Jordan Peterson is an academic, an internet personality, and a big fan of beef. A man of many accomplishments, he’s most famous for writing a bestselling book called 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos while simultaneously living what can only be described as an incredibly chaotic life. The latest Peterson drama comes to us via Twitter, which the academic has just dramatically announced he will be “departing” forever. Don’t worry, he’s not going to go quietly into that tweetless night; Peterson has promised us all a long article explaining his problems with the platform soon. For now, however, he wants us all to know that Twitter is a hellhole which makes your life infinitely worse.

“The endless flood of vicious insult [sic] is really not something that can be experienced anywhere else,” Peterson tweeted on Monday, “If I have something to say I’ll write an article or make a video. If the issue is not important enough to justify that then perhaps it would be best to just let it go.” He adds, “I like to follow the people I know but I think the incentive structure of the platform makes it intrinsically and dangerously insane.”

I may not agree with Peterson on much but he’s spot on there. And I, for one, am really glad that the man once described in the New York Times as “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world”, has finally discovered what everyone else has been banging on about for years. Women and marginalized people, in particular, have been sounding the alarm about how Twitter, along with other social media platforms, ignores violence and abuse on the platform. They have been sounding the alarm about the intrinsically dangerous incentive structures of social media platforms, which prioritize engagement above everything else. But, you know, nothing in life is really important until a rich white guy starts paying attention.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/17/jordan-peterson-twitter-yumi-nu-sports-illustrated

Stephen Marche – The ‘debate of the century’: what happened when Jordan Peterson debated Slavoj Žižek

Richard Evans: the film Denial ‘shows there is such a thing as truth’. By Harriet Swain

STANISLAV MARKELOV – Patriotism as a diagnosis

Julien Benda: Our age is the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds

Beginnings and Endings

Margaret Mead on the definition of civilisation

Slavoj Žižek vs Noam Chomsky

Books reviewed: The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek

Thomas Moller-Nielsen: What is Zizek for?

Why can’t we agree on what’s true anymore? By William Davies