I feel it everywhere I go, a general sense of disdain toward all authority and toward all suggestions of personal excellence or responsibility.
So many things have been said about social media that it's hard to really gain any insight from the carcass of that discourse, but I've found a personal distillation of the problem, and it's that by forcing everyone to very near the same level in terms of reach and perceived authority, we've reached a terminal fracturing of culture. Contrasted with Lyotard's characterization of post-modernism, we've arrived at a total dissolution of absolutely all values and structures, where everyone is a pioneering author of a perfect, thoughtless, personal rule.
There are problems I care about personally, like how spelling mistakes are considered instead trendsetting efforts against a reality which, while elitist, doesn't actually exist; or how your little brother with his cohort will watch five whole movies in his life and adamantly hold that these are the greatest ever made; or they may collectively read four novels and decide that this is the height of writing, so adamantly that this is impossible to object to. But I'd be nothing but an irate reactionary if that was the whole thesis. The main problem is that social cohesion will become increasingly difficult to achieve as people will have increasingly little they can agree on or have in common with each other.
What happens when the way you write, your preferences in art, your work ethic, your fashion, everything you care about becomes obsolete and widely laughable within a few years? Or is so automatically due to not conforming to some ultra-niche orthodoxy conjured by the person you're talking to? There's already a broad culture of shame in calling people out for having interests in practically anything older than a few years. A culture of mocking anyone who likes to challenge himself. A culture of self-infantilization through the ability to choose without any outside pressure. Why wouldn't I just watch porn, Disney movies, and anime? You can't tell me this is worse than anything else, because everything is exactly the same as everything else. Don't think this will stop. What now?
So many things have been said about social media that it's hard to really gain any insight from the carcass of that discourse, but I've found a personal distillation of the problem, and it's that by forcing everyone to very near the same level in terms of reach and perceived authority, we've reached a terminal fracturing of culture. Contrasted with Lyotard's characterization of post-modernism, we've arrived at a total dissolution of absolutely all values and structures, where everyone is a pioneering author of a perfect, thoughtless, personal rule.
There are problems I care about personally, like how spelling mistakes are considered instead trendsetting efforts against a reality which, while elitist, doesn't actually exist; or how your little brother with his cohort will watch five whole movies in his life and adamantly hold that these are the greatest ever made; or they may collectively read four novels and decide that this is the height of writing, so adamantly that this is impossible to object to. But I'd be nothing but an irate reactionary if that was the whole thesis. The main problem is that social cohesion will become increasingly difficult to achieve as people will have increasingly little they can agree on or have in common with each other.
What happens when the way you write, your preferences in art, your work ethic, your fashion, everything you care about becomes obsolete and widely laughable within a few years? Or is so automatically due to not conforming to some ultra-niche orthodoxy conjured by the person you're talking to? There's already a broad culture of shame in calling people out for having interests in practically anything older than a few years. A culture of mocking anyone who likes to challenge himself. A culture of self-infantilization through the ability to choose without any outside pressure. Why wouldn't I just watch porn, Disney movies, and anime? You can't tell me this is worse than anything else, because everything is exactly the same as everything else. Don't think this will stop. What now?