Online as Underground
Every Twitter user is a neuron in the mind of the Underground Man, and together we're trapped in his mire of doubt. How do we free ourselves?
This is a long one, so first, here’s an overview:
First, I sketch a portrait of the mind of the Underground Man, the protagonist/narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.
Then, I argue that Twitter – the primary locus of public discourse today – is the mind of the Underground Man. Each member of the Twitter intelligentsia is a neuron, together forming a collective governed by the dynamics of the underground.
Finally, I speculate about how we might escape the mire of negation.
“Inside the church, we stood in a compact group just by the door, in the last place, so that we only heard the vociferous deacon and occasionally, through the crowd, glimpsed the priest’s black vestment and bald spot. I remembered how, in my childhood, standing in the church, I sometimes looked at the simple folk thickly crowding by the entrance and obsequiously parting before a pair of thick epaulettes, before a fat squire or a spruced-up but extremely pious lady, who unfailingly went to the first places and were ready every moment to fight for them. There, by the entrance, it seemed to me then, they were not praying as we were, they were praying humbly, zealously, bowing to the ground, and with a full awareness of their own lowliness.
Now I, too, had to stand in that same place, and not even in that same place; we were shackled and disgraced; everybody shunned us, everybody seemed even to fear us, we were given alms each time, and, I remember, I was somehow even pleased by that, some sort of refined, peculiar sensation told itself in that strange satisfaction. ‘If so, let it be so!’ I thought.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from a Dead House
Underground. You’ve just been slapped out of the blue. On a whim your offender opted to poke you, as a child does a hornet’s nest, just to see what would happen. Except the child fears the hornet’s nest and pokes it partly for the thrill. Your offender does not fear you, is not expecting a thrill, does not envision sprinting away from a swarm of angry stingers. No, this slap was a less-than-half-hearted attempt to escape boredom.
An ordinary person might stand up for himself, strike back at his attacker, at least attempt to salvage some dignity. But you are no ordinary person. You are Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, a man of heightened consciousness. So instead of acting upon the impulse to strike back, you experience the impulse as an object of consciousness upon which your thoughts – and only your thoughts – begin to act at once. In this sense your offender has stirred up a cloud of hornets, but they buzz only through your mind. Outwardly, you’re motionless. So, as an added humiliation, your offender walks off, deciding you aren’t even good for cheap entertainment.
What could there possibly be to think about in all this? To most people, not much – retaliation to an unjustified slap is clearly justified. In fact, it’s more than justified, it’s just. Simple justice demands that your offender suffer some consequence, that your honor be restored. But to you there’s nothing simple about justice. A million questions need answered before you can adjudicate the case. First and foremost: did your offender slap you “in accordance with the laws of nature,” or was the slap a product of his own free will? Of course, this first question leads to a lifetime of others, and suddenly you’ve wasted forty years trying in vain to decide if free will is an illusion, when what you started with was a slap in the face. Meanwhile, your offender has lost all recollection of your existence – an existence, of which, unfortunately, this episode is but one small representative sample, because:
“The direct, lawful, immediate fruit of consciousness is inertia – that is, a conscious sitting with folded arms… For in order to begin to act, one must first be completely at ease, so that no more doubts remain. Well, and how am I, for example, to set myself at ease? Where are the primary causes on which I can rest, where are my bases? Where am I going to get them? I exercise thinking, and, consequently, for me every primary cause immediately drags with it yet another, still more primary one, and so on ad infinitum. Such is precisely the essence of all consciousness and thought. So, once again it’s the laws of nature. And what, finally, is the result? The same old thing.”
And the same old thing, of course, is you sitting there, pitifully, with folded arms. Held hostage by a never-ending onslaught of doubt-inducing thoughts, you – the Underground Man – have never been able to take any form of decisive action:
“Not just wicked, no, I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent man of the nineteenth century must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character, an active figure – primarily a limited being.”
But what does the fact that you live in the nineteenth century have to do with anything? Richard Pevear offers some insight in the introduction to his translation of Dostoevsky’s Demons:
“The demons, then, are ideas, that legion of isms that came to Russia from the West: idealism, rationalism, empiricism, materialism, utilitarianism, positivism, socialism, anarchism, nihilism, and, underlying them all, atheism. To which the Slavophils opposed their notions of the Russian earth, the Russian God, the Russian Christ, the “light from the East,” and so on.”
