One thing I realized very early on is that when you become even a very minor internet celebrity, as I surely am, there is essentially another you that

Here Are My Actual Dumb Opinions - Freddie deBoer

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2022-07-04 22:30:08

One thing I realized very early on is that when you become even a very minor internet celebrity, as I surely am, there is essentially another you that lives in the collective minds of others and which has very little to do with you yourself. It’s… strange to experience, although honestly sometimes it helps because you can more easily distance yourself from the nastier criticism. But you always have to remember that there’s some little imago of you stalking around the internet, buzzing into people’s brains, that you can’t control and yet which deeply influences people’s perception of you. I don’t know, it’s Chinatown. The human brain was not meant for online life.

Sometimes this represents itself as people “remembering” very specific things I have not written. For example, there is a small cohort of people out there who appear to be convinced that I once wrote an epic takedown of the podcast Chapo Trap House. Really, a least a half-dozen times in recent years someone has sort of vaguely waved in the direction of a supposed time in the past that I really ripped into them. But I never did! I am not a big podcast guy, at all, and I haven’t heard that one in five years. I am critical of the overreliance on irony in the socialist left, and I’m someone who thinks our post-2016 trajectory in general has been really depressing. But I don’t think those things are particularly germane to Chapo Trap House and I don’t bear them any ill will. In a similar vein, people will sometimes ask me for links to things I never wrote, like “where’s that post where you crushed people who like adult coloring books?” I never wrote that. I don’t care if people do adult coloring books. It’s certainly understandable why people think I walk around hating everything all the time, given my reputation, but I’m generally a much more easygoing fellow than people think.

Look: I have monetized a certain kind of dissident left politics - I am utterly sincere and motivated by authentic passion to write about it, but I have still monetized it - and I understand that doing so has consequences for the assumptions people make about me. I am a big boy and I have made my bed and while there are many who will always prefer to shun me I have enjoyed a good deal of forgiveness after personal scandal, for which I’m quite grateful. I do, though, get a little annoyed by some of the talk of the other me. There’s just no percentage in complaining about it, usually. Someone says that I hold some reactionary position that I don’t and have never held, I object to this, and I’m then accused of acting like a victim. This happens all the time. And, look - it’s the internet, people talk all kinds of shit, and you just have to accept it.

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