YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM

By all means try to use this blog post to hold onto whatever community you happen to find yourself in. It is a toolkit for strangling a scene to death and feeling good about it. The gamergate handbook for smearing people (not Shermer, just women) you happen to want out of your company.

Just restating what Chapman says is not a correction? Perhaps I wouldn’t come out swinging like this so hard except that perhaps nothing makes me more angry than being told I just don’t understand something blindingly straightforward, and perhaps if I did I would agree with you. Do you think other people just aren’t as smart as you are? Do you talk like that to people in daily life? Who the hell do you think you are?

Chapman’s fanatics are (eg.) the people who organize the independent film fest and talk endlessly about independent films but don’t direct or act in their own films, or the people who reply to posts but don’t initiate their own threads.

Yes, I am not confused, and this is precisely what makes his terminology useless. The people who reply to posts and talk endlessly about stuff are frequently deadbeats, but this is not captured by his pseudo-technical terminology. Chapman has defined “fanatics” self-servingly as the people who do the productive work and defined them against “mops” as people who are less interested and do not do productive work: it is a false and a very stupid distinction for the reasons I have outlined

Personally I don’t think I have met anyone fitting this description: “They love to be a part of something but they’re too insecure to let other people love it too, and they lose their ability to meaningfully contribute because they’re so busy policing the boundaries of the space.”

Yes, this is another problem with the essay. Since it only serves to flatter the prejudices of a sympathetic reader, the dynamics it claims to point out will only be recognisable to somebody willing to indulge those prejudices, whereas to the unsympathetic reader it just doesn’t have anything to say at all.*

*slight correction: it doesn’t have anything interesting to say at all. It does perform adequate speech-acts viz. draws the boundaries of what Chapman considers acceptable participation in a scene according to his “judgement” about who is and isn’t a fruitful and productive member of his little society. But that makes it an effective piece of political propaganda, a worthy role but not the one he would like to intend for it.

Hall published a noncommittal review of a dodgy-sounding book

I don’t even know who Harriet Hall is, but this undersells it. Just in the wikipedia link that we can all see, she says that the (fake) issues raised by Abigail Shriner in Irreversible Damage, “urgently need to be looked into”. That book, far from a mere “dodgy-sounding book”, was an enormously influential, best-selling, and intensely transphobic avalanche of lies and self-serving distortions.

Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is about how groups of artists establish symbols

That work is not primarily about symbols or groups of artists at all, and insofar as it is about symbols and groups of artists it is about how mechanical reproduction diminishes the ability of artists to control the symbolic structure of their artworks. With that established, that work is primarily about art in a technological society, and about how technics shape (a) art, (b) politics, (c) the mediating interface between the two (which is itself technology in “the age of mechanical reproduction)

Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle is about how consumerist states cultivate mass consciousness through mass media

For Debord, the state is merely part of the Spectacle. The book is about how capitalism itself mediates culture through mass media. The idea of “mass consciousness” is too vague to get much of a look-in here, although the book could be plausibly explained as developing the vague idea of “mass consciousness” into something more concrete.

I have been sufficiently tempted to point out one of the ways in which this is horribly stupid viz. it is written from the perspective of somebody who is a liability to whatever scene he claims to have been a part of

Fanatics want to share their obsession, and mops initially validate it for them too. However, as mop numbers grow, they become a headache. Fanatics do all the organizational work, initially just on behalf of geeks: out of generosity, and to enjoy a geeky subsociety. They put on events, build websites, tape up publicity fliers, and deal with accountants. Mops just passively soak up the good stuff.4 You may even have to push them around the floor; they have to be led to the drink. At best you can charge them admission or a subscription fee, but they’ll inevitably argue that this is wrong because capitalism is evil, and also because they forgot their wallet.

Everybody with half a brain knows that actually fanatics are frequently fucking deadbeats, who are therefore incapable of materially contributing beyond their physical presence. That’s fine, but it doesn’t lend itself to the financial stability of the collective enterprise, especially if they expect to get free stuff out of the bargain, which they frequently do. Of course, this isn’t the case for everybody, but that just proves the point that this is unbelievably fucking stupid

Mops relate to each other in “normal” ways, like people do on TV, which the fanatics find repellent. During intermission, geeks want to talk about the New Thing, but mops blather about sportsball and celebrities. Also, the mops also seem increasingly entitled, treating the fanatics as service workers.

