Deconstructing Ourselves to Death

“<magazine illustration> man deconstructing himself,” Midjourney

From Freddie De Boer:

I certainly would not say that the age of canceling is over. There will be public scandals to come; people will suffer major career and social consequences because of public anger. Sometimes they’ll deserve it. And maybe this is just a lull and the same old songs will get sung again and again.

But at this stage I find it hard to deny that the sense of palpable fear so many operated under, the feeling that the prosecutors held all the cards, appears to be in terminal decline. People just aren’t afraid in the same way anymore. The mob doesn’t have the momentum. The big bad wolf has lost his teeth. I suspect this is for a few key reasons - the fact that all of that endless raging did precisely nothing to make the world more just, for one. The growing understanding that the human species is flawed by nature and that no one can match those standards, for another. But mostly, I think it’s the dynamic I’ve been predicting for a long time: you can only bang the gong so many times. Everybody’s receptors all got blown out. Outrage is a finite resource. People can’t maintain permanent offense forever. Most of us can’t, anyway. You can only tense a muscle for so long.

He’s not entirely wrong. The mob seems to have lost its juice. Weirdly, he doesn’t seem to attribute this to the decline of Twitter. Before Elon Musk, being kicked off Twitter or even just being ratioed on it was a strong enough threat. Now. legitimate inoffensive entities like the Pope are having a tough time staying on Twitter, so now it’s all “join the club.”

But what has replaced the Grand Guignol bloodthirsty mob is arguably more insidious because of its deceptively minor stature: the TikTok stitch. You could literally do a sketch about how cops are racist, but if your racist cop character says something racist, the video gets reposted with a big text box that says “STITCH INCOMING” and off goes a pimply faced teen breaking down why you were wrong. In the Twitter days, the target did need a tiny bit of heat. One popular podcast episode. One viral tweet even. Then, even from such a small perch came the takedown. Now, with a good old fashioned “STITCH INCOMING” disclaimer, you are not only being told that the correct viewpoint is around the corner. You are also being told to completely disregard the quality of the set-up to the takedown. The person who made the video, it could be their first video ever, It could even be a recording of them without them knowing. BOOM! Now you’re just the lolcow of the hour. Better luck next lifetime.

When did this mania for deconstruction start? Officially, with Jacques Derrida in the ‘60s. But it reached a fever pitch in ‘80s academia. Back then, of course, it made more sense. The targets were William Shakespeare, The Rolling Stones, etc. In other words, not just white men, but white masters. Cultural institutions, dinosaurs, that we were taught to analyze and emulate.

And, up until the 2010s, this was how the game remained. The classic liberal orthodoxy of “punching up” being followed to letter and typeset. But then as Twitter got bigger, the targets got smaller. Revered comedians like Louis CK were worthy of takedowns. So were up and coming comedians like Sam Morrill, before they even had one comedy album out.

And as I already said, it’s only gotten worse. On Twitter, a subtweet links to the original offending post. On TikTok, you could theoretically have your taco recipe video get burnt for appropriating Mexican culture and you could never know that you are being painted as a kitchen fascist.

The problem with all this is that masters like William Shakespeare and The Rolling Stones had years, perhaps decades, to develop their craft before they smoked their last cigarette in front of the firing squad. Now that anyone is vulnerable at any stage of their creative career, it is that much harder for a challenging, provocative, interesting work of art to grow.

This doesn’t only affect individual artists. It can potentially affect entire movements. Imagine if rap started on the streets of the Bronx now. The takedowns over “Rapper’s Delight” and its Superman pantyhose homophobia. Rap already had an uphill climb in the ‘80s, with boomer rock critics giving it negative reviews for misogyny and violence. Imagine young sensitive teens with the megaphone?

I was a sensitive teen who initially couldn’t get into rap. Too tough, too mean, etc. In college, an Italian kid from the ghetto played nonstop rap. I heard the Biggie Smalls line “Fuck the football team” and I found my entry point to the world of hip-hop. If this was now, I would just make a video stitch taking down the video in “Dre Day” where a girl gets sprayed with a 40 and me and my TikTok mob would have taken down one of the greatest musical legends just because.

As always, it’s not just the left. We must cook the other side of the patty. For a long time Hollywood films were strictly entertainment. Then directors like Francis Ford Coppola helped elevate the form. Something similar almost happened with indie games and New Games Journalism. But a video game called Depression Quest was taken down by the video game fan community in the Gamergate scandal. Regardless of the actual quality of DQ, now that this type of artsy game was liberal-media coded, now video games had no space to be elevated as an art form.

But even all this is human deconstruction. This is to say nothing about the algorithmic thought police.

From The Loop:

Nandini Jammi, who runs a brand-safety consultancy for advertisers, explained the problem to me this way: “Instead of actually looking for criminal content, these brand-safety technology vendors have identified keywords such as ‘crime,’ or ‘violence,’ or ‘terrorist.’ So they’re literally blocking words that journalists need to use to cover the news.”

Perhaps this is why we see a quadrillion stories of the Kardashian-Jenner dynasty and virtually zero about the Gaza strip. Let alone any artworks that are actually relevant to our current situation (as opposed to the idpol wish fulfillment fantasies that we must revere as art or else).

And it’s gonna get worse. From the latest Atlantic article from Jonathan Haidt:

The combination of video and voice will seem authentic and be hard to disbelieve, even if we are told that the video is a deepfake, just as optical and audio illusions are compelling even when we are told that two lines are the same size or that a series of notes is not really rising in pitch forever. We are wired to believe our senses, especially when they converge. Illusions, historically in the realm of curiosities, may soon become deeply woven into normal life.

That’s right: just like the hackneyed stand-up comedy bit about the wife slapping her husband for cheating on her in her dream, it won’t matter if we know we are watching a deepfake; the emotional content will carry a greater charge than its veracity ever will.

This seems to make an even wider, more comfortable entry point for AI art (or non-art) of course. As I previously said, AI has no worldview. Blame for racist AI won’t come for the machine, but for its parent company. We will see racist art not as a takedown moment, but as a progress report on human society as a whole. More pleas to do better, the whole 9 yards.

By this point, we will be deconstructing humanity itself. Finally, a subject large enough and worthy enough for dissection.