Under the Digital Eye of Sauron
To be fully legible is to be fully alone. Digital subcultures aren't much better
I write to you today from sunny Budapest, where I’m in town for the Ludovika Festival, while musing on the bin-fire my Twitter mentions have been since publishing an interview with Lauren Southern at UnHerd last weekend.
A lot of people were angry with different aspects of that conversation. I don’t want to dwell on the great many responses here, except to say that many of them richly illustrated the point Southern and I both wanted to make: that internet ideologies are enticingly pure, while life and relationships in the real world are usually much more ambiguous and complicated.
The whole episode has left me reflecting on how this striving for purity and clarity has been baked into the internet since its inception: a phenomenon that itself has earlier roots in a specifically American - more particularly, Californian - culture. This is a culture that optimises for thin social encounters, assumed to take place almost always between strangers: the culture you might expect to form at the utter West, founded on the impulse to leave behind constraining tradition and dreary familiarity and begin again, among strangers, on a blank slate.
In this maximally-thin culture, the most basic courtesy you can extend someone is not to read someone else’s social signals, but to pointedly not read their signalling: to assume only that you cannot make assumptions. And the corollary of this courteous refusal to make assumptions is then that desires, preferences, and social codes may safely be ignored, unless they are explicitly spelled out.
It’s no coincidence that the internet was born in this crucible of alienation-by-consensus. The digital domain thins interpersonal encounters still further, by dematerialising them: even physical appearance and body language are abstracted, reducing each voice on the internet only to words. So maximal explicitness is necessary to get your point across without confusion or misunderstanding, while conversely everyone has to take on trust that their interlocutor means what they say. Inevitably, a language for inflections swiftly emerged, via emojis and HTML; later, internet usage made the leap from arcane nerd hobby to mass-adoption cultural phenomenon, via interfaces that enabled users to format more richly, and see what the end text looked like: “What You See Is What You Get”, or “WYSIWYG” interfaces: an illusory user-experience of transparency, actually underwritten by complex code, that in turn stands metaphorically for the illusory experience of encountering everyone in perfect legibility: WYSIWYG sociality.
Liberals across the political aisle all express a version of this dream: broadly, a moral claim that “If you aren’t willing to be explicit about what you want it’s your fault if you don’t get it”. You see this on the liberal Left, for example in people trying to “process” (that is, rationalise and render transparent) sadness, anger, or other powerful emotions. On the liberal Right you see it in the manosphere, among other places, where devotees are encouraged to disregard any attempts by a woman to induce their male partner to try and guess a desire in order to meet it. Behind all these is a clear but (ironically) unstated moral stance: that transparency is good by definition, and it’s unwise and even morally suspect (coercive, perhaps) to assume someone else can infer your wishes from a hint. Whatever remains undeclared is at best marginal, if not outright dangerous.
But what in fact is the undeclared? A moment of mis-recognition from Redpill Pickme extraordinaire H Pearl Davis sheds some light:
Davis implies here that that this exchange is wrong because the relation between husband and wife should be hierarchical, with the man given authority over his wife - and hence absolved of asking for assent in anything. This reveals a marked ignorance of how even formally hierarchical relations work in practice; but even leaving this aside, what interested me about the tweet is how profoundly it’s marinaded in the same WYSIWYG moral code, brewed in California and propagated worldwide via the internet.
As perhaps the quintessential manosphere-adjacent antifeminist, Davis has embraced that subculture’s extreme liberal individualism, along with the WYSIWYG moral code that underpins liberal individualism. Within that framework, marriage is only legible as a series of transactional cost/benefit assessments. But to see it in these terms is to miss one of marriage’s most alchemical social dimensions: that it’s also the smallest possible unit of subculture.
She assumes here that when a man says “let me ask my wife”, that’s literally what he means. But while that might sometimes be the case, often what’s actually being conveyed is “No, but I don’t want to explain why to you, or cause you to lose face”. And what’s being referenced is a relation some of which is, by definition, inaccessible to the WYSIWYG moral order.
For while marriage as a social form is oriented outward, in the sense of acting as a fundamental social building block it’s also oriented inward: it assumes the existence of intimate social exchanges that are, by definition, inaccessible to the public. This obviously includes sexual intimacy, but extends infinitely beyond this most private of activities to encompass everything from shared experiences to nicknames, running jokes, collusion, conspiracy, a wider social circle, the care of children, and (of course) often being perfectly happy to be used as an excuse when one’s spouse doesn’t feel like doing something.
