I’m right on the verge of putting together and publishing the sixth and final episode of this series of posts that began in January, after which I’ll go back through and add some links to each of them. But I wanted to pause briefly and jot down a tangent that emerged for me as I was about 2/3 of the way through the fifth segment (on clickbait). I knew that it would take me well past my word limit, so I thought I’d save it for a different post.
As I mentioned last time, one of the fundamental symmetries that clickbait challenges is the assumption that hyperlinks accurately reflect the target pages/sites that they link to. This relationship is not unlike that between news items and their headlines or titles. It is no fun to see a title on an article that prompts you to read the article, only to discover that the headline was misleading. This happens more often, in fact, than it probably should1, and it reminds us that the clickbait farms of the early teens, in many ways, grew out of the news vs sales conflict that every journalistic enterprise must deal with.
Not only was this assumption kind of vital for the first 15-20 years of the web, back when Google was still a search company, but it’s at the heart of language itself. You might recall this line from Alice in Wonderland:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
Carroll is satirizing a particular attitude (linguistic relativism) towards language, but it’s not entirely false. Without getting too deep into the weeds, there’s only an arbitrary connection between the words we use and the objects, actions, and concepts they represent. But that arbitrary connection is enforced by social compact—otherwise, there’d be no way for us to communicate. When we use words, they do indeed mean just what we choose them to mean, right up unto the point that someone else reads or hears them, and then those listeners or readers must interpret and determine that meaning. They draw on their own experience, history, and fluency to do so; it’s not a precise or perfect system by any means, but it’s generally pretty effective.
On the one hand, then, it’s really a small matter for MrBeast and other clickfarmers to say that they “survived” rather than “spent” 50 hours in a vat of ketchup. Chasing that “wow factor,” however cringe it might sound, isn’t going to break the language or anything. On the other hand, though, it’s a tactic2 that relies on and exploits our generally good faith attempts to use language accurately. There’d be no “wow” without the norms that underwrite it. And at a certain threshold, one that we’ve almost certainly passed as a culture, it becomes more and more difficult to sort out sense from nonsense.
From Symmetry to Synecdoche
But the reason that I wanted to write a little more about clickbait was that there’s more to hyperlinks than just that symmetry between link and target. I got at this a bit in my last post when I talked about links as referential or representational. I tend to talk about synecdoche in terms of its scalar properties, but fundamentally, it’s a trope that allows us to substitute part for whole, where the part represents the whole. And so there’s something (ideally) synecdochic about the newspaper headline or the website hyperlink; we expect them to represent accurately to us the whole (article or target page) that follows. That’s how we make the decision to read the article or click the link, after all.
The distinction between metonymy and synecdoche can sometimes be hazy—I’ve seen examples in writing handbooks actually get it wrong (imo)—but the rise of clickbait has intentionally blurred the two, perhaps beyond the point of return. I’ve talked before about how I map the two tropes across Kahneman’s fast and slow thinking and how, even if the difference between them is difficult to maintain in practice, it’s worth retaining. Put in these terms, clickbait is an attempt to activate our fast thinking, and clickfarmers grew especially adept at finding phrases that short circuited reflection: “you won’t believe what she looks like now,” “the secret that Amazon doesn’t want you to know,” “the one food guaranteed to help you lose that fat,” and so on. This bait and switch, so common nowadays, was/is a crucial part of the context collapse that is a feature of online culture. Our ability to navigate the world around us depends on our ability to build a persistent context (and to share it among others), and I believe that metonymy and synecdoche are two of our most vital linguistic tools for doing so3.
When we lose them, or lose the ability to distinguish between them, or are surrounded by bad actors who are intentionally obscuring that difference, we find ourselves mired in what Byung-Chul Han calls in Infocracy the “frenzy of communication.” We contribute to context collapse through the looseness of the way we use language, but the shift to social media platforms is another big piece of it. By channeling as much of our discourse as possible into a single, neverending stream of content, platforms serialize the information that we generate, divorcing it from any context in particular, and making it difficult to restore it to its original place. Han describes it as “communication without community,” where our phones function as “mobile shop windows through which private matters are constantly presented to others,” “more likely to produce consumption and communication zombies than mature citizens.”
This isn’t getting better. Amidst all of the chaos generated by the Legion of Dumb, you might be forgiven for missing the Reuters report last week that found that our country passed a tipping point whereby more Americans now get their news from social media and video platforms than from traditional media. Or the suggestion that our country’s top “intelligence” officer will be designing the mad king’s briefings to look more like Faux News broadcasts, so he doesn’t ignore them in favor of thinly justified declarations of war or baseless claims of unqualified success. But these are macro implications of our unwillingness to engage in context-building. They’re bad enough, to be sure, but I want to write (finally!) about what happens when we lose our grip on context at the micro level. It has to do with Ai and the next stage of enshittification, and it’ll be showing up soon. See you then.
A while ago, I cited Parker Molloy’s term “sanewashing,” whereby mainstream media writes headlines that minimize the mad king’s batshittery, by making it seem as though his frequently unhinged rambling results from anything resembling consistent policy. Sanewashing might be an example of inverse clickbait, but I haven’t thought through that closely enough to say for sure.
This is the same tactic that the mad king advocated in one of the books that was ghostwritten on his behalf, The Art of the Deal. To wit, “That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.” If by “truthful,” “innocent,” and “effective,” you mean dishonest, calculated, and corrupt, and by “never” you mean often, then who am I to disagree?
More to the point, I’d argue that a clear-headed understanding of the necessary balance between them is how we build context. Our ability to distinguish the two is how we develop perspective, cause-and-effect relationships, and representativity.
Not to forget those other demands of our immediate attention, "Game changer!" and "Taking The Market by Storm" that guarantee I'll close the laptop and go split some firewood, or get back to the finish trimwork that's been waiting my attention. As I've picked up reading here (and elsewhere) the late stages of colonial extraction discover that what we 'want' is spectacle and the spectacular to grab our attention. What will the bride of Jeff be wearing. God, I'm so very weary of this moment. Thanks for your writing on it.