in his fifties.) Cruise looks great, but the jacket and the teardrop-shaped aviator sunglasses that go with it remind us so sharply of what Cruise looked like thirty-six years ago that they accentuate the contrast with his earlier physical self. We’re meant, I think, to feel a little sorry for him for still trying, and to feel bad that we feel that way. Which is, unexpectedly, a gentle feeling.

Top Gun: Maverick turns out to be a longitudinal movie, one that plays on and with the passage of time as it can be seen telling on the bodies of its actors, like Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight, and Boyhood; François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel movies; and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. In this class of movies, there can be moments of almost unbearable poignancy, exceeding the usual aesthetic frame around a movie. The passage of time can seem to be collapsing as one watches. A great role is a vital moment in the life of an actor, and when an actor revisits such a role, the viewer is aware of watching not only a fictional character’s resurrection but also a real person confronting a work of art that he may have thought at the time that he was the master and creator of, but which, in the years since, he has probably come to realize he was shaped by in ways he could never initially have intended, no matter how consciously he then thought he was working.

The first essay I ever wrote for my blog was about the original Top Gun. Peter and I watched it on a DVD mailed to us by Netflix, in April 2003, neither of us having seen it during its 1986 release, when we were teenagers. Peter now has no memory of having watched it at any time, but I looked my old essay up on my phone the morning after we saw Maverick. I was so angry in 2003! I wrote so knowingly! I seemed so certain of the points I was scoring against my enemy, whoever that was! Maybe a blog can be longitudinal, too? It was all so long ago.

In the spring of 2003, America was invading Iraq for the second time, and Top Gun was already an old movie, time-traveling from an America that hadn’t gone to war for a generation and was on the verge of discovering that it had a hankering to kill again. By 2003 America had consummated that desire, and I was angry, I think, because the Top Gunof 1986 seemed to me to have done what Marxians call ideological work toward that end. My theory seems to have been that the movie had whetted an appetite for violence by manipulating its male viewers’ anxieties about inadequacy and about having feelings for other men that were too strong. It was hardly a reach for me to come up with such a theory. In those days, to justify the U.S. military’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy, psychologists like Charles Moskos theorized something similar. It was understood that very few soldiers are willing to die for something as abstract as a nation and in practice risk their necks only for the other people in their unit whom they have become close to. Moskos thought open homosexuality would interfere with what he called unit cohesion. The military needed for soldiers to feel close but not in that way. If they started making love to each other, they would stop loving one another.

The year 2022 calls for different ideological work. America has lost its appetite for war. In fact it no longer has the stomach to digest the ones it’s still fighting, and consequently there is little discussion by journalists, and virtually none by politicians, of what we’re doing in Somalia, where we recently increased our military presence, or of our ongoing complicity with war crimes and humanitarian catastrophes in Yemen. In 2003, I thought Top Gun was a movie about short-circuiting mourning in order to induce a mindset more amenable to killing. Maverick, however, is just a movie about mourning. Period. Which isn’t to say it’s honest; more on its disingenuousness in a moment. But despite that disingenuousness, it is, surprisingly, a movie about decline and loss, visible from the movie’s very first frames in Cruise’s weathered face. Val Kilmer also reprises a role from the first Top Gun movie, and Kilmer, who in real life is recovering from throat cancer, is even more cruelly changed by time. His character tells Cruise’s, at one point, “It’s time to let go.” Cruise resists, of course, and the movie’s highs, which are considerable—I won’t pretend I didn’t enjoy the ride, and I even recommend it—stem from the fantasy that a man in late middle age can have one last hurrah. I think the viewer is meant to experience the hurrah on the screen as fantasy; I think the movie wants the viewer feel that Kilmer is right, that the end is coming, that, in fact, it’s pretty much here.

