Building community

Lydia Laurenson’s interview My Life In The Co-Living Scene, and Related Alt Culture Observations wrestles with shared culture and community.

I found myself having surprising agreements with the right wing when I started getting into that community, a few years back. For example — before I met anyone on the right wing, I had intuited this concept of “luxury beliefs,” and then later, I found out that this was a phrase that people use a lot in the “dissident right” or “New Right” community. Years ago, I had this idea that there are types of lifestyle experimentation that wealthier people can easily afford to do, and I suspected that those same lifestyle experiments are higher-risk for less wealthy people. Years ago, I would try to talk to my liberal friends about this idea, and often what people said was that I was unfairly gatekeeping. But when I eventually made some friends on the New Right and talked to them about this idea, they already knew what I meant. So I began to see that there was a funny meeting of the minds for me with some people on the right wing.

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Having crossed so many lines politically, I feel like I can see the outlines of the culture underneath the Discourse. I feel like the core issue underneath everything we’re talking about, all these different lifestyle experiments, is that the baseline culture is a mess. And the culture war isn’t helping.

Our “normal” culture is so hard on people right now. So many people have trouble forming basic long-standing bonds. This really matters to me. I spend a lot of time thinking about this.

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Our society needs to have a real serious conversation about interpersonal commitment and morality. But I think that’s everyone, it’s everywhere, not just weirdos in the Bay Area. The whole culture is a mess.

So I used to be very focused on these countercultural ways of living. I thought it was important that more people be accepting of alt lifestyles, not in an evangelical sense but because I thought alt communities had insight on how to do this stuff better. Now I'm less like that. I feel like I have seen the Matrix on all these cultural issues because I understand both the liberal and the conservative perspective. What is real underneath the culture war narratives?

Where and how can we create stable communities with members who truly support each other? Is it in the form of a liberal co-living space? What about a conservative religious village? I almost don’t even care anymore about the affiliation of people who are creating a community. I mean, I do care because I want to be part of a healthy culture and I want to fit in. But I also just want the culture to work for some people, somewhere, over a long period.

I made a comment there which I want to also have captured here:

As someone who has developed my own (notably childless) alt micro-community, I think a lot about how hard it is to build community networks in the face of shattered cultural norms & skills, and how I would not have it in me to build what is necessary for healthy childrearing. I grant that the broad right are pointing to real problems emergent from lost shared-community-capacity, while the broad left whom I align myself with shy away from even recognizing it.

But of course the right are confused about the roots & remedies. They want to blame feminism and The Queers and so forth for screwing things up. They think that we can just return to the 1950s dream of the suburban nuclear family if we just Try Harder and punish deviance enough. But that is not just an ugly dream because of its intolerance. It is also doubling down on the very thing which ate the seed grain of our shared-community-capacity: the atomization inherent in suburban life and the nuclear family.

Addressing our need for shared-community-capacity aligned with left cultural sensibilities requires a radical vision of what we want the social order to look like, exploring genuinely novel social forms. I tremble with dread at attempting society-wide transformation of that profundity; history is rich in cautionary tales about unintended consequences. But pursuit of the Suburban Nuclear Family Dream is one of those cautionary tales. The only way out is through to something new.

JD Vance

Starting to collect some resources. You can jump down to the critiques of Hillbilly Elegy if you wish.

The guy

He muses that people should stay in violent marriages.

This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term. And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages. And that’s what I think all of us should be honest about, is we’ve run this experiment in real time. And what we have is a lot of very, very real family dysfunction that’s making our kids unhappy.

Business Insider is one of countless sources warning about his background in venture capital and tying him to neoreactionary weirdnerd Peter Thiel:

Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance is running for Senate as a savior of the Rust Belt. Insiders and experts say that reputation is unearned.

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Experts on venture capital expressed concern about Vance’s potential conflicts, given his investments in everything from agriculture to defense. “There are a thousand red flags,” said Jeff Sohl, director of the University of New Hampshire’s Center for Venture Research. “You’re either going to be a really great VC and a bad senator, or a bad VC and a great senator. Or what will likely happen is you’re worse at both because you can't do both jobs.”

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Impressed by Thiel’s focus on improving the economy through investments beyond software and IT, Vance approached the billionaire and expressed interest in working for him. “We sort of had a conversation that led to a job offer,” Vance said in the same interview. “That’s pretty much how I got here. There’s been no looking back.” Vance attributed “pretty much” his entire career to Peter’s mentorship. If not for Thiel, he said, “I probably would have been doing something else.”

J.D. Vance, the False Prophet of Blue America from The New Republic goes into greater detail:

The bestselling author of “Hillbilly Elegy” has emerged as the liberal media’s favorite white trash-splainer. But he is offering all the wrong lessons.

Sarah Jones November 17, 2016

J.D. Vance is the man of the hour, maybe the year. His memoir Hillbilly Elegy is a New York Times bestseller, acclaimed for its colorful and at times moving account of life in a dysfunctional clan of eastern Kentucky natives. It has received positive reviews across the board, with the Times calling it “a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass.” In the rise of Donald Trump, it has become a kind of Rosetta Stone for blue America to interpret that most mysterious of species: the economically precarious white voter.

Vance’s influence has been everywhere this campaign season, shaping our conception of what motivates these voters. And it is already playing a role in how liberals are responding to Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, which was accomplished in part by a defection of downscale whites from the Democratic Party. Appalachia overwhelmingly voted for Trump, and Vance has since emerged as one of the media’s favorite Trump explainers. The problem is that he is a flawed guide to this world, and there is a danger that Democrats are learning all the wrong lessons from the election.

