Egg-manning: Arguing with the fringes

I've been thinking more about writer Dan Brooks's post about the death of the Straw Man and the rise of the Egg Man. I'm not in love with Brooks's name for this "egg-manning" phenomenon (for one thing, googling it currently yields pictures of Peyton Manning being egged, which I'm not necessarily opposed to, but is indicative of the requirement of lexical singularity in the age of Google). So far, I've only been able to find one other use of it online (by blogger Tim Hall). But as I read more opinion pieces on both mainstream news websites like the New York Times and encounter news via social media (on Facebook and Twitter, where the person sharing the opinion piece is, in effect, endorsing the argument), I keep returning to this concept.

While straw-manning involves making up an imaginary person who holds a view opposed to your own just so that you can refute it, egg-manning involves finding a real person advancing a real view on social media just so that you can refute it. Finding an actual person essentially justifies the necessity of making your argument. There really are people who must be argued against!

Straw-manning involved assuming that someone out there disagrees with your argument. Egg-manning does not assume this, but instead makes another, typically unstated, assumption. The assumption that egg-manners make is that the person making the argument opposed to their own is part of a large, influential group of people, and that the expression of the argument is part of a larger trend. Rarely is any particular opinion held by only one person; you can search for a hashtag or a term or through various interconnected bits of the blogosphere or social news networks and usually find hundreds or maybe thousands of examples of the argument which you wish to argue against.

The next step in the assumption is the implicit or explicit linking of these hundreds or thousands of people actually stating the argument online with a larger mainstream group that, while not actually stating the argument, has stated or acted in such ways that makes it clear that they believe in some of the same things as the group that actually states the argument online. Most often in the U.S., these large mainstream groups are liberals/Democrats or conservatives/Republicans. Sometimes, they're smaller and/or more amorphous groups, like racists, sexists, Tea-Partiers, Social Justice Warriors, fraternity brothers, hipsters, or many other groups that are partially defined by their stated beliefs and actions. The largest, most amorphous group to be argued against in the U.S. right now is The Establishment. Dissimilarities between ideas held by the small group actually stating the argument online and the large group not stating the argument are ignored in favor of whatever they have in common, which, to the egg-manner, represents a coherent ideological framework.

Even if that group of people isn't large right now, it could become large in the future if its ideas are not argued against. Often times, an example from history is provided to show how quickly ideas can spread if they are not forcefully countered with another argument, a time when silence sealed the fate of a people. In the past, small, vocal groups of people got large less-vocal groups to go along with them. This is intended to make it clear that arguing against a dangerous idea is not so much an act of participating in civil discourse (and thus not subject to the informal rules of civil discourse), but a kind of duty, and that to fail to argue against it would constitute negligence of one's duty.

Sometimes, the egg-manners are correct, as many people who assume things tend to be every now and then: a dangerous view that once was fringe becomes mainstream. It can happen quickly with viral spread of ideas through social media. But other times, the egg-manners are incorrect. The view never becomes one held by more than an un-influential, fringe group online. Of course, if you are able to indefinitely postpone the point at which you believe the fringe idea will become mainstream, you can never be proven wrong, but if we were to require that the aforementioned assumptions be tested (which requires setting a finite time frame in which the fringe idea would become mainstream), I think that many assumptions like this would turn out not to be true.

Then there is the possibility of a backfiring effect: that by arguing against the fringe idea, egg-manners give legitimacy to it, thus bringing about its popularity. Not only are egg-manners raising the profile of ideas with which they argue; they are also providing more examples of opposite arguments for the egg-manners on the other side of argument to use in their egg-manning. There's likely an emotional component to the way in which egg-manning fuels that which it seeks to fight: anger from one side fuels anger from the other.

It's unclear whether egg-manners consider their arguments to be "arguments" in the traditional sense - attempts to convince another person of the truth and/or to provide support for a like-minded person who feels alone - or whether they consider them to be acts of self-expression. If it is the former, the egg-manner should care about the impact of the argument. But if it is the latter, being wrong and ineffective may not matter. It's a rhetorical maneuver that continues to interest me. If only it had a better name.

