The masculine urge to post

Stop doing this!

Years ago, my colleague Ryan Grim told me to start a Substack for the sake of cultivating an independent collection of people who might be interested in my work. I took his advice — as I often do — but have now lurked quietly long enough. I’m planning to use this space for thoughts that are too long for X but too short for columns. It’s also set to automatically pull in links to my latest podcasts and articles. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

And away we go.

Not long ago, my feed delivered a post from a right-wing man I once respected gleefully referring to a high-profile woman as a “cunt” on social media. It was a one-line insult, not meant to be profound or persuasive. It was written, though, by a smart person who is capable of deep thought.

Men should generally not refer to women this way, and I generally should not cuss or eat Dominoes, but these things happen. It’s not morally defensible. What’s much more interesting than a dude calling a woman a cunt is that a smart person who uses their X account for professional purposes clicked “publish” on a tweet like that. It wasn’t a slip of the tongue in a bar, it was intentionally meant for public consumption.

There was a time in Web 2.0 when social media felt much more ephemeral. I remember using Twitter to literally plan nights out during college. Hitting “post” didn’t feel like publishing. But it always was. A social media post is a public statement under your byline, whether it’s text, video, or audio.

I don’t believe this man would have ever published an article in 2005 referring to a woman whose foreign policy he disliked as a cunt, let alone a major media figure. So why publish that on social media?

This where Marshall McLuhan would explain the medium of algorithmic social media does not merely change the delivery mechanism of a given message, but changes the message itself. If this man needed to send a message about this woman in 2005, it would be packaged in a cable news hit, a blog, an op-ed, or perhaps even a private email. It almost certainly would have more closely resembled, “This person is wrong for reason A, reason B, and reason C,” than “This person is a cunt.” Neil Postman’s “television-based epistemology” is now the “algorithmic-social-media-based epistemology” and the results are all around us.

I’m curious about social media conditioning some of us to exhibit an emotional incontinence that would have been seen as discrediting in prior eras. It seems emasculating, actually, for grown men to publish that kind of goofy insult on a professional channel for posterity.

As we know, algorithmic social media incentivizes 1) the act of publishing and 2) extreme emotions. It seduces us into writing and recording when we otherwise might have remained silent. (When you log onto X, a blank box asks, “What’s happening?”) We are also trained to write and record more extreme versions of our reactions, arguments, and thoughts. (Think: “I hate this” or “I love this.) Political narratives are forged in a digital casino.

It seems clear the costs are not worth the benefits, real as they are. One easy fix would be to revert Facebook, X, and Instagram feeds back to literal timelines. I like to regale Gen Z friends with tales of actually reaching the bottom of my Twitter feed when it was a minute-by-minute list. One negative incentive at the time was speed over substance, but that’s preferable to today’s system. This won’t happen, of course, because the revenue losses would be impossible to stomach.

It’s still an incredible statement on the rapid devolution of our professional conduct in public life that we’ve so quickly succumbed to these pressures. But the pressures are intentionally designed to maximize our time in front of these screens, so it’s no surprise.

To brings things full circle: This is exactly why I’m planning to scribble off more thoughts here on Substack in the near future.