Hotel Concierge

My complaint is not that fetishization is bad. It is bad, often, but so is unprotected sex, and both are fun, and you knew that already. Hot take: use your judgment.

My obsession is rather with the way in which fetishization is subsidized by society. All societies. The bigger the society, the more one has to perform the anthropologically modern task of pleasing a stranger, and a thumbnail glance followed by upvotes-to-the-left will always favor viral image over substance. The prior essay established a formula for our betrayal by appearances: When you ask for a display of X, you select for people who are good at displays, not X. If the display measures ability to lie, and X is a virtue, then map not only differs from territory, it insults it.

Strictly speaking, this formula only implies that it is advantageous to allow oneself to be fetishized. “So what? Normies gonna norm.” But as competition increases, the cool kids are judged both for their selfie poses and for the tagged faces around them. And if brand is everything and your peers reflect your brand, then fetishizing others is now rewarded.

It seems to me that this is the invisible hand behind the cartography of our loneliness. In kindergarten, poor and rich kids might play in the same sandbox; after college, such friendships are mediated by the checkout counter. Hobbies and neighborhoods segregate race like the lines of a coloring book, girl gangs harmonize vocal fry, even the wokest heterosexual men somehow dissociate from gays. These borders are all the harsher for not being planned, for existing, ethereal, in unlaughed jokes and clumsy prandial opinions in need of tensely-smiled excuses. Harsher, because no individual has to believe in these nudges of ostracism for them to reign. All that is necessary is to wince along with the ingroup as the outgroup digs their grave. You try to palliate the punishment, you promise to make up for it with future kindness, but you’re being watched. And that creates an inevitability more powerful than the best of intentions.

I understand that any meaningful culture requires gatekeeping. It is the fearful, hushed complicity that I am opposed to, because it treats the ephemera of unbelonging as equivalent to actual evil. Turn on CNN in a room quiet enough for conversation and watch human warmth dissipate. Poor, bland CNN and yet everyone feels they have to respond, or else look like the kind of guy who doesn’t respond. “Shit sucks.” Now the second guy has to respond to that. He’s decided on “Yeah,” but a sad-casual yeah or a slow, mournful one? No one wants this situation. And yet are you going to be the one to switch off the litany of injustices? In front of everyone?

I remember walking across a college campus and seeing sidewalk chalk that read “10,000 CHILDREN SOLD IN SEXUAL SLAVERY PER YEAR.” An acquaintance, who was into depression memes, asked me what I thought. “Seems bad,” I said. Seemed safe enough. And yet a cold, echoing silence informed me that I had made the wrong choice. “But...it’s good to know,” I said. “Yes,” the concerned person said. A sad smile: “It’s good to know.”

Was it? In that moment, was it really? Did either of us go Taken or even donate to UNESCO? I can’t help but see everywhere a connection between globalization and gatekeeping and powerlessness and fetishization and the way ordinary people become monsters. What’s it called when everyone trying their best makes things that much worse? “Hey, don’t hate the player, hate the—”

Whom do you call bad? – He who always wants to put people to shame. What is most human to you? – To spare someone shame. What is the seal of having become free? – No longer to be ashamed before oneself. (The Gay Science)

I.

Samzdat—for my money, the smartest guy in the game today—wrote a superb essay sequence in part about the replacement of metis, defined as “hard to express,” “local,” “accumulated, experiential knowledge,” by episteme, i.e. “top-down,” “abstract, generalized, theoretical knowledge.” Think Soylent in lieu of meals, Brutalist apartment complexes instead of town squares, standardized tests over apprenticeship, nuclear replacing extended family, and the way capitalism selects for profit at the cost of...externalities.

My thesis is that the same checkboxing that has occurred at the macro level is now taking place in the micro: the regulation of the interpersonal for mass appeal. I don’t know how this will affect any one individual, but I can guess at the societal trend. The left will correctly observe an increase in the granularity of racism, classism, sexism. The right will decry political correctness and its penalties for saying the wrong words or liking the wrong things. History will witness a generation of neurotics: body image, IQ, mannerisms, self-worth. But to the system, this is optimization.

Who or what is responsible for this process? Take the neuroticism in the water supply. Last I checked, the brightest minds of Twitter had issued a joint statement: “how can u blame millennials 4 having anxiety when we live in a capitalism that is literally fascist !!!!” These folks take enough beta blockers that I assume they know what’s up, but I wish they were more specific. Assuming that Adam Smith isn’t threatening anyone with a musket, how is capitalism to blame for when your voice shifts up in pitch? Three possibilities, for argument’s sake concede the first half of each statement as true:

1. Capitalism makes people poor, and poverty causes anxiety. 2. Capitalism leads to inequality, and inequality causes anxiety. 3. Capitalism creates competition, and competition causes anxiety.

Okay: Does hypothesis #1 make sense? No one who has ever tasted malt liquor would dispute the sorrows of poverty. But the association with anxiety is peculiar: the latest and largest JAMA Psych survey found that high income countries have triple the prevalence of Generalized Anxiety Disorder as low income countries. With a caveat for cultural diagnostic issues, this squares with my intuition that fear of starvation is not a generalized anxiety at all.

That study did find that low income predicts GAD within nations—similar results in this study on PTSD—and this seems to hint at hypothesis #2. The New Yorker agrees, “much of the damage done by being poor comes from feeling poor,” and I guarantee that a tax bracket extrapolation is being Today-I-Learned at a cubicle near you. But think about this for more than five seconds. If Bezos envy is enough to make Americans cirrhotic, why doesn’t this feeling cross national borders? Why aren’t those blissful Canadians just as torn up? Do rice farmers agonize over not being able to keep up with the Kardashians? “You have to be exposed to inequality.” Whoa, really? So you think that nationalism and gated communities are the solution? Because if exposure is the problem...

Hypothesis #3 solves this objection: inequality itself isn’t bad, but national inequality looks bad because it correlates with competition (and losing at it). Envy may or may not carry a passport, whatever, envy isn’t the problem. The problem is that capitalism asks you to both break and watch your back. Abject poverty may require the former, ill-gotten riches advise the latter, but the frenzied competition of low-income-in-high-income-country demands both.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t explain Twitter. Could there be anyone more sheltered from financial competition than an upper-middle-class twenty-something at a private college getting Yelp $$ with a parent’s credit card? And yet these people are miserable, I do not dismiss it, miserable despite metropolis housing and a suburban home to fall back on, miserable despite subsidized loans and baccalaureated arts, miserable despite—revealed preferences—not caring about money at all.

Look, if you come at me screaming about selfish baby boomers and a wasteland economy, I will shrug and agree. I have no interest in defending the machinations of capital. But there’s a note of truth to my caricature of The Boy Who Should Have Done Comp Sci, and the out-of-touch mogul complaining that millennials need to stop buying avocado toast exists as a strawman so this generational apathy can be ignored. Sorry, they like Xanax in Beverly Hills too.

I’m also not saying that you should care about money to the exclusion of all else. What I’m saying is that your ideology was implanted by a microchip. You think you care about meaningful work. Looks like TEDx agrees with you:

“Van Gogh didn’t pick up a paintbrush until he was 27,” says the narrator of Why are millennials so stressed? Is it Quarter Life Crisis?, “Do something that adds value to who you are, and what you have to offer...Be patient. Finding your life’s work is a life’s work in itself.”

“WE ARE THE PURPOSE GENERATION,” announces Refusing To Settle: The Quarter Life Crisis, “When you pursue meaningful work, you inspire others to as well.”

“Millennial success is about shaping individual identity,” according to Quarter Life Crisis: Defining Millennial Success, “So eat your avocado on toast.”

“What would happen if we supported millennials, instead of shaming them, if we supported them wholeheartedly, unabashedly, enthusiastically?” asks It's About Time We Stop Shaming Millennials, “Let’s find out.”

Yes, shall we? Because when I translated the above Newspeak, I learned that millennials are going to a) start their careers later, b) invest more time and money in empty signaling in order to get a job, c) work for established megacorps rather than start their own businesses—which they don’t have the skills to do, and d) accept lower pay in exchange for a dubiously defined “meaningful.” Maybe the avocado toast analogy isn’t so bad after all: you’re not overpaying for the meal, you’re overpaying to be in a place that serves avocado toast.

It’s tempting to view these TEDx speeches as horseshit neoliberal propaganda, because they are, yet if that was the whole story you wouldn’t expect the capitalist class to be tugging their collars. But consider: the kids who talk most about getting rich for its own sake are the children of immigrants. Martin Shkreli’s parents are Albanian janitors = American as a second language = paying $1 mil for a Wu-Tang album, a group now classified as “classic rock.” Contrast with The Rich Kids of Instagram, who still want money, but for the sake of activism, rehab, or...Instagram. Hey, why is Instagram our accepted proxy for status? Open to suggestions, but I think it’s the visual medium. Not only is harder to fake tagged restaurant selfies than knowledge of @dril​ tweets, status-by-text is insufferably obvious. On Twitter, you can see the seams where someone is trying to act cool, Instagram lets you hide class markers like a travelogue Kubrick (n.b. this also makes it better for advertisers).

However, this authenticity is extremely tenuous. Even though Instagram clout is a scarcer resource than Twitter cred, both are far easier to come by than stock options. Rich people are constantly trying to meme themselves into self-worth, #hustle #hustlehard #money #makemoney #millionairemindset #positive #goodvibesonly, but when Tai Lopez boasts that he earned his new Lamborghini by reading a book a day and...giving a TEDx talk, he comes off as memeably lame. His money hasn’t bought him class, which is why he doesn’t realize airport self-help is dirtier than erotica, and that his car doesn’t matter when when you can stream Drive in HD, #moodboard, #aesthetic.

As we send iPads to India and subtitle Pixar in Sanskrit, the supply of status symbols kisses good-bye to demand and the price of class drops accordingly. Put simply: money is worth less, because talk is cheap. The TEDx talks are an attempt to bargain for labor using the nascent social currency. This won’t work for long. It takes time to mine bitcoin, but there’s no limit to how fast you can print meaning. Hence the system’s bipolarity towards social media: a conflict between short and long term interests. Social media is good if it augments consumerism (e.g. advertising), bad if it replaces consumerism (e.g. memes are free); good if it microdoses your oxytocin so you don’t have to leave work, bad if you start a weed blog and stop showing up altogether. Promoting one outcome necessarily increases the likelihood of the other.

This explains why The Boy Who Should Have Done Comp Sci exists, but not why he’s miserable. For that, I recommend Eighty-Sixed, Cazzie David’s Marxist critique of her Dad’s curbed enthusiasm. In Curb, the set-up is the disconnect between intuition and etiquette and the punchline is when Larry tries to adjust the latter to fit the former. “He does what we all wish we could do!” In Eighty-Sixed, the set-up is still intuition vs. etiquette, but the punchline is the opposite—the comical efforts of the characters to satisfy etiquette:

REMI: Can you guys get off your phones? Or can one of you get off your phone so I can get on my phone? OWEN: Just go on your phone too. REMI: No, one of us has to not be on our phones, or we're literally a table of three millennials on their phones. It's like a really embarrassing stereotype I'm not trying to perpetuate. OWEN: I mean...you’re trying to go on your phone. REMI: I mean, I don’t want someone to take a picture of us and have us, become a meme. (Link)

But what did you expect? These are godless 3rd generation immigrants living in post-scarcity zero-intrinsic-motivation Los Angeles. Capitalism is to blame only insofar as it has made them more equal, with nothing left to compete over except social currency. The annoying mannerisms that consequently evolve—manic squeals of emotion, polyethylene politeness, and an infinite series of “special” occasions—are all methods of packaging reality into something that can be efficiently validated from outside [1].

However, as Cazzie suggests, this competition couldn’t be better designed to crush humans into a jelly of learned helplessness. Make no mistake, when social currency was pegged to strength, rank, or gold, as in ages past, it was terrible, but it was predictable. Now social currency is Blanche DuBois fiat, “Ah’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers.” It never lasts. Back in 2016, human meme Ken Bone earned a backlash for the contents of his Reddit history, which was ridiculous—if tepid politics and softcore preggo porn are the worst of your vices you deserve to be sainted—but raises the question, could any of our chat logs take the heat? Doubtful. The circles of hell have been built deep over the past fifty years, the list of sins writ in blurred legalese. I’m not worried about Black Mirror histrionics, but rather about how this plays out in the micro, with millennials paralyzed by the pointlessness of pursuing any action that wilts under scrutiny, which is all of them, how dare you be happy when 10,000 children are sold into sexual slavery each year? “actually, i’m not happy. i have anxiety.” Well, whatever works.

This is not a polemic against “callout culture,” but rather against the underlying process (compare: the justice system) that makes callouts (compare: prison) unnecessary except as a distant threat. Public shaming will not stop just because you ask the perpetrators to stop. How could they? Just let knock-offs depreciate their street cred? If gatekeepers were nice to posers their currency would Zimbabwe within a month. Throw in the process described in the intro, the fear of being shamed for not shaming others—and everyone turns into a rat.

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (Discipline & Punish)

This is the sinuous path to our particular dystopia, collectivized atomization, the conspiracy against each of us by everyone else. Things will get worse before they get better. The politicization of everything mirrors the spread of capitalism: in both cases, local resources (wool, opinions about videogames) are exchanged for global currency (euro, opinions about gender). Over and over again we are told of the importance of making this trade. I’m sure your coworkers like you well enough, but these days no one would be surprised if anyone turned out to be a school-shooting racist rapist. “Nice fella. Quiet. Kept to himself, mostly,” says the naive yokel, to which Dave Chapelle’s white guy voice replies, “My God! That’s the first sign!” Lesson learned: don’t trust your instincts, loyalty is a spook, only the media can see the truth.

In this way, the global community dissolves all communities smaller than itself. Let me be explicit: I am against this. Not against immigration or sending aid abroad, but against the promulgation of a monoculture. Though a complete monoculture will never exist, movement in that direction is harmful: a) any culture that pacifies everyone will satisfy no one, Disney has no terminal values, and b) I don’t think the math works out. It’s niche differentiation, the law of Solzhenitsyn’s gulag: a decrease in the diversity of opportunities for competition will lead to an increase in competition’s ferocity. "My world has been so filtered that I only encounter people half a deviation away from me along any axis and yet I hate nearly everyone I meet,” says the urbanite fake-laugher sipping LaCroix. Yeah, like that’s a coincidence. You’d kill a guy over breadcrumbs if breadcrumbs were the only privilege allowed. When social currency is only achievable through one set of values, then the game truly becomes zero sum.

However, it’s possible to agree with the theory and disagree with the praxis. The counterargument is simple: so what? False positives happen, everybody knows that. Wise men also know not to to look too closely at acceptable casualties. Bad for the spleen. They say: Have you seen human history? Haven’t we made progress? Don’t act like forcing collectivism hasn’t made for a fairer world. Don’t pretend that conformity doesn’t prevent evil acts.

And maybe it does, but I ain’t goin’ out like that. I can’t answer the philosophical question of the false positives—how much hindrance of evil is worth the shackling of good? You’ll have to answer that for yourself, every day. But I am certain that evil will persist under the rule of shame. It will thrive. And I can tell you about the specific form of this evil: the demons that escape our rituals, the false negatives that are missed.

II.

Which brings us to ‘Cat Person,’ the hit New Yorker short story that is good despite all of those words.

Briefly: Margot, age 20, meets cute with Robert, 34, while working at a cinema concession stand. They text for a few weeks, make some in-jokes; Margot falls for Robert; Robert starts acting weird. They go on a date, which is shitty, but Margot attributes this to Robert’s apparent vulnerability and puts the moves on him. They go back to his place, where he liveblogs his anxiety and gives her D-minus dick. Margot feels regretful and miserable. She doesn’t text him the next few days, he panics, she cuts off contact, he says okay, they see each other at a bar, she avoids him, he texts her, I miss you, what did I do wrong, are you fucking other guys, are you, are you, are you, answer me, “whore.”

I like this story—although I prefer the DOOM version—because it tricks you into making the same interpretative mistake as the characters.

For example: Robert is a pig, his “anxiety” is an act he’s learned to manipulate empathetic women, he seeks out young women because they’re more likely to fall for it, and when it doesn’t work, he returns to his baseline hatred.

Or: Margot is a narcissist, her “empathy” only exists as a means to voyeurism, and once she gets bored or dissatisfied with a man she drops him without so much as an explanation. Robert’s slur was the wrong-but-understandable flailing of the powerless.

But the enlightened take, ft. Baudrillard: you will never know. Either, both, or neither interpretation could be true. There’s not enough information to judge, and any new information could be very well be part of the act. And that’s why the characters—both of them—decided to self-destruct, with sex and with rage respectively. Pain is tolerable if it can be told in a story but ambiguity is anti-story and weak people cannot stand it. They have to find out whether their text message construction of the other is real.

The obvious question, then: why did they spend so long texting, if they were just going to wind up at a bar? I’m told you can visit such institutions any day of the week. There is a courtship ritual that involves 1) a quick meet-cute or a headshot swipe, 2) a lengthy vetting process via text, “send me your favorite meme,” “lmao,” and 3) brief dates that are almost formalities, and this courtship ritual is not only modern, it is the future. Do you remember the Softboy?

The Softboy is a fairly recent development, created as a sort of response to the backlash against overt male assholes. Where an out-and-proud asshole might wear a tight white tank-top to show off artificially tanned muscles and a faded tribal tattoo, the Softboy pairs a prefab oxford with a sweater because he cares. He doesn’t listen to fist-pumping rap like those other boys — he listens to Bright Eyes because he’s sensitive. Everything a Softboy does is artifice, a performance to prove to you that he’s not like other men. And that’s why you have to watch out for him.

You’re caught so off-guard when he doesn’t immediately treat you like roadside trash that it’s blinding. “Guys,” you text your group chat after your first date of IPAs at a cozy little bar he recommended. “He’s actually…nice.” As the weeks progress, you’re regaled with tales about his beloved mom and sister, the creative nonfiction he writes that always feature non-binary characters, his childhood dog, Sadie. (Source)

If this excerpt gave you cancer and you intend to bring a class-action lawsuit against me, I understand. Still, this thinkpiece fascinates me. It’s like ‘Cat Person’ with none of the variables plugged in: the archetypal, Chipotle-bag form. The woman glows with wit and poise from some conduit of culture—the group chat? knowledge of movies? of etiquette, of good and bad kisses?—while the man flickers potential from under some shadowy blanket of hurt. A tragedy in two acts: she has the power to judge, she judges incorrectly.

Both stories have the same ending, with the guy saying a Bad Word as proof of his Badness. This is unfortunate, because the spoonfed idiots who seize upon that aspect are doomed to repeat the tale forever. Suppose the guy didn’t say an epithet or get an “I <3 MOM” Camille Paglia bicep tattoo. What then? Would he still be a bad guy?

It's not like he didn't tell you he was seeing other people, but did he have to tell you about her in such detail? It's not like he didn't tell you that he was not sure about commitment, but did he have to string you along? And, really, those missed calls and ghosting acts? Well, technically you aren't dating...

It should be obvious: yes. I’m not one to cry wolf at the normal tides of a relationship, but I’m also of the opinion that relationships take place on an emotional spectrum that ranges from boredom to abuse. The pattern of abuse is quite specific: a push, then a pull. No one remains uncoerced with someone who is merely cruel, but they’ll fight tooth and nail to defend the honor of someone who follows cruelty with cuddles and headpats. The softboy, then, is manipulating this algorithm in the laziest possible way. He discloses, then ghosts; flaky, then possessive; a wonderful listener, then inexplicably angry; cuddle, then sulk. I’m not saying his behavior is morally equivalent to that of a stereotype in an undershirt, but it wastes the same time and leaves behind the same doubt as to whether you were ever loved at all.

It should be obvious, but it isn’t, because society has trained women (and men) to ignore such dynamics and instead look for creative nonfiction featuring non-binary characters. But guess what: the softboy has checked every sorry checkbox of Good Male Ally, and yet remains a manipulative asshole, because there is no checkbox for manipulative asshole, because recognizing manipulative assholes is metis, not episteme. This is not to say that checkboxes are useless: to the extent that they supplant intuition, they are worse than useless.

The changing connotation of “male feminist” is illustrative. In 2012, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie told TEDx that “We should all be feminists.” T-shirts, snowglobes, action figures, book deal. Five years and a few false negatives later, the reigning take is from Buzzfeed: “17 Types Of Male ‘Feminists’ That Need To Be Stopped.” The outcry against the softboy is part of this checkbox update—but you can predict what happens next. Walking by Starry Night, your long-lashed date will mention that he read this really powerful short story, says a lot about modern relationships, ‘Cat Person’...

I don’t mean to suggest that bare-ankled men should be herded outside the MOMA and shot. I certainly don’t begrudge them their motives: the desire to have casual sex with a bunch of art school chicks is #valid. Now, the intuitive approach here would be to order two Lagunitae and say, “sup babe, u like john maus? wanna fuck?” Gross, I agree, but would you prefer two weeks of stale pleasantries and recycled ex-girlfriend in-jokes working towards the same end? Don’t answer, the point is moot: Any man who tries the direct approach will sooner or later wind up screencapped onto a wanted poster, and any woman who responds positively will be marked as a harlot, by men and by other women.

So, insofar as every group chat is a Panopticon window, coeds have to speak in code. No matter how dope your metis or your doubt of episteme, you must appear as though you value the latter, must display and pursue and speak in the language of checkboxes. Hence the modern courtship ritual: texting, with its idiosyncrasies of capitalization, emoji, and jargon, or better yet, online dating—with its linked Instagram profile, Spotify anthem, and dossier of angled mugshots—delineate checkboxes more clearly than sloshy meatspace: they allow for finer adjustment of brand and offer objective, shareable proof of correct desires and etiquette. Further, the slow pace of instant messaging creates a heightened intimacy—gives time to ponder each slightly-less timid exchange, the summer camp effect—which, like other social media relations, can be managed during 15 minute toilet breaks. Since couples are supposed to be right for each other by facetime, norms shift so that actual dates are a formality: “What more could you need to know?” This is dumb, but as long as checkboxes allow for enough metis that actually compatible people find each other, the system works.

Then monoculture arrives. Checkboxes become more granular and the list of permissible narratives shrinks. Everyone sends the same signals so the signals lose meaning. The Emperor has no clothes. False negatives. Cat Person. Saying “I’m a good guy,” is a Chekov’s gun for public masturbation. Saying “I’m a good guy—and not the type of bad guy who says he’s a good guy,” is a confession to the Zodiac killings. The list of narratives shrinks further. Everyone is using them. And the implosion of human spirit accelerates, toward that last equilibrium which always prevails.

III.

This is not mere rhetoric. I contend that shame-based monoculture brings with it a specific model for masculinity, femininity, and their relation, an equilibrium upon which disparate subcultures are quickly converging. (My examples are mostly American and cis-hetero, extrapolate with care.)

The roles will resemble those of ‘Cat Person’: women with an intangible aura of power and men wounded enough for plausible deniability. But ‘Cat Person’ is a cautionary tale, not a mission statement. Something’s off, and for your consideration:

I do think there’s a hint of class tension in the story: Robert teases Margot about her “highbrow” taste in movies, and repeatedly brings up her college education in a way that (in my mind) suggests the possibility that he hasn’t gone to college himself. Margot, certainly, interprets his behavior in this way: she believes that he’s intimidated by her, that she has the upper hand, and this appeals to her... (Kristen Roupenian, author of ‘Cat Person’)

(Notice the story’s cover photo: pale feminine lips against those of an unshaven, deep-tanned man.)

How could ‘Cat Person’ be changed into a declaration of values? It would have to show Robert’s perspective. No doubt he would be self-aware about his problematic behavior: remorseful, striving to improve. He would possess the intellect and à la mode class opinions needed to mark him as a good kid gone wrong. He would have a mental illness or an unhappy childhood, and though this would not excuse his behavior, we would see his dance with Margot as “sad” but “beautiful”—a story of two imperfect people doomed by a dysfunctional age.

The story would be unchanged in one key respect: it would still get an endorsement from The New Yorker.

Let’s not get bogged down in exposition: BoJack Horseperson is a fifty-something ex-sitcom actor, wealthy, witty, cynical, horny, in good shape except for the gut, insecure, narcissistic, and a depressive of the cool, externalizing variety. That’s right, folks—alcohol, drugs, and h-h-h-heartbreakin’!

My question is simple. This is a Netflix original series, and so by definition MK-ULTRA programming designed to calcify the pineal gland of the viewer, but BoJack seems a little naughty to star in chordate Veggie Tales. So, how and why does the deep state want to justify this guy as a sympathetic protagonist?

Someone is going to tell me that “actually, the show is, like, really sad. It doesn’t justify his behavior at all.” Dead wrong, but here’s your shot at the mic:

BoJack’s roots as a showbiz comedy genre ensure that it’s full of jabs at the expense of the industry. But it goes so much deeper than that. So much of the “BoJack” DNA is tied up in BoJack’s origin story as a ’90s network sitcom star because the show itself is actively working against the concept that sitcoms represent the way stories should work; that there are easy answers for any of its characters. And that’s what makes it feel so fundamentally true, at its core. No hugs or laugh track can smooth over this stuff. The only real solution is to keep on asking the questions. (IndieWire)

When a work of art is praised for “asking the questions,” nine times out of ten that’s because its answers are shit. The critical mistake here is to think that content can overcome structure. However harshly BoJack’s plot rejects sitcom answers, it still follows the sitcom formula: 1-2 topical issues per episode, hamster wheel character development, punchline before scene cut with a hand-holding jingle. Even the most reprehensible characters become sympathetic in the light of this childlike predictability, It’s Always Sunny is a whole lot nastier than BoJack but The Gang Still Gets Gif Captioned. No matter how many times BoJack “gut-punches [the viewer] in the feels,” the lingering emotional aftertaste is catharsis, comfort. Put the pieces together: “There are no easy answers...but that’s okay.” [2]

Which is just what an innovator in a Quarter Life Crisis wants to hear. BoJack turns the banal into “sad” but “beautiful,” per the mawkish “life is just a series of precious, painful moments, man” slogan of those hurtling towards a painful moment. It appeals to the same audience as Frances Ha or Jeff Rosenstock—if you don’t know, good—people with student loans, internet hangovers, fizzled romances, dead-end jobs and “I’m trying to reset my tolerance,” people who want to believe that their debt is going to be worth it in the end.

I don’t fault the L train for finding solace in a middlebrow show about talking animals, but it’s no more possible to pluck Hope from Pandora’s Box than it is to open your skull to comfort alone. BoJack pretends at a quarter-life panacea while in fact selling a specific brand of suffering as aspirational—the duty that Girls abandoned when Lena Dunham was outed as a Russian bot—it has to validate the pursuit of social currency.

Easier said than done. Here’s what it’s up against:

I should have warned you that this clip failed animal safety trials as a replacement for Ipecac. But if you denounce it as “degenerate bugman soy-cuck bullshit,” you’re missing the ball big-time, because repeated punchline is that Sarah Silverman is #problematic.

At 0:47 she can’t figure out the ethnicity of a brown guy. At 1:58 she asks a black woman, “How can I be a good ally?” and gets chastised (“It’s not my job to teach you how to be a good ally.”) At 2:44 she says, “I love you Indians!—I mean, Native Americans!—I mean, First Americans—oh, I can't keep up.” At 0:15 and 2:37, she forgets the names of red states, so at 2:23, she hedges her bets with “I love you racist south!” This, though stupendously unfunny, is at least self-aware: note that a) this is a country song, b) you’re meant to feel bad for opioid epidemees who vote against their “own interest,” her words, and c) 4:07, “And you call me Hollywood elite? Dude, I'm from fucking New Hampshire...I’m caring about you, I’m condescending to you.”

Conservatives love to hatesturbate to the idea of a PC dystopia where citizens report to vegan restaurants for the exchange of platitudes and/or wives. I loathe political correctness, but a more realistic dystopia involves Sarah Silverman. Friendship is countersignaling, says my man Scott: we bond by nudging at the boundaries of etiquette and then being forgiven. The king chuckles—who knows what wacky yet meticulously anodyne trick this mad court jester will attempt next?—while his counselors spread whispers among the peasants, “See, look how much freedom you have!”

The past and future—among the permatourist grammarians for whom Sarah is an avatar—is not sanitized speech. It is offense, laughter, and “omg, that was sooooooo bad.” Case in point: Sarah, agonizing about “putting people in boxes” at 1:03; about white privilege at 1:27; and about her own class at 3:53. We’re supposed to excuse Sarah’s moments of offense because of these apologies, but I hope that you can see that the causality is reversed, that the apologies sanction her to be offensive.

Nevertheless, Sarah’s comedy of liberal manners would not fly with the leftist audience of BoJack. Here’s how the discourse goes:

SARAH: I Love You Americ-uh LEFTIST: really? you love america? funny thing, i was just reading about my lai, vietnam. you ever hear about that? where u.s. troops massacred over 300 civilians, bayoneting old men, raping women and shooting children in the back of the head? seems bad to me. but i guess you can’t help but love the old red, white and blue, huh? sorry, continue. SARAH: I Just Want To Be A Good Ally LEFTIST: oh, of course you do. hmm, let me think. maybe you could donate some of your income to poor, queer, and disabled people who need it? ever think of that? maybe you could stop gentrifying black neighborhoods. is that a possibility? it’s such typical white feminism—

—and so on. If you’re not hip to blue tribe infighting, the short version is that liberals (e.g. Clinton) tend to see capitalism as in need of “a few tweaks,” whereas leftists (e.g. Sanders) see capitalism more as “a death machine designed to chew up human lives”—that is, per this leftist—and I contend that this mirrors the conflict between TEDx and Twitter, between social currency as an augment to consumerism and social currency as an end in itself.

Sarah’s flimsy politicking, then, constitutes a vicious attack on the value of social currency. We’re all playing on the same team in the long run, follow the spirit of the law, but don’t take the letter too seriously—uh, I spent three years after college doing dissociatives and reading Deleuze, now some chick with no mason jars is gonna tell me that’s worthless? Fuck outta here.

Hence the dialogue above. That the leftist critiques of Sarah may be deserved is beside the point, the point is that they are infinite. In the battleground of ideas, positive beliefs are painted targets. The Democratic Socialists of America mock grrrl-power feminism and commercialized gay pride; the bibliophile right scoffs at God and country; the true communist rejects any dopamine that is the product of capital; the true fascist knows that serotonin is inseparable from the pernicious Jew. It seems broadly true that political extremism comes not from an excess of belief but from a lack. You don’t write the manifesto and then reject everything else: the manifesto is an emergency brake when the rest has slipped away.

While such a nihilism-plus-one forbids many worldly pleasures, it pays dividends in social currency. At bars designed to look like dive bars, millennials compete to agree with each other, drinking beer and talking about places they’ve had beer in the past, standing shoulder to shoulder in a circumferential defense against randos, listening to an algorithmic playlist until they decide it would be more entertaining to sleep. No one says anything for fear of shame, or if someone does, no one is willing to risk counter-shame by shaming them, so instead—silence. No one, that is, save our hero, who has figured out how to say nothing loudly. Performatively overindulgent, a loose-limbed comic stumble, he says he wants to start a fight, he says the bartender looks cute, he says he’s so wasted, he says he doesn’t give a fuck—he debases himself and so is allowed to mock others, he leaves no beliefs to be shamed. “Yes: I admit my complicity. I admit my hypocrisy. I just don’t think anyone, anyone, should be let off the hook when so many people are suffering.”

Perhaps this is why horseshoe theory appears true: left does not equal right, but nihilism always gets big laughs at parties.

BoJack’s politics are what you’d expect from a show that eschews “easy answers” in favor of “asking the questions.” It’s skeptical about factory farming and Big Hollywood, but also about doing philanthropy abroad or writing for a feminist blog. The successful are selfish and complacent, while the main characters, though often selfish, are either clueless manchildren, who need education, or performatively guilty intellectuals, who need love to encourage their betterment. These are the real heroes, the show implies, because they require the least amount of corrective shame.

No wonder The New Yorker likes BoJack—they’re running the same protection racket. Etiquette creates a problem, then offers relative status (over the shamed) in exchange for compliance with an invented solution. The best example comes from season 4, when the journalist character, Diane, writes a blog post about sexual harassment. As we see it scoring fire emojis on Twitter, she voiceovers: “Let's get one thing out of the way right now: if you're a man, you're not gonna get it. Some of you think you get it. You want to get it. You listen, nod, and...”

Since I cut off her quote, this may well be true. But why isn’t she talking to anyone? It’s not just this speech. Either the show indulges that tic of bad satire where a character recites a fact (“because it’s totally cool that...”) and none of the other characters react (“right”) and that’s supposed to constitute a joke—or else the takes are soliloquized into space, sometimes followed by a montage of wrongthink caricatures (“well I think...”) never seen before or again.

There’s a lesson here about the way in which e.g. women are told to express discontent: in marches, with hashtags, with thinkpieces, as part of a homogenous mass addressing society—i.e. not in an individual dialogue, which n.b. would never start with “you’re not gonna get it." Yes, personal advocacy and public activism are nonexclusive in theory: in practice, the latter is a tool to redirect the former, a polite reframing of “take it up with HR.” Anyway, use it or lose it—how can u blame millennials 4 having anxiety? I don’t dispute that public activism helps women (or whomever), I’m trying to explain why society—and its male-weighted net preferences—likes it. And my nasty suspicion is that turning individuals into op-eds is the 21st century version of diagnosing hysteria: “Oh, they’re having feminine problems.”

Crucially, posing such problems to society means that the good guys never have to respond. Not as individuals—how could they? Disagreement is problematic, agreement is sycophantic. Correct response = “I’m making space for the marginalized voices of women and POC. Pass the blunt.” Good guys only respond to the social issue, and the ensuing diffusion of responsibility means they don’t have to respond at all. Funnily enough, dissolute men—from biker jacket bad boys to Tinder hikikomori near you—explain misbehavior with the same appeal to principle. “Well I reckon we was jus’ bad kids from a bad part of town.” “It was a messy relationship—in a sense, both of us struggled with internalized misogyny.” The last man demonstrates etiquette and performs guilt, so no shame is needed. We’re supposed to forgive his cruelties because of these apologies, but I hope that you can see that the causality is reversed, that the apologies sanction him to be cruel.

BoJack is a paean to that sanction—to the conditional freedom afforded by an audience—to celebrity. Old and new, Hollywood glitz and rose gold iPhones, the show pixilates what it would never call but nevertheless remains the American dream. “Instagram made me want more for myself, man. People on there getting famous for nothing,” Hi, My Name Is Todd informs me, “You paying with cash or credit?” Credit, duh. Smart kids know that high school is a means not an end, that’s when they start practicing debt if they hadn’t already: one day, this will all be worth it. There’s no way to survive the dark except to dream of who you might be. Such images are fragile in the morning light, but BoJack promises that all the shame taken and dealt will be worth it; promises that the obeisant—those manly, complex, sympathetic nonentities—will never suffer an absence of mirrors.

IV.

Incentivized nihilism is not unique to our when, where, or who. Through my Campbellian analysis of godawful coming-of-age genre fiction, I have determined that tests of ingroup loyalty allow for three deferrals:

1. “I’m too naive to respond.” 2. “I’m too angry [at the outgroup] to respond.” 3. “I’m in too much pain to respond.”

Each of which once corresponded to a protected group: children, soldiers, and the sick. Yawn, old news. Global monoculture would be remarkable in degree, not kind. I predict: more checkboxes bandwagoned into oblivion, more emphasis on an “authenticity” that will also be branded, more sickness, rage, and naiveté, more nihilism, misery, and loneliness. Hijinks ensue.

What will not happen is that some demographic, e.g. men, will be “cucked by society.” Actually, I’m confident that all 120 million people who think that’s going to happen are 18. You know how I know? Because the worst a Scantron can do is ask you to say some shit—words are powerful, they are not genitals—and only an 18 year old wouldn’t even consider lying, only an 18 year old could be so narcissistic as to think his opinions, his story, are so valuable that the world ought take heed of its hypocrisy and listen [3]. If I wanted to Patreon that kid’s lunch money into a retirement fund, I’d say something like:

“Sorry, the hypocrisy isn’t going anywhere. Grow up, learn to fake it—the world won’t tell you, but this stuff only matters if you take the bait. I mean, if a fine revolucionaria demands that I salute Comrade Stalin, you better believe that millions of deaths are about to become a statistic. And more often than not, it turns out she was faking it too, or didn’t literally mean what she said, and we talk about family and get some jokes going and it’s chill. If I have hope to offer, it’s that. We’re not as different as the inane bullshit we use to keep others from seeing us.”

All of which is objectively correct, and by the time I finished talking the kid would have figured it out on his own. BoJack himself uses deferrals #2 and #3 (rage and misery), the rest of the show’s male cast uses #1 (naiveté). Rick & Morty uses #3 and #1 for R and M respectively. Punk rock, pundits, and podcasters lean heavily on #2, as do the undercover frat boys of progressive circles, keeping a stock list of grievances to reroute thorny conversations. Ed Sheeran, Aziz Ansari, jomny sun, Let’s Players, and people with anime profile pics use #1. Rap music has shifted from triumphalism to defeatism, but make no mistake, the performative sadness is not consequent to the pursuit of hedonism. It is a justification. 

It’s true that a few amateurs of these templates will method-act their way into the morgue, but that’s show business. Compare and contrast with other rites of passage. It beats the fire ants.

And yet, my advice contains a lie of omission, and teenage gestalt has a note of the truth. Because I didn’t fake it, not at first—it was more like society decided that the tune I’d been humming since preschool was now counterpoint to the national anthem. My alarm went off and the sun rose in the east and every tabloid and pop-up and fortune cookie and listserv email had been fitted for those of my class and generation. WHAT HAPPENED? Did all the back-row agitators and pubescent late-bloomers team up and They Live the establishment? Did they intern and work their way up? Did they save up enough tips to buy a majority share? Come on, admit it—isn’t it strange how the toys of one’s childhood become the sexy Halloween costumes of adults?

Once I understood the rules, then I guess it became fake—which, take the money and run, I know. I don’t believe in a true self or any glory thereof. I get that everyone’s a phony because you gotta play telephone to reach other people. But it seems kind of fucked that my life got so much easier when I stopped treating people like people.

As we leave the comfort of this quietist interlude and return to the nausea of doomsaying, the message is unchanged: in the end, things are going to look pretty much the same. They may not feel the same, but they’ll look it. Technology erases externalities, mythology erases the records of their erasure, the characters aren’t as nuanced but the arc remains the same. What use is a time-machine, what could be said? Be strong? Be kind? Be patient? The good guys always win? How could it be otherwise? That’s how the story goes.

V.

Back to the plot: Shame leads to nihilism, nihilism to masks, masks to the hell of being with other people and alone.

We still need to talk about the last step, and nowhere is it more obvious or fun than in romance or lack thereof—e.g. Cat Person—so I want to carve shame’s causal chain with regards to gender. It’s long, but the synopsis goes like this: men defer on the big scary questions, women gain control of the public space; women get social currency, men get the soft power to determine what social currency is, the streets have never been cleaner, and everyone gets what they want in private.

We’ve covered everything up to "women get social currency,” a step which is neatly illustrated by S4E6 of Broad City, ‘Witches’. Abridged for your convenience:

Ilana notices that Abbi has a grey hair. Ecstatic, she insists that Abbi is becoming a witch. Abbi doubts this: she is distraught because she is Manhattan poor and by the touch-of-grey era ought to have a “MacArthur Genius Grant” or be posting pictures of “Akai [sic] bowls on Instagram.”

Ilana goes to see a sex therapist, an elderly black woman wearing glasses and a hamsa hand necklace, who says “vulva.” We thus learn that Ilana has been unable to orgasm since the election: not only has she upped her SSRI for feeling “anxious and depressed,” her in-office attempt at masturbation is interrupted by a mental montage of Trump-related misogyny. “I think I’m just broken,” sigh.

Meanwhile, Abbi sets up shop selling handmade cards outside the Met. She’s cheered by a witchy old white lady, but depressed by an Asian Upper East Side dermatologist who appears younger than stated age. After being further upset by the visit of an ex-bf—who, like the derm, throw down an insane amount of cash on her cards, “I love helping struggling artists”—she decides to get Botoxed.

“Fuck you Trump, I’m going back in,” Ilana announces, and this time her synapses flare Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Beyoncé, Malala, Oprah, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, Martha Stewart—and the pudendal nerve.

After one cheek injection, Abbi changes her mind. “I think you’re really beautiful,” she tells the dermatologist, “and I think you would be, even if you didn’t do any of this crazy shit to your face.”

Ilana and Abbi meet up. Ilana explains that she’s tapped into a “ferocious female current” and seen the “witches who run the world.” They receive an invitation to a spooky gathering in the park where the side characters are playing bongos, Abbi runs back and fetches the dermatologist, and Ilana has a screaming orgasm implying literal as well as figurative circlejerking. The end.

Standard disclaimers apply: blessed are those who put forth original content into an unoriginal world. Still, the praise for this episode as "incisive” and "compelling” astounds me—I’m not sure a dedicated misogynist could tell a more damning tale.

- Ilana is so brainwashed that not only her mood but her libido is tied up in politics, like an insect waiting for the go-ahead from the queen. Have some fucking dignity, please.

- Abbi is a struggling artist in NYC...her vision of success is an award or an Instagram post...okay, spitballing, could there be a connection? The pursuit of social currency at the cost of tangible success? If you’re gonna suffer for art, make art an ends, not a means, else you’ll make postcards. “Aww, but don’t worry,” the show replies, “either way, the rich will donate enough to keep you afloat.”

- Which is the same solution Broad City offers Ilana: masturbating to a Pinterest board of politicians, CEOs, and celebrities. It’s not like these luminaries are rousing her to do great things, which would be fine—instead she’s accepting her fate and living vicariously through them. Note that this makes her a cuck.