This fabric of shared meaning is the lifeblood of community, culture, and belonging. Marriage, as a permanent, committed, interpersonal dyad, is its smallest possible unit. To the extent that it’s rendered transparent and accessible to those beyond its charmed circle, the intimate world internal to a marriage becomes inert: irradiated, lifeless, sterilised. This is why posting about your intimate relationships is such a bad idea - at least if you want to continue having intimate relationships.
An uncomfortable inference follows from this. That inasmuch as it remains committed to radical transparency, internet culture and the liberal individualism it expresses are actively hostile to human sociality as such - and especially hostile to marriage. To the extent that we fail to practice digital modesty and instead lean into the moral and techno-theological practice of radical transparency, we will continue dissolving our own capacity for intimate shared meaning.
In practice, of course, no one can tolerate standing entirely unprotected in the full glare of the digital eye of Sauron. Instead, online subcultures proliferate, in which the WYSIWYG faith in interpersonal transparency is re-oriented from total alone-ness toward a set of (assumed transparent, explicit, and legible) social or moral codes. To be part of the subculture you have to adhere to those social codes. The trouble, though, is that adherence to a digital community of shared meanings often comes increasingly to compete with an individual’s ability to create interpersonal shared meanings in the real world. In order to spread, subcultures emerging within the de-materialised, opt-in world of the internet need to capture attention, which incentivises them toward simplification, rigidity, and radicalism. Needless to say this means the more viral they are online, the less adaptable they are to the complexities of actual human life and relationships.
This is, in a nutshell, the bind Lauren Southern recounts herself as having ended up in: where the internet ideologies she had absorbed as a guide for life turned out to be woefully inadequate to the far more complex realities of actual adult life. Those objectors who say she was never truly a candidate for membership in e-right communities to begin with, due to some detail or other of her identity, partner choice, or behaviour, are missing the point: there is always some detail of real life that renders us an imperfect candidate for membership of a viral internet ideology. By virtue of having emerged in abstraction rather than interpersonally, these rule-sets all set every one of their members up to fail.
What is to be done? It might seem simplistic to say ‘the cure is going outside’ but really: the cure is going outside. If I have cause for hope for future generations, it’s in stories like Southern’s: of a young woman who grew up online, and learned the hard way that the realest reality is still, well, reality. It may be that this is a distinctively millennial challenge, and subsequent generations will grow up with better cultural defences against the internet’s more extreme dematerialising temptations. I hope so. In the meantime, I fear a great many more of us are going to have to learn the hard way that neither maximum legibility nor doctrinaire subcultures are an adequate substitute for real trust, real connection, and real interpersonal meaning.
Yes, yes, yes!!! I was seeing this almost 20 years ago when social media exploded. I started my mom life just before all that as a tail-end Gen Xer, and while I got along very well with the moms in the generations above me, once social media hit, I could not believe how much of a hard time I had relating to the moms just under me. Whereas you might ask a mom previously in real life how is the best way to sleep train a baby, now it was mom groups and boy, if someone gave some answer that someone else could interpret as "abusive"...watch out! But none of the moms were advocating abuse, they were just trying to connect and share. But sharing without tone, mannerisms, etc... and in writing where you have to put what you are trying to say into black and white...a lot was lost and the worst was assumed. Finally at some point early on, I just had to ditch my Mommy groups. My Gen X, "live and let live" principle was strong enough I chose not to care anymore as I was going to do what I was going to do anyway.
When I considered blogging way back in the mid-2000s, I thought through what the logical outcome of such a thing would be if I wanted to be successful. And I realized it would involve ordering my family life in such a way that it would be post-able, essentially having to pimp them out for "likes" and then draw some sort of moral conclusions which I probably wouldn't be able to live up to in reality. I saw clearly how miserable all of it would make me and decided against it. I'm glad to see others are waking up to all this, albeit having to learn the hard way. We should give them some grace.
Anyway, I actually do live a rather traditional life, but my husband is a good man willing to work multiple jobs at times so I can stay home. Our position was, "He makes money, I steward it." And it has worked for us for over 2 decades very well, but our shared cultural background is extremely useful in this arrangement as well.
"posting about your intimate relationships is such a bad idea - at least if you want to continue having intimate relationships." I think it's important to not lose sight of the fact that most people DO KNOW this - even if they spend a lot of time on the internet. What is true though is that the internet has turbocharged the influence of the small minority of exhibitionist types who do NOT know it. As it has also turbocharged the prominence of various other kinds of inherently annoying people.
Interesting essay though.