Microplastic America

Moments after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump last week, there were memes. T-shirts saying “You Missed.” Instagram Reels that scored photo carousels of the event with 50 Cent’s “Many Men.” There were even memecoins.

[A} dozen of them sprung up on the website pump.fun, with names like THE BLOOD STAYS ON (TICKER: BLOOD), EARS OVER BITCHES (TICKER: EOB), and CEVIL WAR (TICKER: WAR).

Somewhere in the multiverse is a nation that processes the attempt and comes to grips with how A FUCKING CIVIL WAR WAS NARROWLY AVOIDED.

From the Slate piece:

After JFK was murdered in 1963, the British broadcaster Jonathan Miller viewed the rolling postassassination TV news coverage and found that the medium had been “forced … into a brief maturity,” tamping down the typical “greedy squalling” before “the commercials came yapping back on Tuesday.” No such rest and respite occurs now. When a country’s divisions, ideologies, and observations are all memeified bit by bit, it’s only ever greedy squalling.

We can also compare this moment to 9/11, when comedy shows were all on hiatus for weeks and magazines asked when we can be funny again. But now everything is fodder. If a narrowly-avoided Franz Ferdinand is grist for the content mill, the President impotently calling out of a speaking engagement with COVID is a bit that writes itself.

Before last Saturday, I was inspired to write the piece you are reading now after reading the last sentence in Henry Oliver’s Substack piece, The Modern Discourse Novel:

Writing about the internet, in other words, doesn’t have to mean incorporating its glibness.

In another time, David Foster Wallace might have pointed out that writing about TV doesn’t have to mean incorporating its irony. Both statements would be true, but irony and glibness were defining characteristics of TV and are defining characteristics of online life.

It’s as if the Internet is a religion based around the following principles:

• Irony

• Glibness

• Schadenfreude

• Pettiness

• Optics

• Flattery

Or we can tip the hat to Nicholas Carr and file this all under shallow engagement.

Some, like Kyle Chayka, call our current moment the “brain rot” era. Ryan Broderick, through a Garbage Day headline, spotted one of its symptoms: You May Not Realize It Yet, But You’re Already Forgetting About The Trump Shooting. If that’s true, how much more is the media cycle past genocide and antisemitism?

The damage this all does to our psyche is more profound than we realize. According to a new article cited in Popular Mechanics, consciousness evolved for the purpose of strengthening social bonds.

Rather than helping individuals survive, it evolved to help us broadcast our experienced ideas and feelings into the wider world.

I know, this sounds like social media. Which is exactly what is so frustrating about our current moment. We are communicating like never before, but on such a surface level. We have more friends than we even asked for, but how many of them are based around a weak, tacit agreement to like each other’s posts? Are you lucky if you find love on a dating app or if you narrowly avoid being the lolcow of the week by not writing a cringeworthy message that ends up on a dating nightmare account?

I say all this not as a scold, but as an addict myself that is still struggling with an exhausting online cycle driven by fear of ridicule and thirst for validation. I suspect I am not the only one who knows how poisonous the trough is and loathes themselves for weakly feeding at it anyway. It is this very shameful level of engagement that has us communicate with each other through shallow irony as oppose to deeper levels of communication. Memes are called “shitposts.” If you speak like a youth, you are diagnosed with “brain rot.”

As David Foster Wallace said in “E Unibus Pluram”:

Surely I’m not alone in having acquaintances I hate to watch TV with because they so clearly loathe it—they complain relentlessly about the hackneyed plots, the unlikely dialogue, the Cheez-Whiz resolutions, the bland condescension of the news anchors, the shrill wheedling of the commercials—and yet are just as clearly obsessed with it, somehow need to loathe their six hours a day, day in and out. Junior advertising executives, aspiring filmmakers, and grad-school poets are in my experience especially prone to this condition where they simultaneously hate, fear, and need television, and try to disinfect themselves of whatever so much viewing might do to them by watching TV with weary contempt instead of the rapt credulity most of us grew up with.

Rapt credulity. Yes, there was a time when people watched TV with rapt credulity. In the ‘50s, sitcoms and game shows were consumed by American families with no self-consciousness. In the ‘60s, TV became the symbol of Plastic American conformity that hippies loved to loathe. As aging boomers caved and watched TV with their Gen X children, the ‘70s gave birth to self-conscious media consumption.

Wallace again:

Television’s classic irony function came into its own in the summer of 1974, as remorseless lenses opened to view the fertile “credibility gap” between the image of official disclaimer and the reality of high-level shenanigans. A nation was changed, as Audience. If even the president lies to you, whom are you supposed to trust to deliver the real? Television, that summer, got to present itself as the earnest, worried eye on the reality behind all images. The irony that television is itself a river of image, however, was apparent even to a twelve-year-old, sitting there, rapt. After ’74 there seemed to be no way out. Images and ironies all over the place. It’s not a coincidence that Saturday Night Live, that Athens of irreverent cynicism, specializing in parodies of (1) politics and (2) television, premiered the next fall (on television).

