Mall Messiahs, Part 3
The Internet is fueled by an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Many times, when a search query (or, being more contemporary, a Chat GPT query) has no results, that means that no one asked it in any message board, meaning there wasn’t a know-it-all who could give the pat, barely serviceable answer that many knowledge searches end in.
Compare to 12-step, a spiritual community that is only thirty years older than DARPANET’s invention. Perhaps you wanted to ask about the stance on social media. Posting your 30 day chip on Facebook, etc. Right now all answers to that question depend on whom you are asking. You would get interpretations of past traditions on media that do not directly acknowledge how social media is necessarily different from print and broadcast. Any official stance would require years of meetings with the global committee, and it would never be official unless it became actual literature (a new pamphlet, or a revised intro to a central text even).
This may seem frustrating, but compare this to Google, which is vulnerable to sponsored content by snake oil hacks who would make their own for-profit social media response to AA, or even the non-sponsored content by some old timer on Reddit who is all too happy to inflate the value of their $0.02.
Tara Isabella Burton’s book Strange Rites is full of examples of how modern online religions are remixed. This is a good way to describe it (though I am more skeptical than she is of this phenomenon). Much of the knowledge we seek online is like a remix, taking snippets from an obscure old 50’s text, throwing in a Star Wars clips and gilding it with modern meme speak for that sparkling sheen.
Burton (and Klein) also value how intuitive many of these modern paths are. Nothing wrong with intuition except there is an unfortunate dearth of warning signs distinguishing intuition from impulsiveness. I myself was never aware of the gossamer thin distinction until a psychoanalyst introduced it to me. Needless to say, ad-supported search engines thrive on this lack of distinction. The mania of a new Avatar-based cult is too infectious to waste a disinformation sticker on.
This is to say nothing about the notorious rabbit hole that we all fall into. Google is still the primary destination for deep dives, but increasingly there are iceberg videos on YouTube that sometimes go up to six hours, starting with the tip of the iceberg of what we know about an artist, a philosophy, etc. and going all the way to the bottom with the murkier, deepest depths of knowledge about the subject. MSNBC and Google would have no problem weeding out the false ones. But will any major corporate entity give a six hour response?
Even when the search query results are picture-perfect accurate, humans are notoriously bad at distinguishing what actually is an insight and what feels like an insight.
Google has no problem calling the latest QAnon drop false information (not now anyway). But QAnon followers are too enraptured by the chain of insights to care.
Many spiritual quests online have less to do with what is the correct answer and more to do with what the popular answer is. This fueled the McMindfulness craze of the late ‘00s to the late ‘10s. As time went on, Buddhism was increasingly open to homosexuality and transgenders. This is not bad per se, but this mainly had to do with the temples that were open to these people getting higher Google hits than more traditional temples. For something like this, not a problem. This also means that Eastern philosophy sources that flatter white college educated liberals are more likely to flourish than those that challenge their views. The tradcath movement can even be seen as a culture war weapon against woke elder millennial yoga moms and manbun mystics.
False answers and insights are not the only hidden obstacles on the path. The web is tangled up in false narratives, especially about tech leaders, especially Elon Musk. Trump is a former business tycoon that went bankrupt and transitioned to political power. Musk speaks and acts like Trump but while at the top of his financial game as a titan of industry. This godlike power has entranced many Musketeers, some even wanting him to be king of America (even this being an echo of channers calling Trump God Emperor). Investors backed Musk to buy a failing microblog service for $44 billion as a result.
Among the shallow emotions that Nick Carr didn’t get a chance to detail in his 2011 classic The Shallows: desire. Rene Girard scholar Luke Burgis talks about how our desires are thinner online. For this reason, contrary to what Tara Burton says here, there is a world of difference and depth between the self creation of 19th-century flaneurs and today’s fast-fashion obsessed influencers.
You could even summarize the modern experience as being a chain of mild, fleeting desires. Or as Dean Kissick says, “Manufacturing desire has grown more important than creating something beautiful or even desirable. That’s the logic underpinning auction-block hysterias, entertainment streaming platforms, endlessly scrolling social media; after some time, you don’t know what you want. You only want to want. Things are desirable because they’re desired.”
For years, a common sci-fi conceit was to imagine an AI god. It’s not hard from this perspective to see why everyone is so excited to watch AI art or listen to AI music. Not often you get to see a powerful, borderline omniscient entity create something before your very eyes. Of course, the result is a tepid “oh shucks.” (I use AI art because I can’t draw and I can’t afford an illustrator. How quickly robot gods become unpaid interns). Once everyone got tired of the parlor tricks, Alexa fell from maternal cyber mother to a $10 billion dollar paperweight for Amazon. Thin desires.
