Elias Aboujaoude (b. 1971) published Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality in 2011. The book is remembered for its diagnostic categories: grandiosity, narcissism, ordinary everyday viciousness, impulsivity, infantile regression, the illusion of knowledge, the collapse of privacy, and virtualism. What is often missed in casual summaries is the book’s careful qualification. Aboujaoude’s e-personality is not a moral verdict. He writes explicitly that the virtual personality can liberate people from inhibition, make them “bolder, stronger, and more efficient,” and make it easier to voice unpopular positions or to organize against injustice. The pathology arises when those strengths become grandiosity, impulsiveness, cruelty, unwarranted certainty, or a self-reinforcing identity that begins to absorb the offline person.
Which parts of Nathan Cofnas (b. 1988) does the internet reward? Which parts does it suppress? What happens when the reward system starts shaping the intellectual product itself?
The benefits and costs of Cofnas e-personality are large. The best online Cofnas is an auditor. The worst online Cofnas is a performer. The Jason Arday plagiarism affair of July and August 2026 is remarkable because both figures appear in the same story, in the same weeks, addressing the same subject.
Give the e-personality its due. Cofnas has spent much of his adult life working on subjects that carry severe professional costs. His credentials are real. Columbia BA, Cambridge MPhil, Oxford DPhil, a substantial peer-reviewed publication record in Human Nature, Philosophical Psychology, Biology and Philosophy, and Utilitas, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Cambridge, and now a postdoctoral position in philosophy at Ghent. Dismissing him as an internet crank requires ignoring a body of scholarship.
His strongest habit is forensic. His 2018 audit of Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique (1998) is the crowning achievement of his career. Cofnas spent a year examining the evidence and citation structure on MacDonald’s terms. That is the intellectual practice that later made him dangerous to Jason Arday.
His targets include MacDonald, Thomas Sowell (b. 1930), Donald Trump’s economic populism, the “podcast bros,” conservatives he considers unserious, and hereditarian allies such as Noah Carl. His archive covers Why We Need to Talk About the Right’s Stupidity Problem, Thomas Sowell’s Wishful Thinking About Race, MAGA Communism and the End of America, Podcast Bros and Brain Rot, and Don’t Scapegoat Women. This is evidence against the simplest theory that he searches for what his coalition wants to hear. He is willing to annoy his own potential allies.
The online medium has done for him something the normal academy was unable to do. It gave him distribution. An argument that might circulate among a few hundred specialists in Philosophical Psychology can reach tens or hundreds of thousands of readers through Substack, X, podcasts, and YouTube. His interview circuit has included Amy Wax (b. 1953), Nicholas Wade (b. 1942), Michael Huemer (b. 1969), Noah Carl, and Stephen Kershnar, alongside appearances on Brain in a Vat, Andrew Gold’s Heretics, and various heterodox-academic podcasts. Those conversations are not uniformly sycophantic. Carl and Wax have disagreed with him about human worth and the political consequences of hereditarianism. Huemer can pull him into ordinary professional philosophy. The long format sometimes improves Cofnas because it lets the careful philosopher reappear.
The internet did not merely corrupt Nathan Cofnas. It created the conditions under which a professionally isolated academic could continue producing intellectually consequential work.
The four registers of his output contain the journal paper, the long Substack essay, the Substack Note, and the X post. That distinction becomes more important under Aboujaoude.
The journal Cofnas is the least Aboujaoudean Cofnas. He defines terms. He anticipates objections. He narrows claims. He distinguishes the procedural question, may this hypothesis be investigated, from the substantive question, is this hypothesis true. His 2020 defense of research on group differences in intelligence is controversial, but its architecture is academic philosophy.
Long-form Substack is intermediate. The evidence remains. The titles get hotter. Research on Group Differences in Intelligence becomes A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution. A disagreement with Cambridge becomes Cambridge University’s War on Free Speech. Footnotes persist. So do villains, heroes, and calls to action.
Notes and X are different again. Qualifications disappear first. Then argumentative structure. Then occasionally ordinary civility.
That is close to what Aboujaoude predicts. His e-personality begins with disinhibition and then tends toward grandiosity, narcissism, darkness, regression, and impulsivity. The important question is not whether Cofnas possesses each trait. It is whether the movement from journal to Substack to Note to X systematically increases their observable equivalents.
Grandiosity is one of the easier dimensions to see. It requires care because Cofnas has suffered institutional and personal persecution for his beliefs.
