Long time readers may recall I’ve referred to Fredrik deBoer, an English PhD, educator, and longtime blogger, a time or two. Later, his blog seemed to disappear, but it turns out he started a new blog called the Anova. This appears to be short-lived, as Andrew Sullivan points at this farewell post by Fredrik:
Shortly I will be headed to the Richmond University Medical Center to pursue intensive treatment for my mental illness. My day-to-day existence has become entirely unmanageable, and I fear for my health and safety. I do not have much of a plan at this point other than to get checked in. When I am back out I will try to decide if this project can continue. If not I will immediately suspend the Patreon, but feel free to stop your payments yourselves too. It is clear that I can never return to my old ways of engaging online, and I must leave semipublic life permanently, among many other changes. All I want is to build a quiet and simple existence where I can live and work privately without hurting myself or others. At present I have a hard time contemplating the future. I just know that my life is fundamentally broken and drastic measures are necessary to fix it.
This touched Andrew, who, for those not aware of The Dish, was a blogger who tried to blog the blogosphere – keeping an eye on many of the blogs, as well as other news sources, and react to, or at least relay, the interesting bits. Of which there was a lot. As a reader of his blog, and only his blog, it was addictive to the point where I’d be fascinated, then burned out, then fascinated; no doubt, a reflection of my own personality, my own tendency to have a lot of interests, all of them about a millimeter thick. Here’s Andrew:
Freddie is someone I barely know in physical space, but feel intensely close to. In the years of hourly blogging, he was one of a handful of people I always tried to read and who guest-blogged for me on my vacations. I happily gave space to someone whose views are very different than mine because they were so sincerely held, so clearly expressed, and he was capable of challenging his own side. There was something of Orwell in him. But I also discovered in those years what he found out: that living online is deeply dangerous to mental and physical health, that the pressures of the online crowd can overwhelm individual thought, and, in the end, thought itself. Twitter is not a place to air diverse viewpoints; it is a desiccating swarm of like-mindedness, moving as a single mutating mass, shimmering with every minuscule ripple in the news cycle, destroying all perspective, undermining learning, destroying the very process of reading, and deeply corrosive of a liberal society. If you are in the middle of the online stream, as I was for a decade and a half, and you are intelligent and attempt to be conscientious and honest, the emotional toll will be crushing. If, like Freddie, you are already bipolar, it is a deeply unsafe space.
Freddie saw this very clearly only a week ago, explaining why he had drastically culled his online content: “I wanted to look past what we once called ideology: I wanted to see the ways in which my internet-mediated intellectual life was dominated by assumptions that did not recognize themselves as assumptions, to understand how the perspective that did not understand itself to be a perspective had distorted my vision of the world. I wanted to better see the water in which my school of fish swims.” So he tried to find a new perspective, but still failed. He realized what I once saw. You cannot edit this stream. It edits you in the end. This is self-knowledge: “[T]he fact that so many people like me write the professional internet, the fact that the creators of the idioms and attitudes of our newsmedia and cultural industry almost universally come from a very thin slice of the American populace, is genuinely dangerous.”
The scale is well beyond anything I ever experienced, but the nut at the center of this fruit is rather the same as what I did for years back in the 80s and 90s in attempting to keep up with 20-30 BBSes, every single day.
I am uncertain as to how to disentangle the effects of the experience from my own personality, since one affects the other in an endless positive feedback loop. Does my utter and long fascination with the telecommunications hobby, ever so much more comfortable than actual face-to-face conversation and confrontation, account for my later-in-life marriage? Or was that an inevitable result of a highly introverted and shy personality?
In the end, though, I doubt I share a lot with Andrew and Fredrik, because scale does matter. As any experienced software engineer knows, scale is an amplifier, and at some point your algorithm, your processing equipment, begins to fail. Andrew experienced scale harder than just about anyone, and I suspect Fredrik’s root mental illness made up for any lack of pure volume.
And motivations matter as well. I cannot speak for Fredrik, but my impression of Andrew, who I believe I found shortly after he started up, was that he put together a goal (of covering the blogosphere & other news, honestly critiquing what he read) and then strove to reach it – as it kept running away as the Internet grew at a fantastic rate. At some point, the endless reading, analsys, and the instant reaction writing wrecked him.
During the BBS days, I was addicted to the idea that I had a function which many people found useful. The feedback of maintaining, implementing, and participating in the BBS experience was emotionally and intellectually satisfying on many levels. But with UMB, the primary goal is to blow off steam. Just prior to starting UMB, which was a couple of months after the termination of Sullivan’s The Dish, I found I was beginning to mutter to my wife about, well, whatever was annoying me out in the world. Politics, science, anything that caught my attention. (Muttering is different from discussion, which my wife and I also do with each other.) And I didn’t like that. I’d spent years explicating opinions in public, and when the BBS world went away as the Web spread, that stopped. The Dish took its place for me in terms of lapping up my addictive energy, but then The Dish went away, and when I came up with the name Unsightly Mental Blemishes and mentioned to a friend that it’d make a good blog name, he said, Well, start one then.
So I did. And now I don’t mutter to my wife anymore, except during movies. She occasionally says I spend too much time blogging, but I think, given my motivation this time around, it’s probably healthier for me to blog than not to blog.
My best wishes to Fredrik. If blogs are homo sapiens, then BBSes are, perhaps, the equivalent to Neanderthals, each a distinct landscape to be explored. Exploration comes with costs, and I’m sad to hear that some explorers find those costs to be dear. I hope he finds an undamaging mode to living which he can learn to love.
