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.
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.
You would think that the fall of the USSR in 1991, along with the prosperity that
