Dissentivisation
If you’re not a regular reader of Andy Rutledge’s blog, this post won’t make a lot of sense until you first read his articles USA.gov Redux and his latest piece The Design of Dissent.
Finished? Good.
In the latter article, Andy (I hope he doesn’t mind if I call him Andy; all that Mr. business seems far too formal for rel=”colleagues”) complains about the negative feedback he received after he posted the USA.gov redesign (short version for anyone who didn’t bother to read it: Obama is a dirty commie!) and specifically cites tweets from Malarkey and me as examples of how the “Leftist” design community won’t tolerate “minority” (by which he means “right-wing in a liberal industry”) views expressed through the medium of design.
(It’s at this point that you can laugh at his first mistake in crediting me with any influence or weight within the UK web scene. Perhaps he thinks editing Digital Web is somehow an influential position and people might care what I twitter about – somehow I doubt that, though. It is noteworthy, however, that despite protesting that what is written on his personal site is personal, he still attempts to link my comments on my personal Twitter account with Digital Web.)
Anyway, on to the central thrust of his complaint, which is that the web design community as a whole is a left-wing monothought clique and any dissent is met with criticism and vulgarity. Unfortunately this statement does the original USA.gov redesign too much credit—it is not, as Andy tries to characterise it, “political dissent”; rather it is a humourless rant designed to spread FUD through false citations and out-of-context quotes, in the lead-up to an election that will prove important to not only America but the world. While I can’t vote in the US election, that should not and does not preclude me having an (informed) opinion on the candidates. Chatter on Twitter shows me that I’m not alone, and there are many US voters who are doing their own research to sort the truth from the lies.
Andy also wonders why so many negative reactions came from the UK; my own hypothesis is that US-based readers are all too aware that his brand of terrified, “reds under the bed” McCarthy-ist is still around—here in the enlightened UK I think we assume that kind of wrong-headedness died out around the time we stopped hating Cuba and worrying about The Bomb; when confronted with it, we tend to have more of an immediate, visceral reaction.
There’s no denying that Rutledge knows his stuff when it comes to design, but I mean, come on—how can anyone expect to be taken seriously when they describe Britain as “socialist” and trot out phrases like “legions of Communists around the world seem to simply adore Barack Obama” with a straight face? There is no conspiracy among the “Leftist design community”, Andy—it’s simply that when confronted by ignorance many will feel duty-bound to point it out.
Matthew 15:14
Filed under: Musings.
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Comments
- Phil Thompson
- 497 days ago
I love reading Andy Rutledge’s site but he seems to have gone a bit crazy of late.
The design he created for his original post was great and any person criticism directed at him is wholly justified on account of the problem being his bizarre attitude and not his talent.
- #2
- Thomas C. Stoecklein
- 496 days ago
You go to great lengths to point out Andy’s supposed ignorance, but fail to address any such instances of ignorance. Beyond that, you don’t even bother to attempt to refute his “ignorance.”
Instead, you call him a “cock” on Twitter and lambaste him on here as being ignorant. You even go so far as to imply a parallel to McCarthyism.
To say that this is laughable would be wrong. In all honestly, it’s saddening. Has political discourse in today’s world become so muddled that, when confronted with a differing worldview, we are unable to refute it and must resort to childish name calling more representative of two children on a playground than two educated adults?
Congratulations for missing Andy’s point completely; thereby proving it true (in this instance, anyhow). Nowhere is he attempting to argue that the design community is a leftist conspiracy. Rather, that it is hypocritical in its collective views.
If you were step back and look at things rationally, you’d see this hypocrisy in the design community’s embrace of “political dissent” on one hand and rabid intolerance of differing opinions on the other.
And at the end of the day, it doesn’t take a rhetorician to notice there’s a great deal of hypocrisy in that.
- #3
Thanks for this great post. Still, I hope this bandwagoning (if thats what happening on twitter and elsewhere) against his right-wing propaganda makes him think again and get his facts straight.