You’re well-read. You were raised on Slavophilic notions, but for the better part of two decades now, you’ve spent most of your spare time tucked away in your little hole, poring over any books you could get your hands on. And, coming of age in Russia in the 1840s, many of those books have been filled with various isms imported from the West. The reason you started exploring these isms is because you’re a man of elevated consciousness who’s inundated by negative thoughts. You were still young when you became acutely aware of all the limitations of Slavophilic notions. So, you started seeking fulfillment elsewhere.
But for every new ism you explored, the end result was the same: before long, you couldn’t ignore the limitations. So many “systems elaborated by lovers of mankind for the happiness of mankind,” each system with its own blueprint for a “crystal palace” – umpteen different visions of utopia in which, having discovered the natural laws governing human behavior, mankind has re-organized itself in accordance with those laws, finally attaining the heights of human flourishing – each with a legion of limitations. By now, you’re angry because a crystal palace, “at which it is possible not to put out one’s tongue, has never yet been found.”
This cycle of exploring new systems only to be disappointed by them has led you to question the entire enterprise of elaborating systems for the happiness of mankind. You have a few observations that you place at the feet of all the system-builders, those who seek to re-organize society in accordance with the dictates of reason, those who believe that if only man were “to be enlightened, were his eyes to be opened to his real, normal interests, man would immediately stop doing dirty, would immediately become good and noble.” Of course, you’re deliberately exaggerating here; none of the system builders are really that naïve. Still, they have grand schemes for the improvement of society, and against those schemes you pit, above all else, man’s petty desire to act as he pleases:
“I, for example, would not be the least bit surprised if suddenly, out of the blue, amid the universal future reasonableness, some gentleman of ignoble, or better, of retrograde and jeering physiognomy, should emerge, set his arms akimbo, and say to us all: ‘well, gentleman, why don’t we reduce all this reasonableness to dust with one good kick, for the sole purpose of sending all these logarithms to the devil and living once more in accordance with our own stupid will!’ That would still be nothing, but what is offensive is that he’d be sure to find followers: that’s how man is arranged. And all this for the emptiest of reasons, which would seem not even worth mentioning: namely, that man, whoever he might be, has always and everywhere liked to act as he wants, and not at all as reason and profit dictate.”
And so, here you are, sitting with folded arms, discontented with the Slavophilic status quo but contemptuous of all alternatives. Your contempt is rooted in the observation that reason “is a fine thing,” but:
“reason is only reason and satisfies only man’s reasoning capacity, while wanting is a manifestation of the whole of life… including reason and various little itches… I, for example, quite naturally want to live so as to satisfy my whole capacity for living, and not so as to satisfy just my reasoning capacity alone, which is some twentieth part of my whole capacity.”
You’ve lived your life in accordance with this observation. For instance:
“I’m told that the Petersburg climate is beginning to do me harm, and that with my negligible means life in Petersburg is very expensive. I know all that, I know it better than all these experienced and most wise counsellors and waggers of heads. But I am staying in Petersburg; I will not leave Petersburg! I will not leave because…. Eh! But it’s all completely the same whether I leave or not.”
Seemingly against your own profit you refuse to leave Petersburg. Later on, you observe that “it was always my heart that somehow kept mucking things up!” And you note in passing that you once wished to appear as a hero. And despite all your ostensible hopelessness, there’s something that compels you to write your little novella: “eh, I’ve poured all that out, and what have I explained? … But I will explain myself! I will carry through to the end! That is why I took a pen in my hands…”
You’ve taken a pen in your hands because you love your home. You see it suffering. To a vain man like yourself, such suffering appears as a cry for heroism. But you see right through every effort at heroic action, including your own. You stick your tongue out at all the would-be crystal palaces “not because [you] have such a love of putting out [your] tongue,” rather, you have a love for the land upon which the palace is to be built, and you believe palace-building will do it more harm than good.
To have a heart full of love and an elevated consciousness is to be a tortured soul. “Is it possible to be perfectly candid with oneself and not be afraid of the whole truth?” So far, the answer is no, because in your candidness you see suffering all around you and grand schemes for reform that promise only more suffering:
“The final end, gentleman: better to do nothing! Better conscious inertia! And so, long live the underground!”
