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Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die
"There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."
Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I'm going to try to combine a culture war style post and an "interesting person" post. We've had a few of these "interesting person" posts, with this one being one of the most upvoted posts all time. Hat tip to @naraburns. The good news is that I'll be using a
real, livevery online person that we can all directly reference instead of an example from my own life.And that person is Shagbark.
Shagbark is a twitter personality I stumbled across several years ago by accident. Sometimes, you gotta love the algo. In about the last year, he's developed a legitimate following. 52,000 followers as of this morning. I believe 50k is the "famous on twitter" threshold.
Shagbark is eclectic to say the least. I could try to spin a narrative, but I think it's more impactful to go with the bullets:
Part of Shagbark's rise was due to his wife. I searched for, briefly, but cannot find the tweet exchange where in an young(ish) Asian woman from San Francisco made fun of Shagbark's wife's appearance. Paraphrasing, she said something along the lines of "Good news if you're a weirdo NEET; you can still get married if you're okay with your wife looking like this." Shagbark demonstrated some knowledge of the game by not directly replying and letting his defenders go after the bug lady. Not only did it work, but some rather large accounts came out of the woodwork to do it. Shagbark's signal was boosted and he now, by his own account, makes most of his money off of twitter monetization. On this last point, I am a bit skeptical; as a USCG vet, he's entitled to a pretty hefty basket of goodies that can go a long ways to supporting his bohemian lifestyle.
In sum, Shagbark is a technology hating somewhat-trad Catholic who LARPs as a kind of beatnik nomad / homesteader / flaneur / dirtbag entrepreneur and ... makes most of his income writing on Twitter and Substack. Contradictions abound, yet I cannot help think he does have genuine intent. This is not some multi-levels of irony deep parody or satire account. This is a real human, with real emotions, and many of them are unsupervised.
The Culture War Angle
Recently, Shagbark has been going through a bit of a crisis. After having his child, he realized that he couldn't actually raise her in a dilapidated shack in the New York hinterlands. He's now considering a move elsewhere. The suburbs are a non-starter (cars and soullessness) but any major metro is too expensive both in terms of money and ideological selling-out. So, he's started to look at old busted up cities that could be cheap to live in. His list, from this tweet is:
Personally, I'm hoping he ends up in Wheeling, WV. I've lived close enough to it to know that parts of it are truly hellscapes. I'm looking forward to the plot arc where Shagbark becomes a bizzaro Catholic-Luddite Harvey Milk advocating for the return of coal burning fireplaces to Wheeling.
Stemming from this look at cities, Shagbark wrote this tweet. The primary point of it is covered well in the second paragraph:
Shagbark bemoans that a bunch of
pseudointellectuals cannot find a cheap neighborhood to be unemployed in yet still meet up for beer, cigarettes, and High Quality Discourse About Subjects of Great Import. Now, I've been in enough bars around the country in all kinds of different cities and towns to know , sadly, exactly what Shagbark is envisioning. A bunch of weirdos sit around, nursing beers and cheap cocktails, shooting off their malformed opinions about random topics and letting the alcohol smooth out the edges. When you first encounter this in your 20s, as a brainy nerd, you think it's the coolest thing ever. After you round the corner into your 30s, you realize that it's a lot of talking in circles and well disguised emotional commiseration. Real intellectual work is done via writing because it forces you to state what you mean and the build an argument and evidence around it. You discover your own weaknesses, assumptions, holes. You often end up writing a totally different thing that you set out to, which, just as often, is a good thing. You've dug through the dirt and mud and found gold.Pontificating in a bar is not this. It feels like it the way that LLMs feel like you're chatting with a human. But even a momentary bout of self-awareness dispels the idea that you're really doing the thing. We get drunk and debate in bars to form and sustain relationships of various sorts. We're not there to write the next Tractatus.
Obviously, you can tell I'm thinking of The Motte now. Part of what sustains this site is a culture of effortposts and even effortful comments. I believe most of our AAQCs are responses to topline posts, not the original screeds themselves. If you want to spout off about something random, that's what the Sunday thread is for. Mostly, I think, it works. As the holder of both several AAQCs and multiple temporary bans, I can say that most of the time if there is a "break down" it's because of the personal irresponsibility of individual posters, not something systemic or cultural.
The question I am left with is, however, what if Shagbark got his wish and found a cheap, "beautifully depressed" minor city with a magical bar full of ... Mottizens! Would this actually work or would most of us, being Turbo Autists, shut down in public and let this drunken HippyCath dominate the space? Would there be verbal equivalents of AAQCs or would it all devolve into drunken shouting before anyone got to their second section heading?
Stated plainly; is verbal discussion about any topic actually a road to productive work on that topic, or is writing absolutely better? The obvious exception is when the subject is a specific interpersonal relationship. You talk to your wife/husband/*-friend about your relationship, you don't write markdown formatted posts about it.
Following on that, is Shagbark a greek hero; doomed to horrific failure specifically in the case that he wins. If Shagbark's Booze Lair opens in Houma or St. Louis or Utica, will he find out he's simply created a flophouse for bums instead of a watering hole for this generations Sartres and Hans Uns Von Balthasars?
Well, allow me to present the counter-factual. Yes, writing is essential. It is absolutely required to create a coherent system of belief. But before you put pen to paper, there is a natural human urge to bounce your ideas off another human. Maybe more than one. Possibly a small group, in some kind of social situation, where you can engage in vigorous discussion (dare I say debate?) where your ideas are winnowed down before you ever put them on a piece of paper. It might even be reasonable to give your group a name, something a little pretentious, because you are discussing Important Ideas, not merely commiserating over a
beercoffee.Something like the Society of Psychoanalysts, founded at Café Korb in 1908 by Sigmund Freud. Or there is the famous Café Central, patronized by Peter Altenberg, Theodor Herzl, Alfred Adler, Egon Friedell, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Anton Kuh, Adolf Loos, Leo Perutz, Robert Musil, Stefan Zweig, Alfred Polgar, Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, and Stalin. All of these men of course eventually put pen to paper. But they didn't keep coming to the same coffee house just because they really liked the barista's triple caf no fat skim milk four pump blended mochachino. They found value in arguing, debating, and discussing what would become some of the most influential theories in the world with other intelligent men.
Now I'm not saying that Shagbark's club would look like Café Central. It probably would look like a bunch of weirdos sitting around nursing beers and cheap cocktails while pontificating loudly on subjects they were not qualified to take a 201 class in. But that is no reason to write off this kind of circle-jerk entirely. A circle-jerk it may be, but a circle-jerk can still result in ideas that will cause the world to tremble.
The vast majority of people at the Cafe Central were weirdos sitting around nursing beers and cheap cocktails and we've never heard of them. For every Freud and Herzl and Stalin and Hitler, there were fifty losers whose manifestos wound up lining a parrot cage. One of the important things you realize when you read the biographies of revolutionaries, is that it's really hard to tell the serious ones from the unserious ones until suddenly it is very obvious. The Bolsheviks embodied every stereotype of the LARPing coffee shop revolutionary, the thugs who use Socialism as a cover for robbing banks, the burnouts who just hate their parents, the grifters trying to avoid getting a real job, etc. Then suddenly they took over Russia. And I don't think it's something you can predict in advance, some people rise to the occasion and others turn out to be failures. Sam Adams was far more important than John before the Revolution, afterward Sam was an afterthought until he became a beer. Jesus may not even have been the most important Messiah running around Judea in 33, he turned out to be the most important man to ever live.
These kinds of environments are important because they support a huge petri dish of ideas and thinkers, and most of them will be unimportant but some will be earth shattering.
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