"Let's nerd out!"

Words you hear before the Devil spirits you away to Hell.

Oct 20, 2020

You ever notice how emotions are broken nowadays, like the whole spectrum of human affective experience is lying in shards on the floor, waiting for someone to come along and sweep up the whole mess, thus allowing all mankind to enter a featureless non-state of affectless being? But no one ever does sweep it up? And so we’re all left surveying the remnants of our former selves, able to see ourselves only in slivers and facets reflected back to us through the various digital portals we’re now forced to access in order to reach each other, and even our own selves?

It’s a fact that you can write literally whatever you want on the internet and no one will stop you. No one will even ask you if it’s a very good idea that you’re writing what you’re writing. There are entire billion-dollar companies set up to allow you, even encourage you, to commit to digital paper whatever queasy, half-rational thoughts stagger their way from your brain to your fingertips. Sometimes they’ll try to stop you if those thoughts are, say, pro-genocide, but only sometimes. But mostly it’s just like, go for it, man. Have at.

Probably I should say something about how now there are no more gatekeepers and such, the democratization of information or what have you. Actually, you can just imagine that part of the argument, or go navigate to somewhere else that has something to say about those things. I don’t have “big thoughts” like that. Mostly I want to write about exclamation points.

This thing where everyone is constantly being encouraged to write down and transmit everything they think, it’s led to some, I won’t say “bad,” but certainly odd tics. Some of those are public tics, like prefacing your braggy tweet with some half-assed disclaimer, like, “I realize there are much bigger issues in the world, but” and then going on to explain how you’ve won some award no one has ever heard of but it makes everyone insanely envious of you anyway. Some of them are private, existing mostly in personal or professional communications. Exclamation points are a common one. When I Was A Boy we were taught to use exclamation points sparingly, if ever. Why? Blah blah Strunk & White something something, but the real reason was that it made your writing sounds like it was being blurted out by a benzedrine-addled 1940s newsie (he needs to hit his sales numbers this week, or else). Exclamation marks conveyed overexcited idiocy, they were the golden retriever puppies of punctuation marks. Serious Writers saved them for expressions of withering contempt, otherwise they didn’t use them at all. Theodor Adorno (dead German philosopher and critic) would probably have said Some Things about exclamation points.

Now exclamation points are everywhere! And we all know why! It’s so you don’t accidentally come off as sarcastic in emails! Because We All Get Too Much Email, and no one has time to write anything long enough to create tone and context, both of which would make it clear when you were actually being sarcastic and when you weren’t, rendering the exclamation point unnecessary. Sadly, if everyone wrote all their emails like that, we would all be dead, because it would take forever. There is no time for long emails because there are so many emails, such that mentioning how many emails one has to respond to elicits near-universal nods of assent. “Oh my God, yeah,” they’ll all say when you mention all the emails. It’s one of modern communication technology’s Necessary Evils. Or so I’m told. For various reasons, I don’t get a lot of emails (loser, no friends, not a “name”). But as I understand it, most people keep their emails short and full of exclamation points in order to convey a) the information they need to convey, and b) the fact that they’re not drolly telling their correspondents to go fuck themselves.

(Note: I’ve noticed this does not hold among members of older generations, many of whom are rather tight with their exclamation point usage. I believe this is because either they do not recognize the effects I’m describing or they do not live in fear of coming off as sarcastic, because they own land.)

A side effect of the exclamation point bandage on the “not wanting to come off as sarcastic” wound is that we all sound like absolute fucking maniacs all the time. The meeting has been moved from 1:30 to 1:45. “Thanks so much!” I left the keys in the top drawer. “Amazing!” Here is the new password for the Dropbox. “Beams of pure light are shooting from my every orifice at this news!” (that one still sound sarcastic). The average email chain reads like the meeting minutes from an office where everyone is undergoing a worrying manic episode at the same time.

And we all knows this. I’m not conveying new info here. We may not like spattering our rarely capitalized (no time!) electronic communications with exclamation points, but it’s not as bad as being thought of as a total jerk with terrible email etiquette. It’s just one more clause in the ever-evolving social contract none of us ever signed, where we all (I guess?) agree to take on the literary personae of over-enthused summer camp counselors in order to avoid giving offense to our peers. We all have to do it, especially those of us (hi) who maybe lean a little heavily on sarcasm irl (zero new emails, zero unread) and whose correspondents would have good reason to think that we might actually be telling them to go fuck themselves.

(I’m not a language grouch, by the way. I glory in the ever-shifting hues of verbal expression etc etc. This is The Way It Is, and I accept it, by which I mean, “I have no say in the matter,” about which more below.)

