Brief Interviews with Dangerous Amateurs

A conversation with Christopher Lasch's Angry Ghost

Last Monday, The Scroll published an essay titled “The War in Ukraine Is Not Taking Place” in which an anonymous Twitter user who goes by the name Christopher Lasch’s Angry Ghost (CLAG) argued that a “global media spectacle has overtaken reality.” To learn more about this CLAG fellow, and the emergent world of anonymous media critics and public thinkers of which he is a part, I spent several hours in mid-May speaking with him over Zoom. The following is a condensed and lightly edited version of our conversation.

Christopher Lasch's Angry Ghost @ghostofchristo1

A serious contradiction emerging between the mass synchronising powers of digital media, that enable the near-instantaneous global spread of words and ideas into all contexts, and a competition-based logic that elevates the social value of novel and "luxury" ideas.

Jacob Siegel: What are you? … I’ll be more specific. There seems to be a new class of anonymous public intellectuals, or anonymous media critics or pseudonymous social critics, operating on Twitter and other social media platforms. It’s a new thing and it’s interesting, but it’s not clear exactly what it’s accomplishing or how significant it is—whether, for instance, it has begun to outwork and replace some of the prestige media and intellectual institutions or instead just provides a larger stage for the age-old critical discourse of disgruntled intellectuals who would once have carried on their harangues in bars. What’s clear is that there’s a class of people, which you’re a part of and therefore well positioned to comment on, who issue social commentary both for each other and for the larger media class whom they’re commenting on and maybe gradually replacing. What are you all up to?

Christopher Lasch's Angry Ghost (CLAG): Anonymity has a history. It’s got an extensive history in terms of authorship. Think of the 18th-century public sphere where a great deal of publication was done anonymously. In the States, you’ve got the Federalist Papers as a good example. 

There was this norm of conducting civil and political discussions behind pseudonyms, and it was an accepted thing. It’s interesting now because the affordances of digital media provide us with an opportunity to conduct something similar. There was an important ethos around anonymity from the earliest days of the internet, but that’s no longer the case. Now it’s being highly problematized because it’s seen as something that can’t be disciplined. So it becomes a problem. 

How long have you been on Twitter?

In one form or another, probably for 12 years. I was a pretty early adopter, but I had a number of accounts. I’ve had accounts under my own name but also various other kinds of anonymous accounts, just playing around with different forms of tweeting. I didn’t really get any traction, so I would spend a lot of time just kind of tweeting whatever I wanted to virtually no engagement whatsoever, but it was fine. 

I’m interested in this idea of fragmentation and the aesthetics of the fragment. Twitter perfectly encompasses or encapsulates that. You put together a tweet thread, it’s a collection of fragments. You look back on your posting history as a collection of fragments or perhaps notes to self, notes to others, notes on things, notes in the margins. So for me, that’s the metaphor I approach it with. I see it very much as a series of notes, which I make on the timeline.

What are you taking notes on?

John Pistelli [columnist for The Scroll] made a brilliant observation a few years ago. He pointed out that there’s this kind of belated “theory cannon” on Twitter, or at least the parts of Twitter that we hang out in, that’s made up of texts from the ’70s and ’80s, writers like Christopher Lasch, Jean Baudrillard, and Paul Virilio. In a way, it’s kind of an oppositional thing, a way of making sense of where we are now. 

There’s not much good stuff being published right now, not a lot of good cultural commentary about our current digital predicaments, so we have to go back to what was published in what I think is the most similar period to what we are living through now: the 1980s, and that period of postmodernism and so-called political correctness and the various responses that emerged to that. And essentially we’re arguing by analogy. We’re kind of going back to that work, finding it a precedent, and trying to make sense of the present through the lens of this curated canon of slightly obsolete texts, which nevertheless have quite profound things to say about where we are now. 

Okay, but now imagine that you’re explaining this to your grandmother. Grandma finds out that you spend X number of hours per day in this place, Twitter, let’s say it’s five, and she’s worried about you. She wants to know, “What do you do there?” How do you explain this to grandma? 

It’s not a part of my life that I tend to talk to others about because I just don’t feel that it has any particular meaning or kind of resonance outside the set of online relationships that one has with one’s followers or with whom one follows, or the kind of general kind of subculture we’re all in. But on the other hand, if I were to make a bigger sense of this, I think there is certainly a kind of media class or a chattering class, as you referred to it, that is very much on this platform. A lot of eyeballs are glued to this platform daily. A lot of the discourse gets produced here in real time that determines the collective responses of people through Paul Virilio’s idea of emotional synchronization [See CLAG’s essay from last week for an expanded discussion of emotional synchronization] via the smartphone.

What’s happening is that there are these global waves of affect and emotion that are churned out through social media but have material effects. You can say it’s just this website, but it affects the way news stories are written. It affects the way in which people teach certain subjects in school and university. It affects politics. It affects how we make sense of current events and connect those events into a kind of wider context. Retrospectively, it’s a way of understanding history. It’s really a kind of collective reading and authorship platform. It’s not something I see as trivial. This is part of the evolution of the internet itself. 

Saying “it’s just Twitter” is like saying “it’s just academia.”

Yeah, exactly. There’s a desire to trivialize this in order to protect oneself from really thinking about the outsized nature of the problem because we really are dematerialized now. People use the terrible phrase referring to “lived experience” to mystify this by implying there’s some kind of distinction between the “real” lives we live and what we do online, where I don’t think there is anymore. What happens online is just as much real life and just as visceral and just as physical and embodied as what we do offline. 

