Understanding the affect: a tale of two speeches

by liberal japonicus

I finally listened to Carole Cadwalladr's 2nd TED talk. I started it I think when GftNC recommended it, but had to turn it off and, having returned to it and finished it, I thought about why that was the case. It is instructive to compare the talk to Cadwalladr's first TED talk, which she references in the second one. For me, the emotion of her second TED talk is overpowering and I wasn't sure she would get through the talk. She acknowledges that in the opening when she says

I've been feeling a lot of panic and fear about this talk. And not just for the normal reasons of public speaking, although that's there, too. But it's also because I want to say something meaningful, and I've been overwhelmed by the enormity of what is happening right now. And there's a particular set of circumstances which have also been feeding into my confusion and denial. And that is because the last time that I stood on this stage, it led to a three-year legal battle, culminated in London's High Court, in which it felt like I was on trial for my life, because I was. My career, my reputation, my finances, even my home was on the line. All because I came here to warn you that I didn't think democracy was going to survive the technology that you're building,

On the verge of tears, voice cracking, for me, it is a question of affect. I'm not sure if it is an aspect of living here in Japan, I've always had a tendency to look away when people were in situations where they would prefer that no one saw, but after 30+ years here, it has grown to an almost compulsive degree.

This calls to mind a couple of things. One was Hillary Clinton's nomination acceptance speech. For me, the affect she had gave me a sinking feeling that she was going to lose. To say that now makes me sound like one of those idiotic pundits who diagnose the problems of candidates and campaigns with the 'if he/she just did x, everything would be different'.

Another example from the opposite way is anytime Kemi Badenoch opens her gob (Here, here and here, I won't put longer ones up, but just listen to her in any PMQ or the most recent BBC morning interview where she demands to be allowed to finish, and talks over people.) The affect is, I think, propping Labour up, which I'm happy-ish about, but seems to be drawing attention away from more important issues that need to be addressed

It's easy to focus in on these things, and one can see how them become victim blaming. (It's probably no coincidence that my three examples are women, how does the affect work with men? Lots of examples of men saying cringy things, but nothing from men that strikes me like these three examples)

What is a woman to do? For me, a speech like Julia Gillard gave to the Australian Parliament and Tony Abbot is what I want to hear. However, that speech has been later framed contextually as less anchored by an understandable rage and more of a case of fighting fire with fire, claiming the speech was in response to  a hypocritical motion to remove the Speaker (a former Opposition politician who had become independent and was appointed by Gilliard as speaker) by the opposition. The author of the piece above is an Australian female academic, but there are a number of takes from this direction. Speaking as a person outside of Australia, some these takes feel a bit like a backlash to a woman expressing anger, and this 10 year later look doesn't express that so much. I'm not sure if this is a Liberty Valance "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend."  Still, I'm wondering about that tightrope of affect that women have to negotiate.

Anyway, another open thread for that. The previous one, maybe put your examples of Maga/Musk DOGE examples of idiocy, here maybe talk about what the other side of the ledger needs to do.

Comments

[nous]

I dislike TED talks because I think the genre/medium too often favors presentation and high concept over critical engagement.

I had no problem whatsoever with Cadwalladr's talk, despite my also being uncomfortable with public displays of emotional vulnerability. For me, it's a Scandinavian background thing, but it's also something that I recognize as being bullshit that weaponizes public expression against the targets of abuse and bullying - especially when those targets are women (or from groups that get "feminized" by patriarchal power structures).

I'm sure that giving that talk was literally triggering for her, in the clinical sense of the word in the context of trauma. It was an act of bravery, and defiance, and strength, for her to get up there and open herself up for a second helping of vitriol for the sake of her message.

The most corrosive effect of social media, in my opinion, is the way in which it turns us not into listeners, but into meta-commentators, always already enlisted to respond in real time rather than engaging more thoughtfully and empathetically.

Again, this plays most strongly against the vulnerable.

And oh how I struggle not to fall into the easy extension of this spectator cruelty to Badenoch, or to Musk. Which is not to say that I don't want them to be subjected to public censure and humiliation, merely that I don't want either to allow myself to be habituated to these responses for anyone at risk of being dehumanized by my communities, or to reinforce the public tendency towards these sorts of responses, even when I find the target deserving of public disapproval.

