Anonymous asked: am i imagining it or is there a bit less anger towards the left from you about the death of 90s Culture recently? Not that you’re not still melancholy about it, but it seems like in recent months you’ve moved from “Horny 90s Secular Culture was my rightful birthright that was DESTROYED by Gawkerites” to “Horny 90s Secular Culture is worth mourning but it collapsed under its own contradictions that have only become visible in the wake of a lot of Internet Feminist Discourse.”
> [same “less anger toward the left” anon] Even more speculatively, it seems like you’re less sympathetic toward the Right than you were, set, a year or so ago, less in the sense that you now back the actual agenda of the Left than that you briefly expected that the Right’s pushback would take a form more compatible with your own preferences than it has. Any of this onto something? [2/2]
You’re seeing something real but you’re not seeing it right.
If I’m more sanguine about the culture wars lately it’s because the wave already broke. In 2015 I was saying the other side walked off a cliff and just hadn’t looked down yet, well by now they’ve looked down.
And on the one hand meep meep, motherfucker, on the other hand this means the dumbest and gone-too-far stuff is gonna be coming in the other direction now as the backlash sets in.
Like, what’s the last time the cultural “left” tried to sieze new territory, and not just struggle to hold the line? MeToo? At the time I called it as feminism biting the hand that fed/off more than it could chew, and yeah, by all reports the “targets” there are being welcomed back and people notice that they were still viable all along, meanwhile the supporters are getting blackballed as risks.
(Meanwhile, the Republican supremes are expected to rule that no, protections against sex discrimination do not just imply protections for sexual/gender minorities, and wouldn’t you know it most “sexual harassment” law is leveraged out from similar implications.)
The next step in the culture war is just to make people realize this is already happening, the woke order’s plummeting, and all the stuff that’s been growing underground poised to benefit from their fall is going the other way.
I point out Stupidpol stuff to draw attention to how the new young avant garde in pretty much every subculture - even explicitly leftist ones - is increasingly anti-woke, and the invention of a typology - “radlib”, “wokescold” – by which their rivals don’t even have to be refuted, just identified, mocked, and dismissed.
I point out how all the woke take factories are exhausting their funders’ patience, pivoting to video and selling out to Bryan Goldberg (who made his name by founding a women’s vertical that wasn’t shrill feminist, an online Cosmo when everyone was trying to build an online Sassy), and how meanwhile the hot rising thing is a bro site with an editorial line somewhere between rape culture-tolerant and -positive.
I point out how not so much opposed but underneath consent culture there’s a flourishing ecosystem of Fsub kink as lifestyle (which was the other side in the ‘80s feminist sex wars, after all) and the rising smartphone generation grew up with “catering to the male pornographic gaze” as a popular hobby.
And I’m not just wishcasting here, even the perceptive people on the “other side” have noticed this – Sady Doyle’s looking back over ’00-’10s internet feminism and wondering if it even changed anything deeper than superficial fashion that will cycle back before too long (subtext here is she was a half-step behind the Marcotte/Valenti/McEwan coterie and tbh a better writer/thinker/intersectionalist but now she’s in upstate New York scrambling for enough child care to crank out work for lower-and-lower-profile outlets; if you’ve read her work long enough you know she’s acutely aware of how in the 80s second-wave feminism and radical feminists weren’t so much defeated as just… gave up on and left to wither.)
Like, “this too shall pass”, y’know? It’s passing. Which doesn’t mean the stuff that takes it down or replaces it won’t be dumb and fucked up. To the extent I had identified with the “cultural left” to begin with it was cause I came of age in the 90s after the ‘80s backlash had run through and the reigning “cultural right” was pretty dumb and fucked up. Weirdly sour in a sunny time, in retrospect I realize they were trying to drive a stake through the ‘70s so hard it never got up again and that excess probably did buy me some more time of comfort, but could get counterproductive too, you know if these are the guys trying to maintain their hegemony through suppressing left voices…
Plus honestly yeah I was invested in the fun-for-all ideal of Horny 90s Secular Culture as it portrayed itself, and if more modern revelations are that it was premised on hierarchies of power… Well, at some level I’m “ohhh, hierarchies of power, so THAT’S how you create the good times, they should’ve told us, no wonder we’ve been fucking it up”. But I’m still eagerly receptive to plans to bring things closer to the ideal, or at least avoid some of the worst failure modes and rig the hierarchies right by going in eyes-open.