- And oh man, the racial politics. I’m not calling the show problematic—which is obnoxious and fails to interrogate meaning for the audience—but if your fantasy involves a benevolent black lady offering spiritual guidance, consider whether you’ve invested too much in lip syncing to Cardi B. Needless to say, the dermatologist is Asian, fool that she is to have worked for the Sinai residency when she could have been “self-deprecating” and stoned.

- At the end of their review, Entertainment Weekly says that Broad City tells stories about “what it really means to be a New Yorker.” Yes. I agree.

Here’s the deal: society ladies are under diamond-making pressure to be looked at, and the happening look is “powerful.” Being powerful has its perks and perils, but that’s not what’s mandated by the disembodied miasma of shame, that’s not what society sees. Hence counterculture: symbols of power, costumes and identities, at a discount compared to actual power.

Witches are in. So are other feminine mysticisms that hint at superpowers without compromising delicacy: goth couture, chokers, collars, cloak-like outerwear, piercings, nose rings, gauges, acrylic nails, colored eye shadow, winged eyeliner, anime (now endorsed by Kim K), cosplay, pastel-colored hair, emojis, tattoos, astrology, crystals, communism. Fashionable toughness: bomber, denim, Carhartt, and Salvation Army jackets, beanies, camo print leggings, knives, combat boots, bisexuality, short hair, streetwear, hip-hop, AAVE, conspicuous interest in black men—a woman once rattled off a list of celebrity fuckables, then told me, “I wanted to see if you were cool with it.” “‘It?’” (n.b: She was a virgin.) The messages of failed suitors, some grossly sexual, some worshipful and desperate, some merely unskilled, all uploaded to a fake Instagram and brandished with glee: “Sorry to inform you, but your gender ain’t shit,” another she said. “Yeah, although to be fair, you come off as pretty callous and unlikable yourself.” She laughed.

This is a not a comprehensive look at femme fashion—normie culture has its own regalia, the neotenous pixie look is somewhere between; but anyway, though I’m jaded I’m not a hater, everyone’s gotta get dressed in the morning and I don’t think it’s particularly noble to tighten a corset and cough like you have TB. Still, why in 2k18 are women across so many subcultures encouraged to look powerful? “FEMINISM,” says the guy that’s all Adam’s apple and no forearms, returning his turkey wrap to a Ziploc in the pocket of a faded peacoat. Like duh, women shame other women, those group chats turn to subgroup chats fast enough to make entropy blush. And he might have a point, except isn’t it strange how so many of those countercultural traits sound like “hot”?

What do men want? A few months ago I saw Bladerunner 2049, which had not one but two stubbled white anti-heroes—the younger of which wins the grudging respect of the older—aerial shots of grey cities and brown landscapes, a Hans Zimmer score, and that Zach Snyder humorlessness that scans as masculinity for nerds. I liked it, by which I mean it had sexy robot babes. Such as: Luv, an assassin and the second-in-command of a robot-manufacturing company,

whose off-white Rick Owens and perfect skin merely hint at the depths of her wickedness. She flirts with softboy everyman Ryan Gosling, kills his female boss (who also flirted with RG), fights with him, wins, fights with him again, loses, and gets choke-drowned in a scene that was prolonged enough to raise my Tarantino-kink hackles, although she’s evil, so, can’t be sure.

Or Mariette, a prostitute,

whose dyed hair and colored eye shadow reveal her as an agent of the robot rebellion. Mari(on)ette puts the moves on Ryan, asks for a cigarette. He says no, but later his hologram gf, Joi, who has bangs, says it’s okay (“I want to be real for you”) and Voltrons with the prostitute so that Ryan, tormented, unsmiling, can have a Very Special threesome. Mariette then bugs his trench coat—she was using him!—but though the rebellion has questionable means (also: trying to kill the older white anti-hero) they have virtuous ends, so he’s like, K.

Luv kills Joi in Act 3. Not touching that. Ryan, now at the 180 mark in the Hero’s Journey, wearing Chinatown nose tape and the blue-pink lighting of a sensitive boy,

encounters a giant, naked, advertisement for his dead girlfriend. “You look lonely,” the behemoth sayeth, “I can fix that.” Rain is falling, the trench coat is trenchant, the neon is screaming, EVERYTHING YOU WANT TO HEAR, EVERYTHING YOU WANT TO SEE, and the poor dude’s circuit-heart fritzes—

—And that’s the money shot. Lamentations that BR 2049’s gender politics “aren’t that futuristic” are not even wrong: It’s porn. Descriptive more than prescriptive, and if you don’t believe me, compare Luv to the dermatologist to evil CEO Tilda Swinton in Okja to the boss lady in Westworld to a bougie season 4 villain of BoJack; compare Mariette to Lady Bird to the redhead punk girl from BoJack (voiced by Abbi of Broad City); or watch, I’m sorry, The Emoji Movie: “Jailbreak,” heroic punk girl; “Smiler,” vain forewoman of a robot army; and this reject from vore. All 2017. You can argue this is bad porn or mock the audience that wants this from their porn, and I do, but if you get mad at Brazzers for not being Khan Academy you’ll wind up with blue balls and an F in differential equations.

Why do powerful women so outnumber powerful men in male-centric BR 2049? Warning for some ugly topics I am going to discuss casually. The simple answer is this: when women look powerful, it’s “okay” to hurt them. Female villains are ideal, since their strength counts for feminism but also they deserve to be hurt. FYI, if they “valiantly” control “silicon” or were popular in high school, they’re evil.

Choking lovable losers isn’t so easy to justify, but where public broadcasting fails, private browsing steps in. For the inimitably modern query “online hookup,” the top Pornhub results come from a studio called Hookup Hotshot. Sample titles: “Skinny Latina Finds A Guy Online & Gets Brutally Fucked,” “Gorgeous Teen Nasty Anal Sex Tape,” “Goth Girl Hooks Up With Guy For Rough Anal,” and the evocative “Pretty Teen Loves Getting Destroyed.” The ladies are decked out in collars, chains, eye shadow, pastel or rainbow accessories, and schoolgirlisms. The dude, a bearded-glasses white guy somewhere on the barista spectrum, uses the porn name “Bryan Gozzling,” which didn’t surprise me, because there have only been like four people, ever.

These clips share a narrative, admirably paced compared to BR 2049, where the seduction occurs via dating-app messages between the woman-of-the-week and Bryan. The woman most often initiates the dialogue, and even when Bryan does his flirtation is docile: once, no joke, “I like your aesthetic.”

Gozzling shoots these one-on-one, POV-style scenes intimately, with no production or lighting crew: “By being alone with the girls, we are able to focus more on each other, and the sex is more natural and intense because of that.” (AVN)

Extreme online dating! Ever wanted to fuck the shit out of a girl you met online? Watch Bryan Gozzling find a cute new dating site chick every week and fuck them ROUGH. Just the way they like it! (“About,” Pornhub)

Compare this to the casting couch videos of old. “Hey...so tell me...do you ever...masturbate?” Rather than hire Serge Gainsbourg for this crucial voiceover, they use the guy who takes your order at Wendy’s. This is not an accident, the absurdity is part of the appeal. The casting couch is not a fantasy of discovered masculinity, nor of coercion, nor of getting lucky, but of having a role, backed by setting and the cameras streaming live to the Panopticon, that compels her to want to have sex with you. This backing, though my description may have strayed from traditional feminist theory, is the patriarchy.

Ctrl + W and tab over to Bryan: was the patriarchy vanquished? Sure seems like it—these ladies are 100% taking the initiative in calling out Daddy. Double entendre of the year, folks: please note that a) the Daddy meme-kink explosion started on Tumblr and spread to other homes for the moderately woke—a self-described “art hoe” once complained to me that it was being “appropriated” by “basic white girls”—and b) amazingly, the backlash against it is mostly from men, guys who talk in the Lawful-Good-Because-I’ve-Never-Been-Outside voice, “Well, I believe in sexual liberation, but this just seems...wrong.” Sorry, you sound like a teenager getting righteous about grinding at prom. Like, really? It’s 3 am and you’re gonna rock Nicole’s world with a Viennese Waltz?

Kink, the casting couch, dirty dancing, and alcohol share a societal function: they democratize erotics. Since online hookups obviate the latter two and millennial porn scenes are shot like mumblecore, the roles that patriarchy once assigned are instead explicated by kink—here, “specific acts”—and more generally, fetish: symbols of power.

Feminism and kink thus correlate for a reason: they both decentralize patriarchy. You can read a zine about that, but what the hollow letters won’t tell you is that kink is short of breath on the same treadmill as other etiquette. Gosling’s hologram and Gozzling’s paternity are ominous signs of the endgame: when there is nothing left to want, except...

Which means we gotta talk porn theory. Frame the question like this: How’s a guy s’posed to recover from a 9-5 on eggshells and a friend group that plays board games, assuming that actual change is impossible? According to Nietzsche and the anthropology department at 4chan, he has two options:

1. He fetishizes his public life, i.e. he becomes a cuckold.

The original sin of cuck porn is being too meta. Cucks aren’t jerking off to the girl in porn, nor to a male magnification of themselves, but rather to their separation from the action, to the fact that they’re watching porn. That doesn’t make it a fetish of weakness, an idea both empirically nonexistent and definitionally wrong. With e.g. femdom, the man’s weakness is balanced by a fetish for the strength of his dominatrix. He commands her power, even as it is directed at him. Cuck porn follows a similar principle, but erases the need for a partner. It is a fetish of self-pity and aggrandizement at the cost of individual connection, and this is what makes it contemptible.

Cuck porn is defined by dehumanization of the bull: if you call death of the author and root for the winning guy, it becomes infidelity porn, a more traditional fantasy of potency. Race and class are useful to this effect—truckers, bikers, high school bullies, big black cock in America, immigrants in Europe, faceless businessmen in Japanese hentai, masked bigwigs in Eyes Wide Shut, the very poor and very rich who appear almost beyond the rule of society—but not sufficient. Within the race example, note that a thumbnail of professional interracial porn spikes blood pressure even without “cheating,” while the doings of amateur couples don’t provoke quite the same response—they might actually like each other.

The bull can never be likable, because the fantasy is of a sexual potency that compels the woman to want him despite everything else [4]. The bull is often portrayed as morally depraved (e.g. pseudo-rape) or intellectually inferior (jock vs. nerd); at the very least, he must lack dimension, must be chosen for his demographics and stats alone. This injustice is the crux of the fetish and of the visceral fury against it, because now the cuck’s victimhood—linked by race, class, and relationship status to following the rule of society—has been equated to virtue.

As with the casting couch, then, the cuck is empowered by his identification with the camera: he gains access to the societal power that assigns his role and the other. His embrace of impotence via the incubi in his private sanctum (i.e. wife), is—similar to other religious rituals—the sacrifice of individual dignity necessary to dissolve into the herd. Cucks describe an initial anguish followed by a tremendous relief: this is the individual shame and mass salvation of a sermon. The evildoers are strong, we are pure but weak. Though you may not see it now, society knows what’s best. All is ordered, all is forgiven. Be thankful. Jerk off.

2. He fetishizes his private life, i.e. he lives in taboo.

Start with a case study and work backwards: Enraged by the prevalence of the cuck fetish—the cultural effect of which (rage and prevalence) cannot be understated, if you type “love porn” into Bing video you get “Wives and girlfriends love BBC”—the internet is trying to diversify raceplay, with “blacked” now joined by the terms “bleached,” “beaned,” and “riced,” in a kumbaya endorsement of women as objects and political spite as the ultimate pleasure. 

To make these narratives work, pop culture is working overtime to divorce the connotations of race from race itself, so that if you drop Soundcloud rhymes or wear Supreme, hip-hop girls legally have to fuck you for your “blackness”—for your race as masculine role rather than you as a fallible man. Eminem codified this trope for poor white people, the Jews perfected it with Drake, Lil Peep’s martyrdom opens the door to softboys, and I predict Rich Brian - Dat $tick (92M views) and Lil Xan - Betrayed (165M views) will do wonders for Asian and Mexican-American assimilation. Similar process among women: as gentrification and Steven Pinker put skinny minority girls into porn, greyscale Tumblr gifs bestow the white girl glamour of the missing, suffering, pilot episode flashbacking, and otherwise Laura Palmered.

These are only a few broadly offensive examples of how innocuous traits are woven into narratives of power. Yes, animal lust makes it possible to get off to the meditation voice app if you try hard enough, but once sexual preferences reach consciousness—regardless of origin in nature or nurture—they inevitably attach to a narrative. The supposed “crossed wires” of a foot fetish are transformed into a story of sole as “forbidden”, the tactile pleasure of biting or hair-pulling is archived into a mythos of rough sex, a coffeeshop crush on a cardiobunny blonde is Pavlov’d into visions of a yoga club Eden.

Even this is reductive. Because kink is mostly depicted in discrete traits and communicable acts, private, idiosyncratic fetishes—she rolls her eyes like that, he bites his lip like this, she was such a dork in high school after her parents’ divorce and now she writes poetry and works at Sephora—are ignored, except by Murakami. But in long-term relationships, these narratives predominate and become staggeringly complex. That’s how you stay interested in someone, you go out in the forest and you name all the animals, you rewrite reality into a folie à deux, that sweetly narcissistic take on good old sexual selection: “Aww, you’d do that? For me?”

These semantics are unimportant except as they clarify the underlying logic of fetish. Why do innocuous traits become sexualized? Secrecy and intimacy—you’re the only one who knows these things [about your partner], you’re the only one who can do these things [to your partner], you have a power that no one knows, you’re being someone you’re not supposed to be—Taboo is what separates the private from public.

The object-level argument I’m making is about sex, but it doesn’t have to be: Ivan Ilyich spurns familial intimacy for social appearances and dies by them; Blow Out John Travolta fetishizes his narrow domain of expertise and is stunned when reality shrugs. In an ideal world, a mild taboo would separate private from public and neither would be so intolerable that the other would have to substitute. But this is not an ideal world, and between the two strategies, any decent person would choose the one that allows for love.

Unfortunately, couple-on-the-run plots tend to finish with bullets or holes. Taboos only last so long as no one snitches, but why shouldn’t they? Private narratives are inefficient, since familiarity takes time; effortful, since they require trust in one’s own judgment; and worst of all, they bring no social currency. Sooner or later, enough people cash in that the taboo becomes society-approved. This is a contradiction waiting to happen, and so:

…One has to have an inverted image of power in order to believe that all these voices which have spoken so long in our civilization—repeating the formidable injunction to tell what one is and what one does, what one recollects and what one has forgotten, what one is thinking and what one thinks he is not thinking—are speaking to us of freedom. (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1)

I don’t know how much sexual desires have changed throughout history. Deep inside the germ cells, probably not much. But in the superficial expression of these desires, I think so. When I was young and dumb, BDSM was male, taboo, and ugly. The bad role models to whom I was shyly, ambivalently, inexorably drawn—not for their badness, but for their candor, for the absolution that comes from being around the much-worse—often whispered about force and running mascara, tidbits of conspiracy: “Pretty much every chick is down to be treated like shit.” A 25 year old alcoholic engaged to an 18 year old feminist-poet with a gluten allergy tried to explain women with a spectacularly rapey clip from Wild At Heart—which nicely complements the Frank Booth scene from Blue Velvet, “It’s Daddy, you shithead! Where’s my bourbon!”—anyway, I remember being scared; I think I made up an excuse to leave.

Toxic masculinity? Sure. But look at how it went down: leatherbound queer industrial music mainstreamed by Trent Reznor in 1994, then Janet Jackson (1997), Britney Spears (2001), Secretary (2002), and the snowball keeps rolling past Rihanna (2010) and Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)—is it fair to say that kink has never been seen as more female? OKCupid claims that interest in bondage is up another 23% since 2013—is it fair to say that kink has never been less taboo? A meta-analysis of 36 studies on polyamory and BDSM found that participants were “overwhelmingly white, with relatively high socio-economic status”—is it fair to say that kink has never had more social currency?

The pop culture of sex is voiced by women because men don’t feel “allowed” to confess desire, except in repressed geek lingo (“if you know what I mean”) and submissive fawning (“can i eat your ass and see pics of your feet.”) Accordingly, men often resent the “I Had Sex With A DJ And He Couldn’t Find My Clitoris” thinkpieces—which, to be fair, are not exactly Bluets—but they ignore society’s tax on these pieces, which women pay and men could if they so desired: local currency into global. Your orgasm must be instructive to society as a whole. If men would play the part—nonthreatening “sex nerd,” against stigma, pro-education, attracted to fictive characters and unattainable celebrities, moving suburban to urban for a journey of self-discovery—they could have thinkpieces galore. They won’t, or suck it at, which is why those traits code female.

And yet the thinkpieces of today were the male fetishes of yesterday, because men determine what social currency is. When a sensitive boy errs on the side of roughness with a new hookup, this implies some heretofore hidden power, a duality of the homeschooled which may or may not exist, and this gets positive reviews even if the woman asks him to tone it down: a knowing grin, a text the next day, “smh, can’t believe you left bruises.” Conversely, men complain about the demand for scolding and spanking among the purpose generation, but if you picture the hypothetical woman that’s into those kinks, is she more or less attractive than average? Your correlation leads to causation.

Over the past few years, kink has become not only prevalent, but predictable. Hookups will pause at second base and ask for completion of a checklist of preferred kinks for the sexual encounter. It’s easy enough to tell in advance anyway, or at least to detect the trendy submissiveness, F >> M, “I like being told what to do,” that correlates with class, high emotional quotient, bullying in middle school, lower-case font, confessional poetry, and anxiety—“I’m not even that insecure about anything, I just want to be liked.” I’m not knocking the brand, just pointing out that it is one: maybe intentional, maybe not, but when sex went on camera it became something to sell, the patriarchy had acne up close and so switched from PR to marketing, and if you’re seeing it, it’s for you.

It’s damning that in female-demo Fifty Shades, Christian gets a backstory for his kink (abused as a child, doesn’t like to be touched) while Anastasia is a virgin who reluctantly goes along with it to please him; but ironically, this vast infrastructure to give men what they want, doesn’t. Not because pop kink shows consent poorly or autotunes S&M—those are academic complaints—but because it makes domming into an expectation, into another performance of gender at which men must measure up. Forget the rising male insecurity about “nice” as a slur—even for bad boys, the greater the checkboxing of power, the more it feels like like submission. Of course there is pleasure in doing unfreedom well, and some men have put in the hours, acquired a taste, and scored the associated plaudits; and maybe they would have liked it anyway, who knows? Both sexes play house with the dolls of a past generation. There is no outside view.

For each willing man, however, two have recoiled, and society now has to deal with an influenza of working-age NEETs going on disability and protest-fapping to anime crossdressers. Compare the feminine Pornhub searches above to those more popular among men: milf, step mom, step sister, hentai, 3D, VR, overwatch. What’s the theme? I’ll accept “femdom-y comfort” (incest, heroines), “no male competition” (POV, Freudians), or “stuff you can’t thinkpiece about” (= still taboo), but the most salient trend is that they are fake, maximum pretense: you know that’s not his mom, right?

This pretense is our deus ex machina: it’s how society eases the MGTOW back onto the path. Remember the fifth Gorillaz member talking to Ryan Gosling?

You look lonely—I can fix that.

No, she can’t. Like his girlfriend, she was programmed to say that. Just another performance for which he has to hear and read lines. Except—except—she doesn’t know she’s been programmed.

That’s his edge. When your sweetheart says, “Fuck me like you hate me,” it takes a few seconds to register and then you must choose. You can decline, if you're a fucking pussy. You can go through the motions, though it won’t be convincing and you don’t want to, not during intimacy with the one person who’s supposed to be an escape from faking it. But how can you convince yourself to hate her? You’re supposed to turn off your childhood values and tune out the buzzwords that are blasted from propaganda screens 24/7 and reduce her to orifices deserving of loathing and spit in her mouth and squeeze her carotids and call her a worthless slut?

The honest move is to hate her for asking. For femdoming you into dominating her. For using you. For forcing you to be a man, not just here and now, but in the thousand microscopic acts of toxic masculinity necessary to put her into your bed. You hate her for her hypocrisy: for being so progressive, for looking so powerful, and yet still being—you tell yourself—programmed to submit. 

And that’s the endgame, the single byte of privacy that can never be stripped, the only inexhaustible source of desire in a hyperreality: the fetish for the lie itself.

Now change camera angles: I’m fascinated by the popularity of Lana Del Rey, whose lyrics and videos set 50s Hollywood and Badlands imagery in the modern day—one video starts with Lana and her ear-gauged beau in front of a rippling American flag—among 1st and 2nd generation immigrants living in Harlem, a demo that also makes shrines to Hepburn and Monroe. A whitewashed mythos that couldn’t be more of an anathema to well-intentioned progressives, and yet to the Youtube comments in Portuguese this ahistoricism is exactly the point. The nonfiction past weighs heavy on the Google-doodling present, with its malign or obsequious reminders of difference, while the hyperreal past offers a clean break, an American grandeur that has no modern heir—and so a chance at assimilation.

It’s no coincidence, then, that Lana repeatedly refers to her boyfriends as ‘Daddy’: it’s the same democratization via the hyperreal, the last resort and logical conclusion of identity kink. Everyone has a father, he’s innately an authority figure, and the name requires nothing from its bearer: no restriction on race, looks, strength, or demeanor; if a guy wears Nike Air Monarchs and spends the weekend in a furor about sorting the recyclables, that just means he’s the real deal. Men grouse and grumble about this, but they’re supposed to, it protects them from the shame risked by asking for the role. “She dotes on my every need and wants me to randomly inflict ‘funishments’ on her for unworthiness. It’s like, what can I do? She’s crazy.” This “craziness” then incorporates itself into the glamour of the fetish. ‘Video Games’ opens with three silent seconds of alien skyline, spavined towers piercing red thunderous clouds, and then the music starts and we return to Lana and grainy footage of skate parks and pool parties: None of this is real. I heard that you like the bad girls / Honey, is that true? [5]

Sounds bleak, but isn’t this what we wanted? Think about how perfect it looks when the camera zooms out from the hundreds, thousands, millions of lying and entwined bodies. The women look so powerful, and yet this does not diminish their delicacy. The men look so gentle, and yet this does not diminish their strength. Women with an intangible aura of power! Men wounded enough for plausible deniability! EVERYTHING YOU WANT TO SEE! EVERYTHING YOU WANT TO HEAR!

That’s my interpretation of that Bladerunner clip, anyway. Heartbreak is the goal because the defeated have societal permission to tell their stories without shame. Then again, maybe that reward isn’t enough. In the last few seconds of the clip, Gosling looks down at his gun.

I’ve noticed that some women tell stories about past relationships with a sort of compulsion, to anyone within earshot. The stories are told well enough that they must have been told before, but with such urgency that the essential point must have never been quite communicated. Certain words recur: “jerk,” “asshole,” “gaslighting,” “emotionally abusive”; emphatic, imprecise words; words that try and fail to describe a wrongdoing that no checkbox quite fits.

So instead there are examples: “He made me feel small in front of my friends.” “He was super cold for no reason when we were on vacation.” “He broke my phone.” “He kept using Tinder.” “He threatened to kill himself.” “He screamed at me when I didn’t want to go down on him.” “He wouldn’t come and pick me up from the ER.” “He broke my phone again.” “He would wear headphones and ignore me when I cried.” The physical abuse stays subtle enough to seed doubt: a blocked doorway, a shove during an argument, refusal to wear a condom, coercive violence masked by a context of kink.

The prelude to these offenses is the same: The woman breaks character and the man's worldview collapses. He’s performed so much, and yet...After everything I’ve done for you? The relationship was based on a lie: She’s nice enough, and from just the right angle...On debt: I can learn to like her. But it is impossible to maintain a single lie. A lie corrupts everything. It forces honest words to arrange themselves around it and in so doing become dishonest. A new equilibrium crystallizes, a new truth. And so when she lapses, however slight, the whole relationship is called into question. The relationship that assigns roles, the relationship that is the sole basis for his manhood. So he has to hurt her, in some small way. The hatred smolders from that day on.

“You know it’s funny, when you look at someone through rose-colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags,” a sad witch once told me, quoting, she explained, BoJack Horseman, shortly after giving me 10,000 words on the minutiae of her ex-boyfriend’s brand. I guess once you get burned, you can’t help it: you tell the full story, and whisper, “Please don’t be this.” But though I wasn’t the person she described, I couldn’t help noticing that if I was, she would have just told me who to pretend not to be. And I didn’t have the heart to correct her, but I don’t think the metaphor works. The flags are still red. It’s everything else that’s changed.

VI.

One question remains: cui bono?

In my third year of med school, I rotated in a specialty that I did not like. Let’s call it “Surgery.” Midway through, I was called to the course director’s office for feedback. This doctor, whom I didn’t know well, was tense with bureaucracy. A stiffness of the neck, jokes with no humor but timed for a laugh, an inquiry in each sentence regardless of question mark, or maybe it was that her family photos were turned towards my side of the desk. She read a list of templated praise—I was accused of being “enthusiastic” and “professional”—then she paused, smiled, and asked how I thought things were going.

Reader, the rule is simple and ironclad: never trust a bureaucrat who asks for candor. But candidly, things were not going well. Each day I spent 5a to 6p in the hospital and accomplished maybe one hour of useful work. Most of this hour was spent filing out a spreadsheet that was redundant with the electronic medical record and of unclear purpose. A script to automate this was rejected for reasons also unclear. Although I had to be present for surgeries (forearms scrubbed thrice, cap, mask, glasses, gown, gloves, unable to move hands above nipple line or below waist), my role was mostly limited to inflicting the same fate on the patient (eyes taped shut, tube up bladder, tube down throat, gauze between lips, arms wrapped at side, sterile blue covering all but the relevant flesh). Talk was discouraged, screaming unidirectional. The fire alarm went off daily, the emails were marked urgent. Both were ignored. The same trauma page went out for simulation mannequins and real bodies; in my one hands-on experience with the latter, I learned that new defibrillator models offer, I kid you not, constructive criticism. “PUSH HARDER,” it said. The man’s broken ribs were floating on so much blood that the sensation was of pushing crackers down into soup. He was very dead, which was no doubt why I was allowed to participate. “PUSH HARDER. PUSH HARDER. GOOD COMPRESSIONS! PUSH HARDER.” “This isn’t your fault, it’s not working!” someone said. The machine didn’t care.

So, it was like any other job, albeit unpaid, but my presence was so useless that it called the rest of my education into question. Our grade was for a) #enthusiasm and #professionalism—which, ironically, lead to a covert arms race of ass-kissing between students, some of whom never returned to speaking terms—b) a standardized test of factoids unrelated to our hospital work, and c) several mindless assignments that were essentially grade subsidies. Why? Why all the mandatory lectures and quizzes and essays in the first two years of medical school? Why $50k per anum? Why did I need a baccalaureate? Little was pertinent, less retained, and for my future income, none of it mattered, save the rubber stamp of attendance, and my scores on the standardized tests, on factoids, which I could and did learn at home.

I said, "I'm not sure what my role is on the team. Sometimes I feel a little lost."

The bureaucrat went to absolute zero. “Explain what you mean.”

“Well...”

“Has anyone been bothering you?” the bureaucrat said, “Mistreating you?" 

Came out of nowhere. “No, I don’t think...”

She leaned forward: “Sometimes residents or doctors can behave problematically. And we can do things to help, if you’re being mistreated.”

At last I understood that I was being encouraged to rat someone out.

Was I being mistreated? Not like that. Medicine harbors plenty of jerks and assholes, sure. My theory is that it’s because med schools have such high standards: when you demand perfection, you select for perfect people—there are a few—and many, many liars. I was prepped for my admission interviews by an esteemed local doc who advised the university pre-meds. “Keep your narrative in mind and come back to it no matter what,” he told me, “They want coherence. Never answer the question they ask. Answer the question they should have asked.”

Seemed like a bug; I now realize it was a feature. Acing the interview is an end in itself, because if you can fake it that well, you’re not going to dilute the brand. Bryan Caplan says students go to college for signaling. Colleges pick their students the same. They don’t care if first years Silk Road smart drugs in ethics class: They care that their students brand themselves as ethical, which is why attendance is mandatory but the assignments are ungraded. If you’re neurotic enough to jump through the hoops of an irrelevant bachelor’s degree and irrelevant research and irrelevant community service—intrinsically good, sure, but which have nothing to do with reading an EKG—then you’re not the type that risks misbehavior; and the more time-and-money debt you’re in, the more you have to lose by rocking the boat. Clincher: This arbitrary complexity can be used to lobby the State. “Here’s why only doctors who make $400k are qualified to change this bandage. Nurse practitioner what?”

So I was right: Surgery was never about learning. Every minute and muscle fiber accounted for by a regimented task—it was more like a boot camp. The boot camp proves to the officers that you’re willing to suffer, a tenacity which may have use-value or may not, but either way separates the zealots from the merely interested. It creates loyalty through debt and promises the power such loyalty brings: “I don’t like being yelled at, of course,” a future plastic surgeon told me, “but I really like the idea of being the guy yelling.” And the boot camp convinces everyone involved that any future good fortune has been earned. So when someone observes that “healthcare costs are driven by price, not utilization” and that prices are largely set by a cabal of financially-interested specialists, the brass can reply, “Are you kidding? Do you know how much I suffered for this?”

Admitting my distaste for credentialism would have been a failure of the real test. The bureaucrat was trying to protect herself and also a star pupil. Naming names would exculpate both of us.

We haven’t quite reached the #MeToo chapter, but in that debate, here’s a question I’ve never heard asked: why don’t men falsely accuse women of rape? The patriarchal legal system should be on their side, right? You can hedge, “men don’t want to admit weakness, even falsely,” but I assure you there are plenty of men who would happily prostrate themselves if it let them hurt a woman with power. 

However, even those men have an instinct for self-preservation. And if you go to HR about rape there is a high pretest probability of being (illegally) intimidated, demoted, or fired. Empathize with the amoral, profit-maximizing bureaucrats for a moment. Once an accusation is made, true, false, or complicated, there is liable to be: clocking in late, crying on the job, minor acts of sabotage, and split loyalties among coworkers. The bottom line has no patience for such workplace drama. The verdict must be clear and unanimous so that no one wastes time talking about it: either the accuser shuts up, or someone—accuser or accused—has to go.

The company would like to fire the less valuable employee, whomever that may be, but if that employee goes public with a tale of injustice, the company might lose more from bad press than they would from firing the higher-valued employee. So if you go to HR, they perform a calculation: How likely is the story to go viral? It matters how plausible the story is, as it should. But race, class, gender, brand—of perpetrator and victim—are just as important.

The math works out well for accusations against celebrities. Almost guaranteed virality, and if the accuser is a free agent, the celebrity’s employer cannot buy silence with threats of termination.

But here’s a different hypothetical: a famous surgeon (white) was working for the first time with a new resident (Asian) and the latter made a mistake. Not a surgical mistake—he asked a question. A little too casually. Talked back. Broke rank. The surgeon went on gastric bypassing but a few minutes later asked the resident where he was from. “Japan.” “Ah! Japan!” The surgeon talked about a few cities he’d visited. The resident laughed. The surgeon then launched into a story about a visiting Japanese doc, who had stood “with his hands like this” and watched a procedure silently up until the most intricate part, when he said [the surgeon did a voice]: “Oh...may I...attempt?” In moments, the visitor had finished the procedure. “Could barely speak a word of English, but an absolute surgical genius,” the surgeon said, “We could use a hundred like him.” The resident laughed weakly and was quiet.

The intent was clear and the effect precise: humiliation. Also maybe to allegorize something about immigration and social currency. But good luck reporting “he did a funny voice” to HR. And if the resident did, what’s the best case scenario? Woefully in debt, newbie in town, can’t leave the program without a black mark, the resident has zero leverage—and that’s the problem. I don’t dispute that harassment policies sometimes help workers, use them and any other resources at your disposal. But institutions like harassment policies out of pure self-interest. Racism and sexism are bad, but there will always be racists and sexists. By framing the problem in those terms, as a zero sum game between individuals, the real issue—being unable to fight back—is ignored, is defined out of existence.

Which leaves only one explanation: “It sounds like maybe you’re not making the best use of the curriculum,” the bureaucrat who controlled my grade said. “We make our residents write ‘constructive criticism.’ Yours is: ‘It's clear that he knows the material. He needs to be more confident! Take the initiative! Speak up on rounds!”

An expectation floated between us. I said that she was right. I said that I had some anxiety and was working to open up. And she nodded—stiffly, but with limitless understanding.

VII.

So we arrive at #MeToo, late. The consensus take—using shame as a proxy for justice is unfair to Socrates, but when wronged you’re allowed to Kill Bill a mofo by any and all means—is fair, but addressed to the ghost of a movement. As is the nature of hashtags, the initial crisis morphed into a seasonal ritual, complete with costumes and magic words to be spoken, and a seemingly unstoppable momentum was revealed as a pendulum swing now gently ticking with the passage of time, much discussed, ever-present, never pressing: equilibrium.

We can trace that first swing from the Weinstein report in the Times (10/5/17) to the Aziz Ansari story in Babe (1/13/18). Same day, The Washington Post replied “Ladies, let's be reasonable about #MeToo.” Next day, The Atlantic published “The Humiliation of Aziz Ansari.” Two days later, the Times bait-and-switched, “Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader,” and I witnessed the following exchange:

A: [link to the Atlantic article] A: the whole thing is super interesting B: yeah it’s definitely causing a lot of discussion A: yeah

Then the topic changed. Equilibrium.

Fundamentally, I agree: Weinstein is a psychopath, Aziz’s worst crime is having stretched out vowels into a comedy career. The Babe exposé was so atrocious, however, that you’ve got to wonder why it was allowed to exist. The allegations against Weinstein and others were filtered through the Pulitzer-winning objectivity of excerpted quotes, “emails,” “lawyers,” “previously undisclosed allegations.” C.f. Babe:

Before meeting Ansari, Grace told friends and coworkers about the date and consulted her go-to group chat about what she should wear to fit the “cocktail chic” dress-code he gave her. She settled on “a tank-top dress and jeans.” She showed me a picture, it was a good outfit.

After arriving at his apartment in Manhattan on Monday evening, they exchanged small talk and drank wine. “It was white,” she said. “I didn’t get to choose and I prefer red, but it was white wine.”

This is insipid—the hot takers obsess over it—and could easily have been cut if you were supposed to take her side. You’re not: The Babe story was born to fail and thus define the boundaries of #MeToo.

Aziz is a liminal being. He’s 35, near the border between millennial and Gen X. He’s feminist-lite. He’s brown-skinned and a second generation immigrant. His politics are between liberal and leftist. And though his accuser was a girl he met through his celebrity, he had no direct power over her and the wrongdoing did not occur at work.

Result: His behavior was judged to be on the margin of acceptable. Aziz doesn’t show up in the Times list of misconduct cases, and interestingly, neither does James Franco (40), despite accusations of impropriety by at least five women. In fact, of the 71 men, there are only six under age 40 and only one under 35 (Ed Westwick, a British actor).

You can explain the geriatrics as a correlate of wealth. It takes time to get rich, and as 80s feminist icon Catherine MacKinnon put it, “economic power is to sexual harassment as physical force is to rape.” But like, really? Steve, the masturbating hobo of Penn Station, does not appear on the Times list. Creepy bodega owners, handsy bouncers, lascivious masseurs, fuckboy purveyors of dick pics—nada. You’re ignoring most harassment if you just hit the finance majors, but that’s not what’s happening either. On the list, I count 29 men in entertainment, 19 in journalism, and 14 politicians. Is this representative of economic power? Is Garrison Keillor one of the reptilian elite? Does “Hollywood” or “Washington” or “The Media” have a problem with sexual harassment? Or is it not a coincidence that these three fields happen to be those most dependent on public approval?

I’ll repeat myself: most of these men deserve punishment. But if you decide blow is permissible but the evils of crack cocaine are not, and it just so happens that most crack users are black—well, you have to wonder about intentions. And when the demographics of the accused are considered, it appears that #MeToo is only incidentally about gender.

The people claimed the right to observe the execution and to see who was being executed. The first time the guillotine was used the Chronique de Paris reported that people complained that they could not see anything and chanted, ‘Give us back our gallows.’

...And yet the fact remains that a few decades saw the disappearance of the tortured, dismembered, amputated body, symbolically branded on face or shoulder, exposed alive or dead to public view. The body as the major target of penal repression disappeared. (Discipline & Punish)

Contrarian folk-hero Michel Foucault once defined the two historical modes of punishment as “right to death” and “power over life.” The former was meted out in the name of the king: it was his “right” to punish, and the punishments were symbols of his rule. Hanging, pillorying, mutilating, branding, and the chain-gang—penalties were overt, public, and prurient. “If the executioner...managed to cut off the head with a single blow, he showed it to the people, put it down on the ground and then waved to the public who greatly applauded his skill by clapping.’” Glory and infamy surrounded the criminal as well, and crowds not infrequently rioted, either to free him or to tear him apart themselves.

Foucault states that this ritual vanished with the Enlightenment and the replacement of the aristocracy by the capitalist bourgeoisie. Now punishment acquires a humanitarian rationale: to re-educate, to reform. The death penalty wanes. The prurience fades. Punishment becomes a solemn duty meted out in private, becomes individualized, and then ceases to be a punishment at all. Instead, it sublimates into guidelines. Changes in infrastructure. Confessions of aberrance, classification, treatments for-your-own-good. Preventative measures. Power over the way life is lived. Silent, insidious shame.

I’ve spent most of this essay discussing the second mode. But the spectacle of the scaffold never quite left us, because the class that benefited from it never quite disappeared. The values of aristocracy, who derived authority not from their labor or even the labor of others but from symbols of such rule, live on, decentralized, in our pursuit of social currency. Some careers are more dependent on social currency than others, of course. If I had to name three, I’d say: entertainers, journalists, and politicians.

No wonder there’s pleasure in watching trials-by-shame. Weinstein had shock value, caught us off guard, but after the Louis CK allegations the takes were 50% memes, 50% smug iterations of “life comes at you fast.” For you, bystander, that’s the benefit of #MeToo: to create the illusion that something is being done, that your social currency has brought about justice—the branding of flesh as torture, circa 2018.

Here’s the irony: by a completely unrelated mechanism, something is being done. Since the “workplace drama” of sexual harassment is, in fact, bad for business, harassment has to stop:

A four-year residential college is what sociologists call a total institution: it controls the conditions under which students eat, sleep, work, and party. “You can just imagine all these contextual dimensions in college that could be tinkered with to create a less stressful, less hard-drinking, more respectful environment,” Hirsch said. The assumption is that some college students are committing sexual assault when they don’t intend to, and that many are more vulnerable to sexual harm than they ought to be. (The New Yorker)

That’s the basic power-over-life idea of “Is There a Smarter Way to Think About Sexual Assault on Campus?”, published a month after AnsariGate, which describes a $2.2-million Columbia research project, headed by a psychologist and an anthropologist, to “classify student identities” and modify structural risk factors for sexual assault. It sounds vaguely dystopian: it will probably be very effective. But since few results are mentioned and wouldn’t be deipnosophist-able anyway, the article has to convert the project back into social currency. Hence the dramatic,

Hirsch looked at her closely. “Do you want to do this with me?” she asked.

And cutesy asides,

“Snacks, we learned, were a really big thing,” Hirsch said.

Which serve no purpose except to warm us to these bureaucrats and advertise their endeavor. “You’ve heard about sexual assault on campus, but don’t worry—at Columbia University, Something Is Being Done.” [6]

So, score one for the bourgeoisie. But note that the aristocracy benefits from these articles as well: By agreeing to advertise megacorps as woke, they remain arbiter of what a woke business is. Do you remember that nonsense about Youtube Kids?

It was a typical night in Staci Burns’s house outside Fort Wayne, Ind. She was cooking dinner while her 3-year-old son, Isaac, watched videos on the YouTube Kids app on an iPad. Suddenly he cried out, “Mommy, the monster scares me!”

When Ms. Burns walked over, Isaac was watching a video featuring crude renderings of the characters from “PAW Patrol,” a Nickelodeon show that is popular among preschoolers, screaming in a car. The vehicle hurtled into a light pole and burst into flames.

Okay: I sympathize. Had the right branding, actually a copy of Videodrome. We’ve all been there. The kid will survive being scared by the monster, I promise, and your delirium tremens both a) isn’t helping, and b) speaks to the arrogance of privilege, a certainty that you will never see a guy gargling his own vomit after a heroin OD or even a masturbating hobo.

This is as fake as fake news gets. The 0.005% of Youtube that is Cronenberg should be removed, but will always exist, is the price you pay for the zany user-generated content that makes kids prefer the site over edutainment bullshit that will make them #childfree by 16. But that doesn’t slow the Times’ agenda: case studies from Indiana, Utah, and Tennessee, sacrificial son, conspicuous absence of father, mother named “Staci” who says,

“My poor little innocent boy, he’s the sweetest thing, and then there are these horrible, horrible, evil people out there that just get their kicks off of making stuff like this to torment children.”

Presumably in response to seeing the Dungeon Master’s Guide—you get it, right? They’re Soviet agents. The Times says as much,

And [these videos] show, at a time when Congress is closely scrutinizing technology giants, how rules that govern at least some of the content on children’s television fail to extend to the digital world.

And links to their article on Facebook election meddling, saving me the trouble of exposition. Both discourses are patronizing at best. For all the philosophizing about pernicious algorithms, the Times readership does not park their kids in front of Youtube—they use Netflix, which has only State-approved content—and the people calling for regulation of Facebook seldom use it, as they prefer that company’s other property, Instagram.