Prince and the art of making yourself scarce

Among the surprisingly strong feelings I experienced after Prince's passing (especially while watching some of the relatively-high-quality concert videos people have been posting) was a kind of shame at having taken so long to recognize how good he was. Part of the reason the strength of the feelings have been so surprising is that I was never a big Prince fan. This wasn't the normal level of regret one feels when an artist dies that you may have taken for granted. This was a sense that I might have been a much bigger fan of Prince had I listened to more of his music. But the answer to the question of why I didn't listen to more of his music, I think, has much to do with the unique way Prince produced music and managed access to it.

On the one hand, he produced a huge amount of material. This may have diluted his "brand." I don't mean "brand" in the commercial/corporate context, so maybe that's not the right word. I just mean that when I thought of Prince, I thought of all the music I hadn't listened to. It's subjective whether the material was consistently good (and it is rare for any artist to produce a lot of consistently good material; far easier to produce a few ground-breaking albums, call it quits, and leave the audience wanting more), but the mere fact that there was so much of it raises this question: where do you begin? The choice to listen to Prince wasn't whether or not to spend $10 - $40 on a few albums (as the choice might be to buy all of Guns n' Roses' oeuvre). There were hundreds of songs, and while there is some consensus that his earlier albums were among his best, there were plenty of gems scattered throughout the rest of his career. It would seem random to buy one late-era Prince album and ignore the others, but buying them all would cost a lot.

This leads us to the unusual way in which he regulated access to the music. Ever since 1999, the year Napster went mainstream, musical artists have had to balance the added exposure that comes with free distribution with the fact that giving things away for free is no way to make a living. Streaming music like Spotify and Youtube's Vevo channel are kinds of compromises that allow artists to make some money (arguably too little) while music consumers are able to listen to whatever they want either for free with advertising or for a small subscription fee. The more artists transfer over to that model, the more appealing the service like Spotify becomes. From the perspective of the music consumer, you could keep paying your monthly fee to Spotify and get to listen to what most new artists produce, or you could pay 10 bucks to listen to one album by one artist. The shift in value was incremental and difficult to notice - it wasn't like a single label or artist deciding to provide their music in a certain way tipped the scale. But at some point, the scale tipped. Music is as valuable to individuals and society as it ever was, but the value of individual artists or songs shifted when we started consuming music in different ways.

Thinking about how I missed the boat on Prince until now makes me think about how we recognize artistic excellence in today's world. I get a sense that there is a kind of skepticism about it now, a desire to ask, "how good could he possibly be? Wouldn't more people have been listening to him and making a bigger fuss about his music over the past several decades?" The question of who gets celebrated as a musical genius isn't just a question of subjective judgment of talent (though it is that, too). It's a question of how output and access influence our estimates of excellence. If something is even moderately awesome, we all hear about it, see video of it, and post it on social media right away. Encountering some of the videos of Prince's performances is so jarring because we've become accustomed to a world without secrets (and that includes secret genius). It's one thing to unearth an under-appreciated artist or work. This practice has become commonplace online: a sophisticated content curator spends hours digging through the detritus of YouTube so that we don't have to, and presents us with an overlooked or forgotten work of genius.

Prince's work was different. It was sitting there in plain sight; it just happened to be behind a paywall. That wall came down (at least temporarily) in the wake of his death, and it really did feel like something brilliant that had always been in your immediate vicinity had been suddenly revealed, rather than feeling as though a curator dug up a hidden gem.

I also get the sense while watching videos of the unbelievable live performances that Prince wasn't made for the world of sampling and covering, of copying and pasting, of virality and memes, not only because of what he produced and how he managed access to it, but also because of his performance of self. A large part of the appeal with Prince is the performer, some un-copyable charisma that he had. Whereas a Beatles or Metallica melody might sound interesting if interpolated by another artist, a cover of a Prince song would just make whomever was covering it look positively un-charismatic by comparison. Access to Prince's live performances is (or at least was) limited to begin with (similarly, this is a reason why Hamilton can still be a phenomenon in the age of digitally reproducible art). It's true that when the artist dies, the recordings (including the recordings of live performances) will live on, but the recordings are once-removed from the actual ecstatic experience of being there, with the performer, with the crowd. So watching them also makes me sad. Once the performer dies, the party's over.