And I do think that any "well this is just how people respond to these emotional displays" discussions that get trotted out while we treat emotional vulnerability as a problem normalizes a lot of patriarchal structures and lets people avoid their own discomfort rather than confronting the harmful injustice of the framing.

Not aiming this personally at you, lj, since you were brave enough yourself to broach the subject in a personally reflective way.

[wj]

The most corrosive effect of social media, in my opinion, is the way in which it turns us not into listeners, but into meta-commentators, always already enlisted to respond in real time rather than engaging more thoughtfully and empathetically.

I would say that the most corrosive effect is how it enables mob behavior and piling on. Before, responding to someone required actually writing a hard copy and mailing it. Whether to the target (which almost had to be a public figure to find their address) or to a Letters To The Editor forum. Amassing a group to join in was quite difficult. Not impossible, but not feasible for "light and transient causes".

Now, a flash mob is all too easy to develop.

[Donald]

I think social media is morally neutral. The worst effect it has it has on everyone who uses it— it makes it harder to concentrate on reading a book. I see that in myself.

But I don’t think you will get too many Palestinians longing for the good old days of mainstream media gatekeepers.

One reason people gave ( I think it was Blinken and Mitt Romney I saw discussing this ) for disliking TikTok was that apparently a great many of its young users were influenced to be on the side of the Palestinians. It was a cliche last year amongst people of that sort— I think one of the Clinton’s said something like this too— that young colllege protestors needed to get off social media and acquire the deep historical knowledge that comes from reading books. Sure. In reality I suspect some of the protestors probably knew far more of the history than some of the people criticizing them for their social media usage.

I know social media can also be awful. I still read Twitter. It is both awful and extraordinary. Nobody who had a Twitter account and followed people like Assal Rad would ever completely trust the MSM. And it isn’t just what appears there, but the links to articles you might not have heard about otherwise.

[Donald]

To be clear, since Assal Rad is not a household name, she is usually the first person I read on Twitter each day.

I don’t completely agree with her media criticism but most of the time I think she is right.

[nous]

I would say that social media is not inherently bad, but it does mediate us in ways that the Milgram Experiment argues make us less likely to feel responsible or connected to the subject of our attention. The person being harmed is not with us in the same way that the others on our side in the comment threads are with us - especially when following a link. Mediation is one of the factors that reduces an individual's sense of moral responsibility.

I'd also argue that the algorithms that drive social media interaction are not morally neutral at all, but are engineered to drive conflict and engagement in a search for click-through revenue.

Whether or not there is moral intent to do harm, it's a recipe for a harmful feedback loop that drives division and conflict.

And the reward system of likes and upvotes tied to that whole system drives the mob behavior that wj points to.

Going back to the original focus of online reactions to uncomfortable displays of emotional vulnerability, the way that these things spread online leave the people affected by the emotion engaging in avoidance behaviors to limit exposure, but encourages those who are excited by cruelty or seeking to avoid cruelty being turned on them by others to enlist others in bullying behavior.

It's possible to use social media in powerfully moral ways, but to do so is often to use it in ways that run against the current of how the designers intend it to be used.

It was less the case in the Web 1.0 era. Blogs like this are a holdover from that earlier era.

[liberal japonicus]

Nous, thanks for those comments. A lot to chew on. I think there's a funny tightrope to walk, where we shouldn't be so quick to look away because it reinforces those patriarchal structures, but if we look too much, we get inured, and maybe even seek it out. Much to think about.

[GftNC]

I can hardly convey how fascinated I am by this post, for several reasons.

1. I was surprised, on such a tech-literate blog, that the Carole Cadwalladr comment and link produced so little (zero) reaction, and now that it has, that reaction is pretty much zero to do with its content. (Full disclosure: I was, to a very tiny extent, one of the 39,000 supporters who enabled her to keep fighting.)

