I don't remember how exactly I came upon your Substack, at some point over the summer, in a way that is I'm sure serendipitously connected with my interests in AI and art, AI and truth. I've enjoyed your stream-of-consciousness approach to posts, your ability to weave, maybe not an argument, but an assessment, an emotion even, around matters of public discourse and culture. Now, I do not agree with some of the things you have been writing as of late, but I've always been naturally inclined to build bridges when others burn them, to understand every idiom or community, to learn, to offer other viewpoints, to find commonwealth where possible - knowing it's not always possible, and sometimes history tells us we have to push, even fight, back. But that's not where we are here, and I welcome your openness and invitation for critical dialogue.
Now, as to the politics of vulnerability. You are right, we have been prone to, encouraged to (social media and mobile phones dramatically lowered the bar of public self expression), incentivized even (think "personal branding") to share more of ourselves, to perform something akin to intimacy in public. But the reality is that anything that's in the public eye is a performance, and that's where there's a paradox that won't be resolved. There's always something that's out of the frame, that's edited out or hidden. True intimacy only exists in spaces where we don't have to perform, where we can just be, safe to be honest and vulnerable, but at the same time available to receive criticism. A priest in the confessional or a therapist in their office, held to secrecy by ethics or deontology, a loving friend, kin or spouse, telling us the hard truth we need to address about an ailment, a mistake, a path down which we err.
I think that the cost of true intimacy, that of being vulnerable enough that you can hear you're doing something wrong, is not one we are able to bear in public. For intimacy comes with a cost, that of hearing things you don't like to hear, that you might not even want to hear even. And if we claim to embrace intimacy in the open, then we must welcome contradiction, disagreement, and losing followers. This is the cost of being intimate in the open. That might be unfortunate, as the foundations of any civic construct rest on civil disagreement. But maybe, just maybe, that kind of disagreement is only possible if we approach others not with our full selves from the start, but with versions of ourselves that they can understand, that they feel understand them too. In other words being intimate in the open might be a pretense for foregoing the possibility of civic discourse and civil disagreement, it might be an excuse for digging one's heels, and waiting to find others who are like us, so that we may lament, in our shrunk commonwealth, about those that we don't understand, and that don't understand us.
Yes, and what more is, empathy allows us to hear other peoples ideas and opinions and let us have patience and curiosity…Empathy comes from love.
I stay away from tiktok because the algorithms are somewhat dividing. I think what we must realize is that god/source energy is within us all and we all express ourselves differently on this planet earth.
So far, I haven’t lost real-life friends to my beliefs. Just to give you an idea— I could be sorted as a conspiracy theorist and ’redpilled tradwife’ and that’s saying something, coming from a Swede!!! 🫎🇸🇪
Yes... you're lucky you haven't lost friends in real life. I have, and it's really a bummer. I lost 2 really good friends that I'd known for over a decade. I'm still digesting that, to be honest. I think it's one of the reasons I won't stop yapping... can't let that go to waste. (And I couldn't agree more on the TikTok front, yikes!)
Hi Anthony, thank you so much for this thoughtful response. I really appreciate your openness and how you articulated the paradox of public vulnerability is beautifully put.
You’re right that true intimacy usually happens offstage without performative stakes. I agree completely—and I don’t think we’re in disagreement at all, actually.
What I was trying to explore in the piece isn’t that everyone should be vulnerable in public, but that vulnerability itself has been repurposed into a kind of public performance. It’s not always about sharing to connect anymore... it’s often sharing to signal. It’s less “here’s who I am” and more “here’s the version of my struggle that aligns with my identity group’s politics.” That framing has consequences for how we build trust, especially across ideological lines.
So when I say vulnerability has become conditional or politicized, I don’t necessarily mean that private vulnerability is being threatened. I mean that public expressions of emotion now often require ideological disclaimers to be “safe” or acceptable. And that creates a strange dynamic where people either perform alignment or retreat into silence.
Your comment added a lot of richness to the conversation though, so I’m grateful you took the time to write it. And yes, I’m always here for civil disagreement and bridge-building. That’s the entire spirit of what I’m trying to do here :)
This is quite possibly the best thing I have read on how to make sense of this moment in social media— which has become real life for so many of us.