I would dislike this if it were pure culture war, but it’s dumber. Consider a third example, the demand for Twitter to ban the omg-actual-nazis on their platform, something something algorithms radicalizing the youth. Okay—but you know what website doesn’t use algorithms to mediate human interaction? 4chan. You know what website has more Nazis than Twitter? 4chan. But no one ever says, “We need to clean up 4chan,” which would at least be consistent, because there’s no social currency in that claim, bluechecks don’t know /fit/ from /lit/ and they find object permanence difficult.

The campaigns to regulate social media are not against algorithms, just the algorithms in front of them. What they really want is better targeted ads. Medium essayist James Bridle cements this point in his take on Youtube Kids, ‘Something is wrong on the internet’:

Automated reward systems like YouTube algorithms necessitate exploitation in the same way that capitalism necessitates exploitation, and if you’re someone who bristles at the second half of that equation then maybe this should be what convinces you of its truth.

I believe [Youtube and Google] have an absolute responsibility to deal with this, just as they have a responsibility to deal with the radicalisation of (mostly) young (mostly) men via extremist videos — of any political persuasion. They have so far showed absolutely no inclination to do this, which is in itself despicable. However, a huge part of my troubled response to this issue is that I have no idea how they can respond without shutting down the service itself, and most systems which resemble it.

Almost nothing is said here and yet every sentence is wrong. Bridle claims that the only silver bullet for “exploitation” would be to turn off the Moloch machine and go back to asexual budding. Fine. But since that’s not going to happen, what’s the second-best option? I nominate, “go outside,” “delete your account,” or, “literally just use a different website, idiot.” Bridle instead pushes for “responsibility” from corporate America—i.e. more control over what is posted—and defends the importance of branding:

As another blogger notes, one of the traditional roles of branded content is that it is a trusted source.

Do you see? If Bridle can’t have full communism now, then rather than face the perils of unbranded content, the second-best option is Mercantilism. That’s what regulation of Silicon Valley means, either through legislation or populist pressure: a rent-seeking oligocracy that excludes any newcomers who can’t comply with the rules. Bridle’s idealistic pieties are worthless. When he and other leftists rank options in this way, they are the greatest ally the corporate establishment could ever want. And vice-versa. From the pamphlet itself:

The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets...

Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, ever-lasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from earlier ones. (The Communist Manifesto)

Marx was right to describe the fall of the “feudal system of industry,” “monopolised by closed guilds.” He was wrong because it rises and falls in each era. When a clickbait obituary says that millennials killed Quiznos, JC Penney, Volvo, Martha Stewart, Abercrombie & Fitch, Kodak, Polaroid, Wheaties, Tootsie Rolls, Crocs, Harley-Davidson, or Aeropostale, the standard quip is that there was a “failure to innovate.” An alternate explanation is that if you innovate too hard, if you brand yourself too well, it’s impossible to back out—you get old and die with your demographic. 

Only controversy—only ritual shame and absolution—can drum up the publicity necessary for a generational rebranding. Hence the Zuckerberg hearings, the hagiography of the Parkland kids, and #MeToo. I would be thrilled if the latter movement cut down on workplace harassment, but note that millennials have too much anxiety to do workplace harassment anyway, they do online date-rapes. And I notice that the crackdown on quid pro quo coincides with an acceptance and proliferation of camgirls, Venmo for nudes, sugar baby slash daddy couples, and internet-mediated sex work. I’m not hating: Doing sex work to pay for grad school is morally wrong only because grad school is never okay. But when a sex worker is raped, do you think the public will #MeToo in support? And even if they did, wouldn’t such publicity mean she could never work again? Out of sight, out of mind, I guess. At least it didn’t happen on company time.

This is the final answer to the cui bono of shame: A gender war masking a culture war masking a class war masking a generational succession—not a war, but a massacre. Whether or not the young mercantilists know it, they are defining the signals of class, the avocado toast “meaning” of “meaningful work,” that will spawn TED talks—say, “How the #MeToo and Time's Up movement impact the Tech industry”—and will in adulthood will get them jobs, underpaid but better than nothing, making their employers look woke, selling products to other youngsters trying look woke, submitting to the system in exchange for relative status over the most shameful of all: their parents.

How does the past generation plead? Tim Kreider, an unmarried 51-year-old writer, in “Go Ahead, Millennials, Destroy Us”:

Like most people in middle age, I regard young people with suspicion. The young—and the young at mind—tend to be uncompromising absolutists. They haven’t yet faced life’s heartless compromises and forfeitures, its...

Yet this uprising of the young against the ossified, monolithic power of the National Rifle Association has reminded me that the flaws of youth...

Power is like money: imaginary, entirely dependent upon belief...

My message, as an aging Gen X-er to millennials and those coming after them, is: Go get us. Take us down...I for one can’t wait till we’re gone. I just wish I could live to see the world without us. (NYTimes)

It’s easy to mock Kreider’s attempt to turn narcissism and laziness into martyrdom, and I do, but he offers a fitting eulogy, because “Go ahead, do good stuff” was precisely the lack-of-strategy his generation applied to their millennial kids. I’ve been hard on millennials in this essay, but you’ve got to remember, most of them grew up without fathers. Oh, maybe an adult male was present from 6-9 pm and on weekends, but scarcely did he succeed at passing down strength. Nor did anyone else.

Why? Perhaps the elders were weak themselves. Perhaps they were strong, but not strong enough to overcome the fear of imparting anything too personal, too contrarian, of raising the kid wrong and being shamed. Perhaps they simply didn’t care. Perhaps it was a systems issue. Time spent with family varies inversely with class. The poor sleep six cousins to room fogged with asthma, the rich outsource child-rearing to nannies and boarding schools, in between there’s a gradient of extracurriculars leading to the college adieu. Perhaps some parents tried, tried hard, but their message was drowned out by the white noise of culture. Perhaps it was inevitable that in the crusade to sever all local ties, shame and society would split the family, that last knot of loyalty between individuals.

Or perhaps the past generation chose not to instill strength, tried to raise passive and enfeebled children that would not to dare overthrow them. If so, they were sadly mistaken. “Unlucky man, may you never learn who you are”—sounds like Narcissus, but that’s from Oedipus Rex. Didn’t work out for Laius and Jocasta. The noble path is to train the next generation to be as strong as possible, to fight the duel with honor and so the winners have reason to care for the losers until the hourglass runs out—mercy is not charity when the defeated have something to give. Instead, what did your parents offer? “Sorry, life isn’t fair.” That was the most unfair thing your parents did, they never taught you how fair life can be. Well, joke’s on them: the brightest minds of my generation fell into howling madness and we didn’t need drugs or tie-dye to topple our ancestors and settle into the groove of our wasted lives. All we needed was shame, wi-fi, a niche to obsess over, and an excuse to tap out.

But what a hopeless victory we’ve won. For a week after the Louis CK verdict it felt like a lump of magma was lodged in my chest. I’m still mad. And if I’m honest, it wasn’t because of the sins themselves. It was more like, he’d sold out. Sold out in the oldest way, sold out the next generation, couldn’t keep his dick in his pants and now whatever wisdom he had goes unheard. I feel the same about Woody Allen—nevermind the details, he’s not getting parent of the year—and I acknowledge my foolishness in caring so much about celeb-comedians, but I guess that’s the thing about symbols, you rest something symbolic on them. And at its best, comedy is the antidote to shame. A breach of etiquette laughed off by shared higher values. A reminder that imperfection is not synonymous with sin. But the imperfect betrayed us. And now the higher values are gone.

The voluble paranoia of the internet told every secret and left behind a scared silence unmoored from the realities of contact with human beings. Now if someone opens up and their insides are disordered you’re supposed to assume the worst. And if they don’t open up, if they instead voice what the billboards are already saying, you have to assume they’re grubbing for social currency. We saw our heroes shamed and saw the same fate latent in us—what could we do? We punished them, tore out the part of us that identified, that was sucker enough to believe in anyone who uses a single index finger on touchscreens. We tried to show that we were different.

Boomers grew up at a time of dramatic social change. In the United States, that change marked the generation with a strong cultural cleavage, between the proponents of change and the more conservative individuals. Some analysts believe this cleavage played out politically since the time of the Vietnam War to the mid‑2000s, to some extent defining the political landscape and division in the country. Starting in the 1980s, the boomers became more conservative, many of them regretting the cultural changes they brought in their youth. (Wikipedia)

Just like the generation before.

At the end of Manhattan, Mariel Hemingway tells Woody, “Not everybody gets corrupted. You have to have a little faith in people,” and the Gershwin swells, and—I don’t know. The teenage conviction that people are basically good is belied by history, even the history of the clip itself. Time corrupts everything. I can only imagine how we’ll look with our fading Triforce tattoos and reminisces of friends dead or sober and it’ll turn out that kombucha was depleting the ozone layer or something and the best our grandkids will be able to say is, “Well, you have to understand—they were the product of their time.”

But the clip feels true nonetheless. It reminds me that people will continue to be people. I have faith in that. Not in the words that we say, but in the method by which we search for the right words, forever.

I’ve painstakingly tried to understand the rules that delineate people so I can accept the ambiguity of not knowing exactly where anyone falls between them. I don’t think that’s quietism. That’s realism. We got into this mess by demanding that people appear as something that incentives told them not to be. If we want to do better than the past, we have to change the rules of the game. That’s only possible if we know what the rules are. And since my pop culture takes will be obsolete by the time you read this, such knowledge is only possible if we’re honest with each other—not confessing in checkboxes to the unseen masses, but admitting to each other the ugly marginalia between them. And no one will do that unless we are capable of forgiveness.

The self-sublimation of justice: we know what a nice name it gives itself—mercy; it remains, of course, the prerogative of the most powerful man, better still, his way of being beyond the law. (On the Genealogy of Morality)

That doesn’t mean we should do less than condemn injustice. Just that we should hate our enemies on our own terms, without appealing to tribal laws or the hordes that back them. And we should forgive on our terms as well—not out of charity, but to wrest the power of forgiveness away from those who have weaponized withholding it. Maybe if we forgave the little things we could stop lying about the big ones. Maybe we could fix reality instead of its facade. At the very least we’d be less alone.

“So we should fight for one another,” Dave Chappelle says, “We should forgive the ones of us that are weaker and support the ones of us that are stronger. And then we can beat the thing.” I’m grateful to him, and to TLP, Judith Butler, Camille Paglia, Zadie Smith, Phillip Roth, Nick Land, and yeah, even Jordan Peterson—to everyone living who never sold out, who fought to say what they thought would help the next generation, when they could have said platitudes at less cost to themselves. I will try to do the same.

In Chappelle’s last stand-up set, he reads from Pimp, the memoir of Iceberg Slim, an infamously brutal man who owned over 400 whores over his career in the 30s and 40s U.S.A. That era had problems, alright. Great Depression. War abroad. Industrialization. Women entering the workforce. Refugees. Racial tension. The very relations between human beings were commodified.

You know what surprised me, when I read the book? That I empathized with the guy. I guess I figured, despite my sermons to the contrary, that to get to that level of villainy you have to be different in some elemental way. But it turns out that Iceberg Slim was a born softboy. A smart, sensitive kid. An absent father. A mama’s boy who learned La Règle du Jeu from the street. A con man before he was a pimp, who, as he became better at it, became increasingly angry at being lied to and forced to lie.

Maybe that’s what aging feels like. Maybe every society is transactional once you figure out the rules. Slim learned them young and became cruel. He spent the rest of his life trying to explain the deceptions of his world so no one else would get burned. I don’t think that absolves him, but it does make him human. I was a slow learner. Despite everything, I’m grateful for the relative innocence that I’ve had. But the calendar has turned and we can no longer take pride in not knowing, for we are the ones who must fight.

Let who can take courage from the dawn’s Coming up with the same idiot solution under another guise So that all meanings should be scrambled this way No matter how important they were to the men Coming in the future, since this is the way it has to happen For all things under the shrinking light to change And the pattern to follow them, unheeded, bargained for As it too is absorbed. But the guesswork Has been taken out of millions of nights. The gasworks Know it and fall to the ground, though no doom Says it through the long cool hours of rest While it sleeps as it can, as in fact it must, for the man to find himself.

(John Ashbery, ‘Collective Dawn’)

[1]. These mannerisms scan as feminine, but there is a precise straight-male equivalent: reddit.com/r/all. Rather than go big, groups of men go small: factoids, tier lists, in-jokes, nostalgic references, pedantic corrections—the concrete bits of information that are most broadly understood. Such a group will eventually produce a list of greatest movies topped by The Shawshank Redemption, regardless of the initial topic of conversation.

[2]. Two “counterexamples” that in fact prove my point. When BoJack fucks the twenty-something asexual-crush of his friend Todd (voice acted by Aaron Paul, already down two dead Breaking Bad girlfriends) and the show launches into a sermon,

BOJACK: Todd, I'm sorry, alright? I screwed up, I- I know I screwed up, I— TODD: Oh great, of course! Here it comes! You can't keep doing this! You can't keep doing shitty things and then feel bad about yourself like that makes it okay! You need to be better! BOJACK: I know, and I'm sorry, okay? I was drunk and there was all this pressure with the Oscar campaign, but now that it's over, I- I- I— TODD: No! No. BoJack, just... stop. You are all the things that are wrong with you. It's not the alcohol or the drugs or any of the shitty things that happened to you in your career or when you were a kid, it's you! Alright? It's you. Fuck, man. What else is there to say?

[credits roll]

The veneer of self-awareness should not fool you: this is a narcissistic defense. BoJack gets shamed, you get shamed for identifying with him (if applicable), but the show gets to pretend that it wasn’t glorifying his behavior (= he’s in the title) and you get to indulge the fantasy of having your sexual prowess interfere with your noblesse oblige.

Another episode-ender, in which BoJack asks his ghostwriter, Diane, for her opinion of him:

BOJACK: Diane, I need you to tell me that it's not too late. ...I, I, I need you to tell me that I'm a good person. I know that I can be selfish and narcissistic and self-destructive, but underneath all that, deep down, I'm a good person and I need you to tell me that I'm good... Diane... tell me, please, Diane, tell me that I'm good... (Source)

Credits roll. Midway through the next episode, set several months later, BoJack and Diane are sitting on a #rooftop having a heart to heart and he repeats his question. “That's the thing,” Diane says, “I don't think I believe in deep down. I kind of think all you are is just the things that you do.”

I couldn’t agree more. But here’s the thing: the show just told you that deep down, you’re a good person. It told you that even wealthy, witty, cynical, horny, in-good-shape-except-for-the-gut people struggle with having a hole for esteem, and then it told you—scratch that, a cute cartoon girl told you—to tune in next season. (Prediction: the bildungsromans of Gen Z will be about finding “authenticity” in a social media world—an authenticity that will be just as branded.)

[3]. It’s fitting that Sam Hyde, the mass shooter meme guy and the closest thing to an alt-right celebrity, achieved fame as a self-taught actor—from impressions in the bathroom mirror to the fake TEDx to the character sketches of Million Dollar Extreme. Audience take: Since these roles are all fake—you could act the part if you wanted to—you are more real, more masculine for not doing so. But since “hippie of racism” must become a fake as shit role to get cred for “not doing so,” it becomes uncool, e.g. Pepes, Kekistanis, and other dying horse in-jokes. Plot twist: Because the Nazi-punchers that cancelled MDE are reacting entirely to symbols, the cleverer elements of the alt-right who reject these symbols are able to meld with society—there’s always one at any Bohemian leftist party—and, someday, age into the normie conservatives loathed by the next generation.

[4]. Aside from romance paperbacks and other waiting room anesthetics, power differentials in porn correlate with unlikability, immorality, and even physical unattractiveness of the dom. There’s no reason that gangbang erotica couldn’t feature a cadre of debonair charity workers—it’s porn—but the existing cycle is hard to break. Consumers want to fantasize about not having to perform, not having to please, about being valued for sexual potency alone. Then the next generation stumbles upon their hieroglyphs and learns that only unlikable, immoral, unattractive people are sexually potent. And so...

[5]. Lana is an overt example, but not an exceptional one: the etiquette of cosplayers also ensnares CEOs, as in Elle, the Paul Verhoeven movie reputed as “the one where Isabelle Huppert dates her rapist” by people who don’t pay attention. In the opening scene, Huppert is stranger-raped on her dining room floor by a man in a ski mask. (Distant camera, male noises, and a few seconds of him pulling up pants and showing white buttock = both horrible and de-eroticized, pathetic.) Afterwards, she takes a bath and orders sushi. She is not unaffected by the rape—she replays the events, buys an ice pick, has fantasies of revenge—but Huppert, mid-50s, the tough-love boss of a videogame company staffed by angry young men, who wears the pants for her too-woke ex-husband and helpless son, who fucks her closest friend’s husband and courts a married neighbor out of boredom, runs her life with a ruthless efficiency that is incompatible with the rituals of victimhood. “I was looking for a way of simply and naturally tossing this out, but I can't find one. So...I guess I was raped,” she says at a restaurant with friends. They are aghast, then annoyed. “You need to see a doctor.” “Done that.” “You have to report it immediately.” “What for? It’s over,” Huppert says, “How about we order?”

The twist occurs when Huppert’s assailant returns, she unmasks him as her puppy-faced neighbor, and despite this, pursues an affair with him. Critics who praise this as “a masterpiece of suave perversity...a kinky sex farce” or denounce it as “a story of a lifelong victim...a macho fantasy adorned with the trappings of liberation” are equally moronic: Huppert wasn’t attracted to her rapist, she was attracted to a guy who then turned out to be her rapist. But if you’ve ever been traumatized, you’ll know that every guy could turn out to be your rapist; or, more likely, could reveal some vile and inexpiable similarity when least expected. The movie is exploring this problem with “symbolism”—the reviewers should have heard of it—and Huppert’s solution is, fuck it.

Even so, she struggles to escape the male demand for her victimhood. When Huppert goes patulous for her neighbor, he frowns flaccidly—“It doesn’t work like that”—so she assaults him, inciting him to “rape” her. He is attracted to female power but only when he feels more powerful still, which means that willful submission is inadequate: she has to be “crazy,” brainwashed, broken. However, Huppert comes to realize that all of her male relationships fit this mold. Son, ex-husband, lover, employees—somehow unspoken, unnoticed etiquette has demanded that she take on both maternal authority and the subservience implied. Her power has intensified the demands that weak men make of her, which is the compromise that society has reached, the reason counterculture heroines are calling out Daddy: since men can’t be trusted, women are obligated to perform masculinity on their behalf.

[6]. I have a theory that this is the sole reason The New Yorker exists. I have a second theory that when that rag of the aristocracy wants to dress up the machinery of capital, they dwell on meetings. Remember how Uber had a data breach and was sexist and stuff?

An emergency meeting was convened, during which Kalanick and the most senior women at the company—Hornsey; Rachel Holt, Uber’s head of North America; and Rachel Whetstone, the head of public and government relations—discussed what to do.

The board members gathered again, in a meeting room in the San Francisco Four Seasons Hotel, and began voting in a secret-ballot process that involved texting their decisions to a corporate headhunter. As we sat down to a meal of roast chicken and vegetable soup at a long table in the kitchen—the boys ate pasta with butter—Shapiro told me that when they met, ten years ago, on a blind date, [new CEO] Khosrowshahi arrived wearing a suit and driving a rented Volvo....Shapiro, who is tall and graceful and wears ripped jeans and concert T-shirts, said that Khosrowshahi surprised her. “He had so many questions for me, and he was funny,” she said. (“At Uber, a New C.E.O. Shifts Gears”)

Emphasis mine, duh. Same deal with “Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet,” 

Ashooh sat at a long conference table with a dozen other employees. Before each of them was a laptop, a mug of coffee, and a few hours’ worth of snacks.

The job of policing Reddit’s most pernicious content falls primarily to three groups of employees—the community team, the trust-and-safety team, and the anti-evil team—which are sometimes described, respectively, as good cop, bad cop, and RoboCop.

The two men are in town a few weeks to work at a branch office. They exchange complaints. This place blows. The job sucks. Coworkers are vultures. Can’t trust anyone. Howard just got dumped by his fiancée. Chad says he just got dumped too.

CHAD: I'm standing there, no note...not a “thanks for four years of a roof over my bleached-blonde head”...nothing. You know? And it comes to me...the truth. I do not give a shit, not about anybody. A family member, a job, none of it. I couldn't care less.

HOWARD: Geez.

CHAD: Don't get me wrong. We're pals.

HOWARD: Same college.

CHAD: Exactly, and that means something. But these other folks...You know, jump on while the going's good? No, that will not do.

“Circle the date on this one, big guy,” Chad says, “We keep playing along with this 'pick up the check,' 'can't a girl change her mind' crap...and we can't even tell a joke in the workplace? There's going to be hell to pay down the line, no doubt about it.”

They move to the hotel bar.

CHAD: I don't want to shock you. It's just a thought. It's the same crap we played in school, only better, because we get a payback on this messy relationship shit we're dealing with.

HOWARD: No, right, it's funny, it is. it's just...way out there.

CHAD: I think it would be refreshing, I really do...and very therapeutic coming off the women we just have. 

HOWARD: Well, just for instance, who would it be?

CHAD: No idea. But she’s out there, I know it. Just waiting for us to find her.

Let’s start here.

They say guilt is omniscient; that doesn’t mean you can’t throw sand in its eyes. Unlike shame, guilt is universal, at some level everyone knows that violating the NAP makes you a dick. But suppose you like, really want to. How do you get from Crime and Punishment to Crimes and Misdemeanors?

The above scene is demonstrative. First, replace the human object with an idea. Hurting an innocent woman is obviously evil—plus, why would you do that? Women are soft, thoughtful, have nice voices, etc. But hurting “women” in general? “Women,” who smile right past you and say “that’s so funny!” instead of laughing and sing along to vapid breakup songs like they could ever know the pain of a sensitive incel? God knows “they” want to hurt “men.”

Second, remove the subject: you aren’t going to do anything. A passive process, inevitable given the laws of thermodynamics, is going to occur. You remember that one scene in Glengarry Glen Ross? “Somebody should stand up and strike back. Somebody should do something to them.” Deus vult.

But that explanation doesn’t do justice to Chad’s cunning. He alternates between 1) “big guy”-ing Howard re: office politics and romantic troubles, and 2) brutal, frequent, almost compulsive misogyny. These are twin strategies in the same campaign. When Chad says, “some corn-fed bitch who'd mess her pants if you sharpen a pencil for her,” Howard gives a single snort of laughter. I know that one. It’s a social laugh, slave morality coming straight from the spinal cord, brain playing catch-up, “oh, it’s funny because it was a joke.” Like all the nice construction workers asking ladies to smile, Chad wants to be a friend. It would be rude not to laugh at the joke of a friend. But when your ego endorses a perspective your superego rejects, you build up a debt of guilt. The heavier your debt, the more you have to borrow from the abstraction of ideal over real. The more you suspend judgment, the more you have to rely on the judgment of others. The more crimes you share with an accomplice, the deeper you enmesh yourself in conspiracy. So a few hours later and a little drunk:

HOWARD: What'd she say? 

CHAD: "I don't trust anything that bleeds for a week and doesn't die."

(Both laugh)

CHAD: So you in?

HOWARD: Aw, shit man...yeah, I’m in.

CHAD: Alright, let’s do it. Let’s hurt somebody.

Somebody shows up the next day.

The object is a deaf woman named Christine. Reads lips, self-conscious about this so wears headphones so coworkers will have to attract her attention. A copy-editor or something, 90 words per minute. Brunette and pale, short hair, slender neck, narrow frame, Améliesexual, Forever 21.

When a male coworker informs Chad of her disability, Chad does an imitation “dolphin voice” and gets a big laugh. Then he goes and introduces himself.

CHAD: You're new here, aren't you? Don't be embarrassed. We're all new sometime, right? (Pause) That's a lovely blouse.

“A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y is like the Holy Grail to this poor wretch,” Chad tells Howard. Howard, sitting down to urinate, gives an ambiguous response. Chad: “You're not pussing out on this, are you, Howie?”

HOWARD: All I mean is, I think everything's a business, whatever you go into. Your typing there or my opportunity directing this project. Doesn't matter. Every walk of life's an industry...from child care right on up.

HOWARD: So, on a personal level, that's what I'm doing here. I was walking by, saw you, figured, "What the hell," you know? You probably have a boyfriend, but you gotta take your chance, right? And who knows? It might turn out to be mutually advantageous. So, that's really just a long-winded way of saying...I'd like to go out sometime. Maybe get a drink? My name's Howard, by the way. I'm free this weekend.

Act III shows the two Lotharios in parallel. Howard’s dating sim begins with a motorized tour cart ride at the zoo. Howard arrives late, blames this on having to “ream out” some employees, has to define “ream,” clarifies that, no, you don’t have to feel bad for them, like, it was no big deal. Then he backtracks and admits he was lying—none of that happened, he ran back to the hotel to change his shirt. “I get so used to saying what I think people want to hear...I forget they might just want the truth sometimes,” Howard says. “It’s all right,” Christine says, “Just remember: I can't hear you when you're lying.”

Cut to:

CHAD: I have to face this. My job ends here in a few weeks, and...I want you to know that whatever you do is all right with me. I don't care about your dating other guys...and if we're apart for a while or...

CHAD: Well, I just want you to know that, whatever happens, I trust you. Okay? Oh, boy, this is really hard. I like you. There, I said it. It's out. I'll eat better now. It's true. I look at you, and I see...good, nice, kind. I am very happy with you, and I want our relationship—you feel this could be a relationship, right? I want to nurture it and just see us blossom.

Christine then proceeds to eyelash flutter like Chad said he cried listening to Carrie & Lowell. We have the power of camera angles, but even without them—this is so, so, so obviously bullshit, right? Like a Markov chatbot trying to simulate “boyfriend”? But hold up. Under oath: can you point out the lie?

Chad’s branch office job does end in a few weeks. He really does see Christine as good/nice/kind, trusts her, doesn’t care if she dates other guys, wants the relationship to blossom (at least in the short term). Contrast with Howard’s “ream out” anecdote, which, objectively: Fake News, Not An Argument, Myth Busted. And yet if Howard hadn’t confessed the plot would have moved on without a missed beat—to you, the viewer, it rings exaggerated, but not intuitively false. 

And you’d be right, because truth cannot be extracted from individual words. Here’s the 2x2 for all y’all Ribbonfarmers: factual-truth = math; factual-lie = lie of omission; counterfactual-truth = metaphor; counterfactual-lie = I’ve got a bridge to sell you. I’m not pulling a po-mo fast one. Objective truth is great, it gave us Youtube and stuff. But words are imprecise no matter how many footnotes: since they compress preverbal desire, they always contain a lie of omission. And metaphors, though annotated with “citation needed, does not actually look like a summer’s day,” sometimes reveal crucial and unspeakable truths about the algorithm that creates them.

Point: lies cannot be proved or disproved by geometry. Counterpoint: still, being lied to is a distinct subjective experience. Example: when a minor fall to major lift makes you spit rage, it’s never because the song is particularly bad, no one actually enjoys math rock but no one gets mad at it either. The anger is instead a response to perceived manipulation. People get mad at rap/country/Bieber because these genres lean heavily on identity; the artist is, from the first guitar twang/phat beat/“baby,” trying to convince you of something about him/her/yourself. “Well, doesn’t everyone do that?” Extremely duh, but note that if you accept the artist’s claim as true or false then the nausea doesn’t occur. You can’t be manipulated if you’ve made up your mind, a sufficiently bad lie stops being one, see also, camp.

That’s the horror of the middle-place: if you just let yourself slide, if you just stopped being you, you would like it. Times Square neon makes me vomit blood but Casablanca is charming despite the same level of weapons-grade ideology. The former might persuade me to drink Suntory, the latter has zero chance of getting me to enter World War II. The propaganda of the past—the art of the past—will always be better than that of the present, not just because of selection bias but because it doesn’t feel manipulative, and it doesn’t feel manipulative because it’s not talking to you.

Ergo: we feel lied to = when we can tell + that we are being told + what we want to hear. And this is why Howard’s anecdote doesn’t feel like a lie: it wasn’t. Sure, the words were bullshit, and maybe he fooled Christine, but what he communicated to you—“I want to be seen as a man despite my multiple and obvious failings”—was 100% genuine.

Why can’t Howard tell a fib? One possibility is that he learned about girls from hentai and Roosh V and so thinks that women are attracted to toughness rather than the conquest of toughness. But more likely is that he doesn’t want to: he’s more interested in having Christine see him a certain way than in giving the Good End answers. So Howard, like you, tries to work Million Dollar Extreme references into his Tinder convos, which makes him a narcissist and a tool but not a liar. Proof of the pudding is that it doesn’t work.

Contra Chad: how come it’s so obvious that he’s lying? But of course: the words weren’t meant for you. Chad has self, not self-image, and so no compunctions about roleplaying to get what he wants. For us, his dialogue falls in an uncanny valley. But if you’re the target audience...

“Did she give you the time at least?” Howard never laughs at Chad’s deadpan because it’s too on the nose, it’s exactly what a friend should say, fact check = TRUE, bleep bloop. Howard social-laughs at Chad’s misogyny because it’s so absurd, he must be joking, fact check = FALSE, bzzzt. Christine makes the same mistake: Chad speaks the language of romance, she agrees to see him as such, and she stops asking questions. They outsource their superego to the etiquette of conversation, and who can blame them, their fantasies are coming true. Only you have the outside view, or so it seems: perfect etiquette masking irony, irony masking anger, anger masking unspeakable sociopathy: that even the anger is fake. But if you see that, then he was talking to you, that was the whole point, to give a winking apology to a fellow conspirator—“Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”

And therein lies the problem, for you and everyone else.

In The Company of Men does not have a happy ending.

Chad sleeps with Christine. (“God, I am just so taken with you. I just...”) Howard sees them at lunch together and gets worried. He pulls some work levers to get Chad out of town, refurbishes his ex-fiancee’s ring, and invites her to dinner.

HOWARD: Maybe this isn't the perfect time...but I care about you, Christine. I want you to know I like you a lot. I need—I just don't want to lose you.

Christine cuts him off. She’s made a horrible mistake by letting things get this far: she’s in love with Chad.

CHRISTINE: It’s all my fault...You both should have known about this...When you don't date for a while...you wonder...if you're attractive...or interesting to someone. You let things get out of hand first chance you get. That's what I did.

Pause.

HOWARD: We did know.

“Chad? He doesn't like you. He loathes you. He detests you and your pathetic retard voice. That's what he calls it. Christine, you bought that shit?” 

Christine freaks out and screams that’s not true, stop it, but Howard keeps going, spilling the beans about the game, apologizing and begging:

HOWARD: Can't you see I'm the good guy? I'm the good person here. I can't alter what we've done, and I'm a fuck...and a bastard and everything else on your list, but I'm here. I'm here, and I'm telling you...I love you.

He brings out the ring.

HOWARD: It's not a game to me anymore. Take it.

Christine doesn’t, and Howard promptly explodes that she’s “fucking handicapped,” “you think you can choose, men falling at your feet?” and so on.

The standard take on this type of (very common) story is that even though [beta male] loved [manic pixie] more than [Chad], the beta male’s complaisance to the patriarchy makes him “just as bad.” Fair enough, consequentialism ftw, but it’s suspicious that the narrator of these tales is often the beta male protagonist himself. No one self-flagellates unless they get off on it, and the above take hides an assumption: that (e.g.) Howard really was in love with Christine.

Was he? There’s no doubt he had some of the relevant chemicals floating around. Yet it’s very possible for abusers to love their victims and cheaters to love their cuckolded spouses. It’s very possible to love each and every other member of the orgy. Hell, I know some meditators who can connect with the astral rhythms of life itself—and they aren’t bullshitting, they really feel it. But drugs are cheap. What does your oxytocin rush mean for anyone besides you?

I’ll tell you why Howard thought that he was in love: he went through the motions. Just as Howard decided that Chad was his friend because that was the role he played, he decided that Christine was marriage material because...she was there. They had nothing in common, they had zero chemistry, but she was there. You gotta serve somebody. “I need—I just don’t want to lose you.” Love as manifest in the material plane requires sacrifice, is sacrifice, of opportunity if nothing else. Howard’s love is meaningless because it costs him nothing. Maybe Uber-Howard would still care about Christine, but not only is it impossible for Christine to know that, Howard himself doesn’t know. Power doesn’t corrupt, power reveals that you were corrupt all along. “Can’t you see I’m the good guy?” See what?

The next day, Howard gets demoted at work. Something went wrong with a fax machine and the copy came out too light; yeah, like a symbol. Chad sees Christine one last time. She confronts him. Chad tries to keep a straight face and then breaks out grinning: “Fuck it. Surprise.”

CHAD: So how does it feel? I mean right now. This instant. How do you feel inside, knowing what you know?

Christine slaps him and begins to sob.

A few days later, Howard shows up at Chad’s place. He’s distraught. Chad jokes around about the contest, then gestures to the other room, where his old girlfriend is sleeping in his king-sized bed. “What the hell? I mean, when did she crawl back?” Howard says. “She never left, Howie,” Chad says, “She’s always been right there.” “Then...why? Why, Chad?”

Good question. The first clue is when Howard runs into Chad and Christine on a date: “Howard and I have the same alma mater. He graduates a semester ahead of me, and now he's my boss,” Chad says, and for once the bitterness creeps in. The second is when Howard, blaming the higher-ups, sends Chad out of town:

CHAD: The real injustice here is if I could throw a curveball—you know, a really good one—just that, nothing else, no education, nothing—none of this would matter. Play in the big leagues for ten years, retire to Oahu.

Chad is handsome, confident, clever, and quite possibly a representation of The Great Deceiver himself. And yet, to get laid, Chad has to contort himself into a puppy. To get paid, he has to kiss ass to Windows 95 robots who wear beige and drink decaf. He spends the day humoring people who won’t acknowledge the joke—that if he could just play stupid arbitrary baseball, he wouldn’t have to. He’s powerless: no matter how well Chad tells his lies, the system determines the signifiers into which these lies fit. 

But Howard—Howard believes in the system. He’s exactly the sort of person who created the phatics that Chad has to obey, who follows even the most vacuous rules with moral seriousness, clings to them all the harder as they turn him into a self-loathing nebbish. Chad’s revenge is to turn the rules against him, to show that no matter how oppressive social protocols get, they will always oppress Chad less, since he’ll say whatever bullshit is required while you’re stuttering your feelings on Whitman. The more checkboxes you demand checked, the more you favor the liar. Chad is bound by the rules of the game, but these rules are what gives him relative power: they make people trust him. “Because I could,” Chad says. “See you Monday.”

There’s a practical lesson here. Every day ambulances scream into the ED carrying young men who moan and complain that they are bedeviled by wine-loving dog moms, fluent in sarcasm, and yet for some reason they can’t get the time of day from those goth chicks who have tongues stuck out and eyes rolled up at all times. I’m not here to kinkshame, send pics if you’re a goth chick with your tongue stuck out and eyes rolled up at all times. But please be aware that lusting after a mannequin is a surefire way to get [extremely Taleb voice] fooled by randomness: the more detailed the script, the more you favor the actor.

I’m not saying you can’t have a type, but the person willing to sacrifice that last ounce of selfhood will always be closest to your 21st century ideal of bimboification. “There are smart women, but I don’t know many women with truly original ideas,” says the cerebral young man who needs four search operators to find adequate porn. Don’t worry—this process is dehumanizing for the fetishized person, but it’s dehumanizing in the other direction as well: only someone who doesn’t care what you think about them, about their real self, would consent to play a fake.

The problem with fetishization is that it prizes symbol above reality, and unfortunately for Christine, dating is systematized fetishization. Not a diss—this is how dating is supposed to work. If our intuition for love is inculcated by Disney, dating replaces the hero’s journey with its symbols: clothes and music as proxy for backstory; movie or pub crawl as proxy for adventure; astrology, Myers-Briggs, and 36 Questions as a proxy for intimacy. Dick pics and nudes test sexual potency without costing the two drink minimum, text and emoji idiosyncrasies reveal more about class and education than a brunch and a half. Dating is an attempt to economize romance, it’s unsurprising that the term was coined in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.

“You know that birds sing, right?” Sure, but nobody has any illusions about what the birds are looking for. I’m not knocking ritual, just ritual that pretends it’s something deeper. If milord sends milady twelve roses, a thoroughbred, a fiefdom, and a bard playing D’Angelo, this courtship is not taken as evidence of good character. It is judged on its own merits, i.e. this guy is either really interested or thirsty af.

This would be common sense except that every force in modern society is opposed to it. Since women are valued as approximations of fetish, they a) lose points for wearing the wrong symbols, and b) lose points if a partner doesn’t fit the brand. So now the first date Scantrons become radiant with their own fascination, because even if they have no meaning except “went through the motions,” everyone on Facebook is acting like they do, and “he seemed nice” is no excuse for dating a Trump supporter or a black guy. And now that privacy has moved public, the list of checkboxes lengthens as men try to gerrymander pussy (which again, always favors Chad) and Cosmopolitan feminists generate new metrics by which women can fall short.

These bureaucrats may have been hurt themselves, they may have the best of intentions. Perhaps that’s why their regulations are never phrased as hostile takeover. Instead, they take the form of advice, #lifehacks, and laugh-tracked satire at a third party’s expense. That’s how it always is, a friendly voice lends you a superego and all you have to do is pay interest on shame. The system wins when its values become your own.

However strong this force was historically, it’s stronger now that society consists of, let me check my phone, everyone. Just as metropolises are now made up of showrooms and gift shops, the demands of 7.442 billion potential tourists outweighing a pittance of locals, the citizens shape themselves into fungible, neon-dyed tchotchkes, while being tormented by the possibility that they have fallen short in this important moral task. The end-game of dating is the targeted ad. 

Before you start in on “swipe culture,” let’s be clear: no one has met cute through friends since the second war in Iraq, and Tinder, whatever faults it may have, at least requires the sacred fumbling of getting to know a stranger. OKCupid is a better example of modern anti-romance, with its careful sorting of partners by politics and caste, with its swamp of information bias that disguises—encourages—lying on the internet. But of course a Yelped bar or bookstore offers the same anonymity, the same curated selection who respond to the same empty lines until you start to hate them for it, like how dare you force me to lie, how dare you be so predictable, and this weakness makes them human which isn’t what you wanted anyway. No doubt they feel the same.

If this sounds bad, it gets worse: the above process is directly responsible for the most modern misandry and misogyny. Please note that the Women Are From Venus stereotypes have largely disappeared, even among misogynists. Please further note that #blackpilled misogynists rarely objectify women; in fact many of these men intentionally desexualize the “female race” and substitute, say, male crossdressers. The catcalling misogyny of the past came from a position of power: internet death threat misogyny comes from desperation. The twist is that the same transition has occurred among women—that despite every metric claiming that women are better off than before, women have moved from Men Are From Mars to a nagging suspicion that anything with a phallus should die.

Why would both sexes feel more powerless? Not discussed in polite society, but heavily discussed by misogynists, is the apparent epidemic of transactional sex: paypig/findommes, camgirls, sugar babies, and omnipresent Amazon wishlists. Sorta kitschy, free country, whatever. I’m sure part of this is mere technological transition, the gyration of the strip club from analog to digital, and Kanye informs me that there have always been implicit gold digging arrangements. But think about what happens when these private arrangements go public. First, some guy starts to associate “hot girl” with “:P spoil me”, and FYI, anger and lust, both performed with a closed fist, are exactly zero degrees apart on the axis of masturbation. And now that our guy has this (maybe unconscious) association, women have to rise to the occasion, e.g. make snotty demands for Venmo donations, because even though this makes him howl with rage, if it’s not there, he assumes the girl’s not that hot.

Everyone loses: women learn that they have to put on an act to get attention, except that half of men think they should die for this act and the other half—even the ones looking for a Serious Relationship—seem to lose interest if it’s ever turned off. Meanwhile the guy grows increasingly lonely/desperate/bitter as he tautologizes that every single girl he likes is an “attention whore." Our guy doesn’t know who he is or what he wants outside of anger and its aesthetics. Maybe he’d hit it off great with one of those women; maybe he should choose a different set of superficialities to pursue; maybe people lie on the internet; regardless, OKCupid gives them a compatibility of 43%.

And meanwhile women are wondering the same thing: how can you know?

There’s one more crucial scene In The Company of Men. Howard arrives at an airport and sees Christine working at a desk. He walks over to her and says, “Listen.” She doesn’t respond. So he says it again, “Listen,” and again, and again, screaming now and—

—but what could he say? Even if his intentions were pure to the utmost, what could he possibly say or do that wouldn’t be perceived as an act? What could any man do that wouldn’t be perceived in the same way? “I asked her what time it was. You know, Mountain, Central.” No wonder she hit you.

TIME IS MEASURED IN DISTANCE FROM GOD. Entropy dissolves oneness, knowledge sieves mystery, age breaks down our attempts at order. Children read fairy tales where every sentence is aphorism, old men ramble of dead names and changed places without moral or end, the body loosens its grip on homeostasis, map approaches territory so we describe but concede all attempts to constrain—“Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”

What we refuse to admit is that we are part of it, the chaos, the chthonian; that whatever logic governs the universe cannot be seen from within. Blame the other, blame the outgroup, blame the system, blame the uncountable particles obeying unobservable dictates. All such attempts fail. Growing up is to witness the diffusion of sin across every animate and inanimate being, to realize that horrible and illogical cruelties are in fact horrible and logical. God does not die with wisdom. But you can see Him move further away.

This is why I don’t blame the kids for dosing #red and #black pills like they’re going clubbing in Siberia. It takes a conspiracy to get out of bed in the morning and turn blurs of light into objects, I’m not sure what the alternative looks like but schizophrenia tends to get poor reviews. And besides, who am I to say that your conspiracy theory is wrong? How could a closed system be wrong? No, I don’t fault the kids for trying nihilism: it’s comforting. If no meaning can be imposed on the universe, then you can find meaning in this belief.

