I’m really enjoying using twitter as a medium in which to do philosophy, because it forces me to make an argument that is organised in chunks, and to ensure that those chunks are more or less well formed and reasonably compressed. It then allows me to capture those thoughts here, and edit, extend, or recompress them. It also lets me use hyperlinks instead of references, which is impressively liberating. What comes out isn’t exactly perfect, but that’s the point: to enable one to make things better and better beyond the suffocating bounds of the optimal. As I have said many times before, I can be concise, but I find it much harder to be brief, but the twitter-blog feedback loop is helping me to work on that. Moreover, it has allowed me to think a bit more about the writing processes of different philosophers throughout history, some of whom are more or less accessible depending on the way they were able to write and permitted to publish.
I feel like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein would have loved twitter, while Leibniz would have preferred the blogosphere, and Plato would have immersed himself in youtube (Socrates: That’s all very well Glaucon, but you have not answered question with which we began: are traps gay?). I think Hegel would have preferred a wiki, and would have been a big contributor to nLab. I would have loved to have been Facebook friends with Simone Weil or Rosa Luxemburg, but I can imagine getting caught in flame wars with Marx and Engels if I stumbled into the wrong end of a BBS (Engels: Do you even sublate, bro?). I desperately wish I could subscribe to Bataille’s tumblr, or browse the comments Baudrillard made on /r/deepfakes before it got banned. I know the world would be infinitely richer for de Beauvoir and Firestone’s Pornhub comments, but we should be thankful we were spared Heidegger and Arendt’s tindr logs. However, I’m pretty convinced that nothing would have stopped Kant from thinking very hard for a couple decades and then publishing all his thoughts in several big books. We’d have gotten a few good thinkpieces from him (Clickbait: ‘This man overturned the authority of tradition using this one weird trick, now monarchies hate him!’), but nothing could have stopped his architectonic momentum.
DEONTOLOGISTICS 