(THREAD) The main problem with that @DanDrezner piece in the Post is that it's an international politics prof writing about the field in which I'm a professor—communications. No one in communications would *ever* compare the blogosphere to either Twitter or Substack. Here's why.

1/ Back in the mid-aughts, I was a Koufax Award-nominated political blogger (I don't know what Drezner was doing then; I first heard of him about a year ago). So I was into the blogosphere pretty deep, as I also ran a second high-traffic blog that was focused on the art world.
2/ The "blogosphere" was an outgrowth of MySpace and LiveJournal, inasmuch as in the heady early days of the internet people suddenly realized that they could engage in private diaristic writing—a very specific subgenre of writing—in the public square, and it was suddenly "okay."
3/ So the blogosphere as such had *nothing* to do with journalism, which needless to say was in a different state just 15 years ago (note: unlike Drezner, I also teach writing and journalism at the university level, so this thread is squarely "in my area," unlike his Post piece).
4/ The blogosphere was a manifestation of the transformation of the public-private binary at the dawn of the internet—and *also* connected to the "creative writing" explosion (what I did a PhD on); in the aughts, creative writing was the fastest-growing discipline *in the world*.
5/ The idea of journalism being in a state of collapse was not present around 2003—at least not ubiquitously. Drezner, the international politics professor way out over his skiis in a history-of-the-internet discourse, anachronistically projects the events of today 15 years back.
6/ Beyond the transformation of the public-private binary, there was also, of course, in the mid-aughts, a print-to-online exodus that was *extremely* heady for all involved. Just as literary magazines and newspapers were headed online, so were "private" and "local" writers.
7/ As any who teach writing at the university level know, the first analysis in the history of any writing system is distinguishing between "long-form" and "short-form" writing. Drezner blithely analogizing long-form (blog) and short-form (tweet) writing systems is embarrassing.
8/ A someone with a minor in sociology, I was interested in the aughts in sociological studies of the early internet that focused on community-building; they revealed people who'd written privately/locally on their hobbies suddenly heading online to build communities of interest.
9/ The phenomenon of blogs acting as a serious external adjunct to news outlets—i.e. not connected to those outlets—began many years into the lifespan of the "blogosphere," in the late aughts. Apparently Drezner hails, he now indicates, from that late period of the blogosphere.
10/ When I was running The Nashua Advocate in the mid-aughts, getting up to 25,000 views daily, there wasn't yet much thought of being a serious adjunct to major-media news consumption. The idea was citizen journalism could pursue things media wasn't really touching much at all.
11/ Substack emerged three years ago, and was popularized last year. What spurred its growth was the *departure* of major-media figures from major-media operations *specifically* to provide readers with an *alternative* to major media.

I still find that problematic in many ways.
12/ As a curatorial journalist, I know as well as anyone that major media *can't* be abandoned—it *can't* be allowed to fail. That's why curatorial journalists do *more* work than anyone to try to augment and expand the audience for major media. Drezner derides this as "linking."
13/ Oddly, what those still in the thrall of major media like Drezner *want* non-major media types to do is merely "link." It's part of the now-dead dream that today's citizen journalists will be mere fanboys and fangirls of their favorite journalists. But that dream *is* dead.
14/ In fact, curatorial journalism, because it's a metamodernistic mode, seeks to execute both ends of a paradox at once: (1) *augment* major-media reporting by using it as a building block; (2) expose its *weaknesses* by showing how it's insufficiently horizontally integrated.
15/ To the late postmodernists of major media, for whom paradoxes are dangerous and binary dialectics comforting, curatorial journalism is only an attack—so it must be destroyed. That it hugely amplifies their work they simply choose to ignore altogether as an inconvenient fact.
16/ So when PROOF moved from books Drezner didn't read and a podcast he never listened to and disquisitions on metamodernism and curatorial journalism he lacked the expertise to understand to *Substack*, it did so for a very—profoundly—different reason than, say, Glenn Greenwald.
17/ Greenwald wants to destroy major media for personal reasons. He is minimally concerned, as an ethical matter, with the ruin that would cause. So yes, Greenwald does want to use long-form writing on Substack to destroy long-form social media. PROOF has nothing to do with that.
18/ *The* watch-word in metamodernism—and I'm a proud metamodernist—is "reconstruction." You reconstruct that which has been near-terminally deconstructed. PROOF is part of a movement to reinvigorate major-media journalism by beneficially amplifying, exploiting and critiquing it.
19/ At every turn, major media will send people who aren't metamodernists, or curatorial journalists, or even experts in mass communications, to distort, reject, and mislead about projects like mine here and at PROOF. I'm now in year 6 of it and I'm effing exhausted by the fight.
20/ To call what I do "linking" is to call what a professor of international politics does "watching CNN." The problem is that—by definition—folks like Drezner will always have a bigger megaphone to treat major media's death-rattle as music than those actually trying to save it.
PS/ I've no beef with any who say Drezner was a big deal in political communications journal articles in the late 2000s, at the tail end of the blogosphere. The world is huge—it's no surprise I didn't come across him then just as it's no surprise he sees gain in attacking me now.

