The term “reactionary” is a politically descriptive term that refers to neo-conservatism and a general disfavor of progressivism. It has been used as a word to smear liberals and to classify conservatives into the most extreme group of the politically tenable right. But the way words and their definitions emerge is not always intuitive. Before I understood the distinctly right-wing denotation of the term, I imagined that reactionary was a term that expressed a mode of communication, namely the opposite of being assertive and proactive. But the non-political and political definitions are much closer and more entangled than is immediately obvious. What follows is a tracing of the thread that winds between “reactionary” as a non-political term, through the Internet and its platforms, into the political philosophies that privilege reaction, and eventually offers a new definition of “reactionary.”
In the case of this homophone there is something too similar between reactionary conservatism’s devices, and the normative communication modes of the Internet as they seep into the political sphere. As the Internet has embedded itself further into our lives, its communication forms have become more and more truncated. That shortening and omission has turned a large part of web-based discussion on multiple platforms to simple reaction rather than deliberation. And, since these platforms circumvent our lives, they have in turn, influenced our methods of communication in the “real world” and doused the way we approach politics with a reactive form of communication. Being a “reactionary” is no longer limited to neo-conservatives, but should be a term that describes a normative mode of communication on both the left and right.
The Internet is both a binding and rending tool—it has become a banality that the Internet brings those across the world together while breaking local social bonds. It is absurd beyond anything we could have imagined it, evolving and multiplying its content like bacteria in a hog’s pen. It is Borges’ Library in Babel, containing every possible combination and permutation of thought. And those thoughts are exploding from someone’s fingertips. This no longer novel tool has changed our method of communication especially online, but increasingly offline, too. We are truncated, betrothed with acronyms, and limited by attention span. The Internet has not only changed whom we interact with and how we receive information, but has produced a new mode of communication that increasingly values brevity. That trend is apparent in at least a few major platforms.
Vine was a platform singularly devoted to brevity and reaction. The child of Twitter breathed its last cultural breath at the end of 2016. This was an app where users posted six-second clips for humor and reaction. Vine clips received numerical relevance by view count, known as loops. And plenty of clips featured reactions to mundane situations in life—when you get pulled over, and then the user cuts the clip directly to their face; when your dog craps inside the house, and it cuts to the user’s face; brief no-context clips of comedy and absurdity. Six seconds or less is just enough time to react with bombast to something.
Reaction videos on YouTube live in the same headspace as Vine. While they are not always short, they are designed to illicit strong responses, and their presence in the structure of the Internet makes them subject to the same “team speak” as other truncated spaces—acronyms, outrageousness, and edginess. They tend to feature a picture-in-picture of a person inside a video or game. FBE (Fine Brothers Entertainment), a YouTube channel with 16 million subscribers, has a series simply called “React,” that features “kids, teens, adults, parents, and elders react[ing] to viral videos, old and new technology, along with other pop-culture artifacts and social issues that impact our times.” In mid-2017, YouTube cited 1.5 billion active logged in users each month. Dozens of other YouTubers are vying to jump into that portico, with reactions to music videos, briefly relevant viral videos, or anything imposing enough to elicit a powerful reaction that an audience can relate to—politics and banter included.
Twitter lives symbiotically with these platforms in a textual format. It is a patently shortened platform, designed to chain link comments with the retweet feature—reactions reign in this category. For the end of 2017, Statista cites 330 million monthly active users around the world on average. The platform has generously doubled its character limit to 280. Before the change, 9% of Tweets hit the 140-character limit, while around 1% hit the 280-character limit now. That’s a bit more room for users to express their thoughts, to give their hot take. Twitter has also removed the filter between citizen and breaking news, and become a place to remain up to date on the latest news. For that, it is an exceptional tool, even with the opportunity for misinformation. However, despite the occasional tweets separated into multiple parts by impassioned users or by governments and businesses making their official statements, the platform is used to compress thoughts into the most concise or explosive level of thought. The mode of communication is at best reductionist and at worst reactive.
This urge to brevity and a need to react seems to bleed into other platforms and across our political atmosphere. Brevity by its nature is antithetical to teasing out details and allowing complexity to intercept topics. There is concise and then there is brevity via omission. Reacting with gusto is also an increasingly normative mode of communication that thrives within breivty. Emojis have shortened our sometimes unintelligible Internet speak—“okay” became “kk,” which has become a thumbs up emoji. iMessage now offers the opportunity to react with six symbols to a message. The “Like” button has been installed across our lives. Does this not influence our behavior and comprehension of the surrounding world? Perhaps an answer lies in consumer-business relationships and so-called “outrage culture.”
Twitter, Vine, YouTube and every other shorthand communicative device are not naturally political—they are tools and platforms. But their brevity lends itself to what appears to be a mode of thought that is entangled with the political moment. The active “typestyle” of Internet users commenting on advertising blunder and unimportant gossip has carried over from those platforms, whether the criticisms are substantive or not. The result is unthinking commentary on trivial questions of lifestyle and fire-lipped reactions to societal events that could otherwise be met with meaningful discussion rather than fury.
An example of this “typestyle” is the inability of private companies and individuals to not make political statements. The most recent example was the fallout of companies choosing to remove discounts for NRA members. Activists highlighted the discount that NRA members had the option to receive through several private companies. Facing increasing scrutiny from private citizens, especially on Twitter and social media where likes and retweets amplify voices, several companies decided to remove their discounts for the NRA. These corporations were faced with a decision to unenthusiastically back the NRA by rebuffing activists or bow to public pressure and solve a situation that appeared to be wrong—especially for their public image.
