A Piece in Which I'm Not Passive Aggressive, I'm Just Aggressive

Okay, I'll say it out loud.

Hello Deeists, it’s been a minute since I updated this. Good occasion to announce: I’m looking for writers to help keep default.blog regularly updated. Shout out to the wonderful Andrey Mir who contributed our first post. Next up on the docket is Celeste.

I’m spending most of my life in bed and nauseated these days. I take these terrible, long naps, where I wake up sweaty and drooling and most terribly of all, groggy. It’s been hard to get my thoughts together.¹ I devour books and audiobooks (really loved When We Cease to Understand the World and Transcription). I am haunted by the feeling I am not productive enough — around the house, with my son, in my career. I long to go to conferences. I fantasize about eating exotic fruits. I scare myself late at night or I make myself sad.

That’s what I’ve been up to lately.

Now, for what you came for: not quite a first, but almost a first for me. I am going to criticize directly instead of indirectly. I try to avoid doing this, mostly out of cowardice. I hate when people unfollow me on Twitter, or confront me, or do a snarky name drop on their podcast. I truly dread it. Buuuut, I also feel like it’s time.

Regular readers know I complain about a “certain kind” of writer a lot, and regular readers have probably noticed that the writer I am usually talking about is Freya India.

I gesture at “a genre” and “a kind of essay” and never say who, partly out of some misplaced collegial instinct and partly because I can’t fully explain to myself why her writing gets under my skin the way it does. It’s not completely uncalled for—she writes on my beat, and also shows open contempt for this thing I’ve poured so much of my time and soul into learning and theorizing and writing about, the internet— but I’m also free to stop reading. Other writers in the same orbit annoy me less, many don’t annoy me at all, and I disagree with plenty of people on substance without feeling this particular irritation. But Freya’s work reliably pisses me off, and it has since 2024. After reading her latest essay, “How Social Media Feminised Us All,” between naps, I’ve decided I’ll just say it: she is a clean example of what upsets me about tech criticism, and more generally, the culture-criticism economy, of which I am a gleeful and enthusiastic participant.

The thesis of her essay is that social media installs the emotional life of an adolescent girl into every user. We are more ruminative, insecure, reputation-obsessed, catty, chronically performing for an invisible audience, all thanks to social media. The apps, Freya argues, borrowing from friend-of-the-Stack Mary Harrington, are “structurally feminine,” and the result is that men are being turned into teenage girls, which is, naturally, a catastrophe. To be fair, there’s one version of this claim that doesn’t say women are the problem, but that rather, platforms reward traits culturally coded as feminine and that, over time, users of all kinds adapt to those incentives. This is not the claim actually being made, to be clear. But it is the sympathetic version.

The first thing that pissed me off about this was opportunistically using Helen Andrews’s viral “feminization” frame. The “feminization” grand-theory-of-everything is less a theory than it is a mood resurrected from 1990s intellectual life.

The anxiety is, of course, as old as misogyny itself — the worry about a womanish culture is more or less eternal. The ’90s iteration is the direct influence, though, and the figure everyone is implicitly reaching for is Camille Paglia. Paglia spent decades arguing things like Western achievement is constitutively masculine, that second-wave feminism was a whining refusal to face the fact of male genius, and that the women complaining about their treatment in public life were embarrassing themselves and dragging the culture down with them.

Paglia shaped a generation of women pundits who went on to build a public persona out of being the exception to their own sex. What’s thinned out in the current iteration is that, well… Whatever you think of Paglia, and I’m genuinely not sure what I even think, she was a genius and exceptionally well-read.

The current anti-woke pundit class is full of women trying on the Paglia persona without the intellectual rigor. And then there’s a worse bottom shelf: media personalities with no intellectual pretensions at all who have made a career out of telling men that most women are the problem. That is what “pick me” actually means. It’s not empathy with men, it’s not criticism of women, it’s the willingness to treat women — as a class — as the exclusive source of social dysfunction, with a built-in epistemic trap, because any woman who disagrees becomes exhibit A. You and women like you “get it,” all other women are inferior, almost animals, who are too stupid and too morally small to comprehend their social role.