2. I am very interested indeed by lj's problems with CC's affect, as well as HRC's and (in contrast) Kemi Badenoch's. Regarding the first two, I agree that their sex is probably relevant, in that there is a huge, understood and no doubt internalised trope about "crying and emotional women" in the patriarchy, which lj obliquely refers to. I am also inclined to think that his discomfort may indeed partly be because of having internalised Japanese cultural taboos.

On the Kemi Badenoch example. It seems to me (but this is purely in the UK context) that her sense of smug self-assurance is very similar to that of many privately educated upper class men in politics. If her affect particularly bothers the English, I would assume therefore that it is mainly misogyny. The major criticisms I have read of her (in the Guardian, so hardly representative) seem to relate mainly to the content (inadequate), rather than to the manner. But I have no idea how that plays abroad.

And regarding male affect (although I'm not sure it really counts as such), the first example I thought of was Jacob Rees Mogg lounging half supine in the House of Commons. It rightly received plenty of criticism, but possibly not the discomfort caused to lj by the three women he mentions. And Kavanaugh's affect in his confirmation hearing (anger, resentment, entitlement) did receive lots of criticism, but possibly mainly from women for obvious reasons. I can't remember e.g. lj saying anything about it as affect qua affect, although I'm sure he was properly scornful about Kavanaugh in general.

3. On the Julia Gillard example, again I think the various reactions are very interesting. In trying to protect the Speaker, she was of course doing what pretty much any politician under pressure would do, even assuming she knew the extent of his behaviour. And we would probably have objected to that cynicism in isolation had we known all the details. But her affect in the speech was so clearly a reaction, and an absolutely righteous one, to the unbelievable misogyny and contempt with which she had been treated, and to see Abbot's hypocrisy in weaponising a false feminism must have been more than she could bear. I think the speech was magnificent, and fully deserves the iconic status it has achieved, and while I completely understand the context being discussed, it seems to me insulting if anyone (not here, obviously) should imply that it was purely cynically performative.

Other than that, unsurprisingly I too found nous's comments (particularly @08.41) helpful, thoughtful and humane.

[GftNC]

If her affect particularly bothers the English, I would assume therefore that it is mainly misogyny.

I should have said, "that it is mainly misogyny and racism."

[liberal japonicus]

Interesting stuff! Unpacking my post (always a dangerous thing), I don't think I was thinking about _all_ kinds of affect, so the upper class insouciance that Rees Mogg exhibits, or the overwrought anger of Kavanaugh is not really part of what I was thinking about, though it is definitely an issue of affect. But given that Trump can talk about world leaders "kissing his ass" (which some British articles have transposed to "arse", which is fascinating to me, does that make it worse or better?), it's clear that affect doesn't really do much when it is a man. The closest thing I can think of for a male is Elon Musk's comments after Tim Walz was celebrating Tesla stock going down. Musk was like a little kid who had must been bullied on the schoolyard, and it was in a Fox interview, so I can't find a non-fox source, though both Jon Stewart and Seth Myers hit on it. This Buzz Feed article points to the reaction.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/michaelabramwell/elon-musk-reacts-to-tim-walz-tesla-comments

About Badenoch, there is also that quite strange aspect of British conservatism: They often hold out that they are more enlightened in terms of race than Labour because they have more diversity (Badenoch, Patel, Kwartang, Braverman, Patel, Sunak to name the most prominent) but they back policies that are retrograde at best. I'm sure a lot of the talk against Badenoch comes from a view leavened with racism and a lot of it comes from within the Tory party itself, so it is hard for me to agree with the paeans to Tory diversity. It is problematic to argue that this is being an Uncle Tom (not sure what the UK equivalent of that would be) which is sort of a nuclear grade observation, but race within the Tory party is indeed baffling.

Also, I think that folks here aren't ignoring Cadwalladr's work, it is just that it is self-evident that the algorithms and data-harvesting are problematic, the SLAPP on her was self evident, so it's not like we have to convince each other it is the case.

[GftNC]

Interesting stuff indeed, lj. Thanks, and specially for the final para which of course makes perfect sense.

On the Tories' claims for enlightenment on DEI, I find the ones about sexism particularly galling, given that until Teresa May the example they always used was Thatcher, who famously pulled the ladder up after herself.

