Slate's Rosetta Stone

Hidden in this piece on hating the band The National, Carl Wilson unintentionally provides the key for understanding Slate:

In the end, it simply seems too repressive and stultifying to demand that we give up entirely on the fundamental pop pleasure of taking a side. Too often that instinct has manifested itself in discarding important genres, or valid modes such as sentimental or aggressive music, and especially in masking a social prejudice as an aesthetic one—hating artist x as a stand-in for hating “the kind of people who listen to x.” In this case, though, I’m the kind of person who listens to the National—adult, white, middle-class, liberal-artsy. If the competition is merely intramural, merely Beatles-versus-Stones, I get to choose my colors.

Of course, there's no contradiction here: the kind of people adult, white, middle-class, liberal-artsy types hate the most are other adult, white, middle-class, liberal-artsy types. And that is what animates Slate, that annoyance. It's partially self hatred and partially the hatred of those who resemble you in many ways but who, in your own mind, fall far short of your own standards. I'm not suggesting that that's a ridiculous attitude; we all feel some version of these feelings, and unless you're of the opinion that all people are equal in temperament and character, they can be rational. But I am saying that satisfying this desire, to grind away the resentment of the digitally-inclined creative (or "creative") bourgeois, is the real ethos of Slate. The contrarianism is a means, not an end; cheesing off other AWMCLATs will often involve defying the conventional wisdom in a kind of showy way.

I'll tell you: it's a living. You've got to give it up to the people at Slate, as they've found a formula that has made them that rare creature, a consistently successful web magazine. The results, for me, are more likely to be annoying than enjoyable, but then I'm not really the target audience, and often enough they do produce entertaining work. I'm a fan of The National but I quite liked Wilson's piece, in large part because he both takes his aesthetic and artistic commitments seriously (the surest route to my heart) and recognizes the ways in which they're a little bit ridiculous.

You've got to read Slate through the lens of how individual pieces satisfy the central dictum. Given the perception of AWMCLATs as insufficiently devoted to capitalism, Slate's economics tend toward the neoliberal and market-oriented. Given the (false but widespread) perception that AWMCLATs are cultural elites, Slate's art and media criticism tends toward the "poptimist." Etc. etc. As an unapologetic lefty with sympathy towards high culture, I expect to read in something of an antagonistic mode. There's some topics I find it's better simply to avoid; anything about, for example, organic food is likely to be hugely annoying, because that subject fits too perfectly into the AWMCLAT stereotype and the analysis will be too laden with signalling to be of much use. Pick and choose, pick and choose.

Wilson gets more explicit:

And it’s this manoeuver that makes me realize some of my impatience with The National or Radiohead is that they enact what I fear it would be like if I—as a fellow vocationally thinky type—led a rock band.... These bands remind me of myself in earnest-dude mode, thinking I can win someone over if I go on stacking point upon point instead of exposing my unreliable heart.... 

So maybe I hate this goddamn band because I hate my goddamn self, and I should get some goddamn therapy instead of taking it out on the goddamn National. But perhaps my reaction to the National is a healthy form of self-suspicion.

If more people would write with this kind of candor about the tangled web of personality-formation, cultural commitments, and rational arguments that go into our ideas, we'd be more honest and more happy. As much as I tease (or yell at) the AWMCLATs, particularly the fussy types who write at Slate, I think that this reflexive tendency to distrust and judge those that are most like you is bad for them and for you both. It's an unhealthy fixation, one that is the product of a unique combination of the medium of the internet and a set of cultural convictions about art and media that could hardly be more tangled, meta, and self-defensive. I know it's unhealthy for me, anyway.

What really bums me out is that Wilson shows the most distrust for his "earnest dude" self. I suppose Wilson would say that Earnest Dude Chris Wilson is in fact the pretentious, self-deluded part of his personality, the part of him that is sentimental and romantic in its convictions. What Wilson identifies as The National's defensive posture, the self-control that bothers him, is to my mind precisely their refusal to risk sentimentality. If you are the kind of person who regularly reads, say, Vice magazine, you could be forgiven for thinking that sentiment and romance are the worst possible intellectual sins. I don't know, maybe.

But I suspect that, in fact, the earnest part of many people is their least defensive and most alive side, and that if they were completely honest with themselves, the would rather occupy it more often. And so for all of my needling, I fear in fact that these kind of cultural pathologies are bad chiefly because they make a sin of your becoming more fully yourself.