Do We Live In Hell?
PART 1: Well... yeah? Sort of.
Sometime during the pandemic, I realized that I had come to see logging onto social media in the same way hair-trigger reactionary weirdos see American cities. For reasons pertaining to their specific media diets and personal inclinations/damage and their echo chamber’s singular slurry of credulity and incuriosity, these people view cities as bottomed-out liberal hellscapes populated entirely by sick and venal predators, poisoned and irredeemable. But even this kind of judgment is a bit much for terminal-stage tech enshittification. I have my gripes with urban life, but these Fox News casualties are experiencing a different kind of derangement. The brazen rats and rotting infrastructure and foul smells and brainless hype beasts are all moderately disconcerting; the people I am describing do not actually see any of this. Instead, by choice, they chug and gobble whatever anecdote or fudged data or manufactured misery they can find to nurture their sense that other people in other places are living in subhuman conditions. This is a Taxi Driver mindset. Imagine the resulting internal monologue of someone more materially comfortable and somehow even more spiritually distressed than Travis Bickle, and you’ll begin to understand their furious incomprehension and vicious fantasies of retribution.
There is an obvious political and financial calculus to cultivating all this disgust, but that only partially explains the reflective opacity of all this scuzz. After Donald Trump’s first inauguration, the pop culture sphere caught this immediate and rabid obsession with politics. It was time to pick a side and make it your personality—resist or own the libs—and what became people’s idea of fighting for American values in the modern culture war played itself out as distressingly online busybodies rolling around in the sewer with other morons and psychos.
For the Twitter-brained media class, refrains like hellscape became big pious blurts for associating with the left. To publicly proclaim lost hope was a weird intellectual flex, even if these people were largely living comfortable lives. At the levels below where these powerful cynics leverage this disgust and pessimism to get and retain what they want, all these people are telling themselves awful stories to keep themselves amused and feign solidarity. This is perverse in both form and content, but what is hardest to parse is the extent to which a normal civilian would take this up as a hobby. Out of boredom or loneliness or the libidinal satisfaction of scratching some shameful itch, these sour and vengeful dorks have made a leisure-time activity out of spinning bespoke fantasies of sprawling crimes and demonic enemies and righteous revolution. I say this as someone who is friends with people who choose to root for the New York Jets, but you absolutely do not need to live like this.
There are many places where that anger might be put to more socially productive and less personally corrosive use. Factory workers and war refugees and poverty-stricken Americans navigating the slightest health crisis are all surviving hellish conditions—and there are plenty of actual horrors in the world that warrant justifiable anger. Even the month leading up to Trump’s second inauguration has been filled with the assassination of a healthcare CEO, two terrorist attacks carried out by currently serving or former American soldiers, our newly inaugurated president “joking” about annexing various parts of North America and launching a quid pro quo meme coin, mysterious and ominous drones hovering over New Jersey, Elon Musk doing back-to-back Seig Heils at the inauguration, an ongoing genocide in Gaza, various tech execs going full kleptocracy, and wildfires engulfing large swaths of Los Angeles. This would give the impression that the fat happy heart of empire is barrelling towards apocalypse and no one has any conception of how to stop it. This apocalypse is not and will not be evenly distributed, which makes this doomsday picture so dull and grating.
We are not equal victims of the entropic failures of neoliberal capitalism, and it’s helpful and healthy to reckon with the difference between knowing about horrors and experiencing those horrors. For the relatively privileged, to suffer in today’s hellscape is to be aware of widespread suffering, to read an onslaught of stupid or depressing news and to have no ability to change it, or to sense your complacency in the rotten system that creates and perpetuates this misery. This sort of seething involution and rage-posting in response to all this is simply unhealthy. It makes a person small, sour, and eventually lonesome. Mostly, it makes you weird.
Many have described Twitter as the hellsite long before its ongoing erosion, and with every lurid bloom of hothouse extraction and a screen to watch machines of violence pounding away all day and all night, it is easy to see why. But Twitter is not where atrocious things happen; it is an atrocious place. People who live their lives on Twitter must at least subconsciously know this—hell is other people, after all—but they won’t admit it. One half pretends the problem with Twitter is that it is full of Nazis harassing and abusing, spewing free-associative Trad Cath boilerplate and clammy manosphere pablum. The other half pretends the problem with Twitter is that there is too much censorship, too many libs in the lamestream media, and Elon Musk had to save it to protect Free Speech and all its truth and beauty. There are legions of frothing dullards who spend every waking moment in a state of total panic about vaccines or trans people or Trump, posting the same giddy screeds every day and multiple times a day about incredibly obvious and mainstream topics, just at a psychotic pitch. Everyone acts as if the problem with Twitter is other people and the agony of having to look at their terrible opinions. But the system is not torturing us by the things we hate; we are tortured by the things we’re addicted to.
