I Can Hear You from Here*

Musings From the Comments Section

Recently I had put out a new video on my YouTube Channel, its format being one of my favorites to make, and certainly the easiest because it aids in my ability to get my thoughts out without necessarily having to sit down and write it out in full. (Laziness, I know.) These videos are my “Reel Talk Reflections” wherein I can provide an impromptu/extemporaneous reflection on the various issues of politics and culture while footage of me fishing from the pond plays.

Usually fish get caught, sometimes more than one, like in the video down below:

The main thrust of this video was that the online spaces that we inhabit, cyberspace, has a principle of duality to it similar to how light is both a wave and a particle. The internet is both a drug we consume, and enables an altered state of consciousness to commune with other fellow travelers online. A digital astral plane, if you will. I recommend giving the video a watch, as it will be necessary for today’s discussion.

What I enjoy about these reflections is the comments section. As a writer and commentator, I like looking at the feedback from viewers and readers especially from names I can remember seeing very early on when I started posting. One of the comments came from “thealienrobotanthropologis8276”, someone who I can remember in the comments section of some my earliest videos back in 2020. He wrote the following words, and I wanted to reflect on them:

When we talk about the internet, we really mean comment sections and infinite content wells. The content wells aren't fundamentally different from TV or video games, sometimes just lower or higher quality. The comment sections can be used like an extension of web 1.0 by mostly lurking. I like to keep a document of comments I've written and expand on things to help refine my thoughts instead of just shouting into the abyss.

But the real problem I think you're getting at Prude, is that comment sections really put the fractured or multicultural society problem in front of everybody's faces in a very confrontational manner. Regardless of where you stand on the issue (keep moving away vs stay in the land that you call home), in real life, most people avoid physically moving more than they have to and avoid being confrontational, even if some people deserve it. Both keep moving away and keep staying but not effectually pushing back are losing strategies. If you read comment sections, it's very tempting to join the brawl and shout your two cents into the abyss. If you remove the comment section, people will instead evaluate if the source they're following is worth their time anymore. Is a given digital space worth fighting over in the comment section, or when things diverge too much should you just start to look elsewhere? Obviously these are both losing strategies at some level.

Building spaces with a substantial enough of a shared culture to avoid this whole mess is a challenge that I don't see good solutions to right now. It's back to the whole negative vs positive vision problem. We don't have anything meaningful in common beyond not liking the latest societal trends. Meanwhile, if we find groups aligned with our other interests, few if any people will understand our criticisms of the current things.

Let’s get into some of this because a good comment can spark good dialogue, or at least bring one to flesh out his thoughts more.

The Comments Section….

For starters, I like the idea of keeping a document or some kind of written record of where you’ve put down a comment. After all those are your words, although sometimes it doesn’t feel as if they mean much in the fleeting ether of the comments section whether that be on YouTube or random Substack posts (although sometimes the notifications will remind you of your words years later.) I’ve certainly changed positions over the course of a great deal of things which you can which may make room for some embarrassing explanations or changes in rhetoric if you were to look back without a good record or memory of past statements. Comments sections and forums of an older internet feels long forgotten.

For instance, when doing a writing test for a job interview I had come across an old forum that was still active and was part of a former NFL Player’s website, before separating so it could still be maintained. It is still quite active and it is uniquely local to the Baltimore area which was a pleasant way to get in-depth details on what I was supposed to write about from first hand accounts of Baltimore area residents. The form itself reminded me of old of forums for video game discussions and exploits, yet this time it was for people trying to live their best life while keeping up with the local gossip. We have certainly traded the pleasure of more communal interaction for the endless content well that has been expertly crafted to be as addictive as possible. We long for a sense of “place”, which is why in the Reel Talk I mentioned the John Perry Barlow talk, and the sense of “place” Grateful Dead fans had when it came to the internet. A “here” for those who weren’t always the band fanatic nomads/groupies. The Image Board or Forum (From Salo to Something Awful to 2Chan) feels like a retreat to the comfortable place where the sparring could lead to a summary exile if not in good faith whereas nowadays an exile from a “community” just means a rebrand that can still crank out a grift somehow.