Elegy is little more than a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class. Vance’s central argument is that hillbillies themselves are to blame for their troubles. “Our religion has changed,” he laments, to a version “heavy on emotional rhetoric” and “light on the kind of social support” that he needed as a child. He also faults “a peculiar crisis of masculinity.” This brave new world, in sore need of that old time religion and manly men, is apparently to blame for everything from his mother’s drug addiction to the region’s economic crisis.

“We spend our way to the poorhouse,” he writes. “We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being.”

And he isn’t interested in government solutions. All hillbillies need to do is work hard, maybe do a stint in the military, and they can end up at Yale Law School like he did. “Public policy can help,” he writes, “but there is no government that can fix these problems for us … it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

Set aside the anti-government bromides that could have been ripped from a random page of National Review, where Vance is a regular contributor. There is a more sinister thesis at work here, one that dovetails with many liberal views of Appalachia and its problems. Vance assures readers that an emphasis on Appalachia’s economic insecurity is “incomplete” without a critical examination of its culture. His great takeaway from life in America’s underclass is: Pull up those bootstraps. Don’t question elites. Don’t ask if they erred by granting people mortgages and lines of credit they couldn’t afford to repay. Don’t call it what it is — corporate deception — or admit that it plunged this country into one of the worst economic crises it’s ever experienced.

No wonder Peter Thiel, the almost comically evil Silicon Valley libertarian, endorsed the book. (Vance also works for Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management.) The question is why so many liberals are doing the same.

In many ways, I should appreciate Elegy. I grew up poor on the border of southwest Virginia and east Tennessee. My parents are the sort of god-fearing hard workers that conservatives like Vance fetishize. I attended an out-of-state Christian college thanks to scholarships, and had to raise money to even buy a plane ticket to attend grad school. My rare genetic disease didn’t get diagnosed until I was 21 because I lacked consistent access to health care. I’m one of the few members of my high school class who earned a bachelor’s degree, one of the fewer still who earned a master’s degree, and one of maybe three or four who left the area for good.

But unlike Vance, I look at my home and see a region abandoned by the government elected to serve it. My public high school didn’t have enough textbooks and half our science lab equipment didn’t work. Some of my classmates did not have enough to eat; others wore the same clothes every day. Sometimes this happened because their addict parents spent money on drugs. But the state was no help here either. Its solution to our opioid epidemic has been incarceration, not rehabilitation. Addicts with additional psychiatric conditions are particularly vulnerable. There aren’t enough beds in psychiatric hospitals to serve the region — the same reason Virginia State Sen. Creigh Deeds (D) nearly died at the hands of his mentally ill son in 2013.

And then there is welfare. In Elegy, Vance complains about hillbillies who he believes purchased cellphones with welfare funds. But data makes it clear that our current welfare system is too limited to lift depressed regions out of poverty.

Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer reported earlier this year that the number of families surviving on $2 a day grew by 130 percent between 1996 and 2011. Blacks and Latinos are still disproportionately more likely to live under the poverty line, but predominately white Appalachia hasn’t been spared the scourge either. And while Obamacare has significantly reduced the number of uninsured Americans, its premiums are still often expensive and are set to rise. Organizations like Remote Access Medical (RAM) have been forced to make up the difference: Back home, people start lining up at 4 a.m. for a chance to access RAM’s free healthcare clinics. From 2007 to 2011, the lifespans of eastern Kentucky women declined by 13 months even as they rose for women in the rest of the country.

According to the Economic Innovation Group, my home congressional district — Virginia’s Ninth — is one of the poorest in the country. Fifty-one percent of adults are unemployed; 19 percent lack a high school diploma. EIG estimates that fully half of its 722,810 residents are in economic distress.

As I noted in _Scalawag _earlier this year, the Ninth is not an outlier for the region. On EIG’s interactive map, central Appalachia is a sea of distress. If you are born where I grew up, you have to travel hundreds of miles to find a prosperous America. How do you get off the dole when there’s not enough work to go around? Frequently, you don’t. Until you lose your benefits entirely: The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF), passed by Bill Clinton and supported by Hillary Clinton, boots parents off welfare if they’re out of work.

At various points in this election cycle, liberal journalists have sounded quite a bit like Vance. “‘Economic anxiety’ as a campaign issue has always been a red herring,” Kevin Drum declared in Mother Jones. “If you want to get to the root of this white anxiety, you have to go to its roots. It’s cultural, not economic.”

At Vox, Dylan Matthews argued that while Trump voters deserved to be taken seriously, most were actually fairly well-off, with a median household income of $72,000. The influence of economic anxiety, he concluded, had been exaggerated.

Neither Drum or Matthews accounted for regional disparities in white poverty rates, and they failed to anticipate how those disparities would impact the election. Trump supporters were wealthier than Clinton supporters overall, but Trump’s victories in battleground states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio correlated to high foreclosure rates. In Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, Trump outperformed Mitt Romney with the white working class and flipped certain strategic counties red.

But Matthews was right in at least one sense: Trump Country has always been bigger than Appalachia and the white working class itself. You just wouldn’t know this from reading the news.

In March, Trump won nearly 70 percent of the Republican primary vote in Virginia’s Buchanan County. At the time, it was his widest margin of victory, and no one seemed surprised that this deeply conservative and impoverished pocket in southwest Virginia’s coal country handed him such decisive success. And no one seemed to realize Buchanan County had once been a Democratic stronghold.

A glossy Wall Street Journal package labeled it “The Place That Wants Donald Trump The Most” and promised readers that understanding Buchanan County was key to understanding the “source” of Trump’s popularity. The Financial Times profiled a local young man who fled this dystopia for the University of Virginia; it titled the piece “The Boy Who Escaped Trump Country.” And then there was Bloomberg View: “Coal County is Desperate for Donald Trump.” (The same piece said the county seat, Grundy, “looks as if it fell into a crevice and got stuck.”)