Lucky for you, it’s not all bad down here. You do have one form of relief from all this torture. And it waits for you in the most unexpected of places:
“It is precisely in this cold, loathsome half-despair, half-belief, in this conscious burying oneself alive from grief for forty years in the underground, in this assiduously produced and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness of one’s position, in all this poison of unsatisfied desires penetrating inward, in all this fever of hesitations, of decisions taken forever, and repentances coming again a moment later, that the very sap of that strange pleasure I was talking about consists… the pleasure here lay precisely in the too vivid consciousness of one’s own humiliation; in feeling that one had reached the ultimate wall, that, bad as it is, it cannot be otherwise, that there is no way out for you, that you will never change into a different person; that even if you had enough time and faith left to change yourself into something different, you probably would not wish to change; and even if you did wish it, you still would not do anything, because in fact there is perhaps nothing to change into.”
The pleasure here comes from an alleviation of moral strife. You’re tortured by an unsatisfied desire to be a hero. You think your country in need of saving, you want to be the savior, yet you see no viable means to that end. Still, your heart won’t let you abandon your country – you won’t leave Petersburg – so you just gnaw at yourself endlessly. It’s only in the absolute depths of your despair, e.g., after you’ve been utterly humiliated with a slap to the face, that you can, for a moment, put an end to your incessant gnawing. Because in those depths, you can finally clasp onto something certain: you are, simply, nothing. You are no one. It’s okay to put the books down, stop trying to diagnose society’s ills, stop trying to devise a cure. Look at yourself, you’re incapable of all that. You can rest now.
Unfortunately, the relief is temporary:
“Oh, if only I were doing nothing out of laziness. Lord, how I’d respect myself then. Respect myself because I’d at least be capable of having laziness in me. There would be in me at least one, as it were, positive quality, which I myself could be sure of. Question: who is he? Answer: a lazybones.”
Laziness, even if it’s not an admirable way of being, at least is something. In moments of the utmost humiliation, you can almost clasp onto an answer to the question “who are you?” The answer is “nothing,” and that answer is the source of your strange pleasure. But the pleasure is fleeting, because while “nothing” sort of sounds like an answer, it’s not – it’s nothing. To be a lazybones is to have a patch of dry land in a sea of doubt; you can’t put your toes in the sand of nothingness because, by definition, the sand doesn’t exist. And, in any case, you don’t even really believe that you’re nothing. You describe your hopelessness as “assiduously produced and yet somewhat dubious” – you’ve crafted this hopelessness, you’ve plunged yourself to these depths, and you know, in your heart, that you’re not really stuck here.
And so you renounce what you said before (long live the underground!):
“Eh, but here, too, I’m lying! Lying because I myself know, like two times two, that it is not at all the underground that is better, but something different, completely different, which I thirst for but cannot ever find! Devil take the underground!”
You know all too well that “man is predominantly a creating animal… doomed… to eternally and ceaselessly make a road for himself that at least goes somewhere or other.” You can’t stay put, but you don’t know where to go, so you can’t even begin to consider making a road for yourself. You’re left to sit, arms folded, gnashing your teeth, “frightening sparrows in vain.”
Online. As pleasant a place as the Underground Man’s mind is, I didn’t spend all this time there for the sheer enjoyment of it. I did so because I think understanding his mire can help us understand our own. And our mire, of course, is Twitter – or social media more broadly, but I’ll be focusing on Twitter here because that’s where the intelligentsia, those who fancy themselves drivers of public discourse, spends most of its time. In fact, I think that if you understand the Underground Man’s mind, you understand Twitter. Twitter is his mind.
Others have made the argument that the Underground Man seems rather like a modern internet troll:
But this undersells the Underground Man and oversells the run-of-the-mill troll. The Underground Man, troll-like as he is, actually does possess a rare intelligence. Few, if any, among us are his intellectual equal. Sure, using Twitter does make us more like him – but that’s because by logging onto Twitter, we become a neuron in his mind, and the spaces we inhabit influence our psychology; it’s not because we suddenly become him.
Let’s start here:
Of course, the idiots most in need of blocking are those who respond negatively to our tweets. Every tweet is sent out into an effectively infinite ocean of idiots, such that even the most unobjectionable thought imaginable turns out to be… well, objectionable:
And in this sense every tweet is like an idea that enters the mind of the Underground Man, for whom “every primary cause immediately drags with it yet another, still more primary one, and so on ad infinitum.” The Underground Man wouldn’t even be able to set himself at ease with the thought “I love mangoes” because his own mind would seize upon the thought just as Twitter seized upon the tweet.