The audience for this type of content is inexhaustible because the audience is mostly men who would like a woman to say it for them. To her credit, Freya isn’t this but she is pulling a more genteel version of the same move.

Every behavior on Freya’s list is better explained by status dynamics under conditions of visibility than by sex. What she’s describing isn’t feminization but what happens when status competition becomes total. Under those conditions, people converge on the same behaviors not because they are feminine, but because they are adaptive. Every literate, high-status social world in history has shared exactly these flaws. Courts, salons, academic departments, literary circles, venture capital firms, hedge funds, private schools, as she notes, are all full of it. I won’t bore you with the history; you already know it. What social media does is intensify and universalize those conditions. It doesn’t “feminize” them.

If the problem is femininity, the implied cure is a return to masculinity, which cashes out, stated or not, as fewer women in discourse, or women behaving less like themselves, or more girls who are “not like other girls,” which is ultimately the “I know I’m just a dumb broad, but…” posture you will see daily on Twitter.

Freya waves this off.

She doesn’t want us all to become more masculine, she isn’t sure it’s possible, she isn’t sure it’d be good. In her writing, Freya is constantly hedging, ostensibly because she doesn’t want to make enemies, which is a move I recognize because it is the move that has made me every enemy I have ever made as a writer. You don’t have to pick a side to be successful. I’m still a fence-sitting centrist, and not the “good” kind either, not the “free-thinker” kind, but the kind who gets called a coward by everyone. But, and this is the lesson I learned the hard way, the argument does the work whether you like where it points or not. Borrowing a right-wing argument and signing off with a disclaimer does not neutralize it and suddenly make it “apolitical.” It just asks the reader to pretend along with you. And they won’t. (Then your Goodreads page fills up with reviews accusing you of trying to “trick” progressives.)

The second problem, and the one I care about more, maybe selfishly (definitely selfishly), maybe on principle, maybe because I love the subject, is that Freya, who is now being touted as an expert on the deleterious impact of social media, has neither a theory nor a history of the internet. This was my problem with her book, too. Review forthcoming.

Her entire model of the internet is post-2010s. She is writing about the ocean after spending her whole life in one aquarium, and the youth-pastor preaching she is so wont to do is only possible because she has no idea what came before and, ostensibly, no interest in finding out. The missing historical grounding, like the hedging, is paired with the emotionally and financially lucrative role of being “wise beyond her years,” the Greta Thunberg of being ruined by the Instagram algorithm. Her First Things essay on the women of the New Right, a scene she has been adjacent to for maybe two years, proceeds as if she has more standing to narrate it than people who have spent decades inside it and came out the other side with criticism. It was pitched against Sam Adler-Bell’s piece on women, mostly in their 30s with years of offline experience in these communities, including marriages to right-wing men and children, leaving the right. In Freya’s account, there’s always some off-screen “grandmother” doing the evidentiary work— some avatar of a prior generation where girls were girls and men were men and Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.

Her theoretical formation, as she tells readers in the preface of her book, happened over “month after month” working as a staff writer at Jonathan Haidt’s Substack, which is to say, inside the single most influential node of the phones-are-ruining-the-kids school. The same preface concedes she is “not an expert or an academic” but “a woman in her twenties.” That’s humility, but it’s also a tacit request for the reader to go easy on her. Unfortunately, judging by the torrent of negative and lukewarm reviews, no one has respected it. I’m happy to accept she’s no sociologist, nor is she pretending to be one. Similarly, I myself am as much of an “ethnographer” as Eva Vlaardingerbroek is a “legal philosopher” or my friend Cartoons Hate Her is a data scientist. By which I mean, we’re doing valuable work — and we’re writing or creating content about it — but we’re not professionals in the field. We’re all making our way here. But that said, Freya should send the memo to her speaking agency, because the podcast-and-conference circuit is selling her as an expert tantamount to Jon Haidt or Jean Twenge.

