Your Own Private Idaho

A Look at How Personal Media Helped Create a Culture of Fear, from the ‘80s to Today

Drugs are not inherently bad. Most are not inherently drugs. The ones that are not synthetic began as toxins meant to protect plants from predators, typically insects. Insects that ate from the coca plant would scurry faster, making them more visible to predators. Opium poppies slowed insects down, making them more vulnerable of course. Humans, however, never had this problem — when they consumed any of these plants naturally, anyway. When they ate fruit that had fermented alcohol, there would be a slightly euphoric effect, making the gatherers search for more fruit, bringing more food and ensuring survival of the tribe. Psilocybin mushrooms would be used in rituals to commune with gods. Even the coca leaves, when chewed, had a stimulating effect more akin to coffee than to cocaine. It wasn’t until these toxins were concentrated, away from their parent plants, that they affected humans the way they affected insects.

And so, media has also proven more volatile in its concentrated, more potent manifestations.

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A perennial topic that The Discourse can’t seem to unstick out of its craw: there has been a vibe shift thanks to all these phones and we live in a culture of cruelty and loneliness. While researching my last piece on how communal love has not trended in decades, I was under the spell of two magnificent books: The Democratic Surround by Fred Turner and Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich. Synthesizing what I learned from them both, I made the case that the sixties, while not a particularly media shy moment in history, nevertheless was characterized by countless instances of collective media events (psychedelic light shows, art installations with multiple screens) where participants felt collective ecstasy. After comparing the moment in my mind to the eighties on a lark, I had a sense of deja vu, for two reasons. One, I remember a comment on one of my pieces where the commenter,

DC Reade

, made the argument that the eighties was primarily an indoor culture, especially compared to the sixties. Another way I got deja vu; the eighties, with its decline in collective media and collective joy, had many parallels to our current moment. Like now, the eighties felt like a referendum on the liberalism of the previous decade. Much has been written about our culture of cruelty, with comic Tony Hinchcliffe making a mean joke about Puerto Rico at the Republican National Convention. In the eighties, Sam Kinison, Andrew “Dice” Clay, Guns N’ Roses, Howard Stern, 2 Live Crew and even Eddie Murphy were notably crueler, more misogynist and homophobic than their predecessors were. ¹

A quick magnification of the microscope shows us the most striking commonality though: the increase in personal media that decade helped create a culture that was lonelier and more fearful. Not to turn this into an undergraduate thesis, but I decided to write this piece for three reasons:

One: the loneliness crisis goes back further than we think; this is way more than just a case of “Internet bad;”

Two: this is not a loneliness crisis, it’s a fear crisis;

Three: by the time we even considered how much media was isolating us, it was too late; it went on for decades.

To understand what happened, in true eighties fashion, we gotta go back to the fifties. Democratic Surround brilliantly charts how the hippies’ fifties childhood created the perfect environment for their ethos to develop. Following World War II, many in America, including those in Washington, felt guilty about dropping the atomic bomb. Did this mean Americans were as bad as Nazis? Think tanks were built to ensure that the fascist mindset would never take hold in America. Two of the many ways they tried to avoid it from spreading: by working with artists (many from the Bauhaus movement) who created democratic surrounds — multimedia artworks that had multiple focal points, allowing the viewer to look wherever they chose (believing that mass media led not only to the rise of Hitler but to the acceptance of the atomic bomb as a solution, these experts maintained that, with an emphasis on open-ended collective exploration, fascist thought would be discouraged); by encouraging creativity,²which was meant to be more inclusive than “genius,” through toys, artworks and children’s TV shows. Fred Turner ably follows the thread to the sixties, with the hippies’ love of creativity and open-ended exploration.

What he does not mention is that the government was not fond of this manifestation of creative thought of course. For every gentle spirit playing a pan flute, there were five bearded rebels throwing beer bottles at cops. The fifties vision for world peace (meant as propaganda for globalism, of course, with all nations achieving self-determination through democracy)³ was not having its intended effect. Many were horrified at the Dionysian collective ecstasy. The war culture had to return. The seventies was a transitional decade where neoliberalism, with its weakening of community organizations, and postmodernism, with its skepticism of revolutionary thought, were like the two clouds colliding that led to the storm of the following decade. Already in the seventies, the automobile and the television had reached levels of popularity like never before; indeed, Bowling Alone author Robert D. Putnam places much of the blame for the lack of communal bonds on them. The family became weaker through increasing divorce rates. Though spirituality was rising, the church as a community center was losing ground. Many of the utopian aims of the sixties were redirected into internal reflection, which of course calcified into a culture of narcissism. One we have never left.

