Horizontal vs. Vertical
December 2, 2015 7:11 AM   Subscribe

The geometry of censorship and satire, Mark Ames
I first heard about Sergei Dorkeno’s theory on “vertical censorship vs. horizontal censorship” back in 2008, right around the time that the Kremlin shut down my satirical Moscow newspaper, “The eXile."
posted by the man of twists and turns (32 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
I can't tell if this is Ames whining that he can't say whatever he wants without other people saying their opinions at him or satirizing people whining that they can't say whatever they want without other people saying their opinions at them.
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:07 AM on December 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


' as every social media Stalinist will tell you, "satire should punch up, not down." '

as a mid-point argument in an essay that started with the idea that downward acting dictatorial vertical censorship is archetypally Russian? And that complains people aren't subtle enough, or don't look carefully at nuances and context and meaning (e.g. misunderstanding Charlie Hebdo?). This does not seem like a good logical progression or self-aware writing here.

This is either some sort of performance satire that's designed to baffle virtually all readers or, basically, another 'whiny liberal leftists don't like my jokes any more' article with a bit of a twiddle half-theory about forms of censorship as a hook & a nod to right wing trolls as 'just as bad'.
posted by AFII at 8:15 AM on December 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


Interesting to use Edward Snowden as an example of horizontal censorship - I was nervous about sharing my views on socail media rather than in person because I know the government is reading my social media because of Edward Snowden—so people's hesitancy to speak online about it vs in person seems to me to be an example of vertical censorship.
posted by joannemerriam at 8:20 AM on December 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


Sloppy sloppy. Typical self-interested hyperbole. No one likes my writing and I don't feel interesting now that I'm not a Stranger in a Strange Land, with all the prositutes I want. :'(

Fact is, Swift today would be hounded off Twitter for "promoting child cannibalism as a solution to Irish poverty"; demagogic satire-shamers would trash Swift for "punching down, not up"—because as every social media Stalinist will tell you, "satire should punch up, not down."

Uh, why would he be criticized for punching down, exactly?

One of the most revealing reactions to the Charlie Hebdo massacre came from Jon Stewart, who complained that “comedy shouldn’t be an act of courage.”

As much as I agree about stagnant/suburbanite/liberal satire, I mean... he clearly meant physical courage.

Maybe I'm just annoyed since the last thing I read by Ames was his stupid feminists-are-hypocrites-for-having-sex Dworkin eulogy. Or maybe Ames is just subconsciously offended by his own equation of naive (and often not naive) social justice defenders on Twitter with white supremecists and MRA harassers.

Mostly he's mad that he's a white man and so the most biting feminist and antiracist satire is denied to him, I guess. Again, I agree with him about the Hebdo cartoons, but... he's mad that satire he admits is stuck in 1968 is possibly racist in some fashion?

I am having a straw that broke the camel's back moment with white men in journalism, who insist that either 1) activists are doing it wrong, 2) activists are upset over nothing, or 3) activists have actually tangibly destroyed our culture by distracting everyone from the Real Issues. I have heard it 10,000 times and I'm over it.
posted by stoneandstar at 8:21 AM on December 2, 2015 [6 favorites]


Back here in the world we all must share, we call "horizontal censorship" "social norms." They've been around for a while.
posted by aaronetc at 8:25 AM on December 2, 2015 [8 favorites]


there’s even less room for The eXile’s satire, which was far more aggressive, outrageous, radical, and anarchic than anything I’ve seen since being forced to return to the US in 2008.
Author feels unappreciated; clearly society is to blame for this violence.
posted by Etrigan at 8:26 AM on December 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


I enjoy Mark Ames' writing but mainly I clicked on this to see if Pando is now paywalled as it was the last time it was on the front page of metafilter and I clicked.

Greenwald had a great article the other day on stupid groupthink:

What Foreign Policy “Debate” Means on “Face the Nation”
posted by bukvich at 8:34 AM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


I disagree with a lot of this, but found all sorts of interesting thoughts scattered through the essay.

I think failing to recognize long term historical differences is a flaw in the piece overall. For example, the author seems to think the first time communal living was ever experimented with in the US was by hippies. Also, thanks to an interest in soviet music, I've read a fair number of tangential comments on the differences between American and Soviet political humor.