The ‘80s of course was the “golden age” of irony oversaturation as well as overstimulation, which continued until…9/11. Graydon Carter breathlessly heralded the end of irony in Vanity Fair. Then hipsters came, along with Gawker. Irony and glibness were now weaponized through the Internet, leading to memes, Twitter, etc.

The 2010s may have been the worst decade though because this was when Microplastic America was founded. There was no room for debate anymore. Any disagreement with any ideology was met by whatever Twitter mob sniffed blood that day. People were not more enlightened; they acted that way for fear of being shamed. Even if what you said was OK, it wasn’t a good look. Teenagers now had to worry about optics, previously a term used in smoky campaign war rooms. Who cared if a black writer has a valid criticism of Obama? The schadenfreude of shaming him through a clapback was too good to refuse.

And yet, the dawn of Microplastic America came at a time of…rapt credulity regarding the Internet. This was the Obama age. We voted “yes” to ending racism! Twitter helped his campaign…the possibilities were endless. We can subtweet our way to a new Utopia!

By the time the utopianism died down and tech was met with more skepticism, it was too late. The microplastics were everywhere. The information war over Gaza. The antiwork movement. The fight against the right wing. The discourse on cynical pink washing. The Discourse, of course, being the largest source of shallowly contemptuous interactions, much as the oceans are the largest sites of microplastic contamination.

If Plastic America was best represented by the clean-cut, smarmy game show host, the ambassador of Microplastic America is of course the influencer. As

Sara

Sutterlin aims her withering gaze at them, we see a fresh new entertainment hell. The lowest common denominator of entertainment was brain-dead entertainment. Now, it is…physically attractive shitty hotel guests? Do I have that right? I reread the piece, yes. You may want to reread it just to make sure.

As I said back in March, we need a revolution beyond politics: we need a revolution of consciousness. Sorry, but we can’t fix Microplastic America simply by voting Democrat. Much like the ‘60s revolution in consciousness was a response to Plastic America, a new one must counter Microplastic America. A large part of the ‘60s revolution entailed dropping out of the rat race; kids stopped chasing the American dream. Zoomers do not have the luxury of great jobs to drop out of. What the youth can do — what we all can do — is drop out of the race for validation. You think inflation is bad? With the attention economy inflation, a million followers won’t even get you free drink. Does this mean stop making music, writing stories, hosting comedy shows? Shit, it doesn’t even mean stop posting!

Already, there are people posting without validation, for intrinsic motives.¹ From an earlier post:

YouTube vloggers are vlogging like no one is watching, with low viewer counts and no sponsorship deals. They just want to express something to the camera. Not even an audience, necessarily, the camera. Many of them feel more comfortable in front of a camera than a person.

From the same post:

“[A]uthentic” is the opposite of “manufactured” and AI has expanded the scope of what can be manufactured direct-to-consumer in the last ten months: poems, love letters, fashion models, influencers, cartoons, friends, lovers, therapists, writers, actors, musicians…perhaps there’s a shorter list of what can’t be manufactured.

I would bet that the humancore creators and the vloggers doing it for the love of the game are driven by an insatiable thirst for what is authentically, quintessentially human. After years of dancing and primping for invisible algorithmic gods, the idea of trying to hop onto the latest trend in order to become rich seems futile, especially with the current inflation that is happening in the attention economy.

It is impossible to live a life of self-validation and game the algorithm at the same time. The algorithm has made us more manufactured, more machine-like, it has programmed us to be less human.

Sam Kriss recently wrote a note about how the online right wants to create their own cancel culture mobs in the wake of those who made jokes about Trump’s assassination. Seems right; those who mock the assassination attempt of a presidential candidate should be punished. But this perpetuates the cycle of microplastic culture and microplastic discourse, but from a tedious Bizarro perspective. Now it’s the right wingers that get to be the scolds and the liberals that get to be the trolls. Meanwhile, they are all in a panopticon, as Kriss says. A prison where the bars are made of thin desires, I would add. Was a time Republicans fought for family values. Now they seem obsessed with owning the libs. The left had a thirst for freedom when the hippies joined. Now they are the helicopter parents of everything that happens online.

The term “Microplastic America” might seem like a facile, clever play on “Plastic America” but otherwise having no substance. But like microplastics, online slights, shitposts, petty influencer fights, etc. are not harmful individually. They are all too small to pose that kind of threat. It is only en masse that they cause damage. And like microplastics, the damage is barely detectable until it’s too late. By the time you’ve found out, you’ve already committed to the bit.

1. You’re welcome.