Tom Scocca - Part 1 lyrics

Last month, Isaac Fitzgerald, the newly hired editor of BuzzFeed's newly created books section, made a remarkable but not entirely surprising announcement: He was not interested in publishing negative book reviews. In place of "the scathing takedown rip," Fitzgerald said, he desired to promote a positive community experience. A community, even one dedicated to positivity, needs an enemy to define itself against. BuzzFeed's motto, the attitude that drives its success, is an explicit "No haters." The site is one of the leading voices of the moment, thriving in the online sharing economy, in which agreeability is popularity, and popularity is value. (Upworthy, the next iteration, has gone ahead and made its name out of the premise.) There is more at work here than mere good feelings. "No haters" is a sentiment older and more wide-reaching than BuzzFeed. There is a consensus, or something that has a**umed the tone of a consensus, that we are living, to our disadvantage, in an age of snark—that the problem of our times is a thing called "snark." The word, as used now, is a fairly recent addition to the language, and it is not always entirely clear what "snark" may be. But it's an attitude, and a negative attitude—a "hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt," is how Heidi Julavits described it in 2003, while formally bestowing the name of "snark" on it, in the inaugural issue of The Believer. In her essay, Julavits was grappling with the question of negative book reviewing: Was it fair or necessary? Was the meanness displayed in book reviews a symptom of deeper failings in the culture? The decade that followed did little to clear up the trouble; if anything, the identification of "snark" gave people a way to avoid thinking very hard about it. Snark is supposed to be self-evidently and self-explanatorily bad: "nasty," "low," and "snide," to pick a few words from the first page of David Denby's 2009 tract Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation. (I bought the Denby book used for six bucks, to cut him out of the loop on any royalties.) But why are nastiness and snideness taken to be features of our age? One general point of agreement, in denunciations of snark, is that snark is reactive. It is a kind of response. Yet to what is it responding? Of what is it contemptuous? Stand against snark, and you are standing with everything decent. And who doesn't want to be decent? The snarkers don't, it seems. Or at least they (let's be honest: we) don't want to be decent on those terms. Over time, it has become clear that anti-negativity is a worldview of its own, a particular mode of thinking and argument, no matter how evasively or vapidly it chooses to express itself. For a guiding principle of 21st century literary criticism, BuzzFeed's Fitzgerald turned to the moral and intellectual teachings of Walt Disney, in the movie Bambi: "If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all." The line is uttered by Thumper, Bambi's young bunny companion, but its attribution is more complicated than that—Thumper's mother is making him recite a rule handed down by his father, by way of admonishing her son for unkindness. It is scolding, couched as an appeal to goodness, in the name of an absent authority. The same maxim—minus the Disney citation and tidied up to "anything at all"—was offered by an organization called PRConsulting Group recently, in support of its announcement that the third Tuesday in October would be "Snark-Free Day." "[I]f we can put the snark away for just one day," the publicists wrote, "we can all be happier and more productive." Is a world where public-relations professionals are more productive a more productive world overall? Are the goals of the public-relations profession the goals of the world in general? Perhaps they are. Why does a publicist talk like a book reviewer? If you listen to the crusaders against negativity—in literature, in journalism, in politics, in commerce—you begin to hear a recurring set of themes and attitudes, amounting to an omnipresent, unnamed cultural force. The words flung outward start to define a sort of unarticulated philosophy, one that has largely avoided being recognized and defined. Without identifying and comprehending what they have in common, we have a dangerously incomplete understanding of the conditions we are living under. Over the past year or two, on the way to writing this essay, I've accumulated dozens of emails and IM conversations from friends and colleagues. They send links to articles, essays, Tumblr posts, online comments, tweets—the shared attitude transcending any platform or format or subject matter. What is this defining feature of our times? What is snark reacting to? It is reacting to smarm.