I can’t begin to parse this thought-provoking essay on postliberal epistemology but I can tell you one of the thoughts it provoked: knowledge and logic are very overvalued entities in Silicon Valley. Our Spotify Wrapped personalities are supposed to feel revelatory. Instead, they reveal that I had a regrettable month listening to the Hair soundtrack over and over again.
Where is the Hope? Look Outside,Then Look Within
Strange Rites opens with a deep look into the Sleep No More phenomenon. Sleep No More is a live, in-person, immersive theatrical experience. You can walk among the characters. Sometimes they even whisper in your ear. It has a rabid online following, but make no mistake: the McKittrick Hotel is where the Holy Mass takes place.
Where it doesn’t take place? The mall. For years, the agreed-upon metaphor for social media was the casino. A couple of recent articles have convinced me that the mall is a better model for understanding our current situation. Let’s use this framework to look at the labor movement’s recent ups and downs.
Lockdown forced many people to consider their purpose. Especially those who did not have the luxury to work from home. The web helped in many ways. Starbucks employees are increasingly unionizing. Unfortunately it’s not enough. Support for unions is high but actual union membership is still low. This goes for civic communities in general. Most workplace resentments got siloed into the antiwork subreddit, which devolved into people griping about their bosses.
Now imagine this was a mall. The union membership store would be shuttered but the antiwork thirdplace for people to bitch about their job would have a line around the corner. But that would also lose customers as more people grow tired of the growing din of office temps reading emails out loud with disgust. In the mall, just like online, popular is more important than true.
I have made enough contrasts with 12 step and online life. A comparison point would be Weight Watchers. People go to Weight Watchers meetings to lose weight. They end up going for community. But there are no 12 steps to keep the focus on the psychological underpinnings of weight loss, so meetings devolve into trading recipes and vicious competition to be on the calendar next year. This all sounds more fun than Overeaters Anonymous, which is why you’re more likely to see a Weight Watchers meeting at the mall.
The Weight Watchers experience is an apt metaphor for what drives social media: entertainment, as opposed to art. Comfort instead of discomfort. How do we bring art into the mall? The same way we brought art to IRL: scenius. Likes and comments are not enough to build a community. Artists who work together in the same scene are like coworkers but instead of having the common goal of punching the clock they share a common purpose and vision. Not only do I believe it’s possible to harness this energy online: it happened online.
In 1999, a comedy message board called A Special Thing was created. Ir evolved from a fan site for Tenacious D to a place for comedy nerds to hang to, eventually a place where the comics themselves would post and chat. This is to say nothing of the record label. The LA comedy scene’s energy was harnessed online before it went mainstream with the Comedians of Comedy series and became a moneymaker with Zach Galifianakis’s casting in The Hangover.
This strong presence is possible when the web is decentralized; when it is more like a city than a mall.
“A friend’s party” is exactly what scenius should feel like. There are only so many messages that will come across on a megaphone at a mall megachurch. Art and spirituality are small-time jobs. They are not reducible to easy narratives or concepts.
By “narratives” she means “political categories that Twitter locks us into.” I myself am a pansexual ethnically Muslim recovering drug addict with mental illness. I used to say that, for a pansexual ethnically Muslim recovering drug addict with mental illness, I was boring. Now I say the categories are boring. Or at least how they are reduced to hashtags and unfunny memes. Moreover, they are the least interesting things about me. There is something magical, mystical, about meeting people IRL that the Internet can only improve but never replace.
In the sixties and seventies, there was an AAVE expression where a Black man would say someone “had soul.” It is not wrong to say that it meant a person had a good spirit but there were many other factors. Being down-to-earth. Loose. Real. The closest thing to it is something Chinese Eastern philosophy adherents call human heartedness. Although Confucianism is known as a more strict spiritual path than Taoism, even Confucians believe it is necessary to have this spirit to prosper as a moral person. Web 2.0, centered as it is on algorithms and categories, might do a fine job making us laugh and shocking us, but, no matter how big or small Black Twitter grows, it has yet to give us this special quality.
The Beats had soul. They did not spend time subtweeting Republican senators for lulz. They drank, danced, smoked…some would even argue that writing itself was an afterthought. They lived together and then wrote about their lives together. The word “spirit” comes from the Latin “spiritus” which means “breath.” The Beats breathed together. By meditating together. By smoking together. By talking to each other. Knowledge was never the point. The road was the destination.