The problem is that the kids don’t go far enough. Because if you pause the goat sacrifice to pass around the sign-in sheet, “chaos reigns, but remember, smoking ain’t cool,” you’re lazy, you’re a poser, you need Satan more than he needs you. You fondle the inconsistencies of your cynicism as a way to pretend that your worldview doesn’t rest on thin air. You may understand that other people see the world differently, but you refuse the possibility that they might be right, that if you adopted their closed system it would make perfect sense. Because admitting that would destroy what it means to be you. It would let in the chaos. We’ll smash our idols instead.

This is a moviepost—extensive spoilers follow for Death Proof, Jackie Brown, and Inglourious Basterds—and I wrote it mostly because I wanted to talk about some movies. But first, a topical tie-in:

There is always an outside that a person considers unworthy of life...The individual progressive or racist may never say that the outside is unworthy of rights, but they feel it. This is what is meant by that line from Inglorious Bastards when the character of Lt. Aldo Raine says; the "Nazi ain't got no humanity. They're the foot soldiers of a jew-hating, mass-murdering maniac and they need to be de-stroyed!"

Here we have a thirst to destroy the perceived inferior, except instead of a racist seeking the end of Jews it is the progressive liberal seeking the genocide of racists. That's irony.

And understand what is happening here. Aldo Raine is really a proxy for Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino is the one speaking, not Brad Pitt. The man is very left-wing and he wrote the script. That move is essentially an exposition of the directors [sic] politics.

The above quote is taken from The Anti-Puritan. Exactly what it sounds like: dude read three Moldbug posts and now thinks he can write. The specifics of this guy’s bad opinions are not that interesting—would you believe that even the videogame industry has been corrupted by cultural Marxism?—but perhaps something can be learned from the framing:

A climate scientist drives to an important summit on global warming. On the way there, he fills up his tank with gas. The only reason oil companies are in business and climate change is occurring is because of people like him who fill up their tanks with gas. Their payments make climate change possible. The payments are the reason Exxon, Shell and BP exist.

A feminist complains about the cis het patriarchy. Her boyfriend, whom she spreads her legs for, is tall, strong, confident, manly, and "dominant" in every way. Fucking dominant men is the reason they exist, the reason they will continue to exist, and the cultural incentive to become dominant...She and billions of other women perpetuate "the patriarchy" with their sexual choices. Patriarchy exists because of them.

A college professor complains about McDonald's. She has eaten fast food from a burger restaurant recently. She, and millions [of] others, are the reason McDonald's exists. (Source)

Let’s accept that there’s a lot to unpack here and move on. Focus instead on the form of the argument: tu quoque, again and again. The feebler the discourse the more accusations of hypocrisy (Bush Lied, Barack Hussein’d) because hypocrisy doesn’t require knowledge of anything but pre-algebra logic. Even a child can identify a contradiction: “But mom! You said—!”

This is precisely the skull malformation that has constricted discussion of the protestors who identify as “Antifascist Action” and are derided as the “alt-left.” Antifa has already become a perennial non-issue where all opinions are based on anecdote and there are plenty of anecdotes to go around; no one has skin in the game, anyone can upvote, and measurable achievements are dwarfed by spikes of indignation like hypertensive hemorrhages into America’s brain. If you don’t believe me, you haven’t been watching the stock prices of PP, NRA, PETA, and BLM.

Antifa now faces the two attacks that were long ago formulated against other activist groups. One: antifa is composed of violent morons who carry upon them body and pubic lice species yet to be classified by science. Two: antifa is counterproductive to their stated goal, e.g. getting to whack-a-mole pamphleteers is actually a powerful incentive to suffer for fashion.

I suspect both criticisms are true, but whatever—does the first imply the second? Is violence bad even when it is effective? Because if it isn’t, then claiming that “antifa are thugs too!” is worse than useless. Your opponent can simply reply, “So what? Nazi ain't got no humanity.” And now that you’ve cried wolf, that guy won’t listen when you claim that, in this instance, violence might not work. So you better be damn sure about your answer: what price should be paid for the sin of hypocrisy?

There is always an outside that a person considers unworthy of life...

Quentin Tarantino has dedicated his career to answering this question. 

QT has seen too many movies for it to be any other way. If you consume enough art across epoch and genre, you can’t help arrive at the Susan Sontag #redpill that content doesn’t matter all that much. All art is genre fiction no matter the pretensions and our lizard brain judges accordingly. Sure, thematic analysis is fun to play with after the fact, but if a movie has the right tropes in the right places—femme fatales, tough muchachos, pretty pictures, happy ending—well, you can convince yourself of just about anything.

Take, for example, Death Proof. Genre: exploitation/slasher. Synopsis: hot babes go for a night out, ex-stuntman stalks and runs ‘em down in a death-proof car; stuntman rinses and repeats with another girl gang except they turn the tables and Mortal Kombat his thoracic spine. Rating: extremely badass, you should check it out, anyone who tells you different is a pleb.

Namely: some people complain that the movie has too many scenes of girls talking and that their QT-isms are an unrealistic depiction of an actual group chat. The characters bicker lewdly, if that’s a thing, alternating between weirdly masculine sex-as-status teasing and pledges of undying affection, the verbal equivalent of a catfight, which is maybe how a creepy foot fetishist would imagine female dialogue, but...

Nope, still pleb. Tarantino wasn’t the first guy to invoke this trope, it’s part of the DNA of the slasher genre, as old as Jamie Lee Curtis getting razzed for her virginity in Halloween. Misogyny, maybe, but also content is a spook. Slasher movies have to fill 70 minutes before the eponymous slashing, and they also have to make you care about the outcome of said slashing without humanizing the characters so much that you get all Marley and Me when they die. 

What’s the secret? Status games, the less nuance the better. Boys would watch paint dry if you said it was a grudge match. Catfighting is no different than the elaboration of powers in a shonen manga or the suspicious glares exchanged between heist movie protagonists: it creates tension. Different value systems have been described, there can only be one, now you’re rooting for process of elimination to reveal the truth. No—you identify with that process. Hail Gnon. You could make a movie with men playing status games and being killed off by women and men would still find it hot; I know this because of female horrorcore rappers but also because this movie is called Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and it’s 10/10. Incidentally:

This is referenced again in the final scene of the film, in which the viewer cheers on our group of heroines as they beat to death a pleading, injured man.

Here’s the hot take: tote bag feminists are wrong to think that drawing boobs on Powergirl is a male attempt to diminish her power. On the contrary, the more vampire slaying the better. Sexualization is an attempt to gain access to female power: if she wants The Phallus badly enough, she might just lend her power to you. Obverse: men are idiots for thinking that the existence of rape fantasies means that women secretly want to be raped. There’s an image floating around the manosphere about that terrorist with a heart of gold, Ted Kaczynski, who was gauche with ladies in the free world but deluged in love letters upon his incarceration. Before you can say medium = message, someone tragically rendered celibate by their 23andMe results will point to this as proof that women “only want serial killers.” Newsflash: Kaczynski is serving eight life sentences without possibility of parole. Do you think the fangirls didn’t know that? Rape fantasies (theoretically “hot”) are qualitatively different than being raped (“unimaginably horrific”) because you construct the former, can turn it off at any time. The fantasy victim is assaulted by a terrible power, but the person who selects and controls that power is...

Of course it is, cough, problematic, that slasher movie girls display power through HPV vaccinations while male zombie apocalypse survivors soliloquize on whether suicide is inevitable in the absence of God. But once you sexistly set up that women should be valued by their sin, the wages = death equation is not in and of itself misogynistic. No, it’s just inevitable: sex-as-status tension can only be relieved in two ways and one of them is frowned upon in theaters. Film crit cliché and Kraftwerk song, I know, but: watching a movie renders you impotent—you can’t interact with the sexy image on the screen—except through what the camera will allow.

That’s why you are complicit in the murders that occur in the first half of Death Proof. The ex-stuntman—old, a teetotaler, star of TV shows long forgotten (and played by once-famous Kurt Russell)—is as impotent as you are, capable of getting a deleted scene lap dance but zero penetration, and when he gets in his car to commit vehicular homicide x4, he looks at the camera and smiles. Because you’re right there with him, waiting for the money shot. It would be nice to fuck, but you’ll settle for a murder. Except when it actually happens, played four times for your amusement, it’s horrible—a face melted off by a tire, a wet leg flapping in the street. Throw in a Wilhelm scream. Wasn’t that what you wanted? Are you not entertained?

It’s all perspective, my man. For all the short shorts and naughty words, the girls plan and backup plan ways to prevent unwanted sexual advances; two of them have boyfriends and one is texting a crush trying to seal the deal; they discuss and decide against inviting the opposite sex to their lakeside vacation. But that’s not what you see from the outside. That’s not where your attention is drawn, wandering the club and editing your .jpg of grievances. For you, dancefloor means sex, choker necklace means slut, and being a slut means she would never sleep with you. That’s a personal insult. And that means that nothing else matters.

Which is insane. This isn’t an argument for or against promiscuity, the point is you don’t even know promiscuity looks like. You know symbols, and for that matter, why those symbols, where did you learn those? Brazzers? If you’re gonna be mad at a thing you should at least be mad at the thing itself, not at whatever fucked up fetish you’ve imposed on reality.

There’s a scene midway through the movie where QT tips his hand. The second girl gang is lounging in a car, one of them dangling her feet out the window. The ex-stuntman approaches, you assume his perspective, and maybe because it’s an old grindhouse film...

...but the color goes out, and everything is black and white.

Which, speaking of:

Jackie Brown is first and foremost a movie about being extremely cool all the time (you should watch it). The plot is an excuse: briefly, Pam Grier (airline stewardess), Robert Forster (bail bondsman), Samuel L Jackson (arms dealer), Robert De Niro (ex-convict), Bridget Fonda (stoner surfer chick) and a couple Feds each try to nab a briefcase holding $500K.

Jackie Brown is secondarily a movie about how race shapes each and every human interaction, but that description makes it sound like a Very Special Episode, and that couldn’t be more wrong. The movie is gleefully amoral, in fact lapses from pure MacGuffinism are treated as intolerable weakness, e.g. Jackson to De Niro:

ORDELL: You know what your problem is, Louis?

Louis doesn't say anything, he just puts his hands in his pockets.

ORDELL: You think you're a good guy. When you go into a deal you don't go in prepared to take that motherfucker all the way. You go in looking for a way out. And it ain't cause you're scared neither. It's cause you think you're a good guy, and you think there's certain things a good guy won't do. That's where we're different, me and you. Cause me, once I decide I want something, ain’t a goddam motherfuckin' thing gonna stop me from gittin' it. I gotta use a gun get what I want, I'm gonna use a gun. Nigga gets in my way, nigga gonna get removed. Understand what I'm saying?

Apparently not, because De Niro later makes this mistake and gets popped.

For these characters, race is just another weapon. When Jackson meets Forster for the first time, he lights a cigarette, puts his feet up on the desk, and taps out the ash in a partly full coffee cup. Then he points out a photo of Forster with a black employee. “Y’all tight?” “Yeah.” “But you his boss though, right?” “Yeah.” “Bet it was your idea to take that picture too, wasn’t it...?” In their second encounter, Jackson, trying to get bail for Grier, pulls the same trick:

ORDELL: Man, you know I'm good for it. Thousand bucks ain't shit. 

MAX: If I don't see it in front of me, you're right. It ain't shit. 

ORDELL: Man, you need to look at this with a little compassion. Jackie ain't no criminal. She ain't used to this kinda treatment. I mean, gangsters don't give a fuck - but for the average citizen, coupla nights in County fuck with your mind. 

MAX: Ordell, this isn't a bar, an you don't have a tab. 

ORDELL: Just listen for a second. We got a forty-year-old, gainfully employed black woman, falsely accused - 

MAX: Falsely accused? She didn't come back from Mexico with cocaine on her?

ORDELL: Falsely accused of Intent. If she had that shit - and mind you, I said "if" - it was just her shit to get high with. 

MAX: Is white guilt supposed to make me forget I'm running a business?

But Forster—male lead, the “good guy”—plays his version of the race card and flips the script.

Example 2: Bridget Fonda, surfer gal, plots to betray Jackson, who “moves his lips when he reads,” "let's say he's streetwise, I'll give him that.” But Jackson knows that she sees him that way, it makes her predictable, which is why he can keep her around: “You can’t trust Melanie, but you can always trust Melanie to be Melanie.”

That’s not the half of it. Jackson talks a soon-dead man into getting in the trunk of an Oldsmobile, houses a homeless addict in Compton and tells her it’s Hollywood; he lies effortlessly, and when drafting your fantasy friend group you should be aware that people who lie effortlessly do it because it’s fun. Threatening someone gets you an automaton who will system 2 your demands and nothing more. Deceiving someone gives you control over that person’s soul. So Fonda’s stoned delusions of manipulating him—which in fact make her easier to manipulate—are part of her appeal. Translated: “She ain't as pretty as she used to be, and she bitch a whole lot more than she used to...But she white.”

Except Fonda is manipulating him. She’s spent her adulthood as the side piece for Dubai businessmen and Japanese industrialists who—though she doesn’t even speak the language—get off on the fact that she’s a haughty blonde who thinks she’s better than them, thinks she can manipulate them. But since they’re paying for rent and weed, doesn’t that mean...?

Example 3: Pam Grier as Jackie Brown.

From more Sam Jackson than Sam Jackson to mumblecore for Medicare, Jackie outsmarts everyone and it’s not even close. The Feds lean into their uniforms but she doesn’t miss a beat: urbane dinner guest in one scene, “panicked, defensive, unreasonable black woman” in another. Of course the movie ends the way it does, of course. Jackson steps into a dark room. Jackie screams “he’s got a gun!” And a cop pulls the trigger. You can’t always beat the system, but if you try sometimes, it just might beat who you need.

Why does Jackie win? The canon explanation is that she’s an airline stewardess: her job is to tell people of all origins what they want to hear. The meta explanation is she’s played by blaxploitation star Pam Grier. The gimmick of Grier movies like Coffy and Foxy Brown is their exaggeration of the audience’s favored tropes re: sex and race—say, hypersexuality and fashionable/wearable blackness. But the punchline of these films is that on-screen, Pam Grier with an afro is disguising herself as an high-class escort to fool the baddies: “The gentlemen you’ll be meeting this evening have a preference for…your type.” And then she kills them.

So it’s true that these films let you "exploit” a caricature, but the flip side is that anyone who can turn that caricature on and off gets to exploit you. And that seems to be Jackie Brown’s realist take: not that racism is the Original Sin for which Thou Must Atone—because everyone sees race and is selfish besides—but rather that it makes you a sucker. And the flip side: by capitalism or by meme magic, the world will always conspire to show you what you want to see. Choose wisely.

If Jackie Brown accepts that racism is inevitable, Inglourious Basterds sets out to prove that it’s also kind of fun.

It’s telling that Inglourious Basterds posters are push-pinned on the walls of fraternity houses right next to Scarface and The Wolf of Wall Street. Three movies, three sets of protagonists who happen to be amoral, masculine, and white. Sounds like a diss, but who are creatine-chugging white boys supposed to look up to? Chris Pratt? You can just tell that guy was grown in a test tube. There’s a reason Tarantino movies are popular and there’s a reason I’m talking about them instead of Buñuel or Tarkovsky and it has something to do with “making intensive use of a major language” and the twenty-somethings desperate to identify with a character named “Bear Jew.” And the above scene is indeed, “sick af.” Goes off without a hitch except when the Nazi says that he got his medals for bravery, and then there’s a split-second of—what, annoyance? Like, stick to the script, asshole. You’re sure as hell gonna get it now.

But I’m sure you’re aware that’s the joke, that once you got Ennio Morricone in the background you can justify anything. The Basterds “ain’t in the prisoner taking business”; they scalp the dead and maim the witnesses they leave alive. There’s no panorama of concentration camp horrors, no humanizing backstory, no evidence of any softness save boyish joy in the art of cruelty. Halfway through the film a young man celebrating the birth of his son is shot dead after surrendering in a Mexican standoff; the Basterds shrug and move on. At the climax of the film, a movie theatre full of Germans is exploded, shot, and burned to death. The modern viewer can’t help but cheer.

The opening chapter, Colonel Hans Landa vs. the outgroup under the floorboards, sways your sympathies in the opposite direction. No, it doesn’t make you hate the French or the Jews. But the tension—the silence and the ticking and the mounting requests and insinuations—is so unbearable that you can’t help but wish for someone to pull the Band-Aid. And the camera can’t do that. Only characters can. Only the character driving the action, and Landa drives the action in his every appearance. Something has to happen—and like the man onscreen, you cave.

Hans Landa alone seems to understand that he’s in a movie, which is perhaps why he’s so polite, so witty, so manically overacted. Perhaps this is how he sees through the Allies’ tricks and disguises: he assumes everyone else is an actor as well. And perhaps this is the apologia for his crimes: he’s just playing a role. The Basterds loathe the Nazis, but Landa bears no animosity towards the Jews, can empathize with them quite easily—it’s just, he likes to play detective and the Nazis were hiring. Is that really worse? Didn’t both the Walrus and the Carpenter eat as many as they could get?

And so, near the end of the film, when Landa cuts a deal to exchange his Hugo Boss for Levi Strauss, he asks of his prisoners the one question that would matter to a character in a period piece: “What shall the history books read?”

Landa’s argument, of course, is a load of shit.

In Inglourious Basterds, every disguise fails. The British film critic-turned-agent is unable to play the Nazi he’s seen on-screen. The German actress is revealed to be an Allied spy. The vengeful Shosanna is revealed as a sweet Jewish girl; the baby-faced Nazi lusting after her is shown to be a monster. The propaganda film burns. Only Lieutenant Aldo Raine and one Basterd make it out alive, and that’s because they’re American, i.e. monolingual.

Perception is a slave to narrative, but narrative has zip zero zilch nada to do with reality. The author is dead. Was Triumph of the Will a “good movie,” technically proficient and even emotionally moving? Absolutely. Could the director’s intentions have been “good,” apolitical, an attempt at beauty but nothing more? Unlikely in this case, but possible. But was Triumph of the Will “good”?

This is the obvious yet unswallowable truth: sometimes good people do bad things. “Nazi ain't got no humanity”? How many films have Nazis with wives, mistresses, children, pub games, medals for bravery? And yet Lieutenant Raine’s opening polemic is correct: the foot soldiers of the Third Reich worked for a Jew-hating, mass-murdering maniac: they needed to be destroyed. Reality isn’t Disney, where internal beauty works its way external. Reality isn’t even so kind as to match intentions with consequences. The American (Union) soldiers fighting against the Nazis (Confederacy) may have been motivated by every bit as much hatred and bloodlust, and yet they were necessary, they were the good guys. FYI—that’s irony.

“So you’re saying we should punch the alt-right?” Are you an idiot? The Nazis weren’t bad because they were Nazis, they were bad because of the things they did. If you actually think that punching a teenage Kekistani is going to bring down the New World Order, go ahead, but stop pushing the pillow of identity over the mouth of reality.

The goal of the System, the sum of vectors going both left and right, is to keep people arguing about abstractions of violence so they won’t deign to consider the ugliness of pragmatism. The radical left will asseverate that violence is justified, refusing to question whether their particular brand of protest is effective; the alt-right will keep rallying against cropped image lunatics, the finest examples of white genocide the media has to offer, never seriously considering that sometimes people lie on the internet; and “““centrists””” will deduce that since violence is never okay, since everyone is so irrational, nothing can be done. But that’s still a perspective: it’s the perspective of the camera.

Fuck that. This essay is a condemnation of anyone who thinks that the hypocrisy of the outgroup disproves their complaint, of anyone who thinks that good intentions are enough to absolve you from sin:

What you have to understand is that the PC debate is a farce. When the public demands a witch for the stake, the NYTimes selects David Brooks,

perhaps the most balding, white, sanctimonious chump at a newspaper full of balding, white, sanctimonious chumps. Here are four critiques; don’t read any of them unless you still find it exciting to watch a strawman burn.

What’s more interesting is that while Brooks criticizes upper-middle-class culture for being “laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class,” his article is nothing but illegible cultural signifiers. Which, duh, he’s writing for the Times. Brooks thus renders himself irrelevant (which was the point): his critics focus on his blunder of political correctness (the high school grad intimidated by a chicken pomodoro) and dismiss him as classist accordingly.

Lesson: Anyone who opposes political correctness from within will lose and be humiliated. Even without the unforced error, Brooks could have been dismissed as rich and white. His archives could have been mined for hypocrisy. Even a charged non sequitur would have crushed his argument: “So it’s no big deal that it’s legal to murder transpeople in all fifty states? No, I’m David Brooks, better focus on political correctness!” Of course, plenty of non-bourgeois oppose PC, but you’ll never hear that point of view in the Times because, yikes—internalized racism.

The result is that the anti-PC viewpoint is only taken seriously when it refuses the framework of PC. I don’t mean “taken seriously” like there is a meaningful debate. But when an internet troll calls you, say, “a fucking spic faggot,” you can’t reply “hah, well that just shows your heteronormative, colonialist assumptions!” without looking like a wimp. You have to reply with equal bile, which smells of hatred, maybe fear. And it’s no fun to be on the receiving end of hatred, but it’s better than being treated—like Mr. Brooks—with contempt.

Trolls, like catcallers, flashers, and school shooters, are men who ran the numbers and found: being hated > being invisible > being humiliated in the official channels. The first two go back to chimps, the third variable is society-dependent, and wowza does ours fuck it up. Men want to become masculine, citation needed, and when society shit-talks the honest path to manhood then it is inevitable that those foolish enough to listen will turn to the black market. And once that’s your game...

This blog is far from politically correct, but I try to mock only the deserving— bureaucrats, demagogues, cowards, and conformists—and for behavior, for the things people can change rather than those they can’t. But people tend to be insecure about the things they can’t change, and it just so happens that in America insecurity is always wound up in sex. Every debate about safe spaces thus devolves into a debate about gender: a catalog of body dysmorphisms, a who’s who of racial castrations, cuckold, bitch, cunt, whore, freak. You’d think everyone would be against this level of discourse, but gun control means one thing on Park Avenue and another thing entirely in Wichita. The law, in its majestic equality, forbids both the popular and unpopular from being unpopular. Calls for PC go nowhere because cruelty is the best weapon some people have.

Idiot [unemployed, probably no friends]: “So you’re sympathizing with racist, misogynist trolls. Wow. Just—I can’t even.” I didn’t say anything about sympathy. I said that a society gets what it pays for. IMHO, most shock-value trolling is both ineffective—it strengthens the case for Big Brother—and morally disgusting. But it’s a symptom, not the disease. Like oxycodone, trolling is recourse for people with nothing better to do, and like The Opioid Epidemic, the hand-wringing has less to do with fixing the problem than with making it so consumers don’t have to look at something ugly.

The content of trolling is thus extremely not the issue, but even so, I’ll take the bait. To accuse someone of failing at gender is the worst sort of punching-down. It’s not just hateful, it’s lazy, it’s bullying the foreign kid to make up for getting your ass beat at home. And it’s dumb. Forget about the moral argument—my critique is that the gender police are not even wrong.

Judith Butler (Gender Trouble), who coined the term “performative gender,” the antecedent to “sexuality is a spectrum,” has reached Antichrist status in some circles and in fact received a personal diss from Pope Benedict XVI. She’s good, and if you wanna throw down you gotta throw down with the best. So: Does Butler write like a pedant getting paid by the syllable? Does she open each topic with a chain of passive-aggressive rhetorical questions? Does she have the worst fanbase this side of Harris and Klebold? Does she have a point?

Hemlock time. How do you define gender? “Gender is a set of behaviors and attributes that correlate with sex.” Okay—what’s sex? “Aren’t you a doctor or something? XY and XX.” I’m flattered by the appeal to authority, but weren’t you the guy complaining when the CDC lowered the normal testosterone range? How do you feel about androgen insensitivity syndrome?

You can deny your eyes and insist that having an SRY gene makes Eden Atwood male, but from a medical perspective Eden is estrogenized, at risk for osteoporosis, and going down in the chart as an F.

“Look, fella, I know a dime-piece when I see one.” So modify your definition: hormone levels, fertility, waist-hip ratio, empathizing over systematizing, long bathroom lines, 10 Things I Hate About You...The first problem is that all of these traits exist on, sorry, a spectrum, from menopausal women to full-figured men. The choice of which traits to include—and where to draw the cut-offs—and if the division is binary or quaternary or nullary—is just like, your opinion, man (woman/they/them). The bigger problem is that now you’re defining sex as gender.

This reduces your original statement to, “Gender is a set of behaviors and attributes that correlate.” Which is true. And as far as stereotypes go, gendered ones ain’t bad, maybe even necessary to function, the guy wearing a V-neck probably does like shaving his pubes. But they are still stereotypes, man-made, imperfect, and punishing to those who do not conform. I’m no cultural relativist, some people suck and deserve cold and swift judgment, but is the presence or absence of armpit hair really the hill you want to die on?

There’s a practical argument to be made against fractalized gender: it’s confusing. With 3^^^3 possible sex-gender-orientation combos, how are kids supposed to know how to grow up? Aren’t imperfect gender roles better than 24-year-old otherkin? I hear you, guy wearing a Harley-Davidson jacket and listening to Mötley Crüe, but Tumblr semantics are a consequence of twenty-teen spirit, not the cause. If we weren’t arguing about the gender binary (and before we were) we’d be arguing about the range of femininity or masculinity; the crusade would be for pixie cuts and stick-and-poke tattoos to be considered as feminine as Brazilian butt lifts. Don’t be fooled by words—do you really want society to have one idealized template per gender? How would that ideal be decided? Majority rule?

There’s a hilarious overlap between the people who get mad about preferred pronouns and those who call for a return to “traditional masculinity.” The idealization of some Hollywood-ified tradition isn’t the problem; if you want to roleplay a fursona, go ahead. No, what’s pathetic is the begging. Rather than be a man, in spite of the system, you demand validation from the system for aspiring to be a man. Being against identity politics is the new identity politics. That’s why right-wing culture warriors are so into the idea of crybaby millennials—it’s comforting to believe that you’re actually strong (since you don’t drink from plastic water bottles) and that anyone getting laid is actually xeno-estrogenized. Even if this was true, obsessing over it, masturbating to it, using it as an excuse for self-pity and inaction—that makes you a  _ _ _ _. Four-letters. Multiple choice. Maybe hangman will teach you something.

The foundationalist reasoning of identity politics tends to assume that an identity must first be in place in order for political interests to be elaborated and, subsequently, political action to be taken. (Gender Trouble)

My beliefs are no doubt way south of Ms. Butler’s on the political compass, but we agree about one thing: that ain’t a nice way to go out.

But this is precisely the way in which the laundry-is-a-social-construct movement has failed. I have held off on criticizing them because it’s too easy, when you mock Rachel Dolezal for being “transracial” you get to pretend your own self-image is meaningful, but no, all identities are power poses in front of the bedroom mirror, meaningful only insofar as they help you with the rest of the day. “Well, SCIENCE says that—” You sure you want to play that game? Again, I respect anyone who has the courage to defy their assigned caste. I have no purity objections to a transhumanist society where the tap water runs ecstasy and you can get augmented genitals at Starbucks. I don’t even mind Bushwick. The problem with the mad libs youth isn’t the slew of labels—intersectional, nonbinary, pansexual, curious kinkster, ethically polyamorous, empath, casual baby witch (mostly crystals, auras/energy)—the problem is, what are you going to do with them? And there’s a patriarchy-approved answer: buy shit and beg for validation.

If gender is performative, if identity is not necessary for political action to be taken, if the possibilities are infinite once freed from the bounds of phallogocentrism, then why is it that so many cultural subversives sound exactly the same? You know the stereotype. Bondage. Anxiety. Smoking when drunk. Circlejerks of praise for completing the most basic of tasks. Very, very bad poetry. Expensive fashion draped across waif-like models. Guilty pleasures: junk food, liquor, and problematic TV. Hated roommates. Emoji marxism. Twitter. “today i feel cute enough for a selfie, might delete it later.” “didn’t get out of bed until 2 i’m trash lol” “wow, some casual racism at work today. i’ll just laugh and someday burst because i hate confrontation. but whatever.” I’m not saying these traits describe anyone real, although they might. I’m saying: why is this the stereotype?

Discussion questions: When people type in lower case, what emotion do they hope to convey to the reader? The alt-right often asks if “liking feminine traps” is “gay”—is there anything more heterosexual than wishing you had a weaker male friend to validate your penis? Would trans rights even be an issue if the majority were FtM? How many modern protests can be summarized as “consumers demand product”? Who would win, every chafed masculinist and joyless academic or one flamboyant 19th century playwright? As Oscar Wilde put it: “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.”

Choose:

HYPOCRISY’S BAD, BUT YOU’RE WORSE

Plebeians have been plebeian forever, granted, although the age of SSC’s examples (Medieval Britain?) is telling: contra the above, the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow literature exists whenever the majority of the population is literate.

But regardless, SSC (for the record, mostly Good) is being fooled by branding. No one compares the “fantasy” elements of Harry Potter to the U.S. political system. The fantasy elements are irrelevant, which is why Hamilton works just as well. Wannabe pundits compare the characters. And it is the characters, their psyches, the ambiguity that persists after two millennia of debate, that has made The Iliad stand the test of time. As clever as Artemis Fowl may be, it’s naive to pretend there’s no difference.

What makes it obvious that Deadpool (rating: R) is a kid’s movie while 2001: A Space Odyssey (rating: G) is not? Turn on the TV and flip through a few kids shows—nothing educational, I’m talking epilepsy triggers. After a couple, you’ll notice a unifying theme: everything is turned up to the max. All the characters are live/laugh/loving, fighting, crying; the soundtrack goes major or minor for every ephemeral mood. The characters have saucer eyes and exaggerated movements, The Emoji Movie being the logical conclusion of the genre, every motivation gets a musical number, these shows are MAXIMALLY EXPRESSIVE, leaving no doubt as to what emotion you are supposed to feel by the microsecond.

Please hear that I mean no disrespect when I say that this is why people with autism like Disney.

Q: Why did it feel good to watch [Disney movies] over and over again, that you kept wanting to? Watch them over and over again? How did that feel to you?

A: It felt comforting.

Q: Comforting.

A: It felt comforting.

Q: Why?

A: Because it would help me with...reducing my autism. (Radiolab)

Nothing wrong with that. Partisan bullshit aside, Harry Potter is great. But it’s important to recognize the limitations. Young adult fiction can have complex characters, worldbuilding, and rules of magic/ethics/rationality as long as the complexity is spelled out for you. “Snape was mean to Harry...but [flashback] that’s because, deep down, he was still in love with Lily...” What such stories will never ask you to do is intuit that Snape had tribulations, they assume that you have no instinct for cognitive empathy, which you don’t, which is why your politics are vapid. 

(When fiction deprives you of access to any character’s mind or explanation of events, you feel the opposite of comfort: horror. Saw is not a scary film because it is nothing but explanations; a Kafka story feels “off” even before shit goes down because the world and the characters refuse to show their work.)

Young adult fiction is a stepping stone, good if it helps you get better at understanding people without a Wes Anderson narrator whispering in your ear. Unfortunately, the ability to parrot accepted opinions is often taken for the ability to derive judgments of one’s own. I’m thinking of a homestuck 13 year old who is constantly told that he/she is “so mature” for getting straight A’s and being well-spoken with the dinner guests and not ditching class to smoke brick weed with Devin. Whether or not those behaviors are good, the kid isn’t mature, he or she is well-trained, and if you keep claiming maturity then you are going to stunt development. Sorry: not having an adolescent rebellion means you didn’t complete adolescence. The result is neotenous adults who are not overly sensitive—as conservative media would claim—but rather overly dependent on external rules. Cards Against Humanity is so funny, right? You get to say bad words, but it’s only a game.

“Help, I was a gifted kid and now I’m a normal adult!” Different adjective, same problem. Once Hal Incandenza is typecast as “gifted,” everyone will find it convenient to grade him (praise/no praise) on whether he is living up to his label. How do you look gifted? You can solve P vs. NP......or you can read the dictionary. I’ll bet that every ex-gifted kid who now uses “adulting” as a verb is a fan of those faux-pretentious memes, “mfw she confuses epistemics and ontology,” fitting Wikipedia philosophy into preformed joke structures, lowbrow expressions of highbrow concepts, a few college words to suggest immeasurable depths. You do what you know: exert the minimum necessary effort to convince other people of your intelligence. But you can’t convince yourself.

The consequences are predictable. Imposter syndrome. Scrupulosity. Sexual fetishes suffixed with -play. Gushing compassion ruined by the inability to picture how one appears to the outside world. Neediness. Ill-fitting jeans. Trouble with romance, and not because they don’t know how—deep down they do—but because they cling to a rulebook (“milady”) instead of trusting instinct. They were never allowed to have instincts. For that matter they’ve never really wanted, never felt a desire that wasn’t assigned, which is why: open relationships, switched majors, medicated anxiety, and ambivalence, ambivalence, ambivalence.

I know how heavy lies the burden of wasted potential. So please take this in the gentlest possible way: you were never that great. Greatness is a meaningless thing to apply to a kid, or a college student, or any idea that hasn’t forced it’s way onto paper. The only path is forward. “It’s our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” I think that’s Dumbledore, take it or leave it—there’s a time and a place for young adult fiction.

Coming soon:

THE FALSE POSITIVES

Movie reviewer/philosophizer “Film Crit Hulk” weighs in with “P.C. Culture Vs. The Big Joke - A tale of dissent in five acts”:

I'm sitting here at point of paralysis, trying to casually explain the rise of internet trolls, 4chan, hardcore gamer culture, lulz, twitter-eggs, gamergate, pepe the frog, the alt-right, the rich asshole and how they came all crashing together in spectacular ugliness...for the purposes of this conversation just know that all display a combo of 1) being virulently anti-PC. 2) being the kinds of people who have really sad, internal existences and internet they can be anonymous and escape into. And 3) a core philosophy that sees the value of what I will call "the big joke."

That is to say that the world itself is a joke.

I feel bad for mocking a lawful good superhero, but the above paragraph is the sickly sentimentality of someone who has fed on his own vomited platitudes for too long. If I ever reach “the point of paralysis” while explaining “lulz” or “twitter-eggs,” euthanize me.

There's a reason The Dark Knight's Joker struck such a cord with this populace and it wasn't just his good performance, it was his mantra: "Why so serious?" It was his ability to reign terror and tear apart hypocrisy. It was the sense power that comes with having such a freeing attitude toward the cares of society. The pure, bleak joy of nihilistic glee.

There isn't a side. There isn't a belief. The only goal is to burn down your side. After all, "Some men just want to watch the world burn."

Comparisons between children’s fantasy and adult reality tend toward the inane, but there’s a particular irony here: back in ‘08, when The Dark Knight came out, every dinner party worth schmoozing agreed that the pyromaniacs in question were supposed to represent Al Qaeda. And when someone pointed this out, the accepted reply was to say something about how, well, it’s more complicated than that, you see, back in the ‘80s everyone was doing a lot of cocaine and tweaking pretty hard about the Soviet Union, and well, maybe we funded some terrorists here and there, mistakes were made, that’s all I’m saying. It’s a little naive for Christopher Nolan to act like they’re just bad.

Now the analogy has switched teams and it didn’t get any less idiotic. I too have observed that some individuals are psychopaths who care about nothing except mashing the dopamine button. I have never observed a group of such people, in fact I’m not sure it’s possible, shit would go Reservoir Dogs before you could say “defect in the prisoner’s dilemma.” What makes fascism terrifying is that most fascists are not psychopaths. Nurses get Milgram’d on the daily, told to hurt people via IV pokes and pulled bandages, often doing this when patients are demented or delirious or otherwise screaming No No No. And yet nurses are some of the most compassionate people in existence. How do they stay sane? Any violation of another requires the same mentality: this is for the greater good. Repeated like a mantra, whether you’re building a utopia or feeding the kids or preparing to shoot up a school: this is for the greater good. It’s comforting to believe that the bad guys are motivated by “nihilistic glee” because that means you aren’t one of them. “If anything, my problem is...I care too much,” you say, between sobs, as you bring your boot down on the curb.

Political correctness is defined as, "the avoidance, often considered as taken to extremes, of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.

For the moment, I hope you can get past any associations you might have and understand that the intent behind being politically correct is clear: empathy with marginalized groups.

We're supposedly having a debate between PC and Anti-PC culture, but we can't have a debate unless we're really talking about what we're really talking about...We have get away from so much of the false equivalency that surrounds this conversation...we can't miss the only two sides that matter:

Victim and victimizer.

Here’s the thing: no.

Film Crit Hulk’s argument has such polished stupidity that it reflects a shining truth: the switch from “being politically correct” to “PC culture.” This is the sleight of hand common to all defenses of political correctness. Being politically correct is something you do. PC culture is something you do to others.

Two case studies, and hold off on your value judgments:

1. Milo Yiannopoulos mocks and misgenders a transgender student.

2. Harvard rescinds 10 admission offers to students who posted offensive memes. (Incidentally—check out the cover photo of the linked articles.)

Intentionally misgendering someone is an aggressive act. This is true even if transgenderism is attention whoring or special snowflakism or whatever—misgendering violates the Zeroth Commandment of “Thou shalt call others by their chosen name.” You can argue that misgendering is justified, that it’s impractical to cater to every pronoun, that you shouldn’t encourage a society-wide “mental illness”—we can duke that out elsewhere—but don’t pretend it isn’t an act of aggression.

Contrast with the Harvard story: posting offensive memes in a private group chat is not an act of aggression. It may suggest poor character, it certainly suggests weak judgment, and Harvard has the right to kick ‘em out, but don’t pretend the dichotomy is between victim and victimizer when there was no victim.

Discussions of political correctness go nowhere because one team is hurt by the first example and retaliates with the second, the other is hurt by the second and retaliates with the first, and the internet makes private public so it’s impossible to tell the difference.

Film Crit Hulk spends the rest of his 8000 word essay on variations of:

So I'll ask again: why am I doing all this? Why write about movies and politics? Yes, it's because I give a shit. It's because I feel insanely lucky and want to express endless gratitude. I do not consider it heroic or anything more self-serving than the simple idea that it is important. It's because I feel compelled and passionate about it.

Because I don't think the world is a joke.

It's the only one we got and I'm trying to run around with 60 million other Americans and try to hold it together with duct tape. You can demonize this. You can demonize me. I don't care.

I don’t think you should stunt like Jesus on the cross when your grand insight is "them motherfuckers be crazy." But sure, I’m willing to buy that Hulk believes his own gospel. What he doesn’t get is that he holds the majority opinion. The Panopticon gives out mad brownie points for calling out -isms, even private victimless -isms; why wouldn’t it, you’re giving it that much more power over what used to be privacy. And maybe that’s fine, maybe if you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to fear, but don’t say I didn’t warn you: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." If society subsidizes political correctness, then some virtuous people will be PC but so will any competent sociopath. And no matter how noble the intentions behind a policy, when sociopaths exploit that policy, exploit it to shame and punish people who haven’t done anything wrong—well, you’ve got to admit that’s kind of funny.

Choose:

THE GENDER NULLARY

That oughta pay my clickbait dues for the last essay. Now who wouldn’t be excited to share this with family and friends? Sure, I’ll grant that the above video is seven or so months old. But since the shot remixed round the world occurred within a news cycle of Trump’s inauguration, the high magic of low analogies merged the two events in the public memory and into the defining moment of 45th Presidency discourse. To date, xanaxed teens echo mating calls of “let’s punch nazis together <3” while dysmorphic trenbolone masturbators reference “antifa thugs” as proof that the left cannot be bargained with. By now even the least continent nursing home residents have read oversized font about the alt-right. This incident is when protestor vs. protestor became cool, half of society cracked knuckles and the other half made noises of dismay and grabbed popcorn. Took less than two months for a right-wing clapback. As I’m writing this, a car hit some protesters in Charlottesville and the torches of vengeance are burning. But it all started in January. That was when shit got real.

And so let us note that shit had never been less real. Spencer—white nationalist, alt-right celebrity now in disgrace—looks ridiculous here as elsewhere, an inveterate hand-raiser, a petulant Boy Scout going for the fascism merit badge. This guy sustains one jab, no combo, for being a Nazi, except he says he’s not a Nazi, although he’s talking about a cartoon frog that was appropriated by Nazis, except it wasn’t. A guy who couldn’t goose-step if he worked on a poultry farm, whose following was negligible before the media trip, whose great coup was, what, being the subject of a VICE article? Big fucking deal, I can get a VICE article right now. Hold on, give me a minute...okay: “My Entire Body Is A Sleeve Tattoo And Every Time I Eat Pussy I Burn A Copy Of ‘Basic Economics’...On Acid!” Clearly I’m more deserving of the hit single, and yet Richard Spencer is the one who gets serenaded, Booooooooorn In The USA—except that song isn’t as patriotic as the Youtube comments suggest, it’s about a dude whose life is ruined by living in America, so...? We’re fighting about a symbol of a symbol of a symbol of a symbol of a symbol and half the connections are wrong. The only thing that’s real is the hatred. Or rather, the hatred is made real by our collective desire to pretend that anything else is.

Not that I wouldn’t run down the Buddha if he took too long in the crosswalk. I know well how animus is necessary for sanity when you’re doing needless work on a pointless project for a product that will benefit no one. I’m quite aware that the mere existence of people who hate you—even if you never meet them—is enough to put faces on walls and a sick feeling in your stomach oddly similar to shame. I’m not asking for empathy, I have no illusions about peace and love. All I’m asking for is, exhales, an attempt at understanding. Know your enemy. Then allocate your anger accordingly.

