Read on Twitter
If we want to know what American normality is--what Americans want to regard as normal--we can trust television, because television's whole raison is reflecting what people want to see
Itâs tempting to quibble with this, to say all the assumptions about television as some monolithic orchestrator of culture are invalidated by the internet because by god we have social media now but by it's just not true https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1055227790100856832
When we watch television, weâre all alone together; we all share the same activity, but the activity itself is psychologically solitary, so each person alone when he watches it. I donât believe the experience of social media is different in this respect https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1053456891362238464
TV and social networks both provide us with mediated social experience, so they allow us to feel the emotional payoff that we get from having friends or participating in a social circle except without the cost of having to present a social self of our own
This is emotional laborâa concept both totally insane & yet useful because the work of relating to other people is literally what it means to be human & alive. We now treat it as a commodity since itâs possible to act out intimacy once & replicate it at scale through media
Social media only slightly changes the bargain; most people mostly lurk; content creators are less than ten percent of users and even if you self-actualize on one platform, you are likely a ghost on others
Being subjected to the attention of a mob is nothing like being around your friends. You are present as an object to the gaze of millions and this can create an overwhelming and paralytic self-consciousness. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1035964689484722177
One strategy for coping with the public gaze is to present a facade of ironic detachment. Another is to suppress self-consciousness so desperately that you lose all self-awareness and become so mawkish and maudlin and cloying that no one can stand you. More on this in a moment
Memes, stock phrases, retweets, and reaction gifs are all prefab components you can use to construct a social presentation of yourself with a maximum of emotional detachment. Perhaps this is healthier https://twitter.com/Logo_Daedalus/status/1011998998574587905
(This thread itself is a reading of David Foster Wallace's E Unibus Pluram. Thesis: irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are the distinctive attributes of contemporary USA culture, which are pleasurable agents of despair and stasis) http://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf
This thesis now appears hopelessly dated but the brilliant thing about Wallaceâs original essay was that he predicted precisely the thing which was to follow the modality of detached irony culture, a kind of full reversal and willful re-immersion into sincerity:
âThe next real literary rebels in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre valuesâ
This is undeniably the case and as always, my own thesis is that this has proved to be far worse than the irony culture that preceded it, not at all what DFW wanted, horrible and horrifying, not redemptive at all
Television is uniquely suited to irony because it engages both sight and sound. Irony is tension between what's said and what's seen, and TV is perfectly built to juxtapose words with images that undercut whats being said.
The ironies of TV are legion: TV is a syncresis that celebrates diversity. TV performers present an illusion of unconscious appeal only through the extreme self-consciousness of acting. Products which cater to masses are presented as expressing individuality
Mass culture tends to be vile and dumb because it has to please its audience, and this isn't to say that the audience is vile and dumb, only that people tend to be remarkably similar in their stupid and prurient interests and wildly different in their refined and intelligent ones
If social media has accelerated the race to the bottom in mass culture its because the feedback loop between consumers and producers of culture has become tight and rapid and parallel instead of slow and monolithic.
But social media is just audience participation, its not what killed irony. DFWs notes: âAmericans are no longer united by common feelings as by common images: what binds is what we stand witness toâ the fully ironic posture can only exist when nothing we witness has consequences
The thing that killed USAs totalizing ironic detachment culture was the day that we witnessed airplanes flying into our skyscrapers, that was the real birth of ânew sincerityââfor one radiant moment we had real fear of death, and all pretense of avoiding ridicule was demolished
Since then itâs been impossible to not care about anything; ironic detachment gets you shouted down, though it took a decade for the language to crystallize into a new memeplex of thought-terminating cliches. âtoxic privilege,â âout of touch,â âtone deaf,â etc
All the hideous and hideously sincere sentiments that we still carry around from the Obama years, discourse about oppression and identity &c shows its teeth when some naĂŻf tries to shrug and then *record scratch* and someone tells you in a hushed voice thatâs not who we are now
So it wasnât at all the case that some new artistic movement managed to wrench sincerity and meaning out of postmodern ironic self-referentialism that is immune to its own methods of criticism because it subsumes them, it was something wholly outside https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1134883652074999808
The artistic viability of postmodernism was never a consequence of any new facts about art, but of facts about the new importance of mass commercial culture.
The artistic viability of the new sincerity is dead on arrivalâthe machines that evolved to produce âend of historyâ culture have no way to speak honestly, so instead they abandon self awareness in the opposite direction, oversteering into sincerity until it becomes parody
Based/cringe arenât opposite ends of a spectrum, theyâre a single pole; their antipode is meta/irony, and what both extremes have in common is being strategies for avoiding pain, by pushing emotion as far away as possible, or by clutching it so tight it eclipses everything else
In the 90s kids with no worldly experience affected world weariness and now they affect carrying the weight of the world, and in both cases we are talking about young people who canât do either of those things authentically.
The upshot of all this, the proliferation of new sincerity, of everyone constantly /caring/ so much when the actual stakes of the things they care about have basically no personal consequence to them is a sanctimonious social justice nightmare
As an example of this kind of oppressive absurdity, we have just concluded the most overblown and melodramatic month of anti-family propaganda in the history of our empireâ
if you point out the oppressive nature of wokeness viz. the avg American for whom brand loyalty is synecdochic of identity, you get back pablum re: Muslims on the far side of the world killing gays, as if that has ANY bearing on google trying to tattoo pride flags in your eyelids
This is what happens when irony ends, everyone becomes extremely sincere in a way thatâs totally overblown and idiotic, caring about every little nothing, quantifying interactions as âmicroagressionâ and shouting âfuck youâ at the president 5000 times after he says good morning
