Everything Is Political Now but Nothing Changes

PART 1: If everything is political, then nothing is political.

Artwork by @memeindustrialcomplex

The internet, at least as most people experience it, is not good for you. Just how toxic it is depends on how much of it you consume, how quickly, how thoughtfully. But at some point, regardless of how much or how responsibly you ingest it, Chugging Sludge is Chugging Sludge, and the serving size is almost irrelevant. I slurp down plenty of online content, and if you’re reading this, I assume you do too. It occasionally brings me chuckles and appraisal, by way of algorithms crafted specifically for that purpose. Mostly, it makes me anxious and irritable, in more or less all the ways you might expect from an experience that makes you overwhelmingly aware of every horrifying, grisly, and grotesque thing in the world mere moments after it happens and what the absolute worst and moronic people alive think about it.

After so many years in the panoptic hellscape of internet surveillance, the digital feeds have burned into my retinas, my peripheral vision faded to black. I’m somehow reminded of an Instagram image I encountered in the summer of 2020 at the height of the George Floyd protests. In complete earnestness, the post explained why the refusal to post online is inherently racist; posting about race, it argues, is an act of breaking out of your comfort zone, which is apparently political. At that moment, it felt like I was witnessing the hypernormalization of the internet’s collective brain-rot, which is mostly a fetid cesspool of useless hectoring and moralistic grandstanding. Posting is political and not positing is political. Those who argue it’s a privilege to log off are terminally online neurotics rationalizing their own social media addiction.

A 2021 Pew study reported that 31% of Americans are “almost constantly” online. (For teens, that number is 46%). Social media has created an environment where it’s impossible to avoid discussing politics because the political spectacle has fused completely with culture, permeating every aspect of society and turning us all into perpetually anxious and combative dolts.

Politics is now one lavishly fetishized crisis after another, each carried forward in a way that creates a constant state of furious full-spectrum derangement. Entertainment and pop culture are now supposed to be epic social commentaries. Brands and products are expected to imbue a grandiose benevolent mission. Liking and sharing the right content is an urgent moral duty. Everyone has to post, everyone has to have an opinion, everyone has to react to something.

Online is not where people meaningfully express themselves; it’s a fragment of our filtered personalities sacrificed to this parasitic machine. The discourse seems gigantic, but it’s a hot air balloon with nothing inside. All language has become rote and catatonic. The outraged mobs are screaming on autopilot. Social media exists in a strange space between writing and speech, briefly suspended in a context devoid and ever-flattening human interaction. Aside from the New Yorker’s high-minded diction, most writing that emerges from the internet is unbearably dull. Snarky pith haunts all online prose, begging for clicks. Teens on TikTok speak in an identical singsong smugness while millennials on Twitter use the same shrinking vocabulary: valid or cheugy or based. Memes on Instagram began addressing people as my brother in Christ, so now people are saying that too.

Even the manifold and manifest pathologies of contemporary American life can’t interrupt the tedium of it all. The bad jokes and edgelord vulgarities. Thick tongues lolling in the muck, wanly aping Trump’s scatterbrained hyperaggression. The predictable thinkpieces that feign self-awareness and seem to “have their finger on the pulse” of the current moment, but end up being just a very generic and provincial representation of urbane class consciousness. Delusional mediocrities and intellectual peasants with their neurotic attachments to saying slurs and whining about cancel culture. Petty spectacles, ugly reactions, chintzy plastic hate, too clever by half irony, all failing to see the utter emptiness of “transgression” as an aesthetic pose. Everyone like this has a vacuous ideological hole in their center because capitalism hollowed it all out. And they’ve decided to fill that void with shit.

This is our frictionless digital future, the squalid magnetism of these very important culture wars. Our entire sense of self is a waste byproduct emerging from the bowels of human consciousness. The hodgepodge of online frenzies has people believing they’re actually fighting fascism or standing up for women’s reproductive rights or restoring America’s lost greatness. These sick perverts will pretend it’s normal to dance alone in silence for a front-facing camera or that faking Tourette’s for TikTok are healthy ways to chase clout. In 2011, Nathan Jurgenson coined the term “digital dualism” to parry the common normie refrain: “Twitter isn’t real life.” The internet now projects, rather than reflects, our offline life.

As mass organizations like unions have diminished and all questions of macroeconomics have been “answered” by the neoliberal consensus, political institutions have grown very distant and very severed from any kind of popular movement—and really, from popular sentiment. The 1990s brought on the first post-political age, where the distinction between the public and private became far more absolute, and politics became professionalized for technocrats, a nerdy subculture. As the media and internet mystify civic engagement, it’s entrenched our role as passive consumers of infotainment, analyzed through the lens of a pundit or consultant.

