Much Ado About Tiedrich

In response to Scott Alexander.

I’ve been unusually quiet on Substack for the past few weeks. This is for two reasons: First, I did something incredibly cringe and started a new job, so I’ve had less time to write. And second, even though I’ve managed to write at least something every day, I don’t think most of the things I’ve written have merited their own blog post. For fear of wasting your time, dear reader, I’ve only hit publish on the articles about the most important things, like that insufferable Pete Buttigieg dance from the 2020 primary and Murray Rothbard’s years-long catfight with Ayn Rand. (Here at United States of Exception, we hold our audience in the highest esteem.)

In the next week or so, I expect to send out a few gems to your inbox. I’m working on a response to

Amos Wollen

’s wonderful article about insect farming that should be done in a few days. And I was intrigued and a bit miffed by Richard Hanania’s article about liberalism, narrative, and internationalism, which is close enough to my bailiwick that I can probably crank out a 2,000-word response in no time.¹

In any case, I thought it was too long since I’ve published anything, so I whipped up this post yesterday, and I’m planning on publishing a few of my unfinished drafts tomorrow.

But enough with the housekeeping. Now, onto the show…

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On Tuesday I made an appearance in the Substack major leagues when Scott Alexander wrote a blog post about my blog post, “The Most Least Remarkable Person on the Internet.”

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According to my Substack dashboard, if you’re subscribed to this blog, there’s a 40% chance that it’s because you saw “Most Least Remarkable” and you thought it was funny. But if you didn’t, or you don’t remember, the basic story is this: I discovered that one of the earliest posters on the internet, Jeff Tiedrich, has a wildly popular Substack where he assembles screenshots of Tweets and inserts Tweet-length commentary in between them. Most of his commentary consists of calling Republicans “fuckity fuckfaces” or “feckless chucklefucks” or some other epithet, and thousands of people pay him good money for it. I wrote an article about Tiedrich and his followers where I said they’re intellectually lazy low-information voters, and for some reason it became popular. Tiedrich restacked it and his followers left hundreds of vitriolic comments in my replies. Here’s a representative sample assembled by Scott:

Ironically, this person spent several days following me online and left comments on my other articles about how obsessed they think I am with Tiedrich.

I appreciate the juxtaposition here between: (1) a non sequitur about me hating gay people, and (2) a cheeky oblique reference to bottoming that’s premised on the idea that bottoming is something I should be ashamed of. (They did, in fact, clock me as a motherfuckee.)

As Scott captioned this one, “Needless to say, Glenn is a Harris supporter.”

Scott wrote a characteristically levelheaded response in which he muses about when it’s permissible to say mean things on the internet. While the Tiedrich comments were in poor humor, he says my “implied conclusion” that the sort of person who enjoys Tiedrich’s drivel is a “lesser life form” is also very mean and qualitatively no different from my critics. The only apparent difference between me and the Tiedrich followers is that my article is smarter, funnier, and better written than their pithy comments:

It feels strange to call length itself a virtue. But if each of the comments against Glenn had been a two thousand word essay, I think I would have minded less.

I think that’s mostly right, and I don’t disagree that I was mean to Tiedrich and his followers. What else would you call this?

Every day, [Tiedrich] farts out some slop with precisely zero intellectual value, and then hundreds of thousands of people lap it up and some of them give him money for it.

(If you didn’t catch that, I said Tiedrich’s followers eat his farts.)

The one place where Scott and I seem to disagree is whether the Tiedrich comments were actually beyond the pale. I get the impression that Scott has a visceral disgust toward Tiedrich-tier content, but I actually got a lot of entertainment value out of reading the comment section. And insofar as I have an opinion about online incivility, my heuristic is basically that anything goes. I don’t have a sophisticated justification for this, but I agree with that viral Tyler, The Creator Tweet: Cyberbullying isn’t real. Just walk away from the screen. It’s literally that simple.

