56 The New York Review
the redemptive power of open-minded
discussion.
Both Marantz and Phelps- Roper,
approaching the problem from op-
posite directions, have chosen titles
that negate the contemporary techno-
cultural imperatives: to be social, to
follow, on the terms of the machines.
What are those terms? Marantz writes
about the rise of viral- content mills
online, driven by the production of
“high- arousal emotion” or “activating
emotions”: curiosity, humor, “lust, and
nostalgia, and envy, and outrage”—the
feelings that get people to pay attention
and react, in a measurable way, by using
the available tools to click and share.
Phelps- Roper describes the tactics of
Westboro’s moral crusade in much the
same way that Marantz’s amoral and
meaning- agnostic content distributors
describe their own work:We gauged success primarily by
the amount of media attention
we received.... People often
took our constant employment of
shock tactics as cynical and purely
attention- seeking behavior, but
this was a fundamental misunder-
standing of our purpose and the
dynamics of the picket line. “Some
say you’re just doing this for atten-
tion,” one television reporter ac-
cused Gramps during an interview
I sat in on. My grandfather looked
at her like she was uncommonly
dense and said slowly, “Well,
you’re doggone right. How can I
preach to ’em if I don’t have their
attention?”The distinction between the religious
fanatics and the click- chasers collapses
still further as Phelps- Roper explains
that, because Westboro’s fanatical con-
ception of predestination held that God
alone had the power to grant someone
faith, the church refused to preach in a
way that might persuade anyone to join
it. “In light of this,” she writes, “our
goal was not to convert, but rather to
preach to as many people as possible,
using all the means that God had put
at our disposal.” Effectively, this is the
same message that Marantz got from
Emerson Spartz, the twenty- seven-
year- old publisher of shareable and dis-
posable mini- content across dozens of
sites with names like Memestache and
OMGFacts: “The ultimate barometer of
quality is: if it gets shared, it’s quality.”What “activating emotions” under-
mine is a sense of context and pro-
portion. If enough people are paying
attention to something—if you, per-
sonally, are paying attention to it, and it
feels to you as if others are—it’s nearly
impossible to conclude that it’s unim-
portant, or even to fit its importance
onto a scale of relative importance.
Likewise, if a thing gains and then
loses public attention, it seems to have
correspondingly lost importance. For a
few giddy days in the spring of 2016, ev-
eryone was sharing a meme that arose
from no known pop- cultural anteced-
ent called Dat Boi, which depicted a
3D green frog on a unicycle, accom-
panied by the call- and- response text
“here come dat boi!!!!!!” and “o shit
waddup!” For a week or two in 2019,
the news cycle was gravely concerned
with the writer E. Jean Carroll’s de-
tailed and credible account of how the
man who is now president of the UnitedStates had raped her in the 1990s. What
had felt all- consuming became nearly
impossible to recall, except as a future
trivia question.
With attention as the dominant value,
all other values are in flux. Nearly any-
thing can get in. Marantz opens his
book in California, at “a free- speech
happy hour—a meetup for local mascu-
linists, neomonarchists, nihilist Twitter
trolls, and other self- taught culture
warriors.” Already the name of some-
thing Americans are taught to regard
as a virtue—free speech—is a banner
of vice, under which people unleash
their cruelties or hatreds while treating
their critics as oppressors. These are
people who start fights online for the
sake of starting fights, for whom the
act of offending people is a self- evident
victory. One of the attendees wears a
T- shirt depicting Harambe, the zoo go-
rilla whose death had been an Internet
sensation shortly after Dat Boi faded
from memory. Marantz asks him to
explain it: “‘It’s a funny thing people
say, or post, or whatever,’ he said. ‘It’s,
like—it’s just a thing on the internet.’”
Marantz pauses to emphasize his own
familiarity with the sort of numbness
that goes with experiencing “much of
life through the mediating effects of a
screen,” and observes, “It wasn’t hard
for me to imagine how anything—a
dead gorilla, a gas chamber, a presiden-
tial election, a moral principle—could
start to seem like just another thing on
the internet.”
The delusion behind the rise of
the Information Age was the same
as the delusion that the end of cold
war conflict had brought about what
Francis Fukuyama called the “End
of History”: that connection and ex-
posure would necessarily breed en-
lightenment. Phelps- Roper supplies a
helpful corrective, explaining how the
biblical literalists of the Westboro Bap-
tist Church navigated the mass media.
From outside, it may have seemed as
if the followers of Fred Phelps had to
be ignorant, walled off from the faith-
subverting power of secular and pop-
ular culture. Instead, Phelps- Roper
writes of her upbringing:We had wide latitude in our con-
sumption of books, television, film,
and music, and for much the same
reason that we attended public
schools: our parents weren’t par-
ticularly worried about negative
influences slipping into our minds
undetected.Westboro was not afraid of popular cul-
ture; the church was popular culture.
Westboro members understood
that they could despise the rest of the
world without withdrawing from it.