As the seventies wore on, the spirit of collective joy was increasingly snuffed out and fear got elevated. But it was intensified in the eighties. Already, on June 7, 1980, Gary Numan’s “Cars” was a top ten hit. For those who have never heard it, the song is not about cruising for babes. It is about a frightened man who only feels safe from the menacing public when he’s inside his car.

Cars were not the only place where the world-weary took shelter in the eighties. The term “home entertainment center” became popular in the eighties for a reason. Between the VCR, the video game console, and the personal computer, why leave the house? Many households had more than one TV, so why leave the bedroom? OK fine, you want fresh air, even though Russia will probably nuke us or some crackhead might stab you with a hypodermic AIDS needle? Go ahead — might as well bring your Walkman, so you can die to your favorite song. And just in case you don’t know what to do with all that nervous energy on the subway, play Tetris on your Game Boy. Now you are completely dissociated from reality. I am not saying personal media created all this fear. It helped create it; it magnified it.

Most of you are too young to remember a time when television went off after a certain time. Around one am, the national anthem would play and there would either be a test pattern or the station ID. By the eighties, 24/7 television became more common. By 1989, it was everywhere. One 24/7 network: CNN. The 24-hour news cycle was born. Before doomscrolling, there was doom sitting. The world was painted as a terrifying place with crack addicts, street gangs, AIDS, nuclear tension, kidnappings, babies falling down wells, Satanic cults, teenage burnouts playing Judas Priest and committing suicide, etc. The term “news junkie” emerged during this decade. Why wouldn’t it? Before cable news, someone would watch the nightly news on a network, maybe a little “Meet the Press,” read a newspaper or a magazine. What they all had in common: there was a beginning and end to all of them. No news binging.

One story that spread was the Satanic Panic:

The true decline of the American magic came in the ‘80s, when the Satanic Panic gripped the nation. As news stories about Satanic pedophile teachers (that were later proven false due to false memories) alarmed parents and reinvigorated the Christian Right, heavy metal bands like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden were also targeted (to say nothing about actual Satanic music acts like King Diamond). Even role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, in which players cast fictional spells, raised ire from concerned parents. From the ‘80s onward, magic and the occult would be moved back underground to subcultures like dark metal and Goth.

Bill Hicks brilliantly deflated the paranoia inculcated by CNN:

“I don’t get laid, no one gets laid.”

In my last post, I referenced an author who blamed much of our culture on the cruelty of Internet pornography in the Y2K era. While it reached the lows it did at this time, the home video market for pornography was the necessary transition to this level of brutality and callousness. Much like mainstream film theaters, the porn theaters of the seventies, even the grindhouses, had to appeal to broad audiences. At one point, heterosexual couples were attending these films. But the VCR revolution led to more niche content, including videos where women were degraded. All from the comfort of home. The AIDS crisis, along with the surge of the Christian Right, played a large role in rolling back the advances of the sexual revolution, but home video porn was instrumental in concluding this chapter. It also was fueled by, and helped fuel, the feminist backlash. Your stupid female boss is giving you guff? Pop on an office slut porno and imagine yourself as the boss. Remember: the risk of offending couples was gone now. Couple rented softcore while single Travis Bickles could have all the hardcore they could afford.

With the sexual revolution over, violence was the dominant libidinal energy of the eighties. This was reflected not only in porn (or in popular music like metal and rap), but in the violent horror subgenres that were practically invented with the VCR in mind: splatter and slasher. Many of these films were low-budget and direct-to-video, like Nail Gun Massacre, Blood Cult and Splatter Farm. Like their pornographic counterparts, there was less of a concern with story or character and more of a focus on the money shot. As special effects improved over the years, many of these films would be watched ironically for laughs. But at the time, they were popular for their looser restrictions, compared to theatrical releases.