A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution is grander than “here is what the behavioral-genetics evidence permits us to infer.” Cambridge University’s War on Free Speech is grander than “I believe Emmanuel College applied its policies improperly to my case.” “Here I tell the true story” is grander than “here is evidence bearing on a contested story.”
Cambridge received 58 complaints against him. Emmanuel terminated his college affiliation. He sued. A County Court rejected his claim but produced legally significant findings that his hereditarian and anti-woke beliefs qualified for Equality Act protection. Cambridge’s separate disciplinary investigation concluded that his published views did not violate the law or the university’s free-speech regulations.
The internet has not made Cofnas imagine himself as a persecuted dissident. He became one.
The danger sits past this. Repeated institutional opposition can make the persecution narrative self-validating. Every petition confirms the taboo is real. Every cancellation confirms the institutions are captured. Every hostile newspaper story confirms that journalists cannot tolerate the truth. Every sympathetic podcast confirms that outsiders understand what insiders refuse to understand.
At that point an important distinction can disappear. Being punished for a proposition does not establish the proposition is true.
Cofnas knows this. His whole career demonstrates that he can distinguish social reception from evidentiary validity. But the architecture of his online career rewards their fusion.
Aboujaoude devotes a chapter to the internet’s ability to make the self the center of its own media system. He is interested in the online feedback apparatus of followers, mentions, self-searching, applause, and public identity. Clinical narcissism is not the relevant category.
Cofnas is less obvious a case than many public intellectuals. His Substack is not a diary. He does not disclose his relationships or moods. Much of his work concerns arguments, documents, and other people’s claims.
His professional story has increasingly become one of his principal subjects.
Cambridge investigated me. Emmanuel expelled me. A newspaper attacked me. Students petitioned against me. Ghent students are organizing against me. I went on television. I won this part of the legal argument. I lost that part. Here is another attack. Here is another vindication.
His July 13, 2026 Note about Ghent is characteristic. Administrators, he wrote, were giving “anti-Cofnas PPT presentations,” while a Students Against Cofnas group had complained about his effect on student safety and wellbeing.
The events are true. The Aboujaoude question is what happens when a person’s persecution becomes content, the content brings attention, the attention produces new opposition, and the opposition produces new content. That is a closed feedback loop.
Cofnas’s professional identity has become inseparable from being Nathan Cofnas, the academic whom institutions try unsuccessfully to silence. The persona has adaptive value. It explains his setbacks without requiring surrender. It gives supporters a continuing narrative. It generates interview invitations. It turns institutional exclusion into proof of relevance.
Identities that explain everything eventually become difficult to falsify.
Ordinary everyday viciousness is where Aboujaoude lands hard. Cofnas is often good at distinguishing an argument from its author in academic writing. Social media repeatedly reverses that discipline. His public output contains “medieval peasants are still there, just as dumb as ever,” “Catturds with dumb intuitions,” Jordan Peterson (b. 1962) reduced to “clown content,” and other formulations that could not survive his journal register.
The Arday episode supplies an almost controlled experiment because we can watch the same subject move between registers.
In the July 21, 2026 long-form investigation, Cofnas considers Arday’s extraordinary biographical claims and then stops himself. He writes that they are impossible to prove or disprove without more direct evidence. “Therefore, I will only address questions about his scholarship.” He then turns to documents, plagiarism software, dissertations, passages, citations, and journal corrections.
That is good epistemic hygiene.
Six days later, Notes Cofnas writes about Arday’s claim to have played professional football and snooker and ends: “White liberals hear this and think it is real!”
On July 28: “We can literally see the plagiarism with our eyes. 1/10 cover-up attempt by Cambridge.”
On July 30: “Jason Arday should NOT be fired. He was hired to represent DEI, and he’s doing a great job.”
Nothing about moving from Substack essay to Note improved the evidence. What changed was the social function of the speech.
The long article was an investigation.
The Notes were dunks.
That is Virtually You. Aboujaoude argues that virtual environments weaken the ordinary restraining mechanisms that accompany face-to-face contact and can make the e-personality harsher than the person otherwise is. He worries about aggression becoming normalized when immediate interpersonal consequences disappear.
The lower the friction and the shorter the format, the more readily contempt substitutes for analysis.
Cofnas is not an industrial hot-take machine. On his own Substack About page he says he comments on news only when it connects with subjects he already knows and “generally avoid[s] hot takes.” His long-form archive largely bears that out.