On substituting "arse" for "ass", I think it was necessary to convey how absolutely extraordinary it was to talk about the leaders of other countries that way. "Ass" might not land here the same way, because the English always think that as a word it's just comic.

[hairshirthedonist]

My only comment on affect consists of two words: "Lindsey Graham."

Thanks for reading!

[Donald]

Nous, I don’t think you responded to my point at all. The experience on the Gaza slaughter is exactly the opposite of what you say for many people— you got a very direct view from many perspectives of what is happening there if you followed it on Twitter. I don’t have time to go on and on about this and anyway I get the sense peoole shut down when I bring up Gaza her, but it is true, someday someone could write a book on Gaza as the first war where atrocities were seen unmediated by the press and where you could see actual propaganda put and refuted in real time. One could also follow in a regular basis the bafflegab put out by the US government under Biden and then Trump, The NYT regularly whitewashed Biden’s policy in a way that wouldn’t survive five minutes of what Ching Miller or Patel try and defend it. ( As one might expect, the double talk and lies are even worse now,). I saw this covered precisely nowhere in the msm. On Twitter it was covered weekly.

Yet all I see in the mainstream and discussions like this one is purely and entirely the other side with no acknowledgement whatsoever of what countless people like myself have seen firsthand. I know damn well what I have seen on Twitter since Oct 7 2023 and it was far far more valuable than any mainstream source.

And here are Romney and Blinken discussing Gaza and TikTok last year, with Romney giving Gaza as an explict reason for reining in TikTok.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/blinken-romney-israel-hamas-tiktok-b2540021.html

I accept that social media is awful in many ways but if people refuse to acknowledge the positive aspects then I suspect their cure will be worse than the disease.

[GftNC]

Donald, FWIW (and I know I'm not your interlocutor on this), I completely accept what you say. I shut down when you (or anyone) brings up Gaza, because my horror, misery and fury about it are almost disabling. I can just about watch a news report on C4 News about it, but it is almost unbearable. My only consolation about the unbelievably terrible massacre of the medics is that the footage on the retrieved phone has finally made even the MSM unable to report Israeli army and government denials and explanations as fact (actually, here they have been reported with serious caveats for a while, but now they can scarcely be related straight-faced).

The damage done to Palestine and the Palestinians is appalling. But as I said to Israel-supporting right-wing friends of mine recently, and to which they had no answer, nobody in my lifetime has done as much damage to Israel as Netanyahu.

[nous]

Donald,

Nous, I don’t think you responded to my point at all. The experience on the Gaza slaughter is exactly the opposite of what you say for many people— you got a very direct view from many perspectives of what is happening there if you followed it on Twitter. I don’t have time to go on and on about this and anyway I get the sense peoole shut down when I bring up Gaza her, but it is true, someday someone could write a book on Gaza as the first war where atrocities were seen unmediated by the press and where you could see actual propaganda put and refuted in real time.

I thought that I was responding to your comments when I said:

It's possible to use social media in powerfully moral ways, but to do so is often to use it in ways that run against the current of how the designers intend it to be used.

It was less the case in the Web 1.0 era. Blogs like this are a holdover from that earlier era.

You are, of course, correct to say that we can follow the course of the activities in Gaza real time on X, but I don't see how this is any different from reading Baghdad Burning back in the Web 1.0 days, and the way that X fragments the discussion and puts its thumb on the scale of visibility through its promotional algorithms actually makes the experience less powerful and less immediate - at least by my standards. Much as I appreciate Hilzoy's Bsky content curation, I don't find it anywhere near as effective as her actual blog commentary from back in the day.

Same with artist content. An artist's social media presence is a shallow echo of the communities that used to interact on their hosted fora back when. I have friends from all over that I still interact with because of the time we spent on those forums. I don't have a single friend I have made on any of their social media pages because those sites don't actually encourage any depth to the exchanges.

[nous]

Shorter me: Social Media is less social than its predecessors. We should more properly call it Para-social Media.

[wj]

nobody in my lifetime has done as much damage to Israel as Netanyahu.

