In the old days, there was a distinction between good and bad that no longer exists. It related to, say, criminals, but it also existed separately in the field of taste. A limited number of outlets supported a limited number of things as good, and through respect for this idea we all stood on firm ground. Who is this charlatan who can’t find his moments of baited breath in the protean shifts of Abbey Road? We knew what to think and roughly how to think it.
Then came the internet, and the number of outlets we could follow for tips and tricks ballooned exponentially. Now, the opinions of the many counted over the judgment of the few and, crucially, it became the +1, the upvote and the signal boost that carried the weight. But undermining this new, joyous, democratic celebration was a motley crew of rude, bitter and self-regarding misanthropes. “This sucks,” they would say – without hoping to encourage, or offering an alternative, or giving of themselves at all. These were the purveyors of snark.
And that was how things were until November, when Gawker, a conversational American news site, published an extremely long essay by its features editor, Tom Scocca. Scocca had seen snark decried too much – Buzzfeed had hired a literary editor who didn’t believe in bad reviews, was the specific straw that did for the camel – and decided to sprinkle a little context. Yes, there is snark. But why? What is the cause of all this mean-spirited stuff-bashing? What is it reacting to? “It is reacting to smarm,” he says.
In a deft flipping of the argument, Scocca argues that snark is actually a product of the “crusades against negativity” that we can all see: in criticism of the arts, in the pursuit of ‘good news stories’ in journalism, even, say, in Bertie Ahern, Charlie McCreevy and Brendan O’Connor’s famous discomfort with those who questioned the integrity of the boom.
He predicates his introduction of ‘smarm’ as a concept on a body of work he found criticising its evil twin. In books, essays, tweets, the field of public relations and especially in the oeuvre of the Canderel Kerouac himself, Dave Eggers, Scocca identifies the idea that ‘it’s nice to be nice’ as an insidious force.
He quotes David Denby, the New Yorker’s film critic, as follows: “Snark is the expression of the alienated, of the ambitious, of the dispossessed.” In this one-sentence definition, lifted from Denby’s book on snark, we can already imagine how the ramifications spider outward into the world. Snark is familiar to us as the tool of the ‘hater’, bane of every rapper and reality television star. The hater is alienated – they are outsiders to the praise circle. The hater is ambitious – they want what I have. The hater is dispossessed – they have nothing, which is why they want.
But this is dangerous. Why does negativity equate to jealousy? The smarmers of the world want to control the discourse. When Margaret Thatcher died last year, the BBC produced a ponderous thinkpiece with a quote from a real-life ‘etiquette expert’, who hoped people would be “kind enough to say they didn’t agree with her”. If you hated her, we were told persistently, you should suppress your opinion. Positivity is what we want.
In the immediate aftermath of Scocca’s article appearing on Gawker, the author himself had an instructive argument on Twitter with Kenji Lopez-Alt, a molecular gastronomy-type chef from New York with 23,000 followers. After sparring with some straw men and ad hominems, Lopez-Alt clarified that he merely wished Scocca’s article had been more constructive. He had hoped for “debate likely to elucidate different viewpoints to either side rather than shut down conversation”.
Scocca had pretty much just invented the binary opposition of smarm and snark a day previously, and yet here was a public figure demanding that he be more sensitive to both and find a compromise to suit everyone. That is smarm in action, and smarm, in its effort to smother everything, is justification in itself to say something even if you have nothing nice to say.
Start here:
Tom Scocca, ‘On Smarm’ (bit.ly/on_smarm)
Scocca’s original Gawker essay clocks in at almost 10,000 words and features some pretty fiery prose in its assault on Dave Eggers, the American political system and the rotting core of Western civilisation. It’s probably worth a read.
Malcolm Gladwell, ‘Being Nice Really Isn’t So Awful’ (bit.ly/being_nice)
The world-beating journalist and author defends himself, smarm and Dave Eggers in a piece that rehearses what Scocca said and makes some fairly valid points about his selective reading. Useful for balance.
RapGenius exegesis (bit.ly/rap_genius)
The rap explanation site RapGenius for some reason annotates a portion of the essay about Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing, in a confusing piece of internet that is worthwhile both because it’s baffling and because it shows how individual communities are affected by what Scocca has highlighted.
Words: Karl McDonald / Illustration: Fuchsia MacAree
