Corey Robin has posted a brief comment to his blog, entitled
Please, no more of your light in dark times (see below).
In it, he expresses his problem with the way some people (mostly writers, journalists and academics) precede some bit of personal (or personal-adjacent) good news with cringey formulations in which characterize their announcement as "light in dark times". It is, Robin feels, unnecessary.
But is it?
Robin makes it clear he's describing microblogging posts, on platforms whose MO is almost always to encourage the writer to feel that they are publishing to a group of friends and "followers", a sort of mini Christmas Letter cohort, when they are in fact publishing to the known universe. Mountain ranges of covertly collected and correlated data depend on this.
Microblogging platforms thereby foster "drive-by community" and "paintball interaction". Many people have learned this the hard way, finding themselves confronting a nasty comment from an unknown (often anonymous) respondent whom they never dreamed would read their post. There are now multiple stories of people posting thoughtless or tasteless jokes (to what they thought was an understanding circle of friends) before boarding a plane only to find that they'd lost their position and/or livelihood by the time they landed.
People who have posted the sort of good news Robin is pointing to have, often enough, learned how easily it can be perceived as a clueless proclamation of their privilege. As a result, I believe, there has developed a posting style among them which tries to (obliquely) acknowledge their privilege before others point it out to them: "I know that this is a good thing in a shitty world. I know that I am fortunate."
It's far from perfect. We still haven't nearly figured out this "publishing personal information to the world" yet... to some extent, many technofeudalist enterprises bank on this fact.
Given that context, proclaiming "Please, no more of your light in dark times" can seem a little like standing in your doorway yelling "Get off my lawn!".
See how that works?
Why do academics and journalists and writers need to announce their professional good news or that of a friend or colleague or department with these cringey “amid the dark times, a bit of light” introductions? If you think these are dark times, the fact that a journal just accepted your article—or a publisher signed a contract for your co-edited anthology or your friend is now the dean or a favorite writer just got hired by a magazine—well, you can’t really believe any of this illuminates the darkness. Can’t you simply tell us your good news and trust that we’ll be happy for you without our having to run it through the cash register of the universe to see whether and […]
