Blog P.I.

Sometimes the blogs take you down. Sometimes, you take yourself down first. The latter is especially true of those who engage in sock puppetry, a too-cute nickname for an activity itself too cute by half. Our latest practicioner is arts critic Lee Siegel, who seems to be everyone’s least favorite writer at The New Republic.

To recap: During the Armstrong/Townhouse/Kos/Zengerle knockdown in June, Siegel stepped in, univited, to unleash an overheated rejoinder to the bloggers, including the spasmodic coinage of a frivolous term, “blogofascism.” Flash forward to two weeks ago, where Siegel took after English professor and, ah, pedophile expert James Kincaid, who had analyzed the national JonBenet Ramsey obsession for Slate earlier in the week. Siegel’s argument, if that’s what you could call it, was that Kincaid was a pedophile himself:

What a shame that editors still publish his disingenuous screeds against the media’s sexualization of children. They really just seem like ways for Kincaid to hide his own appetite for children behind his indictment of all of us hypocritical “voyeurs” out there.

Among the lefty bloggers who tuned in first, his attacks were deemed so incomprehensible and so unfair that it was beneath even TNR. Marty Peretz and Peter Beinart may offend them politically, but Siegel offended their sensibilities. Within days, a decade-old Siegel column more or less about having the opportunity to sleep with a flirtatious, 16-year-old Uma Thurman surfaced, and brought further ridicule. Ezra Klein suggested it was a case of projection, and though Siegel’s ancient TNR piece seemed to be about not wanting to to do so, it was too on-topic not to become an issue.

And then, without fanfare, Siegel’s blog disappeared from the site, and in its place appeared a mea culpa from editor Franklin Foer:

Unless you’d been reading the comments to these posts, you would have missed the exchange that brought it all down:

One wonders if Siegel or his accomplice meant for the handle to be quite so apropos — “sprezzatura” refers to artwork produced from a genteel, aristocratic point of view, a reaction against the more spontaneous work of rising young artists. Sound like an ongoing feud that you know of?

It’s unfortunate that TNR has removed his blog in toto, as we bloggers would really like the chance to go back through and dig for more

Not that it deterred the swarm, of course. At this point, the rightosphere jumped in as well: John Podhoretz dubbed him “perhaps the single most pretentious person in America today,” and Ann Althouse rediscovered just how little she’d liked his writing. The fact that Siegel/Sprezzatura was convinced jhschwartz was Mark Greif from the literary journal n+1 was almost an afterthought, as was the identity of Sprezzatura’s other master — if indeed such a person exists. To date, the kerfuffle has inspired not just a parody post by Michael Bérubé, but also a parody blog by person(s) unknown.

As Blog P.I. has noted before, it’s been a banner year for sock puppets already — Michael “Mikekoshi” Hitzlik, Glenn “Ellison” Greenwald, even Jason “George Gooding” Leopold. As in the case of Greenwald, hubris played a big factor in this un-socking. For both writers, the temptation to praise oneself in a manner even one’s biggest fans are unlikely to do was insurmountable; this hubris [in part] drives the similar impulse to pour self-generated adulation into one’s own Wikipedia entry. Had Siegel (or his rumored accomplice) just toned it down, Sprezzatura might still be antagonizing Siegel’s antagonists. And whereas the semi-retired Greenwald is unfireable, Siegel like Hitzlik before him is (or was) eminently vulnerable.

Another interesting aspect is just how muted the swarm has been. Possible reasons include the fact that Siegel did himself in, as well as the possibility that Greenwald’s allies are unwilling to make themselves hypocrites. A typical half-hearted criticism comes from Gavin M. at Sadly, No!:

[S]ock-puppetry is bad and embarrassing, but on the scale of human folly, it must rate somewhere near swiping parking spots or soaping postage stamps — a meniality for which one’s own conscience ought to be the thing most permanently troubled.

Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money offers some good thoughts, but still downplays the charge:

It seems to me that most incidences of sock puppetry come from writers who are moving to the blogosphere from another medium, and who are unused to a) the immediate feedback, b) the vitriol, and c) the freedom to be whatever or whoever you want to be. I also, like Gavin, think that sock puppetry is a relatively mild crime as blogospheric sins go. Siegel’s examples were particularly pompous and mean-spirited, but I still suspect that sock puppetry is the excuse more than the cause for his suspension, and that the real reason is that his blog proved to be an embarassment (and perhaps even legal liability) for TNR.

Needless to say, I can’t agree, at least not entirely. Besides plagiarism, what could be worse? (The pedophilia accusation was likely a factor, though legally speaking, Siegel never outright accused Kincaid of being an active pedophile; he merely (if that’s the word for it) suggested Kincaid had the inclination). Sock puppetry is no different from astroturfing, which bloggers usually despise, only it’s done by an individual or two in service of ego rather than many individuals in service of an outside interest. In the blogosphere you have little more than your integrity to go on, and when that’s shot, well, at least your friends will (probably) still link to you. Atrios, incidentally the object of scorn in Olly’s post preceding this one, gets it right:

Simply having an alternate identity online is fine. What isn’t fine is when there’s implicit deception involved which is almost automatic if you’re assuming a new identity to defend yourself. There’s no reason I have to be “Atrios” everywhere on the internets, but if I assume the name “Atrios Rulezzzz!” and run around the internets talking about how Atrios is human perfection defined then I will have succeeded in making a supreme ass out of myself. And if one, Mary Rosh-like, starts inventing tales (I was in John Lott’s class and he was the best professor ever!) then you’ve moved into the realm of explicit deception…”

I’m reminded of the advice Ray Stantz gave to Peter Venkman early in a classic film of the 1980s:

Don’t cross the streams.

Why? It would be bad. You can have as many online identities as you see fit, and they can say whatever you’d like, just so long as they don’t interact as if they were different people (the number of longtime Internet users still using the handle they first logged on with is vanishingly small). True, the Ghostbusters got away with it at the end of the movie, just as as many (perhaps most) sock puppeteers escape undetected. But as web literacy rises, it’s easier and easier to root out the cheaters. When called out, the consequences can be dire. Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light — or at least losing your job and reputation.

P.S. The first half of this post’s headline was borrowed from S,N!

P.P.S. As far as I am aware, this post has the most 80s-centric header yet.