More from Seth Abramson

MAJOR BREAKING NEWS: Donald Trump Is Now Privately Confirming His Support of a Summer Coup of the Biden Administration; If the Former President Has Engaged in Even a Single Act to Advance This Treacherous Plot He is Guilty of Seditious Conspiracy and Must Be Arrested Immediately


1/ Journalists need to be very careful in how they discuss this breaking news. Individuals who have provided cover for Trump repeatedly in the past—like Maggie Haberman—are reporting evidence of a possible seditious conspiracy as mere loose talk from an addled man. Sorry, but no.

2/ There are efforts afoot now in GA, AZ, NV, and WI to delegitimize Biden's victories there. Meanwhile, Trump advisors Flynn and Powell are saying that once those victories are delegitimized, the military should move in. If Trump is in on the conversations, it's a coup attempt.

3/ As anyone who has ever read a book or watched a movie or taken a history course knows, the most important element of a coup is the agreement of the individual who'll be installed as a nation's new president to participate in the installation. Without that there can be no coup.

4/ What Trump is privately doing, according to the NYT, is the *opposite* of what Lyndon Johnson famously did in saying that even if nominated he wouldn't run for president. Trump is telling the coup conspirators that he *will accept a re-installation* if they can make it happen.
(THREAD) To understand the second impeachment of Donald Trump, we must understand the words that preceded and augmented his January 6 incitement of insurrection. This thread unpacks four key speeches—Don Jr., Giuliani, Mo Brooks, and Eric Trump. I hope you'll read on and RETWEET.


1/ If you haven't yet seen my analysis of Trump's January 6 "incitement to insurrection" speech, you can find it at the link below. This thread will look at four shorter—but deeply consequential—speeches just before Trump's, all by Trump allies or family.


2/ DONALD TRUMP JR.

Trump Jr.'s speech on January 6—which ended less than an hour before his father incited an insurrection—is one of the most inscrutable of the day, because its beginning includes some promisingly responsible rhetoric. Then it descends into madness and chaos.

3/ "I'm looking at the crowd here, and you did it all [congregate here] without burning down buildings! You did it without ripping down churches! Without looting! I didn't know that that was possible!" Within 2 hours of his speech, Don Jr.'s audience would be looting the Capitol.

4/ So obviously Don Jr.'s opening is ironic to a historic degree, but this isn't the first time we've heard this rhetoric from him. He habitually ignores right-wing violence because he knows that his chief rhetorical canard—which marries progressivism and violences—gets applause.

More from Politics

We’ve been getting calls and outreach from Queens residents all day about this.

The community’s response? Outrage.


Amazon is a billion-dollar company. The idea that it will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks at a time when our subway is crumbling and our communities need MORE investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here.

When we talk about bringing jobs to the community, we need to dig deep:
- Has the company promised to hire in the existing community?
- What’s the quality of jobs + how many are promised? Are these jobs low-wage or high wage? Are there benefits? Can people collectively bargain?

Displacement is not community development. Investing in luxury condos is not the same thing as investing in people and families.

Shuffling working class people out of a community does not improve their quality of life.

We need to focus on good healthcare, living wages, affordable rent. Corporations that offer none of those things should be met w/ skepticism.

It’s possible to establish economic partnerships w/ real opportunities for working families, instead of a race-to-the-bottom competition.
What does "patriots in control" mean?
What would that "look like" in reality?


So a massive adult film star in all his glory is included in an official FBI government filing


Hunter Biden's book is categorized as "Chinese


TIME admits to "conspiracy" to "not rig, rather


A "pillow guy" has military-grade intercepts detailing the IP addresses and device MAC IDs of EVERY incursion into every county in the
"3 million people are estimated not to have official photo ID, with ethnic minorities more at risk". They will "have to contact their council to confirm their ID if they want to vote"

This is shameful legislation, that does nothing to tackle the problems with UK elections.THREAD


There is no evidence in-person voter fraud is a problem, and it wd be near-impossible to organise on an effective scale. Campaign finance violations, digital disinformation & manipulation of postal voting are bigger issues, but these are crimes of the powerful, not the powerless.

In a democracy, anything that makes it harder to vote - in particular, anything that disadvantages one group of voters - should face an extremely high bar. Compulsory voter ID takes a hammer to 3 million legitimate voters (disproportionately poor & BAME) to crack an imaginary nut

If the government is concerned about the purity of elections, it should reflect on its own conduct. In 2019 it circulated doctored news footage of an opponent, disguised its twitter feed as a fake fact-checking site, and ran adverts so dishonest that even Facebook took them down.

Britain's electoral law largely predates the internet. There is little serious regulation of online campaigning or the cash that pays for it. That allows unscrupulous campaigners to ignore much of the legal framework erected since the C19th to guard against electoral misconduct.

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