The sequel gestures toward rehearsing the neoliberal sermons about masculinity preached in the original. In Top Gun, the danger was that Cruise would feel too guilty about not having saved his fellow aviator Nick “Goose” Bradshaw to make a good soldier. In Maverick, the corresponding character flaw, which the screenwriters have given Goose’s son, Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, is a tendency to “overthink,” to delay firing until sure everything will work out. Which isn’t on the same level at all. In an early scene in a bar, a new generation of young aviators mock Cruise as “Pops” in a jolly hazing, tossing him out to the street when he can’t pay his bill. In Top Gun, it was Cruise’s short stature that signaled that he was a beta struggling in a world of alphas; in Maverick, it’s his age. In both movies, his smile encodes his survival strategy—submission without deference. Cruise is able to make being thrown out of a bar look like crowd-surfing. There’s no longer quite the same arousing and threatening scent of testosterone in the air, though, no longer quite as strong a sense that Cruise is the lone dolphin in a school of sharks. This is a war movie for the Ted Lasso era, when, instead of idealizing the free market of male egos, audiences want to see people on screen being kinder to and more understanding of one another than almost anyone in real life has the emotional wherewithal to be. Among the young aviators in Maverick, only one has the full-fledged blond-beast frat-boy assholishness that prevailed when Cruise himself was a student. In real life, that archaic style has been exploded, and in a military context, even rendered nauseating by the war crimes of people like the Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist any more; of course it does, and it’s still dangerous, but in the way of a cornered rat. Viewers know that if such a personality still tends to show up in elite military fighting units, it’s to some extent because it thinks it can take refuge there. And is safe not even there, really. One of the young aviators who makes the cut onto the final mission team is a woman, and another, perhaps even more tellingly, is a man whose call sign, “Bob,” is no more than his real name. The joke is that he isn’t even trying to be something other than ordinary. Maybe he’s gay? It would make a certain kind of metaphoric sense that in a post-closet world, the gay would be the one without an alter ego.

As for that disingenuousness: Ideology’s weapon, in the sequel, is nostalgia. The viewer is meant to sigh a little over the way technology is forcing pilots like Cruise and his young protégés into extinction. A colonel nicknamed the “Drone Reaper” is said to be shuttering the Navy’s dogfighter programs in order to pour more money into unmanned aerial vehicles, and the implication is that Cruise is a John Henry, who can’t help but keep trying to prove humanity’s superiority to machines, which is to say, to capital. “It’s not the plane, it’s the pilot,” is Cruise’s refrain in the movie, and his character totals half a dozen fighter jets, with as much abandon as if they were so many Ferris Bueller Ferraris. In reality, even though drones are replacing fighter jets, militaries today are more capital-intensive than ever, which, some economists theorize, is why America’s heavy military expenditure over the past quarter century failed to redistribute wealth the way that military expenditure during World War II did. Now more than ever, a nation may be understood as a population that can be taxed so reliably that you can take out a loan against the taxes; if you want to know who’s going to win a war, figure out which side has access to better (deeper, more continuous) financing.

Of all the reasons to feel bad about drones, the withering away of pilots may be one of the weakest. From the point of view of people being bombed on the ground, jets were never any more sporting than drones are. The nostalgia trip offered by Maverick is one last fight the old-fashioned way—a return to an ignorance that drone warfare has made more difficult. The nationality of the enemy that Cruise and his team are fighting is never named, and when the enemy pilots appear on screen, they’re hidden inside bug-like flight suits with opaque visors. In fact, thanks to drones, soldiers today often watch the people they have been asked to kill for so long that they begin to feel a kind of intimacy with them—and nonetheless still sometimes end up killing innocent civilians. And sometimes also end up becoming aware that they have done so. In a recent New York Times article about the moral injury that soldiers are now subject to, there’s a haunting story: An intelligence analyst working at an Air Force base is asked to take out a target in Afghanistan said to be a high-level Taliban financier. The analyst and his team track the man for a week, watching him tend his animals and eat with his family, and then a pilot on the team kills the man, remotely. A week later the man’s name appears on the target list again. They killed the wrong guy. This happened two more times, the analyst told the Times, before the analyst threatened to kill himself, was talked out of it, and was “medically retired.” In Top Gun: Maverick the fantasy is that it’s still possible to fly over these moral compromises at Mach 10 speed.

A new short story in “The Yale Review”

The Yale Review, spring 2021

A new short story of mine, “Massachusetts,” is published in the spring 2021 issue of The Yale Review. The story is about how a group of children are shaped by two teachers whose styles of being are incommensurate. It’s a tiny bit allegorical, but realist enough that you might not notice.

If you’d like to read it, you can get just the spring 2021 issue of The Yale Review for $15, or you can get a year’s subscription (four issues) for $44, along with a coupon for 50% off some of Yale University Press’s books.

New story

If you subscribe before midnight Sunday night, you’ll be in time to receive the next issue of the literary journal n+1, which has a new story by me. The name of the story is “The Remainder.” The name of the issue is “Death Wish,” which is also the 20% off discount code: DEATHWISH. It’s a good story. Subscribe now!