That torrent of voices was naturally magnified by the way that sites like Twitter work to chain link comments and posts together. Eventually the ideas gained traction and snowballed. And people were furious. But why? Citizens tend to be aware that the NRA is a significant political player. The Parkland shooting caused a wealth of anti-gun activism that led people to find out that these discounts were offered. In the case of FedEx and dozens of other companies, the NRA received no special treatment compared to other organizations with group discounts. Citizens’ outrage, tethered to the platforms that compounded communication, presented a political catharsis against the NRA and supporting companies. That was a positive move for activists that belie the gun lobby, but its mode of success appears to have chiefly been born from the Internet and the cumulative effect of reactive outrage on Twitter. This is representative of how our modes of communication from the Internet have bled into the political sphere. Has outrage become a political tool to achieve goals? Is textual fury the language that we speak, so we can only understand true change in those terms? I doubt it, but that event’s similarity to the modus operandi of so-called “outrage culture” is strikingly similar.
What some refer to as outrage culture, others refer to as social justice. Social justice movements are especially active on college campuses, a common location of progressive and postmodern thought. As a result, proponents and supporters of social justice are young, progressive activists and oftentimes the professors who operate within the liberal arts departments at those universities. Postmodern thought as a lever of social justice emphasizes the deconstruction of language and how it shapes society and power structures. These are the linguistic power structures that have been used to the detriment of people of color and the traditionally disenfranchised. Over time, that propensity to deconstruct the power structures of language has led to the irrefutable (by others) condemnation of some words and whole categories of speech. “Mankind” has become “peoplekind” and phrases like “America is the land of opportunity” have reportedly been deemed micro aggressions by universities. (America has been the land of opportunity only for select groups—that particular phrase is obfuscating.) With an earnest goal in mind—to level the playing field—social justice has sometimes overstepped its boundary into outrage over tedious minutia.
The crux of outrage culture, defined by its opponents, is the censorship of free speech. Outrage culture is the supposed overreaction to slights like micro aggressions and extreme sensitivity to power dynamics in language. It is the college student who is perversely furious about the implicit bias of one’s statements—the constant dethroning of the status quo. The line that it draws, while different for everyone, is often too far in the weeds that it can be described as picking the wrong battles, if not being incensed over nothing. As individuals carry their zeal for social justice to the extreme, it has the propensity to focus on the surface of words and actions rather than their implications without a complete comprehension of context. Certain words become prohibited in any context—whether as teaching tools or otherwise. And that too is a reaction, an oppositional point of view. Context and depth removed is the hallmark of being reactive. The knee jerks.
There is not as concise a mirror to outrage culture on the conservative side of the spectrum. But the disparate elements that constitute an antagonist to social justice movements are in fact a group created in reaction. There are hordes of denizens occupying the less moderated edges of the Internet, who denounce college campuses and social justice movements as restrictors of free speech; in the ultimate antagonizing move, they casually use racial and prejudicial slurs. There are the Twitter and YouTube users who shudder in textual and video format at the news of controversial speakers being pushed out of liberal campuses. And they make their words read via these platforms. This group, lacking cohesion, has no agenda other than to react and receive a reaction from its opponents. Who can say the most extreme invective to crack another’s noble façade? The platforms we cannot go without have bred modes of communication that discourage dialogue—conservative and liberal alike have become reactive.
Both postmodern theory as it has influenced “outrage culture” and the urge of antagonists to draw the opposite side into battle, combined with the brevity of Internet-speak is the perfect storm to create the mode of communication that is antithetical to detail and understanding. The platforms—Twitter, YouTube, Facebook—and the increasingly truncated way that we speak on the Internet provide the structure to operate within. Edginess and acerbity masquerading as protection of free speech and conservatism, and infectious denunciation of the dominant social group masquerading as social justice, have provided the philosophical cover. There are true conservatives concerned with free speech limits and true progenitors of social justice fighting for the underrepresented, but they scarcely speak the loudest.
These devices and groups are not distinctly separate or always congruent, but overlapping in some areas like a Venn diagram. The thread between outrage culture and the powerful voices of individuals on social media is the “outrage” part of outrage culture. To be angry over something is integral to that postmodern thinking because language is so freely abused in the eyes of proponents of social justice. In turn, the free speech brigade is furious over their perceived muzzle. The thread from the brevity of our web communication to reaction-mode communication is that thought is simply compressed and complexity is left out. Naturally, where these phenomena overlap is on social media. But, as the NRA example shows, the political increasingly dives into business and personal lives. In reversal, the personal easily becomes political, and so our modes of communication—brief and reactive—and our temperaments to be vociferous and furious, have bled into our political sphere.
To call someone reactionary no longer may refer to a political disposition. A reactionary in the era of the Internet, is the unthinking and extreme that speak first and think later. The President, unfortunately, is the most prolific example: He tweets incorrect and misleading statistics, and continually reacts to what is not fully known or understood. And sure, the President is a special case, but we should all be checking ourselves for how we interact with information, not just the content of that information. Headlines have always made for great reactions, but the paragraphs that lead to that headline are usually more complex.