He writes fewer substantial posts than the typical professional Substack personality. Some take considerable research. The Arday investigation plainly did. The MacDonald work took years. His attack on Sowell involved reading and checking claims rather than reacting to a news cycle.
Aboujaoude’s impulsivity chapter fits the Notes and X layer much better than Cofnas’s intellectual production as a whole. His problem is less intellectual impulsivity than rhetorical impulsivity. He may spend days checking a claim and thirty seconds deciding how contemptuously to announce the result.
Aboujaoude argues that online language encourages a more impatient, immediate, and childish style that can migrate outward into the rest of personality.
Cofnas supplies small examples rather than spectacular ones. “1/10 cover-up attempt.” Sarcastic declarations that a professor should not be fired because he is doing an excellent job representing DEI. “Zero respect left for Simon Baron-Cohen (b. 1958).”
The language belongs to internet adolescence rather than to academic adulthood. It turns a dispute about plagiarism standards, university governance, racial politics, and someone’s career into the scoring language of a meme.
And it performs well online. A three-page reconstruction of institutional responsibility is hard to repost. “1/10 cover-up attempt” is frictionless. The platform selects the latter Cofnas for reproduction.
Aboujaoude argues that the internet erodes distinctions between information producers and consumers. Everyone becomes a journalist and an expert. Control shifts toward the person with the mouse, while enormous quantities of accessible information produce inflated confidence that one has mastered a subject.
Cofnas is not a man who Googled “race and IQ” for three hours and opened a Substack. He is a trained philosopher of science. His characteristic method finds primary documents, reconstructs citation chains, and checks what sources say. On an internet full of pseudo-expertise, that is a comparative advantage.
The Arday investigation demonstrates it.
Cofnas independently found extensive textual overlap between Arday’s 2015 dissertation and Paula Zwozdiak-Myers’s 2009 dissertation. Retraction Watch later reported that Times Higher Education had independently developed similar material the previous year before abandoning publication after a letter from Arday’s lawyers. Purdue biochemist David Sanders, who had independently reviewed the THE dossier, told Retraction Watch there was “no question” of extensive plagiarism. Earlier inquiries by other academics had already produced corrections in two Arday papers.
The Guardian then conducted its own investigation and uncovered serious discrepancies around some of Arday’s public biographical claims.
Cofnas did not invent an internet scandal from nothing.
He also did not discover every underlying problem. Dave Harris and others had been asking questions earlier. Times Higher Education had independently investigated the plagiarism allegations in 2025. What Cofnas did on July 21 was break the material through the barrier into wide public circulation. That is an important distinction.
It is also an extraordinary vindication of the positive e-personality Aboujaoude describes. The man willing to absorb opprobrium was willing to publish evidence that people with more institutional reputation to lose had not succeeded in publishing.
The uncomfortable possibility is that Cofnas’s damaged reputation gave him a comparative advantage.
Once you have already been called racist, protested, removed from a college affiliation, and sued an institution over it, the marginal cost of another accusation becomes much smaller. The person least vulnerable to reputational intimidation can investigate something that more reputable people regard as professionally radioactive.
The exclusion that produced the platform dependence also produced the freedom the investigation required. These are the same condition seen from different angles. Aboujaoude’s framework identifies the condition as pathological in most respects. In this respect it enables a legitimate watchdog function.
That is a contribution of the online Cofnas.
The Jason Arday story may be the most consequential thing Cofnas has published outside conventional scholarship.
His July 21 article displays engagement vastly above his normal posts. More importantly, it led into reporting by The Times, Retraction Watch, The Guardian, and other outlets. Cambridge announced further investigations. Arday resigned. After Arday’s death, Cofnas himself became the subject of mainstream profiles. The Observer now describes him in a headline as “the man at the centre of Arday plagiarism row.”
Cofnas is significantly more famous than he was a month ago.
He is not yet a mass celebrity. His Substack has a little over 6,000 subscribers according to its public profile. He has crossed an important boundary. Before Arday, he was famous within overlapping niches: hereditarianism, academic free speech, heterodox philosophy, dissident-right media, Cambridge controversies. After Arday, major British newspapers explain who Nathan Cofnas is because general readers are encountering the name.
That is a different kind of fame.
Now comes Aboujaoude’s most brutal mechanism: context collapse.