And then Staten Island went to the polls. A full 82 percent of Staten Island Republicans voted to give Trump the party’s nomination, wresting the title of Trumpiest County away from Buchanan. The two locations have little in common aside from Trump. Staten Island, population 472,621, is New York City’s wealthiest borough. Its median household income is $70,295, a figure not far off from the figure Matthews cites as the median income of the average Trump supporter. Buchanan County, population 23,597, has a median household income of $27,328 and the highest unemployment rate in Virginia. Staten Island, then, tracks closer to the Trumpist norm, but it received a fraction of the coverage.

No one wrote escape narratives about Staten Island. Few plumbed the psyches of suburban Trumpists. And no one examined why Democratic Buchanan County had become Republican. Instead, the media class fixated on the spectacle of white trash Appalachia, with Vance as its representative-in-exile.

“A preoccupation with penalizing poor whites reveals an uneasy tension between what Americans are taught to think the country promises — the dream of upward mobility — and the less appealing truth that class barriers almost invariably make that dream unobtainable,” Nancy Isenberg wrote in the preface to her book White Trash. If the system worked for you, you’re not likely to blame it for the plight of poor whites. Far easier instead to believe that poor whites are poor because they deserve to be.

But now we see the consequences of this class blindness. The media and the establishment figures who run the Democratic Party both had a responsibility to properly identify and indict the system’s failures. They abdicated that responsibility. Donald Trump took it up — if not always in the form of policy, then in his burn-it-all-down posture.

No analysis of Trumpism is complete without a reckoning of its white supremacy and misogyny. Appalachia is, like so many other places, a deeply racist and sexist place. It is not a coincidence that Trumpist bastions, from Buchanan County to Staten Island, are predominately white, or that Trump rode a tide of xenophobia to power. Economic hardship isn’t unique to white members of the working class, either. Blacks, Latinos, and Natives occupy a far more precarious economic position overall. White supremacy is indeed the overarching theme of Trumpism.

But that doesn’t mean we should repeat the establishment failures of this election cycle and minimize the influence of economic precarity. Trump is a racist and a sexist, but his victory is not due only to racism or sexism any more than it is due only to classism: He still won white women and a number of counties that had voted for Obama twice. This is not a simple story, and it never really has been.

We don’t need to normalize Trumpism or empathize with white supremacy to reach these voters. They weren’t destined to vote for Trump; many were Democratic voters. They aren’t destined to stay loyal to him in the future. To win them back, we must address their material concerns, and we can do that without coddling their prejudices. After all, America’s most famous progressive populist — Bernie Sanders — won many of the counties Clinton lost to Trump.

There’s danger ahead if Democrats don’t act quickly. The Traditionalist Worker’s Partyhas already announced plans for an outreach push in greater Appalachia. The American Nazi Party promoted “free health care for the white working class” in literature it distributed in Missoula, Montana, last Friday. If Democrats have any hope of establishing themselves as the populist alternative to Trump, they can’t allow American Nazis to fall to their left on health care for any population.

By electing Trump, my community has condemned itself to further suffering. The lines for RAM will get longer. Our schools will get poorer and our children hungrier. It will be one catastrophic tragedy out of the many a Trump presidency will generate. So yes, be angry with the white working class’s political choices. I certainly am; home will never feel like home again.

But don’t emulate Vance in your rage. Give the white working class the progressive populism it needs to survive, and invest in the areas the Democratic Party has neglected. Remember that bootstraps are for people with boots. And elegies are no use to the living.

Against Hillbilly Elegy

I was mad about Hillbilly Elegy early, largely because I am such an enthusaist for Joe Bageant, who explores the logics of angry rural poor whites much better.

Hillbilly Ethnography at The New Inquiry:

Vance’s view of Appalachian culture feels more opportunistic than sincerely white nationalistic. It allows him to portray Appalachian and Rust Belt poverty as an exceptional phenomenon, rather than a symptom of broader trends that could not be so easily ascribed to culture. As such, it conveniently justifies the existence of his book. This opportunism makes the book’s racial determinism all the more insidious: it makes it more palatable to audiences that might normally be on guard against explicit white nationalism.

A long Twitter thread from Linda Tirado.

I’m a couple beers and a whiskey in, and I report on white supremacy, it’s one of my beats, so maybe it’s just hitting my ears a bit weird to hear about how this one particular kind of white people are the group of people who haven’t wholesale abandoned tradition and morality. You guys this is the sixth paragraph. This is gonna be like Ivanka where I told you I’d do the first chapter and then it was like half the book long.

Hillbillies Need No Elegy — a long essay about unhappy responses to Vance’s misrepresentations.

When Hillbilly Elegy seemed to be all anyone talked about, and when I realized people associated that book with me because I’m Appalachian, I read it with eagerness and curiosity. And though Vance’s story was different from my own, I read with empathy for his unique experience. But he crossed a line when he began to use “we” instead of “I.” I didn’t like what he said about “us.” Moreover, I didn’t like the idea that any individual could speak for a 13-state region. Many people from Appalachia were angry about the book. They didn’t like the idea of Vance as a spokesperson for Appalachia, especially one who blamed the poor of our region for their poverty.

I didn’t want to silence Vance, and I didn’t want to be mean-spirited. Instead, I wanted to follow Roger May’s lead and complicate any singular view simply by including multiple ones. I wanted to create a chorus of voices, “each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,” to borrow from Walt Whitman’s view of place.