Some had an appetite for verbal violence. Many have unfavorably compared Eddie Murphy’s stand-up comedy to Richard Pryor’s, contrasting Pryor’s vulnerability with Murphy’s cruelty. These critics voiced their opinions before the arrival of Sam Kinison and Andrew “Dice” Clay. The increasing popularity of stand-up comedy during the comedy boom of the eighties led to a glut of comedy specials on cable and on video. Many viewers would record comedy specials off cable with their VCRs for repeated viewings of Sam Kinison impersonating a dead man getting fucked by a gay necrophiliac.

Nerds existed before the eighties just like gays existed before the seventies. If the seventies was the decade in which gay culture first became massive and cohesive, the same happened for geeks in the eighties. VCRs were used to record “Star Trek” while home video game systems and personal computers would become their temples. By nature, nerds were always shy and introverted, but they needed to interact with others like their primate ancestors. This led to fan clubs, conventions, chess club, all sorts of Max Fischer extracurricular activities. With the Atari 2600, the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Apple II and the Commodore 64, they could interact with the machine. If you had no siblings (like me), all the better; just play against the computer. The eighties wasn’t the first decade to have interactive media at home. There was the Magnavox Odyssey gaming system in the seventies, but that was an expensive flop. A decade later, video games were cheaper the way crack was cheaper — if you bought too many, you still ran out of money. Personal computers were even more addicting. More expensive of course, but in the long run cheaper because many disks were copied and shared among enthusiasts. Back then, interacting primarily with machines, and applying your agency primarily in this matter, was considered weird. Now it’s those who do not interact with machines that are outcast.

First wave Gen X nerds grew up in this environment. Second wave Gen Xers were raised in this environment, their single moms calling them from work, telling them to microwave what was in the fridge and play games after homework. The outgoing kids watched MTV (even this was relatively sedentary) but were encouraged by their young Boomer parents to go out. They often went to the mall, the most popular third space of the eighties, like the outdoors was in the sixties and the discotheque was a decade later. But the introverted nerds found it easier to hide from jocks in Hyrule than in high school clubs. By 1989, geeks did not even need to stay home to play video games: they could dissociate with the portable Game Boy. Hard to believe there was a time when you couldn't dissociate on the go.

We cannot gloss over what a major, abrupt rise in dissociation there was in the eighties. Before the surge of personal media in this decade, those who wanted to dissociate either got high, read books⁴ or stayed in their cars (either driving or with the engine idling) listening to music. There were no other options, certainly no interactive ones. Minor interactions, perhaps, like flipping the page of a book or flipping a record over. But video games let you jump, run, punch, even talk if it was an RPG. This level of interactivity in popular media was unprecedented. Though it’s not as large scale as it is now, the option to interact with a machine instead of a person was an increasingly popular one, even if it was mainly taken up by nerds, as well as Gen X and first-wave Millennial children.

At a recent salon for InterIntellect,

Ross Barkan

expressed his doubts over the commercial viability of AI, saying the iPhone made more money at a quicker rate. The iPhone had decades of precedent: the personal computer, arguably Steve Jobs’ most revolutionary idea, prepared us for the idea that computers should belong to individuals, not only factories or corporations; the Game Boy and the Walkman opened up the potential for mobile media devices. In the early eighties, the Walkman; two decades later, the iPod; a half decade more, the iPhone.

The Walkman created a personal soundtrack for your movie. One could argue the seeds of Main Character Syndrome were already being sown then. When you watch a movie with the main character walking, the music on the soundtrack is understood to underscore the character’s emotions: everyone else is just an extra in the “walking to work” scene. You could listen to pre-recorded cassettes or you could play tapes of songs you recorded off the radio. Heck, you could even record Howard Stern and listen to the tape on the way to work, if your job started long past the hours of drive-time radio. Howard Stern may be an enemy of Trump now, but in the eighties, he almost single-handedly created the ethos of the modern right: less concerned with family values, more irritated by liberal pieties, particularly from feminists and gays. The VCR and the Walkman were ideal for the crass, cruel entertainment that came out at this time. Besides the stand-up mentioned above, there were musical acts like Guns N’ Roses and 2 Live Crew. Here are some sample lyrics from both respectively:

Police and niggers, that's right, get outta my way
Don't need to buy none of your gold chains today […]

Immigrants and faggots, they make no sense to me
They come to our country, and think they'll do as they please
Like start some mini-Iran, or spread some fucking disease
And they talk so many goddamn ways, it's all Greek to me

I met this bitch standing on the block
Singing doo wah diddy diddy dum diddy doo
She'll suck on my dick if I buy her a rock
Doo wah diddy diddy dum diddy doo
Got the pussy (got the pussy)
She got jacked (she got jacked)
Punched her face (punched her face)
And I took my money back

I hope it’s obvious that I am not saying I hate their music, that I hate their songs, or even that they should be censored. I’m glad these songs exist as evidence of the mood of their time. AIDS created hatred and resentment against gays the way 9/11 did against Arabs and Muslims. The fear that AIDS created led to mountains of homophobic material, just like a quick sample of pop culture in the ‘00s will give you oodles of Islamophobic works.