There’s also, as Ella Dorn pointed out, none of the criticisms she’s celebrated for making are new.

Gen Z has been complaining about social media for years. Activists across the political spectrum were making these arguments decades ago. Many of us have been hearing the quotidian warnings about “the Phone” since middle school or younger. But more salient than any of this, much of internet culture commentary is built on this sentiment. pandora’s vox was written in 1994 by a woman who called herself humdog, whose actual name was Carmen Hermosillo, and it could have been written today, could have been written ten years ago, and was, in fact, written thirty-two years ago.

humdog was on the WELL, the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, a dial-up conferencing system the Whole Earth Catalog set launched out of Sausalito in 1985. For years, the WELL was the flagship example people pointed to when they wanted to argue the internet could host real community.

humdog was already, in 1994, diagnosing almost everything the current crop of anti-woke tech critics thinks it just discovered: the commodification of interior life, the way posting your feelings to a corporation-owned board converts you into factory equipment, the “hysterical identification” of strangers with each other’s pain, the performance of identity as the default mode of online presence, the way online “community” is mostly micro-marketing dressed up in hippie vocabulary. I won’t belabor the longer tradition humdog was drawing on, the Frankfurt School and Baudrillard and the whole twentieth-century literature on mass media and commodification. I’ll stay on our turf of the internet. What I’m trying to say is: we been knew.

Reviewing Humdog's Collected Writing

Nathan Jurgenson has a name for the mistake Freya is making. He calls it digital dualism: the assumption that “online” and “offline” are separable realms, that online life is a degraded copy of some more authentic offline self, and that the task of theory is to explain how the bad fake place is corrupting the good real one. Jurgenson’s whole project, and the project of Real Life, the magazine he founded, is to argue that this is wrong, and that online and offline have interpenetrated completely enough that any theory of contemporary life which treats the internet as a contaminant dripping into a previously clean container is describing a situation that has not existed for at least twenty years. (And in my humble opinion, basically never existed.)

Which brings me, at last, to the two ornamental corpses.

Freya name-checks both McLuhan and Postman. I love McLuhan, but I don’t cite him often because I’m not sure I understand him well enough and have certainly distorted his work when I’ve tried. I say this because it would be unfair not to acknowledge he’s a genuinely difficult thinker. Because of this, he — quite wrongly — gets written off as a crank. And often, his work is abused.

McLuhan gets invoked via “the medium is the message” to argue that the apps themselves, rather than their content, are doing the feminizing. But that phrase doesn’t mean what it’s usually taken to mean, including in this amended framing.

For McLuhan, the “message” of a medium isn’t the mood it puts you in or the behavior it encourages or the content it disseminates. It’s the change in scale and pace a new technology introduces into society. That change happens regardless of what the medium is carrying. The first and best example of this is the electric light. The lightbulb has no content at all, and it still reorganized human life by ending the distinction between night and day. Our lives restructured themselves around the fact that the sun was no longer the clock. The railway, in the same way, didn’t invent movement, it restructured where people lived and worked and what counted as a city, and it did this regardless of what it used for. Print produced the silent, private reader as a new kind of person, and with him “the reading public” and the interior life. A new medium reorganizes the environment around it, and the reorganization is the message. The content is almost beside the point. Elsewhere, McLuhan calls content the juicy piece of meat the burglar throws to the watchdog of the mind to keep you looking the wrong way.

Here’s an instructive interview with Jacques Ellul that helps elucidate this concept which, really, I don’t think is obvious or easy to understand:

It matters that when Freya says the platforms are “structurally feminine,” what she actually means is that certain posts and videos encourage certain kinds of self-presentation, and users, especially young ones, end up mimicking them. That is a claim about content and behavior pretending it’s a claim about the medium, and if you’re not careful, you might just fall for it. Every piece of evidence underneath what she’s actually saying is content-level: what the apps reward, which features tap into which traits, what goes viral, how users feel when they scroll. It’s an easy mistake to make, and why, like I said, I don’t often cite McLuhan.