So I read and listened, and tapped into the dense and rich and longstanding tradition of Appalachian writers. Along with Anthony Harkins, I collected voices of Appalachia — to create a snapshot of a place and a time that makes it impossible to believe the idea Appalachia is dead and in need of an elegy. Roger May not only inspired this work, but he collaborated with us to include photography from the region. The result, Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, is a book that intends to offer context for some of the claims Vance makes in his book when it moves beyond memoir, and to pass the mic to a wider range of writers, poets, photographers, activists, and artists who make Appalachia a place far too complex to capture and far too dynamic to die. As long as we keep our eyes open, we will continue to find an Appalachia that evolves, and to build on a strong history of activism and art — and pushback.

Just spend some time with Looking at Appalachia, and you’ll see that. Read writers from that place. Study art from the mountains. Listen to the Trillbilly Workers Party podcast. Follow the work of Y’ALL (Young Appalachian Leaders and Learners) and the STAY Project. Check out Appalshop and their Appalachian Media Institute, celebrating their 50^th anniversary this year. Read David Joy and Bell Hooks and Robert Gipe and the Affrilachian Poets and Silas House and see how they don’t sound one bit alike, even though they’re all Appalachian.

What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

In 2016 headlines declared Appalachia ground zero for America’s “forgotten tribe” of white working class voters. Journalists flocked to the region to extract sympathetic profiles of families devastated by poverty, abandoned by establishment politics, and eager to consume cheap campaign promises. Following the election, demystifying Appalachia and locating the roots of its dysfunction quickly became a national industry, shoring up the success of J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy and the author’s rise to fame as the media’s favorite working-class whisperer with broad appeal to liberals and conservatives alike. Personal anecdotes that demonstrated the enduring failures of American progress spoken through the mouthpiece of colorful and bereaved mountain folk became its own genre of election writing – the “Trump Country” piece – and in its creation reduced the region’s rich and complex history to a series of character studies.

Fascism: propaganda, persuasion, support

From the newsletter of Jeff The Undertow Sharlet. Wise on several levels, including in the use of “scare quotes” and the reference to myth, and there is more if you follow the link to his newsletter.

With darkness Trump became president, took over a party, and now threatens the world. Why does anyone imagine he wants to “resist” it? Why do they still pretend darkness can’t win?

It isn’t inevitable — but stopping it requires seeing it. Evaluating Trump's speech according to democracy’s laws of physics makes as much sense as declaring what we don’t know about black holes “impossible.” Fascism exerts a different gravity. The speech fuses the base; it’s the "confidence” of the base that draws in “undecideds.” That’s how fascism “works.” It doesn't have to be how fascism wins. But defeating it, I suspect, means at least a larger number of us discarding our reassurance narratives. Looking at the awfulness dead on, & fighting that, not what we wish it was.

Trump is a grotesque; he broadcasts, and only some can receive such a signal. But many of those aren’t, in everyday life, grotesques themselves. It’s their belief that persuades some. Their confidence. Their delusion. Trump speeches are for them, not for undecideds. Telling yourself no undecided could be drawn into Trumpism's obscene narcissism is by definition self-deception. The fact that someone's undecided, nine years in, means that they're not immune. They haven't caught Trumpism yet, but they aren't vaxxed, either.

It’s also important to emphasize that “undecideds” are a vestige of a vanished political order. It’s not that they don’t matter; but they matter much less. Trump’s campaign hacks may still care, but I think Trump knows he has two paths to power. The first isn’t through undecideds, it’s the activation of the base. If his base roars and democracy — that’s what I’m calling the other option, whoever represents it — mutters, he takes power.

If you're reading this you’ve probably read the reporting on the extensive legal groundwork Trumpism has established not to “contest” the election, as MSM, still operating pre-2016, puts it, but to overthrow it. But thatvs only part of that picture. Trumpism is a many-headed beast. Wonks do the legal stuff. Trump does the myth stuff. “Lies” is an accurate term, too, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t express how the lies work. “Myth” speaks to belief. The myth stuff right now is preparing the public for overthrowing the election if he loses. Preparing his followers to believe it justified, attempting to prepare the rest of us to acquiesce.

And yet, if Trumpism has multiple means of seizing power, that means there are multiple ways we can push it back. But only if we let ourselves see it coming.

Ready Player One

Damien Walter, whose commentaries on science fiction I admire, proposes ten SF novels which belong on any list of The Hundred Best Novels Of The 21^st Century (So Far). It is an interesting list, but I was surprised to see Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One among them. Walter observes:

Take a look at the world. It looks far more like RP1 than any other SF novel. The fact the author has limited self awareness and thinks the nightmare he depicts is keeeewl is another issue.

A striking point. The world of Ready Player One is a near-future of environmental and economic catastrophe in which people escape the misery of their lives through elaborate virtual reality games. Golden Age SFF writers would have given us heroes overthrowing this dystopia. Cyberpunks would have inverted that with antiheroes desperately navigating the horrors. Many SFF writers — and “literary” writers exercising the conceit — could have offered it as satire. These kinds of moves animate comparably prophetic worldbuilding in 20^th century SFF from writers like John Stand On Zanzibar Brunner, Octavia Parable Of The Sower Butler, Bruce Distraction Sterling, or Neal Snow Crash Stephenson.

RP1 breaks from those traditions in treating its world as uninteresting, little more than an enabling conceit for the virtual environment where Cline really wants to focus. This disinterest in his own sensitive prophetic antennae is weird.

Cline wants to give us, instead, the least interesting way SFF dialogues with itself.

All genre works interact with the meta-text of other works; I consider this the defining quality of “genre”. When a western introduces a sheriff, a horror story introduces a vampire, or an SF story introduces a time machine, it takes advantage of reader expectations about how these work from other stories. This can provide storytelling convenience, saving a bit of exposition … or it can support much more powerful effects.

