Seth Abramson’s Fall from Grace

May 3, 2022

You might know Seth Abramson. He’s not unfamous on Substack and for a long time he’s billed himself as the founder of “post-internet writing”. I’m writing this because an event happened in the news that finally exposed some parts of the legend of Seth that I find unsavory. He has been flirting with what is to me a forbidden line for a long time, but he ultimately crossed it recently. 

The context is important, but the tweets in which I expressed myself are clear. There was in the context of the Ukrainian-Russian war a story about the “Ghost of Kyiv”, supposedly a fighter pilot who shot down a lot of Russian planes. It turns out this was false. The whole time it had been a Ukrainian propaganda effort. But Seth fell for it hook, line, and sinker, and published a full-length story about it on his personal page. 

Many people fell for it, of course. But Seth has long billed himself as the epitome of the “internet writer”, I believe, falsely. And to cling to that kind of oversized personal story in the greedy way that Seth has done, but to fall for a clear propaganda story, completely dissolves his oversized claim to credibility.  It’s a story of Seth’s hubris. It calls for some remorse and humility, but that kind of credibility that he claimed for himself can’t be regained, and never should have existed in the first place. 

The following happened after I called him out on Twitter. I don’t believe it’s unreasonable to say this is not Just Another Twitter Dispute. To a real extent, it is about What We Are Talking About When We Talk About The Internet. I believe it’s worth your time to read, and it will not drag on as long as Seth’s fallacious Ghost of Kyiv story.

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

Having not heard an answer from Seth Abramson, I checked his page, and he blocked me. This strikes me as a pretty Millenial type of problem from beginning to end, especially his final reaction.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

The erroneous “Ghost of Kyiv” love letter is still pinned on his Substack page.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

What seems especially typical about this whole thing is the final reaction, which is for someone like him to stick his head in the sand in response to the final critique telling him that he’s been played.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

This is not personal, per se. On a certain, I think too-empathetic, level, it’s sad that he got played by Ukrainian propaganda. But I think that (particular) pity is outmoded. Every important public intellectual warned us against falling for propaganda in recent decades.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

So, of course we can respond to this by saying the lesson is to not fall for the propaganda line. We can say that you’ll know what is and is not propaganda when it looks and feels something like this incident did. But that’s not enough for me.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

A lot of this has to do with who Seth had set himself up to be, gathering all the credibility he could find to himself in the domain of studying “the internet”, and setting himself up as not just an arbiter of taste, but the only “Example” of Writing In The Internet Age.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

Hubris sums up the personal story. That he would define what “post-internet writing” is, would of course be time-limited. The internet is too deep and too wide for anyone to own the essence of the whole thing.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

Once Seth began to describe himself as a sort of founder of “post-internet writing”, the classic story of hubris took over. His subsequent work was trying to debunk Donald Trump’s words, and prove collusion with Russia, the whole bag. But overall the quality couldn’t hold.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

On the subject of Donald Trump, Seth was ever trying to be current with him. Overall I have issues with people who thought that they’d catch Trump in some criminality in the White House. Maybe they had reason to worry. But meanwhile they lost sight of the electoral board.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

Trump was always going to win or lose in his project of personal grandeur on the basis of the election. Politics is elections, as opposed to prosecutions. Elections have an element of public education, which Seth and others going after the minutiae didn’t do.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

I’ve often felt a bit of “shade” thrown at me by a certain set of liberal sensibility for “not doing enough to get rid of Trump.” I admit I didn’t buy into the obsession for or against him, I just opposed him. He bored me by trying too hard to be cool and hip, I suppose.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

Although I didn’t “try to get rid of Trump” in the various legal mobilizations that the citizenry were doing, there was never in these mobilizations any mention of something important. So I knew the 2020 election was going to be the only way we’d get a different guy in office.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

The liberal side wanted to show that Trump was not fit for office and so on. But despite their passion and desire, they just plain missed on one source that proved that argument. Wayne Barrett’s early Trump biography. Not using those facts was a big whiff on an easy pitch.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

There’s no discussion of Trump’s political career in that book, but there’s a plain reason: Barrett passed away, and the book was about older misdeeds. This was the kind of book that spoke to character and moral fiber, of lack thereof. It was the type that wins elections.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

I kept waiting for someone to mention that book and the facts in it, in the first election, in public opinion efforts against his agenda, in the midterms, in the second election, but there was nothing, and those against Trump barely won out.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

So it seems clear to me that America doesn’t read or doesn’t know what to read. If I’m wrong that’s more than ok. But if it’s true then at least it’s been said.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

This book by Wayne Barret should have been read, but me replying to every question about my opinion of Trump by recommending that book didn’t move the needle at all, no matter how early (2016) or late (2022) in this nightmare I did. I’m not at fault for it not being read.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

But this issue with Seth and his fall from grace isn’t really about Trump or the Wayne Barrett book you really should have read about Trump, although he was as obsessed as all of Trumps friends and some of Trump’s enemies were with Trump for years and years.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

This is really about someone who billed himself as “the guy” representing “the internet” and its writers, who gained some success under that label, and who fell apart because he really took the wrong path with it.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

There’s millions of writers on the internet, and even more that are yet to be, doing wildly different work, which can’t be encapsulated by a minority academic discipline like “post-internet writing.” And certainly they aren’t here to kowtow to one man as the discipline’s leader.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

It doesn’t sit well with me for someone to self-define as “the definition” of something so common. And of course, it didn’t used to be so common, and if that’s your line then Seth’s time of holding onto that position by fiat is over, as opposed to never was.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

But I still doubt that Seth ever defined by any true standard what the internet is or what writing on it means, and neither anyone else in general. It’s neither so different or so particular as to deserve some minority academic discipline with niche experts and credentials.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

Here’s why I care enough about this to attack. There are some rules derived from common sense about the internet, one of which is “Don’t get sucked in” and another which is “Don’t fall for the propaganda”. Seth got sucked in, and fell for the propaganda.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

Seth set himself up as an expert on “post-internet writing” before both getting sucked in, and then falling for the propaganda. And when he set himself up as an expert, he pushed into the mainstream the idea that “internet writing” has niche experts, and that he was foremost.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

Seth also substituted a lot of his particular circumstances in, and portrayed them as universal truths and/or necessities for an “internet writer”. In a certain sense, this is unwarranted gatekeeping. It’s reasonable to view his fall in light of this hubris.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

There is also an unfortunate sense that unfortunately can’t go unmentioned, in which in the person and self-created myth of Seth Abramson as Internet Expert, the public has been sold a deep falsehood that “internet writing” is inherently lesser in quality than other writing.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

This is not unrelated to the earlier books Seth published, in a “Metamodern” trilogy. Unfortunately for us all, they really aren’t the solid foundation on which I’d expect a figure who then aspired to a presentation of expertise and genius to be resting on.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

We live in “interesting” times when shallow appearances often pass for quality. I think this has something to do with a sense of panic that pervades our circumstances, in an age when there is no Authority telling those who don’t know what to do, what to do.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

I think this panic over having no recourse to rote instruction leads some to turn to “comforting” presentations of expertise on subjects that are too large for expertise to exist. This is no new problem; it is an ancient one, and completely solvable under our modern system.

May 3rd 2022

Ian Hoopingarner @IanHoopingarner

What is new in this problem that Seth’s fall represents, is simply the subject matter: among those topics which are too large for there to be expertise, should be included “the internet”: which is not a small thing.

May 3rd 2022

(Edit/NB 5/3/22 8:23pm: I removed a few repetitions of the same tweet. Still getting used to this. 🤷‍♂️)