I also think its interesting to consider how the Internet has made context more difficult. One of the reasons satire can be difficult in the age of the internet is that people are essentially talking at everyone. People can take things out of context and the perspective of the person speaking can be lost.

Of course, this doesn't excuse someone for being an ass.
posted by lownote at 8:34 AM on December 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


I'm trying to remember The eXile, and honestly, I can't. I know I read a piece or two from it, but I had no idea it had been shut down, let alone in 2008. I figured it had died out along with a bunch of other publications from the early 00's.

Does anyone with a better memory than I actually remember it?
posted by Hactar at 8:35 AM on December 2, 2015


Woo. Tough Crowd.

Anyway, digging under all the 'woe is me for I am not appreciated in the land of my fathers' stuff, I thought there was an interesting overlap between the meat of this essay and the talk by Veronica Belmont at XOXO that mathowie linked to a couple of weeks ago in the way that the internet will take a piece of content that you created, flatten all the original meaning and context out of it and turn it round into a soundbite / image meme / whatever that can be used as a stick to beat you with.

Defending yourself against this is enormously difficult because in a narrow sense the stuff they use is true: they really are things you said, wrote or created, but shorn of their context to the point that despite that what they say about you can be completely divorced from your original intent.

We see this over & over again on the internet, where it’s easy to tear the context of people’s words away whilst forcing the words themselves back into their mouths so that they can occupy the role of hate figure du jour for whichever internet subculture (and you can take your pick) has decided to pick on them.

Hence the death of satire, (or in Veronica’s case the idea that she is more than a shitty internet meme): context is everything & yet it’s so easy for people on the internet strip the context from the things that you do in order to turn them against you. It’s not so difficult to jump from there to a world where most people begin to self-censor in quite radical ways in the hope that their words / images can never be used against them (even though this is clearly impossible: shitty people on the internet will always be able to find something they can use against you :( )

Hactar: My memories of the Exile are predominantly of reading the War Nerd (aka Mark Ames in another guise).
posted by pharm at 8:43 AM on December 2, 2015 [9 favorites]


Even if you disapprove of Ames on moral or identitarian grounds, you have to admit that this thread so far is a pretty nifty illustration of horizontal censorship in action.
posted by Sonny Jim at 8:56 AM on December 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


the dumb scolds of twitter dot com actually got colbert canceled, and thanks to this metafilter thread, pando is now gone from the web

good job, guys

good job
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 9:05 AM on December 2, 2015 [6 favorites]


...horizontal censorship [social pressure] feels like it comes from everyone and anyone, depriving the censored of martyrdom status.

Ho ho ho. Oh my word no. No, son. Have you ever seen the internet? Claims of martyrdom for violation of social norms is second only to cat videos.
posted by Harvey Jerkwater at 9:05 AM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


> I'm trying to remember The eXile, and honestly, I can't. I know I read a piece or two from it, but I had no idea it had been shut down, let alone in 2008. I figured it had died out along with a bunch of other publications from the early 00's.

Does anyone with a better memory than I actually remember it?


Yup, The eXile was essential reading if you were interested in Russia in the '90s. Ames can be an ass, but that's true of most edgy humorists. I don't much care what he has to say about Kids Today and How They've Ruined Satire, but I loved his reportage from Moscow, so I cut him some slack.
posted by languagehat at 9:06 AM on December 2, 2015 [5 favorites]


Even if you disapprove of Ames on moral or identitarian grounds, you have to admit that this thread so far is a pretty nifty illustration of horizontal censorship in action.

If horizontal censorship is thinking a guy is a douche, well, then. Let he who has not sinned.

It is definitely nifty to decide that everyone who does not agree with you is a cultural Stalinist.
posted by stoneandstar at 9:06 AM on December 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


I don't see any censorship in action in this thread.

Does anyone here feel censored? Speak up!

There is a lot of self-censorship, both in the West and the East, and there always has been. I'm uncomfortable with some current aspects which seem to me to be unhealthy, both in the mainstream media and in academia, and in some activist areas, but twenty years ago I would have been uncomfortable about other areas. It's wise and good to talk about these, and when you can't talk about them then you're entering a dangerous area.