Walter explores a deep version of this in his long video-essay on Iain M. Banks’ Culture stories, which are bursting with general space opera tropes and allusions to deep cut specific works from the SFF “canon”. If one knows those sources, the Culture has fun playing with old favorite toys, but that is candy coating on its sharp critiques of ideas behind earlier works, its use of the depth behind those elements to add complexity to the stories’ themes, and more.

RP1 has a simpler, frothier project. It reflects a style exemplified by John Myers Myers’ 1949 novel Silverlock, a picaresque in which the protagonist stumbles into encounters with various characters from history, myth, and literature. The story does serve a theme — the titular protagonist grows into a better person through a very direct encounter with Literature, as when piggish Shandon Silverlock encounters Circe from The Odyssey — but the main thing is having fun going oh, I get it!

I do not see Cline attempting even Silverlock’s modest thematic payload. The Hey I Recognize That thrill is the whole thing. Its structure as a puzzle-box mystery-thriller — in which the reader “plays along” to see if they can decode the clues presented in the story before the characters do — is a cunning move to amp up the effect. Unlike an Agatha Christie mystery, the clues are not all part of the text; one must know all the stuff it references to connect the dots. To keep from losing the reader, RP1 goes wide rather than deep, as much pop as geeky, referencing movies, teevee, and games which it expects Generation X geeks to all know.

Credit where credit is due: Cline’s love for the material shines through, and the puzzles are pretty good. As I am a GenX geek, the first few chapters of RP1 tickled me. I put down RP1 at that point, disappointed that it offered nothing else, but I cannot not fault people who wanted more of that than I did.

The loose film adaptation delivers fun popcorn entertainment by borrowing this playbook. It exercises Spielbert’s gift for kinetic and fantastical filmmaking, uses more familiar references, simplifies the puzzles down to just enough to drive events, and is a bit ennobled by a subtle performance by Mark Rylance cast as the MacGuffin.

That’s all fine as far as it goes, but I find it weird and troubling that Cline’s box of popcorn produced such a sensation. I wish I could take innocent, adolescent joy in RP1’s story of a fan whose fascination with things I like enables him to fix the media environment he inhabits and win glory, fortune, and (of course) a hawt girlfriend along the way. But I cannot. I think we must see RP1 reflecting a broad pop-geekkultur movement which avoids grappling with the kinds of juicy, challenging ideas available in SFF, a movement which so prefers superficial entertainment & affirmation that it expresses hostility to anything else. Smarter people than me have extensively criticized the cultural politics lurking in the book, and its attitude has realworld consequences: the Gamergate movemement of geeks zealously “protecting” geekkultur hurt real people in real life.

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A follow-up from Damien Walter:

Imagine a work of fiction written by a citizen of Oceania

who thinks Big Brother is keeeewel

and is a “fun read” in the way Nineteen Eighty Four never could be.

So, some folks questioned my selection of Ready Player One as a “great” book of the 21^st century.

Some thoughts.

I really dislike RP1. I viscerally despise the entire construct of “geek culture” it panders to. To borrow a one liner from Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western culture, “I think it would be a very good idea”

But. To think critically about a matter like the greatest SF of the 21^st century means thinking beyond my own preferences.

I strongly suspect that Ernest Cline had no more serious intention writing RP1 than to 1) indulge all the nerdish things he likes and 2) make himself the UberNerd.

And he succeeded on both counts.

So the “greatness” of RP1 wasn’t intended by its author. But nonetheless, deliberately or not, Ernest Cline wrote the perfect primer on the postmodern dystopia that anyone who grew up in the 1980s or later was born into.

The horror of postmodernity expressed by Jean Baudrillard was that even our inner lives were no longer our own. Immersed in the mass media simulacra, our most precious memories are mere imprints of mass culture commodities.

Cline's obsessive presentation of 1980s “geek culture” icons — that he presents with zero irony — is nonetheless a very effective representation of the postmodern horror. There really are billions of us today imprinted, not with unique memories of reality, but with mass manufactured dreams of time travelling Deloreans.

Of course PKD and Gibson did this all much better. But Neuromancer is a book that will always be read by the punks and hackers who already get it.

Ready Player One is a book about the matrix

written by a man who, even if he escaped the matrix, would demand to be put back in

for the poor souls still trapped in the matrix.

I think that qualifies it for greatness. Of a kind.

The Cosby Rule

We do not just fail to combat Missing Stairs doing sexual harassment and worse. We systemtically support predatory individuals. This is part of what feminists are talking about when we talk about rape culture.

As a result, many people understandably turn to trial-by-social-media as the only available way to get any kind of justice. I respect and support that; it is all too often the only available alternative to No Justice At All.

I confess to uneasiness with people who seem to embrace trial-by-social-media as not just a necessary expedient but a positive good.

In particular, I consider it important to take care with what we take as established fact without rigorous legal or journalistic support. We must never suggest that a false accusation is likely — they are vanishingly rare — but they are plausible, and exaggeration of the severity of wrongs is not just plausible but common when social media shitstorm dynamics really get moving.

We must never let that caution undercut our support for accusers. We must always give accusers our vigorous support: taking their accounts seriously, protecting them from harassment, giving them resources & reassurance through the painful process of facing trauma in public. Accusers need this because of how monstrously difficult we make it to make a public accusation of sexual misbehavior. The community needs this because it supports the countless other survivors of sexual harassment, assault, and worse.

But I do wish we would back away from expressing support for accusers with the aphorism “believe victims”: because radical credulity misunderstands the dynamics of trauma and creates an invitation for bad actors to stir up shitstorms.

There is no contradiction between supporting accusers and resisting shitstorms by dawdling to judgment. We have time. Public information usually gets stronger over time. The truth will out.