So okay. This above video spread because of the associated ethical conundrum: is it okay to punch Nazis? The type of person who spends all day masturbating to hashtags, “romantic skeptic, academic creative, hopeful pessimist; essentializing is often reductive, so I’ve been working to inhabit a space of tension more comfortably”—says yes, punch ‘em whenever possible. Obvious retort: you sure you’re gonna stick to Nazis? No possibility at all for that slope to get slippery? Fair enough. But let me steelman the antifa argument: assuming you have a foolproof detector, isn’t it sometimes okay to punch Nazis qua Nazis?

Libertarians will say that thoughtcrime shouldn’t be punished. Which is true, but professed Nazi-dom isn’t thoughtcrime, it’s speech-crime. Consider you and your hypothetical gf at the proverbial club. If some guy says, “Damn, I just know your girl would love riding this dick,” he’s not making a threat, merely stating his opinion. And yet of course you shouldn’t play lawyer, of course you should introduce your Heineken bottle to his nasal bridge. How is that different than first-striking someone whose stated opinion is “gas the Jews”?

“Is it morally okay to punch Nazis?” It depends, sometimes it’s okay to punch someone just for sucking at improv. The problem is that it’s a deontological question, and like many such deontological questions there’s an undercurrent of narcissism, “I’m the type of person who [believes in social justice/believes in free speech],” but whatever, I’m not sure people can hear that word anymore and it’s better stated elsewhere. TLP’s insights were genius, read them twice; I’m just doing the math. Assume for the sake of argument that genocide is bad and that bonafide Nazis who support it are also bad. The correct question is: what will be the consequences of the loudly proclaimed policy of “punch Nazis?” Will it reduce the number of Nazis? Will it lead us to war? What does it take to kill an idea?

Anyway, it was while attempting to answer these questions that I stumbled upon a global conspiracy to enslave the human race.

Biblical man didn’t build a tower to sneak into Heaven’s happy hour without ID. He wanted to “make a name; lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” The tower was symbolic, decorative, a community service project. It was supposed to bring people together.

And accordingly, the LORD doesn’t care about the tower, doesn’t even mention it by name. The tower is merely a tip-off that something is awry. When God descends to Earth, His complaint is,

'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do; and now nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do.’

The Judeo-Christian capital G—o—d, robed, bearded, opinionated, deadlifts, thematically male, is the avatar of civilization, just check the year. Even so, His omnipotence is not uncontested. He knows this. You should see what He did to the guys with the golden calf. God said, “Let there will be light,” and there was light. But just as Nyx preceded Zeus, that means the darkness was already there. And the house always wins at the second law of thermodynamics.

“Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do.” God didn’t punish Homo sapiens sapiens for hubris, he launched a pre-emptive strike. “Now nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do.” Far be it from me to psychoanalyze God. But if I’m reading the tone correctly, He did this because He was scared.

II. 

But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life and life only.

—Bob Dylan

Everyone deserves to figure out the meaning of life at least once or twice. We’re talking late teens and early twenties, when work is too easy and finding better work too hard. Turning the post-acid feeling of cosmic oneness into a fridge-note to-do list is harder than expected, but whatever man, MWF pass/no pass. Start from the basics. Matter is math, mind is matter. Determinism except for the quantum stuff. Time is a flat circle, space is a mobius strip, morality is aesthetics and aesthetics is quantifiable. Big Bang and billiard balls of 1s and 0s colliding and uncolliding on loop. “Though existence has no inherent meaning,” you tell your ex over chamomile, “in the end, all we have is each other.” Reply: something about how all behavior is an expression of the ancestral Art that is shared by our collective unconscious. “Um, yeah,” annoyed, “I thought that was obvious.”

Ah, surprise surprise, turns out your inch and footnoted masterpiece was predicted by the Greek philosopher Fuchylus in 380 B.C.E. Like, you could have right-clicked that guy’s papyrus for synonyms. Not to mention the next twenty-three hundred years of middlebrow philosophy you somehow missed. Why did you think your reductionism was original? Even your doodles are boring. Wolfram plays coy. The rock band turns to sediment. Making a fool of yourself drunk won’t get a rise from fate and sobriety gives a hangover too. Atoms don’t touch they just brush electrons; the sky magnifies the sun onto the anthills of man. Spilled soda on the counter and cashed bowls on the kitchen table; it’s the witching hour, and some guy in an Neff beanie is asking if you have any Xanax. And the meaning of life strikes again, that sacred cosmic oneness, how strange it is to be anything at all—but just for a second. And with the wisdom of a philosopher, you reply, “Dude, I need to sleep.”

That’s when the open-mic audience would start finger-snapping and I would do a handle pull from whatever was available, probably Seagram’s. Look, we’ve all been there. And to the best of our abilities, I hope we’ve all moved on.

It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown. (Beyond Good & Evil)

But I also hope that you’ve kept some sympathy for homebrew creation myths. Even though one inevitably stumbles upon some version of “existence is suffering, might as well floss,” the challenge of applying vocab words to reality sometimes reveals patterns that would not otherwise be obvious.

So consider yourself warned: the unfortunately academic ideas hereafter will not take the controls you so desperately proffer, and they will not grant you an answer that does not exist. I still believe they are important.

The question is thus: why don’t we choose to be happy?

For those who doubt humanity’s anti-joy stance, look no further than the sci-fi concept of Wireheading. If in the year 20XX the Hegemony announces a Guaranteed Happiness Machine, would you use it? There’s no catch. You sign in triplicate, there’s low-volume Sinatra playing from an overhead speaker, a lab tech hooks up electrodes to your forehead, terms and conditions, agree, YES, ON. And then you feel good. As good as it is possible to feel. The machine makes heroin look like a sharpie high. The feeling it gives you isn’t mere hedonistic pleasure, it is limitless understanding, loving and being loved, progress and growth—whichever nouns or adjectives you prefer, the sum feeling is happiness. The machine never stops working and it never induces a tolerance. You can stop anytime, although no one ever does, they live in rapture while undergrads making $12.50 an hour tend to their fluids. Ninety years later, they die.

I have no doubt that some readers would hit the ON button so hard they’d break a metacarpal. Not unreasonable, if you are depressed or a hippie circa 1967. I can’t question your axioms, I’ll drop a few nickels when I pass by on Telegraph Ave. Those of you who reject suicide by Hallmark, I agree, but please note that instead of happiness, equanimity, transcendence, or any other internal state postulated as the ‘meaning of life,’ you are prioritizing something that is not a feeling at all.

A second thought experiment re: that something. Suppose that your behoodied Silicon Valley boss offers you an all-expenses-paid vacation to virtual reality paradise. This is more than a chemical high: an analysis of your preteen forum posts nudges the universe into whatever genre fiction your unconscious craves most. The VR offers you the chance to live out your dreams. Alas, for copyright reasons, any memories of the vacation will be wiped upon your return, any skills you acquired will be unlearned, and any metadata of your adventures will be destroyed. You’ll remember inhaling the sedative, then you’ll wake up with lumbar back pain to show that time has passed.

I’m more tempted by dreamland than the empty calories of wireheading, but even so I recognize that both choices are fundamentally the same: an ecstasy that leaves no trace vs. bland but tangible reality. The decision is almost binary. If you would spend a year in the Matrix, why not twenty? Why not the rest of your life?

These concerns are not theoretical.

In the study, Kahneman and colleagues looked at the pain participants felt by asking them to put their hands in ice-cold water twice (one trial for each hand). In one trial, the water was at 14C (59F) for 60 seconds. In the other trial the water was 14C for 60 seconds, but then rose slightly and gradually to about 15C by the end of an additional 30-second period.

Both trials were equally painful for the first sixty seconds, as indicated by a dial participants had to adjust to show how they were feeling. On average, participants’ discomfort started out at the low end of the pain scale and steadily increased. When people experienced an additional thirty seconds of slightly less cold water, discomfort ratings tended to level off or drop.

Next, the experimenters asked participants which kind of trial they would choose to repeat if they had to. You’ve guessed the answer: nearly 70% of participants chose to repeat the 90-second trial, even though it involved 30 extra seconds of pain. Participants also said that the longer trial was less painful overall, less cold, and easier to cope with. Some even reported that it took less time. (Summary by this website, source Thinking Fast and Slow)

Ur-Rationalist Daniel Kahneman distinguishes between the experiencing self, which reacts to the bartender’s “you’ve had enough” with pain fiber shocks of disbelief, and the remembering self, which, subject to biases such as duration neglect and the peak-end rule, leaves the two star Yelp review. The cold water experiment is a brilliant demonstration of how, as in the wirehead and dreamland examples above, our remembering and experiencing selves often disagree. This should be intuitive: consider the TV series ruined by the finale, the regret that follows junk food bliss, or the bad date that turns into a comedic memory.

Except Kahneman doesn’t take his idea far enough. Consider the motivations of a suicide bomber. The experiencing self knows nothing save immediate pleasure and pain. It has no interest in martyrdom. It will only pull the trigger to end some greater agony, such as during sickness, when some elemental part of you literally does “want to die.” The remembering self is what chooses to endure the flu, since it knows from its internalized stories that all pain eventually subsides; failure of this mechanism is the cognitive basis for depression. At times, the remembering self will even coax the experiencing self into discomfort, e.g. work, in exchange for a future reward, e.g. dough. But the case of a kamikaze, the remembering self is willing to die not for its own postponed pleasure, but so that some other remembering self can look back on its behalf.

Ask any teenage boy, would you prefer an miserable life—and I mean no “life satisfaction,” no “dopaminergic reinforcement,” nothing but anhedonia and abject suffering—with a great legacy, or a happy but unremarkable stay? All he’ll have to do is point to his Nirvana t-shirt. In his own faux-hawked way, he’s continuing the sacrificial tradition of his ancestors: warriors, prophets, and parents. Any given hamartia may cut your QALYs in half, but plenty of Greeks would’ve taken an arrow to the heel in exchange for a Homeric cameo. This is why utilitarianism is for nerds. I get the need for a heuristic, fine, but the remembering self doesn’t want quality of life, it wants quality of death, and it is impossible to factor that into your calculations because nothing ends, Adrian, nothing ever ends. Your story continues postmortem on the Ship of Theseus down the River Styx, vulnerable to necrophiliacs and redeemable by eulogy. The remembering self is not bound by pleasure, it is not bound by time, it is not even bound by self.

If someone hits your hippocampus with a rock and proceeds to wipe every trace of your existence from humanity’s collective memory, then you aren’t you anymore, pick a new name and maybe stop messing with the CIA; but anything short of that and the remembering self rises up like The Thing. In every interaction worth memory, some fraction of your breath-by-breath biography is pasted into the the recipient’s memory and thus into their remembering self. The size of this interpolation varies, as does the fidelity of translation. Cashier gets a caricature, lovers get a short story, and you get an anonymous manifesto called ‘The Tower.’ Burroughs: 

The word has not been recognised as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host. (The Electronic Revolution)

Of course, it’s not just words. It’s everything.

The idea of “cultural evolution” is as old as Darwin, the idea of transmissible cultural information bits—“memes”—at least as old as Dawkins [1]. For the idea of human consciousness as a collection of memes, Keith Henson coined the term “memeoid,” although he defined the term as “victims who have been taken over by a meme to the extent that their own survival becomes inconsequential.” Pleading guilty to the goofy vocab, I contend that we are all such victims. Schizophrenics are absolutely correct to be worried about the insertion and theft of one’s thoughts. Memory is a collection of memes. The so-called remembering self scores our attempts to secure the interests of such memes, the experiencing self totals the millivolts of pain and pleasure, and the algorithm to which we ascribe free will chooses between them.

But by this point I hope that I have demonstrated the limitations of Kahneman’s terminology. So, in older and perhaps better words: superego, id, ego. Q.E.D.

III.

One is a sterile number. When there is only one there can be no love, no yearning, no union. Two are required to forge a relationship. Without the other, the self has no meaning. (Myth = Mithya)

Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind. (Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius)

The first dichotomy, per Freud, divides ego-instincts from object-instincts. Ego-instincts bubble up from within. Our necessities, the autonomic-prompted lower rungs on Maslow’s hierarchy, are such: hunger, fatigue, defecation, micturition, respiration, crude sexual desire. Newborns, lacking cerebellar motor plans, with vision only capable of parsing light and motion, respond solely to ego-instincts, treating the entire world as an extension of their ill-defined bodies. We are born narcissists.

Object-instincts, together composing the infamous libido, develop as we learn the range of our power and begin to direct it outwards. Freud marks draws his second dichotomy as the yin and yang of libido: Eros, the love instinct, and Thanatos, the death instinct. I have written elsewhere about this dichotomy. Whether our interactions with the outside world can be reduced to two fundamental modes is debatable, but while other categorizations are possible, I find this one to be a useful approximation.

In my view, Eros—true love, sure, but also the sacred moments of connection between strangers in a mosh pit—is best approximated as belonging. Not cognitive empathy, affective; not the conscious decompiling of another’s code, just the instinctual feeling of namaste, “the light in me sees the light in you.” Eros can mirror neuron a puppy or a mood-concordant landscape; even the Buddhist desire to renounce desire falls within her domain. Eros asks for nothing save acceptance. Acceptance is belonging and belonging is pleasurable. Only when we see ourselves reflected by the universe can we believe that it is part of us.

With Thanatos, Freud describes an extreme. Our other primordial desire is not for death per se, but for control—Ananke. Self-destruction is the ultimate form of such power—the pleasure of failure is that you know how to do it—but sudoku falls on the same path. Ananke hates nothing but entropy. Ananke rewards us for turning atoms into tools and tools into appendages, so much the better if those atoms comprise other humans, viz. the high of domination. But Ananke cares not if we are weak, so long as we are choosing to be weak, viz. the high of submission. Ananke demands action. Ananke compels us to learn, to make the universe predictable, to gain control over time, what next happens, and space, what happens next. Only when the universe is predictable can we believe that it is part of us.

"The ego is the libido’s original home," says Freud. Other human beings are no more than anthropomorphized objects and anthropomorphization is no more than self-reflection in a funhouse mirror. We are born narcissists and it is narcissism to which our instincts pull.

Exposition and truisms, nothing more distasteful, I apologize for inflicting them on you. What I’m trying to prove is that the battle between id and superego is cooked from the start. All of the above goddesses are bound within the id. The id is what we want, by definition. The superego has to sneak and skulk around this fact. Its power—our sacred power as conscious beings—is that we can choose how to go about wanting.

How do we make that choice? At first, Pavlov. Suckling is a spinal cord reflex, calories are tasty, welcome to the rat race, kid. Ananke drives development: contracting the sarcomeres of babbling or crawling is intrinsically pleasurable because it is a new form of control. Once we piece together the object permanence scam, operant conditioning takes over as lead programmer. Convincing dozens of children to sit quietly and crank out long division is possible only with a mass conspiracy of reward and punishment for strange, bureaucratic tasks, see also golf, San Francisco, writing longform on Tumblr. These inculcated memes compete for the real estate of your mind, e.g. a meme A that reads, “Do not allow meme B entry.” (Although the message might sneak past the immune system as a mutated meme B2.) Memes also cooperate—“Do not forget meme C, no matter what”—and this process of anchoring new memes to existing residents (per terminology, creating a “memeplex”) is the mechanism behind semantic memory. As always, the map becomes the territory. Certain memes sate the id and are reinforced into habit, new memes follow through behavioral association and in turn dangle the carrot and wield the stick. The final algorithm of one’s existence must to some extent serve Eros and Ananke in each moment (you have to “want” in order to act), but it may or may not work towards their long-term procurement, or the sum of their derivatives, happiness. However, pleasure or not, the remembering self will use the superego’s algorithm when assigning meaning to memory: “Did I do what I really wanted?”

But whoever considers the fundamental impulses of man...will find that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another, and that each one of them would have been only too glad to look upon itself as the ultimate end of existence and the legitimate LORD over all the other impulses. (Beyond Good & Evil)

The remembering self doesn’t care what MacGuffin you pick. Five-act memories are the natural consequence of movement toward a goal—static friction, activation energy, climax, relaxation, rest, there’s no other way to so much as cross the street. Stasis is the enemy, action begins with the disruption of routine. Minimum wage jobs are worse because of their pointlessness more than because of their indignity, work harder/better/faster/stronger and no one cares, screw up and you’re replaced without a missed beat. No direction, no story; the days blur together until arthritis leaves you crippled. Stoned summers don’t get you off the hook, duration neglect compresses both good and bad sensations. No matter how pleasant, when nothing is happening, the superego starves. There’s a reason couples fight on vacation.

The secret to a cozy deathbed is to pick a single memeplex and grind towards its goals alone, a Nietzschean Will to Power over Schopenhauer’s Will. Being a dilettante is simply too easy: flat lines don’t form memories. Reinventing yourself between brunches feels good—the illusion of control—until you’ve dreamt the same dreams too many times and they no longer get you high. A little navel-gazing, mind-wracking, and soul-searching is necessary, but adolescence is supposed to come with an expiration date, and adulthood marks the switch from explore to exploit. The menthol-smoking relativists in acid-wash jeans are correct: the meaning of life is arbitrary, constructed, cultural, fake. But the path to a meaningful life is universal.

Happiness and meaning—sometimes they overlap, sometimes you must choose. I don’t have the answer, there is no answer, all I can do is warn you about the trap by which you obtain neither. Even if you’re sign-me-up-for-the-Orgasmatron all in with Team Experiencing Self, the id is too myopic to be any good at long-term hedonism. The unchecked id would have left us cavemen, samizdat & chill wouldn’t even be on the table. Conversely, even if you’re polishing trophies for Team Remembering Self, the default superego is an incoherent mess, infected with millions of selfish, MALIGNANTLY USELESS memes that have no interest in your happiness, care not for the coherence of your autobiography, and will drive you to madness rather than let you winnow them away.

The key word is default. We all have some degree of protection, either through physical isolation or memetic immunity, “Mom says not to trust strangers who say they have candy.” But most of us fall short of contact precautions. And in that case, we are ruled by probability—by Moloch, by Nyx, by Nature, the only force that God fears. Why else would He confuse mankind’s language? Why would He demand obedience to 613 commandments? Circumcision? What was Judaism, with rabbinical prohibition against interfaith marriage or proselytization, except God’s attempt to create a religion that would not spread? It failed, as it always does. Autotune and Manifest Destiny. The house always wins at the second law of thermodynamics.

With free flow of information, how can any belief system hold? All belief systems rest on axioms, if you grant equal footing to a contradictory axiom, the belief system collapses. I suppose I’m that guy claiming that atheists invent a God—not an interventionist God, nor a fuzzy deism, but a set of unprovable principles that determine right and wrong and to which one must atone. Don’t give me that humanism bullshit. When someone slaps your hypothetical girlfriend’s ass in the proverbial club, what does humanism say you should do? At least toxic masculinity has an answer. Humanism is a motte and bailey, a set of milquetoast ideals which provide no guidance in day to day life and so leave you passive (“Hey, man—first principles!”) or, more likely, vulnerable to whatever crypto-ideology is most virulent. If you do not have a code of conduct, one will be provided for you.

With free flow of information—a suppressed memetic immune system, a hypothetical Tower of Babel—it is statistically inevitable that every meme will attain its most infectious form. There are countless ways to make an idea more or less palatable, but the first step is always the same, a single amino acid substitution, a lingering desire affixed to every thoughtlet: “SPREAD THIS MEME.” With free flow of information, this will be the only value that remains—every other axiom will be cancelled out by its opposite, but the codon “don’t spread this meme” will, definitionally, not spread.

A pathogen that is too restrained will lose out in competition to a more aggressive strain that diverts more host resources to its own reproduction. However, the host, being the parasite's resource and habitat in a way, suffers from this higher virulence. This might induce faster host death, and act against the parasite's fitness by reducing probability to encounter another host (killing the host too fast to allow for transmission).

But as long as transmission continues despite the virulence, virulent pathogens will have the advantage. So, for example, virulence often increases within families, where transmission from one host to the next is likely, no matter how sick the host. Similarly, in crowded conditions such as refugee camps, virulence tends to increase over time since new hosts cannot escape the likelihood of infection. (“Optimal virulence,” Wikipedia)

At least natural selection is a package deal: half your genes per haploid donation. Even the most selfish of genes is bound to help its chromosome buddies reproduce. Not so with our minds. Speech can excise one meme at a time. That meme has no obligation to help any of your other memes spread. Indeed, insofar as your other memes occupy time and energy, they are its enemies. The result: an overpowering desire to be understood, all I want in life’s a little bit of love to take the pain away, unquenchable, because the memes that want to be understood are contradictory and changing from moment to moment: you have failed to define a you, so you are a vessel [2]. 

At least the force of natural selection acts along one axis. Here, you are torn apart.

IV.

Art is form struggling to wake from the nightmare of nature. (Sexual Personae)

“Culture is not about esthetics” by Gwern Branwen is worth reading even though I oppose its conclusion with a vehemence others reserve for colonoscopies and Ayn Rand. I can’t do justice to 125 footnotes of background research with a bullet-point paragraph, but the argument goes:

We subsidize the creation of art, both directly (museum fees, camgirl wishlists) and indirectly (universities, copyright law).

There is already far more art than could possibly be consumed in a lifetime.

Old art is better than new art—because of the selection bias of time, if nothing else.

People would be happier if they consumed only the best art.

We should not encourage the production of new art; indeed, if it truly is harmful, we should ban it. (Gwern gives nonfiction a pass.)

If you’re not in the right mindset, this may seem completely insane, which it is, but you have to respect a guy who goes for the null hypothesis hat trick. Intellectual honesty is best achieved by contrarianism against every belief encountered, including contrarianism. We arrive at verisimilitude by ping-ponging between falsehoods, praise be unto Gwern for serving as one of the paddles.

The first objection to an art ban: what qualifies as “better?” Let’s assume that all art can be boiled down to a single rating between 0 and 10. Perhaps even then an 8 may be situationally better than a 10; perhaps for some people Eminem’s rhymes resonate more than George Chaucer’s. Do niche and novel issues benefit from niche and novel perspectives?

Gwern says no. “Fiction can be unfairly persuasive, bypassing our rational faculties.” “Time consumption is zero-sum between fiction & nonfiction.” “As a society, is it good to have our discussions and views about incredibly important matters like space exploration hijacked by fiction?”

Either fiction is effective as propaganda and setting societal agendas, or it isn’t. If the latter, then the loss is nil; if the former, then fiction is dangerous!

Gwern seems to think that if we banned Guardians of the Galaxy the relevant audience would switch to Douglas Hofstadter. The assumption here is that nonfiction exists, distinct from and more truthful than fiction. I don’t buy it. Whenever a human is involved it’s fiction, and if policy decisions came from Excel spreadsheets that data still would have been collected by a mortal of limited peripheral vision. Please recall that extremely fucked up scientific racism tomes of yesteryear such as “Crania Americana” and "Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race" were nonfiction bestsellers. A glance at the news site of your choice will show that we have achieved only a marginal improvement in veracity. If you ban sensationalist fiction, odds are that the proles will get their info from sensationalist nonfiction, and if you think our discussions and views are hijacked now, just wait.

But the greater oddity here is that, when pondering the possible benefits of fiction, Gwern chooses to talk about...space. This reeks of too much Modafinil. Gwern gives two lines of courtesy toward the majority of modern fiction:

Now, what good deeds could only new works produce? Certainly it’s not edifying & educating our youth; it is not as if the pedagogy of Euclidean geometry has changed much over the last millennia, nor is 20th century fiction known for teaching moral lessons.

What the hell? I don’t know what 20th century fiction Gwern has been reading. Even Go, Dog. Go! had a moral.

That’s right. Love in the Time of Cholera, natch. Fiction needs motion which requires a MacGuffin which generates a value system around it. Fiction dispenses a moral lesson even when it’s not trying, and before you come at me with “the only moral question is whether you voted for Trump and how many bednets are you sending to Africa!!!!” allow me to point out that fiction is strongest when it deals with microethics, not “is war bad y/n.” (“A triumph of honesty...a shocking exploration of modern values.”— The New York Times.) We face a hundred small dilemmas every time we get close enough to breathe another person’s exhaled nitrogen and NOTHING BUT ART CAN ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS. We can gin and rummy about how conserved moral questions are over time—I’m sympathetic to Gwern’s object-level claims, the classics are underutilized, subsidies are bad—but even if the disease is ancient, you have to speak a living language if you want to recognize the symptoms.

All of this supports the first objection: that new art provides a nontrivial benefit to the observer. But I’m going for a bigger claim: it doesn’t have to.

Gwern states the following:

The humanities have made notoriously little use of science’s techniques, worldview, or results...Conceptually, I see no problem with a nation of sober hard-headed engineers and scientists doing quite as well without the novelists.

This seems like Gwern’s idea of a utopia. So let us suppose this art-banned nation of engineers exists—every man, woman, and child, speech-therapied and carbuncular, saluting a flag of the golden spiral—and indeed, is so successful that a post-scarcity economy is achieved and everyone retires to leisure. Now, enlighten me: what would these people do all day?

They could read Dostoyevsky. Maybe Notes from the Underground, if they’ve retained a sense of irony. They couldn’t write analyses of Dostoevsky, however—that would be new art. There wouldn’t be much in the way of comedy, but why would that be needed when one can recite from the classic jest and prankbooks of yore? As for tragedy, at the funeral of a loved one, choose from any of the more than sufficient eulogies already written. No new fashion but khakis are always in season. No new recipes but who doesn’t like Mealsquares. They could fuck. They could play tic-tac-toe. They could plug into the Orgasmatron—and this, I suspect, is the endgame of Gwern’s utilitarian fantasy hell, inspired by a glance at Maslow’s Hierarchy and, “Well, that part seems unnecessary.” I know it’s gauche to claim that your opponent’s philosophy would lead to the extinction of the human race, but he not busy being born is busy dying. “People would be happier consuming only the best art.” A rat in a cage will mash its nucleus accumbens until it starves to death. Are you a rat?

Gwern never defines what is art, perhaps because a broad conception would render his argument absurd, so I’ll help, apologies in advance for clichés. Art is compressed communication. The better the compression, with regards to both perceived fidelity and amount of information contained, the more artful the art. Limitation—poetic meter, scene-cut-scene, verse-chorus-verse—is the essence of every form because removing redundancies and noise, unnecessary memes, is how one creates a map. Satire is effective when via exaggeration or noun-swapping absurdism it calls attention to the underlying pattern. A twelve minute ambient or noise track may lack musical structure but conveys a precise-yet-generalizable mood to the listener; a random field recording feels less artful because it does not. A Pollock canvas may be composed through randomness and chaos, but the choice to use randomness and chaos...and so on. Life itself is walls between fluid. Beauty is objective, because we all interpret beauty by this criterion, and subjective, because experience dictates the extent to which we can unpack a given compression [3].

Art is not necessary for a meaningful life: if you contort your superego enough you can find meaning in rolling a boulder uphill. But given the Tower of Babel, the Will known to teenage pirates as “information wants to be free,” most human beings are compelled to spread memes above all else. And if your goal is such, then you must choose between compression and manic, babbling psychosis. The sharing inherent in romance and child-rearing is still the most efficient method of spreading one’s memes, but a conversation and a concerto are different in degree, not kind. Good fortune spoils if you cannot share it, yet when the pink slip arrives your instinct is to forgo the yellow pages to work on your novel. The old and homeless tell bawdy jokes and cirrhotic anecdotes, anything to anyone who will listen, street preferred to asylum, that anoxic last ditch expulsion of gametes trying to leave behind something of meaning. We live an world of aspiring communicators if not aspiring artists, everyone but the children who do not yet know they will die. Art is the way by which man purifies his soul from chaos, it his revenge against Nature, he decides which memes of consciousness to spread and he takes the rest to the grave. Or she.

“Best art?” There is no best art, only more and less true. Art exists for its own sake, it may heal, torture, corrupt, enlighten, restrain, or indulge, but this is incidental; all it wants is to be understood.

V.

I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in a circus sideshow, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me. (Invisible Man)

I’ll pull the political band-aid—I think “ease of having one’s art understood” is a defensible conception of “privilege.”

Don’t @ me, bro. I’m not trying to score internet groupies, here, I just want to torch this hydra of semantics once and for all. Per Wikipedia:

Privilege is a social theory that special rights or advantages are available only to a particular person or group of people. The term is commonly used in the context of social inequality, particularly in regard to age, disability, ethnic or racial category, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion and/or social class. Two common examples may include having access to a higher education and housing. Privilege can also be emotional or psychological, regarding comfort and personal self-confidence, or having a sense of belonging or worth in society.

This is one of the better definitions, and it is still so vacuous that when I plugged it into Google Translate my computer crashed. No one disputes that “some groups have advantages relative to other groups,” even proud racists admit this. The argument concerns who has which advantages and the relevant score multipliers. Case in point: the above definition includes "self-confidence” and "worth in society.” So who has more privilege, a cis-white-hetero billionaire with full-checklist depression or an unemployed transgender black woman who, despite this, is basically content? Either the billionaire has less privilege, in which case “privilege” is a Harrison Bergeron happiness tax, or the suicidal person has more privilege, in which case, how much does “privilege” matter, really. I know, not supposed to be a linear scale, but in a country of unhappy people this is the question that always comes up: “I am so alone and so miserable, you’re dancing on tables at the gay club, sympathy bottled or on tap, and I’m supposed to prostrate myself to atone for my 'privilege?’”

The academic leftist notion of privilege fails—is infuriatingly counterproductive—because it rests its weight on the experiencing self. Kahneman (in)famously found that, in the U.S., income’s effect on "positive affect” saturates after $75,000 per annum; race and sex impact happiness less than one might think; I’ve met Upper East Side kids less fulfilled by their iPads than Sub-Saharan kids without running water were with “catch the rock.” I am not saying such differences are insignificant. They are significant. But the vicissitudes of chemistry and fate (sickness, isolation, loss, defunct serotonin receptors) are the most important predictors of day to day happiness, which correlate but refuse to be limited by demographics. Saved wealth buffers against tragedy but suffering finds a way. Hedonic treadmill is the buzzword: as monoxide salesman Thomas Ligotti puts it, “We do not have the power to make our lives monumentally better, only monumentally worse.”

The remembering self tells a different story. Kahneman’s 75k study found that while happiness levels off, “life evaluation” does not satiate with income; other studies support a stronger link between income and “life satisfaction” than income and happiness. Of course these surveys are semantically loaded enough to put a postmodernist into anaphylaxis. The satisfaction question is usually phrased: “How satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?” This is not a good measure of the remembering self. For our purposes the question ought to be: “Looking back, how satisfied are you with how your life has played out?”

Now even the most melancholic billionaire is gonna start singing My Way. The suicide note of George Eastman, founder of Kodak: “To my friends, my work is done – Why wait?” Poverty does not allow for such closure. Like a forgotten drive to work, we are amnestic to routine, and memories of “eat, menial labor, sleep” blur together in the rearview mirror. The important-yet-oft-forgotten obverse is that, independent of happiness, wealth buys freedom from routine. Chores—with increasing tax bracket, dry-cleaning, maid, gardener, and nanny. Work—the cheapest jobs get replaced by machines, nurses deal with the predictable consequences of urination and defecation, PAs treat a narrow range of colds and sore throats, doctors can research, lecture, politicize; at the top of the food chain, some CEOs fly to new city each day. Even leisure—a night at the opera is no more fun than pizza and brewskis, but the former is novel, for a time, and the latter soon fades from memory.

Just as freedom from routine can be spent on new experiences it can be spent on new ways to express them. Most purchases this side of a bodega are autobiographical product placement, from name-brand Tylenol to the SkyMall catalogs of the 1%. Ever since Gutenberg invented copy/paste, however, it’s been cheaper to ditch symbolism and go straight for the symbols. We describe upper-class people as “cultured” because...they know a lot of culture. Class is language, education over wealth, no one would invite a Duck Dynasty heir to the new Soho vegan place but you can tell instantly if a homeless guy went to college. What counts is breadth not depth, knowing the right way to convey your opinions—“underrated,” “progressive,” “guilty pleasure,” “ironic, I think”—not the specifics of taste. The bourgeoise use The New Yorker as a word a week calendar, or Slate if they can’t read. In a post-guillotine world, mainstream culture is the new counter-counterculture, and since dressing oneself in the morning is a middle finger to the haters, it should be no surprise how many childfree consumers are working on novels or at least unwatchable concert videos. We are all celebrities now. Map becomes territory, and as anyone who has kept a journal knows, soon you witness the present as you plan to record it, seeking out events good or bad that are likely to yield something worth recording. As the old try and fail to teach the young, life comes at you past.

Pause, value check. Leaving aside the moral question of whether it’s okay to Eat Pray Love while lonesome atheists starve, is Cash 4 Novelty, as a personal value system, a) the disgusting slop of narcissist-capitalism, or b) the boy in the bubble and the baby with the baboon heart? Answer: yes. Let’s review. Option 1, reject the demands of the remembering self altogether, “memes are viruses and should be purged.” But this takes you to some weird places: if you’re a glass half-full kinda guy, wirehead extinction; if you’re a pessimist, vas deferens snip-snip and/or mass suicide. Option 2, the remembering self is good but the Tower of Babel is pathological, we should make like Sisyphus and find meaning outside self-expression. Whether or not this is a noble sentiment, it is an inevitable flop. The Tower of Babel is a logical consequence of memetic selection: to prevent a version of "spread this meme” from taking over, one would have to ban any and all communication between human beings. Seems impractical.

And so we face reality. Pleasure is necessary, so necessary, all the more necessary as one grows older—but not sufficient. We plan our lives around being understood. If wealth grants freedom from routine, increasing the ability to define oneself and the language to express this, then it bestows a privilege independent of its effect on happiness.

This has political implications, namely, that money is good [4]. If a country’s per capita GDP rises threefold over ten years, that is a positive even if the happiness surveys don’t budge. A trade policy that bumps the purchasing power of the bottom quintile by 5% and the Bilderberg Group by 500%—increasing both societal wealth and inequality—is in vacuo a good idea. Absolute amount of money, not relative, buys freedom. Economics is not a zero sum game. (There may be better ways to distribute the dough, sure. Different argument.) Switching political stances in the batter’s box, the reactionary claim that American women were happier before they had orgasms or jobs is untrue. But even if it was, the indisputable increase in the ability for women to self-define and self-express is likely worth the cost. See also: every other pitch for traditional values and neonatal pneumonia.

It is perhaps not generally realized that a refrigerator can be a revolutionary symbol—to a people who have no refrigerators. A motor car owned by a worker in one country can be a symbol of revolt to a people deprived of even the necessities of life... [Hollywood] helped to build up the sense of deprivation of man's birthright, and that sense of deprivation has played a large part in the national revolutions of postwar Asia. (The Medium is the Massage)

Which brings us back to privilege. Belonging to the dominant race and sex of a culture grants the same in memoriam advantage as class, but by a different mechanism. Poverty and lack of education prevents one from speaking the language of culture. Differences of race, gender, and orientation prevent others from listening.

Without getting too bogged down in vocab, the canonical term is “stereotype.” Stereotypes are necessary to function. If art is compressed communication, a stereotype, in the broadest sense, is a pattern of extrapolation. We are constantly making small stereotyped judgments. A raised eyebrow and pause after the end of the sentence may signify “He’s skeptical,” “He’s joking,” “He’s mad,” or, “He’s mad because I ran over the Japanese Prime Minister,” depending on context. Conversation would be unfeasible without these snap judgments, with social confusion verging on autism.

Contrary to the pop-ethical consensus, discrimination is not caused by having too many stereotypes but too few. If you wake to find a lithe man dressed in all black standing over your bed and holding a katana, it may be quite reasonable to infer that he is a hired ninja and that you are in grave danger. If, however, you assume this about every East Asian man that you encounter, you lack nuance of stereotypes. If you want to insert a more topical example, go ahead, it should be obvious however that misunderstanding can result in racist outcomes even without conscious ill-will. Example: stories about disparities in use of Emergency Room analgesia make the headlines about once a year. My observation has been that there are certain culturally accepted ways to express pain, some verbal (saying “I have a high pain tolerance” suggests the opposite) and some nonverbal (wrong ratio of gritted teeth to screaming). When ordering the Dilaudid, physicians unconsciously underestimate the pain of patients who didn’t dot the i’s and cross the t’s of their agony, or, less charitably, unconsciously realize that an undocumented migrant is less likely to write a complaint letter than the hawk-like Shakespeare professor who has given two stars to every book club novel for the past 45 years.

Small comfort for the guy with a broken femur, I agree. But this matters hugely for any campaign against -isms. The above bias would not necessarily be picked up by the, ah, "replication-challenged” Harvard Implicit Bias Test, because if a person of the race in question was wearing an argyle sweater and reading Middlesex the mistreatment would not have occurred. The collegiate notion that some folks are Racist and some have been Saved betrays a preschool understanding of human beings. Most racists are really culturists, or “I don’t hate them, unless they X,” and all racism starts this way, a single heartfelt (although not necessarily true) observation that is falsely extrapolated. I am not defending this, just pointing it out that you do it too and that to some extent it is inevitable. Race and gender are social constructs, but the cultural norms that correlate with race and gender—and goth, prep, jock, etc—are real. Avenue Q theory: until we evolve a hive mind or learn to speak pheromone, every interaction will be mediated by a model of the other. There will always be a stereotype. The unsurprising path forward is to talk to the stereotyped individual, acquiring new detail which is added to the map as it asymptotically approaches the territory. “Be aware of your biases” is excellent advice, but framing this as “don’t be racist, join or die” fails—is infuriatingly counterproductive—because it doesn’t create a new stereotype to work with, an alternate explanation for the genuinely felt observation.

Denying one’s stereotypes altogether is impossible, although you can’t say the woke garbage wytch industry isn’t committed to the attempt. Nevertheless, if you, well-intentioned young person who gets anxiety with phone calls, are trying very hard not to fit someone’s behavior to a stereotype, thinking “don’t stereotype don’t stereotype” over and over throughout the perilous encounter—then too bad, kid, because a) you need to start lifting or something, b) you have a fixed view of how to treat someone based on demographics, which is c) uncomfortable for all concerned, and d) a stereotype. The social justice term for such benign stereotyping is “microaggression,” but when it concerns the opposite sex, it is more precisely dubbed “objectification.”

The Reddit demographic seems to have a mental block about this concept, so allow me to Joe Rogan you some experience: it is perfectly acceptable to think that buxom blonde women are hot. However, if you convey to your waitress that you are attracted to her solely because she is a Hot Blonde, you are saying that all of her other personality traits are irrelevant, i.e. her choices don’t matter, e.g. you get maced. (See also: “What should I wear tonight?” “Honey, no one cares,” and then the fight.) What’s confusing is that sometimes it is okay to like someone just for being comely and flaxen-haired—even the same waitress at the club that night. But notice the difference: at the club, the waitress is trying to convey “Hot Blonde.” You’re not boxing her in, you’re correctly identifying and complimenting her outfit. See also: catcalling vs. dirty talk.

Microaggressions are no different. Someone asking to touch a black woman’s hair may lack malice but nevertheless reminds the woman that in the eyes of others she cannot escape her race. Even explicitly positive stereotypes are harmful—gays are fashionable, Jews are smart; 1970s rockstars lamenting dehumanizing fame—and I hope you can see that they are harmful not against the experiencing self, for at some level attention is always enjoyable, but against the remembering self, which demands to be understood.

What’s less obvious is that the mere existence of a stereotype is harmful. If you have never been hated, as in people-wish-you-were-dead hated, then you may not understand this, but—hatred is painful even if you never encounter those doing the hating. There’s an element of paranoia, sure, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about this very old very fundamental feeling of being misconstrued, of one’s memes being stymied somewhere out in the ether, of one’s legacy going down wrong, a feeling closely related to shame and to which the response is, invariably, rage.

This particular flavor of suffering spares the privileged: historically, straight white males. They had the money so they got the education so they defined class so they controlled the language so they spread the most stories, any of which can serve as template for “white dude.” This says nothing about acuity of suffering, only that such suffering can be communicated more easily and with more nuance. “I’m not Elliott Smith depressed today—it’s more of a Bright Eyes feel. Know what I mean, officer?” “No lies, just love, sir. You have a nice day.” Gross misunderstandings are rare. Oh, you can try—Bushwick art majors tweeting “white people be thinkin physical intimacy be spicy food”—but it rings hollow, because everyone knows at least one horrible “free hugs” guy and his equally horrible friend with a fetish for sriracha. Or at least knows the type. In contrast, white people get their info about minorities from cuckold porn, or worse—sketch comedy.

If we care about the remembering self and we care about other human beings then forging new stereotypes is crucial. This puts me in agreement with mainstream liberalism—although I hope my conservative readers can see that this comes from a genuine desire for fairness rather than brownie-point trend-hopping or sublimated self-loathing—that minority representation is important. Something worth fighting for.

Except there’s a catch: the current push for “diversity” isn’t going to work. 

Like so many policies with charitable intentions but terrible incentives, executed by so many people with no understanding of Goodhart’s law, the current push for multiculturalism will spin the wheels of progress while accomplishing very little. It will create a new hatred for every one that it solves. And those in power will laugh all the way to the vault.

VI.

Real, total war has become information war…the cold war is the real war front—a surround—involving everybody—all the time—everywhere. Whenever hot wars are necessary these days, we conduct them in the backyards of the world with the old technologies…It is no longer convenient, or suitable, to use the latest technologies for fighting our wars, because the latest technologies have rendered war meaningless. (The Medium is the Massage)

If globalization is the defining phenomenon of the modern age, then immigration—physical and cultural, the latter determining who gets to be understood—is the defining political conflict. Let’s take a break from theory and see what the LA Times is doing to bridge the gap,“How Houston has become the most diverse place in America”:

The boys sprint in white and yellow uniforms down the green turf, grunting and sweating as the coach shouts from the sidelines. “Búscalo, búscalo,” he yells in Spanish, urging the players to sprint for the ball.

