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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?
So he starts off by aggressively misunderstanding and misreading singularitarians, then we get through to the stochastic parrot meme.
Then there's a misunderstanding of terrorism. Since when has there been anti-drug terrorism? Anti-alchohol terrorism? People don't get angry with the things they use/abuse so they can tolerate the bad situations they're in. People get angry with the causes of their problems or moral outrages, so we see anti-government terrorism, anti-abortion terrorism (note that this does not usually come from guilty mothers who aborted their children raging against the machinery they used themselves), anti-ethnic terrorism, religious terror...
You see suppression and regulation of alchohol, drugs, not terrorism.
About the only thing he gets right is that this anti-tech terror movement would get crushed even if it did exist. Technology is the biggest force-multiplier in history. This trivializes his argument.
My belief that de Boer is not worth reading is reinforced. Furthermore, if you think he's mentally ill, you shouldn't read him either.
As it happened I unsubscribed from him on Substack the other day for unrelated reasons, although I'm paid up until May. However
This doesn't follow. I already knew he was mentally ill in the sense of being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and many of his best articles were written while he was struggling to manage his condition. My concern now is that his mental illness may be interfering with his life to the point that he's at risk of a severe episode. And even if he was literally psychotic, I don't believe that psychotic people are incapable of producing interesting or thought-provoking articles.
Fair enough, I just thought de Boer was in the aggravating kind of mental illness camp, as opposed to the 'fun or amusing' camp. From the tone of your post, you didn't seem interested or happy to read his content.
Oh no, I've been subscribed to his Substack for years. My girlfriend teases me about how often I start a sentence with "I read an article by Freddie deBoer the other day..."
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Even the aggravating kind can be incredibly fascinating and insightful at times. Terry Davis was (although ymmv, he could be fun and amusing at times too.) John Nash too.
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