Glib-ism
by tristero
George Packer, writing about Laura Poitras,
How much was the U.S. government hounding critics for political, rather than legal, reasons? To what extent was the government’s capacity for surveillance matched by its will to abuse it? In the cloistered world of expatriate Berlin, a sense of proportion was hard to maintain. Secrecy became self-perpetuating and, for some of Poitras’s friends, self-important. Cut off from daily life in America, encrypted to the hilt, and surrounded by Europeans who were willing to believe the worst, Poitras was, in many ways, making a film about her own strange social world—an atmosphere that seemed likely to constrict the free flow of ideas.
That is truly elegant writing. Very few people have the talent to compose sentences like this, let alone string them together with such seaming little effort, let alone pivot so gracefully to a more all-embracing idea. Indeed, Packer’s prose is very convincing.
But it is utter bullshit.
Packer’s talking about the film that eventually became Citizenfour, Poitras’s amazing, not-to-be-missed movie on Edward Snowden. But Poitras, even in the early stages, was never making a film about “her own strange social world.” Back then, she was doing what everyone creative does (including Packer himself), simply exploring the material she had access to and playing with it, trying to find a structure. Yet Packer, describing this common practice, invites us to dismiss her entire milieu – not just Assange or Appelbaum – as a claque of weirdos, of little interest to The Serious Amongst Us. The further implication is that Poitras and her work are also not that Serious, either.
But given the fact that Poitras herself had been detained some 40 times, many people around the world, not merely those easily misled “Europeans,” are, for very good reasons, quite “willing to believe the worst”about the US government and its obsessive pursuit of the chimera of Total Information Awareness.
As for the “atmosphere” in Poitras’s circle being “likely to constrict the free flow of ideas…” well, just think about that for a few seconds. If you do it’s obvious that the vastly more likely constrictor of the free flow of ideas is the most powerful surveillance technology in the world being used to monitor every single electronic communication, not the feeble effort of an expat community trying to evade the spying.
But hold on. I think I’m being unfair to poor Mr. Packer. According to Frankfurter, a bullshitter…
…does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
In reading over the article again (and thinking about his work in general), I think Packer does care about describing reality correctly. The problem is that reality for him is mediated by aesthetics and he often confuses being glib for the truth. He clearly loves the sound of his sentences, the graceful flow of their grammar and syntax, their rhythm. Packer’s genuine ability to write like a mofo hypnotizes many readers into believing what he says. It surely has the same effect on him. He simply can’t resist his talent.
So, speaking technically, Packer is not a bullshitter. He doesn’t have enough self-awareness to be. He really thinks that because what he writes is so well-crafted, therefore his opinions actually depict reality.
But a well-articulated sentence is not necessarily a substantive one. Look at how he describes Snowden’s speaking style (as if it mattered in the slightest):
…he keeps speaking in the hyper-rational, oddly formal sentences of a computer techie.
This is such a precise description, it conjures up an entire image of the man. The problem is that that is not how I hear how Snowden actually speaks. To me, he sounds like someone who knows exactly what he is talking about, and like someone who, despite enormous pressure, is keeping it together.
More seriously, Packer tries to cast aspersions on Snowden’s motives, as if Snowden’s character was somehow as important as the wholesale invasion of privacy of the entire world by the US government.
Also, Packer’s attempt to drive a wedge between Binney and Snowden is quite misleading. While Binney did once say Snowden was “transitioning from whistle-blower to a traitor,” (in re “hacking into China”), that was in June, 2013, before anyone, including Binney, knew very much. However, by June of 2014 Binney said:
In the debate on Snowden as either patriot or traitor, Binney opts for the former: “I would put him as a patriot, yes. He is trying to stand up for the Constitution. That’s what we all did and our government attacked us for doing that. So, in my view, the government is the criminal here.”
Exactly. Packer’s attempts to twist the story from the real “criminal” to the messenger don’t withstand even a mere blogger’s scrutiny.
Poitras’s film was never about Snowden’s personal life, which she made very, very clear (for example, by not interviewing his girlfriend). It was also not about the leaks themselves, either. It is, for me, the documentation of an astonishing historical moment that focuses on the behavior of the people at the center of it – Snowden, Poitras, and Greenwald. They behaved then with remarkable poise and responsibility (and they continue to do so). They acted as if they knew full well that they were quite unimportant, that the only story that mattered was the American government’s mind-bogglingly wholesale destruction of personal privacy.
That is not an especially glib or original insight on my part. But I think it happens to be real.
UPDATE: More on Packer and Snowden.
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