Alastair's Adversaria - Running With Scissors

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

This reflection was first published on the Anchored Argosy: https://argosy.substack.com/i/139401332/running-with-scissors Follow my Substack, the Anchored Argosy at https://argosy.substack.com/. See my latest podcasts at https://adversariapodcast.com/. If you have enjoyed my videos and podcasts, please tell your friends. If you are interested in supporting my videos and podcasts and my research more generally, please consider supporting my work on Patreon (www.patreon.com/zugzwanged), using my PayPal account (https://www.paypal.com/donate/?business=4WX77P4F8S7WL), or by buying books for my research on Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/3…3O?ref_=wl_share). You can also listen to the audio of these episodes on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/alastairs-adversaria/id1416351035.

The following reflection is entitled Running with Scissors. It was first published on the Anchored Argosy. Several years ago, there was a Slate Star Codex post in which Scott Alexander coined the term CISA to describe statements, news stories, or ideas designed or selected for maximal controversy and divisiveness. The concept has since been adopted by others. Ross Douth had notably used it

to describe the viral video of the Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandman, a perfect example of a scissor. The concept of the scissor is one of found very illuminating and useful. It captures the dynamic, most potently operative on social media, whereby interpretive differences over specific statements, news stories or ideas, can escalate into the most heated and polarised oppositions, into antagonisms that far exceed anything seemingly justified by the stakes of the precipitating issue. Such scissors can depend much less upon the intrinsic importance of the matters that occasioned them than upon the supposed wrong-headedness of others in their response to them. Relatively low-stakes scissors can blow up into global arguments, fueled by incredulity and anger at any who see things differently. In many respects, scissors are cases where people sense that fundamental differences in perception are surfacing.

Back in 2015, there was a viral photograph of a dress. the colour of which was disputed by viewers. Some saw it as white and gold, others as blue and black. While the colour of the dress was a matter of no significance in itself, it revealed more fundamental differences of perception, and so a random photograph of a dress became a matter of global discussion. While different perceptions of colour are fascinating, they are relatively low stakes when compared to fundamentally different perceptions of social and political reality. The classic Scissor appears to expose such differences, and one's interpretation of a scissor is a seeming shibboleth by which people will pigeonhole you ideologically. Numerous examples of such scissors could be given.

Carl Rittenhouse, Brett Kavanaugh and All Lives Matter. More recently, the Jason Ardeh story is a great example. People can get exceedingly animated about these matters, even if they seem to concern issues that in and of themselves are of more local and limited importance. Someone with an opposing interpretation can seem alien inexplicable and threatening. My sense is that the prominence and power of this dynamic cannot be understood apart from an appreciation of the way that the internet, and especially social media, has transformed our epistemological environment. It is difficult to grasp much about the ways that people currently think, express themselves, communicate, argue, and are persuaded without some appreciation of these radical transformations. However, fewer

clear-sighted about what has occurred, the dynamics of the epistemological environment we now operate within, the way that it shapes us, and how we might avoid being unreflectively determined by its forces. In an article for the New Atlantis, John Askinus, one person with a clearer appreciation of this, declares the passing of the fact, circa 1500 to 2000, and the central place that it enjoyed within our ways of knowing. Prior to the rise of the fact, Ascanus argues, Knowing felt like fitting something, an observation, a concept, a precept, into a bigger design, and the better it fit, and the more it resonated symbolically, the truer it felt. Particularly with the invention of the printing press, the means for the production and dissemination

of the fact had come, and things such as modern science could arise. Facts were plentiful, but not superfluous, were guaranteed and produced by authoritative experts, and gave the impression of a sort of transcendent universality and objectivity. One could see a text such as the Encyclopedia Britannica as a symbol of this epistemological order. The internet, however, introduces an age of superabundant information, increasingly produced through automated processes, and no longer controlled by dominant experts and authorities.

Ascanus quotes L.M. Circassus, superabundance encourages the view that truth isn't real. Whatever view you want to validate, you'll find facts to support it. All information is also now potentially disinformation. Where facts were once believed to be trustworthy grounds from which a meaningful, ordered, comprehensive, integrated, authorized, and compelling narrative would organically emerge. In the age of superabundant data, this is no longer the case.

In place of the fact, the age of superabundant data prioritizes stories or narratives, and those who create and disseminate. them. Askinus writes, but in the world of superabundant readily recalled facts, generating the umpteenth fact rarely gets you much. More valuable is skill in rapidly realigning facts and assimilating new information into ever-changing stories. Professionals create value by generating, defending and extending compelling pathways through the database of facts, media narratives, scientific theories, financial predictions, tax law interpretations and so forth. The collapse of any particular narrative due to new information only marginally reshapes the database of all possible

narratives. The writers at Ribbon Farm have often reflected upon the importance of narrative processes of meaning-making, upon different forms of narratives, and the character of narrative selection. Our current environments, they argue, represent a significant transformation of modes of narrative formation, dissemination, and selection. For instance, Venkatesh Rao comments upon the role played by vibes and memes as a sort of narrative ooze in our developing epistemological environments. Vibes and memes are, Rouse suggests, akin to low-level code, words that function, not at the high level of abstraction of a New Yorker article or TED Talk, but which trace the contours or flows of collective consciousness energy.