And this is why I say that none of us is the Underground Man — because while he could be an excellent Twitter troll, he would never even manage to become that. He’d have an extensive library of unsent tweets, but he’d never work up the courage to send them out into the world. We, on the other hand, being of less elevated consciousness than he, can send our tweets. And more, we can craft entire online personas for ourselves.
He can’t even become an insect, but we can become generals on the frontlines of The Discourse — Alec Karakatsanis fighting for equality, Kmele Foster fighting for liberty, Matthew Yglesias fighting for progressive liberalism, Jonah Goldberg fighting for conservative liberalism, Patrick Deneen fighting for a post-liberal conservatism, Chris Rufo fighting against critical race theory, Ibram X. Kendi fighting against racism, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, and Andrew Sullivan fighting for civil freedoms, Nathan Robinson, Brianna Joy-Gray, and Virgil Texas fighting for democratic socialism, Nicole Hannah-Jones fighting for racial equity and Bronze Age Pervert fighting for an anti-egalitarian paleoconservatism.
If, in the nineteenth century, the Underground Man’s mind was swarming with a legion of “isms,” in the twenty-first century, Twitter is swarming with a multitude of legions. The Underground Man lived under the despotic rule of a czar that derived authority from the tenets of Russian Orthodox Christianity, those tenets being under vicious attack by intellectual elites; we live under the decadent governance of a sprawling liberal bureaucracy that derives its legitimacy from the tenets of classical liberalism, those tenets similarly being under vicious attack by the Twitter intelligentsia. The Underground Man had little love for the Slavophilic status quo, but he also couldn’t bring himself to love any alternatives; Twitter has little love for the liberal status quo, but the “endless multitude of idiots” won’t allow anything to take its place.
So, for all our furious tweeting, we don’t end up actually accomplishing much of anything. Twitter, as a collective, sits like Dostoevsky’s protagonist, arms folded, gnawing at itself. And, at least on occasion, we’re all conscious of this. When the Underground Man wonders “if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble — that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void,” he’s anticipating this tweet by about 150 years:
In that tweet we hear echoes of the strange pleasure that the Underground Man feels at the depths of his despair: it’s comforting to think that any tweet you could possibly send will be sent in vain; this alleviates the burden of moral strife. But, as with his strange pleasure, the comfort is fleeting. We don’t really believe it’s hopeless or we wouldn’t keep tweeting. And even if we did believe it was hopeless, we still wouldn’t leave, for the same reason that the Underground Man won’t leave St. Petersburg:
And yet, just when we’ve yelled out “long live the underground!” we remember that, actually, we’re down here precisely because we want something completely different:
It’s easy enough to picture the Underground Man mocking those who were once true believers in the “internet’s initial promise” — this meme might as well be a thought flashing through his mind:
This is a lighter take on the Underground Man’s central contention: when you expect man to be cooperative, to see that going along with your scheme is in his best interest, just then he’ll turn around and do something entirely unexpected, for the hell of it, simply because he wishes to do as he pleases, and not as reason dictates. The Underground Man imagines man’s act of defiance to be wicked and destructive, but sometimes it’s simply… bizarre — like, a-thousand-T-Rexes-battling-80,000-chickens-bizarre.
Mankind’s system-shattering absurdity is what Twitter, and the internet more broadly, force upon any with eyes to see. That, I think, is another reason why we can’t escape its gravitational pull even in the moments when we feel its toxicity most intensely: there’s something comforting about the thought that meaningful social change is impossible. Even when we’re not inundated by a seemingly unstoppable tide of negative energy, we’re still overwhelmed by the chaos of the whole spectacle:
And there’s a strange sort of comfort in watching all this chaos on your phone screen, in the thought that any effort to impose order upon it would be in vain, in the conclusion that, really, all that’s to be done is to keep on babbling:
I think this comfort has something to do with why we all love Andrew Callaghan’s video journalism so much (All Gas No Brakes, Channel 5). But Callaghan’s work has more to offer us than a soothing sort of paralysis.
Escape. We’re mired in a spiritual-technological muck with roots stretching back even before the nineteenth century. It should go without saying that we can’t just “escape.” But it should also go without saying that we have options other than sitting, arms folded, sending babble into the Twitter-sphere.
First, some options I don’t think are viable — precisely because they aren’t reconciled with the dynamics of the underground. Let’s take Alec Karakatsanis, a staunch leftist, on the one hand, and Patrick Deneen, a member of the post-liberal right, on the other. They’re pursuing radically different agendas, but their tactics are flawed in similar ways.
