I thought that this intervention into the sad, enraging Essay Anne Vanderbilt/Grantland saga was useful, in several ways. First, simply because Tom Scocca is a brilliant writer and a thoughtful guy. But second, because Scocca is the author of the smarm essay, and I think that interacts with this controversy in a useful way.

Scocca writes

If you believe that Stealth Bomber technology, which Vanderbilt had claimed to have worked on, should help you hit a ball with a stick, you are already a willing participant in a confidence game. Aerospace hokum is deeply integrated into golf culture; this is a sport where the word “Titanium” stamped on a club guarantees as much elemental titanium as the word “martini” guarantees vermouth.

This is a fine point, and well expressed, as usual. But I can’t help but think that there’s another kind of willing participation in a confidence game, and one that, like titanium golf clubs, is found within an affluent and passionate sect.

Ubiquitous to discussions about this story is the notion that the Grantland piece led simply and directly to Vanderbilt’s death. One of the first comments on Gawker echoes a very common sentiment: “Fuck this dude, he killed her hands down.” That is a sentiment that has been expressed again and again on Twitter, on Tumblr, on blogs and in comments. And much as it did during the case of Dharun Ravi and Tyler Clementi, the notion of simple causality between bad behavior and suicide hangs in the air throughout all of this. Even those who don’t assert that simple causal explanation are engaging in an ambient rhetorical space where her suicide touches and colors everything. It most certainly moves the mob, the Twitter storm that is now a permanent fixture and permanent threat of online life. Had Clementi not jumped off a bridge, Ravi’s cruel thoughtlessness might have warranted no more than a write up from an RA. Had Vanderbilt not killed herself, the story would not have burned up the internet for days.

As Christina Kahrl wrote on Grantland: “We’re here because Essay Anne Vanderbilt is dead.”

Well: Caleb Hannan did not kill Ann Vanderbilt. He cannot be meaningfully accused of any complicity in her death. It is tempting to indict him and his editors for that crime, given the comprehensive ugliness, negligence, and profound lack of empathy that attended his piece and its creation. You can read thousands of words by others that say what needs to be said about the piece. But it didn’t kill her. Everything that we know about suicide and mental illness and human life tells us that. That’s the reality of a broken world. And I should easily be able to judge Hannan and his editors for their profound lack of sensitivity, compassion, and care while making that point.

But I think the simplicity and force of that causal argument, whether explicit or assumed, is precisely why I’m still reading about it now. Because I think that’s what the Twitter storm needs; it needs to assert, in every situation, the absolute simplicity of right and wrong. To publicly state online that you are conflicted about any story that has provoked the mob into action is to risk the immediate wrath of the storm. It happened that, on the day the Jameis Winston case was blowing up, I watched the Ken Burns documentary about the Central Park Five. I thought about making the point that, perhaps, we shouldn’t rush to judgment when a young black man is accused of rape, given our country’s history on that front, but I didn’t dare. I knew the risks.

What people have built, on Tumblr and Twitter and Facebook, is a kind of boutique moral ideology that has one precept that precedes all others: the sheer obviousness of right and wrong. The very words “grey area,” in any context, have become anathema. The ideology of the Twitter storm is a kind of simple, Manichean morality that would make George Bush blush. They used to make fun of him, for that, the liberals and the leftists; his “you’re either with us or you’re against us” worldview was seen as not just illiberal but childish, a kind of moral immaturity that resulted from evangelical Christianity and neoconservatism and dim wits. Now, the shoe is so firmly on the other foot that the default idiom of the lecturing Twittersphere is a kind of aggressive condescension, one which assumes into its expression the notion that all right-thinking people already believe what the mob believes. It is on a foundation of this kind of moral certitude that all of history’s greatest crimes have been built.

That, to me, is the self-deception, a confidence game in the same way Scocca means above: a willful belief, among members of a social and cultural strata, in a kind of frictionless universe where putters can be made out of Stealth Bomber materials, or where all moral questions have long since been settled. It would be nice to live in a universe where there is straightforward relationship between good and evil and where all tragedies have accessible villains. But you don’t live there, and the notion that you do makes actual moral progress harder for us all. I would call that attitude smarm, myself. The problem is that the self-same people who were enamored of Scocca’s smarm essay– the ones who made its popularity possible– are the ones who make up the Twitter storms. And this has been my greater point about smarm: I find it a useful notion in a vacuum, but the mechanisms of internet culture makes me pessimistic about its actual use. As I said at the time: tons of the people who lauded that essay had, days earlier, gone gaga for BatKid. But BatKid was textbook smarm. It turns out that smarm, like so many other human faults, is easier identified in others than in ourselves, even when we are the ones who need to be indicted most of all.

And this is the problem for Scocca, and for us all: he’s a writer of great integrity whose ideas can only be spread with the will of a mob. I don’t blame him for not pointing out that the most influential purveyors of smarm are in fact the very people whose approval his essay required. I have many convenient blindspots to the comprehensive corruption of my present life. I just think that the altitude of his rhetorical station might need a little adjusting. Same message for him as for the Twitter mob: you can position yourself however you’d like. But we’re all down here in the grime.