“Umusitari!” comes a voice on the sidelines — run down the line — from Biganiro Espoir, a native of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Margaret Long Wisdom High School soccer team hails from Central America, Mexico, Africa and points between. Its bench hums with Spanish, Kinyarwanda, Swahili and often English. But its real unifying language — soccer, played hard — is universal.

Okay, first of all, no American gives two shits about soccer in between World Cups. Entry number 80, Stuff White People Like: “The Idea of Soccer.” ("Many white people will tell you that they are very into soccer. But be careful, it’s a trap.”) Nor is it a coincidence that the photographed uniforms lack red and blue. I’m just saying, kind of provincial that they didn’t call it football.

“It’s really surprising to see a place like this in the South, where you consider it to be racist and xenophobic,” said Michael Negussie, a Wisdom High School senior from Ethiopia. “Stereotypes of Texas don’t apply here.”

Note that it’s taken for granted that “you” consider the South to be racist and xenophobic—and indeed, the stereotype only doesn’t apply because:

...demographic experts say the Houston metro area, home to the third-largest population of undocumented immigrants in the country — behind New York and Los Angeles — is a roadmap to what U.S. cities will look like in the coming decades as whites learn to live as minorities in the American heartland.

What that means is a whole new dynamic, in which minorities are no longer seen as outsiders. “Suddenly these are 100% American kids, and they’re falling in love with each other, making multiracial babies,” Klineberg said.

A “psychology of inevitability” begins to set in around immigration, he said — it’s happening, and it might not be a bad thing.

“Maybe it’s going to position Houston…for success in building the connections to the global marketplace. Maybe I can make money off of this.... And then we begin to say, how do we make this work?”

This article is bad. It’s bad for conservatives, it’s bad for immigrants, and it’s bad for anyone caught in the crossfire called America. No matter our superficial differences, I hope by the end of this essay we can agree on one thing: if the revolution ever comes, the LA Times should be a first round draft pick to be burned to the ground.

Theory of mind, please: how does this article look to conservatives? When I said that since white people control the language they have an advantage in communication, I didn’t mean, like, Republicans. It’s no big mystery that sleeveless undershirts can only get off to NASCAR and daydreams of slavery. Count off the archetypes: hypocrite evangelical priest. Serial killer. Grandiloquent but inept oil baron/plantation owner. Mentally addled inbred bucktooth. The only nuance is whether those hicks are gonna die off from diabesity or heroin, am I right?

This didn’t happen overnight. At some point there was a modicum of mutual respect, or so I’m told. But ingroups gonna outgroup, and slowly—faster after the insult of George W. Bush—the y’all class became a stereotype, got stereotyped so thoroughly that they weren’t interesting to talk about, which left them no way to contest the verdict. So now the LA Times can take your opinion as a given, and the poor, suffering factory workers are only brought up when some Coachella communist wants to say “they’ve been fooled by the 1%” and call for “solidarity.”

No. It would be unfair to say that you have blinders on when far as I can tell you have gouged out your eyes altogether. Talk to any, any, any Trump supporter, and you get:

There was a working-class, white bar I spent two days in and that’s where it really struck me: This man [Trump] is really resonating. This message is really taking hold and really hitting people. What sociologists and others have long talked about when you go to a poor, working-class black neighborhood is that there is this code of honor, this demand for respect. That same thing was taking place in the white bar I was seeing. And Trump was fulfilling that respect. It was all about respect, regaining respect. (The Atlantic)

Respect. Being understood as an imperfect human being struggling for his or her values, “even if I don’t agree, I can see where you’re coming from.” It’s so simple and yet no one wants to do it, because once you concede that other value systems are valid you start to question your own. Better to pretend at being Robin Hood, 90% tax on Martin Shkreli and basic income for all. And maybe that’s a great idea, but it doesn’t solve the problem: You could give every Appalachian 2 mil and they’d still vote for Brexit and Le Pen. They don’t want your money, they’ll take whatever government handouts are offered but they’d rather go nuclear than beg. Class matters, but this problem is cultural, not economic. “Look, I’m [gay/Muslim/an immigrant/from Portland]. You’re asking me to ‘respect’ people who would deny my existence.” I empathize, you don’t have to respect them, but you unless you think bigotry is Mendelian you should at least look a little deeper:

“...is a roadmap to what U.S. cities will look like in the coming decades as whites learn to live as minorities in the American heartland.”

The LA Times is speaking excitedly of how a group that has already been forced out of the social discourse will soon lose their voice completely. They’re thrilled by the up-and-coming Yelp $$ restaurants and the possibility of “making some money off this” in the “global marketplace.” They’re saying that once the right sort of people move in it might turn out to be a really nice neighborhood. The direct consequence of this brand of pro-immigration sentiment is hatred of immigrants. Oh, I’m sure there was some animosity to start with—that’s why the media had to build a Doomsday Device, to make sure the situation didn’t get out of control. 

Cheesy example, bear with me: “The Gay Agenda.” Treated as a joke, and does indeed sound like a fantastic glam rock band, but when rural conservatives denounce it they mean “the advocacy of cultural acceptance and normalization of non-heterosexual orientations and relationships.” And here’s the thing: they are right to worry about this—just as they are right to worry about immigration—not because David Bowie will corrupt the youth but because of the LA Times. Once acceptance becomes orthodoxy even private dissent becomes grounds for ostracization. No matter your other convictions you become a stereotype that society will single-issue-vote off the island, just ask Brendan Eich. Of course I support gay marriage; my point is that if one’s views before were “well, it is kind of weird,” then being told “soon there will be enough of us that we won’t have to deal with people like you at all”—that makes homophobia logical. And at least you can change your opinion of gay marriage. It’s much harder to change being white and low-class.

It would be correct to blame the LA Times and their ilk for the rise of Donald Trump. But that would let them off too easy. This problem began long ago and it extends far beyond a political issue or presidency. If you’re working class and want to get a promotion then odds are you will have to impress a bureaucrat, be it a manager or a Dean of Admissions. You will fail unless you share their values or convince them that you do—these values are the biggest obstacle to your advancement. So when some vacant skull in a dinner jacket tells you that the working class “votes on social issues” and “against their economic interests,” splash some pinot on his ascot and inform him that they are one and the same.

No one is born hateful, stranger anxiety doesn’t even start til six months. But culture war is history being written by the winners, first draft. Conservatives are offered the choice of fighting the ever-changing tides of social values or toiling away in obscurity while journalists pretend to like soccer. People want to be understood. And they will rage all sorts of ways against the dying of the light.

It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are others left over to receive their aggressiveness...When once the Apostle Paul has posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it became the inevitable consequence. (Civilization and Its Discontents)

Please understand: I don’t think that the red tribe is in any way morally superior to blue, see above and also history. But in our society there is a meaningful asymmetry between them. The upper-middle class—mostly urban, mostly blue—claims by far the largest share of America’s income, more than the middle class and far more than the 1%. This, despite their protests to the contrary, gives them disproportionate control over the news and entertainment industry, which in cyberpunk America is tantamount to controlling the culture. 

So even though individual subgroups may feel under-represented—perhaps the mainstream media is “liberal” and likes Katy Perry while certain free-thinkers are “leftist” and like Kate Bush—they are by and large clueless as to the feeling of freak-show isolation that comes from existing outside their norms altogether, norms which are ubiquitous every time you turn on a screen. They are, one might say, “blind” to their “privilege,” blind to the fine print disclaimer of their culture, “Swipe left if you voted for Trump.”

I didn’t vote for Trump. And my personal experience of refugees and illegal immigrants—via medical and psychiatric asylum cases—has been overwhelmingly positive. But policy decisions shouldn’t be settled by anecdotes. There is a moral imperative to help those in need—and conservatives should recognize this—while at the same time friction is inevitable when two cultures exist side by side—and liberals should recognize this. One would hope for a reasoned discussion of how to balance the two. But that won’t happen as long as those whose are insulated from the consequences of policy—need I point out that Los Angeles is not located in Houston?—use multiculturalism as a weapon to enforce class.

And what’s so infuriatingly tragic is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Do migrant farmworkers have more in common with Sarah Silverman or a rural mother of four? Polls show that 9 out of 10 Syrian refugees think John Oliver is worse than the war. One of my Muslim colleagues wears a Dallas Cowboys hijab and plays Fire Emblem in the break room—why doesn’t the LA Times do a story about her? How come when “multiracial babies” get mentioned the context is always sexy brown man and not sexy brown woman? Do liberals think that only Broad City characters have the capacity to consent? Some right-wingers buy into the predatory immigrant mythos wholesale, and they’re idiots, but many more are concerned not because they think most immigrants are drug dealers, rapists, etc, but because if they were, the castrato left would post three monkey emojis and say that the reports of such incidents are proof that Islamophobia is alive and well. It would be so easy to validate the concerns, to say #notallmigrants, sure, but to say just as loudly that misdeeds are misdeeds and will be punished as such. I’m no skinny-armed libertarian saying “if only we didn’t talk about race, no one would be racist!” I’m saying that the specific way the media talks about race and culture, creating an incoherent set of rules regarding “appropriation” and etiquette, proudly crying out that this is the end of those boring, selfish white people, has made the situation much, much worse. If the left wanted to prevent assimilation, there would be no more effective way.

That’s the point.

VII.

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” — Sun Tzu

Suppose you’re a benevolent Disney executive (maybe an oxymoron) who wants to increase minority representation in movies. How are you going to do it?

Well, your first instinct is to throw a fistful of Franklins into the writer’s room and scream “write me some of them brown people!” But here’s the problem: all your writers are white.

So now the decision tree forks. You can tell them to write “how they imagine” a person of color would talk and act, taking food choices, cultural dialects, and quinceañera celebrations into account. Or you can tell them to write an a-racial dude and use the paint bucket tool in Maya.

And that’s not really a decision at all. Not only could asking white boys to Tarantino another race lead to potential uh-ohs, having your characters speak anything but the dominant language/culture would limit your audience (definitionally, else it wouldn’t be the dominant language).

So you tell the writers to write an a-racial character, but since the cis-white-hetero patriarchy created the dominant language, the default assumptions of how people act—that means white. Which gets you a blockbuster superhero movie and a million Tumblr webcomics. Nice!

Except you’ve only sort of increased representation: there are minority characters, but in every way besides melanin they’re lighter than Luke Skywalker. There’s something to be said for that (for children in particular, since kids are kids wherever you go) but it’s not going to help the 18 year old black girl whose tastes, mannerisms, and values have been shaped by the pressures of being black in America, if nothing else.

Ergo, you decide to hire some minority writers to write your minority characters. Applications rush in. How are you going to decide who makes the cut?

“You know, the usual. Interview. Letters of recommendation. College transcript—”

This is part of a larger, systemic problem with the way power has shifted not from Group A to Group B, but from ground up to top down, and top down works in a very specific way: it concedes the trappings of power while it retains the actual power. (The Last Psychiatrist)

This is how the system protects itself against change. At every step of the social hierarchy, what is required for a person of color or a woman to succeed is determined by the values of the ruling class. I think that’s “white patriarchal supremacy,” but don’t quote me. Of course, the same principle applies to e.g. homosexuals and Jews; thankfully those traits are easier to hide.

Here’s your analogy: when you glance over at the in-flight movie flickering in front of the passed-out behemoth blocking your path to the bathroom, it is instantly apparent whether he’s watching a good movie like Face/Off or terrible Oscar bait. What gives the latter away? The meticulous set design? The histrionic orchestra? The slow pacing? The lingering close-ups of faces? The heavily scripted funny-because-it’s-sad-and-true? Oscar bait films are theatrical, a word which is supposed to mean “keeps reminding you that you’re in the audience,” but actually means “keeps reminding you that you are the audience.” The actors are side characters, background dancers. The hero is the camera. It’s the one with the character growth, guilt and redemption, it’s the one for whom the score sings. Which means the hero is...

It’s better than nothing. Better than segregation, better than open and unpunished murder in the street. It’s progress. But as Baudrillard said, that The Matrix was the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix itself would produce, I suspect that the most art about inequality is precisely the art that inequality sanctions.

And that’s bad. There’s a case to be made for affirmative action, but you know who gets the scholarship? Whoever can best conform to the in-demand stereotype. Middle of the road for the med school application. Tone it down if you want to get into Wharton. But maybe play it up a little for the grant proposal—go ahead, be a queer Chicano nationalist, send some mean tweets, academics eat that shit up. Of course they’re the only ones that will: the rest of society will stereotype you as “another” queer Chicano nationalist academic and never listen closely again. Even if you’re Manny Pacquiao you better not step from the party line. About half of African-Americans oppose gay marriage—you ever see that op-ed in the Times? Of course not, no one wants to hear that, they want Dear White People, an extremely controversial show about how important it is to pay Ivy League tuition. This is the scam behind every campus free speech debate: Freddie DeBoer and Ezra Klein draw pistols at dawn, but no matter who wins it is further cemented that Twitter, Vox, and college are where the correct opinions of class are determined. I often hear arguments about [insert school] not having [insert support group], which might be a real concern except that no one seems to care that outside of college it’s either AA or the bar. Harvard Inc. was America’s first corporation, FYI. Better make sure your toddlers are practicing their Latin.

You want some sick irony? Everyone knows that class is somehow hereditary, that a rich kid will get a better job than a poor kid even if the former has a rap sheet for selling ecstasy to One Directioners. But if you know or have had sex with any of the sons/daughters of the bourgeoisie you will have observed that no one is more critical of such nepotism. These “gifted” but “troubled” people will bumble through their whole lives, getting second through tenth chances, mysteriously finding that anything involving an authority figure goes their way, as they ruthlessly condemn capitalist injustice, never realizing that criticizing privilege is...the language of privilege. And wouldn’t you know it, the promotional video for the latest Run The Jewels album features none other than the cast of Portlandia, helping such youth bridge the gap between the predictable children they’ve been and the predictable adults they are going to be.

This isn’t a new trend, although it is trending. Think about it this way. The service industry is any job where the customer is always right, e.g. writer, therapist, barber, sales. This has always been a proxy for class, since only the aristocracy had the time and knowledge to make listicles for the King. (“The Ten Most Protestant Criminals In Bastille Prison—You Won’t Believe Number Three!”) On the other hand, if you have a manufacturing job—anything that involves doing rather than talking—no one cares whether you have problematic faves.

Enter the industrial revolution, as featured in Office Space (1999): mind over matter, words over matter, manufacturing jobs get replaced by machines. Unemployment + labor saving machinery = a lot more people have the time and ability to read Wealth of Nations. No more kings, no more monopoly rights, now theoretically anyone can code Ye Flappying Birde and please the market. So if you’re an aristocrat and being literate was like, your whole thing, how are you gonna keep partying like it’s 1899? You need a job that lets you tell other people what is okay to read/write and consume/produce—a job that keeps you one step ahead and thus relevant. And so the meta-service industry: mass media, academia, and government work. Fast-forward, and note that the remaining manufacturing jobs now involve a) operating machines or b) designing machines. And gosh darn does the newspaper hate those alt-right nerds and those Silicon Valley tech bros.

So the conspiracy comes full circle. The meta-service industry promotes a version of “multiculturalism” that is hostile to everyone outside their class but doesn’t affect them, LA ain’t in Houston and Manhattanites would never step in a neighborhood without HBO. This pushes the suckers of the working class into xenophobia, and those they mark as alien have to abandon the idea of making things and assimilate through the only other path offered: the meta-service institutions. Now you have a glut of wannabe thinkpiece writers. Supply and demand, university prices go up, labor costs goes down, and everyone buys the assigned woke products and logs onto Twitter to bemoan capitalism. Well, you may not love capitalism, but capitalism loves you.

In a global market, the main criterion for a service industry gig is your ability to speak inoffensive in four languages, which winds up being a proxy for class. Fine, no surprise, pop music sucks. But the incentive of the meta-service industry—I’m not saying it’s all they do, but it is the incentive—is to create new ways to be offensive (n.b: not offended), new required extracurriculars, new rules of etiquette making it harder to advance the class hierarchy without paying up. Some would call this racketeering. Those would be uncharitable people. But consider effort the school system spends on teaching the approved answers to ‘why’ questions, as opposed to ‘how’ questions like ‘how to balance a checkbook’ and ‘how to feed oneself,’ with the assumption that if you reach the upper class you’ll be able to pay someone to do those practical skills for you— and if you don’t, hey, there’s always food stamps. Think carefully about whether this mode of education is likely to make society more meritocratic or less.

The issue is not that youth of color see academic success as limited to whites. It is that they typically see white teachers as enforcers of rules that are unrelated to the actual teaching and learning process. (For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood...and the Rest of Y'all Too)

Bonus: if you say that you’re trying to help the disadvantaged, then when your policies make the situation worse—well, that’s all the more reason to redouble your efforts.

What’s the solution? There’s only one and it is so radical that I hesitate to even suggest it: stop being a pleb. You. Stop treating words as a substitute for action. Stop paying time and money into institutions that loan a symbol of mastery in lieu of actual depth. Stop looking for such symbols in others. Stop judging policies by the veneer of good intention rather than the details of consequence. Stop looking past people, because this is all the same, isn’t it? Working from a map, a stereotype, a symbol, instead fighting for the complex truth? None of this horror requires malice or even stupidity. All it requires is taking the easy way out.

Or don’t change. Keep hitting the like button, the algorithm guarantees it’ll be something you like. But there’s a price to pay. And it won’t hurt right away. It’s a price paid in memory, not sensation. That’s why it’s so terrible. It won’t sink in until it’s too late, when you look back and wonder,

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do? (Invisible Man)

VIII.

“The ingenuity and adaptability of Homo sapiens has led to its becoming the most influential species on Earth; it is currently deemed of least concern on the Red List of endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.” (“Homo sapiens,” Wikipedia)

Accelerationist philosopher Nick Land is very smart and very edgy and can sometimes finish a full sentence without asking the reader to recognize this. This eagerness makes him very empathizable and lovable, and he does get the problem, even if his solutions are, you guessed it, calamitously, catastrophically, direly, and dreadfully wrong.

Since this is the epilogue, i.e. not the place to defang every noumenon, I’ll skip to the punchline: Nick Land thinks we’re nearing the end of the world. Or at least the end of a world where debates occur via blog post rather than bone cudgel. Per his condensed manifesto, “The Dark Enlightenment”:

Civilization, as a process, is indistinguishable from diminishing time-preference (or declining concern for the present in comparison to the future). Democracy, which both in theory and evident historical fact accentuates time-preference to the point of convulsive feeding-frenzy, is thus as close to a precise negation of civilization as anything could be, short of instantaneous social collapse into murderous barbarism or zombie apocalypse (which it eventually leads to).

No, man. Tell us how you really feel.

As the democratic virus burns through society, painstakingly accumulated habits and attitudes of forward-thinking, prudential, human and industrial investment, are replaced by a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a ‘reality television’ political circus. Tomorrow might belong to the other team, so it’s best to eat it all now.

Land titles the next subsection “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards zombie apocalypse” and provides stats for the possible governments (“Communist Tyranny,” “Authoritarian Capitalism,” “Social Democracy”) that occur in sequence before “Zombie Apocalypse.” Okay, sick campaign setting. But why is this all inevitable?

Militant secularism is itself a modernized variant of the Abrahamic meta-meme, on its Anglo-Protestant, radical democratic taxonomic branch, whose specific tradition is anti-traditionalism.

Land is describing the Tower of Babel. I wouldn’t name its essence as “anti-traditionalism,” but the meme “spread this meme no matter what” has a similar destructive effect. Land’s solution, depending on the essay, is either an omnipotent AI ruler or biotech augmentation of high IQ individuals into elite übermenschen. Which, who knows, maybe that is how the Rapture will go down. I’m not here to make fun of anybody’s religion.

But in the short term, Land is wrong. This isn’t the end. The fall of Babel wasn’t a warning of what might happen. It’s something that happens all the time.

Since the death of God there’s been a vacancy, now everyone wants evolution to answer “why.” If anything seems unjust, it’s because evolution cares only about memetic fitness. Moloch, who elects foolish politicians! Moloch, who crowdfunds terrible podcasts! Moloch, who makes it so girls only like tall guys who drink Natty Light!

The catch is that evolution doesn’t care about memetic fitness. That’s a meaningless statement; evolution IS memetic fitness. And what determines memetic fitness is: whatever we decide.

Competition is ugly, no denying that. But blaming Moloch for fidget spinners is unfair to that poor Carthaginian spirit: people just want fidget spinners. If they didn’t, there wouldn’t be fidget spinners. It’s possible that folks don’t know what’s good for ‘em, sure, and you can elect some small deity to enforce your taste as law, but you haven’t killed Moloch, you’ve just shifted the arena in which people compete. Now all the bullies are under 5′7″ and pontificating about how partying is for nerds. Or how much they love Stalin.

Evolution is always bound by a value system. History has a progression, but it’s not an arc, it’s a spiral. God strikes down the tower, the “democratic virus” burns through society, we move towards a single language, the masses cry now nothing will be withholden from them, and God strikes down the tower once more. This is predestined by the very fact that each human being is unique. When you impose one language, one value system, when you hold someone back from that desperate desire to be understood—don’t expect that person’s God to forgive you.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.

Land and his followers are wrong twice over. Wrong because they are fooled by the word “multiculturalism” and thus advocate for the pretend solutions of social exit, “assortative mating of the elite” or a “white ethno-state,” when it was cultural inbreeding of a white aristocracy that created the monoculture, multiculturalism in name only, that they so despise. It wasn’t Moloch, it wasn’t Nature, it was regulatory capture and top-down imposition of values. Those who feel persecuted for thoughtcrime are those who should be pushing hardest for diversity—real diversity, as opposed to a slick brochure of the indebted. Such diversity of ideas was what made America great, not that we haven’t punished people for race and sex and religion and a million other insane reasons that are not “bad behavior,” but even so America is the country of the stolen sample and the conspiracy theory, a nation of ingenuity and creation like no other, while the “white ethno-states” or “Scandinavian social democracies” you adore have created, I think, Avicii. Like wealth, class should not be treated as a zero sum game. There should not be a single ladder of correct beliefs. Having more ideas, even bad ideas, allows more ways to self-actualize and has worth in of itself.

It’s true that no group can perfectly match the values of its constituents. But the reactionaries are wrong again because their ideal nation would look no different. There is always a language gap between human beings, and fidelity is sacrificed to bridge that gap. Groups come together and cleave apart; it is the nature of individuation. Even if our society prohibited every value but the uncritical passage of information, soon we would be competing to pass information the most uncritically. Soon we would split into rival factions based on philosophy of uncritical passage. Man is a machine that extracts meaning. But communication of such meaning occurs in spite of groups, not because of them. Only when treated as an individual do we feel listened to. Existence is suffering, but once in a while someone else gets it. Might as well floss.

Still, don’t let me trick you into undue optimism. Though all value systems can generate meaning, though individuals will always fight to belong and then fight even harder to push away—that does not mean that all value systems are equal. Not long ago kids would argue over which console was better. Now teenagers whisper ‘cuckold’ and ‘nazi’ like it’s considered good manners. We are in the midst of a profound rearrangement of what traits are to be incentivized and rewarded, driven by some seven billion people each acting with what they believe to be the best of intentions. But who can foresee with what success and with what result?

[1a]. Memetics is not without controversy: in academia, it often stands accused of the heresy of dualism. The meme of “Christianity” cannot be sequenced in the way that DNA can, so how can one confidently say that it has “spread” from missionary to convert? Or that a gnostic sect is a “mutation”? Show me the nucleotides of thought, quoth the critics.

Two objections. First, we can’t isolate memes for mass spectrometry because consciousness isn’t a physical entity, it is a PATTERN of relation AMONG entities, an emergent property, meta-neuronal, not neuronal. The order of letters gives meaning independent from the letters themselves, ditto words, ditto sentences.

Second, it doesn’t matter. Is your neural firing pattern for “green” is the same as my neural firing pattern for “green”? Maybe or maybe not, perhaps your brain codes hues in RGB and mine uses hexadecimals. But it seems clear that some information is exchanged between us when we agree that grass is green. “Meme” is a proxy term for that unit of information. And if you accept this, then the burden of proof is on you to show why the mathematical algorithms of evolution—mutation, migration, and selection—the near-universal laws of information exchange—fail to apply here.

[1b]. If you take memetics seriously—and you should, Daniel Dennett’s in the New Yorker so it’s gonna be status quo in 10 years—then you should be skeptical of the gross extrapolation of IQ. Review: Is IQ a useful measurement of innate cognitive ability? Yes. Is IQ a summation of multiple somewhat-correlated skills into one number? Yes. Are some, if not all, of those skills trainable? Yes, with the greatest effects in early childhood. Are IQ tests sexist/racist? No, but they are trainable, training is culture-dependent, and culture cares a great deal about sex and race.

Ah, but here’s the trick. Let’s pretend that, like the SAT, IQ is an immutable and comprehensive measure of inborn intelligence. It would still describe hardware, not software. An out-of-date Compaq could still run new games if you allowed for a slow enough frame rate. Someone with an IQ of 80 could pass medical school given sufficient perseverance; there’s no single meme in the medical field (or quantum mechanics, etc) that is too big for the human brain, it just takes varying amounts of time to flip the pages. If you claim that IQ predicts various negative life outcomes, fine. If you claim that it’s an ability cap, you’re an idiot.

[2]. Note that the desire to love another (Eros) is actually more primitive than the desire to be loved (i.e. understood, Babel). If this seems counterintuitive, note that the Eros does not require recognition of the love object as a separate being. Babel does, and empathy takes effort. Last time you felt desperately alone, was the dominant emotion, “I hope one day someone loves me,” or “I hope one day someone accepts my love?” Pet your therapy dog and think about it.

[3]. Hence the template model (section II) of human beauty: men are attracted to wide hips because experience teaches that this trait is representative of the category “woman,” not because of an inborn preference for curves over lines. I suspect that inanimate beauty follows a similar mechanism: a view from distance is pleasing because if you zoom out far enough you can see a pattern in anything, symmetry is pleasing because... 

Paglia: “Every time we say nature is beautiful, we are saying a prayer, fingering our worry beads.”

Trend the first - Fake news: “Solving the Problem of Fake News” (New Yorker), “Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook” (New York Magazine), “Fake News Expert On How False Stories Spread And Why People Believe Them” (NPR), “Students Have 'Dismaying' Inability To Tell Fake News From Real, Study Finds” (NPR), “How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study” (New York Times), “How to Destroy the Business Model of Breitbart and Fake News” (New York Times), “The plague of fake news is getting worse -- here's how to protect yourself” (CNN).

Trend the second - Post-truth: “This Article Won’t Change Your Mind” (The Atlantic), “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds” (New Yorker), “Why facts don’t matter to Trump’s supporters” (Washington Post), “Why People Continue to Believe Objectively False Things,” (NYTimes), “Why We Believe Obvious Untruths” (NYTimes), “It’s Time to Give Up on Facts” (Slate).

Pause—why do these articles, I suppose it’s too meta to call them “fake news”, exist? I mean, human intransigence has been around since at least the 1980s. And yes, Breitbart sells souls wholesale, but for every article penned in blood by Mephistopheles there are 666 million (Snopes confirms) incorrect tweets, tumblr posts, reddit comments, and Facebook memes. Where do people really get their news? The Urban News Network has no wish to enter such murky waters, nor do they want you to ponder their 2016 election blindsiding and whether, perhaps, maybe, their self-righteous sensationalism even contributed to this abhorrent outcome. No, quite the opposite:

Private browsing and Adblock if you must click the links, these sites will give your computer herpes.

Denunciations of “fake news” both aggrandize the media and flatter their readers—who, after all, are being informed by the Pulitzer-winning journalism that America needs. This crowd is even more pleased by articles on our innate resistance to facts, social science skin flicks brought back pay-per-view. Fake news is a concrete, solvable problem, but “Post-truth”—and note that anyone who uses this phrase is not just drinking the Kool Aid but is doing a keg stand with it—“Post-truth” is cozily fatalistic. “Some people, they just can’t handle facts. What can you do?” Needless to say, every human intransigence piece references the Trump administration in either the first or last paragraph, except the Atlantic piece, which compensates via a cartoon illustration of a Trump supporter being unable to handle facts.

It’s comforting to know that everyone else is dumb, else Facebook would be out of business. But imagining that 3/4ths of the U.S. is occupied by orcs is actually a little scary. It’s too many people to hate, and they have guns, and besides, it’s no fun to be disliked. “Why would they be angry at us?”

Trend the Third - The Oxy and the Pity: “The Original Underclass” (The Atlantic), “2 of a Farmer’s 3 Children Overdosed. What of the Third — and the Land?” (NYTimes), “‘Deaths of Despair’ Are Surging Among the White Working Class” (Bloomberg), “Study: Communities Most Affected By Opioid Epidemic Also Voted For Trump” (NPR), “Orphaned by America’s Opioid Epidemic” (Washington Post), “Disabled, or just desperate?” (Washington Post), “Why The White Working Class Votes Against Itself” (Washington Post).

Not everyone absorbs information through the cultish repetition of buzzwords. So, to accommodate visual learners, the Washington Post has been kind enough to provide photos.

He returned in torn jeans and, with nothing better to do, went outside. He limped to the truck and fiddled with jumper cables. He set a fire inside an iron bin and burned some trash. He inspected a sheet of aluminum he had found, wondering how much he could sell it for. He walked into the woods and walked out. He looked at the road. A car hadn’t passed in a long while. It was 1 in the afternoon. The day already felt over. (Washington Post)

Madie Clark looks in on her granddaughter Zoie Pulliam, 10, and a visiting relative at their home in South Charleston. Clark moved into the bedroom where her daughter Amanda Pulliam and son-in-law Austin Pulliam died of heroin overdoses. (Washington Post)

This is poverty porn. Orphaned kids and burning trash and mothers trailing secondhand smoke and framed pictures of Jesus. Sunburns and Frito-Lays and rotting teeth and AM country radio in waiting rooms. Dead grass, chronic pain, highway-Walmart-highway tessellated on a map. The loss of manufacturing jobs. A people devoid of purpose, seeing no option but to kill the pain or else themselves.

If you think the above paragraph is accurate, then I bet you think rap music videos are an accurate depiction of urban black life. It’s a stereotype, a stereotype constructed for your convenience. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your half-forgotten high school reading list. I don’t dispute that Dogville is accurate for some portion of the white working class. But it’s far from the whole picture.

Per fivethirtyeight: Clinton did well in medium-income, high-education counties; Trump did well in high-income, medium-education counties, pictured above. No one in a town of 95k median income is so overwhelmed by “economic anxiety” that they spaz out into intravenous heroin. #MakeAmericaGreatAgain is predicated on education, or lack thereof—class, not income. And to the neutral pH water crowd, that’s terrifying.

Different monikers have been proposed for the Urban News Network audience: blue tribe, White People, upper middle class, Aspirational 14%. For simplicity, I’m going to use “liberals,” but please do not interpret the following blast of vitriol as “conservative,” “leftist,” “anarcho-marxist,” or otherwise politically motivated. You will not find a policy proposal here. This is a critique of people.

The alt-right contends that a liberal belief in “multiculturalism,” uttered as a slur, is undermining the foundations of civilization. They’re delusional. Liberals don’t believe in multiculturalism at all. In its purest form, liberal ideology only recognizes two types of people: liberals, and the tragically misguided—who, if not for their brainwashing, would listen to hold music and take Zoloft like any sensible person. Oh sure, you can consume your culture. Dress how you will, eat your ethnic food and celebrate your ethnic holidays (how exotic!), place your religion on the mantlepiece, complain about white people on any number of white-people-owned forums and newspapers. Be as cultural as you want, as long as you choose cash or credit and don’t contradict the superculture. Zizek voice:

“The tragedy of our predicament, when we are within ideology, is that when we think we escape it, into our dreams—at that point, we are within ideology.”

Liberals do not want to look at cultural values, they do not even want to acknowledge that cultural values exist, because that would mean they have a set of cultural values, and ain’t nobody gonna FaceTime that abyss. So how do liberals explain the people who read magazines about car radios? If the FOX demographic contains human beings with thought-out opinions, then they are terrifying. But if they are would-be Tesla owners who have been cruelly deprived of Cotillion lessons, who have been tricked by Steve Bannon into liking Harley-Davidson and hydromorphone, who, as the saying goes, are “voting against their own interests”—then nothing needs to change.

As of late, this blog’s essays have been obsessed with a particular theme: how, in a capitalist society, defining yourself against something perversely encourages that something to exist. Your freakout alerts enemies, exes, and passing contrarians that they should rush to the other side; your panic deepens; soon enough you’ll pay the opposition to set up their bowling pins just so you can see them get knocked down again. But if/when your rage congeals into boredom and it’s time to silence a group once and for all, a different tack is required: pity.

The media coverage of the opioid epidemic aims to turn rural America into an Oppressed Group. It is the final bombardment of a culture war campaign that has been going on for decades, spearheaded by 600 episodes of This American Life crying “Look, even these savages have some nobility!” The Hallmark cards for Trump voters are not an attempt to heal a divided nation, they are Liberals Going Their Own Way. We want other groups to be post-truth, deprived of free will in an incoherent and unjust society, because this allows us to completely ignore them. For their own good.

Sam Altman of Y Combinator asked Trump supporters to explain to their vote. A few highlights:

“He is not politically correct.” Note: This sentiment came up a lot, probably in at least a third of the conversations I had.

“He is anti-immigration.” Note: This sentiment came up a lot.  The most surprising takeaway for me how little it seemed to be driven by economic concerns, and how much it was driven by fears about “losing our culture”, “safety”, “community”, and a general Us-vs.-Them mentality.

“He is anti-abortion.” A number of people I spoke to said they didn’t care about anything else he did and would always vote for whichever candidate was more anti-abortion.

I humbly submit that NONE OF THESE ISSUES were discussed in the run-up to the 2016 election. “Political correctness” prompted an eye-roll and a mention of a rogues gallery weakman (e.g. Milo Yiannopoulos). Immigration was always discussed in terms of economic anxiety or xenophobia/racism, never in terms of “loss of culture.” As to abortion...“What is this, 2004? Who cares?”

I have no idea if Altman’s sample was representative, methodology not printed, standard disclaimers apply. But I am concerned. As Hollywood liberalism disappears deeper and deeper into its own fractalizing asshole, those outside its cultural sphere—in America, France, England, and elsewhere—will feel progressively less heard and respected, which will prompt liberalism to bury its head all the more. “How come the white working class uses government programs while railing against handouts?” Because you are the government. They’ll take what they can, but they’ll be damned if they beg for it. “Why are all these hicks voting for authoritarianism?” Exercise some basic cognitive empathy, please. They’re not voting for authoritarianism. They’re voting for fuck you.

1. Other People Don’t Exist

There are only two human beings in La La Land: Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. Ryan and Emma have motivations (opening a jazz club, acting) and foibles (Warhammer 40K, keyboard duster). The other characters that appear in the film have neither. Ryan’s sister exists only in contrast to him: she is competent so that we can see that he is neurotic. Then she disappears. John Legend plays a pop jazz player so that Ryan can look downcast and mumble something about plebs. Emma Stone’s roommates wear red, green, and yellow, so that Emma can wear blue.

The film’s closest pass at non-solipsism is the opening number, in which a group of diverse and unrealistically polite Los Angelenos sing about coming to the city to chase their dreams.

[Young Man] I hear 'em ev'ry day The rhythms in the canyons That'll never fade away The ballads in the barrooms Left by those who came before They say "you gotta want it more" So I bang on ev'ry door

[Young Woman] And even when the answer's "no" Or when my money's running low The dusty mic and neon glow Are all I need

The film preempts the critique “how can you make a film about two white people navel gazing in the year 2016?” with this song’s answer, “because everyone else is exactly the same.” Doubtful, but whatever—note that these traffic-bound palette swaps once again redound on Ryan & Emma. Transitive property: if our heroes succeed, so does the whole world.

Of course, it’s not La La Land’s job to be Synecdoche, Los Angeles. There’s nothing wrong with making a romance that focuses very closely on the two leads—the Before Sunrise trilogy comes to mind. But even in those movies, the bit parts seemed to have existences independent from the main characters: an old couple fighting on the train, a disheveled poet smoking on the waterfront. No one in La La Land seems to understand object permanence. Perhaps that’s why they don’t have any friends.

2. Authenticity Is All You Need

Here’s a plot that doesn’t get used anymore: boy lies to girl, girl grows to like boy, lie is revealed, girl is heartbroken, boy renounces lie, boy proves his love by defeating Jack Black in a breakdancing competition, reconciliation, happy ending.

I’ll grant that the above plot is awful, and I don’t recommend that you base your relationships on deceit or anything else from the 90s. But you have to give that guy credit for trying. In La La Land, Emma has to make the first move, twice, for the plot to advance. Ryan then takes Emma to a jazz club (his interest) and invites her to see Rebel Without a Cause (also his interest). I’m not hating, Ryan Gosling is a charming man, they have chemistry, do what thou wilt, I’m just noting a cultural trend. In the olden days, the guy developed a crush and had to "win” the girl; in La La Land, the girl is attracted to the guy’s character sheet, and the plot/romance advances as the guy lets her into his world. (You’re The Worst is a good example of the same, as is Fifty Shades of Grey. Consider whether this represents an increase or decrease in female sexual power.)

This makes Emma Stone, despite her pellegrino bubbliness, the opposite of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

"...that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." (Wiki)

Rather than convince [brooding, soulful] Ryan Gosling to join Zoroastrianism and wear PLUR bracelets, Emma Stone encourages him to go deeper into his narrowly defined dream. “If the masses don’t get it, so be it!” Thank God this isn’t a Darren Aronofsky film. And Ryan does the same for her—in light of Emma’s failed auditions, he advises her to write a one-woman play, a suggestion that in most states is legal grounds for divorce.

But since this is Hollywood, literally and figuratively, both of them become wildly successful.

3. A Sense Of An Ending

Spoiler alert, Ryan and Emma don’t end up together. They get something much better.

In the final scene, Emma (now a famous actress) and her husband (generic dude) stumble into Ryan’s jazz club. He shoots her a glance (“this could be us, but you playin’”), taps out the recurring musical motif, and triggers a five minute Mulholland Drive dream sequence in which Emma imagines their hypothetical life together in space and etc. Look of mutual acknowledgement. Close.

The sad end was inevitable, just ask Titanic, happy endings aren’t nearly as Oscar-worthy. A happy ending raises questions, namely, what next? Kids? Montessori schools? Home Depot? Chablis? Book club? Will you be able to sustain the passion that brought you this far? That’s not romantic, that’s terrifying.

The sad ending lets you idealize the relationship, imagining the emotional peaks without having to reckon with the flatline. And for the same reason, the sad ending serves as a lasting reminder of your own power. “I had her when she was beautiful. And I was the best she ever had.” Lost in her own memories, she’s never going to tell you different.

II.

As usual, there’s a person to blame for all this, and that person is Sofia Coppola.

Every one of the above tropes was codified by Lost In Translation. Most of the side characters didn’t speak English, so no way were they going to get a second dimension. The movie is obsessed with authenticity: Scar Jo picks Bill Murray because he sees through the facade of whiskey commercials (unlike the Japanese, or her husband); Bill Murray escapes his fabric-cataloguing wife; the two of them retreat into each other’s company in lieu of the outside world. And the ending—Bill Murray whispers something unheard, kisses his co-star, and the two of them part ways, leaving behind a bittersweet yet somehow self-aggrandizing memory.

Lost In Translation wasn’t a musical, but its aesthetic was music video, shoegaze guitars and long dialogue-free shots of cityscape, #dream, #urban, #intimate. The movie’s descendants (Her being the closest mimic) are no less dependent on the fuzz pedal. Like a Valentine’s day mixtape, like an album put on pre-coitus, the music is chosen not to set the mood, but to soundtrack the scene for your future self. “When I look back on this, I want to feel...”

This is nice in small doses, sure. Lost In Translation had some good parts. La La Land wasn’t my brand, but I can’t knock the craft—the camera did some sick ollies, the song and dance routine was probably great if you’re into platonic cuddling and Apples to Apples. I don’t think these are bad movies, I just think you should be aware of what your unconscious is signing up for. 

I.

This nonsense concerns the 2017 World Happiness Report, written by a bunch of PhD golems doing part-time for the United Nations. Let’s go straight to the conclusion.

“The country is mired in a roiling social crisis that is getting worse,” [Dr. Jeffrey Sachs] wrote in [the concluding] chapter dedicated to America’s flagging happiness. “Yet the dominant political discourse is all about raising the rate of economic growth.”

To fix that social fraying, Dr. Sachs argues policy makers should work toward campaign finance reform, reducing income and wealth inequality, improving social relations between native-born and immigrant populations, overcoming the national culture of fear induced by the Sept. 11 attacks, and improving the educational system.

Right away, you should be skeptical. The survey (Gallup World Poll) from which this report draws its conclusions did not ask about September 11. It did not ask about campaign finance reform. It did not ask about the educational system. For comparison across nations, the report used one question to measure happiness:

“Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”

And then tried to explain this score via “happiness predictors”: GDP, life expectancy,

“If you were in trouble, do you have relatives or friends you can count on to help you whenever you need them, or not?” (Yes/No; “Social support”)

“Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?” (Yes/No; “Freedom”)

“Have you donated money to a charity in the past month?” (Yes/No; “Generosity”)

“Is corruption widespread throughout the government or not?” and “Is corruption widespread within businesses or not?” (Yes/No; “Corruption”)

That’s it. One might suggest that yes/no questions of this sort are subject to some degree of cultural interpretation. One might argue that using a single question to measure “freedom” or “social support” would earn an F minus in frat boy hangover Sociology 101. One might muse that some of these terms are broad enough to encompass several dozen overlapping variables, giving them little if any explanatory power. One might claim that the “happiness” question does not measure day to day happiness at all, but rather a peculiar sort of satisfaction / imagination (my life may be quite pleasant, but since I can imagine life as a “crunked out” Soundcloud rapper, 6/10).

