Thread by @rechelon

I've been asked to insert more citations for style reasons in a piece published by a major academic press and even though I know should, I am being a stubborn toddler and can't bring myself to.

So here's a thread on why I dislike and largely avoid citations.

First the moment a reader sees citations it changes the received *tone* of a text. This is mostly a matter of the cultural connotations of academic writing in our world, and is so is not fundamental to citations as an abstract technology, but it is still often quite relevant.

To add a few bracketed numbers or whatever into a text is to transform how it presents. There are certain *expectations* and that skews the read towards a drier and more authoritative tone. This doesn't just undermine casualness it can impede flow and addictiveness.

It's my firm aesthetic opinion that in most cases a text should keep the reader at the edge of their seat, propelled forward from point to point, delighted by whirls and twists, energized by a rapid rat-tat-tat of ideas and *implicit* ideas. More thriller than shopping list.

Further there's much to be said for the egalitarian features of casual speech, even when it gets peppered with big words / ideas, I'd rather direct bombast from someone in a hoodie and sagging pants than indirectly pretentious humility from someone dressed up in a suit or tweed.

The pitter-patter of casual speech and the tropes of cheap airport thriller prose are far more respectful to one's audience than any academic style. At the end of the day I'm a nerd from the projects and fronting as middle class scum feels both grossly inferior and dishonest.

(This is, incidentally, why no theoretical text or important philosophical argument should be written without at least a bare minimum of cussing. Anything less natural is insulting to your audience.)

But citations in a piece leave deviations from academic tone feeling canned and artificial -- a kind of Youth Pastor try-hard cringe.

Nothing is more painful than someone awkwardly shoehorning a joke into an otherwise conventional academic paper.

The second thing that sucks about citations is that they engender a kind of learned helplessness.

If something is even remotely googleable or otherwise researchable, it shouldn't be on you to cite some canonical writeup on the fact that 9/11 happened.

One of the worst things I see in young writers fresh out of academia is a propensity to provide citations for EVERYTHING. Every term, every event, every protozoic glimmer of a potential argument.

It bogs everything down, but it also leaves them incredibly timid writers.

A culture that prioritizes citations ends up suppressing novelty.

I'd often far rather a philosophy or physics paper that makes almost no references to prior work because it intricately braves new ground in a self-contained way.

Most academia breeds a kind of timid "must include everything" fetishization of tying every possible dynamic or avenue of consideration together, showing off your reading habits, rather than a radical slicing away to core roots or most important dynamics.

And this brings us to the third shit thing about citations: what is citable is a tiny fraction of what is a legitimate reference. The moment you move into citation land you end up cutting yourself off from all the things that are real but cannot be cited easily.

Moldy punk zines without titles, a conversation at Food Not Bombs, an scene-wide drama that you witnessed and experienced first-hand, a debate that raged across multiple facebook comment threads...

These are all AT LEAST as valid as something "published."

The core of anarchist discourse & theory progresses outside of academia. Academic "anarchists" tend to both lose track of this discourse, miss its pressures, and go off on marginal or disconnected things.

See also why "breadtube" looks so different from the anarchist mainstream.

(Every breadtube video tries to comprehensively cite formally published anarchist texts for some kind of authority, but this leaves them confined to topics the rest of anarchism finds inane or alien, as well as citing texts that are at best of marginal influence or importance.)

The fourth shitty thing about citations is that they promote historicist and scholastic modes of thinking.

What matters becomes less the pure *concepts*, and instead specific texts, specific authoritative sources.

This promotes a kind of ownership I find antithetical to productive discourse. Tying ideas to people and texts creates a kind of investment with perverse incentives. It also makes a concept sink or swim on personal status and associations.

I am never happier than when I see my myriad *anonymous* contributions to anarchist discourse taking off or when arguments I publicly originated get stripped of association with me.

An argument is most productive when it is "in the air" and not tied to any one text or person.

Fifth and finally, citations promote a tendency towards misrepresentation.

Rather than just presenting something or your rendition of it, a citation often acts as an opportunity to weaponize someone else's work in a direction it doesn't really go.

I can make, for example, a game theoretic argument about about incentives and strategies, but if I then append a citation to someone else making roughly similar points, I'm unilaterally welding them onto my claim.

It's akin to puffing up and starting a fight in the cafeteria and then reaching back to someone you barely know and going, "this guy knows what I'm saying!" All too often that is absolutely not the case.

Frankly *most* of the time I see citations being misused.

NOW. It's worth stating that I *get* the abstract theoretical arguments for citations.

More metadata is, in theory, great!

In theory, citations allow us to go off and double check the claims being made. To directly build upon a rich project without restating it all.

But *in practice* citations are an issue of UX. Small aesthetic aspects to an interface can have dramatic consequences upon psychology & culture, spiraling off into heavy clumps of norms & associations.

Citations and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race.