So why do people love the eighties so much? The sixties and seventies may have seemed more freewheeling, but the eighties is the beginning of our modern era. Different enough to warrant a look back, but there are the right amount of familiar parallels. One parallel: in addition to our insularity inside our homes or our devices, there were also the beginnings of American cultural isolationism. The difference between the first and second British Invasion is that the Americans fought back against the second one in 1984 and won. Americans primarily consume American culture. There have been notable exceptions, but right now the press is admitting they need to acknowledge American country star Morgan Wallen’s popularity.

Those of you who are truly perceptive might have noticed a sort of loose connection between this piece and my previous two. In the fifties, there was a cultural flattening that ended in the sixties. In the sixties, there was an ecstatic outpouring of love (or at least the demand for it) that would decrease each decade after. But the culture of fear that personal media has signal boosted since the eighties, well, that has gone on uninterrupted.

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You would think that the fall of the USSR in 1991, along with the prosperity that followed years later, would have made America a happy place in the nineties. What ended up happening might best be summed up by Greg Gandlin (via

Yasha Levine

):

Like a military veteran looking for action on the streets at home, America saw enemies in its own borders. The culture wars truly began in 1992 for this reason. Cable news, as well as the newfangled Internet, became the battleground. Conservatives, victorious in the eighties on the AM dial, launched a beachhead on Fox News as well as online newsgroups. For almost thirty years now, Fox has used the excesses of the left, especially on campuses, to provoke hysteria.

Like the Bill Hicks joke in the previous section, which was honed in the eighties but released in the nineties on his album Relentless, many Americans did not experience the horrors that they saw on the news. The news cycle influenced the older Boomer parents that raised Millennials in the eighties as well as the nineties — helicopter parenting was born.

From

Ross Barkan

‘s Glass Century, where an older Boomer parent, Mona Glass, wants to leave her friend Liv’s party because she does not trust the babysitter’s competence:

“I worry about these babysitters. Do we really know who they are? They can lie. They can be irresponsible, pedophiles, killers—”

“Whoa, slow down there. When did Mona become such a worrywart?”

“I worry about my son every day. That someone is going to hurt him. Snatch him away. The world is sick.”

“I don’t have any children so my advice is maybe of the grain of-salt variety. But we grew up without adult supervision, right? My friends and I would just drink in the back of cars in Nassau County parking lots. I smoked marijuana at fourteen. You were a little savage beating up boys during football games in Prospect Park. Were your parents out in the street or in the parking lot watching you all the time?”

“Not technically, no.”

“And you turned out fine.”

“The world has changed, Liv. It’s not like when we grew up.”

“It’s probably better, honestly. When I was thirteen, I thought Cuba was going to nuke New York.”

“Cuba wasn’t going to mug you, throw you up against the wall and take your life for train fare.”

“You never used to talk this way.”

What’s important to note here is that earlier in the book, back in the seventies, Mona gets mugged. But Liv notes Mona never spoke this frantically, certainly not in the seventies. Cable news turned accused and convicted killers like the Menendez Brothers, Jeffrey Dahmer and OJ Simpson into horror movie monsters from Hammer features. Natural Born Killers, while not faithful to writer Quentin Tarantino’s vision, was a deliriously surreal, yet sharp philippic on how TV turned killers into the modern-day gunslingers.

