ContraPoints, The Intercept, Reading in Distracted Times
A Stalinist, Anarchist and Liberal Walk into a Bar
You come face-to-face with ContraPoints.
With healthy doses of self-deprecating humor, cerebral and incisive debate on socially charged topics and mood lighting befitting a 20’s Parisian cabaret aesthetic, Natalie Wynn has created a YouTube channel that is a work of art as much as a political call-to-arms.
A movement to fight extreme right-wing indoctrination, if you will, with style and chutzpah.
After quitting a Ph.D. course mid-way at Northwestern, disenchanted by the academic life, and after doing odd jobs, she started putting out videos on topics ranging from – the myth of ‘The West’, trans issues, mocking a certain internet celeb professor, Incels among others – with certain production values aligned closely with her personality.
Fall into the rabbit hole and then - subscribe to the channel.
The set-up of quite a few of her videos is in the platonic dialogue mode, with her playing the part of multiple characters, debating complicated topics gleaning rich insights on human nature and the political landscape.
Katherine Cross writes for The Verge –
But her affect and persona are what made her brainy, insightful videos popular. More than most of her contemporaries on “LeftTube,” Wynn has a style; her editorial signature is an unmistakably ornate flourish. Her ContraPoints persona is decadent in the mold of Oscar Wilde by way of Weird Twitter: sexily confident and fearlessly indulgent, with orations delivered from plush chairs and scented baths. Her style extends to the postmodern rococo of her set design and the bewildering variety of costumed characters she plays on her show, giving us something like Platonic philosophical dialogues in the idiom of social media.
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The cult of rationality that pervades so much discourse across the political spectrum neglects the role of emotion in our decision making, and, perhaps most urgently, the role of emotional appeal in the success of many neo-fascist movements around the world. Perhaps the most important thing ContraPoints offers us is a sense of what it looks like to combat that vision with something similarly visceral.
Nathan Robinson writes for Current Affairs –
She’s on a one-woman blitzkrieg against the YouTube right. She knows how to use the medium as well as anybody, and she’s found a brilliantly inventive and totally unique way to convey left political ideas.
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It’s smart, it’s persuasive, and it’s fun. More of this sort of thing, please. God bless ContraPoints. She’s a national treasure.
The Gadfly Media Outfit Stinging the Left
You probably know The Intercept as the searing journalistic voice against the surveillance state and the explosive reporting they did around the Snowden leaks and the NSA. Their editorial ethos is seen largely as anti-government, anti-establishment – but lately there is one group that’s been at the receiving end of their salvos – the Dems.
Critics at the left and in the media are questioning whether this strategy, while intentioned about cleaning the bipartisan swamp, will in reality end up being a blow to the larger goals for the leftist cause in 2020.
Steven Perlberg writes for Politico –
In today’s fast-moving media environment, seemingly every election elevates a new publication to the center of the conversation. In 2008, there was the Huffington Post and Politico; 2012 saw the rise of BuzzFeed; in 2016, Breitbart transformed the conservative media landscape. As 2020 approaches, some see the Intercept as the political site of the moment, a disruptive force focused on one of the most important political stories of our time, the Democratic identity crisis.
The one moment as seen by progressives worthy of celebration was the early coverage of AOC as a contender to take seriously against the incumbent. She is today a popular force in the democratic party structure with her support and endorsement seen as critical by running candidates.
As a go-to site and publication for serious national security wonks, it’s also worth noting that it is a media co. that’s bankrolled by a billionaire. Considering recent events with Gawker, the Gothamist et al., history will probably be the judge how that relationship turns out.
Gutenberg Elegy
Poet and critic Mairead Small Staid bemoans the state of the act of reading in our always-on, hyper-connected modern life, with a constant barrage of shiny new technologies and media vying for our ever-diminishing attention.
Invoking Sven Birkerts who wrote The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, she writes for The Paris Review –
As the culture around him underwent the sea change of the internet’s arrival, Birkerts feared that qualities long safeguarded and elevated by print were in danger of erosion: among them privacy, the valuation of individual consciousness, and an awareness of history—not merely the facts of it, but a sense of its continuity, of our place among the centuries and cosmos.
We live our lives in a 24x7 news cycle, devouring every shock-inducing news headline after another, until the next one in the same day. With the horizontal-ization of our media diet – with the consumption of more ephemeral and drive-by content – whether tweets, Facebook posts, IG stories or Snapchat Discover news content, it kind of makes sense that we are increasingly NOT able to make sense of what is happening in the world.
I can also see the irony of writing this in an email newsletter. In my defense, I do try, from time to time, to fall into the spell of a good novel.
The lack of depth and the inability to maintain even a moderate level of sustained focus on long form fiction or non-fiction somehow ought to have an impact on not only the way it tends to shape our worldview but also the way we connect and understand the self. Isn’t that what the purpose of art is supposed to be anyway?
The diminishment of literature—of sustained reading, of writing as the product of a single focused mind—would diminish the self in turn, rendering us less and less able to grasp both the breadth of our world and the depth of our own consciousness.
Our interactions with our friends, real living and breathing friends for the most part happens online – through our online avatars, perfected and air brushed with our highlight reels on social media. Books make us less alone since they are a technology like no other. They teleport us into the consciousness of another human person.
Loneliness is what the internet and social media claim to alleviate, though they often have the opposite effect. Communion can be hard to find, not because we aren’t occupying the same physical space but because we aren’t occupying the same mental plane: we don’t read the same news; we don’t even revel in the same memes. Our phones and computers deliver unto each of us a personalized—or rather, algorithm-realized—distillation of headlines, anecdotes, jokes, and photographs. Even the ads we scroll past are not the same as our neighbor’s: a pair of boots has followed me from site to site for weeks. We call this endless, immaterial material a feed, though there’s little sustenance to be found.