The Hills I'm Dying On

Grifters, Gadflies, Influencers, and Wolves in Social Engineers' Clothing

The hills for dying

Woke Watch Canada is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber or making a one-time or recurring donation to show your support.

By

James Pew

The famous phrase “the medium is the message,” by Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, is to me so much more than some weird cultural slogan leftover from the hippy world of the nineteen sixties. This term denotes an inversion of our usual mode of thought. When viewing a painting, one focuses their attention on where the painter draws it. There is the figure, in which you are meant to look, and there is the ground, the background which is everything that isn’t the figure. McLuhan would expound on this figure and ground dynamic and describe the ground as an “environment.” He was particularly interested in environments, as am I.

Medium and message can be placed into a figure and ground relationship. The message is of course the figure, the thing we are meant to focus on, and the medium is like the ground or environment where everything is taking place. Why does this matter? Because a message can be changed by the environment it functions in. The figure, or message, can be altered by the medium that presents and delivers it. So much so, according to McLuhan, that the medium itself becomes the message or the figure, that is, the thing that reveals unnoticed wonders when we focus our attention on it.

McLuhan famously used the 1960 presidential debate between Kennedy and Nixon, as an example demonstrating the power of media (the plural form of medium) to alter the content of a message. In a survey of those who had either watched the debate on television or those who had listened to it on radio, it was found that the TV viewers generally thought Kennedy had won the day, while the opposite opinion was held by those who heard it on radio.

Let’s apply this framework to a few other things. How about politics. I would argue that the best rarely enter politics because entry into the environment of politics necessitates dishonesty and compromise of moral principles. The best we can hope for is that some good-hearted politician will lie and compromise moral principles in the most moral way possible. The realm of politics, the power it holds over any individual of purest intention, is like an all-consuming and utterly all-absorbing and impossibly irresistible force of will. No man or woman with a tightly calibrated moral compass could ever survive navigation of such treacherous waters. So they lie a little and compromise principles a little more to avoid the rocks and whirlpools. And, as McLuhan would put it, due to the environmental pressures that resonate throughout the political realm, they transform into something different.

We shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us.

On the internet there is a mixed up overlapping confusion of sub-cultures and communities which all generate their own mini-environments. The X discourse is one dominated by so-called “internet influencers,” who go by other sub-category titles, like “conservative influencers,” or “classical liberal influencers.” Some of the people who are associated with these “influencer” titles may themselves reject the association. However, in all cases those who I am referring to are internet content creators who have built up substantial audiences. (Yes, this is fundamentally no different then what I do. However, my audience is smaller and I’m less influential, and I’ll fight the man who doubts my principles).

There are many complex pressures exerted on these influencers which arise from overlapping media environments, however the common pressure that they all are exposed to is “audience capture.” This is the pressure they feel to continue producing the type of content that their analytical web tools report back gains them the most views, subscribers, and financial rewards. One red flag that could possibly alert us to a grifter who is creating nonsense to please his audience, at least when it comes to intellectual topics like history and political analysis, is when they go beyond just coining terms, but generate an entirely unique analysis with massive layers of “ground-breaking” thinking that somehow past generations and schools of scholars were not able to put together. In other words, for the most part, they function outside of scholarly circles.

The ones who are best at passing this type of thing off as legitimate are smart enough to inject loads of truth, good sense and philosophically sound reasoning into their analysis. In fact their arguments may even be mostly sound and true, however grift occurs at the moment the thinker departs from the reasoned methods he initially employed. I would wager a guess that audience capture plays some role in why a sound and principled thinker would choose to go down that road where so many gadflies and grifters have gone before, sowing confusion and division everywhere they go.

My last piece discussed James Lindsay and his nonsensical term “woke right.” The argument continues, although on X I am barely engaged in it. The world of internet influencers, even though I do somewhat pay attention to it, is nevertheless exhausting at best, and insufferably annoying at worst. I must reiterate that I do admire much of Lindsay’s work – both his earlier work, and even much of what he still produces. However, I find it annoying that in his posture as a serious (even academic) thinker, he argues on X like a petulant child who in broken record fashion bangs on and on about how his definition of “Woke” and “Woke Right,” are just correct, and anyone who doesn’t agree is just incorrect.

According to Lindsay, Woke means having a critical consciousness. That’s it. Nothing more: a critical consciousness. Of course that is completely inadequate and grossly reductive. Woke has several attributes and cannot be reduced to the possession of an undifferentiated critical consciousness. As Eric Kaufmann points out, Woke involves the sacralization of those deemed historically marginalized. And, woke is not tribalistic, as so many internet influencers are prone to assume, it is moralistic. That is why so many sound thinkers have compared the woke movement to religion. See my last post where I include a complete X post thread by Kaufmann who lays out exactly why there is no woke right.

In the comments section of the previous post mentioned, a Woke Watch Canada reader correctly pointed out that this entire topic is nerdy. For this I apologize. However, this particular topic (the argument over what is woke, and whether or not there is a woke right) has broader implications than may first appear. So I’m going to make this a series of short pieces under the heading “The Hill’s I’m Dying On.” Notice that hills is indeed plural. There are a few of them, and they are all connected.

I will expand on this in the next essay of this little series, but for a brief summary of what to expect: It is my contention that so-called “classical liberal influencers” are using liberalism to forward the idea that tribalism is inherently bad, however, they almost exclusively frame it this way in reference to white people.

How does one get the tribalism out of people? Wouldn’t that require social engineering? Isn’t that bad? Couldn’t it maybe lead to totalitarianism? I would not be surprised if many readers of this newsletter also associate tribalism with badness, after all the Nazis were tribal. But since the readers here are so intelligent and open-minded I am sure they will read my next piece where I will give my take on tribalism (and white identitarianism). Just like race, where I have written before that it is not an inherently evil concept, but a neutral one, tribalism can also be seen as something free of any stigmas self-claiming classical liberal internet influencers are attempting to attach to it. I’ll leave you with what I feel is an important question concerning this matter: when in the history of humans have we not been tribal?

---

Thanks for reading. For more on this author, read “Free John” :Daniel Tate and the cover up of Canada's founding father

Follow Woke Watch Canada on X - @WokeWatchCanada

Or, by contributing to our Donor Box: