Since my review of Sven Beckert’s book on capitalism went live (and, truth be told, a few days before that), I’ve been engaged in a back and forth, sometimes bitchy, sometimes friendly, with various critics—of me, of Beckert, of capitalism, of Marxism, of Dylan Riley, of Robert Brenner. You can find many of these exchanges on my Facebook page. Others have sent me screenshots from Twitter and other social media platforms I’m not on.

One of the steady drumbeats in these conversations is privilege. My privilege as a senior scholar with social media followers, Beckert’s privilege as a Harvard professor, Riley’s privilege as a male Marxist, and on and on.

But there’s a kind of privilege that never gets mentioned in these flame wars, and that is the privilege of bad writing, of being a bad writer yet expecting everyone to listen to you, engage with you, respond to you.

There are three kinds of bad writers on social media platforms.

First, there are the droners, the monologuers, who go on and on, holding the floor without any consideration of the person who might be listening to them. We shouldn’t confuse the droner with the maker of long comments. There’s nothing wrong with a long comment. Reality is complicated, and sometimes it requires a lot of words to account for it. That’s not the droner’s problem, though he’ll often try to justify his droning by claiming that it is. The telltale sign of the droner is that there is nothing in the movement of his sentences that suggests he cares or is aware of his audience. The droner goes on unexplained tangents. He repeats himself, sometimes making the same obvious and irrelevant point in twelve different ways. He introduces ancillary information or considerations. Whatever the source of his monologue, he simply does not care about whether his audience is with him or not. He’s in his own head, and if he’s thinking about you at all, it’ll take the form of an assumption that you’re right there, in his head, gliding along with him down the Danube River.

Second, there are the first-year graduate students. These people aren’t necessarily first-year graduate students; some of them are professors at Ivy League schools. They are people who still suffer and savor their memories of that first year of graduate school, when everyone is completely intimidated by the knowledge of their professors or peers, not their knowledge of the subject matter, but their knowledge of The Literature. That is, what people have said about the subject matter (sort of). And these people think to themselves, oh, if only one day, I too could have read everything in The Literature (or at least credibly pretend to have read everything), and flatten my antagonist by citing this debate, or that authority, and watch her flail in fear because she doesn’t know the text or the debate. Wouldn’t that be delicious? And even if I’m not coming down on an antagonist, wouldn’t it be awesome to glide through life, like the Droner on the Danube, dispensing little bits of erudition as if it were knowledge?

(Short personal story: When I was first getting started as a professor at Brooklyn College, I attended a conference, where a senior scholar told me over drinks that in order for me to be successful, I needed to hide my arguments beneath heaping servings of “erudition, erudition, erudition.” Those were her exact words. I still remember it as a painful and embarrassing moment where this extraordinarily eminent professor revealed herself to be that first-year graduate student I’m talking about here. This is also how I feel about the Straussians. Whether it’s Harvey Mansfield or a Twitter troll, they all exhibit that desperate thirstiness of the student looking to impress the professor or intimidate his opponents by erudition, erudition, erudition. It never works.)

The last type is the confused word saladist. The confused may come by their confusion honestly; they’ve tried to wrestle with the text or a body of literature, and they still don’t understand it. I’ve certainly been in that position many times, particularly when it comes to new areas of scholarship I’m entering (as I have been in these last few years with my book on capitalism). Nothing wrong with confusion. What I do when I’m confused is to try and state what I think I know is correct, what I am uncertain about, and then ask people for help. And listen. I’ve posted many such posts on social media that express that confusion. Again, nothing wrong with it.

The confusionists I’m talking about are the ones who don’t know what they don’t know. These are the word saladists, who don’t express their confusion; they enact it. They don’t enact honestly; they express their confusion with great confidence. Usually, let’s be honest, these are men. Not always, but often. These are commenters who express nothing but the muddle of their own minds, and where some confused people can at least give you an indication of where the muddle lies, the confusionists spew so much word salad that you can’t even begin to sort through the leaves, where any amount of confusion may be hiding. These people make you work and sweat to try to get to the bottom of their confusion, but they show no appreciation of or interest in your work and sweat. They just keep swimming in their salad.

Those are three types of commenters; there are many more.

Why do I read them as privileged? It’s not because they’re men, who have privilege by virtue of being men. Some are often women. It’s not because they’re professors. Many of them are not. It’s not because they’re white or cis or straight; again, many are not (at least in my experience).

It’s because they are indifferent to their audience. They speak without giving any sense that there is a person at the other end of the conversation. They don’t see you. They don’t register your presence.

Again, I want to distinguish this point from the problem of the Droner—that is, I want to distinguish someone who goes on at length, honestly, from someone who drones on. And I’ll be honest, it’s because I’m aware that I often write at length, which can indicate an indifference to audience. But if you do read me, I think you get a pretty clear sense that I’m aware of you, not in your specificity, necessarily, but aware of you as a reader, with limited time and patience for other people’s prose. I try to keep things moving along, I try not to test your endurance, I try to be aware of when I’m droning, or sliding down a tangent. I edit my work, trying to trim all excess. I proofread it, so you don’t get stuck on a silly error of mine. And I try to engage you. I know that I won’t engage everyone; that’s the nature of things. But I try to engage you, whoever you are that’s still reading this, at this point.

I come by that desire honestly, I think. I’m not desperate for eyeballs on the page or followers. I don’t dumb things down, I don’t go for that cheap form of academic popularization that you see all over the internet, I try to stick to my own beliefs in a debate, even if they are unpopular (see fascism debate).

But when I say that I care about the reader, I mean that I’m aware of another human being opposite me. I consider that person not merely my equal, but also my partner. I care about what they think, what their experience is of my writing. Sometimes I think they’re wrong, other times I think they’re on to something. The point is, I see them, I’m aware of them, I’m writing for them, I’m thinking about them.

The droner, the first-year grad student, and the word saladist/confusionist: They don’t see other people. The first-year grad student gets the closest to other people, insofar as they’re trying to impress and parade their reading. But they’re not actually aware of other people as persons. They’re obsessed with their own experience of anxiety and intimidation, which they project on to other people. Other people are merely a screen of their own selves.

None of these types make for good writing. Not because they lack talent or knowledge. But because they lack awareness of the most basic other, the person who’s reading this page. They simply don’t care. And that is a form of privilege.