Arday was found dead on August 14, 2026, after weeks of intense scrutiny. Police described the death as unexpected but not suspicious. His family and supporters say the sustained public campaign against him caused enormous distress. Others argue the underlying investigation was justified and that Cambridge’s earlier failure to resolve questions internally helped produce the eventual public explosion. Current coverage ranges from calls for reflection on racism and media excess to criticism of universities for failing to vet and protect Arday.
There is no public evidence establishing that Cofnas caused Arday’s death. Treating temporal sequence as causation would be irresponsible.
The New York Times Front-Page Test
Imagine an intelligent, scrupulously accurate but unsympathetic New York Times reporter putting Cofnas’s words on tomorrow’s front page. Nothing is distorted. Nothing is stripped of context. Links go directly to the evidence. His strongest arguments are included. His history with Cambridge is described accurately. So is Arday’s.
Would Cofnas be comfortable?
Much of his work passes easily.
“Nathan Cofnas compared the two dissertations and documented dozens of closely corresponding passages.”
Fine.
“He noted that journal articles had already received corrections following earlier complaints.”
Fine.
“He argued that Cambridge should investigate rather than dismiss allegations because of the politics of the complainant.”
Fine.
“He discovered material independently of a previously aborted Times Higher Education investigation.”
Excellent.
“He stated explicitly that Arday’s more extraordinary biographical claims could not then be proven or disproven and therefore confined his principal case to scholarship.”
That one makes Cofnas look very good.
Now put the Notes on the front page.
“White liberals hear this and think it is real!”
Harder.
“We can literally see the plagiarism with our eyes. 1/10 cover-up attempt by Cambridge.”
More childish than damning.
“Jason Arday should NOT be fired. He was hired to represent DEI, and he’s doing a great job.”
Much harder after the whole story is known.
The Observer reports that Cofnas told Times Radio that Arday was “not smart” enough to be a Cambridge professor.
That last statement may express Cofnas’s sincerely held judgment. The front-page test does not ask whether he sincerely believes it. It asks whether the statement still looks necessary, proportionate, and defensible when removed from the sympathetic audience that understands the surrounding wink.
Some of these lines fail the test.
Not because Arday later died. A person’s death cannot retroactively make accurate criticism impermissible.
They fail because the mockery contributed nothing to the evidentiary case.
Delete “White liberals hear this and think it is real!” and every piece of evidence remains.
Delete the joke about Arday being a good DEI representative and every plagiarism comparison remains.
Delete “1/10” and Cambridge’s conduct can still be criticized.
That is the cleanest distinction between Cofnas the auditor and Cofnas the performer. The auditor produces the information that changes the public record. The performer adds the material most likely to be quoted back at him after circumstances change.
The Auditor and the Performer
The auditor-performer distinction cuts through the four-register analysis and identifies what actually varies. The registers are the venues. The operations are what matter.
Auditor mode does forensic work. Documents, comparisons, citation chains, careful hedging, the discipline that peer review trained.
Performer mode does audience work. Dunks, mockery, coalition signaling, meme scoring, the discipline that platforms train.
A writer can produce auditor work in a Note, in principle. Cofnas rarely does. A writer can produce performer work in a peer-reviewed paper, in principle. Cofnas never does. The venues carry incentive structures that pull the operations toward the venues that reward them. The pull is not deterministic. The writer’s choice about which operation to run in which venue remains available. Cofnas has chosen to run auditor operations in academic and Substack-essay venues and performer operations in Notes and X. The choices are legible. They are choices.
The important observation is that the same writer produced both operations about Arday in the same three weeks. The auditor produced the July 21 investigation. The performer produced the July 27–30 Notes. Neither cancels the other. The auditor did work of public value. The performer produced material that failed the front-page test. Both are the same writer. Both are what he chose to produce.
Aboujaoude’s framework predicts that platform pressure erodes auditor discipline over time. The Arday case shows the erosion running in parallel with the discipline rather than replacing it. The writer holds the discipline in one register while producing the erosion in another. This is not the standard trajectory the framework anticipates. It is a case where the writer retains more discipline than the pure framework prediction would allow, while also displaying the erosion the framework predicts. Both halves are real.
The Arday affair delivers an enormous psychological and professional reward to the auditor persona.
For years Cofnas has claimed that elite institutions suppress inconvenient truths, that conventional gatekeepers cannot be trusted on politically sensitive subjects, and that someone willing to endure ostracism can see things insiders refuse to confront.
Then he investigated a Cambridge superstar whom the university initially defended, published the evidence independently, watched mainstream outlets follow, watched Cambridge open further inquiries, and watched Arday resign.
