So I guess now we wait to see if the irony turned out to be that no one saw Trump coming the first time but everyone did the second time or that no one saw him taking power in 2016 but he did and everyone did in 2024 but he didn’t
LOL. The future no longer seems very open; in fact, its contours seem very, very clear. What had once been a rat’s nest of 15 or 20 recognizable independent digital-media startups has been reduced, through purchases and mergers, to four consolidated brand portfolios that have any chance at medium-term survival: BuzzFeed-Huffpost-Complex, Vox-Verge-SB Nation-Eater-NYMag, Bustle-Mic-Gawker, and Vice-Refinery29.
Like, you’ve got to understand that from my perspective, the whole of the 2010s was this mounting tension in like, the ~conception of society~ that I faced, permitted to pass over me and through me, assembled a not-insignificant coalition in the face of (that you’re part of), as it reached height with actual mobs on the streets of my town I fell into some sort of mythical slumber, and when I came out of the chrysalis not only had I been improved in several ways that don’t happen, but basically everything in the culture has churned through to be eerily ideal-for-me
Like, Matt Yglesias is playing the Michael Kinsley restorationist role (remember when it was gonna have to be Jesse Singal?)
Like, it has become a mainstream understanding that Taylor Swift, the artist of her generation, is using incredibly fine lyrical control to intertwine her persona with the zeitgeist through implication.
For those who don’t know: Ikumi Nakamura is the woman who was senior artist on Bayonetta, and designed the titular character along with Hideki Kamiya. Their greatest moment of bonding was over their insistence that Bayonetta keep her glasses on at all times.
Nakamura cannot go to horny jail. She is the warden.
Part of my getting all invested in the yard, Blueberry Hill and all, lawn & tree stuff, is even before the pandemic, even before I went clutch-in for the personality change delirium, by 2019 at latest I could tell things were safe again but the culture would just have to grind through some stuff for a few years before it came out fresh and malleable again on the other side, and this was something I didn’t have anything particularly useful to offer worth being pulled off course and consumed for, so I might as well find something else to occupy myself with and draw satisfaction from for a bit
“The kids being back the rock sound of the ‘90s, frustrating ideologues” wasn’t even on my bingo card. Honestly, “the kids bring back rock” wasn’t either
Been feeling up and down and unsteady in a foundational way lately but distinct from either the post-April 2020 crazy or classic bipolar stuff
But I keep connecting it to trends and I realized it’s my reverse pathetic fallacy returning, after like 2 years of putting in the clutch and peacing out, a little rough like jumping off a running treadmill and then jumping back on while it’s still going
For one it makes me realize that my connection to like, “American culture” and my physical neighborhood are of a kind, maybe that’s not that uncommon. And that maybe I should reevaluate NIMBY politics and white “there goes the neighborhood” post-segregation experiences in that light
For two, I may have been saying we’d already passed the tipping point, but I went clutch-in before the election. In my own city mobs roamed the streets and the mayor’s hamhanded #Resistance-fanning not only made it worse it left him politically constrained amidst a runoff with this smug professional glib shitlib problem glasses tweeter I had had my worried eye on for years
In the big important cities, a decade of troubling rumbles come to a head in something of a selective-college NCOs’ coup with the university students on-side
Like, you remember fluff at the New York Times over running a Tom Cotton editorial laying down the foundation that if unruly mobs take the streets of major cities and demand the suspension of the democratically legitimate force of law the government can suppress them with direct force, that apparently came from pressure from the technical staff
And like, “production staff of major newspaper use labor power to try to control editorial line” is well precedented! A lot of Warsaw Pact regimes bootstrapped that way, the LA Times had a guns-and-bombs war with its printing staff over this once. For it to happen at America’s major newspaper in support of challenges to government control of the streets was really a big deal!
The most irritating SJW I knew personally was like, a Drupal programmer who played pinball. And Drupal was apparently something for running web pages, except more than utility at some function “Drupal programming” seemed to be defined as a culture, a kind of tediously shitlib one, maybe in part because their employers seemed to regularly pay to fly them out to these conferences that weren’t even about programming, just shitlib stuff, and that was a foundation of the culture
And I heard at one point they all scorned and ran some guy off (from like, his career) for being a Gorean, and were rumbling about how they could use their ideological solidarity and upstream role in web hosting to control content using their webdev tools
And I mean Goreans lol, but if you weren’t paying attention in the 90s “we must use our technical knowledge of internet infrastructure to constrain human communication to facile mainstream morality while rigorously patrolling the subculture to keep out dorky SFF fetishes” was… pretty much the opposite of the promise of tech culture, to the point this was really kinda worrying.
And now I wake up and look out of my burrow again in November 2021 and that’s in the rearview mirror, on the national and civic levels alike, politics and media, the spirit is “2011 as if we hadn’t lost the spirit of 1995 (which was an embrace of 1969 but rejection of 1978)”.
Biden’s doing “What If Clinton But Also Maybe Turn Presidentialism Down A Notch And Let The Senate Be A Steering Force Of The Republic In Its Own Right”, there’s a tangible desire to go back to the 90s and a dawning realization that yes, that involves punching hippies, at least enough that you can ignore the rest.
For structural vulnerabilities well – not much has changed in public. It doesn’t usually, that’s what happens when capital wakes up, it works behind the scenes. I will say that from history this no longer looks like you’d expect from a narrative that ends with sleepwalking into disaster or ineffectually flailing, it looks like one you expect is going to have a crisis point in a few years that the insurgents are going to be completely unprepared for capital to be prepared for and fall on their faces after having exhausted themselves for maximum visibility
There’s that one CEO who was like “yeah, this company is for achieving our business purpose, if you want to leverage it for some shitlib stuff please find another” and a chunk of the staff left and the Medium huffers huffed but the company went on to sparkle at the metrics VCs love, adding to the question of why companies staff hufferchum in the first place
Substack is hardened two ways, one thing is they have a solid enough understanding with their VC that nothing Anil fucking Dash says could ever matter; the second is like everyone I mostly read free ones online but being e-mailed to subscribers means writing is shielded against any technical or political interference with webhosting, that archived copies survive any attack on or rejection from the platform and that it can be forwarded and shared with contacts discreetly for samizdat or paywall-gatecrashing purposes
It’s morning in America. And they’re playing The Tick on FOX. Spoon!
You know, if in 2016 you were like “I don’t like the way all these young people on tumblr are acting, snottily trying to use high school liberal goodthink nostrums as some basis of social morality, so I’m going to elect Donald Trump, people absolutely would have given that shit as a non sequitur, but like five years later off the chain reaction out of his election, the institutions of our society are in fact being suborned to scrub out exactly that
All the left-libs thinking they’re rebutting conservative CRT pushes by publicly describing them as cynical tactics. Is that how you fight? Like “oh, you’re throwing jabs, creating some space – oh! – setting up that cross and OHHH! A DEVASTATING UPPERCUT! I do believe you’re attempting to strike me unconscious!”
They say “don’t be evil,” but, as the new owners of Google, we are here to remind you of the new commandment of the Silicon Valley prophets: “don’t be stupid.”
Hm, school board stuff has finally come to Portland. Like the street stuff years before it’s often peripheral/hinterland rightists coming in to stir, but this government process needs to get done, the Powers That Be can’t just let opposing sides scuffle out of the way and now realize that “leave the leftists hegemonic” (what would that even mean at school board meetings?) is also a problem
