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I'm in a bit of a funny situation.
I'm sure many of you are familiar with Freddie deBoer, author of The Cult of Smart and How the Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. He's been a controversial and polarising figure in online journalism for as long as he's been writing, who describes himself as a Marxist but whose politics are much harder to pin down than that designation might suggest. He became embroiled in scandal some years ago when he suffered a psychotic break brought on by his bipolar disorder, in which he knowingly falsely accused a fellow journalist of being a multiple rapist, followed immediately by a lengthy stay in an institution and being prescribed a cocktail of medications he (to the best of my knowledge) still takes to this day to manage his condition.
Today he published an article outlining his predictions (the subheader describes it as "a warning, or notes for someone else's manifesto") for a dramatic increase in anti-tech terrorism in the coming years - why it might come about, and what it might look like. But his piece is no more a "prediction" about the future of anti-tech terrorism than a guy called Fredo admiring your house and telling you what a shame it would be if something happened to it is a sincere compliment. No: having gestured towards the idea in the past, Freddie is now nailing his colours to the mast and going Full Uncle Ted. Between the article's lengthy descriptions of the specific vulnerabilities inherent to the modern internet infrastructure, his "lament" about the unavoidable human lives that will be lost as a result of anti-tech terrorism, and the literal screenshot of a recipe for nitroglycerine - any sane person would reasonably interpret the piece as incitement to violence, lacking as it does even the fig leaf of appending "in Minecraft" to the end of every description of a violent act. As with an increasingly large number of his articles in recent months, the comments are disabled, and with obvious cause - this isn't a discussion, it's a call to arms (you don't even need to be a paid subscriber to read it).
My comment is not about whether anti-tech terrorism is good or bad or whether it's appropriate for deBoer to use his platform to incite violence. (For what it's worth I think his diagnosis of the underlying causes of this future movement are pretty spot-on, and the despair he feels when witnessing the negative impacts of big tech, social media and smartphones is certainly something I can relate to - hell, I read Industrial Society and its Future and was enthusiastically nodding throughout.) My comment is about deBoer.
As an aside, the piece mentions parasocial relationships between celebrities and their fans as one of the things deBoer finds most distasteful about the modern technological society. Obviously, I don't know deBoer personally - it would be foolish of me to think I can draw accurate inferences about his mental state based solely on his public writing. But given his history of bipolar disorder, psychosis, and writing remarkably lucid and coherent articles while in the grip of an escalating paranoia (he has openly admitted that one of his most famous pieces, "Planet of Cops", was written in such a state), this latest article of his made me quite concerned. It's certainly surprising for a successful writer who just bought a house and is trying for a baby with his partner to so openly encourage his tens of thousands of readers to blow up 5G towers - and if some security guards are killed in the process, well, omelette and eggs.
But even if I knew for a fact that he was on the brink of a manic episode, I still can't just reach out to him and say "dude, are you okay?" He's written in the past (I can't find the article) about how much he hates it when he publishes something, and someone emails him to ask "dude, I read your last post and I have to ask - is something wrong? Is your bipolar acting up?" when it's abundantly obvious that they just disagree with the post and are using his mental illness as a cudgel with which to dismiss his arguments out of hand. As an intelligent person who's gone to great lengths to manage his mental illness, I can't imagine how insulting, disingenuous and condescending he must find this dismissal-framed-as-compassion.
But even a stopped clock is right twice a day. The fact that it's unfair of people to dismiss his writing with "whatever dude, you're nuts anyway" doesn't change the fact that his condition has (and presumably does) impacted on the content and style of what he's written. If I were to reach out to him, what I'd really like to get across is the idea that "Freddie, I'm not even saying I disagree with your latest article - I'm saying that, even if I agreed 100% with your article, the content of it and the way it's written makes me legitimately concerned that you're on the verge of a severe episode. I'm not the person to help you, but I think you should seek help."
Am I overreacting? Does the piece come off as more sane and level-headed than I'm presenting it?
I agree with you that despite all his qualifiers, disclaimers, and tone, FdB is hopeful that this will happen. It's also a lucid piece, even if he should have reached out for some insights from people with expertise in data center security to explain why his scenario is implausible.
Is it written in a manic euphoria? Maybe, and his history adds reason to think it might be. But I don't think that's a reason to disregard it. Madness might have a place in civilization (pace Foucault), and the modern tendency to pathologize madness is as much a way to defend irrational aspects of a broken world as it is to "cure the patient." Maybe we need the insane to say things the rest of us are too scared to point out, being too well-incorporated into modern society and economy to risk our comfortable place. FdB was rightly cancelled, but that gives him a bit of a superpower: having been cancelled, he is now uncancellable.
As far as his personal health, all we can do is hope either that he's fine or has a good support structure. I hope he has people who are invested in his well-being and are willing to act on it if he starts to decline.
Tech is very redundant. That is why it works so well . Amazon data centers are all over the world so if one fails, websites still work.
You could nuke Council Bluffs and Google would shrug. The idea that someone could shutdown Bard by shoving down a bunch of server racks is delusional; Google's initial reaction to a nuke would be crafting the right PR release and figuring out how to get a big tax write-off for it. FdB is more invested in heroic myths than coming up with an objective, materialist understanding of tech power.
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He’s a doctrinaire Marxist, and it’s hard not to notice that Marxist predictions have not, in fact, happened. Of course he’s going to push the predictions out as ‘well Marxist principles will happen when X, no Y, no Z’. This is predictable if stupid. When you add in that Freddy is mentally ill, you get lengthy screeds like that.
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Absolutely not, his analysis is cogent and perceptive. I'm not approaching this from the perspective of "should we dismiss this out of hand as the ramblings of a disturbed man?", but rather "regardless of the virtues of this piece, is its publication cause for concern about deBoer's well-being?" Maybe it's not my place to ask or wonder. Presumably if he really was on the verge of a manic breakdown, his partner would have clocked some much more obvious red flags long before he pressed publish on this post.
People who disagree with someone on the Internet have a hefty incentive for motivated reasoning in thinking the person to be disturbed.
Also, you're probably not particularly concerned over his well-being in general. If he posted that he had a physical illness you probably wouldn't even send him a get well card.
I explicitly stated that, in spite of finding this article concerning, there was much in it that I agreed with. deBoer has posted dozens of articles whose theses I've disagreed with, often explicitly telling him so in the comments section - this is the first to make me concerned that he might be having a bipolar relapse.
Correct. The obvious difference being that a person going into a manic episode or a psychotic break may pose a risk to themselves or those around them, and may not even realise that they're ill.
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Descriptively, if there were a prediction market for "will FdB be institutionalized by the end of December 2024," I think this would marginally up the price.
But really there's nothing to be done. Neither of us knows him or has even met him (presumably), and the idea that his audience should be invested in his well-being is just another manifestation of the detestable parasocialism infesting the world. I know in my own life there's probably at least a couple people teetering on the brink, and I might have actual ability to help them in some small amount: speculating on FdB's mental state should be understood as entertainment, not as something helpful (which isn't to say it's bad to speculate, just that it's not a form of constructive engagement with the world).
I hope so, but I suspect that's overly optimistic.
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