I Keep Getting Asked About Assertion Culture

I'm not certain I have a good answer, just some good beginnings.

I have recently started to tentatively use the term “Assertion Culture” to describe a certain strain of thought prevalent within social media discourse, an ecosystem that plays by very different mechanics than the oft-cited “town square” it aspires to be. “Assertion Culture” is a simple concept, really.

It begins with how we have moved into a kind of simplified discourse mediated by the dually unknowable and unverifiable nature of social media interaction. In Twitter’s 240 characters or Instagrams photos or the shortness of TikToc videos, we have taken abundance of speech and condensed it into the smallest of repeated utterances. Memes abound, easily replicated without much consideration or thought. We constantly have to both assert our personhood via ongoing selfmaking while guarding against others’ personhood encroaching upon our own selfmaking.

The anthropologist Kathleen Stewart says that “The affective subject is a collection of trajectories and circuits.” We point ourselves toward things and then are turned on or off or we flicker between solid-states wanting to be both or more fluid. We constantly move through our world, our digitalized world, soaking in the glow of ideas because how could one not? Never before have things like information, theory, emotions, or engagement been so easily kept within our grasp at all times. When we need something, all we must do is reach out and touch it.

But what are we touching?

Other people, is what we’re brushing up against—what we’re using to flip the circuit. Or what is reaching out, touching us, flipping our circuits and sketching out new trajectories. And we don’t realize we have gained velocity, that we are already moving toward the next event, the next crisis that must be averted or solved or avoided altogether.

“Assertion Culture” is what happens when this process gets up to speed. Not just in the individual, but in, well, everyone. All the business of reaching out (tweeting, replying, liking) and then coming to rest, just for the slightest moment, to realize that you’re not standing on anything.

So we engage in knowledge-production to fashion ourselves a solid ground. We argue on the internet with others, about, often, ourselves. All our little circuits and trajectories burning with activity.

It is not a surprise that in an age that provides undue focus to bad-faith “trolling” the response has been to get down into the dirt and reify assertion. The way to stand up and say “Here I am, I say differently so it is true.” This happens everywhere, on all sides of positions because it is the fastest way toward that place where we can begin to demand outcomes.

Communication on the internet is both reflexive and asynchronous. When we are speaking we are, mostly, speaking for the benefit of our individual selves. Faced with the inevitability of bad faith arguments and the essential nature of online spaces as ephemerally Truthful, this is as good as it gets for that “hot take”—for that “dunk” or that simple assertion that one is right and another is wrong.

But at the same time we are always reflecting off of others. The internet is a massive battle in which most individuals are merely taking up the arms laid out before them. We have slogans and memes, little utterances that are tried and true and which just exist, out there, for our taking like low-hanging, ripe fruit. So we take them. We repeat our slogans and then the other side repeats their own, we regroup, try a different utterance. We assert the primacy of our utterances, leaving all that messy work of rhetoric and analysis to everyone else. We fall into habits, patterns that restrict our speech further because this slogan, this utterance falls into that genre. And these genres of speech are narrow, narrowing. Held together by assertions of solidity that are bound together by the mere act of being made.

“I am…” is an invitation, except on the internet where it is a plot of land to be tended and defended. It is a staking out of digital, emotional property rights—the cordoning off via the speech-sound of others.

I will leave you with a bit of Anne Carson¹:

“It is in large part according to the sounds people make that we judge them sane or insane, male or female, good, evil, trustworthy, depressive, marraigable, moribund, likely or unlikely to make war on us, little better than animals, inspired by God.”

1. “The Gender of Sound”