Participating in the discourse did not
require them to share its values; they
could attach themselves to it even as
they detached themselves from empa-
thy, solidarity, or, crucially, a mutually
agreed upon substrate of truth. Phelps-
Roper tells how her own loss of belief
in the church was brought about, in
part, by the elders’ decision to tweet
out false claims that they had traveled
to London to picket the wedding of
Prince William and Kate Middleton,
complete with Photoshopped images
of Westboro members protesting out-
side Westminster Abbey, contrary to
the scriptural prohibition on false wit-
ness. When caught in the fraud, Phelps-
Roper writes, the church countered“that the fake picket was never meant
to be taken literally... but this, too, was
demonstrably false.”
Marantz observes the same dance of
provocation and denial over and over
among the revanchists and racists he
talks to. Gavin McInnes, a cofounder
of Vice magazine and later the founder
of the protofascist street- fighting frater-
nity called the Proud Boys—who would
eventually get himself banned from
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and You-
Tube for promoting hate speech and
violence—constantly wiggles his toe
over the boundary of outright bigotry,
only to make a show of pulling it back.
“Whenever a journalist implied that the
Proud Boys were a white- pride organi-
zation,” Marantz writes,McInnes claimed to be shocked
and offended: “‘Western chauvin-
ist’ [his preferred term] includes all
races, religions, and sexual prefer-
ences.”... When he made a cogent
argument, he was a political com-
mentator; as soon as he crossed a
line, he was only joking.By now everyone is wearily famil-
iar with this as the signature move of
the president of the United States, to
say a thing—the virus will disappear,
the neo- Nazi demonstrators were fine
people—while refusing to be held
accountable for meaning it. As the
Trump- promoting journalist (and ac-
cused fabulist) Salena Zito wrote for
The Atlantic during the 2016 cam-
paign, while noting yet another false-
hood from the candidate, “the press
takes him literally, but not seriously;
his supporters take him seriously, but
not literally.”Four years of exposure to this routine,
and more than 200,000 dead bodies,
have made it clear that “literally” and
“seriously” are not separable, nor are
they cause for dismissing anything the
president might say; the formulation
itself was one more act of obfuscation.
But good faith is a liability in a world
built around seizing attention. What
Marantz describes up close from the
outside and Phelps- Roper narrates
from within (and the president lives
every moment of every day) is bull-
shit, in the invaluable and inescapable
sense defined by Harry Frankfurt: the
act of making claims without regard
for whether they are true or false. It
is a thing distinct from lying: the liars
of the George W. Bush administration
were focused on the truth and said the
opposite, in order to conceal it; the
Trump administration simply offers an
incoherent flood of bullshit, in which
the truth may as well not exist at all.
The people of the Westboro Baptist
Church believe strongly in something,
while Marantz’s trolls and nihilists
believe strongly in nothing, but their
worldviews converge on a contempt for
communicating honestly with ordinary
people in the ordinary world.
“Anybody who was paying attention
could see that the leaders of the De-
plorable movement were not good- faith
interlocutors,” Marantz writes. “They
didn’t care to be.” What they were, he
says more than once, is “metamedia
insurgents”:They spoke the language of pol-
itics, in part, because politics was
the reality show that got the high-A BRILLIANT NEW TRANSLATION
OF A KEY WORK OF
20 TH-CENTURY LITERATUREhttp://www.nyrb.comIn the spring of 1919, two young men,
André Breton and Philippe Soupault,
both in a state of moral shock after
the carnage of World War I, embarked
on an experiment in writing. Sick of
the literary cultivation of “voice,” sick
of the “well-written,” they wanted to
unleash the power of the word and to
create “a new morality” to replace “the
prevailing morality, the source of all
our trials and tribulations.”
Breton and Soupault devised a plan.
They would write for a week on every
day of the week and they would write
fast, as fast as possible, in complete
secrecy. When the week was over, the
writing would be done and there’d be
no touching up.
This was how The Magnetic Fields, the
first sustained exercise in automatic writ-
ing as a form of literary composition,
came to be.
“Fantastic, disconnected but vivid and
poetic as though Breton and Soupault
were seeing sea life at the bottom of the
ocean’s floor: very few of us have the
intensity of spirit to live with that
sense of life.” —Kimberly Lyons“With distance, a sort of unity has
established itself, and The Magnetic
Fields have become the work of a single
author with two heads. This double
gaze has made it possible, as nothing
else would, for Philippe Soupault and
André Breton to push forward on the
path where no one had preceded them,
into these shadows where they were both
speaking aloud.” —Louis AragonTHE MAGNETIC FIELDS
ANDRÉ BRETON &
PHILIPPE SOUPAULT
A new translation by Charlotte Mandell
Paperback • $14.95
Also available as an e-bookWednesday, Oct. 28th, 7:30pm EDT
Community Bookstore
Virtual Event
Translator Charlotte Mandell and
Edwin Frank, editorial director of
the NYRB Classics and NYRB Poets
series, will read from and discuss
The Magnetic Fields.
Register for this Zoom event at
communitybookstore.net.