The Internet, Cuntblather, and the Death of Reason

Being on the internet sometimes gives me the feeling of being a witness to the murder of thought.

I don’t use the more popular metaphor of watching a train or car wreck because that has too positive a connotation – we enjoy seeing a twisted wreck, love to drive by the abstract sculptures in steel, flesh, and viscera at a leisurely pace, so as not to miss any of the carefully wrought details. The murder metaphor, which I’ll admit is not particularly uncommon, is more appropriate because, among other reasons, nobody tries to witness a murder. People do not slow down their cars to get a better look at a murder. Especially not when it is of something they like. There is an element of unwillingness to it all; of being trapped in what would ordinarily be the right place at the regular time and finding it all wrong. In this manner, a quick tour of the internet will find you everywhere confronted with cruelty and ignorance casually draped with the stolen finery of the dearly departed.

The internet is a particular affront in terms of discussion and debate. This is where the majority of the visceral slop work in that murder I mentioned takes place, where every set of fingers capable of doing so pecks out ‘reasonable’ lookalikes of real words and sets them forth into the world with a bellicose logorrhea and a genuine sense of urgency, as though if their opinion were not yelled out as quickly and loudly as possible it would not be heard at all. This leads to a lot of overstatement, a lot of ‘this fucking sucks and everybody who listens to it is a pound-me-in-the-butt fag’ when what’s meant is ‘the one song I’ve heard of this band is not particularly memorable.’ With everybody grotesquely inflating their opinions, worried that without all the hot air blown frantically into their at-base uninteresting opinions they won’t even be noticed, the resulting conversation can be imagined.

On the genuinely democratic internet, where every man’s opinion is given space and he is not required to do more than insult anyone who disagrees for that privilege, the people described above are able to engage in discussion on any number of subjects with people from any manner of backgrounds. Meaning that some of the fingers typing out opinions are attached to brains capable of shining these before presenting them to other people, of submitting them to rigorous self-criticism and constructing them as a logically valid argument. Hence making sure that they have something worth saying and are capable of saying it convincingly.

The interaction of these two types is bound to create people who don’t know how to argue but respect and admire those who do, and desire to emulate them. These are the people who generally tend to want to come off as intelligent and have a mild idea as to what an intelligent opinion looks like, but no idea of how to go about getting one. They equate their own superficial perceptions with the depth of real thinking, and we get something about as stimulating as a tattoo of an areola on a 90 year-old man’s elbow: it barely resembles the real thing visually and does not at all in any other way.

The problem is that people in general seem to be congenitally lazy and need to be trained out of it in their youth. Our first instinct is to ask what an unfamiliar word means – a good parent will tell us to look it up in the dictionary, and to keep a dictionary by us as we read. Everyone should have this incuriosity bred out of him as he grows up, but, curiously, this happens less and less as the generations press on. A look at older cartoons is informative: they were deliberately abstract, which forced children to do some mental work to engage with them. Modern-day cartoons, while usually featuring the same characters, are anything but, more often mimicking tried and true formulas drawn from unabstracted places. And modern-day children seem to have maintained their incuriosity and laziness. They would rather watch a word pass by than put in the effort to learn it. They would similarly rather blog up febrile attempts at a shadow intellectualism than take the time to say anything genuinely intelligent.

The combination of these feeble arguments with the fragile egos of the people making them leads to a lot of bitching, complaining, fighting, and playing the victim. This tends to characterize all manner of intellectual discourse, and for much the same reasons, but the unlimited time, the diversity of participants, and the protective anonymity offered by the internet amplify these typical results into something monstrous. Arguments that would never have been started had one of the people involved taken the time to think about some proposition or objection that popped full-formed out of his skull tend to besiege and overwhelm every topic as a tide of people who want to be thought of as thinkers take offense when told their thought is shoddy. The internet, with its infinite potential for a meeting of practically unmediated minds, turns out to be clusterfuck of ego and emotions. Every fictional virtual reality situation has it that your mind goes off somewhere else while your body stays where it is, but for the real thing it seems to be the opposite: all detritus, no mind. We’ve fucked up one reality and seem determined to fuck the one we’ve created within it.

Internet discussion boards serve well to demonstrate a problem that is really pandemic. Intellectual pretensions without the curiosity and precision proper to them can’t produce impressive results and will tend towards producing the faux profundities and belligerent defenses associated with the worst parts of academia and especially with the internet. But the desire to do anything that requires some skill or commitment – that is, anything worth doing – that is not coupled with that commitment and the knowledge of how to go about applying it will come out the same way.

If it is successful, it will be so in a way that makes us all poorer. More often it will make the kind of tangled, rebarbative mess we all recognize on the internet. It will produce bad art the stomach-butts its way into popular respectability – keep in mind that this past year the British awarded The Da Vinci Code as ‘best book,’ and the movie based upon it will open this year’s festival at Cannes – and the type of pop science that spreads so quickly while the real, interesting stuff gets to slog away in obscurity, not reducible to soundbytes such as ‘mathematics is the universal language!’ or ‘evolution is not a fact!’ It produces the popular, completely empty and meaningless ‘spirituality’ so many teenagers profess in their profoundest tones, and the equally empty skepticism that is willing to say ‘I don’t believe that’ (a good statement to start with!) and end its commitment there. In short, a crayon drawing of a hole is proffered as genuine profundity.

More troubling is that, with standards so low, it is almost always accepted at face value. I shudder when I briefly consider the unreflexive monsters these peoples’ children will be raised into. And South Dakota’s just banned abortion. I come more and more to understand what Beckett meant when he ended his narrator’s curse on those he would not forgive in Malone Dies with ‘in the execrable generations to come [I wish you to have] a good name.’ When surrounded by the morally, intellectually, spiritually bankrupt, seeing that nothing more evil than an accidental laziness grown into an essential one produced it, I find myself crawling into the anti-humanist’s mind.