Since reading this article I’ve spent a good amount of time thinking about the challenges of maintaining nuance, particularly online, where the cost of Single Storyism is close to Zero for the individual doing it. The spoils go to Single Story teller while the nuance-communicator is literally introducing cognitive load into everybody’s mind.
Because of how I experienced reading this article, which, I’ll just say, is obviously the only reasonable read of it (only funny because I said it; before I said it it was just actually what I thought), a couple of the critical comments become something like Exhibits A, B, and C of single storyism. I see the author as writing a post here about The End of Nuance in our culture, as demanded in part by the “voter” who needs to have it explained to them via media, with political examples to illustrate. I think some people read it as a little differently than that, like the bigger story in the post is the politics, perhaps because it takes up more words. But notice how Aidan (OP) starts with a point about the mechanisms driving Single Storyism: a congressional staffer asks the author to summarize the issue in 3 sentences so it can be “explained” to voters.
“We want to know what you think as a tech founder.” That was the invitation, summarized.
“We want to tie you, and all that you stand for to our voters, to a single story,” is closer to reality. “What is your version of that story in three sentences max?” It might actually be the case that this was a staffer being generous, knowing that 3 sentences can pretty easily be whittled down to 10 words, or whatever is needed to attach the “tech founder” to one of two, maybe 3 stories, which I frankly couldn’t even name but are probably something like “1. FBI=wrong, or 2. Apple=wrong, or 3. The reality is genuinely too complex to have legs with voters so Nothing To See Here; say anything and move on.
It’s not surprising that in spite of a pretty carefully articulated and nuanced post, some comments are arguments for the single story explanation. I see my own tone and style if not my own arguments in those comments. I happened to approach this article in a state of rare openness with no information about the author whatsoever, bringing none of the existing frames and fighting stances I’ve so often got in tow. But I do think these commenters are missing what’s most intriguing and valuable in the OPs argument and should go read Brooks’ piece.
David Brooks says:
the stories have become identity markers. …. In order to express your solidarity with the virtuous team, you have to embrace the socially approved story. If you differ from the official story …it is not so much a sign that you are wrong …. It is a sign that you have false allegiances. …
This paragraph is both super interesting and, separately, contained what feel like identity markers to me. I killed the ones I noticed with my ellipses to try to lower the likelihood that the noisy signaling by Brooks outweighs the actual argument here. I added an unnecessary ellipses at the end for a final sentence that I think also contained another identity signal. The argument stands with or without markers.
Being derailed by identity markers is my problem in the way that so many things are. I can increase my understanding by reading Brooks’ paragraph and thinking as I recognize it’s my problem, but that’s tough. It’s a lot easier to switch from thinking about arguments to planning my counter-attack. Identity markers tend to shove me out of thinking and toward acting.
I wonder if you’d find the same identity markers if you read the original paragraph; hook all our brains up and maybe we could print out a chart showing where we are at relative to to Brooks on a political spectrum. Hook Brooks up? I don’t know if his brain would show any strong signals in the same spots. I think we all know occasionally when we are including identity markers in our writing. But the more we do, the more they become invisible to us — what the hell is water?*—and I think it becomes easier and easier to delude ourselves into believing that our identity markers aren’t identity markers but just standard vocabulary for all who are virtuous. Lack of comprehension of all the meaning in an identity marker really can make you feel you aren’t ready to engage honestly and seriously with me — you’re either ignorant or undereducated or manipulated by ___ or just a troll. If you don’t preemptively remove yourself from engagement and come at me, I’ll fuck with you, and I’ll shame you for not doing your homework. In a single phrase we signal our identity to the ingroup and reframe reality in a way that totally fucks with the outgroup—it’s a passive aggressive power move and lets us remain defensive while attacking. The bolder it is, the more we keep plausible deniability and a sort of “chill” reframe—so it passes as sincerely held, justifiable confidence, while in fact, that chill factor is probably correlated directly to the actual violence being done.
Even when the tribe knows it’s a performance and might roll their eyes at us, it gets the job done. The job being: taking control, protecting ourselves, etc. We flank ourselves with the ingroup and then act like it’s time for the outgroup to respond, in writing, with — please! — the calm and poise we’ve brought to the prison yard.
It’s about getting followers. It’s about self-definition and digging in our heels. It’s about strong-men and authoritarianism. I know that chemically I’m at a heightened, lizard-brain kind of state when I write Single Story comments or when I use identity markers and kind of don’t consciously acknowledge to myself that I’m using them. I feel driven and excited. High. My propensity for doing this is why I dislike being on Twitter and Facebook.
Sorry, I hope this is interesting to somebody.
*this is an identity marker and completely useless here if my goal is actually to get my idea across to all of the people who read this post**. It’s total noise and can only, at best, fuck with the reader or help me throw up a flag and find some friends. Including it as an aside between dashes is what could be called “bad writing,” basically, and hostile.
**Adding these footnotes is meta-shitty, and I’m doing it to explore what is going on in my head when I do it (what’s it doing in your head?); I think I’m trying to make myself look bigger and broader, period, without having to admit that at all and without really even prompting the conscious awareness of that effort in the reader. It’s a defensive posture with low risk and high reward, short term for me, in a venue where I’m out in the open, commenting on an article by a guy I don’t know and commenters I don’t know, and all I know is that the commenters seem to be mostly dudes, and I’ve not yet signaled my view anywhere clearly about the “brilliance” of the founding fathers who, it’s been noted, would have allowed a white guy like me to vote. In their other Medium comments some of the commenters here convey strains of ideologies I perceive subconsciously as “dangerous” for my image. I may as be in a prison gym, lying down with my hands completely occupied with a barbell, but metaphorically I’m pretty sure I don’t have pants on and. It strikes me that the “identity signaling” conventions I’m engaged in with these footnotes, which in some way show contempt for the out-group (by questioning their readiness to engage with me, etc) in the context of arguments, are totally acceptable and valuable as “Allusions” in literature or art. In both contexts they stretch the reader and load a passage with undercurrents. They create tension between the author and the author’s persona and the reader. They build that tension and force the reader to get into the author’s frame in order to receive the payoff, which in art can take work for the reader and be pretty life changing and beneficial in the end. It’s like an initiation that’s simply mandatory or else the whole experience feels empty. And in arguments, these tools win. They just may not be effective if the goal is truly to educate/engage/open as opposed to “win.”
