Avoiding Phony Universals
Speak from your experience, not phony authority
A bit of a diversion, for me at least; we’ll get back to politics soon.
We love to say our preferences are universal.
OK, see what I did there? Logicians might say I committed a logical fallacy—a hasty generalization; advocates might point out that I offered no evidence at all; rhetoricians might more charitably describe what I’ve done as a handshake. I want to add at least a fourth: I spoke in the phony universal.
The phony universal is ubiquitous on the Internet. (Yes, logicians and critics, I know—but spend some time on the Internet and see if you disagree that this is a widespread phenomenon.) It’s not an invention of the Internet—people have been using the construction forever—but online communication helps it flourish. Indeed, because the natural case of the phony universal is the first-person-plural—”we”—it’s a great tool for audience-building (and audience capture), because if you don’t accept the premise, you stop subscribing.
Despite its ubiquity, however, the phony universal is both harmful and easy to avoid. It’s harmful because, well, it’s a phony claim about something that isn’t universal. Too often, online discourse collapses into Flanderization, in which quips or memes substitute for analysis. Phony universalism accelerates this by collapsing varied phenomena (U.S. foreign policy, Republicans, gender roles) into plausible and unchallenged stereotypes. (Plausibility, remember, is a result of audience expectations.) That can lead to superficial and even wrong predictions—witness the seeming inability of many Blueskyers to understand that Trump isn’t (just) a stooge for Putin on Ukraine, for instance. And it avoids making an argument by simply asserting a truth.
It’s also just darn annoying. The impetus for this essay comes from an unusual place: the exuberant love for books and librarians that a lot of online folks express. I’m no enemy of either, to be clear—they’re great! I like books and waffles!—but the fetishization of both online is a prodigious engine for phony universalism. Books make you a good person! Libraries are essential for democracy! Eh, probably not—there’s lots of bad people reading books and lots of good people who don’t; there’s some fine libraries in autocracies and some good democracies without dead-tree warehouses. Of course, that’s not what anyone means; what they mean is unobjectionable (reading books cultivates intellect and taste; the free flow of information matters to free societies) but eventually what you say, literally, becomes what you mean, figuratively, even if you didn’t mean to. Even phony universals meant for good are bad.
The good news is that it’s simple to get away from the phony universal: just change “we” to “I”. Instead of “We love X” or “X is important for everyone!!1!” you can just say “I love X” or “X is important for me”. The bad news is that what is simple isn’t easy.
The phony universal has always existed, but the Internet is a hospitable environment in which it flourishes.
The phony universal is an adaptive reaction to the structure and tone of online discourse. The structural story is simply told. The platforms on which we publish reward engagement, and a phony universal drives engagement of both the me-too and the reverse phony-universal kind (“What! Nobody does that!”). By contrast, legacy media editors, God love ‘em, would routinely strike out those sorts of claims with the same objections I described earlier. (Marshall McLuhan totally vindicated—the medium is the message.)
The tonal story is more complicated. The arc of the Internet bends toward the conversational, and conversations don’t come with footnotes—they exist in sloppy generalizations, imprecise descriptions, and invocations of the inarticulable. (I urge you to follow and learn from David Gibson on how conversation, and the analysis of conversation, differ from formal argumentation.)
In general, online discourse is more informal, more iterative, and less internally complete than print culture . Sometimes this is obvious—conversational podcasts and video podcasts enshrine parasociality-as-discourse-production—and sometimes it’s less so. When I write a newsletter, for instance, I don’t expect it to stand on its own the way I expect my academic journal articles to be self-contained; if someone objects or if I explain myself poorly, I can always return to it as part of the broader online conversation.
The consequence is that generalization and sweeping claims fit within the tenor of online discussion. Any claim I advance in this medium, then, carries a lower expectation on the part of audience and producer that it’s meant to be taken strictly literally. That allows me to dispense with a lot of throat-clearing and scene-setting that I would need in other registers; it allows audiences to have material they read rather than cite.
Of course, there are dangers and annoyances. There’s the pancake-waffle collapse where people read too much into silences. There’s the subtler misreadings caused by audiences who haven’t updated expectations about form. If you grew up with (traditional, American) print culture, your habits of relating to online conversations will be ill-adapted, just as people from ask-cultures struggle with guess-culture interactions.
Aside: Ask and Guess Cultures In Ask Cultures, people just ask what others want; in Guess Culture, people seek to avoid embarrassment or difficulty for their partner, and hence seek to infer what others want to avoid directness. To speak in stereotypes, contrast a New Yorker and a Japanese style.
More grievous are the frictions that come up when people assert a phony universalism that someone rejects. Objection and response might be the warp and woof of online conversation, but they’re still acts that can be perceived as (or just be) hostile in ways that produce harms superfluous to purpose. You can make an enemy when you just wanted to make a point.
And then there’s the long-term harms to thinking. Speak freely in generalizations and you’ll soon tolerate too much sloppiness—not only in your presentation but in your internal thinking. We tend to think to the level that we’re invited, and thinking too much in Internet degrades organic intelligence.
What can we do to avoid these problems?
First, stop speaking in universals. Just speak your truth, in the demotic sense: I like pancakes is truer than Everyone likes pancakes. It takes hardly a moment to turn a reaction into a thought. If the reaction can’t survive the translation it doesn’t deserve to be expressed. And as a bonus, you’ll have a lower chance of catching strays (even the dullest troll can’t dispute your pancake-liking) and a higher chance of making a dent in the discourse by providing a point of view rather than a reiteration.
The other half is to stop consuming and encouraging slop. Slop existed before AI; it is not only dangerous because of online users, from Boomers to Gen Z, being memed into support for one of the 31 flavors of extremism. Even worse, however, is how slop-consumption leads to slop-production. You have to set higher standards for yourself—and to avoid phony universalism here I will recast this in exemplary fashion: I have to set higher standards in what I write and consume for myself, and I’ll bet this rings true for you as well.
I dunno. Wary of this. I’m reminded of Twain’s line (too lazy to look up the exact wording) that analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog - interesting but the frog dies.