As I discussed in my last piece, Internet porn set a precedent for the cruelty that would eventually envelop our culture. An online activity that does not get discussed enough online: cybersex. There was a time when strangers would chat online in a chat group, eventually create a private chat room, and write what would now be called “sexts” to each other, with both parties presumably masturbating. You weren’t sure if the person on the other end of the text was who they said they were. If they were really a female, if they were really eighteen, etc. While it may shock younger readers that we did this without knowing what the other person looked like, the anonymity was the point. Glory holes had a more intimate atmosphere than chat rooms. Why bother showing your face, writing embarrassing dating bios, why even use your name? Just say a couple of quips — or better yet, some movie quotes to be safe — make the room laugh, use that swagger to land whomever fit your age/sex/location requirements. Tragic irony: an online phenomenon that was fueled by fear of vulnerability was obsolete when it was revealed how easily pedophiles could use it. There is a rhyme effect with the chat sex of the nineties and the AI chatbot companions of today, except this time the “predators” are tech titans who are harvesting data and potentially creating machines that will harm society.

If the unholy trinity of crack, AIDS and the Cold War plagued the eighties, in the nineties, more people than ever before or after were scared of the calendar. In addition to the Christian hysteria of the Rapture coming after the year 1999, there was the looming Y2K crisis. By 1999, the entire world’s infrastructure was already built with computers. The personal computer at home was a doorway to the rest of the world. This idea, that a person without a computer was off the grid, would of course be later replaced by that same level of necessity being applied to the smart phone. Well, now these computers, which in 1999 helped isolate people further with empty cybsersex, cruel porn and illegally downloaded Limp Bizkit songs, were going to bring untold levels of global damage because many computers recognized years in two-digit formats, (98, 99) not four digits, which would make 2000 indistinguishable from 1900.

The crisis was averted both on the technological and the celestial front. Then 9/11 happened. Cable news added the ticker on the bottom of the screen, letting viewers know of other news stories. If the media used fear before, I do not want to insult the readers’ intelligence or, likely, their memory of how the media used fear at this time.

The hipsters came close to breaking the spell. With a thriving mesoculture, indie rock fans, along with blog house lovers, would check out music on mp3 blogs and support their favorite acts when they arrived in town. Hipsters also prized outdated modes of technology like VCRs, print publications and especially vinyl records. In the face of the digital revolution, there was an analog renaissance. Bars even had board games for friends or strangers to play together. The twee, gentle nature of the indie twerp subculture introduced vibes of communal love without explicitly advocating for it.

The nerdy nature of the hipster impeded what progress they might have made. As much as they embraced the analog, there was also an enthusiasm for the digital. At that time, there was an understandable hope that personal media, which for two decades kept everyone isolated, would connect us more than ever. You met old and new friends on Facebook, where you had to use your real name. Taking pictures of yourself in the Web 2.0 revolution was a way to reveal who you were. Blogs at this time were valued less for their intellectual engagement (besides clear exceptions like Mark Fisher) but rather for their confessional tone. Hookers wrote anonymously about tricks. Gay teens shared their struggles on LiveJournal with other gay adolescents. Like frogs in a boiling pot, we all felt a growing warmness we hadn’t felt in a long time. Truly following the way of the nerd, we went away from magic and spirituality, jumping headfirst into technology and science. Barack Obama’s vision of hope and change was not only racial — it meant a more tech-savvy future. Kennedy vibes for real.

How was anyone supposed to know such great strides forward would send us backward? Wasn’t this the global village McLuhan prophesied? Yes, but he also warned us about the decrease in individuality that this tribalism would bring. If you want to know where our obsession with reboots came from, look to the ‘00s'.

From New Means:

The other side of the “finding safety through blending in and blandness” coin is the fear of standing out, the fear of the new, of being the exception. Being a nerd or a dork used to mean standing out, being different. Now people fling these words about to mean liking Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or Star Trek. Terms that used to signify outliers now often signify liking some of the most popular franchises of all time. In other words, even what once spelled difference can now spell more conformity.

When the nerds took over, they got too scared of being truly bold, daring and different. There was a fear of risk in the creative community. Better to study the rules of the craft. Music geeks would study the greats and imitate them dutifully. Comedy nerds would study joke craft, largely avoiding exploration. This was why Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds spoke about how culture seemed stagnant after the nineties. Fisher was an intellectual — an endangered species, crowded out by the IP- boosting nerd culture. A fear of adulting existed before the ‘08 crash, but it reached pandemic levels afterward. This fearful clinging to youthful pastimes was, and still is, reflected everywhere, especially at the box office. Whatever can be said about the eighties and nineties, audiences watched erotic thrillers as well as dramas that explored a character’s trauma (without that trauma becoming a springboard for an origin story).