But sometimes the public does not have good enough information. I have a rubric in those situations I call “The Cosby Rule”:

1. A single allegation plausibly could be just bullshit. Support the accuser, and keep a weather eye on the accused from now on, but leave the pitchforks and torches at home.
2. Two allegations demonstrate that there is some there there, but exaggeration is plausible. Support the accusers, and keep the accused away from power, but hold off on treating the accused as a monster.
3. With three or more allegations, one can feel confident in knowing there is fire behind the smoke. Take at least the weakest allegation as solid.

If the accused really is a villain and we support their accusers, a lot more than three allegations will usually turn up.

Neil Gaiman allegations

My original post

I found a post with a very helpful review of the allegations against Neil Gaiman, smart about the messiness of the sourcing and what we can glean despite that.

To say Master was imperfectly executed is an understatement, but I’m grateful for it, both as a means of hopefully helping to ensure that Gaiman is held accountable for his behaviour, and for its willingness to explore the “gray area” of consent that so often impedes the police, courts, and other media outlets from helping survivors in any meaningful way.

I have not yet had the heart to listen to Master, the Tortoise podcast about Gaiman. Given what I have read, and how it evidently comes from the worst people, it seems plausible that it casts Gaiman as worse than he is. It also seems implausible that there is no there there.

Gaiman is far from the first frustrating example of allegations of sexual assault clouded by irresponsible reporting, social media shitstorm dynamics, and a weak vocabulary of Degrees Of Badness. We need to do better.

There have long been rumours about Gaiman’s liaisons with young fans. Skeevy, but short of predatory. The most generous-to-Gaiman reading of these new reports is much worse than that … and still not rape. Experience teaches us to hesitate to embrace a generous reading. If the worst is true, we can expect more survivors to come forward, which would be very clarifying. Part of Doing Better is letting things unfold as we sift those ambiguities … for a while.

I am a fan of Warren Ellis’ work. After a prudent hesitation to believe the worst I accepted that the worst was true. Fuck that guy. I am a fan of Gaiman’s work. The worst need not be true of Gaiman to get to Fuck That Guy; there is room for a lot of Bad which is short of As Bad As Warren Ellis. Part of Doing Better is taking seriously how Less Bad really can be less bad … and still very bad.

Gaiman’s accusers may have gotten played by the Tortoise podcast people, but they undoubtedly suffered from their encounter with Gaiman, and no doubt they are suffering from the pressures of coming forward. Part of Doing Better is giving them our wholehearted support, right away, before drawing firm conclusions about Gaiman.

My prudent hope — that Gaiman is not as bad as some have already concluded he is — wears thin, but it is worth letting more dust settle. Social media shitorms are destructive. There is plenty of time ahead to say Fuck That Guy, if it proves warranted. Part of Doing Better is combatting shitstorm dynamics, which I want this post to do.

I am sweating through this west coast heat wave, but it sure feels cold out there.

Updates

The first two Tortoise accounts

From the summary at The Politics Of Dancing cited above:

Scarlett [⋯] [Gaiman’s then-wife] Amanda Palmer hired her as a live-in au pair/nanny [⋯] on Scarlett’s first day [⋯] Within a few hours of their meeting, Gaiman climbed into an outdoor bath that Scarlett had run for herself and according to Scarlett, anally penetrated her with his fingers without her consent. This was the beginning of a three-week sexual relationship between Scarlett, then 21, and Gaiman, then 61, in which Scarlett says:

• Gaiman entered her anally without consent or warning in their second sexual encounter, and used butter as a lubricant.
• on another occasion that he anally penetrated her, the pain was so intense she passed out. Scarlett described the pain as “celestial”.
• Gaiman repeatedly subjected her to degrading sexual acts [⋯]

According to Gaiman, Scarlett had agreed to share a bath on that first night, in which they merely “made out” and cuddled consensually. He says he never penetrated Scarlett with his penis and that within days of their meeting she “expressed an interest in mild BDSM.” He says their relationship was entirely consensual.

[⋯]

At the same time that she texted a friend the next day telling them about the bath with Gaiman and saying that he “crossed the boundaries”, Scarlett also texted Gaiman. She signed off her message, “Thank you for a lovely, lovely night. Wow. x”

when she was 20 and Gaiman was 45, K entered a romantic and sexual relationship with the author. K alleges that in one incident while on holiday in the UK, she pleaded with Gaiman not to penetrate her vagina as she had a painful UTI at the time. She says he ignored her and did it anyway, causing her agony.

Again, the details of their relationship are nightmarishly complicated for law enforcement and media lawyers. As with Scarlett, the assault happened in the context of a consensual relationship, and Gaiman and K continued to maintain a friendship up until 2022, at which point K says she “saw the relationship for what it was.”

Two more from Tortoise

I confess that these later reports do not bring the clarity I would like.

One is was a quid-pro-quo of sex in exchange for allowing a tenant renting a house from him to leave her rent unpaid when her circumstances changed and she could no longer afford it.

He can say it was consensual. But why would I do that? It was because I was scared of losing my place.

This is certainly repulsive behavior by a landlord, but I have a hard time counting it coercive for him to offer to give someone something in exchange for sex.

The other was an “aggressive unwanted pass” which included an unwelcome kiss when Gaiman was in his 20s. She says that Gaiman did back off after her firm refusal. Conceivably an honest mistake, though the woman coming forward to talk about it publicly is a very strong sign that it was not.