“Fanatics” like this treat whatever community has sprung up around its artists as a vending machine for personal connection and social clout. They love to be a part of something but they’re too insecure to let other people love it too, and they lose their ability to meaningfully contribute because they’re so busy policing the boundaries of the space. This isn’t a “fanatic” actually, because again, it’s just a(n extreme and highly idealised) type of guy, but again that is proving the point of the stupidity of this enterprise.

Mops also dilute the culture. The New Thing, although attractive, is more intense and weird and complicated than mops would prefer. Their favorite songs are the ones that are least the New Thing, and more like other, popular things. Some creators oblige with less radical, friendlier, simpler creations.

cf. Bob Dylan, “Judas”

Even reading just a paragraph of the article you get the sense that Chapman is an insufferable dork who feels somehow burned about something in his past

The strangest thing about it is that the complaints are played so much to such an intense stereotype it’s as if Chapman is the only person in his model who actually embodies what would otherwise be a ludicrously idealised and caricatured type, and it turns out to be the horrible deadbeat superfan who ruins everything trying to make it his personal possession

Chapman is a fucking moron, and not rationalist curious but deeply embedded in rationalism. “Post-rationalism”, when it was new, was nothing more than a way of being into (at the shallow end) Deeprak Chopra type shit for personal growth on “rational” grounds (“if it works it isn’t stupid” or whatever) without getting kicked out of the clubhouse. It’s harder to see those outlines now because mainline rationalists have effectively adopted that plus far more extreme attitudes in their day to day over the last 5+ years, so post-rationalism looks harder to understand and more interesting than it really is or was.

Chapman himself was trying to do rationalist existentialism (hence his title, “Meaningness”, the quality of being meaningful, with particular respect to “having meaning in one’s life”).

Of course he was naive, but he’s also just writing yet another completely oblivious ass-pulled blog pretending to do meaningful sociology with just whatever shit came off the top of his dome. It’s identical to everything else written in this regard within 15 miles of LessWrong and should therefore be ignored except insofar as its laughed out of the room.

At most, you need to add to it as the field progresses, but I doubt literary analysis ever turns out to have been wrong.

Sometimes. But more importantly a good literature prof will be highly responsive to ongoing changes in the world around them with respect to the selection of texts, texts themselves will develop new resonances as times change (consider how Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded might have changed before and after MeToo), and as critics generate new literature of their own, new perspectives have to be considered. These points, it turns out, all circulate around what you said here:

I don’t think works of literature get a lot of updates as time passes

This isn’t really true. At the most basic level of analysis (which isn’t strictly correct, but will do for now), there are never less than two components, and one of them does change as time passes. (1) The words themselves, usually printed on a page without much variation between copies, and (2) the reader of those words. This “reader” is a hugely complicated object, and the text itself doesn’t really exist in any meaningful sense without one (dried ink letters are not “language” as such, but at most a record of information which generates language upon activation by a mind). It is this “reader” (or the huge variety of “readers” who continue to come in and out of existence as time passes) who generates changes that have to be kept up with in the study of literature, but that reader is a vital object of study in the (very roughly speaking) twofold object of literary studies.

Even the idea of an unchanging but growing corpus disguises, and yet relies on, this twofold division. The maintenance of such a corpus relies on the maintenance of a tradition of readers entrusted with the assumptions and techniques of interpretation pertinent to the ideals of that tradition. What is often foregrounded here is the maintained tradition, external to individual readers, but it is those individual readers who, collectively, actually do the work of keeping it.

The job of an up-to-date literature course is to attempt to account for such changes over the span of a three month term/semester, and it’s the consequent process of selection and refinement that generates the work which is being suspiciously handed off to a scammy robot in the article.

Meditations on Moloch is “soul-wrenching”, apparently. Jesus fucking Christ.

In what world do these people grow up? “Oh my God, conflict exists between interests and values, things are hard, not every problem is tractable”.

There used to be a refrain that “Moloch” is effectively Siskind’s word for capitalism, because he can’t bring his libertarian heart to name what everybody understands. But that’s wrong, because Siskind’s view is no more than the shallowest Burkeanism. And the worst thing about every single anti-Utopian is that they all assume everybody else feels as mugged by imperfection as they do.

Just the very starkest most ratiocinationary combination of a contrarian red herring and a false dilemma

yeah dude the reason people think MDMA isn’t worse than meth is that it isn’t their heart rate they’re worried about with habit-forming meth consumption

I knew they were writing under fake names