Some self-censorship is good, though; you're not getting the totality of my thoughts here, because I am more unkind, judgemental and haphazard in my interior life than I am in my written words among strangers and I have filters that work against the obviously arseholish parts of my nature (as far as possible!) and consign others 'for further consideration' until I've thought about things some more. And some of that self-censorship is, as mentioned, because of societal norms, which are often a mixed blessing, and if you're not trying to move things to a better place then you should be (but laziness and fear are potent narcotics).

But this is true in Moscow just as much as in Manchester. The levels of vertical censorship, however, are very different - and if anyone thinks that vertical censorship doesn't crystallise vast sheets of the horizontal stuff everywhere it pierces, I recomend watching The Lives Of Others.
posted by Devonian at 9:11 AM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


the War Nerd (aka Mark Ames in another guise)

The War Nerd is another guy (John Dolan), which I mostly know because now he and Ames do a podcast where Ames has a hard time keeping up and kind of comes off like a clueless dipshit. Lord knows the War Nerd has his weaknesses, but he at least presents a perspective that's relatively hard to find in English-language media, and that's what I listen to the podcast for, not Mark Ames being Mark Ames.
posted by Copronymus at 9:18 AM on December 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


I'm trying to remember The eXile, and honestly, I can't. I know I read a piece or two from it, but I had no idea it had been shut down, let alone in 2008.

This. Say this enough times and Ames and the other ghosts will disappear.
posted by grobstein at 9:18 AM on December 2, 2015


Even if you disapprove of Ames on moral or identitarian grounds, you have to admit that this thread so far is a pretty nifty illustration of horizontal censorship in action.

Yo, people evaluating and responding to the things you say is not censorship. It is speech.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:19 AM on December 2, 2015 [9 favorites]


That's just what an identitarian would say!
posted by nom de poop at 9:22 AM on December 2, 2015 [7 favorites]


To be clear, I wasn't calling Ames an ass. I don't think I've ever read a satire piece by him. I just think a lot of people act like asses and then try to hide behind "satire" rather than consider why people call them an ass.
posted by lownote at 9:24 AM on December 2, 2015


Fact is, Swift today would be hounded off Twitter for "promoting child cannibalism as a solution to Irish poverty"; demagogic satire-shamers would trash Swift for "punching down, not up"—because as every social media Stalinist will tell you, "satire should punch up, not down." And it's all effected without the crude, violent methods used by the Kremlin censors—we do it to ourselves, thanks to our decentralized new utopia.

This is one of those places where I start going "hmmm" and squinting like..well, like that one Futurama meme.

this flattened-out horizontalism means you don't even control your own creative mind, your historical context, your intentions, your output—everything is now in the hands of the social media's hyper-conformist crowd.

Nobody is controlling this guy's "creative mind" what is he talking about? And nobody controls their historical context. People misinterpreting/appropriating other people's stuff way predates the internet. Swift got misinterpreted in his own time, too, I believe. It's a thing that happens, and the Internet did not invent it.

I started to read the discussion here before reading TFA and I have to say, the discussion about self-censorship here is better than anything he's said over there. Which seems like he mixed some genuine concerns/insights about how your work can get misunderstood with a complete inability to understand what's going on with social media. Would a black woman on Twitter be as dismissive about Twitter's power as this white dude is? Would a woman be as surprised at the amount of crap that trolls can shovel at you and how they can misinterpret your work? Would a trans 15-year-old think that the supportive, occasionally drama-filled community they found on Tumblr was really suppressing their freedoms?

There are some good discussions to be have on how we self-censor online and why, but this piece isn't getting there.
posted by emjaybee at 9:25 AM on December 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


Copronymus: Complete brain failure on my part there. I did know that...
posted by pharm at 9:37 AM on December 2, 2015


Dude definitely comes off as a humorless (ironic, for a satirist) jerk, but to be honest, I'm not sure he's wrong. It's certainly true that social pressure is not "censorship" the way it is practiced in totalitarian regimes, but it's also true that it is extraordinarily powerful at getting people to censor themselves. Human beings depend on society to survive; in our deep history, saving face could be a matter of life or death, and in plenty of places it probably still is.