I would add an example from the pandemic wars: if you say “I think we should be cautious about requiring public responders to get vaccinated (and disregarding their legally permitted religious exemptions), because there will be huge collateral damage if they all quit”, you risk being characterized as an “anti VAXXER“ “pandering to the law and order crowd“ or the worst, which was leveled at me repeatedly, “endangering all of our health and being a dangerous person who must be publicly, shamed, unfriended, and blocked.”
Last year I encountered someone in public who had formed an opinion of me, based on her projections about a handful of social media posts, and had no hesitancy sharing it with me with all the smug and certain viciousness of the online world. That was a first in my experience, as I had thought in person people would not be so unkind, and that they were perhaps just performing for their friends on social media when attacking me. I came to realize in this conversation that it was her belief that “ Everybody knows you’re ______” fill in the blank with any word you like, but her preferred ones were Republican, conservative, privileged. In my community those words irrevocably damage both professional and personal associations.
Since then, my city has not recovered from the pandemic crash in public responders as they did, in fact, refuse the vaccine and were fired. Fentanyl has taken over the streets and refuses to quit, small businesses and large have fled in the face of relentless shoplifting and a level of violence we had never seen here before. (The classic weekly crime is now stealing a car and using it as a tank to crash through the entry of a shop, causing tens of thousands of dollars of damage to the structures of buildings, as well as then emptying out the store of its goods and sometimes hurting or killing people inside.) We have one of the very highest retail crime and property theft rates in the nation. I am not sure we are ever going to put civic structures back together.
Yet to consider the future, to consider the results of ideologically rigid pandemic policies, and to ask for a conversation that would weigh the collateral damage was not permitted. I believe if Democrats had stopped for a minute and mediated their stances and been more amenable to common sense we would not have the anti vaccination/ anti-modern medicine movement we have today — and we might have a sane person heading our federal health department, who actually listens to scientists and doctors.
Thank you for this thoughtful comment, Iskra, I appreciate it—and I agree with a lot of what you said. While I started disassociating from the left around 2018, 2020 solidified most of the doubts I was having. The response to the pandemic was incredibly eye-opening. And not just the government response, but like you said, individual responses to how others were handling themselves during lockdowns, and whether or not they wanted to get vaccinated. There was a lot of peer pressuring going on... and worse, again as you pointed out, literally forcing people's hands or they risked destroying their livelihoods.
And sadly, so much of what was forced to change in 2020/21 still isn't back to normal—and probably never will be. But I think that's why it's so important to speak up during this "new" normal, otherwise we risk living in a society that we don't agree with and didn't take part in creating. We can't keep letting people on the fringes decide for the majority.
I have to wonder how much of this attitude is because of colleges pushing "liberal arts" courses that emphasized "looking deep" into every little nuance for meaning that isn't there. Sometimes, the ocean is just blue; it doesn't have a deeper meaning than that, nor does it have to.
As someone who has a degree in one of those fields, I have to agree with your assessment. The very first thing they plastered into our minds on day 1 of my first-ever "women's and gender studies" course was the idea that "the personal is always political"
In retrospect, I think that is one of the most toxic things I've ever heard. And it is a core tenet of their philosophy (and ideology)
It's the easiest in for creating discord and disharmony, for pushing the "words as violence" bs.
When words hit you personally you stop reacting rationally and with logic, you ignore facts. Because you've been trained to only see "facts" a certain way.
It's interesting, because I've seen that attitude bleed into things at my job. I'm a paralegal, personal injury litigation. You'd think attorneys would stick to the facts as presented in the evidence, but more and more it becomes an emotional bid for attention to their argument. And that holds weight for the jury, I guess, but leaves a bad taste in my mouth when you overlook other, more legitimate and true facts.
Your essays are always great triggers for thought. Here are a few of mine:
1. Vulnerability ought to be selective. I have no desire to expose my soft underbelly to the world as a whole, but I will do so in increasing degrees to acquaintances, friends, family, and my wife. It seems that musicians and poets differ from me in this regard, but I am neither of those.
2. Because time and attention are limited, when it comes to public essayists, I am more interested in those with a specific position and coherent arguments for it than those struggling to grasp the truth. You are one of the few exceptions for me, both because your writing is always interesting and because of what you have to say about the *process* of coming to understand the truth.
3. Despite the previous point, I generally hate glib monocausal explanations of complex phenomena and quickly lose interest in writers for whom that is an M.O. Perhaps this is another reason I like your writing.