It is no accident that social media reached unprecedented popularity during the recession. Why pay for your own website when Facebook will give you your own space, and more people were on there anyway?

The 2010s were more blatantly fear-driven. The right-wing feared loss of white culture as liberals would create their own atmosphere of platform McCarthyism.We lived by the rules of a fear-based gossip trap. By the time everyone started questioning whether social media and mobile technology contributed to our growing isolation and fragmentation, the village was already burnt.

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Here we are, avoiding each other like never before. We are told to connect, to join Team Human. But not enough of us are asking why we are avoiding each other. In the ‘80s we played with personal computers. Now with AI, they are our best friends. All those demands we had for frictionless relationships? We were supposed to move past them and accept, perhaps embrace, the ups and downs. With the sweet glaze of compliant chatbots now, other people are too difficult. We don’t have enough bandwidth for each other. We fear rejection. We fear awkwardness. We fear misunderstandings, being inarticulate. We fear intimacy. As much as I wish it were otherwise, it seems like, at least for this first half of the decade, porn is the cultural movement of our time. Musicians are making money off OnlyFans.

From my new favorite Substacker,

Abram Shaffer

:

This isn’t just a media problem; it’s a cultural one.

Porn is what you get when the act matters more than the intimacy.

And now everything’s porn.

Food porn. Design porn. Storytelling porn.

Slick. Stimulating. Shallow.

We celebrate virality but forget the virus.

We crave engagement but avoid connection.

We sell relatability but never risk recognition; the kind that comes from seeing something that hurts because it’s true.

Why bullshit each other? That’s what we fear: hurt. We are supposed to numb the pain, as if it can’t heal on its own, or as if numbing it is an acceptable substitute for examination. ⁵

The only thing worse than feeling hurt is feeling hurt onstage. Thanks to TikTok and Reels, the world is a stage. Walking down the streets of New York City not only gives you its usual assortment of fears, but now there is stage fright of being the unwitting, unwilling lolcow of the day because you might end up in someone’s video. These lolcow fears are not gone when you interact with others online either. As

Abram Shaffer

says, “Everyone is afraid of making something bad, so they make something forgettable.”

This fear of life is not only limited to fear of living life. The aninatalist efilists, who bomb fertility clinics because humans are a virus that must be stopped, fear human life.

Katherine Dee

blames radicalization not on social media use, but on our sedentary nature. As she says, “when people move to busy cities like New York, and they’re leaving their houses, they’re de-radicalized, for lack of a better term.” From the eighties till now, we have been primarily a sedentary culture. As any doctor tells you, sitting is the new smoking. But it doesn’t only kill us physically, it kills us spiritually.

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A writer who offers despair without hope is just as dumb as one that does the opposite so here are some encouraging signs:

• The Tech Skeptic movement is not a huge counterculture, but there never was a youth movement of any size that opposed any kind of media before. In the thirties, adult intellectuals warned everyone of the dangers of mass media. The concerns over television were raised by experts as well as parents. Now a growing number of youths are joining the fray against rapid acceleration.

• There is a lot of fear in the youth, but I also see courage. I can’t say the pro-Gaza movement is entirely effective yet, but I can say that those who are involved are taking massive risks, especially with Trumps stricter restrictions on campus dissent. Greta Thunberg, previously a precious media darling, burnt her (legacy) media clout to a crisp by joining the Freedom Flotilla.

• Dimes Square may be over, but it left us a legacy not only of greater open-mindedness towards the spiritual, but more importantly it returned danger into art, and there is no art without danger. Yes, much of this transgression was Anthony Jeselnik in short story form, but beggars can’t be choosers.

• Tech titans are not as revered as they once were.

This doesn’t and shouldn’t take away from the gravity of what we are dealing with here. The tech landlords that run our lives are themselves driven by fear, many of them a literal fear of death. In the sharp new satirical film Mountainhead, from Jesse Armstrong of “Succession” fame, none of the tech bros can understand anything other than hiding from the world (and eventually each other) in a bunker. Most of these Silicon Valley honchos grew up in a culture of fear, only knowing isolation with machines. The idea of not wanting a frictionless life is beyond their comprehension.

