\n\nThis goes well beyond insisting that Nick Carraway \nwould have posted on Reddit or that Stalin was the original gaslighter. \nIt is a whole style of talking now, where you just yank a whole lot of \ncultural touchstones together and present the end result as a substitute\n for analysis, like \u201cEdward St. Aubyn is just Henry Green for men who \nread Tatler as an ironic gesture\u201d or \u201cSally Rooney is just Joan Didion \nfor women who can\u2019t drive\u201d or \u201cThe Joker movie is just The Birth of a Nation for men with sinewy arm muscles and no girlfriends.\u201d
\nSometimes\n the end result is funny, and interesting, and it does function as a \nsubstitute for analysis, sort of, if you are in a hurry. Other times it \nis depressing, and for nerds \u2014 just this endless chain of references \nthat goes nowhere, this horrible nest of easter eggs that has no effect \nother than to make you feel on top of things, and too proud of your \nfaculty of recognition, which is one of the less impressive ones as \norders of cognition go. \u201cThe Bible is just Harry Potter for rednecks\u201d \nlooks like something, if you stand far away enough and then move on to \nthinking about another subject immediately, but it doesn\u2019t withstand a \nwhole lot of pressure or scrutiny.
\n[\u2026]
\n\nPerhaps all this was inevitable. The dream of the internet was that each\n of us would be able to access the knowledge of all of human history, \nand the nightmare that resulted is that we are now expected to know so \nmany more things than before, such that the only way to really get a \ngrasp on any of it is to superficially connect them to other things you \nalso barely understand. The most utopian vision of it held that it would\n be a place that would connect us to others, that it would help us see \nand understand the world more deeply. The version of the internet we \nhave landed up with often feels less like a place where we can connect \nto others, and more like a place where we have to learn what TikTok is \nin order to understand the import of the sentence \u201cTed Bundy\u2019s \ngranddaughter outed her entire family on TikTok,\u201d and then later on to \nconnect that event to another idiotic and depressing situation by saying\n \u201cthis is exactly like when Ted Bundy\u2019s granddaughter outed her entire \nfamily on TikTok,\u201d and on and on like that, until the moment comes where\n we all lose our grip on reality completely.\n\n
\n
Shaka, when the walls fell
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