You might be confused that I’m so blasé about the normative angle here—I talk a lot about ethics on this blog—but I just don’t think it’s very interesting. I’m really more interested in the social science of the Tiedrich phenomenon. Who are these people? Where does their brainrot come from? What do they think they’re accomplishing? If I had the expertise and the resources, I would be scraping the comment sections on Tiedrich’s articles, running a sentiment analysis or a social network analysis or whatever it is sociologists do, and then scouring the data until I really understand what’s happening. Where Scott sees insults, I see data points.

I think this is also why I have such a different interpretation of my original blog post than Scott. He says the primary takeaway is that “[most] people are dumb and want slop.” But “dumb” is a loaded and value-laden term—it presumes that there’s such a thing as general intelligence, for example—and I think it’s much easier and a lot more objective just to say that people are apt to some things and less apt to others, and that most people aren’t apt to intellectualism.

When I said this in the original post, it got some of the Tiedrich followers in a tizzy, but I think it’s obviously true. If you try to get most people to understand a sophisticated argument, like why fish shouldn’t have sex, they immediately shut down and call you crazy. If you try to tell them that Good People can do Bad Things and vice versa, they’ll accuse you of being a member of the opposite political tribe and shut down. They just don’t grasp nuance or counterintuitive thinking.

That’s not a moral judgment of the Tiedrichites. And it doesn’t mean that normal people don’t have any knowledge or skills that are valuable to the world, or even that they do less net good compared to the intellectuals, a lot of whom advocate terrible ideas. I would guess that most engineers, for example, have political views that boil down to “X has better vibes than Y” or “my parents voted for X” or “[Cheeto Hitler / Joe Brandon] is a fucktastic chucklefuck.” When it comes to politics, the intellectuals are a lot smarter than the engineers and wield a lot more influence. And when it comes to building a bridge, the engineers are a lot smarter than the intellectuals.

Accordingly, I don’t look down on Tiedrich readers because I think they’re dumber or lesser than I am. I just think it’s really interesting that they’re overstepping their boundaries. When the only thing you know about politics is that your tribe is good and everyone outside your tribe is bad, and you can’t really articulate why that is without screaming or swearing, a reasonable person would probably shut up about politics. But the Tiedrich followers aren’t reasonable. They’re so confident that they’re right, and so peeved that anyone would disagree with them, that they just can’t help themselves from raging online. Another example:

People like this are clearly out of their depth. Imagine if someone spent hours a day posting about a heterodox engineering theory online and got irrationally mad at people who subscribe to a different theory. Imagine if they accused people who disagree with them of being sock puppets for other people they think are annoying. Now imagine if there was an entire movement of these people. If this movement had a shot at taking over a professional engineering society, that would be a problem. But if they just argued about engineering on the internet all day, it would be a fascinating case study into the pathologies enabled by modern communications technology.

Tiedrich followers are just like engineering deniers. If they wielded political power, that would be a problem. But that would require them to be far smarter about politics—smart enough to have more sophisticated opinions than “the fucking fucker can fuck off all the way to fuckoffistan”—or it would require the political institutions that keep people like them in check to be far weaker. Strong political organizations, like the Democratic Party, have safeguards to prevent a populist upsurge. Unlike the Republican Party, where the MAGA lunatics took over the asylum years ago, the Democrats can keep a lid on Tiedrich followers.

This was really the whole point of the article—not that Tiedrich’s readers are dumb or that it’s dangerous when people are so dumb—but that I had found a group of people who are really, really anthropologically interesting and I wanted to share that with the world. As I described Tiedrich in the original post:

The man may be fascinating, if only for the deeply morbid reason that he’s so far gone down a spiral of impotent rage and negative partisanship that you just can’t help but sneak a glance—like a homeless guy on the subway who keeps muttering to himself—but he doesn’t have any real influence. Unlike the homeless guy, Tiedrich isn’t going to stab anyone.

1. Ironically, the response to Hanania might be my first non-satirical article where I even mention the state of exception. It’s a bit subtle, but to a trained nose Hanania’s argument reeks of Schmitt.