The parallels between Netanyahu and Trump in that regard kinda smack you in the face. Bibi doesn't have as much scope for corruption, at least in an absolute as sense. But still, the parallels, from using an office to avoid legal jeopardy, to trashing their country's reputation (probably for decades, at least), and on and on.

[GftNC]

wj: agreed.

Much as I appreciate Hilzoy's Bsky content curation, I don't find it anywhere near as effective as her actual blog commentary from back in the day.

Me too. In fact, nothing I have ever read on the internet has been as thought provoking, lucid and consistently morally impressive as hilzoy's blogging here at ObWi. I miss it to this day.

[russell]

I watched the Cadwalladr TED talk (although like nous I generally don't watch TED talks).

FWIW, I didn't have any sense that her affect was remarkable in any way. Maybe it's a UK/US cultural divide thing but she seemed basically normal, to me.

[liberal japonicus]

Well, the cultural divide was probably more me/everyone else. Which I feel happens a lot with me, and happens more and more lately.

[Donald]

Ok, that was a response, nous.

Every form of media can be used and misused in the same ways. I think talking about the media distracts from the use. This goes back to the printing press if not before.

I can give three examples from Yemen in the past month where the msm was guilty of dehumanization here it was Twitter that brought context.

The Snapchat scandal. The msm spent 100 percent of its time talking about the security breach and massive incompetence. That deserved all the coverage it got, But the transcript showed the Trump team gloating over the destruction of the girlfriend’s building, AP patently an apartment. That aspect leapt out at people on Twitter. It was utterly ignored in the msm. Finally an NPR reporter asked Goldberg about it, who was clearly startled by such a question out of left field.

There are reasons for this that have nothing to do with the medium and everything to do with groupthink, which is something that is far older than the internet in all its forms and has always been the basis for every form of oppression in human history. It wasn’t the internet that had half the white people I knew growing up using the n- word. The reasons for witch trials in the 16 th and 17 th century were widely disseminated by the printing press. Social media is not better or worse in that regard.

Case 2– Trump putting up a video of an air strike in Yemen wiping out a group of men standing in the open. He said they were terrorists poltting terrorism. Maybe. Or maybe Houthi leaders are not that stupid and this was just a village of men gathering together as Twitter people claimed is common. I don’t know, I do know where I saw the discussion.

Case 3– Background for the Houthi rocket attacks, The press in covering it in its usual groupthink robotic fashion never mentions how they stoped with the ceasefire in Gaza and restarted when Israel started cutting off supplies. Doesn’t justify the attacks in ships but one would like to know that there are actual alternatives to bombing.

On Gaza I could go on and on and on. I can’t even begin to list every example or every issue I saw discussed on Twitter.

But when I read mainstream critics talking about social media, I never see the positive side. I never see the groupthink in the msm laid out as why people use Twitter to escape from it. I don’t see people citing the Romney-Blinken discussion and it was freaking obvious that much of the upset over TikTok was about Gaza and young people being critical of Israel.

So I get super tired of these one- sided discussions. When it comes from the mainstream it is clearly motivated by people with their own desire to control the narrative. Not saying this about you nous, obviously, but it is also obvious that there are bad motives and bad actors on both sides of the social media debate.

[Donald]

Some weird spellcheck errors there, as usual.

[Donald]

Put this in a short way. If the MSM had covered Gaza the way Twitter did, the Biden Administration could not have gotten away with what it did.

Now Trump is different, because Trump is utterly shameless But the more normal sort of politician can to some degree be backed into a corner by exposure of their hypocrisy and cruelty. With Trump it is literally part of his brand.

[russell]

Well, the cultural divide was probably more me/everyone else.

Had the same thought about myself.

I very much appreciate Cadwalladr, it's a challenging time to put yourself out there in a visible way.

[GftNC]

In today's Observer, Carole Cadwalladr's piece about giving that TED talk, and (in light of our conversations about AI and IP) her "discussion" afterwards with Sam Altman:

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2025/apr/20/carole-cadwalladr-ted-talk-this-is-what-a-digital-coup-looks-like-its-not-too-late-to-stop-trump-and-the-silicon-valley-broligarchy-from-controlling-our-lives-but-we-must-act-now