💡Now I'm not saying that...

[kesbeacon]

Was listening to Adam Grant on WorkLife talking about how he hates the phrase ‘you made me feel’ because it’s giving up control over one’s emotions and erasing the part where there’s a choice between emotion and action, to which he appended the disclaimer that if you’re in an abusive relationship, being gaslit, faced with a narcissist, this criticism doesn’t apply. And it’s got me thinking about disclaimers like that. I’m not criticising him in this case, but he has set me down the route of thinking about the purpose and effectiveness of a disclaimer.

They turn up all the time, and I understand why, I do it myself. But I also know that... so I see this where people will go ‘oh men are terrible in this or that way, but not you trans men, this obviously doesn’t apply to you.’ Or ‘you should never do this, unless you’ve got the Makes You More Likely To Do This Disorder, in which case this doesn’t apply.’ Or ‘you should never write this unless you’ve got this trauma, obviously it’s okay if you need to cope.’ Or ‘solidarity always, except if you really need X.’ Or ‘everyone should try and do this, unless you can’t.’ Or the example above! Now, I clearly think some of these are more or less valid than others. It’s a tool that doesn’t correlate with the strength of the position in general.

But I also see a lot of people talking about how the disclaimers never actually hit as hard as the statement does. You’ll doubt whether the disclaimer applies to you, or you’ll feel that if you obviously do the thing the statement is about that you have to have your permit ready – you have to prove that you have the right! Which oftentimes you don’t want or shouldn’t feel like you have to do. (And oddly, the people who are more happy to use the disclaimer tend to be the people the argument should apply to…¹)

Disclaimer is a legal term. I think about companies trying to limit their legal liabilities, sometimes in reasonable ways, often in deeply unreasonable ways. And I think a lot of the time when we see them in casual use, it’s because many of us live in a social media ecosystem where we don’t control who can see our words, we worry that our words will be read oppositionally, we know we’re judged on the same standards as the organisations that never sleep, and we know we aren’t able to think through all the possible implications of everything we say to ensure we’ve presented a watertight statement that cannot be used against any group of people. A disclaimer is a nice, easy out.

I get this, just as I get the argument that the disclaimer doesn’t do its job. I think it does do its job to an extent – it does its legal job. Yeah, if I put a disclaimer here that I’m not saying using disclaimers is bad, nobody can come at me and say I said using disclaimers is bad. I said I wasn’t saying that. But looking beyond the literal meaning of the previous paragraphs does reveal a critique of disclaimers.

This critique is twofold. One, if a serious argument is being advanced they easily weaken it; I sometimes feel like they’re a shortcut to a finished thought that avoids actually thinking about conflicting conditions.² Two, they resolve the dissonance in a legal way but not necessarily in actuality. We still can’t control how people are going to feel reading our words, and we still remain responsible for the substance of what we say.

But nor is doing away with disclaimers the answer – we remain in this informational ecosystem, where any throwaway comment could be seen by hundreds of thousands of people, who naturally will be far better equipped just by sheer weight of numbers to spot the flaws in our reasoning. We’re ordinary humans who will say stupid, mean, or ill-informed shit all the time. And we do not have a social setup that is forgiving of flaws.

I wrote and then deleted a paragraph about how I try to handle this on the speaker end. But I don’t think that’s where we solve this (my ‘method’ is something that’s important to me but wouldn’t save me from the consequences of virality!) And while resisting the appeal of dunking on the latest main character and understanding what sorts of speech are worth you specifically criticising and what aren’t is kind of helpful, that ain’t it either.

Because unfortunately, like so many issues, I think this one is emergent from our dominant cultural conditions. And I am not. going. to let myself meander on for another 10000 words or whatever to explain that. Maybe one day I’ll figure out how to write my ‘the internet is not where battles are won’ thesis. I’m not satisfied with SMog.

¹ Fast fashion/fast retail customers who defend their hyper-consumption with ‘let poor people enjoy things’ I’m looking at you.

² I’m groping after something I’m not quite getting here, connected to the way that material sciences must seek an answer that fits across known conditions. Yes, outliers, but if just one pig can fly then we have to find an explanation for flight or pigs that allows for this one pig to do it.