Takes

 We live in the age of takes—so much so that a person like Matt Yglesias—noted author of many a bad take on Twitter—can refer to himself and his colleagues as working within the "take space"; the implication being that takes are a kind of consumer product, and that the maker of takes is an expert craftsperson of our era—someone with the unerring hand and eye for publishing takes of just the right size and shape to win widespread acclaim. 

What is the secret recipe? What distinguishes a good take from a bad one? The first ingredient is obvious: a good take is one that people in its implied target audience will like. It therefore must be one they agree with. Not only that, it must be one they agreed with even before they read it. It can't, that is to say, set out to persuade anyone of anything; the scrolling brain rebels against such bullying—it must, on the contrary, flatter its readers' prejudices.

If that were the sole criterion, however, then making good takes would be easy. No class of specialized professionals would be required. Anyone could do it. Plainly something more is needed. The good take must also be interesting. It must, that is to say, be in some way surprising and even shocking. It must be something that inspires people—as soon as they lay eyes on it—to instantly spread the word. "This," they say implicitly to all their friends, "is something you've got to see!"

How is this imperative to astound to be reconciled to the need to win instant and unthinking assent, without any intermediate stage of persuasion? This is, indeed, the rub. 

As we saw above, a take to succeed must be in some sense familiar to its readers already. It must be something they thought all along, even if they did not consciously know they thought it, in an almost Platonic procedure. It must have existed among the Forms of thought, before it was ever concretized as an actual Tweet. Yet, the mostly familiar is dull. The over-familiar is trite. 

A good take therefore somehow manages to achieve two contradictory things at once—a stunning feat. This explains why it is an art form, and why the expert craftsperson—the auteur of the take space—is required. The good take is such a carefully constructed artifact that it is somehow both instantly recognizable to its audience and yet eye-catchingly novel.

Achieving such a balance is not easy. The only thing we can take comfort from is the fact that humanity had many long centuries to hone this art form, before it ever found its ideal medium of expression on Twitter. 

After all, the expert take-smith was not simply born with the age of social media. They existed long before that—around dinner tables, in pubs and taverns, on the campaign stump, in the church pulpit—anywhere that people needed to both captivate their audience and win enthusiastic approval through the expression and re-affirmation of a shared ideology. 

I was reminded of this in reading Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting, when he describes a certain well-heeled family—members of the intelligentsia—who have the uncanny ability to find and express at every social occasion, and with regard to any given topic of the day, what the author describes as the "best possible progressive ideas":

The best possible progressive ideas, Kundera elaborates (Asher trans.), are those that include a strong enough dose of provocation to make its supporters feel proud of being original, but at the same time attract so many adherents that the risk of being an isolated exception is immediately averted by the noisy approval of a triumphant crowd. 

As soon as I read this passage, I was floored. Here was an author writing decades before the internet was widely available, and he had already described to a T the requirements of the take-smith's craft. These two competing imperatives are indeed what it takes to create a good take. Kundera was describing Twitter before Jack Dorsey had even entered kindergarten. 

I shared this passage with a friend, and we marveled at how accurately it had diagnosed the psychological dimensions of the era of takes. Shortly thereafter, we spent a few hours reading posts on the popular Reddit page, "Am I the Asshole?", in which people describe their own morally questionable behavior and beg the internet to weigh in on whether they did the right thing. 

The page gives readers the option of up-voting particular entries that most truly encapsulate our own thoughts and responses. There were a few that came along that we both leaped upon instantaneously. "Ooh," we said, "vote that up! That one's great!" Usually these entries were brief, punchy, sarcastic, and yet undeniably ethically correct. They were, in short, good takes. And my friend and I, in their presence, felt an irresistible urge to join the triumphant crowd that shared our acclaim. 

Is being a good take a bad thing? Surely not. I wouldn't have such a profound urge to heart so many of the good ones out there if I did not in fact think they were ethically sound. But the dual imperative to both surprise and yet win acclamation can lead to certain patterns of sloppy thinking. All too often, people can engage in corner-cutting that produces the simulacrum of good takes—pseudo–good takes that merely pass for the genuine article. 

One common strategy is the argumentative fallacy known as the Tu quoque. Since the trick on Twitter is always to say something that wins instant approval from one's own target group, bad arguments based on collective affiliation are one of the most tempting short-cuts to take on the platform. 

Someone from a rival political group will say something like: "I can't believe you all support horrible thing X!" Then you, in your desire to publish good takes and receive the dopamine boost that comes from getting lots of likes from your group, may be tempted to reply "Oh yeah? Well, if you're so upset about horrible thing X, how come you never have anything bad to say about horrible thing Y?" 

And it may actually be an accurate description of the hypocrisy of certain members of the rival group that tend to support horrible thing Y. It will certainly win the ready acclaim of the triumphant crowd to which you already belong...

The only problem with it is that it doesn't do anything to actually defend horrible thing X; therefore, it does not address the original criticism; indeed, it indirectly affirms the validity of it. After all, by comparing horrible thing X to horrible thing Y, aren't you saying that you actually agree with the original point that X is horrible? So maybe you should stop supporting it.

Something similar happens every day on the stage of international relations. The United States will say: "Putin invading Ukraine is bad." The Russian foreign minister will reply: "Who are you to criticize us? You invaded Iraq!" 

And whatever truth there may be to this charge of hypocrisy, note the strange concession that it makes to the opponent's critiques. Apparently, the Russian foreign minister admits, by saying this, that invasions are bad, and that the invasion of Ukraine was in fact an invasion, and that it is therefore bad as well. 

As for the charge of hypocrisy, while it may be just as applied to the United States, it does nothing to address the moral concerns of a hypothetical third person, or objective Kantian moral arbiter, who believes that both the invasion of Ukraine and the invasion of Iraq are bad, and that no country should be invading any other country or starting aggressive wars. End of story. 

But this is the kind of second stage of the argument that requires more than 280 characters. It therefore can only be posted as a reply to or second item in a Tweet thread, and will therefore be seen by far fewer people on far fewer timelines. 

And so it is that the age of takes has been, perhaps above all, an age of pseudo–good takes.