This started as a commentary track to Owned, got revised after Lawless Republic, and then circled back in after reading a Tyler Mahan Coe post on quitting social media.
Is what I do good?
I do not mean in terms of quality.1 I mean is it constructive? I know that it is useful, but the bar for useful is low. Presumably the NLPs trained by my Goodreads reviews makes them useful. And I am willing to take very little on that account and feel that it counts. Since what I tend to review is popular in the sense of meant for the general public, maybe less in terms of copies sold, I do get a kick out of the idea that there is some author, somewhere, who sees what I write here and elsewhere and knows that someone read it.
Since I feel relatively intrinsically motivated,2 I feel no burden. Where I feel the burden is whether or not I am doing something that contributes negatively or positively.
The critic writing the scathing review is a trope of considerable vintage. Anger is the vernacular of the internet. Social media is a sort of performance in people trying to gain or lose the attention of the inverse panopticon. And I certainly use that. I am knowledgeable, but what I do is entertainment. I like diving into a footnote, but I do not have the specialization to make that expressly useful, and even if I do, I stay broad in the scope of my readings.
But it is hard to read something like Owned or remark on the works of Cicero and wonder to what extent that this sort of thing produces a better society. That seems a high bar, but it also is an reflective idea, like that even if my scope of influence is nil, if someone did have influence they ought not to do it, so I should not do it myself. Maybe that suggests moving solely to fiction where the fact-finding part of things is less urgent. But I do not want to do that, and even if I did, it would take away my singular niche and thing that is my point of value, my way of trying to be the change I want to see in the world by having someone talking about non-fiction books in the same spaces as the fiction books get discussed.
I hope that I have not made things worse in the pursuit of gags and bits. I do not see a route to improve on this, but I also know that I do not need to quit and give my Depression something else over which to sneer.
- I mean, to run down this burrow real quick, I wish that I had a better sense of how to engage deliberate practice. But I also believe that future me will be embarrassed by everything I write, and probably be shocked at how bigoted I was, so not being able to win, why even play that game? ↩︎
- To the extent that I am not, it is about community, and how I hear about people having such a good time with others as part of the greater Read-o-Sphere. I would love to get in on that, but I also think that it is impossible to target that. Maybe that is the ASD talking and the way that I love people but also feel like there is some aspect to a process of friends and lovers that I do not have the script for. So it is not strictly an absence of extrinsic motivations, and more of a shrug towards them. ↩︎
CITATION HEEDED 