The age of snark

Punching in every direction

Snark was once an effective weapon against elites like Donald Trump and JD Vance. But, increasingly, they're the ones wielding it. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

It’s impossible to address the subject of internet snark without first revisiting the classic Tom Scocca essay “On Smarm.” Published on Gawker almost 13 years ago, the essay’s influence continued well past the death of the site.

Scocca described snark as a useful and natural reaction to smarm. Smarm is snark’s opposite, the yin to its yang. Where snark is disrespectful, skeptical, glib, and unconcerned with tone or social niceties, smarm is smug, sanctimonious, condescending, and obsessed with superficial politeness.

According to Scocca, smarm is “a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.”

Snark is The Onion reprinting its classic article “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” word for word in response to the Parkland shooting. Smarm is David Brooks writing a column in response to the same shooting titled “Respect First, Then Gun Control,” where he argued the real problem was that liberals weren’t nice enough to conservatives.

Scocca also distinguished between snark and smarm by pointing out power differentials — a typical example of smarm would be a smug insider with enormous power and influence asking “Why can’t we all just get along and respect each other?” to an outsider critic, all the while abusing said power and deflecting all criticism into complaints about tone.

Smarm was arguably the dominant conversational tone during the 2000s and 2010s when Scocca was developing as a writer, especially for elites in political, cultural, and journalistic circles. Smarm was the reaction of a besieged elite confronted with people who refused to follow the rules of engagement. Smarm is Dave Eggers proclaiming you should not dismiss a book until you have written one or dismiss a movie until you have made one.

The internet and social media tore down walls and made criticism easier and more direct than ever before. Gawker, an irreverent outlet best known for tearing down elite tastemakers, was the foremost battleground between snarky outsider new media and smarmy traditional institutions.

Writing in Gawker, Scocca defended snark as the appropriate response to smarm, the “fuck you” to sanctimonious bullshitters who would rather tone police their critics and demand credentials than defend their choices on the merits to people they considered beneath them.

And in context, Scocca was right. In 2003, as liberals questioned the government’s case for war in Iraq, the president smarmily resorted frequently to the idea that “now is not the time for politics,” while his administration’s officials fired back by appealing to tone:

“I call on all the vociferous Democrat critics, from Kerry to Dean and from Daschle to Pelosi, to have the courage to tell their hero Ted Kennedy that he went too far,” DeLay said in a statement responding to Kennedy calling the Iraq War a fraud. “Are they leaders or are they just liberal pundits?”

In an environment like that, snark was a useful corrective.

But today’s media environment is different. We live in an age absolutely drenched in snark, especially online. Snark oozes out of the pores of every single platform. It’s almost impossible to have an object-level conversation on any major social media site that doesn’t devolve into snarky asides, cheap dunks, and insults rather than arguments.

Snark was a useful weapon against smarmy, insulated, credential-obsessed elites. But now that the outsiders who wielded it have themselves become the elite, snark has lost its target and moral force, curdling into a cheap and corrosive default register. Snark was a weapon of democratization, meant to pull the self-important off their high horses. But when it’s lobbed freely at any and all people you disagree with, it eradicates the practice of reasonable disagreement.

The age of the quote tweet

It’s difficult to overstate how omnipresent the cynical, ironic, snarky tone has become online. It’s the default conversational register for nearly every social media site.

We communicate in the language of snark now: We celebrate “clapbacks” and “dunks” over our opponents. We “read them for filth” while “throwing shade.” We “mogg.”