Whatever one thinks about Cofnas’s wider worldview, that sequence is going to feel like proof.
Some of it is proof. Cambridge and academic publishing had quality-control problems in this case. Retraction Watch’s reporting about the aborted Times Higher Education investigation makes the institutional failure harder to wave away.
The psychological danger is extrapolation.
“I correctly detected a serious problem with Jason Arday” can become “my model of DEI is correct.”
“My Substack succeeded where institutional channels failed” can become “institutions generally cannot be trusted.”
“Critics called me racist while I was right about this evidence” can become “being called racist is evidence that I am probably right.”
“I paid a professional price for heterodox positions and later broke a real scandal” can become “the positions for which I paid the price have been vindicated.”
None of those follows.
An auditor of all people should know that. David Sanders, the Purdue biochemist who reviewed the THE dossier, supplied the crucial control when he told Retraction Watch that universities and journals often fail to take plagiarism seriously and that this failure is not specific to race or DEI. Cambridge did have a quality-control problem. So does much of academic publishing. The problem is broader than the racial-political framing suggests. Compressing the broader phenomenon into the narrower framing is the extrapolation error the framework predicts, and it is the specific error the writer’s professional training equips him to avoid if he chooses to.
Video Adds a Different Distortion
The video and podcast Cofnas is better than the social-media Cofnas.
Long interviews allow qualifications back in. They also display intellectual competence that disappears in a screenshot. The Brain in a Vat conversation spends more than an hour moving through definitions of race, genetic variation, environmental explanations, IQ, policy, and academic freedom. His Nicholas Wade podcast ranges through environmental explanations, academic censorship, racial hierarchy, and the lab-leak controversy. His Huemer conversation spends more than two hours on academic publishing, wokeism, vegetarianism, and metaethics.
Video adds a different distortion. It turns the intellectual into a recurring character.
The hosts introduce Cofnas as the controversial Cambridge academic willing to say what others will not say. Then comes Cambridge. Then censorship. Then race. Then what academics privately know but refuse publicly to acknowledge. The story becomes ritualized.
The autobiographical material expands. Qualification shrinks. Repeated appearances consolidate a role: the credentialed truth-teller who has paid a price for telling forbidden truths.
That role can be accurate and dangerous at the same time.
Once a man has become “the guy who says the forbidden thing that turns out to be true,” the audience no longer merely evaluates his next claim. It anticipates vindication.
That is when an auditor needs to become more skeptical of himself rather than less.
What Made the Arday Investigation Possible
Before July, there was a plausible reading in which Cofnas’s move toward Substack was mostly professional self-destruction.
He had traded the slow prestige accumulation of conventional philosophy for a much smaller but intensely engaged heterodox audience. His Cambridge affiliation ended. Ghent generated another student campaign. His public persona seemed to be narrowing around race, wokeism, censorship, and the story of his own persecution.
The Arday story changes the calculation.
For once, the properties that conventional academia punished became assets.
His suspiciousness helped. His willingness to read boring documents helped. His taste for contradiction helped. His refusal to be intimidated by an accusation of racism helped. His existing ostracism helped. His Substack independence helped. His willingness to publish without institutional permission helped.
His audience gave the evidence enough initial velocity that mainstream journalists had to examine it.
Aboujaoude’s “third hand” metaphor for the e-personality is uncannily appropriate. The online Cofnas could perform an institutional function his ordinary academic role could not. It was investigative journalism produced by a philosopher.
That deserves real credit.
The irony is that the same platform machinery immediately encouraged him to cheapen his own accomplishment.
The article said: here are the documents.
The Notes said: look at these idiots.
The first changed the story. The second changed how people felt about Nathan Cofnas.
The Gatekeeping Chain Has Partly Collapsed
What makes Cofnas different from most public intellectuals is how far the e-personality has swallowed the occupational boundary.
Paul Bloom (b. 1963) still has enough institutional and genre separation that a provocative Substack post can move upward through The New Yorker, The Chronicle, a lecture, or scholarly publication, acquiring qualifications along the way. The different media regulate one another.
Philip N. Cohen (b. 1966) has an online persona that can become harsher than his scholarly persona, but professional sociology remains a powerful external reference point.
With Cofnas the gatekeeping chain has partly collapsed.
His academic work, Substack, podcasting, X persona, employment controversies, litigation, and journalism now form one career.