Then again the idea of “Here” has certainly changed from the possibility that there could be a central hub in the digital ether that would allow us to come together. The Global Village where niche interests could come together feels dated, although it certainly still exists for specific fandoms, like for Coca-Cola Memorabilia Collectors. My late great-uncle was an avid fan of certain websites he would regularly visit, and chat often with a Japanese fan of Coke and where they had gotten their latest hauls. Nowadays though “here” could be anywhere, the digital “public square” had become so much more controlled and regulated that it is really anything but the classical liberal idea of a public square at all. This is something that Kierkegaard remarked on in 1846 in “The Two Ages: A Literary Review”, that the Public Square can change so much yet it still retains its name and stature despite the transformations. The internet has changed our ability to access information and dialogue in a manner that has been more regulated and controlled, that the Frontier of Cyberspace has closed just like Frederick Jackson Turner documented with the closing of the American Frontier.

More of my thoughts on that in a video here:

I think that the comments section had made it easier to call out people’s bullshit when it came it to editorial journalism. Democratizing it, like Digg and Reddit or just algorithmically boosting the most liked comments ensured that you’d inevitably get a homogeneity of opinions and punishing outsiders. Give people a weapon, they will surely use it on their enemies. Not to invoke ‘member-berries but does anyone remember Gab’s Dissenter Extension? Even when comments sections were banned or things were algorithmically suppressed (Lord have mercy, r/TheDonald) the war was still on even beforehand. Blogs were public comments against the grain of certain people, or just offering commentary on their issues and thoughts. We are more confrontational, our comments sections and public intellectuals are individuals you can tell just by looking at them have never been in a real fight in their lives. A good punch to the face will make a man reconsider his words, and those who have thrown and received such a punch know what I’m referring to.

Of course there is the confrontational attitude to double down or to make it worse, digging that hole deeper. Dr. Sherry Turkle, in her 2011 book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other highlights some interesting trends in our relationships to one another in person and our ability to offshore our intimacy and humanity to the net.

“If you're having a conversation with someone in speech, and it's not being tape-recorded, you can change your opinion, but on the Internet, it's not like that. On the Internet it's almost as if everything you say were being tape-recorded. You can't say, "I changed my mind.”

The internet is forever. Unless some public humiliation/contrition ritual takes place repentance or accepting one’s new positions seems difficult, lest you curry favor with the ruling intelligentsia like that of Dr. Hanania and Mr. Hoste. Dr. Turkle’s point about memory also comes to mind when it comes to Mr. thealienrobotanthropologis8276 makes about writing down comments he had put down in other places.

“When you depend on the computer to remember your past, you focused on whatever past is kept on the computer.”

We have deracinated ourselves from the flesh, where it becomes easier for me to remember the fact that the guy who commented on one of the earliest videos was the same gentleman who inspired me to write this little ramble in the first place. While Turkle focuses on human relationships in her book, one can’t help but notice the same way she talks about desire in an intimate sense can also be applied towards authenticity, community, and being: “To understand desire, one needs language and flesh.” There is a reason why now in this age of constant of surveillance, internet infighting splashing out into the escalation of doxxing and leaks, that people still long for despite their wariness for meeting in the real world. Covid broke people, and those trying to go back into the world that was before are coming out of the warp and realizing that they’ve been thrown a thousand years into the future.

And Its Absence

If you remove the comment section, people will instead evaluate if the source they're following is worth their time anymore. Is a given digital space worth fighting over in the comment section, or when things diverge too much should you just start to look elsewhere? Obviously these are both losing strategies at some level.

Was it ever? Even if there was a comments section you would know beforehand that certain news publications and websites had a liberal bias. Without the trolling I suppose it just stopped being worth the effort? Perhaps my own memory on this subject matter is failing me when it comes to other digital spaces and websites. However when it comes to “packing my bags” and going elsewhere online, I really do disagree with those who say “we should just stick to telegram” or something similar. Why would I want to voluntarily keep myself in the ghetto? If you want to stay there and do nothing to broach your ideas to a larger audience then so be it, I will continue to interact with government officials and potential patrons why the path I’m on is headed in the right direction. Is it futile? Maybe in the long run, but the mainstreaming of ideas once considered too heretical by mainstream conservatives tells me we’re having some impact. I think getting up and going online elsewhere is usually a poor strategy, even if I have to hedge my bets on what I say to stay on the more widely used platforms. I try my best not to be so cynically jaded over what the cause of our current malaise in respects to policy, culture, and religion. Perhaps I am just too agreeable, but if we find ourselves stuck in this paralysis of analysis then eventually people who aren’t as “redpilled” or conscientious of how power works will waste untold amounts of resources to push back or make incremental victories that are built on a foundation of sand.