This is not to say that consensus is inherently harmful (which this piece, like a lot of internet contrarianism, seems to imply); If we all agreed not to kill each other, that would be awfully nice.
posted by zchyrs at 1:05 PM on December 2, 2015


Yeah, the annoying thing about this new trend of reactionary thinkpieces is that it's so typical, and that's exactly what marginalized people are reacting to-- the strong social control that inhibits us professionally, personally, economically, bodily. We were well aware of it before Peak Thinkpiece. I think that pieces like this are exactly the kind of elite (and white, and male) social control that usually keeps the marginalized "in line," and now we're reaching a fever pitch of frantic "b-b-but shut up, class! The economy! White guys are victims of your joylessness!" because the tide of social control is changing and white men can no longer simply disapprove of something and have it swept away from their sight. White male liberals can't be sneaky about their argument-disarming dogwhistles anymore. Bernie Sanders fans are acting like GamerGaters online and it's showing. Occupy Wall Street went nowhere.

No one wants to see ignorance ruling the day, but it's not like that never happened pre-internet. Personally, I don't think it's as endemic to social-media-flattening as people think it is. Things have always been taken out of context and misrepresented to hurt their authors. Ignorance has always been popular. Not everyone objecting to the Charlie Hebdo covers was ignorant, either. I mean, for some reason we think a white American who lived in Russia is the expert on how ironic racist charicatures aren't racist because everyone knows Europe in the 1960s was a magical time where racism was impossible.

But the point is that people who didn't have much of a voice have a strong, collective voice, now. I'm not sure if "populist social movement of marginalized people on Twitter" is much worse than "pompous collective of white men handing down truthiness from on high." Anyway, this guy hates everyone, including his best friend, but even a psychotically angry cynicist is right twice a day in mid-90s Russia.
posted by stoneandstar at 2:50 PM on December 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


If Swift wanted his work considered satire, he should've just put it on theonion.com, not pando.com.

When I was writing media stuff for "a major news site", I twice used the device of "Interview with a Fictional Character" (one with Opus the Penguin for his 2003 revival, the other with "The Banker" on "Deal Or No Deal"), and my editors loved them but did not know what to do with them. Both pieces ended up labeled "PARODY" as a disclaimer even though they were 80-90% true factual info, with the fake stuff added for flavor. Totally 'vertical' decision making, but showing just how news/media people reacted even before the current "dark age".
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:55 PM on December 2, 2015


I don't think he's talking about horizontal censorship in terms of not being able to be an ass for its own sake, but in terms of being an ass in service of a broader social goal.

Right now it feels like we like our satire carefully cordoned off and signposted, or preferably confined safely to the history like Swift, where they can be a known quantity.

I mean, people who engage in satire expect to be attacked by the institutions and people their satire is directed at: that's how they know their satire is successful.

What is new is being accused of being a servant of the very things the satirist is protesting, by people who simply don't agree with the satirist's methods. There is no step of reflection between "that's certainly not how I would have done that", and "whatever they intended, they are the enemy and I'll treat them accordingly".

Put it this way: The eXile wasn't shut down because they were secretly on the side of powerful Russians. The staff of Charlie Hebdo weren't murdered by vicious and cowardly extremists because the CH staff secretly believe that being an ignoramus who cloaks his cruelty with piety is a great thing to be. These feel like really obvious things to say.

But who is going after people who shout their grievances in American magazines? A lot of people, but mostly no-one with any power or the will to violence. And that's interesting.
posted by um at 6:37 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm not sure it's about that step of reflection being elided, necessarily. I think it's about the erosion of the power of the white (and male) voice. It's the erosion of the idea that the progressive white male liberal is always on "our" side, and we should simmer down, even if he says things which are grating or marginalizing or borderline offensive. That step of "well, that's not how I would have done that" is one white person to another.

This isn't to say only white people are capable of being calm and "rational" (i.e. detached), but it's much easier to be so when the thing you're discussing has no bearing on your lived existence.

