The conversational tone of the perpetually online cohort — called “Millennial Snot” by Dudley Newright in a guest post at The Upheaval — has Freddie deBoer nodding in agreement:

This piece at The Upheaval is useful. Though I think the turn towards explicit partisan politics at the end goes badly wrong, it’s very perceptive and correct when it comes to its object of interest, “Millennial snot”, an important concept and appropriate term. Though there are many examples offered in the piece, you already know what Millennial snot is. It’s some overeducated shithead with an email job saying “Uh, I’ve unpacked the privilege knapsack in intersectional space, OK sweetie? Get on my level.” “Whoa, did you just say ‘handicapped’? That’s a big yikes, chief.” It’s a form of engagement, quintessentially Millennial, that’s defined by a combination of self-righteous liberal politics, out-of-date internet lingo, terms from university humanities departments that have become mimetic in the past decade, and a performative, shit-eating quality of being perpetually amused with oneself. Anyone who was on Twitter between 2012 and 2022 or so knows Millennial snot. It’s fake courage as meme, a rehearsed facsimile of self-confidence deployed by people who’ll never know the real thing.

Writer Dudley Newright invokes Tom Scocca’s famous “On Smarm” essay, which is a useful reference. Scocca is far too sharp and well-spoken to engage in Millennial snot, but his essay helped contribute to a permission structure for congenitally not-witty people to engage in what they thought was wit. Scocca’s essay counterposed smarm against snark, presumably because Gawker was constantly accused of popularizing the latter; he defended the value of blank meanness and universal sarcasm as the antidote to false, sunny positivity that exists to foreclose on criticism. Scocca’s piece was a sensation among his Twitterati peers, which is unsurprising given that it was ultimately an essay in defense of being deliberately unhappy and they were all unhappy people. The whole debate looks rather funny to me, in hindsight, a battle royale between a couple of meaningless abstractions that provoked a lot of trivial people to man the imaginary battlements. The week that Gawker published Scocca’s essay, they had been running post after post about “Batkid“, a charming little fellow with cancer who was given a Make a Wish-style experience that Nick Denton’s crew lustily wrung some clicks out of — that is, textbook smarm. Commerce!

Anyway, part of the basic confusion of that little cultural moment was to suppose that snark (reflexive, dismissive negativity) and smarm (treacly positivity in which power might hide) were antonyms. But Millennial snot demonstrates that they were always kissing cousins, easily integrated, two complementary spices begging to be added to the same chowder. Millennial snot is smarmy in that it depends on the speaker’s certainty that they are the good, righteous being in every exchange, and it is snarky in that it operates under a logic of being limitlessly disaffected, an asserted perpetual superiority that’s always believed to be apparent to everyone. It’s a simulation of being witty and cutting the way people are in movies, impressed with the self and literally nothing else, like asking ChatGPT to make you into the cool kid at the back of the class that you’ve always longed to be. Millennial snot so easily integrates two supposedly opposed approaches to communicative integrity because it’s the vocabulary of people who have no particular interest in integrity. They simply want to feel powerful, if however briefly, if only in insincere and meaningless online exchanges.

“Imagine not knowing that I’m a tenure-track professor in Problematic Studies. Not a good look. Read some bell hooks and get on my level.”

The purveyors of Millennial snot attempt to fool themselves and the world about their level of self-belief with two primary tools: one, through embracing the preening sanctimony of contemporary left politics, acting as though they simply are the campaigns against racism or injustice or need, themselves, expressed of course in an obfuscatory academic vocabulary; two, through the language of droll disdain that has become the default idiom of the 21st century as insecurity has become the universal marinade of American elite life. It’s the fusion of modern progressivism’s self-celebratory nature, the discourse norms of our most overeducated age cohort, and the reflexive retreat into triviality as a self-defense strategy. It’s an inescapable style of online engagement even though the heyday of this way of talking is now firmly in the past, just like the heyday of the Millennials who popularized it. It’s the idiom of a failed generation, the unconvincing puffery of millions of unhappy front-of-class kids who have spent their adulthoods expecting the pure beauty of their creative souls to someday be rewarded with fame and riches, somehow, just like Orson Welles giving Kermit and the rest of the Muppets the standard rich and famous contract. It floats the ineradicable belief that success is just around the corner, exactly the way it seemed to be when they wore jumpsuits to warehouse parties in 2005.

I’m not a fan.

At The Upheaval, a guest post by Dudley Newright tries to decipher what the hell all of the permanently online Millennial snots are saying:

Back in May, a black studies professor – an academic of the type who writes dissertations about the semiotics of Beyonce – “clapped back” at one of her peers, a white man who had dared complain that all the jobs in his corner of academia had been given to minorities. Their grating exchange went viral, and the poor schmuck certainly won’t be finding work now.

Setting aside the content of the argument, I was struck by how these people spoke to one another:

“I mean, I’m sorry –“

“Let’s be *very* clear here”

“So true 🙄”

“You’re so right 🙄”

“This is an *extremely* bad look for you”

“Umm, frankly…”

These are middle-aged PhDs with prestigious careers, talking like snotty teenagers or sassy black drag queens. Note the overuse of sarcasm, emphasizing asterisks, exclamation points, and pregnant pause ellipses to denote how “over it” they are. They all speak in the dramatic tone of the mean girl.

“History PhD here, and uh, this thread is…a lot!”

You see this language, and these people, everywhere today. You know them by the “fluent in sarcasm” in bio. The PhDs, the columnists, the policy wonks and Wonkettes, the assorted professional quippers and clappers back – public intellectuals did not talk this way twenty years ago. Lionel Trilling did not call things “brat”. This is new. Yet this bumptious patois is how our ascendant elites talk now.

I call it “Millennial Snot”.

It’s the defining feature of our degraded public discourse, and the apotheosis of secular enlightenment liberalism. The last 20 years of economic decline and consolidation of blue America into fake laptop work culminated in tweets like this:

What is Millennial Snot? Where did it come from? How did it become the prevailing liberal voice? What exactly is the matter with these people? And are we going to have to suffer this obnoxious style forever?
The nerds who never got over high school

Liberals who have time to goof around on social media all day are probably nerds with more-or-less fake laptop jobs. They aren’t working class, otherwise they’d be working all day, but they aren’t terribly successful either, otherwise they’d have better things to do. The Bluesky-American sits awkwardly in the middle, and this feeds his resentment. He got good grades. He’s credentialed, and believes he’s smarter than his boss. He should be running things. If only society weren’t so dumb. If only society were fair, like when he was in school, when a kind teacher rewarded his intelligence and punished ne’erdowells.

Pity the “front row kid”, the wordcel who grinds his youth away for straight A’s only to find that the spoils of the market go to the back row goober who inherits his dad’s used car lot. If only there was some way to turn society upside down, so the front row kid could be on top. If only society could be more like grade school …

That would be a start, but the nerd doesn’t just want to be recognized for his intelligence. He also desperately wants to be cool. He wants to prove to the world that he won’t be shoved into a locker any more. He’s with it now, he uses the latest teen slang, he “understands the assignment”. This is how you get balding hetero professors saying stuff like “she ate and left no crumbs”, and “big mad” and other phrases that will sound embarrassingly dated in a few weeks.