Reality is Just Another Thing we Consume
Social media dictates our news-as-personal-brand.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a lumbering idiot who embodies the personality of everyone who has ever been kicked out of a Best Buy. I apologize for soiling the immaculate dignity of This Is A Newsletter! by mentioning her name, but her constant rants about how America will eventually, inevitably descend into a second Civil War is a recurring thought in my diseased and busted head. This titillating foreboding is the outcome of a longstanding and apparently incurable case of Internet Brain, and this is a prophecy I do not subscribe to; after all, civil wars are bloody and brutal and time-consuming, and the NFL is on Sundays. The real national divorce will be more baffling and strange, two perfectly parallel economies that will reduce self-expression to performative, politicized acts of consumption—and the things being consumed are, both in form and content, not just unsatisfying, but the product of an immense disdain for the very idea of satisfaction. All of it will plop out of a singular horrifying hog shoot, like how Goop and Alex Jones are peddling the same wellness bullshit.
If we’re going to live in a world devoted increasingly to the opaque feuds of relentlessly vacant idiots, we should at least acknowledge an important distinction between stuff that looks and feels and sucks just like politics and actual politics as we all live it. Both are messy and loud, but only one means anything or can change our lives in the process. Everything seems not just politicized but also almost a sort of proxy politics. People vote by burning insufficiently cop-respecting Nikes and firing assault rifles at pseudo-beer that acknowledges trans people as worthy of basic empathy, or vice versa. They post it online to signal to their allies and infuriate their enemies, then wake up the next day and do it again. This is a twitchy and addicting ritual, but none of this is particularly fun, like inviting a cokehead to do coke.
The cultural options available to us are conservative individualism and social justice individualism. While the left and right seem totally polarized, they share a mutual desire to narcissisticly leverage any form of struggle and identity for personal flattery. A fair number of progressive causes and critiques have never been especially difficult to understand, although they have been swiftly and cynically instrumentalized by corporations through therapeutic language and bland #girlboss empowerment dada and the clod mysticism of yoga pants culture. These same causes and critiques have also been willfully misinterpreted and preemptively dismissed by hair-trigger goblins, and whatever they were once about has since disappeared into superheated grievance and meme.
Much of what these brands offer are specific and fundamentally blank virtues: ambition, courage, defiance, dominance. These are big and actionable words, and are generally held in high regard. But when they’re put to a more stringent use, they are inconveniently context-dependent. The fulfillment that companies like Lululemon or Disney or Chick-fil-A or Black Rifle Coffee sell people is individuated, and drawing a contrast to greater and more community-minded goals would make any of these mega-brands look as crude and silly as they actually are: Some people dream of ending the bloody predations of America’s carceral state, other people dream of burning down their local Target for selling rainbow shirts. The point is to be your best self.
There is no reason why any of this mundane human stuff needs to be wrapped up in all this thundering Manichean dumbassery, but this is our culture’s uniquely pathological way of talking to itself. The dominance of these sorts of overdetermined good-versus-evil binaries does not seem to reflect anything healthy in our culture, but our culture is not healthy. There is no appealing to the flimsy and negotiable principles that these frothing online culture war mobs hold. Their opinions on everything from social justice to patriotism are variable and change with the days and specific stupid controversies at hand. What remains fixed is their desire to appear virtuous, to be centered in the glowing spotlight of perpetual victimhood, to abdicate themselves from feeling any sort of moral responsibility as America’s institutions are gradually hollowed out by administrative parasites and our civic life succumbs to MBA enshittification.
All of this is crystallized in the different ways in which every social media website handles breaking news and curates our own realities. Imagine a worker in a food processing plant in Ohio was buried under a mountain of frozen chicken tenders after the conveyor belt malfunctioned, and it’s an hours-long saga to rescue him.
Twitter (X):
“Hi, supply chain expert here. I have 10 years of experience studying factory conveyor belts and best practices in handling food disasters. I can help you make some sense of what’s going on in Ohio. Here’s a thread.”
You click on the thread and see it’s 35 tweets long, and you’re like, “Absolutely not reading that.”
Instagram:
You see a post from someone you went to college with:
“Just hearing about what’s happening in Ohio. Feels like yesterday when I was there getting my bachelor’s of hospitality and hanging with my sisters at Delta Gamma. Solidarity with #TendyGuy.”
You then realize this is a nine-photo album of her partying at Ohio State football pregames. Maybe this helps?
TikTok:
TikTok will be saturated with the darkest comedy imaginable.
“Ohio Guys when they see a chicken sandwich.” Then, there’s audio clipped out of context that says, “I’d like to be trapped inside.”
All the comments are, “BROOOOOO NOOOOOOO.”
Facebook:
When they aren’t hoising some confounding eagle-strewn meme, a horde of seething and lonesome boomers will post something like:
“Yet another atrocity under Biden’s watch. Why aren’t we doing more to help Tendy Guy? #BidensChickenTendies”
Their audience of sighing nieces and cringing grandkids will mute them for their lastest crime against the timeline.
Reddit:
One of the highest upvoted posts under the “Hot” tab will include a sourced article explaining the “chicken tendy mountain” situation, and the top comment will be, “I bet Elon Musk could get to him with his Boring Company.”
Someone, somewhere, further down the comment section will be blazing Tendy Guy or chastising his parents.
New York Times:
You’ll read an op-ed healine that says:
“I was a Democrat. And then Tendy Guy Happened.”
YouTube:
If you’ve ever watched one politics-related video on YouTube, the algorthm will absolutely spam your queue with pundits who have takes that are somehow both repulsive and boring.
Right-wing video essay response to Tendy Guy: “How to make ANTI-WOKE chicken tendies with FREEDOM batter that will DESTROY libtard SJWs.”
Left-wing video essay response to Tendy Guy: “Why making chicken nuggies is emblematic of post-colonial capitalist commodification, explained. Here’s a plant-based farm-to-table option instead.”
Even if you escape the thralls of the YouTube algorithm, you’ll see irredeemably internet-brained communist cosplayers you knew from a Critical Theory 101 class share a link to the video with a post that says:
“Grubbing on chicken tendies—especially with a side of fries and orange dipping sauce—makes you part of an oppressive bourgeoisie that genderizes normative eating patterns. Under our neoliberal hellscape, according to materialist and Hegelian dialectics, this makes you a mansplaining and manspreading post-neo-proto-fascist.”
Once I scroll through this riffraff, I stroll to the nearest body of water and see how many skips I can get if I chuck my iPhone.
You write like an angry dissent preacher and I love it.
Grim.
But serious question from a middle-aged dad: how many people are actually terminally online, and have rotten brains? We're all a product of our surroundings, and while my current surroundings are suboptimal in terms of high culture (or any culture), I really don't come across many people who are half as clued in as me, and I'm maybe sixtieth percentile, at best.
Like, I get everything you're laying down above -- ephemerally -- but I actually participate in none of it. Am I an exception?