Uppity bloggers

Lee Siegel, whose Culture blog for the New Republic was canned for his sock-puppetry on the comments section, pops up in Sunday's New York Times magazine to take one more shot at his critics. It's clear that he's no wiser about the cause of his blog downfall than a few weeks ago -- in particular, he's still (willfully?) confused about the difference between anonymous and pseudonymous, the reasons why people use pseudonyms, and indeeed the reasons why they blog in the first place.

For him, blogging is an expression of rage (hence his neologism "blogofascism") -- rage at the prospect of lifetime obscurity, and a vehicle for inner rage that would otherwise be repressed if we wrote under our own names. In fact, the truth is more prosaic -- consider for instance Josh Marshall's explanation for his pseudonymous guest blogger, DK: stuff said on the blog might cause problems at work. But here's what Siegel says:

On the sock-puppetry: misplaced satire ... Anonymity is a universal convention of the blogosphere, and the wicked expedience is that you can speak without consequences. What was wrong about it is that I did it under the aegis of The New Republic, as a senior editor of the magazine.

What's wrong is that he did it as a commentator on himself, using it to launch personal attacks on his named critics (see how Ezra Klein got dragged into it, for example). But he goes on --

Everyone seems to be fleeing from the responsibilities that come from being who you are. I think that is why the blogosphere is thriving. It allows people to develop a fantasy self .... Look, putting a polemicist like myself in the blogosphere is like putting someone with an obesity problem in a chocolate factory.

Just to pick one counter-example, Christopher Hitchens does a fine obnoxious job of being a polemicist without having to go into comment sections of blogs under an assumed name to do it (that we know of, anyway).

Anyway: the blogosphere strips argument of logic and rhetoric down to the naked emotion behind it ... At least for those who practice incessant character assassination, which represents a good portion of the blogosphere, they vent out of the pain of being unacknowledged.

which must explain why Bill Clinton always got such reasoned coverage in the media, before there were blogs. More generally, a much simpler hypothesis for his rage is his lack of understanding that blogs have created a new form of access -- when someone with a perch in the media writes BS, they can actually get called on it, and God forbid, lots of other people might see it.

UPDATE: More from Brad deLong.