Even if the methodology was pristine, however—and there probably is some signal beneath the tinnitus—Dr. Sachs’ conclusions are inexcusable. His ideas may be correct, they may be disastrous, but nothing in the data even remotely supports them. Indeed, he almost directly contradicts the prior chapters, which argue for the primacy of social factors over economic ones. Chapter five:

...Eliminating poverty in the USA reduces misery by 1.7% points, unemployment by 0.3% and physical illness by 0.5% out of the total 5.6% in misery. Taken together, those three factors barely make as much difference as mental illness on its own.

Dr. Sachs admits this:

America’s crisis is, in short, a social crisis, not an economic crisis. 

Then follows with:

The first priority should be campaign finance reform, especially to undo the terrible damage caused by the Citizens United decision. The second should be a set of policies aiming at reducing income and wealth inequality. This would include an expanded social safety net, wealth taxes, and greater public financing of...

The disconnect is so sharp that I have to wonder if Dr. Sachs got sick of writing and decided to plagiarize Wikipedia. I sympathize. I’m just not sure if you should be doing that sort of thing when you work for the United Nations.

II.

Despite all this, the World Happiness Report is not political propaganda. Like most bureaucratic documents, it is self-propaganda. Opening paragraph:

The first World Happiness Report was published in April, 2012, in support of the UN High Level Meeting on happiness and well-being. Since then we have come a long way. Happiness is increasingly considered the proper measure of social progress and the goal of public policy...

The authors of the report want to persuade you that happiness (as they measure it) is the correct measure of social progress. Two of the lead authors have published books about Happiness Science, the third is Dr. Sachs. The political conclusion is clickbait, a spoonful of stevia to help the methodology go down. That’s why the chapter on China ends with:

If the objective of policy is to improve people’s well-being, then [Subjective Wellbeing] is a more meaningful measure than GDP, as China’s experience attests.

And chapter 6, on work:

Generally, the analyses reported in this chapter provide additional empirical evidence for the merit of policies that focus on both the quantity and the quality of employment to support worldwide wellbeing.

So if you’re wondering why this report needs to be repeated every year, so the same people can say the same things and the New York Times can host,

“The libertarian argument that economic freedom should be championed above all other values decisively fails the happiness test: There is no evidence that economic freedom per se is a major direct contributor of human well-being above and beyond what it might contribute towards per-capita income and employment,” Dr. Sachs wrote.

the answer is, it doesn’t, it gets printed, admired, and tossed in a recycling bin. At best, the report exists to be pointed at, like a highlight of a college application brochure: “We’re not just looking at GDP—we’re looking at happiness.” At worst, it exists because the guy who’s always giving unsolicited back rubs said it should. Good luck cutting the program that investigates well-being.

The big acronyms (WHO, UN, OECD) command a Pope-like respect that your local school board does not. This is because you forget that organizations are made up of people. The elementary particle of corruption is the human being.

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.”

“In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” (Michael Crichton)

III.

One more punchline. Here’s the table that appears in the Times. 

Here’s an excerpt from the same table within the actual report:

I had no idea what being 14th looked like; turns out, not too bad. America’s score of 6.993 appears nowhere in the Times article (or rest of the report). We’re 93% as happy as Norway; we’re better than Germany (16), UK (19), France (31), Spain (34), Italy (48), and Japan (51). How’s your socialized medicine now, suckers? (jk, jk.)

In summary: a specious dataset gives rise to a redundant report with radically disconnected conclusions, the worst of which are picked up by a major media outlet, which excludes any part of the dataset that would compromise the message of societal ruin.

Here is Jenji Kohan, the show’s creator, talking to NPR:

In a lot of ways Piper was my Trojan Horse. You're not going to go into a network and sell a show on really fascinating tales of black women, and Latina women, and old women and criminals. But if you take this white girl, this sort of fish out of water, and you follow her in, you can then expand your world and tell all of those other stories. But it's a hard sell to just go in and try to sell those stories initially. The girl next door, the cool blonde, is a very easy access point, and it's relatable for a lot of audiences and a lot of networks looking for a certain demographic. It's useful. (Emphasis mine.)

Jenji Kohan is very smart; Weeds made me want to smash my head through a plate glass window, but it induced this emotion with near surgical precision. Question, though: do you think Jenji Kohan relates to Piper Chapman?

Jenji is worth 15 mil, presumably she could get her brain transplanted to a mecha; instead she chose librarian glasses, Simply Be, and hair the color of wild berry Skittles. She looks like the Tumblr stereotype aged up 30 years, which is not a diss but also not coincidental. Orange Is the New Black is Netflix’s most-watched original series, it’s thoughtful and well-made, different people watch it for different reasons, standard disclaimers apply, but the show’s core demographic is a) Tumblr, b) people who used to go on Tumblr, and c) 40 year-olds who would go on Tumblr if they could figure out how to caption gifs.

None of these people identify with blondes who sell artisanal soaps—indeed, that is the archetype they define themselves against. Yes, Piper shares upper-middle class markers with OITNB’s audience: that doesn’t make her relatable, it makes her recognizable. “Near-outgroup” is the technical term, “Another skinny blonde bish here to ruin my life” is the phrase I usually hear. The root of OITNB is, “Yeah, you think you’re winning, but what if you went...to prison?” When this prompt stars a white man, it’s gay porn; when it stars a white woman, it’s also gay porn, but tasteful. Piper doesn’t have to be humiliated, she just has to look like a chump. It’s never an accident when Piper is petulant, patronized, conniving, and/or obnoxiously privileged. It is entirely the point. You get to feel superior.

Except that’s just half the trick: not only do you get to feel superior to Piper, you get to feel superior to the show. “Why are they spending so much time on 0.001st world problems!!!!?” Exactly. To make you angry. Rage is free marketing—I learned Season 4 was out from the complaints—but more importantly, your anger invests in you in the show, makes it so you need to know what happens next. In both OITNB and Weeds, characters are rewarded for bad behavior (e.g. infidelity), while ironic synths pulse and the show screams: "See this? This is BAD. And it's BEING REWARDED. Doesn't that make you mad?" Now apply this theory to public relations. A key OITNB character dies a problematic death at the end of Season 4. Do you think the writers/producers/Netflix execs didn’t know this death would be problematic? Feature not bug, it sets up a demand that they make up for it next episode, next season. See also: Game of Thrones.

Which is to say that there are really two stories: OITNB, and the struggle to keep OITNB accountable. And the hero of the second story is...you. 

This is why the meta-story of “how OITNB will change” is so predictable. It’s a serial: Xeno’s paradox towards your MacGuffin of choice.

Season 3 of “Orange is the New Black” is the best one yet, because there’s a lot less Piper (Taylor Schilling), the protagonist of the first two seasons.

Planned obsolescence = the product is created with a flaw so you can celebrate when the flaw is fixed. “We did it, Reddit!”

In the little we do see of her, rapid changes take place, and she is transformed into an almost psychopathic, self-obsessed criminal.

Sure, but she’ll always be a petty criminal. Her morality doesn’t matter, as long as she is fit for scorn.

With such a strong cast of intriguing and complex characters, “Orange is the New Black” would be better off without her altogether. (Source)

Piper’s existence keeps the Skinner Box intact and the dopamine roulette spinning: it tells you what to want. I doubt Piper will die before the end of the show, but if she does, another enfant terrible will take her place. Voltaire: “If problematic faves did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them.” Or, if you prefer, Regina Spektor: “Taking steps is easy. Standing still is hard.”

II.

I’m working on my conspiracy theory game, so: the DNC hack is Vladimir Putin’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton.

Let me start over.

WASHINGTON — American intelligence agencies have told the White House they now have “high confidence” that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee, according to federal officials who have been briefed on the evidence.

[The emails] showed efforts to impugn Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in his effort to challenge Mrs. Clinton for the nomination.

The emails were released by WikiLeaks, whose founder, Julian Assange, has made it clear that he hoped to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency. It is unclear how the documents made their way to the group. But a large sampling was published before the WikiLeaks release by several news organizations and someone who called himself “Guccifer 2.0,” who investigators now believe was an agent of the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence service. (NYTimes)

Them’s the facts. Spin 1:

Whoa, is that Ricky Gervais? Horrifying. Spin 2:

Both liberals and conservatives agree with this analysis, which is kind of beautiful: no matter how fractured the political landscape, Americans can still come together to commit the fundamental attribution error. Putin is a Bond villain, cold as the Khabarovsk winter, doing the dictator wave as he plots the demise of capitalism. Assange, Avowed Foe of Clinton, 5/5 with trample, will crush anyone who hinders his quest for an impossible freedom—and this time, it’s personal. It’s a post-grad version of “the terrorists hate our freedom.” We want supervillains, and we demand to be the reason for their schemes.

You should always be skeptical of a story so convenient.

Here’s Pravda.ru on “Will Trump become Russia's best friend?”

....when asked what outcome of the US elections is advantageous for Russia, 37 percent of Russians said that they found the question difficult to answer. Twenty-six percent of the polled said that the US presidential vote was unimportant for Russia.

Forty-four percent of the polled said that they did not know anything about Donald Trump. Thirty-six percent said that they did not know anything about Clinton.

The article adds that Russians feel more antipathy towards Clinton than Trump, but, “Russia never expects the US to elect a president that would be ‘good’ for her.” Which, not a shocking take, given the sidebar link to “The West has raped, killed and destroyed the whole world.” Damn, talk about clickbait.

The Moscow Times, which has a serifed logo, interpret how you will, references the Trump/Putin Lethal Weapon script and continues:

All of this sounds endlessly ironic to a Russian who for years has been watching Russian political managers manipulate a threat of foreign intervention to put all independent players under effective control. The Russian opposition has long been demonized as “U.S. stooges.” The Russian state has initiated legislation that allows it to label any NGO using foreign funding a “foreign agent.” Moscow put a cap on foreign ownership of media companies, arguing that foreign publishers essentially represent foreign interests and influence Russian politics. Denouncing Putin’s opponents, independent politicians, and even provocative singers and artists as the puppets of some hostile external force has been a daily routine for the Russian state-run media for many years now.

Putin is a politician. Maybe not the fireside chat type, but you gotta keep the proles from throwing firebombs somehow. 81% of surveyed Russians have an “unfavorable” view of the U.S. It’s an election year. Why not score a rook off Kasparov? I don’t know if Russians think their government is behind the hack—the Kremlin denied any involvement, which is exactly what the Kremlin would say—but when Clinton blames Putin, this flatters him. Enemy of my enemy and all that. “Again, Americans attack Russia to distract from their own degeneracy. In such times, we need strong leaders to...”

Switch continents. How has the hack affected Clinton’s campaign?

Polls at this stage are bullshit, I agree, but grant that there’s little evidence that the hack has harmed Clinton. The media quickly honed in on Trump, the leaked emails were dismissed as minor, and even among people who are into salvia and locket photos of Bernie Sanders, the “rigged election” is bullet point ten in a list of Clinton’s alleged misdeeds.

I’ll go a step further: the hack is going to help Clinton’s campaign. Clinton is haunted by her reputation: “You know, Drowning Pool’s ‘Bodies’ was supposed to be a documentary. I’m just saying, man, who knows what she’s capable of?” But now you do “know”: she’s capable of swaying a few bureaucrats to write emoji-afflicted emails. The leak localizes a previously amorphous corruption: she still looks shady, but in a way that’s understandable, manageable. This will make it easier to support her. Vent and move on. “They’re both nuts, but what can you do? At least we can hold her accountable.” Logical follow-up: in the general election, Clinton moves to the left on a superficial but high profile issue. “We did it, Reddit!” Yeah, you did.

Last piece of the puzzle: the Times claims that Assange “timed email release for the Democratic Convention.” They fail to point out that this was when the emails were least likely to do harm. If the the emails were leaked in the primary, Ezra Koenig would have lead a mob of amateur webcomic artists on Washington. If they were leaked in the general election, Clinton would be hard-pressed to regain control of the narrative. As is, Assange lobbed a fat one for a DNC spike. Case closed. Bring out the comedians.

Assange is not stupid. He is playing the long game.

A: So that's a rather interesting understanding of how organizations really only have two choices to deal with transparency. The first choice is they can simply stop doing things that embarrass the public, so instead of committing an unjust act, commit a just act. Instead of hiding something, explain it. That's one choice.

A: The other choice is that they can spend more on their security; they can become more baroque; they can take things off-record, speak orally and continue with this course of unjust action. But if they do that, they will become inefficient compared to other organizations, and they will shrink in their power and scale. And that's also great because unjust organizations are in economic and political equilibrium and competition with just organizations.”

Q: That's what you call the "secrecy tax"?

A: Yes, that's right. So organizations that are doing things that the public doesn't like, when there are leaks, self-impose [a] secrecy tax through all this bureaucracy administration secrecy, and as a result simply shrink in their power and influence to conduct their affairs in that manner. (Source)

The leak was never meant to swing the election. It was meant as reminder: your secrets are not safe. But for this threat to work, the Capitol has to take Assange seriously as an antagonist—precisely what Putin wants, albeit for different reasons. And if they want to be taken seriously, they have to pick a fight with the winning team.

If it helps, consider an alternate universe where Assange leaks emails impugning Trump. Does anyone care? If bizarro-Trump wins, Assange was just another guy trying to rack up retweets; if bizarro-Clinton wins, Assange was supporting the future Commander-in-Chief = totally uncool.

Putin and Assange may personally prefer a Trump presidency, I don’t know and it doesn’t matter, their actions are business, not pleasure. The hack wasn’t a supervillain plot. It was an advertisement.

III.

I do not intend this essay as opprobrium against Putin, Clinton, Assange, or Orange Is the New Black. There are better reasons to judge each of them, for good or ill, than what is written here. And besides, don’t hate the player, etc.

Look, I know this is an easy target. Grant me this one? I’ll aim higher next time.

The researchers conducted a survey on 316 18- to 29-year-olds on how often they watched TV; how often they had feelings of loneliness, depression and self-regulation deficiency; and finally on how often they binge-watched TV. They found that the more lonely and depressed the study participants were, the more likely they were to binge-watch TV, using this activity to move away from negative feelings. (Source)

The amyloid minds at VICE, laying brand on a similar study:

You have met them, the new type of person that has emerged in the last couple of years through the cracks of your classic popular tribes—not quite a hipster, not quite punk or cutester, not an earnest pothead or fuckboy, but something else, something other—The Man Whose Entire Personality Is Built Around Really Liking Breaking Bad.

Well, good news: That man is hideously depressed, and so are we all, because binge-watching TV shows is trouncing our mental health. (VICE)

And now that correlation has blurred with causation:

But the most confounding factor may be how fast the technology that lets us binge is changing. Consider the autoplay function on Netflix. When an episode ends, there’s a 15-second pause and then the next episode in the season starts automatically. There’s no choice in this behavior, which means it’s up to the viewer to regulate themselves and turn off the TV. (NPR)

Thanks, Mom.

Since NPR isn’t willing to bite the bullet, I will: Big Media is forcing autoplay on the American public, giving us depression and diabesity. Big Pharma follows close behind, profiting off the treatment. Then the cash gets funneled to the NRA and makers of 32 ounce soda. Sigh. Pack up the Nespresso, honey. We’re moving to Canada.

II.

Here’s an alternative explanation: people rarely binge-watch in groups. Couples may share a series, but that tends to be a forty minutes per night thing, not the please-plug-me-into-the-Matrix desperation of your seventh consecutive episode of [topical reference]. And if two lovers can’t coordinate bathroom breaks, no way are you gonna get five people to agree on a non-alcoholic activity for more than an hour. Frequent bingers, then, “don’t have anything better to do.” On average: lonely, bored.

For such individuals, maybe binge-watching is palliative, maybe it’s harmful, maybe it depends. Which comes first, the fantasy world or the ruined reality? Further research is needed. Read some sci-fi. Ask your doctor if Love is right for you.

That doesn’t mean binge-watching’s proliferation is unimportant. On the contrary, it indicates a profound shift in our choice of entertainment, and, accordingly, the way we define ourselves.

Of the top 10 most-watched broadcast shows, The Voice, Little Big Shots, and Dancing With The Stars are game shows; 60 Minutes is news; The Big Bang Theory is a sitcom; Empire is a soap opera; NCIS and Blue Bloods are police crime dramas.

Aside from Empire, these shows are all procedural: the intra-episode narrative trumps any season-long arc, most episodes can be watched out of order. “If you don’t watch Dancing With The Stars from the beginning, you’re going to miss all the self-referential symbolism in season 3,” said no one ever. Cable TV takes this to the next level: not only is episode order immaterial, it barely matters when you tune in. This encourages group viewing: “Switch on the Colts game, I wanna see who’s winning.” Like pop from an overhead speaker, cable exists to soak up unwanted attention, which is why you’ll find both in YMCAs, sports bars, and urology waiting rooms.

Try to visualize other situations in which procedurals are viewed. Dad drinking news and Coors after work. Mom fading into HGTV on a gloomy day. The family gathered under blankets in the living room, eating whole wheat pasta to signal dominance over a narrated Serengeti.

Procedurals are comfort food. How do you make someone comfortable? Tell them a bedtime story. Status quo, perturbation, status quo. Sheldon/Oprah acknowledges his/her wackiness and everyone hugs. Bill O’Reilly/John Oliver’s indignation subsides, leaving a knowing smile for the ingroup. All hail the peak-end rule.

But procedurals have a stark limitation: they won’t let you disappear. The playwright Gustav Freytag divided drama into five acts: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. This is the formula by which humans process stories and thus memories. It can be obscured; it cannot not be escaped. If the story begins in medias res, the opening action becomes exposition. (Example: Star Wars.) If a “climax” happens without prelude or follow-up, it isn’t a climax. (John Travolta’s death in Pulp Fiction.) If the story lacks a proper climax, we connote symbolism on a close-enough moment. (The Sound and the Fury.) And if the story ends without proper denouement, we conjecture a moral and fill in the narrative gap. (A Perfect Day For Bananafish.)

Problem is, this formula is antithetical to binging. When you reach resolution, you have to pause, breathe, and relax, else it’s not resolution. Switching to four-wheel drive and climbing a mountain of exposition requires effort or despondency. Watching back-to-back episodes of the same news program is unpleasant. Three consecutive Friends reruns is grounds for a 5150.

Hence, the serial.

Serials are epitomized by the soap opera, featuring “related story lines about the lives of many characters, usually focusing on emotional relationships to the point of melodrama.” I don’t think fans of The Wire would call it a soap opera, but if you elide drama and melodrama then it meets the above definition. So does Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Transparent, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Scandal, Fargo, and ~ any Nussbaum-approved must-watch So Important Netflix Original Series. Sure, some soaps borrow procedural tricks—Bojack wears the forced-grin affectations of a sitcom—but a quick Youtube comment scan proves that fans watch for the character arcs. The slick .jpg above distinguishes between “shows to devour” and “shows to savor”; the actual difference is “completed in four days” vs. “completed in six days.” Which is nothing.

(Even in the pre-streaming era, soap operas were daytime programming, designed to fill time. Contrast with the evening news.)

How do these shows do it? Two plus hours (per night) is a significant investment—many habitual bingers hesitate to sit down for “a whole movie”, and the tenth minute of a Youtube video is mythological. The longer one is immersed, the greater the risk of fantasy disengagement, of Wait, why was I watching this? followed by Shouldn’t I be working on my actual life? followed by a refractory period of self-loathing, muscle weakness, and hummus.

22-minute procedurals permit your mind to wander between punchlines, two-hour soccer matches encourage you to talk with Europeans, serials—binged alone—cannot take any chances with your attention. And to this end, one rule is paramount: never provide the viewer with resolution.

III.

We are dancing around the word “ritual.”

Rituals can be social (various rites of passage) or antisocial (OCD compulsions); pleasant (eating), neutral (wearing a uniform), or unpleasant (cutting). No matter the adjective, the purpose is the same: comfort. Rituals are predictable, predictability allows understanding, understanding allows control, and control is the opposite of anxiety.

The knock against procedurals is that they are predictable, but they have to be, that’s the point. Serials are bound by the same five acts and are almost as predictable—meta-spoiler alert, the show is called Love, it’s about a boy and a girl—except the bass doesn’t drop as planned. We need a fix for the tension the show has created [1], so we click onwards, only to find a fresh set of obstacles and associated sidequests. Zeno’s paradox on a Kramer entrance. Status quo, perturbation, sine waves forever.

This informs serial structure in both macro and micro. “The in-laws are coming so we have to pretend to be vegans” is a viable sitcom plot, but too simply resolved for a serial arc. Instead, a fundamental wrongness is built into the serial’s world. Pilot episode, every time: the girl is dating the wrong guy, the guy is dating the wrong girl, the protagonist is/was maimed in a horrible accident, Good Male hero is forced to bow to a Bad Male prick. When the big wrong is offscreen, something still needs to block the path to resolution, hence drama, locker-room drama, a special conflict between each and every subset of characters. I’m sure this seems self-evident—“drama has drama”—but note that serials rarely showcase contented friendship, whereas procedural characters get along dandy as they catch criminals/make fun of Manhattanites/find quality housing at an affordable price. Procedurals come with preformed tribes: Mets against Yankees, family feud family, Man vs. Wild. Serials are about individuals.

And, counter- or intuitively, this makes serials aspirational. You might like 30 Rock’s jokes, its philosophy, its characters, but no one thinks, “If only I worked for NBC in the mid-2000s! I would belong.” In contrast, people love to imagine themselves in Westeros or Walking Dead-land, which, though I haven’t been following too closely, seems like kind of a downer place. I’m not saying aspiring Costco warlords think such a life would be pleasant, but neither outrage porn isn’t pleasant and yet you still go on Facebook. “You have it all wrong, I’m mad at the people who post outrage porn.” Oh, cool. I think there’s a subreddit for that.

IV.

Fine, pedants. The line between procedurals and serials is sometimes blurred—reality shows, for example, have season-long narratives but still grant resolution and piano music at the end of each episode. And people watch TV for reasons besides comfort and superstimulus immersion. Some shows carry branding, some shows are didactic, some shows are even, I admit it, “good.” Style is the soul; I’m not radical enough to claim that content is meaningless.

Still, the pattern is strong. And not unique to 16:9.

Viral content—shared amongst a group with context prepackaged—always follows the structure of a procedural. “As a goalie, Jason never let a ball get past him. Then he developed ALL: Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. But, thanks to Memorial Sloan Kettering…” Music videos follow this pattern, bound by the I–IV–V–I and chorus/verse/chorus of the song. So do op-eds, clickbait, and thinkpieces. In a “takedown” or “debunking”, the host parasite gets the first and last words; infographic .jpgs are closed captioning for the talk show formula.

The stories we follow longitudinally become soap operas. Webcomics, blog or vlog archives, celeb goss, rap discographies, folk discographies, group chats, forums, Twitter/Tumblr/Instagram archives. Diary entries of any sort, really—start keeping one and by day four you’ll have drawn yourself a shipping chart.

Two observed trends to correlate with the above.

First: sharing content that is too-broadly procedural (“FWD: FWD: When this little girl starts singing…”) is a dead giveaway that someone is old, sorta uncool, and never allowed to borrow your phone. Conversely, Flomax junkies mock Vyvanse containers for their focus on niche serials. “I just don’t get it. Why would you care what online strangers think about K-Pop?” “Because it’s part of the narrative, Dad! God!” I’m sure housewives still watch soaps, but the majority of modern serials are consumed by young people online.

Second: procedurals are low class. Game shows, cop shows, crap reviews = there’s a reason the Angry Birds movie was advertised at McDonald’s. Honest question: do you know anyone who watches any of the top 10 most-watched broadcast shows? Okay, one person watches Big Bang Theory, but she’s an acquaintance, not a friend. Even your parents are cooler than that—they like Downtown Abbey.

Bonus: have you ever heard of a Republican watching a Netflix Original Series?

V.

Even at their most polemic, procedurals reaffirm the status quo. Oh, maybe not the societal status quo, not directly, FOX and Gawker agree that’s all sorts of messed up. Your status quo. Which amounts to the same thing.

Breaking news breaks for about one week, followed by a week of feeble, bedridden decline. If you don’t believe me, do a Google Trend search for the political scoop of your choice. They all look about the same.

The lifecycle is consistent as well: rumors, media description, tribal rage, measured thinkpieces (“Really, this should teach us empathy”), and dissolution into the sea of history. The parallel is obvious. The logic of stories transcends scale, not by black magic, but because the media gives us what we want. So why does individual interest fade? Think back to a hot-button issue you stopped talking or thinking about, what was your reason? A four-word thought bubble: “Now I get it.”

It doesn’t matter if you actually get/got it, the feeling of understanding equals resolution. Procedurals comfort even if you disagree. If Jacobin is always wrong, not-Jacobin must be correct. CDC pamphlets bolster anti-vaxxers, Corinthians on a sunset makes atheists want to go Kratos. No one hatewatches a serial, hatereading a procedural is anxiolytic: “I was lost, but now I know exactly what to feel. Loathing for the outgroup.” A mental punching bag for when mental masturbation isn’t enough.

Consequently, procedurals are terrible missionaries. Typical procedurals propose a status quo, “The One Where [Tribe] Has a [Noun] Problem”, mansplain, and ouroboros back. This is necessary—in a proper ritual, Act 1 has to mirror Act 5—but putting the conclusion up front is discourse arsenic. Consider:

People who agree with Act 1 will either stop (“Cool, that’s what I thought”) or read until the Act 5 reinforcement. Status quo affirmed. 

People who blindly disagree with Act 1 will stop (“Of course this is what they believe”) or hateread towards Act 5 validation. Status quo affirmed.

People who disagree with Act 1 but read charitably despite this MAY have their object-level opinions changed. Neat, but zoom out: what motivates these people to move past the first paragraph? “This is awful, but I ought to be open-minded.” Which implies a big-picture belief, an identity—that will be confirmed by the ritual. “I’m glad I read that. Even if I don’t entirely agree, now I get where they’re coming from. Welp, back to my podcast about extraordinary moments in otherwise ordinary lives!” Status quo, etc.

Step away from my castle and dismantle your trebuchets. A nuanced opinion is better than a pixelated one. I am simply pointing out a bug, maybe a feature: procedurals rarely change one’s axioms. Usually the opposite. They are rituals, and rituals tell you what you want to believe.

VI.

At age 6, ideological viruses are transmitted vertically: prompted or not, children try out for team mascot. A decade ago, 3rd-graders proclaimed “Iraq is about oil!” like it came from the CIA’s classified file on puberty; in another town and tax bracket, sunburnt Cub Scouts tell racist and homophobic jokes for the same reason: “These are the people we are supposed to dislike.”

Ideologies happen to children. They do not seek them out. Does anyone?

High school punks start out angry—cystic acne, this town sucks—attend shows where you can punch nephrons, and then stumble upon the CrimethInc slogans that justify their anger. This doesn’t invalidate their politics, I’m not here to argue politics, and anyway I also thought the Anarchist’s Cookbook was hot shit when I was 15. But order of operations implies that beliefs develop, to some extent, by accident. If you start proselytizing Bakunin to a skinned-knee 12 year-old he’ll hit you with a shuriken; at 17 he’s reading Das Kapital on a cracked Samsung to impress a girl with a nose ring. Cool, but you better believe that in 1861 he’d lie about his age to fight for the Confederacy. No one joins reddit to whinge about how Amy Schumer runs the Illuminati, they join to talk about videogames and eventually the memes seep in. Do social media fascists have more in common with a social media marxists or guys with WHITE and POWER tattooed on respective shins? Anyone remember Pokémon Go?

Cults have two goals: keep veterans involved and recruit new members. Rituals accomplish the first task and prevent the second. If you lead with the story of Xenu dropping H-bombs on the Late Cretaceous, you’ve killed any chance of winning over a D-lister. No, you start with:

“What is true is what is true for you. No one has any right to force data on you and command you to believe it or else.”

"If it is not true for you, it isn’t true. Think your own way through things, accept what is true for you, discard the rest. There is nothing unhappier than one who tries to live in a chaos of lies.” (Source)

And then you offer aid: addiction treatment, relationship counseling, personal efficiency seminars—how can Scientology help you? By the way, is anyone else just loving Dianetics?

This is a serial, a soap opera, the plot of every TV series about a sad comedian trying to make it in the big bad world. “I’m smart, I’m sensitive—but I’m troubled. Will anything ever make me happy?” I don’t know, but I guarantee you’ll still have thetans at the end of the first season. Act 1 doesn’t have to match Act 5, so bury the lede and make sure Act 1 is tempting. Think about how a salesman shakes your hand, drops a few compliments, asks where you’re from, tells a story about the place—all before mentioning the product. You know it’s a sales pitch, but somehow that doesn’t bother you until you’ve spent $25 on scented bath salts. Being a salesman isn’t about selling the product, it’s about selling yourself. Willy Loman knew that but made the mistake of starring in a play called Death of a Salesman. If you’re building a brand, save it for the end of the ad.

These are ugly examples, but they speak to a sad desperate beautiful truth: people want to belong. Belonging always precedes belief: you have to be part of {X,Y,Z} in order to even hear about X. Politics and ethics are no different than grammar and etiquette. Stuff we pick up as we learn to fit in. 

Our beliefs are not fixed, but change has only one path: prove that you belong in Act 1, and use this shared starting point to argue for a revision of tribal customs. This is the structure of a serial. More generally, it is known as empathy.

This is how I know that any art piece billed as Feminist & Important will, in fact, win exactly zero people over to feminism. This is not a criticism of feminism, nor is it a criticism of the art. It is a criticism of the marketing; it is a criticism of you, pro or anti, for demanding that SEO labels tell you what to want. The media narrative replaces exposition and obviates the conclusion, turning a (persuasive?) (complex?) story into a clickbait headline, a chanted war cry, repulsing anyone who does not already agree. This is true for any ideology: being on the front page of The New York Times is a death knell, it is static friction, it tells everyone who distrusts the Times that they should disagree. Once you step into a church, all you can do is preach to the choir. “Must Watch” means “You already know what you’re going to see.”

Is there hope? Public opinion of same-sex marriage inverted in the 2000s, from 57% opposed in 2001 to 55% in favor in 2016. The people who changed their minds tell a similar story: I had a friend/coworker, mad cool, downed shots like Steph Curry, and it turned out she was a lesbian. Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange coming out letter doesn’t use the words “gay” or “bi”; the album has multiple songs about female lovers but only oblique references to his male, unrequited, love. The message isn’t “Fuck off breeder scum.” It is consciously the opposite: “We are not so different.”

And that’s the catch. Is that what you want, to be “not so different”? To say: “As great as my suffering is, I know you can relate”? To watch your identity become decorative? To see your community dissolved and washed away?

The cost of progress is assimilation. It is painful. Assimilation means competing against the gruesome majority of the human species, and you will be outnumbered and outvoted, and you will have to play by their rules and their values, and most of the time, you will lose. This is the sacrifice that heroism requires: you have to say no to belonging, you have to force yourself to be around people who ignore you, who despise you; you have to be kind to them until they fucking cave.

For everyone else, there’s Netflix.

VII.

Fields of study have intrinsic biases. History is conservative: patterns repeat, competition is progress, it’s no fun rooting for the losing team. Psychology is liberal: once you reduce everything to DNA and environment, judging someone for their choices becomes absurd. Entertainment genres have biases as well: action movies, ft. Objectively Bad Guys, are conservative; tearjerkers, implicitly about society’s failure to support the weak, are liberal.

Procedurals and serials do not have political biases per se. They are weaponized nonetheless. Procedurals resist change, serials promote it. Not any particular type of change—serials simply promise something better.

The subset of people who lose themselves in serials falls entirely within the set of people who are “trying to find themselves.” Young people, educated people, people with options, people with free time, people in therapy. The buzzword is narcissism, but I don’t mean it as an insult. The alternative does not seem better. People who never inhabit other lives are either dangerously sure of themselves or are too survival-occupied to ponder alternative values. The poor, the devout, the sycophantic.

With prosperity, the balance has shifted towards serials. There have always been cults, now anyone can be a cult leader, and that would be fine, except the first item on the agenda is to invent rituals, mandate sacrifices, come up with ways to keep normies out. The problem is not that there are too many tribes. It’s that they are mutually exclusive.

Is binge-watching bad for you? I doubt it. But the current sea change comes with a cost. The ceaseless movement from tribe to tribe, each one vowing a better fit, splits us into factions, balkanizes us into subcultures, and atomizes us towards the logical endgame: a personalized fantasy and a dextrose drip. My fear is not that serials will make us lonely. My fear is that we will become unable to conceive of another human being who could make us feel less alone.

But I don’t need to tell you that. You know how the story goes.

[1]. 

So. What are judges told to consider during sentencing?

These theories of sentencing can be divided into utilitarian and deontological.

- Retribution and Denunciation are deontological. Imprisoning a 94-year-old ex-Auschwitz guard is unlikely to deter future Nazis and comes too late to reform behavior or prevent harm. Perhaps his punishment will provide slight comfort to the families of Holocaust victims (reparation), but this is not the primary motivation for his sentence. “Some things are just wrong.”

- Incapacitation is utilitarian. Consider a Hannibal Lecter-type who is perfectly content to remain in jail and make small talk with Clarice. Assuming torture and execution are unconscionable, Dr. Lecter cannot be meaningfully punished; nevertheless, his imprisonment protects society, improving sum utility.

- Reparation depends on the ability of the criminal to make amends. If reparation was the sole basis for sentencing, a severely disabled criminal—one totally unable to recompense society—would get off scot free. Utilitarian.

- Deterrence depends on the ability of (+ need for) the public to be deterred, e.g. “making an example of him.” Utilitarian.

- And Rehabilitation depends on a criminal’s capacity for redemption. Once again, punishment is context-dependent—how will this benefit the overall good?—rather than intrinsic to the crime committed. Sorting Hat says utilitarian.

Sophisticated people like to talk smack about the Levitical ugliness of retributive justice. Punishment for punishment’s sake is barbaric. Shouldn’t our justice system try to heal society instead of inflicting new wounds?

Maybe. Maybe not.

Imagine two young men found guilty of the same offense, say, drug possession with intent to distribute. One comes from money and goes to Princeton. The other defendant has multiple incarcerated relatives and lives in the poverty of North Philadelphia.

The judge, who has a very broad jurisdiction, is an impartial race-blinded robo-utilitarian. To whom will he give the harsher sentence?

First, observe that the rationale for drug prohibition is utilitarian. The justice system cares little about marijuana possession in and of itself. Rather, it uses marijuana possession as a screening tool to find people who are at risk of committing more serious crimes in the future.

(Whether marijuana is a useful predictor and whether these rehab/deterrence techniques are worth the cost is, obviously, a matter of debate.)

But the screening tool isn’t marijuana possession, exactly: it’s getting caught. My alma mater provided a hedge-obscured courtyard a half-block from the dorms, complete with picnic table and benches, so that sulky ex-prodigies could play Hal Incandenza without risking detention. It made sense: freshmen who limited their vice to nighttime in the designated area were (probably) responsible enough to pass their classes, so the university had no reason—and did not wish—to intervene. On the other hand, students who smoked in their dorm rooms or between lectures were (probably) cavalier about their drug use and in danger of slipping up: hence RAs, hence campus police.

If poverty has forced you to room with two aunts and three asthmatic cousins, smoking indoors is probably a no-go, and safe outdoor smoking areas do not exist. But this increased likelihood of getting caught is a “““feature”””, not a bug, because low socioeconomic status (and correspondingly, minority race) is an additional risk factor for a variety of criminal offenses.

If the justice system wants to cost-effectively Minority Report future criminals, it should target the disenfranchised for arrest, and it should sentence them more harshly as well. The Princeton student has few criminal peers, no family history of crime, and plenty of social and financial support for his beachside recovery. His likelihood of recidivism is low. The Philly resident is surrounded by crime. His family cannot pay for rehab or therapy. His likelihood of recidivism is higher.

“It makes sense to spend government resources on the guy who needs it,” the argument goes. “Get him into treatment he wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford. Send a message: shape up or else. And, if worst comes to worst—keep a potentially dangerous person off the street.”

And so, for the same crime, utilitarianism disproportionately punishes the less fortunate.

One can remain a utilitarian but condemn the way utility is calculated. Perhaps prison is so harmful and rehab so ineffective that, for minor crimes, sentencing is worse than doing nothing. Reasonable, but this does not invalidate divergent sentencing for more serious crimes.

Or perhaps the awareness of injustice, “the courts hate ___ people”, causes public distrust that outweighs any benefit from utility-conscious sentencing. This argument is impossible to resolve, since the harm of “public distrust” cannot be quantified. However, choosing sentences to fit public opinion seems a perilous game, especially since the public bites onto whatever tribal narrative the media is currently selling. 

Reality is rarely so simple. Let us return to our original case of affluenza-induced vehicular manslaughter, and translate the typical defense: 

“The defendant made a mistake. The trial and media hoopla have been a nightmare, more than sufficient deterrence. The defendant has been enrolled in an intensive rehabilitation program, where he is learning to cope with his depression without resorting to substance abuse. He has no past history of similar offenses. He is never going to make this mistake again.”

“I understand that you want to send a message, to punish someone who has recklessly squandered his good fortune, to show that no one is above the law. But this sentence will not undo the harm that has been done. It will not prevent further harm. Does your thirst for vengeance warrant needlessly ruining a life?”

(numbers surrounded by [ ] are footnotes, scroll to the bottom.)

I.

Americans want to know who’s winning. The stereotype holds that Americans obsess over sex, money, and violence, but America’s fetish is not beach-tan cheerleaders or football concussions, it is SportsCenter. Miley Cyrus is replaceable, a People magazine subscription is guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, and Cash Rules Everything Around Me only because you can’t throw a Roth IRA at a stripper. Americans want to know who’s winning. Sex, money, and violence just happen to be games in which everyone knows the score.

Certainly, s/m/v aren’t the only ones in town—America is the country of Believe It Or Not and One Weird Trick. “Yes, he may have a career, a family, and the respect of his community, but can he do this?” Part for the whole: we carve out niches of power and make them our identity. Even losing becomes a game you can win. “No one understands what I’m going through” = if the game weren’t rigged, I would be the one on top. Flip the board and sulk. “The same thing we do every night, Pinky—complain that we don’t have enough spoons to take over the world.”

But the hunger games are the ones we obsess over. Oscar Wilde: “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” Once you understand this, America’s prudish prurience makes sense: the act of sex isn’t important, the scorecards are important. Consider your last breakup: “I know you love me for who I am. That’s why I can no longer trust your opinion.” On TV, Mr. Protagonist walks out of the nightclub with blonde on each shoulder, then scene cut to post-coital sheets and the long exhale. Aspirational without making you insecure—thank God it didn’t show a penis. Paperback erotica doesn’t have to be more explicit than a Downton Abbey episode, and the master/slave narrative, replacing sex with the symbols of sex, is particularly popular among insecure women and men. “He’s more powerful than me, but he still likes me? That’s all I needed to hear,” she thinks, driving to the dorm room qua sex dungeon; meanwhile Sir has trimmed his pubes and taken down his Pink Floyd posterior poster because he’s not sure if it’s offensive and he doesn’t want to kill the mood. I welcome your hatemail. Maybe I’ll start scrapbooking.

Winning and losing are loaded enough that society places a taboo on numbers to keep us from going Highlander. It’s rude to ask someone “what’s your income, IQ, and girth?”, but it is equally impolite to flip your own baseball card. Why? Because size, class, and Int are considered unchangeable markers of value, and plausible deniability vanishes when numbers get involved. Thus, one of you is better and always will be better, which means the guy who loses at sex and money has only one path to redemption. Let’s hope your summer camp aikido pays off. [1]

The measurement obsession isn’t unique to America, of course. It’s part of any individualistic society, i.e. “The West”, i.e. “the dystopian cyberculture that all developed nations asymptotically approach.” But America is definitely at the far end of the spectrum. And before I go full Noam on this mofo, I’ve got to give credit to individualism. Do you know what happened to Tibet? They were peaceful, they were selfless, and they got totally crushed. Whereas America won the 20th century: best movies, best music, best military, best fast food, best athletes, and we’re the ones giving out the awards. Measurement leads to competition, competition leads to capitalism, and the starting line ain’t fair but the race does pick out winners.

On the other hand:

Sometimes I just feel really ugly and it makes me so sad. There’s brief moments when I think, “Hey, I’m not that bad,” but these moments seem to few and far between. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I remember being in middle school or maybe early high school and spending the entire day crying at my house because I was upset over a certain part of body. I missed out on going to a concert with my sister and her friend. I obsess about everything from the smallest wrinkles on my forehead to my gums to my cowlick to my eyebrows to my acne to my cellulite. These are things that aren't even a big deal. For example, I'm skinny and have the slightest cellulite under my butt. No one has ever commented on it negatively but I obsess over it. It’s unhealthy but I don't know how to change the way I feel about these things which are always going to be a part of me. I find imperfections in every thing I do. I hate that I’m never going to be the prettiest or the smartest or the funniest. I don’t know why anyone finds me attractive. I see girls every single day who are ten times prettier and cuter than I am. Why would anyone find me attractive next to these girls? I wish I could love myself like I deserve to be loved.  [From a forum, somewhere.]

