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A writer is more likely to be ignored or condemned than they are to be appreciated; so I write a fatalistic sense trepidation, always. If what you write, or how you write, is too complicated to be grasped immediately, to be marketed and widely disseminated, then it is dead, or worse than dead. In an age of distraction, paranoia — of the op-ed and the hot-take — it is not only difficult, but essentially, impossible, to create or participate in a meaningful, philosophically robust and sustainable, public (or private) dialogue. The internet has turned the individual into a troll; the philosopher into a perpetual grad-student; the activist into a Bolshevik. The right is the left, the left is the right; the humanist is nowhere, the mob everywhere. The result is a distortion of information, a lost sense of proportion, a degradation of language. If Ronan Farrow, Twitter hero, wants to produce a truth, namely that Woody Allen molested his sister, it is quite easy for him to ride roughshod over the actual medical and legal opinions that certified not only that there was not enough evidence to prosecute Allen, but that the young Dylan Farrow had in fact been coached by her mother before speaking with investigators about the case. The implication of Farrow-Allen dispute, is that invisible people on the internet can produce their own reality, their own truth, and in effect, rewrite history. The history of Woody Allen, filmmaker, is now, essentially determined; a new set of facts have been produced in the Twitter-fact-factory, and there seems to be no going back. Even more disturbing, is the use of Allen’s own (fictional)…
