House of Eratosthenes

By the time I started this blog, I’d already had a long time to figure out you can “win” an argument on the Internet and then you can be right about something — those are two different things. It’s easy to forget this, but it’s important to keep in mind because both of these require strategy and effort. And this is not effort applied in a common direction. They are, in fact, opposed. Winning an argument on the Internet depends a great deal on dispensing retorts that are bite-sized, and often inaccurate, so as to hold the attention of any bystanders. Really being right often involves an accumulation of complexity, just like a program or script, as the answer evolves to soundly address a sprawling collection of disconnected but relevant factors. During which time, how much fun it is for someone else to watch you, is not a matter under consideration. Being “Internet-right” means being fun to watch, and being really-right often requires being boring to watch.

If your answer is getting better by way of evolving, it’s going to have to absorb some body-blows so you know what to change. That’s how it works. And so around the time I started this blog I began to notice how easy it was to Internet-win arguments with a certain type of personality, the better-than-you, every-hair-in-place guy who took the time to triple-check his grammar and spelling so that he could tut-tut you about “George Washington actually never said that” or “Prepositions are actually okay to end sentences with.” You know this type yourself, probably. You’ve met him: The “actually-guy.”

I can Internet-win arguments with these types in just a few choice words: “I make ten or more mistakes every morning before you punks even think about getting out of bed.” Interestingly, any other time I theorized about the happenings in their own lives I would earn a predictable rebuke of “you don’t know that about me,” no matter how innocuous or safe the assumption. I was always wrong on these, or at least potentially wrong, which was just as damning. But here I was acting as if I knew what time they woke up in the morning, and opining on it rather rudely, and I never received such a correction. Not once. That’s because it was in their nature to see this as an admission of defeat, and they were showing off for their friends who no doubt saw it the same way. So one of my idle pursuits was winning arguments on the Internet with these punks and their friends, and being the only one present who could see it was a win. Rather like hitting a hole-in-one playing golf by yourself.

It didn’t bore me as much as it should have. I found this fascinating.

And perhaps that was right, in fact maybe I should have found it even more fascinating. If you were a thirteen-year-old punk arguing with me on the Internet back in 2004, let’s see…that would make you the same age as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez now. Crowder has a rule about her “only mock AOC when she truly deserves it, but let the little stuff go.” I like that rule. It makes a lot of sense.

This is a generational affliction. It isn’t all just AOC. The kids can’t tell Internet-right apart from being-really-right, they think it’s all the same thing. It’s like the point to life is to reach your coffin without ever having been wrong about anything, and you’re never wrong about anything unless you admit to it.

So if I had been AOC and I had asked my millions of followers WTF that growling thing in the sink is, only to find out garbage disposals have been around for eons, I’d laugh at myself. Like an “OMG you guys what planet have I been living on?”…It’s okay not to know what something is. It’s a little tone deaf to use that ignorance, innocent or not, to then try and leverage that ignorance, innocent or not, into a rallying cry to push an agenda: bigotry, economic exploitation, and climate denial. Remember, AOC considers herself a leader. Leader’s make mistakes.

Actually, an apostrophe in this context indicates possession not plurality…oh wait. I think I see what the writer did their.

Look, I know of some people who go the other way: So fervently do they believe the future belongs to “strong people capable of admitting their own mistakes,” that they go looking for mistakes to make so they can make a big show of admitting they made one. And when the moment comes you can see how fake it all looks, how it has the feel of being rehearsed. Which it likely was. So there’s a delicate balance here. You should learn as much as possible from your mistakes, but you should apply your energies toward doing as well as you possibly can. This requires a little bit of thought. Because if you only learn from your mistakes, but you’re trying not to make them, doesn’t that translate into trying not to learn anything?

Well no. You set up test environments. You practice playing your musical instrument in private. You remove the weight from your potential mistakes. You test the triggering mechanism on the nuclear missile with the payload removed.

Millennials get a bad rap and much of it is undeserved, you can see by watching certain splendid individual examples within their set. But across the entire set as a whole, I’m sad to say the reputation has been earned. All those years of participation trophies and “you’re just so special” and “that was a real good thing you did” have created this sense that right-vs.-wrong is a purely societal construct, and if you ever think you made any mistakes you should a) refuse to ever admit to them and b) disabuse yourself of that notion toot-sweet, even if you see iron-clad proof that you made the wrong call. It’s just your self-esteem taking a beating sweetie, now brush it off and strut around like a pigeon on a chessboard the way you were taught.

See, that’s wrong. You might say it is the ultimate error. If we’re right all the time, even just “Internet-right,” we don’t correct anything and therefore we don’t improve. We don’t do our learning when we win.

This affects billion dollar endeavors. I see Rian Johnson does a lot of “pushing back,” especially on Twitter, against anybody who “doesn’t get” The Last Jedi and sees errors within. I don’t begrudge the man for standing up for his work. And perhaps there’s been something going down here that has escaped my notice…but it’s rather amazing that this has been his reaction all of the time, with every little bit of criticism, this Millennial attitude of “I’m right, you’re wrong, you only have a problem because you don’t get something, I know something you don’t know.” TLJ, as myself and others have noted, isn’t really that complicated of a movie and it doesn’t have that complicated of a message hidden within. It’s loaded up with mistakes just like any other movie. Once you admit to that, you could admit that some of these mistakes were significant and affected the overall quality.

Johnson, along with the others involved in the production, cannot even admit the “Leia floating in space” scene was a mistake. This is a huge red flag, an indicator that the wrong people were in charge. Artists and entertainers should be able to absorb and channel criticism. It’s part of the job description.

And politicians? Doubly so, when they fancy themselves capable of drawing up the set of rules that are supposed to guide the new command-economy they want to create. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has lately taken a bizarre turn with “I’m both joking and not joking at the same time” with regard to the only-have-twelve-years thing. Now, I’m not entirely sure how alarmed I should be about this. She is, after all, the leading symbol of a major political party; in the years ahead she will only get closer to the median age of our most impactful congresspeople, while her more moderate rivals are forced to retire. And if I’m reading this right, her understanding of right vs. wrong has been so damaged by the Internet that she’s entirely lost her sense of dialectics. She, along with her constituents, may never have had it. The mindset she represents is one that says none of this stuff means anything at all, there is no world to save within twelve years, they’re all abstractions, there is only winning arguments on the Internet and that is the only reality.

I could be wrong! Hope so.

If I’m not, this is going to get worse before it gets better.

I wish your post were listed discretely within the blog so that they could be “Shared” (I hate that term in this context) on the Hello Kitty of blogging or other forms
- Fai Mao | 06/14/2019 @ 16:19
You mean, permalinked? You can copy permalinks from the “Recent” section on the left.
- mkfreeberg | 06/15/2019 @ 07:01

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The Glory of ErrorThursday, May 30th, 2019

The Glory of Error
Thursday, May 30th, 2019