I don't remember how exactly I came upon your Substack, at some point over the summer, in a way that is I'm sure serendipitously connected with my interests in AI and art, AI and truth. I've enjoyed your stream-of-consciousness approach to posts, your ability to weave, maybe not an argument, but an assessment, an emotion even, around matters of public discourse and culture. Now, I do not agree with some of the things you have been writing as of late, but I've always been naturally inclined to build bridges when others burn them, to understand every idiom or community, to learn, to offer other viewpoints, to find commonwealth where possible - knowing it's not always possible, and sometimes history tells us we have to push, even fight, back. But that's not where we are here, and I welcome your openness and invitation for critical dialogue.
Now, as to the politics of vulnerability. You are right, we have been prone to, encouraged to (social media and mobile phones dramatically lowered the bar of public self expression), incentivized even (think "personal branding") to share more of ourselves, to perform something akin to intimacy in public. But the reality is that anything that's in the public eye is a performance, and that's where there's a paradox that won't be resolved. There's always something that's out of the frame, that's edited out or hidden. True intimacy only exists in spaces where we don't have to perform, where we can just be, safe to be honest and vulnerable, but at the same time available to receive criticism. A priest in the confessional or a therapist in their office, held to secrecy by ethics or deontology, a loving friend, kin or spouse, telling us the hard truth we need to address about an ailment, a mistake, a path down which we err.
I think that the cost of true intimacy, that of being vulnerable enough that you can hear you're doing something wrong, is not one we are able to bear in public. For intimacy comes with a cost, that of hearing things you don't like to hear, that you might not even want to hear even. And if we claim to embrace intimacy in the open, then we must welcome contradiction, disagreement, and losing followers. This is the cost of being intimate in the open. That might be unfortunate, as the foundations of any civic construct rest on civil disagreement. But maybe, just maybe, that kind of disagreement is only possible if we approach others not with our full selves from the start, but with versions of ourselves that they can understand, that they feel understand them too. In other words being intimate in the open might be a pretense for foregoing the possibility of civic discourse and civil disagreement, it might be an excuse for digging one's heels, and waiting to find others who are like us, so that we may lament, in our shrunk commonwealth, about those that we don't understand, and that don't understand us.
Yes, and what more is, empathy allows us to hear other peoples ideas and opinions and let us have patience and curiosity…Empathy comes from love.
I stay away from tiktok because the algorithms are somewhat dividing. I think what we must realize is that god/source energy is within us all and we all express ourselves differently on this planet earth.
So far, I haven’t lost real-life friends to my beliefs. Just to give you an idea— I could be sorted as a conspiracy theorist and ’redpilled tradwife’ and that’s saying something, coming from a Swede!!! 🫎🇸🇪
Yes... you're lucky you haven't lost friends in real life. I have, and it's really a bummer. I lost 2 really good friends that I'd known for over a decade. I'm still digesting that, to be honest. I think it's one of the reasons I won't stop yapping... can't let that go to waste. (And I couldn't agree more on the TikTok front, yikes!)
Hi Anthony, thank you so much for this thoughtful response. I really appreciate your openness and how you articulated the paradox of public vulnerability is beautifully put.
You’re right that true intimacy usually happens offstage without performative stakes. I agree completely—and I don’t think we’re in disagreement at all, actually.
What I was trying to explore in the piece isn’t that everyone should be vulnerable in public, but that vulnerability itself has been repurposed into a kind of public performance. It’s not always about sharing to connect anymore... it’s often sharing to signal. It’s less “here’s who I am” and more “here’s the version of my struggle that aligns with my identity group’s politics.” That framing has consequences for how we build trust, especially across ideological lines.
So when I say vulnerability has become conditional or politicized, I don’t necessarily mean that private vulnerability is being threatened. I mean that public expressions of emotion now often require ideological disclaimers to be “safe” or acceptable. And that creates a strange dynamic where people either perform alignment or retreat into silence.
Your comment added a lot of richness to the conversation though, so I’m grateful you took the time to write it. And yes, I’m always here for civil disagreement and bridge-building. That’s the entire spirit of what I’m trying to do here :)
This is quite possibly the best thing I have read on how to make sense of this moment in social media— which has become real life for so many of us.
I would add an example from the pandemic wars: if you say “I think we should be cautious about requiring public responders to get vaccinated (and disregarding their legally permitted religious exemptions), because there will be huge collateral damage if they all quit”, you risk being characterized as an “anti VAXXER“ “pandering to the law and order crowd“ or the worst, which was leveled at me repeatedly, “endangering all of our health and being a dangerous person who must be publicly, shamed, unfriended, and blocked.”
