On Critical Thinking: Why it's good to have hate in your heart

Criticism falls short in the digital-age because our reality has become delusion.

‘Ours is not an age of intellectual self-confidence, and among the intellect’s modern functions, the criticism of culture is scarcely regarded as one of its most indispensable.’ — Giles Gunn, Irregular Metaphysics and the Criticism of Culture (1987).

Hating (critical thinking) is essential to culture. 

A perfect Sunday consists of scrolling through various social media feeds and rattling the bars of the iron cage when shown content that is tone deaf, wildly incorrect, or needs to be erased off the face of the earth with the creator censured for life. We were more charitable in the early days; we just kept scrolling, or, at most, checked the comments to see if people agreed that the post was stupid. A voice echoed in the back of the mind: If you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

It would be a disservice to the internet if we continued to allow mediocrity to slide.

Who are we to deny ourselves the pleasure of helping someone reflect on their digital footprint? We are slaves to the algorithm; as much as we keep hitting uninterested, Big Tech knows we have masochistic tendencies.

We are not condoning hate speech, cancelling, or the like. We are arguing the case for you to spend at least five more seconds thinking about the posts the algorithm is showing you in a world where we overproduce and overconsume content.

Pre-Twitter, those interested in arts and culture relied on critics in large publications to tell them what was valuable to go and experience. People would check the Sydney Morning Herald every Thursday to know which movies were worth going to the cinema for. Yesterday, someone most likely pirated Her (2013) because an anonymous cuck on Letterboxd gave it five stars and they thought their one-sentence review was clever. Taste has always been arbitrary, but critics have always been the arbitrators.

The public needs criticism. In The Function of Criticism (1984), Terry Eagleton laments that the critic is a repairer of the ‘public sphere’. The critic’s role is to observe and aid the public in understanding and engaging with culture more effectively; they are a disseminator of abstract information, and we trust them to tell us honestly what is worth our money-time-energy. As Bruno Latour points out in An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto” (2010), criticism has done “a wonderful job of debunking prejudices, enlightening nations, and prodding minds”. Seeds planted by critics foster discourse over coffee, the lens which we should view The Sopranos with, or why Andrew Scott’s Hamlet is perfect. 

Criticism falls short in the digital-age because our reality has become delusion. We have lost the tangibility of culture because it moved into our pockets. We watch whatever we want, see any painting we want, listen to whatever music we’d like at the very instant we desire. There is an apparent inaccessibility of journalism, even with the world at our fingertips. The most valuable critique is behind a paywall, and users would rather not oblige. It would be remiss to disregard the importance of our more egalitarian information services, however we do not want to sign up for your mediocre fortnightly Substack newsletter to read lukewarm-takes: just send us a voice note instead. The form of mid-20th century poor-takes came as flippant in-conversation comments that blew off with the wind. People who continue this behaviour embed poor-takes on the internet forever. Do not let their stupidity slip through the cracks.

The accessibility and connectedness of online information renders the careful thought of the critic obsolete. An eminent example of the modern critic (or lack thereof) is the Sydney Food Influencer, who articulately describes the food as “so yum” and the restaurant having “great vibes”. The reel is immediately saved and we go to that very restaurant the next day, inevitably disappointed. We have long been aware of Instagrammability but these food reels exemplify the framework of “vibes” that now uphold our generation’s cultural critique. The lexicon of our ‘critics’ has devolved into vague impressions, waiting for the affirmation of a moral ground from which to disagree, forgetting that you can hate something just because.

These vibe-core anti-intellectual hyper-moralised post-critique reels-pilled chronically online positions feed into the decline in media literacy and comprehension: case in point, every Twitter thread ever. When everyone in the world has an opinion equally platformed, our ability to discern authoritative, credible voices becomes a difficult task. It is simply our duty to arbitrate taste back into the world. Good criticism involves identifying the why. Looking to understand your subject’s point of view and assessing the efficacy of the statement they are making. In the polluted sea of misinformation, miscommunication, and missing the point, exercising critical thinking is what enables us to evolve like the fish that flopped onto land and grew legs. The current zeitgeist of anti-intellectualist discourse exemplifies a worrying aversion to critique, shielded by the invincible defence of “let people enjoy things”. When all culture is considered “good” (media, arts, food), the existence of any standard is nullified. If everything is good and nothing is bad, then good means nothing at all. We ought to think critically about the rise of the alpha male/trad wife dichotomy or why being a ‘26 year old teenage girl’ should get you strange looks. 

We’re begging the question now, so why should we be haters?

The hater emerges as the modern critic. Critics anchor cultural and social discussion, whether you agree with them or not. These individuals uphold steadfast moral, aesthetic, and cultural principles, holding creators/institutions accountable for their output in the world. (See select commentary Youtubers, keyboard warriors, and Slavoj Žižek.) When we have all become creators, why shouldn’t we all be critics, too? 

As Giles Gunn establishes in Irregular Metaphysics and the Criticism of Culture (1987):

“Cultural criticism is no mere complement or supplement to other, more established disciplines of inquiry, but the foundation for that general revaluation and transvaluation of established values which must go on in every age.”

Criticism is a regenerative cycle, always subject to further critique, in and of itself. In our age of digital connection, social media fosters an apparent sense of community, importing an implicit obligation of concession to the views that are imposed through content. For Eagleton, the discourse of bourgeois public sphere is formed almost exclusively in relation to the means of exchange, rather than the means of production. 

A laissez faire attitude to culture is not one which enables its own understanding and development. As content is forced down your throat by the algorithm, it thinks you agree with whatever you’re being shown. Reclaim your net-agency, do not let Big Tech tell you what to like. Use your right to the comments section as a means to get up on your soapbox. That’s what it’s for!

Engaging in criticism (disseminating ‘hate’) as a means of communicable exchange is what builds our cultural and social depth. The more you hate, the deeper you go.