Frank Kogan

In regard to your self-insulting words: Perhaps we should discuss this more thoroughly behind a friends wall on your own lj, but I've been meaning to post a comment there suggesting that your constant anguish and self-doubt demonstrate why — at least in the short-run — the hallway tends to stymie and strangle the classroom online: one's first impulse in a conversation is to wonder where one's self is potentially under threat — how you come across personally and what social type you're perceived as. So the need to identify types and alliances and social markers and hairstyle is way more immediate than the need to understand someone else's actual ideas. We're likely programmed biologically to look out for risks first, before seeking opportunities. The mind tends to shut off once one arrives at a position appropriate to the sort of person one is. Examining ideas and rethinking one's typologies enough to be surprised — that comes later, if at all. (But again, if you don't shut off, this ought ultimately to help you do a better job of understanding people and types and alliances and threats etc. So there doesn't have to be a tradeoff between hallway and classroom.)

The word "co-opt" is stereotyped and lazy in Eric Weisbard's formulation. Specifically, he's being stereotyped and lazy in assuming that the white middle class* always "co-opts" and never adapts and intensifies. (Which Eric doesn't necessarily assume. It was just a lazy sentence he wrote.) Also, for a rebellion to turn truly disruptive, I'd think it would have to substantially commodify itself in order to finance itself. But commodifying something doesn't necessarily tame it. Suppose there's a bigger market for it untamed than tamed.

*Eric didn't use the word "middle class," but he should have. Historically, rebellions that stick tend to come from the disaffected middle class, not from the mostly powerless and definitely not from true outsiders, who have little constituency. At least, that's what my shallow reading of history tells me.