A McLuhan-shaped argument would look more like: the algorithmic feed reorganized the basic unit of public speech from the article to the post, from something with a beginning and an end to something with neither. It would notice that the feed collapsed the distance between private and public, so that you now speak to your friends and to strangers in the same sentence, in the same register, with no way to tell which audience is listening. It would notice that quantified approval, in the form of likes and shares and follower counts, became the primary currency of public life, and that this happened independently of whether the posts themselves were vain or humble, masculine or feminine, left or right, bitchy or kind, inclusive of dancing trends or not. As Luke Burgis has astutely pointed out several times, it often happens in religious content. Ultimately, “scrolling makes men vain, like women, because of likes” is not a claim about form in the media ecology sense.

Then there’s Postman. Another charitable understanding of Freya’s thesis is that adults online are regressing into adolescents, that the line between child and adult is dissolving from the adult side, is Postman’s thesis in The Disappearance of Childhood. Published in 1982, the book argues that childhood is socially constructed rather than biologically inherited, and it was produced by print literacy and the long apprenticeship of learning to read. Electronic media dissolved the apprenticeship and erased the line between child and adult from both directions at once, so that children become prematurely adults while adults slide back toward the child.

It is curious that this doesn’t come up at all. Not that every Substack essay needs to be a dissertation that’s example-stacked and rife with citations. But if you’re going to go to the trouble of citing Postman, may as well cite the germane work, right? Her hat tip, “Postman’s idea that technology is ideology, McLuhan’s the medium is the message,” is wrong on both halves. Postman’s idea is that the new tool doesn’t add itself to a culture, it changes the culture into a different culture. And the McLuhan half we’ve already covered.

The problem is that in both cases the theorists are decorative. You see this happen with Lasch a lot too. Everyone’s claimed to have read The Culture of Narcissism (what about Revolt of the Elites btw?), nobody’s gotten past the first chapter. But really, you don’t need any of these theorists to extend Helen Andrews’s viral piece to social media. (I’ve done this. I used to do it with Adorno all the time, and when I remember that, I want to shoot myself in the face. I have the benefit now of only one kid and a lot of free time, so hopefully, I do this less often.)

But let’s get back to the meat. Set the citations aside. Who cares whether she “gets” McLuhan or has cracked Postman. Why take for granted that they were even right? And here’s where I expose myself plainly as not being a McLuhanite at all.

Does she have a point? On the surface, yes. The attention economy does distort personality, and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t. Another piece for another time but I don’t think it’s quite as apocalyptic as “we’re all brainrotted narcissists.” But anyway, calling this “feminization” is a story about gender that’s super-imposed on, ironically enough because it gets you podcast invites. The reality is though that once interior life is commodified, people converge on whatever behaviors maximize attention. If those behaviors resemble “teenage girls,” that’s not a feminizing force — it means Freya’s exposure to young women have been in environments where they are under the pressure of constant visibility.

And I think most saliently, none of what she describes in her work — her book, her Substack — is really about smartphones as such. It’s a description of what happens when human interiority gets routed through a market. humdog knew this in 1994. It is, genuinely, the oldest observation in internet criticism.

And now I circle back to her book. The book has the word commodification in the title. The word capitalism does not appear once. There are plenty of right-wing critics of capitalism she could be in conversation with; one need not be a Marxist to levy these critiques. For example, her friend Paul Kingsnorth, whose own book on the same subject, Against the Machine, is quite good.

But I’m going to stop here, because Freya does not deserve to be my departure point for what ultimately is a protracted complaint about essay writing, as much as I harbor an outsize annoyance with her. I’m free not to read her work or work like hers.

I think something animating all this is that the culture war as we knew it has mostly ended, or has become more ambient, but the economy of the culture war and the format the culture war trafficked in — validating what the paying audience already believes and play-act as an intellectual while doing it — has migrated, fully intact, onto the world of tech-criticism. There were only so many conversations we could have about “gender ideology” before we moved on to the internet its very self.

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• From 2020: The Real Culture War Is About How We Use Technology

1. though, weirdly, today might be a two post day…