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Purity For Thee, Convenience for Me!
Note: the way this Substack works is that every public essay has a follow up piece under a paywall for the part I wanted to say but either didn’t have space for or, more often, didn’t want to deal with drive-by goblin-screaming by bad-faith internet vultures. This piece, somewhat unusually, follows on from two: Take My Life, Please: The Media's Will They/Won't They Love Affair with American Fascism Prepares For Its Terrible Wedding Night and Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media
A little over a year ago, I started this digital space with an essay on, well, digital spaces. It was two months after Musk had taken over Twitter—oh halcyon days of innocence and youth! Everyone I knew, followed, was professionally connected to or wanted to be, whose politics I agreed with, whose morals I admired, all of them were very busy at that moment in time, very loudly proclaiming that they could not possibly stay on Twitter given Musk’s obvious econo-cultural malfeasance and vividly telegraphed nasty intentions.
It felt inevitable. A sorrowing sort of twilight moment. We were sure we’d lose track of each other, because it was just so clear no one could possibly support that new incarnation of Twitter being run into the ground by braying, slobbering, panting jackasses in jackboots.
Because purity is so important, you see.
We simply cannot support anything or anyone who slips up a bit ideologically, even a little bit. There’s no such thing as a necessary moral compromise, don’t you know? No situation ever has or ever shall occur in which a good person might make a politically fraught choice in order to further the cause of progress. Every stance, every word, every action, must exist in perfect virtue, without one single solitary speck of ethical contamination, a thing which a real living human person can definitely do. Every position and policy must hover at the absolute bleeding edge of tomorrow’s most enlightened progressive thought. Doing otherwise will bring fury raining down from the digital heavens. Managing to thread the needle will be rewarded with absolutely nothing, certainly not votes or political support or even a slight nod of acknowledgement.
Because obviously I just can’t vote for Joe Biden. Yes, the alternative is grinding, authoritarian far-right fascism. I feel just peachy about letting that happen (to other people, I literally cannot imagine it ever affecting me, why yes I am the working class proletariat salt of the earth, you’re too kind), but I will not, not ever, NEVER OH NEVER SHALL I check a box next to someone who…has had to suck it up and quietly work with people they don’t like and profoundly disagree with in order to accomplish any version at all of the things I keep saying I want!
AND I’M ABOUT TO TELL YOU ALL ABOUT IT FROM THE PAID ACCOUNT I NEVER DELETED ON ELON MUSK’S CRATERED HEARTLESS NAZI-INFECTED HAZMAT DUMPSITE TWITTER WITH A STRAIGHT FUCKING FACE.