Perhaps these remarks are true though for the average person? I still read The Atlantic, although I am not an Atlantic’s target demographic, the same with Harper’s or The Economist. I read them alongside old books, the blogs of my cohorts, and publications like IM-1776 or The American Affairs Journal. Perhaps this is my own attempt to stay connected to a world outside my own pseudo-reality, as a f*ck you to Lippmann perhaps? Or that I am aware (even if I am a minority) that there is a world outside of my own little online ecosystem. The comments section, plus with Turkle’s observations that we are less empathetic and more acrimonious online than ever before the net, we are in some serious danger. Even if comments sections stay around, I have a feeling we’d be far more likely to be just as confrontational and angry at each other leading to people going their own separate ways. The thing is this only works on conservatives. Gab, Truth Social and Telegram have their userbases and people who stay there over Twitter or YouTube and will probably never come back and that’s fine. Journos and other pederasts go to Mastadon, BlueSky, or Threads and go back to where they know they have some kind of power or authority.

Do I miss the comments sections? Perhaps, as some people have genuine insight but they usually blog now, or tweet out their thoughts as a “micro-blog” which is a glorified lengthy comment anyways. If I sound dismissive, it isn’t intentional, it is more so because I am trying to make sense of the ecosystem I am inhabiting now, in 2023. So more props to the original commenter in my video for forcing a moment of ecological introspection.

What are You Doing Here?

Building spaces with a substantial enough of a shared culture to avoid this whole mess is a challenge that I don't see good solutions to right now. It's back to the whole negative vs positive vision problem. We don't have anything meaningful in common beyond not liking the latest societal trends. Meanwhile, if we find groups aligned with our other interests, few if any people will understand our criticisms of the current things.

Perhaps I take issue here the most.

When I put the asterisk in the title for the word “here” it is because the word “here” is subject to the reader’s mind. Do you want something physical or are we talking about the fragile temporality of our online spaces? Everyone wants to build something to last, and while the digital offers as non-infinite-but-kind-of-infinite space to inhabit it’s not necessarily real, just as real as much as we want to assign value and meaning to it. My time on Twitter will go up if I can somehow make it monetizable but that would require me to be “good” at Twitter. Here has to have meaning in a way that can manifest outcomes or become a place to facilitate outcomes that you want.

As for positive versus negative visions, this was the key thing that I tried to address as my Scyldings Conference speech this last June. We have to affirm some bloody basics if we’re going to get somewhere, which arguably puts the Christians in these right-wing spaces in a pretty darn good spot on what they have to do or can do. How well do our relationships work if you’re against the transgender industrial complex but someone of a well known community node actively platforms one who tends to agree with them? Confederal models can only work for so long, and the question becomes who do you tolerate or work with in face of your own personal hypocrisy?

If we find groups aligned with our interests, few if any people will understand our criticism of the current things.

Not everyone is to be an interlocutor!

I say that not for grifting purposes but because there are clearly successful people we can agree with who do get it, and the problem is making those connections. If you keep a record of your own comments, I would behoove us to also keep a record of where get ideas. From the Saints all the way down Morgoth’s Review do I try and note where ideas come from in order to add them into my own catalog and how I can build one off the other and see where things take me. Nate Fischer obviously gets it, Auron MacIntyre is the boomer whisperer, and Morgoth keeps me from getting too optimistic about things (and I am thankful for it.) You want to amplify the people who are already out there, and subject matter experts whose data and explanations you can effectively use.

The purpose getting our heads out of the digital sand into the physical again is because we sorely lack the real, and have become quite accustomed to our impact in the world being only through online spaces and memes. Kekistan and the Meme Wars are long gone, the MAGApedes have faded away, but there is a light piercing in through the room asking you if you lift, garden, or know what to do in case shit hits the fan.

I don’t have all the answers, but I am trying to see if we can figure it out a way to effectively balance the force multiplier of the internet with our political situations back on the ground. It will be difficult, but foundations are certainly being built.