That’s a good graph format I’ve never seen before (the L-R location of the red/blue circles represents an average, too)
Lot of mirror images but some differences - partisan-marked stuff tends to have an “additive value” of around 100, races around 150, Hillary is 84 which Trump has on Rs alone (plus 8 D, even with so many of them at 1 or 0) but Obama was 112
“the Alt right” and “antifa” are lowest at a mirrored 57/58, their onsides teams are lukewarm but the opposing team hates them
Remember that time that there was a false alarm of a nuclear attack on Hawaii? That was in January of this year, I had to look it up. At this point it just as well might not have happened.
I completely forgot about this, the time in January 13, 2018 that (according to the official story) an emergency communications drill was accidentally pushed live and every cell phone in Hawai’i shrieked a klaxon and displayed
BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
And for a good hour or so people thought they were being targeted for nuclear annihilation
Tapping through Palak Joshi’s Instagram Stories recently, you might have come across a photo that looked like standard sponsored content: A shiny white box emblazoned with the red logo for the Chinese phone manufacturer OnePlus and the number “6,” shot from above on a concrete background. It featured the branded hashtag tied to the phone’s launch, and tagged OnePlus'sInstagram handle. And it looked similar to posts from the company itself announcing the launch of its new android phone. Joshi’s post, however, wasn’t an ad. “It looked sponsored, but it’s not,” she said. Her followers are none the wiser. “They just assume everything is sponsored when it really isn’t,” she said. And she wants it that way.
A decade ago, shilling products to your fans may have been seen as selling out. Now, it’s a sign of success. “People know how much influencers charge now, and that payday is nothing to shake a stick at,” said Alyssa Vingan Klein, editor in chief of Fashionista, a fashion news website. “If someone who is 20 years old watching YouTube or Instagram sees these people traveling with brands, promoting brands, I don’t see why they wouldn’t do everything they could to get in on that.” […]
Sydney Pugh, a lifestyle influencer in Los Angeles, recently staged a fake ad for a local cafe, purchasing her own mug of coffee, photographing it, and adding a promotional caption, carefully written in that particular style of adspeak anyone who spends a lot of time on Instagram will recognize: “Instead of [captioning] ‘I need coffee to get through the day,’ mine will say ‘I love Alfred’s coffee because of A,B,C,’” she told me. “You see the same things over and over on actual sponsored posts it becomes really easy to emulate, even if you’re not getting paid.” […]
When Allie, a 15-year-old lifestyle influencer who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym, scrolls through her Instagram feed, sometimes the whole thing seems like an ad. There’s a fellow teen beauty influencer bragging about her sponsorship with Maybelline, a high school sophomore she knows touting his brand campaign with Voss water. None of these promotions however, are real. Allie is friends with them and so she knows. She once faked a water sponsorship herself. “People pretend to have brand deals to seem cool,” Allie said. It’s a thing, like, I got this for free while all you losers are paying.“ […]
Henry, a 15-year-old beauty influencer who asked to be referred to by his first name only, said he doesn’t post fake ads himself, but said he noticed his social status rise as he got more attention online this year. “People come up to me at school like, ‘do you get sponsored?’ When I say I do they’re like, 'OMG that’s so cool.’ I noticed the more followers I gain the more people in the hall come up and talk to me.”
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AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
read this then read this other post i wrote and appreciate that this article describes not a sea change into some nightmarish new reality, but in fact a natural extension and elaboration of the way you yourself used brands to express yourself as a teen (and do right now!!!!!!!!)
as your boyfriend cums shudderingly all over you: oh, are you triggered?? did that trigger you, you little bitch? your hands are shaking and you have to log off now huh? fuckin’ snowflake