I was actually a big fan of Ames for a long time and just kind of choked down the stupid shit he said about women all the time because I was way too involved to say, "well, naturally women are hypocrites, but that's not how I would have gone about illustrating that," but also strongly aware that to say anything about his misogynist strain of thought would just bring on charges of myopia, narcissism, small-mindedness, capitalist apologism, accusations of Puritanical Americanness (because Russian women are much better than American women, you know), etc., etc. So I just stewed silently in my frustration and tried to live in the cognitive dissonance of respecting someone's work but also knowing that they hate me by virtue of the fact that I'm not a sexy 22-year-old Russian woman. I would rather be hated for my ideas, you know?

On the whole, I agree about this weird internet mob mentality, and I agree that we're in a very odd place right now re: satire, but I'm tired of it being all about men's freedom to make fart jokes about Putin as a ~revolutionary act~ or whatever. Who cares. Maybe it was never in good taste to satirize the downtrodden? I still don't know why he thinks Swift was "punching down." There is plenty of biting satire out there-- some of it about men, some of it about white people, some of it about horrible rich monsters who are actually ruining our society. I am just not sure why a white guy drawing Obama's head on 50 Cent's body is so trenchant and worthy of getting frothy? Surely you can hate Obama and even satirize rightwing racial attitudes without rubbing salt in the wounds of the people who actually deal with racism on a daily basis.

I guess maybe it's because America has such a representation problem-- maybe with more marginalized people in positions of power that shit wouldn't be so upsetting. Maybe with less poverty and domestic violence and rape it wouldn't be so obnoxious from an overgrown teenager cruising Russia and writing about STDs, to paraphrase Taibbi.
posted by easter queen at 7:42 PM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


I should add that I get where the satire was coming from and I understand-- good satire should make everyone uncomfortable. When I'm tempted to defend Hillary Clinton, I should remember that she's done some jacked up shit, too, and even though I would like to see a fucking woman president, I have standards. But I see a lot more vociferous and colorful white, leftwing male frustration toward people who are not white, leftwing males, in general. It brings out something floridly offensive in them. It pisses me the fuck off.

And to be honest I would love to be able to see beyond stupid sexist shit happening all the time. But it's hard to see past it when it's always in your face. I would like to found a newspaper just to bitch about fucking liberal men who piss me the fuck off, but I would not get to throw sordid flesh parties for my publication, I guess, because feminists have more personal responsibility than Angry Young Men. According to Ames.
posted by easter queen at 7:46 PM on December 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


Beyond easter queen's post, I'm a little surprised there has been little explicit mention of Mark Ames's personal life and how it might contribute to his stance on "horizontal censorship":
When I went back into the TV room, Andy pulled me aside with a worried grin on his face.

“Dude do you realize…do you know how old that Natasha is?” he said.

“Sixteen?”

“No! No, she’s fif-teen. Fif-teen.” Right then my pervometer needle hit the red. I had to have her, even if she was homely (eXiled, 153).
It makes sense to feel more threatened by how the public thinks you're loathsome than by the KGB, a government agency that actually imprisoned and killed people.
posted by Ouverture at 12:04 PM on December 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


Scratch a misogynist, find an abuser, I guess. Or scratch a bitter nerd who didn't get laid during college, find an entitled asshole rapist of a man. I don't know.
posted by easter queen at 11:23 AM on December 4, 2015


I should also add that the best critiques of our current cultural landscape re: satire, trigger warnings, etc., that I have read have all come from women of color (Roxane Gay is one of them, but there are others). I don't think that's a coincidence-- women of color are capable of interrogating these issues without giving in constantly to knee-jerk fear and anger that they can't be as fucking toxic as they want while still receiving accolades. Women of color have to deal with the issues in real life and in the classroom and are capable of carrying out the considered, rational train of thought that white men would like to pretend only they are capable of (while throwing tantrums and right-wing sympathizing hissy fits like this one).

I guess that's what I'm tired of-- white men snapping and using right-wing silencing techniques on the rest of the left, because their supremacy has been threatened. It's not cute when they do it, and it's not cute when you do it.
posted by easter queen at 11:28 AM on December 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


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