Dave's journal, week sixteen

The week of three candidates

DES MOINES – We’ve had stupid news cycles this year, but this week took the stupid cookie. I’m not talking about how I spent Wednesday, watching Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announcing his presidential campaign — no, that would be patronizing, and I showed up to understand why a subsection of the electorate was so interested in him.

The stupidity, you probably guessed, was the Great Bluecheck Saga, probably the biggest waste of time and mental energy I’ve ever seen a crowd engage in. Sure, I joined that crowd a few times, and I stated the reason why: Grown men were embarrassing themselves in tremendous ways, posting bad poetry about Elon Musk, straightforwardly typing things “why won’t you pay for free speech?”

I retweeted some of it, but felt dirty every time. Not enough to quit the site, like Dan Diamond did; I’m linking him because he says some smart true things about Twitter’s declining utility as a traffic-driver. I felt dirty because there wasn’t much to say about the situation.

Here’s my basic understanding of things. To a certain kind of conservative, one very well represented in the tech industry, journalists are so irritating that productive people would be better off out them. They learned to build things; we learned sophistry-adjacent typing skills. They microdose epsilocybin; we snarf adderall and antidepressants. (I don’t, I’m basically a Szaszian about mood-altering drugs, but understand that lots of people in media can be mocked this way.) They take risks, we tear down risk-takers.

The people who verified accounts in pre-Musk Twitter did two things that exacerbated this ill feeling. One: They were incredibly generous about giving verification to reporters, even if they had little reach or few followers. Two: Starting in 2017, but accelerating in 2020, Twitter moderators used the threat of de-verification to punish people with illiberal political opinions.

This clearly irritated Elon Musk, who's explained why in hours of Twitter Spaces now. He tore down the old verification system, announced that the blue check of verification would only be available to those who paid for extra-feature Twitter Blue, and promised to level the playing field. And he lied about that. The funniest twist this week was Musk giving free blue checks to celebrities, alive or dead, who had more than a million followers but wouldn’t pay for verification.

You know all this, but the perspective I can add as one of those media people is that many conservatives who dislike the media came to think that verification was of tremendous psychological importance to us. This wasn’t true. Here are some kinds of validation journalists crave: story placement, whether or not we’re on TV, which podcasts we’re invited to, whether we’re paid to go on TV, whether we can sell a book. You couldn’t convince the anti-media folks that this was true. Indeed, trying to explain ourselves sounded like a ruse — exactly what wordcels who want to maintain their prestige would say!

I think we saw the truth will out this week. Bluecheck-less media people kept using the service; newly bluechecked people who’d bought the privilege of started appearing at the top of threads, more exposed than every to people who want to make fun of them. The panicky reversal of the “no check unless you pay for it” policy has created some excellent comedy, like the account used by the Anonymous hacker collective getting a button that falsely claims that they gave their identity and phone number to Twitter.

Are you sick of thinking about this? I am, and I heard nobody in the waking world talk about it in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Iowa this week, except for the journalists also traveling in these places and my friend Garrett, who I visited to meet his new daughter. In real time, I’m also learning that my fiancé can’t go to bed until I do — I am a lumbering noise machine when I come in late, and she can wake up if the moon is too bright — so I’d better tie this off.*

The Best Thing I Read: “Joseph Smith and the Mormons” by Noah Van Sciver. I try to read at least two books a week, and I only just made it when I finished this and “Nordenholt’s Million,” an apocalyptic sci-fi novel from the end of the Weird Fiction era, in which a disease that sucks nitrogen out of plants causes a worldwide famine and Britain is rescued by a sociopathic Herbert Hoover figure who saves five million genetically useful people while the rest of Britain is cordoned off and left to die. Just like the best bit of “War of the Worlds” is the study of panic in Martian-zapped London, the best bit of “Nordenholt’s Million” is the narrator’s journey to London driven mad by starvation, descending into a new dark age.

Good, but I still preferred Van Sciver’s book, the best thing he’s ever done. His character-drawing is light and cartoony, characters looking like they could walk onto a Sunday strip, but his scenery-drawing and use of the form — like a scene of angry Missourians shooting at the Mormons followed by a page of gunpowder clouds — serves a deeply researched story.

The Best Thing I Saw: Harold Lloyd’s “Safety Last!” Everyone’s seen a few seconds of this, in some compilation of Classic Comedy that shows Lloyd’s hapless but athletic nerd clinging to an arm of a giant clock. Turns out that’s one of the last big gags in a movie that wrote the Looney Tunes script — my favorite gag was Lloyd crouch-walking beside a cart to conceal his lateness to work, then, after the cart is pulled away, continuing to crouch-walk like a hermit crab, his boss 100% onto what’s happening, until he walks next to an elevator and Lloyd leaps up to push him in.

I saw “Beau is Afraid,” too, on my only night off, catching the 8:10 show at a theater in the Des Moines suburbs where teens had just set a firearm in the mall food court. Still thinking about that one, some brilliant nightmare stuff fighting for screentime against some weird ideas that never connected — not for me, at least. Dream Logic lets you get away with anything.

The Best Thing I Heard: Heard a Jeff Lynne production on a shuffle, then remembered how Lynne tried to do for Del Shannon what he did for Roy Orbison. “Mystery Girl” still holds up, but “Rock On” has been forgotten, for the simple and fair reason that Shannon wasn’t as interesting or talented as Orbison. But I liked “Lost in a Memory” from the first time I heard it, a great use of Lynne’s mini-wall of sound to build up a simple, wistful lyric.

*The meta-conflict is that I’m convinced people only need five hours of sleep, and she’s convinced we need eight. My theory of sleep is that you never have a problem doing it if you properly exhaust yourself. Who has insomnia? Not pig farmers, people with email jobs who plead “anxiety” if they see a spicy headline. Just work as long as possible then pass out. It never fails.