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by
Ryan Holiday
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August 26 - October 1, 2019
SNARK IN ACTION: A MOST EFFECTIVE WEAPON
This is snark in its purest form: aggressively, self-righteously full of shit.
Everything he does is now a convenient chance for blogs to link readers to their hilarious past coverage, to rehash the same jokes, and to repeat the same accusations. It’s a hole Adams simply cannot dig himself out of.
I’d tell him the whole system is broken and evil, and I’m sorry it’s attacking him. But there’s nothing that can be done.
many bloggers defend snark.
Of course the snarky are dissatisfied and disillusioned—who isn’t?
it is just shouting for the sake of getting clicks and raising their profile.
Snark is intrinsically destructive. It breaks things; it does not build.
If snark was really about change, then bloggers would need to actually believe in what they were saying beneath the humor.
They hadn’t meant anything they wrote. It had all been a game.
The proper response to fakeness is not to ineffectually lob rocks at palace windows but to coherently and ceaselessly articulate the problems with the dominant institutions. To stand for and not simply against.
Snark offers an outlet for their frustration.
For the outsiders without access, snark is their only refuge.
Snark is not the response of “the masses” to the inane doublespeak of politicians. It’s a defense mechanism for writers who, having nothing to say, are absolutely terrified of being criticized or derided. Snarky writing reflects a primal fear—the fear of being laughed at. Snarky writers don’t want to be mocked, so they strike first by mocking everyone in sight. 1
There is a reason that the weak are drawn to snark while the strong simply say what they mean. Snark makes the speaker feel a strength they know deep down they do not possess.
To respond is merely to expose the jugular once more—to show that you’re human and vulnerable and easily rattled.
To be called a douche
a way to dismiss someone entirely without doing any of the work or providing any of the reasons.
Roger Ebert calls snarking “cultural vandalism.” He’s right.
Earnestness, honesty, vulnerability: These are the targets of snark.
“Ideas are society’s fuel. I drill a lot of wells; most of them are dry. Sometimes they produce. Sometimes the well catches on fire.”
What Jezebel did with their fury and snark was eliminate the freedom of that process.
If controversial ideas are the victims of snark, who benefits from it?
People with nothing to lose.
People who need to be tal...
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no reputation to ruin, only notoriety to gain.
the people who thrive under snark are exactly those who we wish would go away, and the people we value most as cultural contributors lurk in the back of the room,
the decline of public executions coincided almost exactly with the rise of the mass newspaper.
the online media cycle is not a process for developing truth but for performing a kind of cultural catharsis.
they were doing with trumped-up evidence and the gallows what we do with speculation and sensationalism.
it is a power I don’t relish using, because once I start, I don’t stop.
These acts of ritualized destruction are known by anthropologists as “degradation ceremonies.”
we-versus-you scenario with deep biological roots.
You nudge blogs toward those dangerous instincts. They love the excitement of hunting and the rush of the kill without any of the danger.
Julian Assange
they launched WikileakiLeaks.org, a semiserious site that asked anonymous users to send in embarrassing information about Assange and the inner workings of the WikiLeaks organization.
it wasn’t the allegations that suddenly marked a point of no return; they were just a convenient cover.
there may be someone like me out there working the mob. In fact, many blogs initially suspected the same thing. But that didn’t stop them once the ceremony started.
He was turned into a caricature of himself. As a result, any redeeming value of his work was utterly irrelevant.
This can happen to you too.
Woody Allen.
My intention was to call upon people to see beyond media and lawsuit-inspired scandal, and to consider people for their true value and for their contribution to society. I feel that the comments of a former friend of Woody Allen, Harvard professor and famous civil rights lawyer Allan Dershowitz, apply to this particular phenomenon: “Well, let’s remember, we have had presidents…from Jefferson, to Roosevelt, to Kennedy, to Clinton, who have been great presidents…. I think we risk losing some of the best people who can run for public office by our obsessive focus on the private lives of public
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blogs are our representatives in these degradation ceremonies.
You used to have to be a national hero before you got the privilege of the media and the public turning on you.
No wonder only morons and narcissists enter the public sphere.
Consider how the ceaseless, staged, and artificial online news chase makes today’s generation of reporters feel.
Bloggers must write and film and publish an insurmountable amount of material per day,
It’s enough to make anyone bitter and angry.
“rage of the creative underclass,”
Alain de ...
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