Displacement - Displacement is a psychological defense
mechanism in which a person redirects a negative
emotion from its original source to a less threatening recipient.
A classic example of the defense is displaced
aggression. If a person is angry but cannot
direct their anger toward the source without
consequences, they might "take out" their
anger on a person or thing that poses less of a risk.
Media Twitter does not hate Substack because it’s
pretending to be a platform when it’s a publisher;
they don’t hate it because it’s filled with anti-woke
white guys; they don’t hate it because of harassment
or any such thing. I don’t think they really hate it at all.
Substack is a small and ultimately not-very-relevant
outpost in a vastly larger industry; they may not like it
but it’s not important enough for them to hate it. What
do they hate? They hate where their industry is and they
hate where they are within their industry. But that’s
a big problem that they don’t feel like they can solve.
If you feel you can’t get mad at the industry that’s impoverishing you,
it’s much easier to get mad at the people who you feel are
unjustly succeeding in that industry. Trying to cancel Glenn Greenwald (again)
because he criticizes the media harshly? Trying to tarnish
Substack’s reputation so that cool, paid-up writer types
leave it and the bad types like me get kicked off? That they
can maybe do. Confronting their industry’s future with
open eyes? Too scary, especially for people who
were raised to see success as their birthright and
have suddenly found that their degrees and their
witheringly dry one-liners do not help them when
the rent comes due.
Things are bad, folks:
Further Reading:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-all-just-displacement
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