Karakatsanis, considers a tweet thread “inspired by the gap in what mainstream media treats as urgent and what are the greatest threats to human safety, wellbeing, and survival” to be among the most important he’s ever written. In the thread, he hones in on two main examples of this gap in coverage — the gap between air pollution crimes and the crimes “publicized by police press releases,” and the gap between retail theft and wage theft:
He writes that “viewed in terms of absolute property value and objective harm,” the corporate media’s obsession with retail theft looks absurd. Karakatsanis places the blame at the feet of the mainstream media, arguing that they should spend their time reporting on what causes the most harm. But I think the Underground Man would mock him for that, because it assumes that audiences would want to tune in to hear about those things. I’m not so sure they would.
It doesn’t matter what reason dictates we should be most concerned about. Fear isn’t rational, and fear is what drives the news cycle. No matter how much havoc is wreaked by air pollution, it’s more or less an invisible menace. Climate change advocates are all too familiar with humans’ limited capacity to fear something they cannot see. What we can see, however, is someone loading up garbage bags in the aisle at Walgreens:
A news cycle that plays this video on repeat is likely to be much more profitable than a news cycle focused on air pollution. That will be true whether or not air pollution is actually more harmful, and it will probably still be true even if you tell everyone in the entire world about how harmful air pollution is. And the same logic can be applied to corporate wage theft versus gun violence, which has been dominating news cycles of late. No matter how much more harm is objectively caused by some guy in a suit changing numbers in a spreadsheet to divert wealth from employee paychecks into corporate pockets, there’s just something about the sound of a gun shot, the sight of blood on the sidewalk, the cop lights and caution tape… people care more about murder than they do about wage theft. I’m not sure that fact would change even if Karakatsanis had his way and corporate media talked exclusively about wage theft for the next 25 years. People would go somewhere else to hear about murder.
I’ll spend less time on Deneen because I’ve already written extensively about his common good conservativism, and the way it overlooks the often-absurd desires of actual common people, here. To take one example, though, he’s written about how the “life of prayer” is central to human flourishing. American liberalism undermines the life of prayer by letting greedy industries run amok: proper prayer is only possible given certain “conditions of silence, solitude and rule,” but those conditions are disrupted by, e.g., “big porn” and a music industry that churns out only “noise.”
My suggestion is that, before Deneen tries to take porn and modern music away from the American people, he watch this Andrew Callaghan video, in which one gets the impression that many Americans feel more at home looking at porn posters in the parking lot of a Phish concert than they do listening to a preacher from the pew of a chapel:
The point here is that both Karakatsanis and Deneen have in mind radical changes that they would impose upon the American people for the benefit of the American people (systems elaborated by lovers of mankind for the benefit of mankind). Karakatsanis would take away the media cycles that many Americans know and want; in its place he would substitute something new that they should want. Then, once he’s converted them, he could begin the work of eliminating air pollution and taking on corporate wage thieves. Deneen would take away the music and the porn that many Americans want, and he would replace them with silence and solitude. Then, he could begin the work of building the Catholic faith and ordering society in accordance with its dictates.
Differences aside, their visions share at least one underlying (if subconscious) assumption — namely, that they know what’s best for mankind, and if only they can get mankind to see what’s really best for it, then mankind will fall in line. I, like the Underground Man, find this assumption naïve and delusional. No Twitter thread or Substack post, no matter how masterfully crafted, will amount to anything in the service of some grand scheme to impose order upon a fallen world.
And yet I do think it’s possible to improve the world, and I do think Twitter threads and Substack posts can be useful toward that end. But a viable path forward has to be tailored to the dynamics of the underground. And here’s where Andrew Callaghan comes into play.
Let’s return to the question that the Underground Man poses at the end of the novella’s first section: “is it possible to be perfectly candid with oneself and not be afraid of the whole truth?” The Underground Man has no choice but to be perfectly candid with himself; he suffers from an excess of consciousness, so willful blindness isn’t an option. From this I pull a lesson for all would-be world improvers operating in the twenty-first century: strive with all your might to be perfectly candid with yourself about as much of the “whole truth” as you can manage to see. Even the slightest bit of naivety or willful blindness is blood in the water for the “legions of idiots” to come crawling out from obscure corners of the internet and make a fool of you.
