In the early stages of Twitter there was something diabolical about the technology of the subtweet in being able to communicate indirectly to a girl in your followers while maintaining the plausible deniability that the message was ever aimed at her.
It was a form of broadcast that was at the same time impersonal yet extremely intimate, where the exoteric message was technically available to everyone, and so nothing special, but the esoteric message—if crafted in the right way—could only be grasped by her, and presumed a sort of shared epistemic island cordoned off from the rest of the world, a place of thin mountain air above the rabble which her successful parsing of would only confirm and reinforce.
In my day, we'd call that burying the lede. Or, in your case, maybe it's more like burying some shards under three feet of unrelated 'content' in a midden.
Yeah I read somewhere that Kierkegaard may have been trying to indirectly communicate with a girl he almost married through a chapter or some lines in one of his treatises. But no way that girl would have gotten through Either Or to pick up on the few subtextual lines if she’d had IG reels at her disposal. Maybe same problem for a Bismarck treatise I suppose
In the early stages of Twitter there was something diabolical about the technology of the subtweet in being able to communicate indirectly to a girl in your followers while maintaining the plausible deniability that the message was ever aimed at her.
It was a form of broadcast that was at the same time impersonal yet extremely intimate, where the exoteric message was technically available to everyone, and so nothing special, but the esoteric message—if crafted in the right way—could only be grasped by her, and presumed a sort of shared epistemic island cordoned off from the rest of the world, a place of thin mountain air above the rabble which her successful parsing of would only confirm and reinforce.
I miss this too
have done the same thing in a few of my essays but the girls never pick up on it
kind of think their attention spans are too short for long form subtext
In my day, we'd call that burying the lede. Or, in your case, maybe it's more like burying some shards under three feet of unrelated 'content' in a midden.
Seriously, though, I liked this more than I usually like your writing. Interesting work.
Yeah I read somewhere that Kierkegaard may have been trying to indirectly communicate with a girl he almost married through a chapter or some lines in one of his treatises. But no way that girl would have gotten through Either Or to pick up on the few subtextual lines if she’d had IG reels at her disposal. Maybe same problem for a Bismarck treatise I suppose
I listened to this using the Substack text to speech article reader and it gets pretty fantastic towards the end.