Where data points are superabundant, narratives will tend to be weak and incoherent, the extreme messiness of reality and its seeming lack of meaning will dominate. However, as humans have a felt need for meaningful, for a narratable world, the meltdown of narrative in the age of superabundant information can be intolerable. Memes, vibes and other viral phenomena can appeal directly to our hunger for narratibility, offering us master narrative frames within which to inhabit a messy world meaningfully and to hold its bewildering complexity at bay. after the dethroning of the fact such master narratives will increasingly determine our interpretation of specific data points, news stories, statements, ideas or events. Indeed, interpretation might not be the best word here, suggesting a conscious, reflective, deliberative, and temporarily extended process through which an understanding is achieved. Narratives, however, tend to operate on a primal and less conscious level, the sort of level that vibes, memes, and other viral social.

phenomena tap into. People just immediately perceive reality as meaningful within a sort of tacit aesthetic frame, a frame that they neither understand nor can fully articulate. And this is where scissors come in. Scissors, it should be recognized, chiefly concerned situations where interpretation is less straightforwardly demanded by the facts. The most prominent cases in racial justice arguments, for instance, tend to be not the strongest and the clearest, but the most controversial. This scissor cases where contrasting underlying master narrative frames seem to come into view. The ideal scissor case is one where two or more master narratives are directly competing for control over reality, with the facts that they render being regarded as symbolic

and revelatory of the larger narrative reality that they project. Ideology holds considerable attraction in such a context of information superabundance. Ideology offers tidiness, a way of corraling the complicated data points into a grand narrative about the patriarchy, the tyranny of the left, late capitalism, whiteness, wholeness, or something else. Ultimately, reality can be boiled down to a fundamental opposition between good and evil, with specific cases being heads of one great hydra lurking beneath the dark surface of the sea of reality, uniting them all. Ideology is extremely narratively compelling, and its projection of clear meaning offers an intoxication

certainty to the action that responds to it. And for those within a narrative, it can be transparent, both in the sense that they don't see the story as a story, but simply see reality through that story, and in the sense of transparently obvious. How could those who disagree with me not see as I see? It must be that they do see, but are vicious. COVID, of course, was a great example of the way that our new epistemological environments work or don't work, and their contrast with older ones. Information was superabundant, bewilderingly complex to non-experts,

and was generated from non-integrated domains. However, given the perceived existential urgency of the situation and the anxieties that we feel in the face of inscrutable and meaningless realities, agnosticism or radical uncertainty were not attractive options. An environment of superabundant information meant that the authorized fact and the assurance offered by experts were no longer effective in securing certainty and consensus, even when underwritten by official authority and power.

Consequently, different narratives competed to offer a comprehensive and compelling frame that answered to the existential needs. And in the context of social media, these, even the officially authorized narratives, routinely operated through the narrative ooze of viral emotions, memes, and vibes. Of course, as tends to be the case, the reality was exceedingly messy, and all such narratives were greatly overplayed. Acknowledging the limits of narratability and the difficulty of finding coherence in an age of superabundance is an alternative to fights over scissors. Much of the power of scissors arises from our unwillingness to surrender data points to the fog of complexity and our desire for the compelling narratives offered by ideology.

The collapse of the fact and the dominance of competing narratives has the social correlate of tribalism. The vibes, memes and ideologies function through social virality, and the narratives are advanced and fought over by opposing parties. Postmodernism made us all more alert to the ways that truth is generated by power, which power then employs to underwrite itself. In the post-fact era, suspicion can mutate into increasingly cynical and nealistic, forms. Narratives generate and strengthen solidities and narratives can develop in response to the interests of tribal groups. Strong narratives can form intense solidities and internal doubting of aspects of tribal narratives can feel like a compromise of loyalty or even as betrayal. Within this environment, narratives can also be a lot less rational. Narratives on the right, for instance, increasingly

respond to themotic demands and to the question of whether someone is a friend. or an enemy. The question of whether the vibes of a position satisfy the gut, whether it feels sufficiently based or masculine, for instance, can be much more determinative than those of supposedly objective facts than reality. Persons who are native to such an epistemological environment can approach reality as a sort of gestalt, and the solidarity of the tribalism corresponds to the unity of its narrative. It is very difficult to disaggregate, differentiate and discreetly handle specific aspects of such perceptions of reality. The whole is at stake in each part, and challenges to any element will also be experienced

as a challenge to the integrity of the tribe. Cizzers do not merely reveal the operation of different narrative frames. They advance and police them. Social media, with its vibes, memes, and viral elements, does not merely constitute a new epistemological realm that we must navigate, but is itself the operation of novel collective ways of knowing, ways of knowing that are no longer typically those of clearly differentiated agents engaging in responsible, defined, and temporally extended acts of deliberation and reflection. The post-fact era of vibes, memes, and virally competing narratives is weird and disorienting.

Thought, discourse and persuasion no longer function in the ways they once did. If we do not seek to understand our processes of unconstitutional, understanding, an act to preserve or recover a healthier epistemological environment, we risk being much diminished in our rational agency and capacities. We also risk cutting ourselves off from people who are not of our ideological tribe, becoming unable to see them in any capacity other than as the villains of our tribe's stories. But this is not a sentence of doom, and risk is not certainty. Reality still exists. We must find a way to remain attuned to it, responding with sanity and grace to the complex world we have been given,

remaining open to each other, not rejecting stories, but not necessarily absolutizing everyone that seems right. So much of my work here and elsewhere is made possible by the gifts of generous donors. If you would like to support my work, you can do so using my Patreon or PayPal links. They are below in the show notes. Thank you very much for listening, and God bless.