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Sunday, December 9

A “Friend” Writes

I hope I was right about you're reaction to the Johnny Sneer Twitter account, and also that after our conversation you either understood or at least regained a broader context with which to mediate your initial, visceral reaction. While completely unsurprising, it was nevertheless gloomier than warranted: and please note my use of the comparative. It would be unrealistic and irresponsible not to recognize the dark undertow coursing through the above link, but I'm afraid it is an honest, organic reflection of our era.

Having been nurtured in Augean stables of pandemic mendacity and industrial-strength hypocrisy, this demographic tends to exhibit everything from varying degrees of unconscious contempt to unqualified disrespect for their society and much of what it celebrates and rewards. Bertolt Brecht comes to mind. So if you can't brighten or channel our Mr. Sneer's stream, you might consider adding to it and influencing it in a way that respects his autonomy without relinquishing the prerogatives of your intellectual rigor or altruistic intent. N'est–ce pas?

Honestly, I think it's bollocks. On a scale of naught through ten in a muddled measure of relevance, merit, and usefulness, I am overwhelmingly inclined to assess Twitter a global score in the 0.05 to 0.1 range, a barely perceptible twitch above distracting nuisance, yet one more on the steaming tragic-comedy heap accumulated through the end of the last century. Twitter's more focused applications might register a middling range of values as with surveys of true journalistic historicity—as opposed to the promotional marketing and press release regurgitations that debase journalism (and predictably: all social media) today. The more positive, communitarian aspirations motivating hundreds of thousands of Egyptians to fill Tahrir Square would certainly swell this subjective and arbitrary abstraction to it's greatest weight.

Twitter is a tool, a chainsaw that most people use just to make sawdust, and sawdust does have its uses ... as long as we're not baking any bread.

In one of my weaker, more untethered moments of inspiration I thought it might be interesting to transpose something like War And Peace or A Tale of Two Cities into a Twitter stream, but such a project could never escape its earth-shattering tedium or irredeemable irrelevance. What would be the point—and more, the effect—of turning Tolstoy or Dickens to wood pulp? A finely conceived Dadaist middle finger to both the medium and its adherents, yes. However, it's a terrible misapplication of attention and way too much fucking trouble. Besides, even after crowd sourcing we'd still be left with a tremendous pile of nasty pastries.

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