gadzook

Somebody in head-to-toe temu mall goth gear is standing in front of a wrinkled pride flag and doing bad ass poses into the camera with a plastic toy gun they are pretending is real, posting the photographs on Tumblr dot com. The post has sixty thousand notes and everybody thinks this is for real, actually, unironically bad ass. 1200 replies believe the plastic gun held together with screws is real and half of them are begging the poster to erotically execute them through latently-ironic meme phrases. They are all 25-35 years old. The OP is an American and it would have been cheaper to buy a real gun.

It makes me feel like an insane cave-dwelling salamander man. It's all just empty symbols. It's all just gesturing towards ideas that only exist in the data center between the poster and the viewer. Everybody styles the same cheap crap in the same way to check the box on a commodified identity. Even the actual aesthetic property of the fashion is secondary to the performance of aesthetic. The function is to be itemized as this commodified identity more than living through its aspects. It's all social marketing, not conversation. And it works. It drowns out anyone who actually gives a shit about any of these things they're aping. I feel like I take these things too seriously and I'm making myself weirder by thinking about it so much, but I've realized authenticity is ultimately the only thing worth caring bout. Our present cultural landscape, because of how high-volume social media functions, is outright opposed to authenticity. All of this, the amount of social reward for this kind of empty performance, the amount of individual demand created for it by our media environment, is the atomized form of it. I'm going crazy. Does anyone actually do anything cool anymore?

good luck on the internet, everyone