This is the part of the post where I talk about how our agreed-upon punctuational solution to the problem of accidental sarcasm is more or less emblematic of the wrenching extremes within which we now live. The choice you’re faced with when you’re desperately slamming out those telegraphic, tonally bereft emails is: Do I portray myself as a condescending jag-off or an obsequious dimwit? It’s a sorry choice to have to make, but we live in an age of sorry choices, many of which are freighted with undue symbolic weight. I wish I could say what I mean, but there is no time, so I have to whittle down the nearly nearly infinite range of expressive possibilities that human language offers us to one that risks offending and another that risks stupidity.

Of course, this egregious dichotomy is, in an important sense, not real. Most of us are not going to be tried and executed on the evidence of one 20-word email (unless it’s racist, duh). Most people understand that the emails they receive are almost always sent in haste. They’re throwaway communications defined by style rather than content. You know and I know that, whatever we do email-wise, it’ll probably be fine.

But still, you have to act as though it—the egregious dichotomy—were real. Because what if you don’t bother with the exclamation point, and, for whatever reason, the Recipient sees sarcasm where you didn’t intend any. And then the Recipient, who is a mere work acquaintance and not someone who really knows you outside of emails and work things, sears an imprint of the sarcastic email and their own feelings of offense and anger forever into the image of you they carry around in their head? So that when you’re talking to the Recipient maybe in the less explicitly work-related moments of a Zoom meeting or whatever, the whole time they’re thinking “Who does this imperious asshole think he is? And where does he get off?” (You’re a he in this scenario, obviously.) And then what if, somehow, the Recipient finds themselves in a position to affect your life in some material way in the future? What if they’re promoted and eventually ascend to become the head of the company? What if their success in business leads to a career in politics, where the Recipient also succeeds? What if the Recipient becomes the President of the United States?

Now you’ve pissed off the President of the United States.

This is a paranoid fantasy (it’s not mine, the culture speaks through me), an exaggerated worst-case scenario of the sort of anxieties that circulate around “not coming off like an asshole.” Nobody feels as if they can afford to risk misunderstanding, because who knows what the consequences will be. If you happen to offend someone, chances are they won’t become President and then use the power of the state to humiliate you, maybe by naming an embarrassing executive order after you, like “Unclogging America’s Toilets Because Of What Mark Sussman Did,” for example. But there all sorts of things that could happen, and for those of us who lack professional and financial stability, some of those things are potentially ruinous, because almost anything unexpected (loss of job, decrease in hours, medical emergency) is potentially ruinous.

The insanity of the egregious dichotomy is that it reflects the zero-sumness of precarity. You are either an asshole or a nice person, and the degree to which you perpetuate an image of yourself as the latter, it sometimes feels, will be the difference between flourishing and foundering. You are either hired or fired, and the constant yo-yoing between those two conditions will ensure you’re never quite comfortable in either. With the world seemingly completely out of control, with the prospects for individual prosperity looking increasingly bleak, with most people my age and younger living without any real safety net or meaningful savings, the possibility of giving unintended offense seems increasingly unacceptable. In a better world, I could save my exclamation points for when I really need them, establish a nest egg of treasured enthusiasms to be doled out prudently and at the appropriate time, but without anxiety. As it is, one kind of scarcity requires us to be profligate in other spheres. Your life dangles from the bottom of an exclamation point, or rather many exclamation points, as many as you can possibly produce. One must always hit their numbers, or else.

I’m not talking literally, of course. That would be crazy! Again, the egregious dichotomy is just an example. Its absurdity, and the absurd behavior it provokes, is produced by a confluence of technological innovation and social decay that’s way, way too familiar by now. Technology “advances,” it changes the way billions of people live their lives, social practices change in order to cope. One of the results is often some new kind of quasi-real affect that we all understand to be more or less fake but that has been conjured and rendered necessary in order to ward off new and potentially disastrous consequences. Sort of the way that calling your superior “sir” signifies “respect,” but respect that is, at least potentially, completely artificial. The demand is not that you feel respect for your boss or commanding officer, but that you “show respect,” that is, indicate through words and actions a “sincere feeling of respect” whose actual existence is beside the point.

The question remains: to whom and what is the sweaty exclamation point ultimately addressed? Not the person you’re emailing exactly, but the conditions that make the exclamation point necessary in the first place. Now especially, while the pandemic has many of us siloed away from each other, communication requires technology that strips away the flickers of human behavior (the momentary eye contact, the fidgeting hands) that allow us to make ourselves clear to each other. In order to become legible to each other, our attempts to make ourselves understood will increasingly be addressed to the media that supplement, delimit, and control our communications rather than the people we’re ostensibly communicating with. You’re not emailing another person, you’re emailing an entire context, one that demands that you address it.

I suppose that’s the final irony: Anxieties about “giving offense” via email are produced not by actual human relations but by the communicative medium. Knowing this changes nothing. In the event that I ever receive an email, I’ll riddle my response with so many exclamation points, you won’t know what to do with yourself. I’ll be the king of enthusiasm. The fucking king.

Since the beginning of time ...

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