It's Not The Critic Who Counts

One of those Substacks about how journos are bad.

Traditionally it is bad form and unwise to psychoanalyze people you dislike. However, it's a truth universally acknowledged that some journalists are seething black holes of insecurity and projection. For years this has been not only obvious but sayable, and the theme's been done to death in Substacks from disgruntled journalism expats.

But it came to mind yesterday, when some friends of mine came into the crosshairs for writing publicly about a neighborhood-building project. They want to convince friends and like-minded people to move to a particular neighborhood, so that they can live nearby each other, cook each other meals, etc etc etc. From what I understand they are spending out of their own pockets to make this happen, without expectation of recompense. Living with one’s loved ones is of course both the backbone of civilization and most of the reason for it. But by becoming legible to media vultures and by being SF types attempting to make it in NY, they came under an incredible amount of venom on the internet from the "often wrong, but never in doubt" brigade. Criticisms included "you're claiming to have invented community" (they didn't), "you're making lots of money from it" (they're not), "you should do it instead of blogging about it" (they are), and to cap it off, the truly excellent line, coming from Brooklyn writers for THE CUT, "you're gentrifying Williamsburg."

One might think reporters, who have to write words for a living and get annoyed when you only read the headline, would read pieces before complaining about them. One might also think that they would welcome when people make difficult social things legible, being themselves in the business of clarification and publication. One might even think that people whose credibility relies on a norm of cautious fact-checking wouldn't want to be publicly wrong for no reason. But of course (and again, this has been done) NY media is a rats nest of the shiftiest, snarkiest haters on the planet; It is high school, and perceived low-status groups get the swirlie.

Letting one’s project become legible is of course dangerous in this way, that one increases one's attack surface to the haters. There are also internal dangers - becoming prideful or gauche or whatever. But I like when people explain how they've done something hard, or things they're learning in the process. 

I'm quite blessed to have friends, family, and mentors who try and build community in concrete ways, and to have worked for the past year on building intentional community with an incredible group of people. It seems, from watching these folks, that what leads to their success are boring and cringe: they create some shape for the social experience and they make it regular. For the folks I admire most, that looks like hosting a gathering regularly, whether they feel like it or not on a given Thursday. Constancy makes stuff work, and constancy requires attention and attention is by definition others-centeredness, which is why communities which start from people wishing they themselves had a community seem to struggle.

All that to say that there is a good kind of criticism or even dunking on of other people's things, but that to perform it would require some practice of attention. 

Dan Walden @dwaldenwrites

criticism is ultimately democratic work: it’s secular evangelism. you invite people to look closely, to bring their attention somewhere new so that they can discover something. it only works by attraction: you have to convince people that it’s worth it to look deeper