\n\n"}\n \n \n\n\n\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \n\n \n\n\n \nzippy the pinhead: vaguely reactionary anti-mass-culture mass-culture comic that occasionally drops its authorial voice to yell about kulaks
\n[snip]
\n \ni have met many people who watched jersey shore. (\u2018watched\u2019? \u2018watch\u2019? does it still exist? i don\u2019t know.) i have never met anyone who was motivated to watch jersey shore by the artistry it exhibits; i would assume it does not exhibit any. the motivation for watching jersey shore that is shared by every single person i have met who does so is that it is bad. they watch it because it is bad. the cupcake fascism guy went to the cereal bar because it is bad.
\n \nthere are pop-cultural artifacts that use this vector much more overtly, like pickle surprise. pickle surprise is not high-quality. it is intentionally awful. that is why it has upwards of two million views.
\n \nhere is a selection from the comments on the video: [snip]
\n \na larger-scale example of the same phenomenon is the celebrity status of tommy wiseau. the room is an awful movie. it is watched precisely because it is awful.
\n \nit makes no difference to the cereal bar whether their customers are giving them money because they genuinely like paying three and a half of the currency units of their country to eat a bowl of sugar in an infantile cupcake nostalgia ukulele shrine or because they think it is awful. three and a half currency units from an unironic neoteny-lover and three and a half currency units from the guy who coined the term \u2018cupcake fascism\u2019 are both three and a half currency units. i r o n i c c o n s u m p t i o n i s c o n s u m p t i o n
\n \ni have, for some reason, a bag of candy. i do not particularly like it, and would prefer a bag of carrots. but it requires an active expenditure of effort not to keep eating the fucking candy, even though it is not particularly good and my tongue feels like a plague of locusts shat on it. this does not happen with a bag of carrots. when i have a bag of carrots, i eat some carrots and then i close the bag. zippy the pinhead guy and cupcake fascism guy keep sticking their hands into the bag of candy again and again and again and again and again
\n \n\u201cplease, brer fox, please don\u2019t throw me into the briar patch!!!!!\u201d
\nnostalgebraist somehow this post is responsive both to your recent post about neoteny and to your recent post about doing things ironically.
\nThis was the post the post on neoteny was inspired by.
\n \nTom Whyman, AKA\u00a0\u201ccupcake fascism guy,\u201d has this weird tendency to associate cute aesthetics (e.g. a sign next to some napkins reading \u201cPlease Only Take One Of Me\u201d) and people becoming\u00a0\u201cinfantalized\u201d in the behavioral sense that they are more dependent on others, more self-absorbed, more inclined to complain about relatively trivial pains, etc. \u00a0He doesn\u2019t seem to have a causal theory\u00a0of how these two things are just connected, or which causes the other \u2013 they are just \u201cobviously\u201d part of the same thing, apparently. \u00a0(This perspective makes the logical gaps in something like this post\u00a0glaringly obvious \u2013 note the remarkable slip from \u201ccute aesthetics\u201d to \u201cdependence\u201d\u00a0at the end of the first paragraph, for instance.)
\n \nI guess I think that Whyman isn\u2019t only missing how much of the appeal of this stuff might be\u00a0\u201cironic,\u201d he\u2019s also missing a theory of how cute aesthetics and behavioral childishness are related, which is pretty ridiculous for someone who purports to be riffing intellectually about this stuff. \u00a0(Without such a theory, what does\u00a0he have? \u00a0\u201cI saw something cute in a public space, and also I think lots of people are childish.\u201d \u00a0Cool story, bro.)
\n \n(Q: The Victorians probably had \u201ccuter\u201d aesthetics than we do \u2013 the polite reserve, the idealization of children, etc. \u2013 but were they also more childish?)
\nRe: irony, yes, Homestuck has a theme of \u201call interpersonal interaction \nis mediated by a byzantine tangle of status horseshit that isn\u2019t even \nimmediately obvious as a set of rules for systematically distorting \ncommunication to avoid being \u2018awkward\u2019 or losing face\u201d. So does LW.
\n\nBefore Adam Kotsko turned himself completely into a vector for the culture war, he wrote a book about awkwardness:
\n\n\n\n\nTo find the origin of so many awkward tv shows and movies, Kotsko \n traces the flowering of contemporary awkwardness to the breakdown of \n pre-1960s Fordist social norms:
\n \n\n\n \nThe African-American civil rights movement and feminist movement both achieved considerable gains, but more radical changes proved elusive as the forces of cultural conservatism turned out to retain considerable power. It is here, I claim, that we find the ultimate origin of contemporary awkwardness: the events of the 1960s threw the normative social model significantly off-kilter, making it impossible to embrace that model wholeheartedly \u2014 and yet they did not produce any viable positive alternative.