Claire

Another obscure podcast, Am I Broken, has an episode interviewing a woman under the name Claire, which has been transcribed, and summarized by Stephanie Kay on Bluesky thus:

She tried to reach out to journalists starting in 2019, but was told it wasn’t big enough, it didn’t indicate a pattern of behavior. But now …

Very similar to K’s story. She was a fan of his, met him at a book signing in 2012. Gaiman immediately kissed her, he drew her into his world and invited her places, VIP access, he appeared naked in Skype calls, unwanted phone sex and groping, culminating in traumatic experience on his tour bus.

She was 22, had a boyfriend, wasn’t interested in a sexual relationship. But she liked the connection to her favorite author and didn’t want to lose it. On the tour bus, he tried to pressure her into sex, on top of her, told her “I’m a very wealthy man and I’m used to getting what I want.”

And he told her to kiss him back like she meant it and like she would never see him again. She was scared. And when she didn’t sleep with him, contact died out. He blamed her for everything, said she’d started it all. Saying he normally keeps fans at arms length, that this had never happened before.

Again, the reporting is frustrating. The transcript has Claire saying:

I think he realized I wasn’t gonna let him have sex with me, without him… being… more aggressive, I guess? So, he kinda flopped off.

One can imagine a version of this which is traumatizingly bad consent practice while short of a consent violation. And one can equally easily imagine a version of this which is scary and sadistic.

Paul Caruana Galizia of Tortoise describes their podcast addressing Claire’s case:

On recorded calls, Neil Gaiman tells a woman he allegedly sexual assaulted that he “obviously fucked up”, offers her ^$60,000 for her therapy, and promises to make a “hefty donation” to a rape crisis centre.

He sent the money, but never donated.

Gaiman — whose account to us denied the woman’s allegations — also told her on the calls in July 2022 that:

1. He is “high-functioning autistic”, which explains why he gets “human relations” wrong. He had no comment to make on this when put to his lawyers.
2. He “normally keeps fans at arms length”. The woman met him as a 22-year-old fan in 2012. We have heard sexual assault allegations from former fans, dated between 2004-2007. No comment from him here either.
3. She made the first move on him because “I’d have never made the first move on anybody. I’d be terrified of that.” Even by his own account he made the first move on Scarlett (jumping into a bath with her in Feb 22) and on Julia Hobsbawm (sudden, unwanted kiss in 1986).
4. He admits the age gap of 30 years with this woman was inappropriate, saying: "The me of 10 years ago might have done. But the me of today has learnt a lot." Yet months before the calls, Gaiman had been with Scarlett, who was 40 years younger than him.

While Gaiman didn’t make a donation to the rape crisis centre, he did send this woman that ^$60,000 - the cost of her therapy over the preceding decade. Makes her the third woman he sent money to in the space of eight months. Two – Scarlett and Caroline Wallner – also got NDAs.

Since we began publishing our investigation into the allegations against Gaiman, on 3 July, he hasn’t made any public statements and has repeatedly declined requests for interviews or on-the-record statements. With the recordings, we now have him speaking in his own voice and he says he apologises and accepts responsibility for his alleged sexual misconduct in one woman's case.

Other grotesque affairs

Ulorin Vex on Bluesky offers a story:

I’ve been hesitant to comment because Neil is in my wider social circle and there are people very dear to me who are close to him and are being directly impacted by all of this but after weeks of lurking/getting mad at the victim-blamers I feel like I need to add my voice to support these women

Around 2010 my ex told me that Neil Gaiman had asked if he knew any young women he could send to “keep him company” while he was working alone in a remote part of Scotland. He stipulated that they be “interesting but not interesting enough to fall in love with”

That always stuck with me even though I didn’t acknowledge the creepiness of the entire request until much later. I’ve attached some screenshots (with permission) from a private conversation about this I had back in 2022. AA/A is my ex to clarify.

I’ve removed a LOT of the conversation to protect people who haven’t gone public but suffice to say there is a pattern of behavior dating back to at least the 90s.

Guaging the horror

I have seen a lot of people call Gaiman a “rapist”. I consider that an irresponsible exaggeration given the limits of what we know. But, again, Not A Rapist clears only the lowest possible bar.

At this point, we do have an unmistakable pattern of at least breathtaking entitlement and callousness, with a side order of manipulativeness. I’m uneasy with how hard this is to gague, but it is well into skeevy-as-heck Fuck That Guy territory any way you look at it.

We got good journalism about Warren Ellis … eventually. If Gaiman is worse than already apparent — predatory and cruel — the truth should out as more damning stories come out. I do not expect Worse to surface, but neither would I feel surprised.

Useful commentaries

A bracing word from @rabbit.in.your.garden:

Two public victims … so far. Previously, widely admired by fans & other writers. A nice guy. I unequivocally believe the victims. One victim was his child’s nanny. The other a fan he met at a signing. The nanny he claims suffered from a mental illness that creates false memories. Let’s talk about that.

He claims the 23 year old nanny, his employee hired to care for his child was actively suffering from a mental illness associated with false memories. First, this doesn’t sound like the person a responsible, loving parent hires to watch their child. Second, if she did suffer from this illness, she was therefore incapable of true consent.

I have to interject that this last point is slippery. It is plausible that her memory is not reliable but he did not realize it at the time. But fergawdsake, Gaiman …

She was also his live-in employee, 40 years younger which also creates a barrier to true consent.

NG, by his public statements, admits to a sexual relationship with a woman who by his statements could not truly consent. As an employee, did she really feel she could safely say no to this rich, powerful man who has entered her bathroom while she was bathing on her 1^st day of employment? The dynamic suggests she could not. Even if she could, she states he did things to her without consent, which is definitely assault. Coupled with his claims, that makes NG undeniably a man who commits sexual assault.

This is why women choose the bear. We know the bear is dangerous. We know how to act around the bear to reduce our risk of harm. This successful, married man was an unexpected danger. He should have been safe but he wasn’t.