I see Twitter as an incredibly powerful tool for the one-way broadcasting of information. No more effective medium exists for me to instantly beam information out into the world. But it is a dangerous mistake to treat it as a two-way medium for conversation and social interaction because then you let Twitter into you. The immediacy of it has an inertia that is hard to break. If you spend an hour with your eyes zipping across tweets, you can’t then just sit down and read a book. My experience of Twitter and of online media, in general, is that they’re actually far more physical than books. When I read a book, I can forget about my body to some extent. It’s truer with some books than others, but I have an experience of my mind as the active agent of the process. When I’m online, I feel it inside my body. It feels like either nausea or dissolution.

But to come back to an earlier point, now it’s really incumbent on you to explain to your grandmother, a lovely woman, I’m sure, what it is you do on Twitter. When you talk about “collective authorship,” it sounds like you’re part of the media, helping to shape the stories. Is that right?

One of my [Twitter] followers direct messaged me a couple of weeks ago and was saying that he’d watched my account blow up—well, I don’t know if it’s blown up, but, you know, it’s bigger than I thought it would get—he said, what was most interesting to him about it was who was following me, and he mentioned that I was getting followed by journalists. So there is a sense that you’re being listened to. That they have started to take this seriously and listen to what people are saying under anonymous handles. And it does start to affect journalists and writers. They do start to quote anonymous Twitter accounts. In Nina Power's new book, she quotes HP Lovecraft—sorry, Zero HP Lovecraft. That, to me, is a kind of new thing. 

Then there is the question of where authorship lies or where the boundaries between ideas lie when we’re all kind of anonymously contributing to a stream of continuously morphing and developing information. How do you extract ideas from that? How do you go about making a distinction between the conversation and the people who are contributing to it collectively? That’s difficult. Sometimes you read, you know, articles that have kind of uncanny similarities to things you tweeted a couple of weeks ago, and you just kind of wonder, wow, are these just collective ideas, or is there a more immediate thing going on here. When you tweet anonymously, you’ve just got to let go of those anxieties about authorship. If the ideas or tweets one develops end up elsewhere, then so be it. That’s a form of influence, that’s a form of transmission, and in a way that’s a form of success.

Where do you see yourself politically? 

I’ve always been on the left, and I’m not thinking of changing that. But at the same time, over the last 10 years, and particularly over the last five years, there has been this reorientation that’s quite appalling but also very interesting to me, where the interests of left activists have dovetailed with global capitalist and neoliberal institutions. There has been an absorption of activist, critique, and activist energy into capitalism itself, which then leads a kind of new legitimacy for the system. 

If the left no longer acts like the left, why cling to the label? In other words, what is the left that you’re still attached to?

To me, it’s an orientation toward capitalism and the use of materialist critique. But at the same time, that form of critique has become less helpful or less relevant to this emergent form of the left, which is far more essentialist and utopian.

There is this enormous nostalgia for the last time when things were real, when politics last made sense. The same kind of thing happens on the right as well, where there is a similar production of these kinds of signifiers.

The understanding I’ve come to is that for a lot of people spouting the standard line updates to Marxist materialism, it has become its own sort of identity politics.

The most dominant strain of the left at the moment obviously no longer sees the nation-based working class as the agent of change or the subject of history. It’s out the window. Now it focuses on the global multitude and sees things far more in terms of exclusion rather than exploitation. So rather than seeing political organizing around specific classes being exploited by capitalism, you’ve seen activists organizing on the basis of which people or groups are excluded for one reason or another.

They talk about this in French politics as something that happened in between the ’60s and the ’80s. The sense that workers are exploited through the capitalist system loses a certain amount of purchase during this period as the focus shifts to the excluded, meaning the abject, the homeless, the migrant, the refugee, the disabled, various groups of people who are at the margins. And so it becomes, in a way, focused through suffering. So the exploited worker disappears from view, and human suffering comes more and more into focus. They develop the humanitarian impulse to reach out and help these excluded people. So I think that’s kind of what’s happened. There’s been a kind of re-orientation of the left away from that kind of specific kind of class-based materialist understanding of how the capital as a system exploits workers toward a far more amorphous—but also, in a way, global or all-encompassing—kind of idea of exclusion. 

I'm kind of uneasy with the word wokeness; to me, it’s kind of cringe. I don’t like using it, but obviously, it does refer to something real, which is the repositioning of neoliberalism and institutional legitimacy around the idea of inclusivity and equality. It’s an attempt and perhaps a sincere one by corporations, universities, civil service, and so forth to reorient the mission of capitalism from profit-making toward saving the world. 

Twitter, the medium that has been at the center of the wokeness discourse, also helped birthed the critique of it. Twitter has probably been as influential in terms of consolidating a critique of wokeness and introducing it to a mass audience as any 10 legacy media institutions put together. Assuming Elon Musk really does take control of the platform [this interview was conducted in May when that looked a lot more likely], where do you see it going from here?

I would be surprised if he goes through with it, actually. Maybe I’m wrong, but I get this sense that it might not actually happen. But if it does, I think Twitter might become cringe for certain people who don’t want to be associated with this almost cartoon kind of libertarian tech bro project.

What’s really interesting to me now, and it’s something I’ve noticed more and more recently, is that the progressive left has stopped denying the existence of cancel culture and started seeing the pushback to what it’s trying to accomplish as them being subjected to cancel culture. Therefore, they are the real victims of cancel culture. So anything Musk does will be represented in those terms, in this really tedious two-way hypocrisy that is how we all conduct ourselves online.

But he could just completely trash it. There might be other platforms that emerge subsequently and have to look back on Twitter’s importance—and it has been extraordinarily important and influential over the past 10 years—and see the conditions that created it, what the effects of those have been, and where those kinds of energies and feedback mechanisms are going to take place in the future. Of course, the media doesn’t stay in one place. Obviously, there’s going to be an evolution as these things shift from one platform to another.