Last year I encountered someone in public who had formed an opinion of me, based on her projections about a handful of social media posts, and had no hesitancy sharing it with me with all the smug and certain viciousness of the online world. That was a first in my experience, as I had thought in person people would not be so unkind, and that they were perhaps just performing for their friends on social media when attacking me. I came to realize in this conversation that it was her belief that “ Everybody knows you’re ______” fill in the blank with any word you like, but her preferred ones were Republican, conservative, privileged. In my community those words irrevocably damage both professional and personal associations.
Since then, my city has not recovered from the pandemic crash in public responders as they did, in fact, refuse the vaccine and were fired. Fentanyl has taken over the streets and refuses to quit, small businesses and large have fled in the face of relentless shoplifting and a level of violence we had never seen here before. (The classic weekly crime is now stealing a car and using it as a tank to crash through the entry of a shop, causing tens of thousands of dollars of damage to the structures of buildings, as well as then emptying out the store of its goods and sometimes hurting or killing people inside.) We have one of the very highest retail crime and property theft rates in the nation. I am not sure we are ever going to put civic structures back together.
Yet to consider the future, to consider the results of ideologically rigid pandemic policies, and to ask for a conversation that would weigh the collateral damage was not permitted. I believe if Democrats had stopped for a minute and mediated their stances and been more amenable to common sense we would not have the anti vaccination/ anti-modern medicine movement we have today — and we might have a sane person heading our federal health department, who actually listens to scientists and doctors.
Thank you for this thoughtful comment, Iskra, I appreciate it—and I agree with a lot of what you said. While I started disassociating from the left around 2018, 2020 solidified most of the doubts I was having. The response to the pandemic was incredibly eye-opening. And not just the government response, but like you said, individual responses to how others were handling themselves during lockdowns, and whether or not they wanted to get vaccinated. There was a lot of peer pressuring going on... and worse, again as you pointed out, literally forcing people's hands or they risked destroying their livelihoods.
And sadly, so much of what was forced to change in 2020/21 still isn't back to normal—and probably never will be. But I think that's why it's so important to speak up during this "new" normal, otherwise we risk living in a society that we don't agree with and didn't take part in creating. We can't keep letting people on the fringes decide for the majority.
Thank you for the clear and important thoughts about our weird and discomforting situation. Agree!
Thank *you*, Peggy!
Love, love love this!!!
❤️
I have to wonder how much of this attitude is because of colleges pushing "liberal arts" courses that emphasized "looking deep" into every little nuance for meaning that isn't there. Sometimes, the ocean is just blue; it doesn't have a deeper meaning than that, nor does it have to.
As someone who has a degree in one of those fields, I have to agree with your assessment. The very first thing they plastered into our minds on day 1 of my first-ever "women's and gender studies" course was the idea that "the personal is always political"
In retrospect, I think that is one of the most toxic things I've ever heard. And it is a core tenet of their philosophy (and ideology)
It's the easiest in for creating discord and disharmony, for pushing the "words as violence" bs.
When words hit you personally you stop reacting rationally and with logic, you ignore facts. Because you've been trained to only see "facts" a certain way.
It's interesting, because I've seen that attitude bleed into things at my job. I'm a paralegal, personal injury litigation. You'd think attorneys would stick to the facts as presented in the evidence, but more and more it becomes an emotional bid for attention to their argument. And that holds weight for the jury, I guess, but leaves a bad taste in my mouth when you overlook other, more legitimate and true facts.
so, what now?
yes.
Yes.
Your essays are always great triggers for thought. Here are a few of mine:
1. Vulnerability ought to be selective. I have no desire to expose my soft underbelly to the world as a whole, but I will do so in increasing degrees to acquaintances, friends, family, and my wife. It seems that musicians and poets differ from me in this regard, but I am neither of those.
2. Because time and attention are limited, when it comes to public essayists, I am more interested in those with a specific position and coherent arguments for it than those struggling to grasp the truth. You are one of the few exceptions for me, both because your writing is always interesting and because of what you have to say about the *process* of coming to understand the truth.
3. Despite the previous point, I generally hate glib monocausal explanations of complex phenomena and quickly lose interest in writers for whom that is an M.O. Perhaps this is another reason I like your writing.