Aboujaoude worries that traits cultivated online can be imported into offline life until the e-personality begins reconfiguring the original. For Cofnas, there may no longer be an “offline” professional identity separate enough to compare against.
A blog post helped end his Emmanuel affiliation. The resulting controversy became podcast material. The podcast material enlarged his dissident identity. The identity brought a Substack audience. The Substack enabled the Arday investigation. The Arday investigation produced mainstream press attention. That attention now sends journalists back through his previous Substack and X history.
The loop is complete.
Nathan Cofnas is not a cautionary tale about why academics should stay off social media.
Without his online independence, the Arday allegations might have stayed inside private correspondence, abandoned journalism, and university procedure for substantially longer. The internet gave a professionally marginalized academic enough autonomy to perform a legitimate watchdog function. Subsequent independent reporting showed there was substantial material warranting investigation.
Cofnas is not simply vindicated by Arday either. The success of one investigation does not validate his entire racial or political framework. It does not validate every inference about why Cambridge hired Arday. David Sanders supplied the alternative hypothesis. Universities and journals often fail to take plagiarism seriously, and that phenomenon is not specific to race or DEI. That control matters.
The deepest Virtually You interpretation is therefore not “the internet made Nathan Cofnas bad.”
It is that the internet found two real Cofnas traits and supercharged both.
One is intellectual courage allied to forensic persistence.
The other is contempt allied to certainty.
The first exposed a story powerful institutions had failed to resolve.
The second keeps trying to turn every successful audit into a morality play.
Applying the Method to the Method
The next intellectual step should almost write itself. Apply the Nathan Cofnas method to Nathan Cofnas. Separate the evidence from the coalition story. Separate what the Arday case establishes from what it makes emotionally satisfying to believe. Separate criticism that survives hostile quotation from the jokes that require a friendly audience. Treat every viral vindication as a hypothesis rather than a credential.
The online Cofnas has demonstrated he can audit Cambridge.
The more difficult question is whether the auditor can audit the e-personality that Cambridge helped create.
That is not a rhetorical question. The Arday affair is the strongest possible test of whether the writer can hold discipline at the moment discipline is hardest to hold. The reward for abandoning discipline is enormous and immediate. The reward for maintaining it is invisible and delayed. Auditors who cannot audit themselves at moments like this eventually become prosecutors. Prosecutors who succeed at prosecution eventually become the thing they were prosecuting.
Aboujaoude wrote in 2011 for ordinary users. He did not fully anticipate the case where the writer’s damaged reputation would function as an asset for legitimate investigative work that more reputable venues could not conduct. His framework treats the e-personality as pathology to be resisted. The Arday case forces a modification.
Some of what the e-personality produces is pathology. Some of it is enabling condition. The pathological output and the enabling output can appear in the same writer in the same weeks addressing the same subject. The framework has to hold both.
Aboujaoude’s positive account of the e-personality’s potential appears briefly at the start of the book and then largely drops out. The Cofnas case shows why the positive account cannot be dropped. Writers who have absorbed enough reputational damage to be immune to further intimidation can perform institutional functions that intimidation-vulnerable writers cannot perform. The immunity is Aboujaoude’s e-personality operating as advertised. The mockery that comes with the immunity is Aboujaoude’s e-personality operating pathologically. The two arrive together because they run through the same channel.
This has implications beyond the Cofnas case. Investigative journalism performed by professionally marginal writers is a growing category. The category will produce more cases in which pathology and public service run through the same output. Framework users need to be able to hold both halves at once. Reducing the analysis to either half loses the case.
Coda
After Jason Arday, Nathan Cofnas gets more interesting and more important.
He has demonstrated that the online Cofnas can perform an institutional function the conventional academic Cofnas could not. He has also demonstrated that the online Cofnas produces material that will not survive hostile quotation once the case moves out of the sympathetic-audience frame.
The two demonstrations belong together. They are the same platform doing both things. Aboujaoude predicted that the platform would produce the second demonstration. He did not predict the first. His framework needs the modification the Arday case forces.
What Cofnas does next will determine whether the Arday affair reads as the beginning of a more disciplined phase of his career or as the moment when the auditor persona became too rewarding to audit. The framework cannot predict the outcome. It can name the choice.
The auditor can audit himself. The performer cannot. Which figure produces the next essay is up to the writer. The rest of us can watch and take notes.
Aboujaoude’s book will remain useful for taking those notes because it identifies the specific pressures the writer is under.
