paxamericana:

This goes well beyond insisting that Nick Carraway would have posted on Reddit or that Stalin was the original gaslighter. It is a whole style of talking now, where you just yank a whole lot of cultural touchstones together and present the end result as a substitute for analysis, like “Edward St. Aubyn is just Henry Green for men who read Tatler as an ironic gesture” or “Sally Rooney is just Joan Didion for women who can’t drive” or “The Joker movie is just The Birth of a Nation for men with sinewy arm muscles and no girlfriends.”

Sometimes the end result is funny, and interesting, and it does function as a substitute for analysis, sort of, if you are in a hurry. Other times it is depressing, and for nerds — just this endless chain of references that goes nowhere, this horrible nest of easter eggs that has no effect other than to make you feel on top of things, and too proud of your faculty of recognition, which is one of the less impressive ones as orders of cognition go. “The Bible is just Harry Potter for rednecks” looks like something, if you stand far away enough and then move on to thinking about another subject immediately, but it doesn’t withstand a whole lot of pressure or scrutiny.

[…]

Perhaps all this was inevitable. The dream of the internet was that each of us would be able to access the knowledge of all of human history, and the nightmare that resulted is that we are now expected to know so many more things than before, such that the only way to really get a grasp on any of it is to superficially connect them to other things you also barely understand. The most utopian vision of it held that it would be a place that would connect us to others, that it would help us see and understand the world more deeply. The version of the internet we have landed up with often feels less like a place where we can connect to others, and more like a place where we have to learn what TikTok is in order to understand the import of the sentence “Ted Bundy’s granddaughter outed her entire family on TikTok,” and then later on to connect that event to another idiotic and depressing situation by saying “this is exactly like when Ted Bundy’s granddaughter outed her entire family on TikTok,” and on and on like that, until the moment comes where we all lose our grip on reality completely.

Shaka, when the walls fell