Andrew Callaghan is a living embodiment of this lesson. Most famously, he documents the strangest corners of America’s weird underworlds, putting the microphone in front of people and letting them say/do what they will. There’s no effort to impose order here and there’s no looking away from the uglier parts. Perfect candidness. And when he charts more politically charged territory, he takes the same approach: whether it’s a Q-Anon conference or a Black Lives Matter protest in the streets of Minneapolis, Callaghan lets the people speak their mind and keeps the camera rolling.
So he sees the whole truth, but is he afraid of it? Here’s an excerpt from an interview in which he offers some insight:
Interviewer: “Is there anything that gives you hope?”
Andrew: “…No.”
Interviewer: *laughs, pauses* … “just flat out no?”
Andrew: *nods*
Interviewer: “haha, uhhh… okay……… wow. So, where do you think things go from here?”
Andrew: “I don’t know, man… but I’ll be there.”
He not only sees the whole truth, he runs toward it, even when he sees nothing hopeful in it. “I don’t know, man… but I’ll be there” is Callaghan’s mantra. It’s a perfect encapsulation of a central lesson offered by the Underground Man, and I’m going to start calling it the Callaghan Ethic.
A path forward begins with the Callaghan Ethic, but obviously the ethic itself doesn’t actually get us anywhere. It’s an ethic of attention, not action. Moving from attention to action is the harder part, given that the underground is dominated most of all by an all-consuming, paralysis-inducing doubt: “in order to begin to act, one must first be completely at ease, so that no more doubts remain.”
Alright, so “completely at ease” is an unrealistic goal. Twitter isn’t even completely at ease with “I love mangoes.” But perhaps “mostly at ease” is a reasonable substitute. To be mostly at ease is to have relatively few doubts. So to begin with, we should take the actions that it’s least possible to doubt — things that, for the most part, are so self-evidently good that they’re genuinely difficult for the legions of idiots to attack.
Scale is important. The bigger and more complicated the project, the more there is to question. Revamping the entire mainstream media news cycle or taking on the porn and music industries are massive, civilization-altering projects. There are many moving parts, many unknowns, many points of entry for internet trolls.
A solution tailored to the dynamics of the underground is going to be a self-evidently good, small-but-positive change — preferably something local, so that you’re going out into your own community, in real life, and doing some small good deed. But not all local problems are fit for such solutions, and the Philadelphia intelligentsia is starting to figure this out:
Pretty hard (not impossible, but pretty hard) to object to fixing a pothole. Most Philadelphians are focused on the homicide crisis, and rightfully so. But, being such a complicated problem, it’s difficult to take decisive action on violence reduction when the public is beyond jaded about the city’s incompetence, when public opinion is deeply divided, and when public discourse is governed by the dynamics of the underground. If you’re unable to rally the public behind a coherent plan for violence reduction, maybe you can at least start to dig yourself out of the hole, restore some credibility, and get some momentum going in the right direction by fixing a pothole. And there’s our second mantra: the underground demands that we (1) adhere to the Callaghan Ethic and (2) start with fixing a pothole.
The public has an intense thirst for something positive (for something different, devil take the underground!), no matter how small or unsexy, as evidenced by Terrill Haigler’s rise to local fame under the alias Ya Fav Trashman. For the most part, he doesn’t call for the imposition of grand, sweeping programs. He just shines a light on how filthy Philadelphia is, organizes voluntary cleanup events, gets great turn out, hauls a lot of litter off the streets, and makes sure everyone has a good time doing it. The only serious critique people make is that his efforts don’t make all that much of a difference — but the difference they do make is self-evidently good. Once this block was buried in garbage, now it’s not. It’s not much, given that Philadelphia is the dirtiest big city in America, but it’s something, and it’s building momentum in the right direction. Who knows where it could lead. And who knows what other local problems could be taken on in similar ways by local activists following Haigler’s lead.
Finally, it’s worth noting that this local, hands-on approach literally forces people to leave the underground, if only for a moment. You can organize an event on Twitter, but when it comes time to fix the pothole, you can’t do it through a screen.
Don’t worry, you don’t need to leave Twitter — please don’t, it’s a powerful tool — nor do you need to concern yourself with getting others to use it more productively. Keep right on listening to them babble, and pay careful attention to what they’re saying. But unfold your arms, stop gnashing your teeth, reconcile yourself with whatever doubts you cannot shake, pick a pothole, and start fixing. We’ve got roads to make, and somewhere or other to get.