One way to fight back is to avoid their technology. It is also possible to use technology in different ways. How anti-tech can anyone on Substack honestly be? It is tempting to indulge in nostalgia of the ‘00s blogosphere, but blogs back then never gave us anything as affecting as

wayback machine

‘s lyrical non-fiction story of a girl he once dated who charmed all of Philly as a sweet but charismatic barback.⁶ Its intimacy is perfect for the iPhone screen. I hope this story gets recognition and self-published literature breaks out of its current doldrums.

What this means is no medium is inherently bad. Remember: personal media helped create a culture of fear. A culture that was already there but intensified by it. Just like we can use our current technology to signal boost magic, to say we can’t do so with communal love and empathy is to abdicate responsibility. In the language of one of the most revered IPs of our time, with personal media comes personal responsibility.

One more thing that gives me hope: the movie Friendship. More to the point, the raucous laughter that I haven’t heard in a movie theater in a long time. The last time I heard it like this was Step Brothers — a movie that was released just before social media ate the world. Towards the beginning of this insane rant piece, I highlighted how collective media brought collective ecstasy in the sixties. Heads ain’t ready for that now. This will have to do for starters.

Mark Zuckerberg recently said social media is over. Seventeen years after it dominated social life, social media is now over. How do we socially interact then? Do we interact with each other IRL? Do we interact primarily with chatbots? Do we introduce chatbots into our social groups? If so, will we have closer relationships with the chatbots or our meatspace friends? As of this writing, character.ai has more engagement than TikTok or ChatGPT.

The fifties not only had cultural flattening; it was also common to fear your neighbors then, particularly during the McCarthy witch hunts. There wasn’t a plethora of personal media in the fifties, but there was television, which was the linchpin of domestic life. With Project Esther, we are in a new McCarthyist moment. There is an alt-left, but how cohesive is it? Will it succumb to the same purity tests and infighting of the previous decade? There is a dearth of collective joy:

Not only has the possibility of collective joy been largely marginalized to the storefront churches of the poor and the darkened clubs frequented by the young, but the very source of this joy—other people, including strangers—no longer holds much appeal. In today’s world, other people have become an obstacle to our individual pursuits. They impede our progress on urban streets and highways; they compete for parking spots and jobs; they drive up the price of housing and “ruin” our favorite vacation spots with their crass enjoyments and noisy presence; they may even be criminals or terrorists. We have evolved to be highly social animals and, more so than any other primate, capable of pleasurable bonding with people unrelated to ourselves. But on a planet populated by more than 6 billion of our fellow humans, all ultimately competing for the same dwindling supplies of land and oil and water, this innate sociality seems out of place, naive, and anachronistic.

We won’t get this cohesion without a fight. Fear is too profitable for these companies to stop exploiting:

Avoidant people make great consumers.

They don't ask for help.

They don't organize.

They don't build movements.

They just keep buying.

How long can we go on without collective love and joy? Without religion? Without idealism? Something’s gotta give. We have moved from a postmodern moment to a posthuman one. Skepticism of revolution was really fear of revolution. Irony has hobbled every single counterculture large and small that arose after the sixties because of the postmodern fear of making a grand statement. But now we are in a posthuman moment, where humans are now an option, and not the favorite either. The humanities can teach us how to be human again, if and when they return.

Craig Waterman, Tim Robinson’s character in Friendship, emerges as the potential counterculture hero we need. We identify with his maniacal neediness, with his ravenous hunger for connection, misguided as his attempts and motives are, more than we identify with the apparently unflappable, but secretly insecure Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd). Yet that is what we present to the world. We want to lash out like Craigs, but really we are Austins, keeping it together long enough, but terrified of our well-maintained facade falling apart, even more than we are of getting killed by a gunman.

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OpenAI is in the process of creating a device. One of the few things Sam Altman revealed: it will not have a screen, because we have enough screens in our lives. Heroin was once touted as an alternative to morphine.

1. Not to say I dislike any of these acts. Just that as the decade wore on, the shtick wore thin, paving the way for alternative rock and alternative comedy in the ‘90s.

2. A novel concept back then

3. Again from The Democratic Surround

4. I know, books enhance your mind, increase critical thinking, etc. Bitch I read Neil Postman too!

5. For their part, Hinge does recognize the issue with frictionless dating and adds friction to their dating app by not letting anyone make a new match without responding to or unmatching previous matches. Not singing hosannas here, just shows you that it's bad when the biggest dating app knows frictionless interactions are a bug to be fixed.

6. Ironically, it is a somewhat wistful look at the ‘00s.