Someone sufficiently committed to this media diet might not even notice that the things they say and believe have nothing to do with any observable or representative reality. Twitter, as people used to say back when this delusion was easier to believe, is not real life. This statement was used to point out that the hothouse dynamics of a trending topic do not reflect anything about the broader world, and as a reminder that the interpersonal carnage on your phone really does disappear when you put that phone away. But it does miss the fact that Twitter, in its shrinking and chaotic senescence, could be real life.
America is beserk and deluded, and the last decade in which Trump has haunted the broader culture has often felt like a bloated, nasty, checked-out reboot of the ‘80s. This milieu is not especially conducive to insight, unsurprisingly, but it also makes the feeling that something is not right into something unspeakable. In the gooniest partisan online circles, any lucid discussion about these failures and betrayals and discontents is seen as somehow disloyal. I spent the passive indoctrination portion of my childhood during the steroidal and overstated Dubya years, so I can’t recall a time when America was not categorically incapable of and ideologically opposed to perceiving itself in the most basic way, and not totally weird and seething and insane about even trying. A lot of the conservative project is currently built around making it impossible or illegal to understand any of this, while libs seem concerned with trying to make America into a society governed by a Fortune 500 HR department. The chaos of social media is merely a mirror reflection of this dynamic.
It’s never been easier to find the disquiet from looking at the current state of things—the sclerotic abstraction and corruption and reflexive sadism in all levels of government, the smug self-devouring sociopathy of corporate and financial capital, and a shockingly lazy mass popular culture that is besieged by the aforementioned forces of government and capital. It helps to have Bernie Sanders talk about millionaires and billionaires on TV, and I’d imagine virtually everyone who isn’t a BlackRock shareholder has the sense that they are currently not getting a very good deal in this civic bargain. This sense is correct, but it is value-neutral. The MAGA sludge ecosystem metabolizes this resentment and concludes that it is the result of marginalized populations conspiring against the satisfaction that is theirs by birthright, and proceed vengefully from there. The rest of the mainstream media largely pumps out pencil-necked turbodorks who trade in the same kind of changing consumer habits-style rhetorical elisions that let malign forces off the hook for their actions. This kind of fantastical deflection is more or less how mass culture pushes that volatile and potentially very inconvenient tide of piping-hot disquiet away from any of the circuitry that keeps the free market whirring, and also how it scratches its own weird itches. It certainly sucks, and once you notice it, you see it everywhere.
Most of us are worse off living in extreme wage inequality, under an oligarchy that weaponizes government to preserve its profits and influence. Most of us are more paranoid and agitated living under constant surveillance, alienated from one another by technology. Most of us are more anxious and deluded metabolizing an exhaustingly recursive media discourse that’s better at producing conflict than clarity. It is depressing and getting worse. But the last decade should have rendered the online assumptions of posting as praxis, shame campaigns, cancellations, identity politics, or the refusal to “platform” those with “problematic” views as thoroughly debunked means of advocacy. We are truly living in hell if we collectively shrug and decide this is the only way forward because of inertia, familiarity, and convenience. But this trend is not irreversible.
The way I try to think and write about current events is to remember that the infuriating stuff—like an airplane company whose executives seem to have stopped caring whether its airplanes are safe to fly as an ideological matter or Meta’s commitment to not police its own website’s discourse as a business matter—is extremely real, and then analyze it in relation to the material interests and forces that keep making it happen, instead of as part of some sweeping master narrative or the result of individual moral failures. In this sense, we all coexist within the bummer gravity of this low moment. It’s a useful framework for organizing purposes in unionizing, boycotting, or advocacy; it’s also a point of finding common ground. But when people say we live in hell, it scans as more of a nihilistic resignation, a veneer of high-minded clairvoyance that gives a narrow, avoidant, complacent cynicism a cosmetic heft. It’s less a political statement than a trendy way to channel formless anger into social media clout.
It is difficult, as a reality you accept or describe, to fit the more perverse stuff happening right now into online culture war frameworks; it is too extreme and too stupid. If I’m optimistic about any of this, it’s that a lot of people are aware this sucks, even if they can’t admit or understand that in a more explicit way. If anything good comes of that, it will require giving up trying to make what’s so luridly wrong about this moment fit between these dated and malfunctioning binaries. That first step is liberating, then it becomes easier to understand that none of this continual suckage exists independently of anything, or everything, else. The internet is an unprecedented medium funneling ungodly amounts of information into our brains at all times, and distancing yourself from the 24/7 cycle of infotainment and manufactroversy is to realize that learning about hellish things is to not live in hell, and this hellscape mentality only breeds depression and complacency. Doomscrolling is inert and paralyzing. Despair is a kind of egotism that’s rooted in this belief in our ability to predict the future. Things are bad and will probably get worse in the immediate future, but to suggest the world is irreversibly fucked is no less delusional than blind optimism: More immediately, it is alternatively goofy and vile, and more critically, realizing this creates the possibility of fostering a shared path forward.
The Devil called; He wants the gravity associated with the name of his home back.
The mainstream media has us chasing waterfalls, so to speak. Can we please stick to the facts and the norms that we’re used to? MSM is like PCP for the corporate individual.