Jonathan Fortin:

Stray thoughts on the Neil Gaiman allegations:

• Admission of bias: he’s my favorite author, so I’m naturally heartbroken. Then again, all my other favorite creators have been cancelled, and it's an open secret that Gaiman sleeps with his much younger fans, so I kind of expected this. Pains me nonetheless.
• Worth nothing: Tortoise Media, the only source for this story, is a far right anti-LGBT podcast made by the sister of Boris Johnson (basically the Tr*mp of the UK, who Gaiman has been highly critical of). It’s also interesting that this debuted literally right before the UK elections. However, this doesn’t mean the women who came forward are lying.
• Indeed, according to the podcast, Gaiman even admitted to intimacy in situations that definitely weren’t appropriate (such as “making out” with his son’s 23-year-old nanny in the bath on the literal first day of her job). Even if it was consensual (and again, it might not have been), it’s still extremely sketchy. This is a famous multi-millionaire author in his 60’s engaging in sexual contact with his 23-year old employee. With or without consent, the power dynamic there is nothing to sneeze at.
• As someone who also once had a relationship with a public figure, I know first hand how intimidating that can be. It can be hard to say “no” and deny them what they want. The apologist in me wonders if maybe Gaiman wasn’t even aware of how these women actually felt, but it’s certainly also possible that he knew perfectly well.
• As a reminder: SA [sexual assault] survivors rarely gain anything from coming out. It’s very, very rare for people to make this shit up.
• Another reminder: SA can absolutely happen even in established relationships where there was consent before. You can text someone that you love them and consent to everything one day, and feel quite differently the next.
• It is worth noting that right wing outlets are eager to paint any BDSM or sexual deviancy as SA or abuse. It’s also worth noting that predators absolutely exist in the BDSM scene just like everywhere else.
• Claiming “she was suffering from a condition associated with false memories, even though her medical history does not support this” is really, really not a good look.
• If this is a pattern for Gaiman, other women will likely come forward. I will not be surprised if they do.

“AI”, students, and epistemic crisis

Weird interaction with a student this week. They keep coming up with weird “facts” (“Greek is actually a combination of four other languages”) that left me baffled. I said let’s look this stuff up together, and they said OK, I’ll open a search bar, and they opened … Ch*tGPT. And I was like “this is not a search bar” and they were like “yes it is, you can search for anything in here”.

The thing that made me feel crazy is like, every kid that’s using this as a browser is getting new bespoke false “facts”. This isn’t “a widespread misconception about X that stems from how it’s taught in schools.” Each individual kid is now hooked into a Nonsense Machine.

With the “widespread misconception about X” you can start at a baseline. Like, OK, in tenth grade we talk about X thing from history, and that leaves us with some misguided concepts about X, but we can correct that as students get broader understandings of the world. But with this, each child is getting unique wrong facts they are sure are correct … because they did what we told them to do! They “looked it up”! They got it from somewhere! It’s not a kid making up a belief on hearsay and assumption … it’s something they think they learned.

This kid was extremely combative with me, and I understood why. I was sitting in front of him telling him that the internet, a computer, technology, all these supposedly authoritative things … were wrong. And that I, one person, was right. He basically couldn’t believe me. He decided that I was simply a teacher who’d made a mistake. He could check it, after all! He could look it up! He could find the real facts. I obviously hadn’t done that, I was just an adult who’d decided I was smarter than him. Hence the defensiveness. Like I said: I understood.

It was so fucking rough. I did my best, but I am one person trying to work against a campaign of misinformation so vast that it fucking terrifies me. This kid is being set up for a life lived entirely inside the hall of mirrors.

Transcribed from Twitter. The author took it down because of harassment, so I am not going to point to who they were. Not that I know anything about them anyway. So you have to make your own tricky call about whether and how it is relevant.

Another fashy pipeline

Al Sweigart observes:

I totally see how self-improvement cults can be a pipeline for fascism. Fascism is rooted in social dominance, which in turn is rooted in sadomasochism: sadism for the dominator, masochism for the dominated. A self-improvement cult can become a vehicle for inflicting pain on yourself, where the goal is eliminating weakness, where "weakness" is defined as self-care, empathy for others, and non-toxic forms of masculinity.

For those who don’t quite see it, here’s a (very) rough outline:

1. The conservative mindset is based on hierarchy. There’s always a bigger fish. (And “you” don’t have to be winning. It's enough to self-identify with the winning team.)
2. This view means you don’t measure by doing well, you measure by doing better than others. Better than “those people.”
3. This promotes zero sum thinking. Good things for “those people” must have come at a cost to you and your group. There are no win-win situations and compromise means losing.
4. Therefore, good things never just happen. No pain, no gain. Focus on your individual improvement; solidarity with other people for systemic change and collective benefit is liberal bullshit. They just want free stuff (from you.) If you are feeling pain, you must be achieving something in return. You must. That’s how the world works.
5. You learn to ignore your pain. In fact, pain is a good thing and to be expected. Self-flagellate to signal your virtue. The wages of sin is death. Softness and mercy are weakness. My dad smacked me around as a kid, and it made me the man I am today.
6. You learn to ignore other people’s pain. Practice disabling your empathy. Practice dehumanizing the other. Hey, if you think about it, they’d do the same to you.
7. Arbeit macht frei

(Yes, it’s more complicated than that. Yes, plenty of evil has been done in the name of “the greater good.” But there’s a reason there’s so much right-wing overlap between self-improvement gurus, Alex Jones selling brain pill supplements, MLMs / crypto ponzis promising “financial freedom”, Make America Great Again rhetoric, and plain ol’ racism and religious bigotry.)