This is all extremely fleeting and impermanent, turning us into what Eitan Hersh calls “political hobbyists.” We’re constantly logging on and logging off, creating a politics that is somehow very volatile and energetic, but completely flaccid. In debates, politicians exchange drab one-liners to be turned into GIFs. Their strategists have resigned to the idea of elections being won and lost on memes. Entire communities emerge from deranged fringes and flatulent echo chambers. Elected officials giddy over the evils of seed oils and grooming, and fume about stolen elections. Activists lecture about how it’s not their job to educate you, even as they’re Raising Awareness. To move through this grim entropic realm requires stepping over some very wide and very fragrant trails of slime, and yet we reward these people with attention and money for any red meat they hurl at us. The internet has fractured cohesive working-class communities and turned them into vague swarms of monads, cultivating skills and attitudes that are counterproductive to building power.

The internet creates this illusion that the crisis of mass politics can be solved through an expedient, synthetic ersatz. The Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street fortified this techno-futurist idea that Twitter would be the future of democracy. The comment section is an abattoir where basic cognitive functioning is ground into an unintelligible slurry. Social media is not just a means to observe the performance of politics, but we interact with that performance and demand it to be carried out in a way that flatters our cultural affinities, even if it doesn’t result in any tangible policy victories.

The post-George Floyd demonstrations might be our era’s greatest tragedy: tens of millions of people mobilized in (possibly) the largest protest movement in human history, all for an urgent and necessary cause—to finally force our country to undertake some tragically belated changes—and it achieved precisely nothing. Centuries of Black Americans being bludgeoned, smothered, gunned down and buried, and no one ever answering for it, all injustices desperate for a radical overall. But we have very little sense of how complex and demanding these tasks are. And since our inflexible and decadent political system is so thoroughly committed to its own corruption, the sterile politics of online redirected righteous anger into vague corporate sloganeering and sidebar debates over Confederate statues. Meanwhile, an HR consultant that runs anti-bias seminars for Fortune 500 companies was propelled to the number one spot on the New York Times Best Sellers list.

Rather than practicing patience and empathy, political hobbyists flock to social media to cultivate outrage and seek instant gratification. All it has produced is a stale culture war that manages to be exhausting without ever becoming interesting. It’s like being locked in a closet with your dark mirror image. For every bit of overreaction to cancel culture, there’s an attendant dismissal of the unimaginably ghastly horrors that are slowly converting our nation into an oligarchic prison state. It incentives the kind of professional politics and culture writing that generates thoughtlessly woke and witlessly anti-woke careers. Wokeness is so utterly commercialized and impotent as a force for progress that anyone still hystericizing about it 24/7 is a certifiable hack. More recently, there’s been media consternation over the rise of the “new right,” an oozing digitized current of venomous loathing and blank antipathy; its sole proposition is installing a dictatorial white ethnostate to prevent Disney from posting rainbow flags.

The past few years presented a cascading sequence of crises—widespread protests and sporadic riots on top of an economic depression on top of a pandemic on top of runaway inflation—historic clusterfucks that have exposed every fault line in our fractured, brittle country. And we are treated to the perverse pleasures of circa-now dreck and the heated takes of the powerful mutants at the center of our tumbling-down culture. Once esteemed publications churn out pathetic pop-culture ephemera, like listicles about the outfits on Wandavision or gratuitously extravagant thinkpieces about why Dave Chappelle is problematic. Twitter is hailed as the “digital town square” and it is now run by a wannabe memelord with the managerial style of Dr. Evil on crack. Consuming political content is not a means to an end, a political awakening of some sort—it is the end. The process is entirely aestheticized and atomized.

One of the most sadistic and ruinous effects of online social movements is their uncanny ability to whip up ever-seething mobs to squish individuals in the name of righteous justice. They constantly cast around for its next scalp, but these movements build no institutions, create no collective subjects, and produce no meaningful change. Their only power is dishing out punishment and making targets cower, and this game only works within the internet, and only when everyone involved plays by its rules. As soon as they run up against anything with a separate set of values—a Republican Party plopping their Federalist Society-approved gremlins on the Supreme Court, an ill-prepared r/antiwork moderator appearing on Fox News—they instantly crumble.

Everyone’s a Karen.

Every last set of orienting principles is being dissolved in the acid bath of online culture war, a timeline that’s becoming dumb in crueler ways and cruel in dumber ways. It may be hard to discern because of the banal depravity of it all, but we are living through something more deeply Orwellian than anyone could’ve predicted. This moment is one in which anything can happen because nothing means anything. Words and definitions are corporeal. Conservatives care more about trans swimmers than small government. Liberals cheer on the FBI and CIA, gin up a new Red Scare, and insist on the blind faith in big tech and pharmaceutical overlords. The people who treat politics as entertainment have turned it into a lifestyle brand, a matter of who you sneer at and who sneers at you. Chaos is coming, and we’ll all be glued to our screens, devolving into hooting gibbons stabbing ourselves in the eyes with knitting needles, slowly going insane forever.

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NEXT:

United We Stan, Divided We Drag

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