\nStuck with the proliferation of identities, the (false) universals \n torn asunder, Americans struggle to find something solid to cling to. \n Modern American conservatism offers one attempt to fill this values \n vacuum, but Kotsko, rather than seek universality in a reactionary \n attempt to reinstall pre-60\u2019s grand narratives, looks to what we \n currently share, regardless of our various affiliations: awkwardness. \n This naming of the void is one of his most deft theoretical moves. What \n we all have in common, he asserts, is our inability to deal with the \n absence of assured social scripts; we are all left bumbling diagonally \n toward our lives. \u2026
\n \nKotsko\u2019s chapter on marriage and gender roles takes up the work of \n screenwriter and director Judd Apatow, who, in another deft theoretical \n move, he treats as a genre rather than an auteur. In Apatow-related \n movies, which include The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and The Hangover, awkwardness\n results from the scarcity of acceptable social scripts for adult men, \n Kotsko argues. To prepare for or shore up marriages with women they \n don\u2019t understand, men in Apatow films maintain overgrown adolescent \n friendships based on porn, pot, and video games. In such \u201cbromance\u201d \n movies, a close homosocial friendship becomes part of the traditional \n romance narrative, a childish, sentimental release valve that persists \n into adulthood and rivals marriage itself.
\nHis conclusion, according to that review (I haven\u2019t read the book and there\u2019s no way in hell I\u2019d ever give him money), is that \u2018radical awkwardness\u2019 is a positive force, allowing people to \u201csimply meet each other, without the mediation of a defined cultural order, and figure out how to live together on a case-by-case basis\u201d, which is similar to LW\u2019s \u2018tell culture\u2019, but worse in a different direction. Where ‘tell culture\u2019 assumes that communication can be strictly denotational, 'radical awkwardness\u2019 posits a True Self that exists prior to and unaffected by cultural order, which it sees as a terrible imposition from outside, rather than admitting that a defined cultural order (a commonality of \nlanguage, culture, scripts, norms of etiquette, signs and their \nmeanings, etc.) is the structure that allows communication. l i b e r a l i s m
\n\nOn the one hand, we have the destruction of a shared social order; on the other hand, we have a social order so complex as to make communication almost require violating it and risking loss of face. What gives?
\n\nThere are two separate things going on here.
\n\nFirst, you have jeysiec\u200b\u2018s line about the replacement of \u2018close friend\u2019 with \u2018disposable acquaintance of convenience\u2019 \u2013 the small-scale interpersonal equivalent of the general loss of trust? If you can\u2019t trust anyone to stand by you unless you send the optimal signals, if you face the risk of losing your entire social life for being perceived as \u2018uncool\u2019\u2026
\n\nSecond, you have Nature\u2019s well-known abhorrence of vacuums. The fall of the common cultural order created a vacuum; what replaced it?
\n\nWell, what is irony about? You don\u2019t take up folk music ironically; you do drink PBR ironically. You don\u2019t exercise ironically; you do listen to Ke$ha ironically. Irony is about navigating acceptable patterns of consumption \u2013 cf. 'guilty pleasures\u2019 in music, things that one likes but that one knows one should not admit to liking, because it\u2019s against the rules of the social order, because a good person is a person who consumes the right things, because the rules of the social order were put there by capitalism to fill the void left by the '60s 'radicals\u2019, because progressivism and neoliberalism are two sides of the same fucking coin.
\n\nNow, children, at least ideally, experience the ~unconditional love of the parents \u2013 they won\u2019t be disowned for listening to Garth Brooks or not listening to Kanye \u2013 and are not expected to already know how to perfectly navigate the rules of the current social disorder. (Whyman: \u201cthe desire to feel comfortable and secure in a very troubling and uncertain world\u201d. Atomization, absence of a shared social order for everyday interaction, presence of a shared social insane totalitarian dystopia for consumption patterns.) Given that, a resurgence in childhood nostalgia is no surprise \u2013 but children imply parents, patient stoic adults who love how cute their kids are and put on a cute/nurturing aesthetic for them \u2013 the same aesthetic that Whyman says the napkins at the House of Commons put on.