So here’s a really good example of why Twitter is not for me.

This is in response to a piece by Malcolm Gladwell on Tom Scocca’s smarm piece. Now, like all decent people, I have savaged Gladwell in the past, and I generally think that his work leaves people with a worse understanding of the world than before they read it. But Gladwell has a number of good points in this essay. The most important one, for me, is a point I was trying to make myself: Scocca’s posture as an underdog is to a degree understandable, and justifiable in economic relation to his targets. But culturally Scocca occupies a higher rung in the context where he is arguing. Gawker is a profitable New York media firm with a large readership, and a readership that is filled with the elite of media and journalism. In particular, it is read by those who produce commentary and analysis on arts and media. Gawker might not dictate our cultural narrative, but the people who dictate our cultural narrative read Gawker, and in my experience they really care about it. That’s power.

Gawker has maintained a certain countercultural cachet within that elite, even as its power and influence has grown. (Deservedly, in my opinion.) Meanwhile, Dave Eggers is low-hanging fruit, in terms of picking an enemy, in that context. Eggers is popular and influential but he has never been anything close to cool. The reality is that in the arena of cultural criticism directed towards other cultural critics, to which Scocca’s smarm essay belongs, he is the heavy, and Eggers is the underdog. Yes, Eggers enjoys considerable power in his part of the publishing world. But Scocca’s interest, in his essay, isn’t the economics of book publishing. It’s fundamentally a cultural argument, waged in a cultural context where he enjoys considerable power. That context, roughly speaking, is the online social space of people who work in media, journalism, commentary, and analysis. Scocca was writing to everyone, but his message was fundamentally for other writers, editors, bloggers, and publishers of the websites that, like Gawker, help to define the values of people who read and write written commentary online. From my limited vantage point, he seems to have little to worry about. Snark is already much more popular in that environment than smarm. I think that’s Gladwell’s point. But I also recognize Scocca’s very legitimate worry that the cringe-inducing, lowest-common-denominator smarm of Buzzfeed and Upworthy will take over, due to their economic power.

So as for this tweet. Alan Jacobs is a guy whose work I always read carefully and with interest. We disagree on many things, politically and culturally. (We have different priors, as people are always saying now.) But I know him to be a thoughtful and interesting writer, someone who understands the enduring value of thinking things through in an age of immediacy. Here, though, I’m getting vacuous bitchiness. Simply as a reader, as a consumer of Jacobs’s work, I find this unfortunate. I can get the assumption of bad faith and the dismissal of actual arguments from anyone on the internet. It is a misuse of scarce intellectual resources for Alan Jacobs to dismiss a complex argument without demonstrating any understanding of the actual substance of that argument.

You’ll note that this has nothing to do with not being critical or not being nice. I would love to read Alan be actually, effectively critical towards this essay, to see what he actually has to say of substance. He could flay Gladwell and Eggers alive, and I would happily pick my teeth with their bones. But it only means anything if he actually bothers to actually engage with what they actually write and think. Instead, he tweets this, which to me just makes Gladwell look better in comparison.

Like all of us, Jacobs has certain strengths as a writer. To me, his strength is in the kind of work he publishes on his blog. Meanwhile, the kind of short-form witticism he’s attempting here is not, in my opinion, one of his strengths. That, really, is my beef with Twitter, and it’s where my criticism gets misinterpreted. What people refer to when they use the term “snark” is something that’s actually really, really hard to do, but which everyone imagines themselves to be good at. I love high-quality snark. The problem is that we are drowning in mountains of bad snark, of failed snark. I don’t dislike Twitter because there’s too many mean jokes. I dislike Twitter because there’s too many lame, failed, unfunny mean jokes. To make matters worse, the fundamentally transactional nature of Twitter culture means that people validate and reward each other’s bad jokes, which ensures that they’ll keep making them. Now Scocca is a skilled hand at snark, as is Max Read, and most of the writers in the Gawker stable. (Nick Denton has an eye for talent.) But his argument is going to be heard by people who are, I’m sorry to say, not funny.

My issue then is in part that Scocca praises in the abstract a way of expression that is often poorly attempted in the particular. Snark I don’t think is good or bad, just unevenly applied. Similarly, I recognize that Twitter is a medium and could be used for any kind of expression, but I also insist on the plain fact that most of Twitter as it actually exists is filled with unfunny jokes.

Not that I’d be any better. Quite the opposite! That’s why I’m not on Twitter. I’m no good at snark. Kind of suck at it, really.

Update: Well here’s a longer thing by Jacobs on this issue.