For every winner, there are many, many, many people who feel like losers. Example: body dysmorphic disorder, which occurs in about 2% of the general population but is much more common in certain groups, e.g. 11-13% of people with social phobia. I don’t know if the individual quoted above has BDD, but for every person with “excuse me, I need to stare at the bathroom mirror” dysmorphia, there are a dozen subclinical cases: people who obsess over weight, height, muscle mass, skin tone, acne, vocal pitch, posture, alopecia, and the thousand other difficult or impossible to change traits that come with being human.

“This is so depressing. I can’t stand how the media perpetuates unrealistic standards of beauty.” I wish it were that simple, but I assure you, if Disney, NewsCorp, Time Warner, and Viacom all did a slow dance with antimatter our unrealistic standards would not magically become realistic. The media isn’t blameless, but it tells us what we want to hear. If the media disappeared, we would still want to hear the same things. Type in “pretty girls” on the Tumblr search bar—do you think those “unrealistic standards” are going to disappear? And if you’re looking for a grassroots, sex-positive environment, look no further than reddit’s /r/gonewild, where young women insert objects into their rectums, take selfies, add personalized captions (“I’m stripping [f]or you, gonewild”) that give men a flash of less-loneliness as they dilate their pupils and one-hand-type “cum”, to which the women reply in lower-case font: “it feels good when you like me, please don’t stop liking me.” But don’t hate the player, hate the crushing emptiness of the human condition. Exhibitionists and voyeurs were around before papyrus, and if body image is a modern problem it is only because there are more images of bodies. No matter what Kendrick says, dick is pretty much free. Men are constantly aware that they are replaceable, women are constantly reminded that they are inferior. Most people feel inadequate most of the time.

I get obsessively down on myself, and hammer myself into the ground so hard that there is no way of possibly getting back up. I tell myself I am too anxious to be in charge of anything or have any real responsibilities, and that if I did, I would just freak out and ruin everything and get fired. This attitude basically showed in my job interview, when they started throwing responsibilities at me and I just said "I don't know if I'll be able to do that,” and had no idea how to respond to any of it. I couldn't say "Yeah, I'm capable of that,” because I don't believe I am and I couldn't lie. Clearly the wrong things to say, but I was just so intimated and nervous. I left the interview, went to my car, and broke down and cried for almost an hour. I just feel like my anxiety is going to destroy any chance I have of ever accomplishing anything. [From a forum, somewhere.]

No catchphrase exists that can mend the feeling of inadequacy. You can try—“All of this stuff is subjective, it doesn’t really matter”—but at some level, it does matter. We care about measurement and any trait can be measured. The scale starts at 0 and it goes to 10. You are not a 10. And so, the argument goes:

We all fantasize of being beautiful and with a beautiful person.

People who are less than 8/10 usually manage to find someone: a 2 with a 2, a 4 with a 6, a 6 with a 7, etc.

All of these sub-8 relationships remind me of playing “house” as a kid: you play Mommy and I'll play Daddy. Let’s pretend.

When you’re taking your date out for a fancy dinner, even if you are a 7 with a 7, it is role play. When you get your dick sucked in your car down by the lake and think you’re part of some hot sexual act, it is not, you are pretending. When you get photos taken together, deep down, you’re trying to convince yourself that you’re the hot couple which you will never be.  

We make each other feel better by allowing each other to pretend to be the sexy people that we are not. 8+ people do it for real. [/r9k/]

I reject this. Some people have it easier than others, but beauty is an not immutable truth. For the rest of this essay, that is what I intend to prove.

II.

Let’s play the rating game.

This analysis of speed dating events found that “60% of the predictive power comes from the group consensus and 40% of the predictive power comes from deviations from the group consensus.” I plugged in the numbers of a few threads on /r/rateme and found slightly more generous results: each girl’s mean attractiveness fell between 5.0 and 8.5, and the standard deviation of any one girl’s ratings was ~1. (i.e., if you’re a 7, 16% of people will consider you 8+ based on picture alone.) I’m aware that my methodology is Lehrer-esque, and I bring it up only to introduce two uncontroversial points:

Notions of beauty are fairly consistent within a culture: there is broad consensus about “hot” vs. “not.”

However, there are meaningful differences in taste, even amongst the sample of “people who post attractiveness ratings on reddit.” 

Cool? Moving on.

Why do we agree that some people are more attractive than others? According to Dr. Gad Saad, the associate editor of Evolutionary Psychology:

It is undeniable that indeed there are an endless number of cultural definitions of beauty. However, these are largely inconsequential, when compared to evolutionarily relevant metrics.

Symmetric faces are construed as more beautiful than asymmetric faces in all cultures (irrespective of the race of the person being evaluated and the race of the evaluator). You can visit Bedouins in the Middle East, the Yanomamo in the Amazon, and Inuits in the Canadian north, and they will all agree as to who is or is not beautiful (based on facial features). Clear skin is a universal preference. Certain morphological features that connote masculinity (square jaw) or femininity (high-cheek bones) are universally preferred. Rotund Rubanesque women, heavier women preferred in Central Africa, and catwalk thin models, while varying greatly in terms of their weight, all tend to have hourglass figures that correspond roughly to a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.70 (although cultural settings can slightly alter that preference). Babies who are insufficiently cognitively developed to be influenced by socialization gaze at symmetric faces for longer periods than they do at asymmetric ones. I can provide numerous other examples that support the universal components of beauty but I suppose that you get the point. (Psychology Today)

That’s not an ad hominem, he did it to himself.

Arguments that seek to explain the nuances of human behavior via natural selection are almost always misguided. Dr. Saad’s argument is not the exception. I do not dismiss evolution; rather, I argue that evolution has had powerful effects way upstream of any one trait. Hardware keeps us alive, but our lives are run by software.

Case study: Dr. Saad states that symmetrical faces are universally preferred over asymmetrical faces. This is almost true, but...

...when faces were divided down the middle two perfectly symmetrical faces could be created from the two halves, a “left face” consisting of the left half of the face and its mirror image, and a “right face” constructed in a similar manner. These two perfectly symmetrical faces could then be compared with the unaltered face. In all cases, except in the most unattractive original faces, the unaltered face was rated as more attractive than either of the perfectly symmetrical faces. (Wikipedia)

In most cases, then, artificially-induced symmetry does not prettify a face. So why do we find symmetric faces attractive?

Faces with “average” features tend to be extremely attractive, e.g. Jessica Alba, if you’re amnestic to the Fantastic Four remakes. The above picture is an extreme example (results may vary), but experiments have found that number of faces averaged positively correlates with attractiveness.

...they selected photographs of 192 young male and female Caucasian faces; each of which was computer scanned and digitized. They then made computer-processed composites of each image, as 2-, 4-, 8-, 16-, and 32-face composites, averaged by pixel. These faces, as well as the component faces, were rated for attractiveness by 300 judges on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = very unattractive, 5 = very attractive). The 32-composite face was the most visually attractive of all the faces. (Wikipedia)

Hence, don’t mess with the sliders on the character creation screen. We are not programmed to seek symmetry or clear skin, evolution just says that normal = good. How do we know what’s normal?

Fifteen minute-old neonates show no preference for attractive faces over unattractive faces. But 72 hours later they already stare longer at faces judged by adults to be attractive than they do at unattractive faces. This rapid development of an appreciation of facial beauty (as judged by adults) might be explained by the fact that an averaged face made of 32 faces looks almost indistinguishable from any other 32-face averaged face even when they are created from a completely different set of individuals. It is thus possible that an average of only 32 facial exemplars is sufficient to approximate the population mean, and thus produce a prototype that is shared by almost everyone in a community. (Wikipedia)

This directly refutes one of Dr. Saad’s claims. See also: “Three-month old infants, but not newborns, prefer faces of the same race.” We form a model of the world and find comfort when the world conforms to our model: allegory of the cave, natch. “I loved the new Star Wars!” Me too. Best Disney movie I’ve seen in a while.

Waist-hip ratio is also a bit messier than Dr. Saad implies. American men do prefer a low waist-hip ratio (around 0.68), at least when looking at 2-dimensional figures, although note that this is close to the mean WHR of young American women (0.72–0.73). In comparison, young Hazda men prefer a WHR of 0.78, close to the mean WHR of 0.79 among young Hazda women. Matsigenka and Cameroonian men also prefer their women with a little extra, and I must point out the hefty debate regarding BMI vs. WHR as acronymized predictors of hotness.

But despite a lack of true universality, low WHRs are preferred in most of the world, and this preference pops up in surprising places, e.g. among congenitally blind men. Why?

The researchers showed 511 Brisbane schoolchildren, aged six to 11, drawings of men and women with varying waist-to-hip ratios and body-mass index, a measure of bodyweight as it relates to height.

"We found that the preference for [a waist-to-hip ratio of] 0.7 in women and 0.9 in men emerged strongly around age 10 and 11," Slaughter said.

The bias wasn't evident among the five and six-year olds. But they showed a preference for thin figures, which probably most closely mirrored their own shape. (ABC, actual study here.)

Observation: no one cares about secondary sexual characteristics more than high schoolers. In college, waifish tumblrgirls and late-blooming tumblrboys do pretty well; in high school, they are ignored, hence Tumblr. Why are high schoolers so superficial? If you recall, when you first discovered the thrill of senpai noticing you, it was the most exciting thing ever. So you stopped paying attention in class and started scanning for qts. Who was willing to flirt back?

Puberty prompts you to seek out a mate. Puberty’s dark magic also lowers the WHR of women, increases the shoulder-hip-ratio of men, increases bust size (♀), musculature (♂), penis size (♂), cheekbones (♀), and jawline (♂), all stereotypically attractive traits. Even for a congenitally blind man with an allergy to pop culture, a first makeout session will involve lots of breast caressing, booty squeezing, and running of hands from narrow waist onto broad hips. The map is thus written: wide hips = good chemicals, “even better than videogames!” Puberty onsets earlier in girls than boys, so a girl’s first boyfriend is likely to be taller, older, and more competent than the boys her age = same principle. Culture acts as a positive feedback loop for these preferences, but it is not necessary for them to emerge [2].

With luck, this explanation will annoy people on both sides of the nature/nurture debate. Evolution tells us to form prototypes, but it says nothing about how those prototypes should appear [3]. Forget all the traits mentioned above, if insectoid aliens landed on Earth and spoke English, humanity would be DTF within a month. (“Bro, she’s got legs like you wouldn’t believe.”) On the other hand, many socially constructed preferences are deeply embedded and unlikely to change. Obesity has not been deemed unattractive by the SoulCycle Illuminati. Obesity is unattractive because your cute lab partner is a potential mate, while her pre-gastrectomy Mom is not.

None of this is terribly actionable. You're more-or-less stuck with your facial structure, and it’s no secret that deadlifts and moisturizer will make you more appealing. So why does this matter?

Because the same process that is responsible for our similarities in taste accounts for our differences. You can take advantage of differences.

III.

We form our prototypes of “nice to look at” during early childhood and “nice to stare at” during puberty. Not coincidentally, these are two developmental periods during which our pattern-matching is turned up to the max.

In the beginning, you cry and you are fed. In infancy and childhood, we learn what gets us love. “Love” is perhaps the wrong word—after all, we’ll throw a temper tantrum if it gets us attention. More than kindness, we crave connection. We need someone to acknowledge that we exist, to understand us as human. Without that, we are alone.

I’m going to use the word "love”, though, because whatever definition you create for that feeling (“the opposite of loneliness”) is the one you’ll use for all future relationships: romantic, platonic, and parental. In childhood, we form a prototype of what love looks like and we learn how to get it.

During puberty, we must become powerful. Power is your ability to control the universe, the high of power comes from leveling up. Power exists from birth: as much as curiosity, power is what motivates us to stand, walk, and run [4]. Even social power—“status”—exists before puberty. Poor kids and younger siblings are acutely aware of this, since they have to kick and scream for every advantage. But puberty is when status games become mandatory, and if you refuse to play, you are low status. Why puberty? Because we’ve got plenty of food, air, and water, but sex is still a finite resource. “It shouldn’t be.” Even if it wasn’t, love is a finite resource. “It shouldn’t be.” Hate to break it to you, but there are 24 hours in a day and 28,000 days in the average life. Whatever criteria you use to pick companions, these criteria will become the new foci of status. The game may not be zero sum, but it doesn’t sum to much. 

In puberty, we learn the rules of status games and pick a strategy to maximize gain or minimize loss. We learn how incredible it feels to level up, to be valued and desired. We a prototype of what power looks like and we learn how to get it [5].

This essay is titled “How To Be Attractive”, which means that you (male) expect me to answer “What do women want?” But it’s no different than what men want. We want to feel powerful and we want to feel loved. These twin desires are the yin and yang beneath all interaction: both are necessary for happiness, neither is sufficient alone. The problem of human existence is that power is always relative, between strong and weak, while love is felt in moments of mutual understanding, of equality, so that in any one microsecond of choice the forces driving our lives are inextricably opposed.

However, the notion that love is “good” and power is “bad” is the greatest error of liberal philosophy. It’s an American idea, part of our obsession with objectivity and winning. It’s a way to score morality: whoever causes the least harm is the better person. We don’t care about doing Good—no one can agree on “Good” anyway—we care about not doing Wrong. Insert comparison to our medical and legal systems here.

Consider a group of 20-somethings trying to decide what to eat for lunch. Korean? Mexican? Shake Shack? They look at their phones, scroll down Yelp, and, every minute or so, one of them makes a bold proposition: “We could do sushi, I guess. I mean, if you guys think it’s a good idea.” No one is willing to lead, because what if it turns out the sushi place is really expensive? The leader would have caused harm to his constituents. He would be a failure, a bad person, and, justifiably, his followers would shun him. Sure, there’s an opportunity cost to standing around in the parking lot outside work, but that cost is borne by everyone. His place in the standings is unchanged.

If you are a strict believer in primum non nocere, you should be childfree. After all, parents always fuck up their kids. How could they not? The more power you have over someone, the more likely you are to harm them, and parents are gods in the blurred eyes of an infant. If you are truly scrupulous, you should be polyamorous: no risk of infidelity, no risk of being too boring, can’t renege on no commitment, no need to ever fight. And, of course, you should be asexual. Sex is messy and confusing—someone could get hurt!—but Astroglide makes it so the thenar muscles don’t chafe, and a bit of asexual heteromasturbation will kill whatever libido is left in your blood. All that would be fine—do what makes you happy—except you’re not happy, you have a smoldering fury in your chest and it shows in everything you say. You find people to be stupid and selfish and predictable and yet they’re still scary. Why is that? What are you missing? You comfort yourself: “I may not have X, but at least I have civilization.” Civilization isn’t enough to quench the rage, though, so you fantasize about joining the Dark Side, although you never will, it requires a set of skills you do not have and honestly you would not like it, it is lonelier than you think. “Are you making fun of—?” I’m making fun of an archetype. If you’re seeing it, it’s for you.

That’s the charitable view.

It’s hard to separate the love of power from the power of love—they talk when you sleep, you know. The charitable view is that people eschew power out of a strict but misguided sense of morality. The less charitable view is that becoming strong is difficult, while saying that you love everyone costs you nothing. Being weak is actually protective: as long as you give people what they want, they won’t bother to hurt you [6]. Of course, love without power doesn’t heal the sick, give aid to the needy, or satisfy a partner, but you remind yourself that if you had power, you’d always do the right thing. Alas, you don’t, because of society. Oh well. Start a Twitter trend about it. “Alpha” and “beta” are silly ways to describe social status, but they have meaning in statistics: your alpha is your chance of a false positive error, your beta is your chance of a false negative. I’m not saying you should inject HGH and howl “cuck” at the moon, but there is a way to be confident that pays heed to the greater good.

Not only do érōs and thanatos lack intrinsic moral weight, they are easily tricked, triggered, hidden, and hacked. This is important, so I will give a few examples.

One, mentioned earlier, is BDSM. The key to understanding kink is that both the dom and the sub get to feel more powerful. The dom’s benefit is obvious: the roleplay allows him to pretend at strength. It is not morally equivalent, but domestic abuse comes from the same place. The sub’s power is twofold. First, he avoids any risk of failure and subsequent status drop. (“You’re just lying there?” “I’m being submissive.”) Second, the dom’s willingness to break social norms means that the sub is worth it. “You’re a pathetic tiny-dicked sissy boy [but you’re so great that I’m spending energy on you anyway.]” The dom/sub dynamic is present in most vanilla sex as well: the active partner’s job is to grunt “I’m working really hard!”, the passive partner’s job is to moan “I’m really into it.” I don’t need to point out where the gender division falls in practice. That sounds mean, but no hate, do what makes you happy; just be aware that anyone claiming that erotic choking subverts the patriarchy is trying to sell you a memoir. I propose: “Just Kink About It: How I Reclaimed My Sexuality From The Male Gaze And Lost 30 Pounds In 30 Days.” If that doesn’t go viral, there’s always academia.

We prefer to date high-status people because this counts towards our score, makes us powerful by association. “He has a hot girlfriend, so he must be doing something right.” What constitutes status, however, is culture-dependent. The hobbit that seduces Marnie in Girls would not register as an alpha male in 13th century Mongolia, and Genghis Khan would come off a little gauche in 21st century Brooklyn. (“He’s confident, sure, but his politics are awful—I don’t think he understands imperialist systems of oppression at all.”) If you can’t tell whether someone is powerful, you look for an objective score: if she’s slept around, that means people other wanted her, which means she’s worth wanting [7]. In response, women who want to feel desirable have to look promiscuous, even if they aren’t. (See also: camming.)

Love is just as exploitable. Feeling loved = feeling understood. Children and puppies are lovable because they are simple; neotenous faces appear cute because they are hyper-expressive. The problem arises when synapse-challenged college kids adopt a puppy, spoil it, and get tired of caring for something that is no longer cute. The greater problem occurs when these people have kids. The obverse: people with dementia, retardation, or even a language barrier appear, in some horrible unavoidable way, inhuman. But time brings understanding: as you learn someone’s personal language, you grow to love them, it is unavoidable. (See also: Stockholm Syndrome.) It is possible to love someone based on nothing but their pattern of intubated breaths. It is possible to love someone whom you no longer even like.

Finally, the feelings of love and power, the squirts of oxytocin and dopamine and friends into junctions between cells, come from velocity, not position. All feelings are subject to the hedonic treadmill: you build up a tolerance. Hence new relationship energy, hence /r/deadbedrooms, hence why kings still crave power, and hence the allure of emotionally labile relationships. If your gf screams that she hates you and then does a 180 and professes undying love, your brain will process this as: “I’m so great, I can convince even my haters to love me.” Boom, dose up, and you can do the same for her. Complaining about a “crazy ex” is like complaining that the coke made you too jumpy. You get what you pay for, pal. Caveat emptor.

Despite my mild distaste re: love, power, sex, human beings, I don’t want to harsh the vibe too much. Love can be beautiful, power can be noble, sex, I’m a fan, and all three of them make for great television.

However, if you want to be attractive, you need to understand the ways in which our prototypes are blind. Don’t hate the player, hate the lazy programming of a 200,000 year old meme generator. And the games of love and power have one glaring defect: it’s easy to win if you know how to act.

IV.

Our prototypes are constructed from the narratives we observe. Perhaps in Babylon these narratives were learned through real world experience, but this is the 21st century, schizoid man. Lived romance accounts for 0.1% of our exposure to boy meets girl. The rest comes from pixels.

Try this: close your eyes, and imagine a perfect date with the perfect girl. “She has kind of a cute hipster aesthetic...we’re holding hands...it’s the fall...she’s wearing a sweater...” Have you ever done that? Where did you get that image? Isn’t that an ad for Cialis?

Our prototypes for love are broad—the average of any 32 faces looks about the same—and broadly agreed upon, since parent-child relations and the Golden Rule are fairly consistent across cultures. Puberty is more variable than infancy, and correspondingly, power is narrow and culture-dependent. Sure, the details of your taste can change and expand—you liked Spike in Buffy, now you’re into the guy from Teen Wolf—but the central rules of your prototype (“I like nonthreatening bad boys”) are impossible to alter without becoming a different person. Most of us just switch pages in the Monster Manual.

The influence of cultural narratives cannot be overstated. When someone shows you a picture of an Oppressed Person With Striking Eyes and says “Isn’t she beautiful?”, you’re like, “Yeah, but I'd have to really concentrate if I wanted to masturbate to her. Maybe I could pretend she’s in a sorority?” Pavlov was right: eventually, you can get off to the winky face alone. All porn works this way: in a title like “Big Titted Asian Teen Plowed By Massive Cock”, “by” is the only word that’s not an identity marker, and luckily some enterprising soul invented hashtags so soon we can dispense with prepositions completely. Nota bene that I hate everything.

“Okay, but in real life we don’t have a search function.” Really? Consider: “I saw her from across the room, and I immediately fell in love.” Fell in love with what? “She had these big thick-rimmed glasses...and an impish smile...and we’re holding hands, and it’s the fall...” Right, part for the whole. She had big glasses, so you typecast her into the story you’ve run through your head a thousand times, the story repetition has lodged in your unconscious Id. She had big glasses, so she was the type of girl you could love. “No, you don’t get it—she looked like the girl of my dreams.” Exactly.

Of course, she knows this, which is why she chose the glasses.

This is how fashion works. Unfashionable people can be too flashy or underdressed, but in both cases, the question is the same: “Who are you supposed to be?” A well-dressed person is essentially wearing a costume: if you put an ugly guy an expensive suit, his face is irrelevant, he becomes the suit. Strippers use a similar technique. “Geek chic” accentuates nerdiness (glasses, bow-tie, buttoned-up shirt), unattractive nerds downplay it (brown hoodie, loose jeans, hobo beard). Wearing half Ed Hardy and half Lululemon = weird, but picking either half will make you attractive...

...to poor souls who are into Ed Hardy or Lululemon. Let’s be clear: it is impossible to be attractive to all of humanity. Race is a rule-out criteria for many people, physique for many more. Classic post-coital conversation: girl says “I don’t think I’m mysterious enough to be really attractive,” boy says “I don’t think being mysterious would make you more attractive.” Both are right: mystique makes you attractive to more people, but specialization makes you more attractive to those who have the relevant prototype [8].

In this respect, behavior is no different than appearance.

In this essay, I argue that subcultures form (with labels, identities) because people at the fringe of a larger culture want to be around similar minds. This makes sense: people who differ vastly from you a) won’t understand you, so you won’t be lovable, and b) won’t value your particular set of skills, so you won’t be powerful [9]. Slate Star Codex has the right idea with his cellular automata model of fashion, although his version is a little group-selection-y for my tastes. The bourgeoisie would never confuse Richie Rich in a Wu-Tang shirt for an actual poor person, but neither would poor people. Status is local, not global; convergent evolution just happens when you’re trying to look slightly better than everyone else in the room. n+1 theory of status: you have to be close enough to be recognized as “playing the same game”, and then you have to win. Hipsters look the same from a distance, but any hipster will tell you the ways he’s post-hipster. “I think On Avery Island is the superior album.” Seek professional help. We need the outgroup for our Two Minutes Hate, but most of our day-to-day battles are against the ingroup. To quote a friend: “Wars aren’t less common. They’ve just gotten more civil.”

Once you start watching for status battles, you will find them.

Mrs. X: I had a nasty turn last week. I was standing in a queue waiting to go into the cinema when I felt ever so queer. Really, I thought I should faint or something.

[Mrs. X is attempting to raise her status by having an interesting medical problem. Mrs. Y immediately outdoes her.]

Mrs. Y: You're lucky to have been going to a cinema. If I thought I could go to a cinema I should think I had nothing to complain of at all.

[Mrs. Z now blocks Mrs. Y.]

Mrs. Z: I know what Mrs. X means. I feel just like that myself, only I should have had to leave the queue.

[Mrs. Z is very talented in that she supports Mrs. X against Mrs. Y while at the same time claiming to be more worthy of interest, her condition more severe. Mr. A now intervenes to lower them all by making their condition seem very ordinary.]

Mr. A: Have you tried stooping down? That makes the blood come back to your head. I expect you were feeling faint. [Keith Johnstone, Impro]

Status is not something that you are, status is something that you do. In the above conversation, status is mostly primum non nocere: the players compete to see who can self-efface most creatively. A woman once told me that her bestie would introduce the two of them as “sassy ladies,” “since she knows that she’s the sassy one.” Close-but-not-that-close girls squeal equally loud when they see each other because they’ve reached the endgame of a Cold War of friendliness. When a party host you barely know says “Heyyyyy! Glad you could make it!”, he’s not doing it to be nice, he’s pissing to mark his territory. Either accept low status or reframe the battle to focus on your skillset. Mockery works by discounting the game that the other player wants to play, hence the ultimate comeback: “Nyaah nyaah nyaah! That’s what you sound like.” “Oh, like this blog does, when it’s not disjointed insight porn.” Aww. They grow up so fast.

Status is a skill. It takes practice. What you may not realize is that you practice even when you’re not trying. Impro again:

My belief (at this moment) is that people have a preferred status; they like to be low, or high, and that they try to manoeuvre themselves into the preferred positions. A person who plays high status is saying 'Don't come near me, I bite.' Someone who plays low is saying 'Don't bite me, I'm not worth the trouble.' In either case the status played is a defence, and it'll usually work. It's very likely that you will increasingly be conditioned into playing the status: you've found an effective defence. You become a status specialist, good at playing one status, but not very happy or competent at playing the other.

Since status markers differ across social settings, practice brings skill at playing a given status in a given setting, i.e. a particular character. We are more specialized that we realize, and practice makes you better at being who you already are. “I spend hours refreshing the same three websites and I don’t enjoy any of them.” Seems reasonable. You’re playing to your strengths.

Which brings us back to the Deschanel Doppelgänger in the coffeeshop: one look at her predicts 25% of her personality. She has a Macbook Air, thick glasses, and a floral dress: for some reason, I doubt she’s voting Cruz 2016. She unconsciously holds her features in line with her default mood: bored, shy, bubbly, bitter. So you walk up to her and say hi and within ten seconds she knows 50% of you, or at least the person you will be around her. First date will put it up to 90%. There are an infinite number of details for the two of you to share, but the name of her childhood stuffed animal has no predictive power, while the way she pauses and inhales before each sentence tells you exactly her insecurities. Put another way: once you have your first fight in a relationship, you know how every other fight will go.

With the exception of fixed bias, e.g. racism, first impressions are usually correct. Why? Because we work really hard to make them correct [10]. Consciously or not, we dress a certain way, claim certain beliefs, and enjoy certain things, so that when people look at us, they will instantly know: “She has levels in that shit.” 

But what if you’re losing at all the status games? What if no club will have you as a member? How you can find people who value you for being you?

Take note: this is called “crowdsourcing the superego”, and it’s going to be the hippest trick of 2016. “Everything Awful I’ve Ever Done: A Play In Five Acts.” 90% of people are horrified, 9% don’t care, 1% think you’re a legend, you take solace in the 1%. 

It is thus almost tautological that America’s sweethearts are actors and actresses: they are the faces we see the most. It helps that the media chooses characters we can readily understand—cartoon features, 2D personality—but even if it didn’t, fame is self-reinforcing. Pop culture creates the null hypothesis. If you hear a story enough you are forced to define yourself for or against, and either answer spreads the brand. It’s kind of perfect that Kanye and Kim are America’s vogue icons of masculinity and femininity, since both of them are famous, in large part, for being famous. The word you’re looking for is “meme.”

But that’s only half of it: performers know how to tell a story. If you know the ebb and flow of narrative, you can self-insert into it and make yourself a prototype.

“And you make people nervous, young man," she said—most equably, for her. "You either take to somebody or you don't. If you do, then you do all the talking and nobody can even get a word in edgewise. If you don't like somebody - which is most of the time - then you just sit around like death itself and let the person talk themself into a hole. I've seen you do it...You can’t live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes.” (Franny and Zooey)

This is narcissism. “If she’s not going to like me, I won’t bother. If she seems interested, I’ll throw my manifesto at her and hope that it sticks.” How much time each day do you spend rehearsing your sad-but-beautiful story? What’s your favorite song to listen to while you do it?

The advantage of this strategy is that you will never be rejected. If a date doesn’t like you, they couldn’t handle you at your worst, so they don’t deserve you at your best. And it’s easier: you never have to try at being tough, you never have to try at being witty, in fact, low effort is probably better—you don’t want your partner to get unrealistic expectations. Anxious women do this: “My father died when I was young, ha ha. I’ve never felt good enough, ha ha. I’m such a bitch, ha ha.” This would be mean if it wasn’t quoted verbatim.

The disadvantage is that you will be forever unhappy. If you don’t start out trying your best to impress your partner, you will never try your best to impress your partner. Next thought: “If she likes me when I’m being a loser, she must have something wrong with her. Maybe she’s ugly?” Soon you’re half-hoping she cheats just to confirm she’s worth wanting. Time for an open relationship that neither of you will act on. You might not break up right away. These relationships can drag on for years, with one partner hopelessly in love, the other too oxytocin-addicted to pull the trigger, but dreaming that someone better will arrive, someone with whom he will fall head-over-heels in love. Which will never happen: your cracked-open chest demands unconditional love, and you don’t want unconditional love, it’s too easy, you want a challenge, a test, something you can point to and say “THIS IS IT! THIS IS IT! THIS IS THE PROOF THAT I AM A VALUABLE HUMAN BEING!”

I don’t blame you. Americans like to know who’s winning.

V.

Why are nerds unattractive?

According to Paul Graham:

I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why don't smart kids make themselves popular? If they're so smart, why don't they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?

He explains:

[Nerds] don't realize that it takes work to be popular. In general, people outside some very demanding field don't realize the extent to which success depends on constant (though often unconscious) effort...Likewise, popular isn't just something you are or you aren't, but something you make yourself.

The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable.

The Distraction Hypothesis has a note of truth: smart people tend to like nerd hobbies, nerd hobbies tend to be solitary, and lack of social practice makes lack of social perfect. Fine.

However, as a control group, consider the long-haired kids that stay up decoding Tool lyrics until 3 am. Aren’t these kids distracted by unpopular things as well, like 7/8 rhythms and salvia? I hung with that crowd. Some of them practiced guitar alone for 4 or 5 hours each day. Many of them liked nerd hobbies, since Akira is super deep. And yet these kids were decently popular, and most found anemic hippie girlfriends drifting like tumbleweeds through the Farmer’s Market.

Plus, aren’t some smart kids cool? In an addendum, Paul Graham says:

Smart kids don't necessarily turn into nerds. If you're good looking, a natural athlete, or the sibling of a popular kid, you'll automatically be popular. But most popular kids don't get that kind of free ride. They have to work at being popular. And if you're interested in, say, physics, you won't have the time to spare.

The reigning clique may require total devotion to the Instagram game, but the threshold for “being well-liked” and “getting a cute girlfriend” is far lower. Didn’t you read Scott Pilgrim? High school sucks, agreed, but smart funny kids do fine. Smart tough kids do fine. Smart tactful kids do fine. Do you really believe that no one practices social skills and gets good grades? “Getting good grades doesn’t mean you’re smart.” Agreed, but neither does reading xkcd and being “interested in physics,” which sounds like a euphemism.

If you take away “smart —> distraction —> uncool”, Graham’s argument falls apart. Nerds, unlike other smart people, don’t put in the work to be popular. Why? Because—his definition—“a nerd is someone who isn’t socially adept enough.” I’m stunned.

We need a better definition. For example, nerds are known for their fantastical interests. Real far out stuff, stories about space battles, mad scientists, wizards, robots, superheroes—

—oh.

All of these movies are wish-fulfillment, not through content, but through structure. Exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, dénouement; great power, great responsibility, triumph. The arc is older than the Odyssey, but modern media has perfected the formula. The heroes are like us, the villains are like them. We get precisely the stories we want to hear.

At the least, every Westerner under the age of 25 is a fantasist. You may see the adulation of John Cena or Biggie Smalls as somehow different than the worship of Batman or Deadpool. I do not. 

With age and maturity, the stories become grounded in realism, but the basic tropes remain the same. Mainstream liberals caricature the Koch brothers as supervillains, Trump’s supporters see him as an Eastwood antihero, social justice kids imagine themselves as a ragtag band of heroes fighting against the Empire. (The overlap between social justice and fandoms is not a coincidence.) Nerds may have outlandish fantasies, but not much worse than everyone else.

Let’s try a different tack.

The (unedited version of the) above comic is used as a motte and bailey. Motte: “Nerds just gotta obsess over something.” Bailey: “Nerds play videogames, have no friends, and waste adulthood on the internet.” Subtext: “Those guys are lame, not us.” Come on. “A nerd is a nerd is a nerd” — Nerdtrude Stein. Do you think going into debt for your film studies degree makes you less complicit in the system? Are you really less dependent on outside praise? “I don’t support Wall Street, I spend all my money on pot.” You’re an inspiration to us all.

But we’re getting closer. “Nerds just gotta obsess over something.” If you browse a powerlifting forum and stumble upon a post that begins, “My journey begins in 1995, when, while enjoying the fruitful harmonies of Beethoven’s 9th, I began to contemplate...” you can rest assured that no amount of myofibrils will get that guy laid. There are nerds who obsess over cooking, cars, pets, makeup, drugs, history, and fashion, and they all sound the same. If you accuse someone of “nerding out”, you’re claiming that they are using excess detail in a way that detracts from the underlying meaning. 

In other words: “Show, don’t tell.”

System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.

System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration. (Source)

In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman argues that two distinct modes of thought—fast and slow, System 1 and System 2—are used to process the world. Our default mode is the heuristic-based System 1: unconscious pattern recognition and scripted response. Kahneman’s book is a compendium of the ways System 1 can fail: anchoring effect, availability heuristic, attribute substitution, loss aversion, framing effect, sunk cost fallacy, etc. He’s not wrong. System 2 is good at math. If someone hands you a Scantron and puts a gun to your head, you should take your time, question your biases, and quantify, quantify, quantify.

However.

The improviser has to realise that the more obvious he is, the more original he appears...Ordinary people asked to improvise will search for some 'original' idea because they want to be thought clever...If someone says 'What's for supper?' a bad improviser will desperately try to think up something original. Whatever he says he'll be too slow. He'll finally drag up some idea like 'fried mermaid'. If he'd just said 'fish' the audience would have been delighted. (Impro)

Rather than do what comes naturally, a bad improviser tries to do what is “best.” It never works. It’s too slow, and even if it wasn’t, a try-hard idea will seem out of place, breaking character, breaking flow.

Thinking Fast and Slow picks questions that fit its conclusion. Yes, System 2 is superb at solving short, quantitative problems. But what if you have massive changing input and it’s not clear what variables are important? What you have information gaps and limited time to act? What if you don’t have any numbers at all? What if you don’t even know how to define the problem?

System 2 makes you a bad actor, and nerds overuse System 2. The same type of thinking that makes nerds “interested in physics” is responsible for their klutziness, neurosis, and low status. And if I needed a word to describe this worldview, it would be “rationalism.”

The post-industrial world needs rationality. It’s not a coincidence that the nerd archetype has grown with Moore’s Law [11]. Rationality has made us successful—I am grateful for our advancements in engineering and medicine—but rationalism, as a worldview, demands a sacrifice.

You’ll hate me, but your rationalism is inseparable from your anxiety [12]. Anxiety asks only one question: “What am I supposed to do?” You know the rules with your friends, but you’re lost with strangers or in groups. So you freeze up and try to calculate the best option, but this never works, there are too many variables, and even if the punchline is good the delivery will be off [13]. People invented small talk for this reason, but rationalism hates rituals: “This is pointless. We can do better.” Ironically, when you find a tribal artifact molded in plastic, painted in neon, and sold in the gift shop, you think: “This isn’t authentic at all.” Right, it’s trying so hard to please that it looks fake. Huh.

Your anxiety continues outside of social interaction, as you wonder what you’re supposed to do with the day, with your life. Such questions are unanswerable, so you do nothing, and that feels awful too. The anxiety only stops when you commit to a task, something with a beginning and end, and do it. Ideally, this would be something productive, but after two hours of editing and de-editing the commas of your unfinished novel, you give up. Have a breakdown, call Mom, overeat, spend an hour searching for the “right” porn clip, Facebook, Tumblr, swipe left, sleep. The activities aren’t the point. The point is not having to think.

Pick-up artists (and similar masculinists) attempt to System 2 their way out of a System 1 problem, like the world’s most advanced chatbot.

Does this work? Certainly, approaching more women gives you better odds, and yes, you should brush your teeth and lose the sideburns, but if you consider that “seduction advice” then you have my condolences. It can’t be have been easy growing up without a father.

I don’t know of any randomized controlled trials comparing true to sham pick-up advice, but my impression is that a large fraction of PUAs fail early and give up, as evidenced by the slew of ex-PUA sites. People who stick with the game long enough do succeed, but only when the pick-up tricks stop being tricks. System 2 won’t get you laid, but if you execute an algorithm enough times it becomes automatic, i.e. it gets absorbed into System 1, i.e. you become the character you were pretending to be.

And, like any character, some people will like it and others won’t. The classic knock against pick-up artists is that they “manipulate women to get sex.” How? If you walk up to a woman and criticize her nostrils, will this somehow fool her into thinking you’re a nice person? I used to live with a PUA guy—programmer/chess player, incidentally—and some women, upon meeting him, would immediately decide that he was a skeez, possibly syphilitic. Other women found him charming. PUA tips are marketed to specific audience: the lonely sophomore in the corner of the room staring at the drunk undeclared masses. PUA tricks work to score with those girls, but not because they’re tricks: that’s just what some girls are into. And if those girls are your type, have fun. I hope you like talking about spirit animals.

But it probably won’t make you happy. Most PUAs don’t obsess over status and seduction because they want to have more sex (which would be totally reasonable.) They want to have had more sex. They want a bigger number.

Rationalism is at the core of the rating game. An old-school chauvinist says, “She’s fat and ugly,” a rationalist says, “6/10, nice thighs, forehead is too big.” The former is an opinion, the latter seems like a fact: “Something is wrong with me that can never be fixed.” I know, I know. The people who give these ratings don’t have necessarily ill intentions, they just see the world as something to be optimized. This winds up hurting them as well: “I’m worried she won’t like my, uh, 2D:4D ratio. I mean, it’s above average, if I measure with the curve—” And so on.

Narcissism is a defense against rationality: you remake the scale so you are always at the center. It works, except your inability to fail robs you of the ability to succeed. It works, until you encounter anyone who doesn’t accept your ever-changing values as gospel. Then you doubt yourself, panic, turn to religion, “Give me a sign!”, or rationalism, “Give me a number!”, anything external that can affirm your value. Pacified, you return to the status quo.

We care about measurement and any trait can be measured; the scale starts at 0 and it goes to 10. But even if you were a 10, you would feel unhappy. Even if you mastered every mutually exclusive skill, you would feel weak. The universe is simply more powerful than you are. If you see existence as a set of misaligned atoms, you are guaranteed to lose. Your petty victories will always be overshadowed by petty defeats: aging, boredom, constipation, hard-to-open packaging, and the immeasurable frustration of needing other human beings.

And so.

Narcissists vacillate, rationalists obsess, but they have the same basic problem: an inability to stick to the script. The solution is to pick a character, write down your values, and commit. Sometimes, you will fail. It will suck. But the doubt will stop. You will have something real that tells you if what you’re doing is right. You will know when you are winning.

VI.

The four most common pieces of dating advice are “Be confident”, “Be yourself”, “Be confident in yourself”, and possibly “Be yourself, but confident.”

Thanks for the tip. Maybe you should do a TED talk.

Sometimes the advice is a bit more nuanced: “Suck in your belly, puff out your chest, stand up straight, speak from the diaphragm, take up space, steady your head, don’t smile. And look natural.”

This is a good description of what high status people look like. It’s also terrible, System 2 advice. It’s too many variables to hold in your head at once. You can sustain maybe two of the above actions while consciously thinking about them, even less if you have to, you know, “interact with other human beings.”

On the other hand, if you decide to act like a confident character, you will take on all of the above high status markers without even trying.

I was pretty neurotic in my late teens. I took every precaution to avoid doing something wrong.

I could not touch a girl unless a) she had touched me in exactly the same way, or b) she had granted me verbal permission.

I could not, under any circumstances, compliment a girl’s body. Even a generic “You’re beautiful,” counted as objectification.

I could not joke or talk about sex in any way, as this might constitute harassment.

Certain words were forbidden: “pussy”, certainly, but even “chick.” My dirty talk was a light PG-13.

I never teased. I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.

Some of this was scrupulosity, some of this was simply cowardice. Because I wanted it to be an ethical stance, I treated men the same way.

It was totally insane, but when I read the comments on posts like these, it seems that this sort of insanity is not unique. Rationalists follow a set of rules they don’t really believe in, then wonder why they don’t feel powerful.

My redemption, I think, was when I realized that the words didn’t matter.

On dates, we’d walk through an outdoor mall and joke about the stores and people. I couldn’t compliment her physical features, but I could compliment her clothes and style. I couldn’t tease her, but it turns out saying “Oh, you would like X” gets the same blush and giggle. As long as a conversation has the tone of small talk, it is. Night would fall. We’d start talking more honestly about ourselves. I’d pick a bench, we’d sit down, and I’d say: “So, wanna make out?”

This worked, over and over again. Why wouldn’t it? That’s a perfect end for the quirky Annie Hall date we’d been on. If she wasn’t into that sort of date, she wouldn’t have gone out with me in the first place.

Sometimes girls would tell me, “You’re so confident,” and I would be amused. But I did feel confident. I even looked confident: body language, voice, the works. I had practice playing this character. I didn’t even have to try.

“Jeez, Portnoy. You plotted this all out?” No, I realized it in distant retrospect. If you try to copy my teenage moves, you will fail, because it will be fake. No one over the age of nineteen can or should be a Manic Pixie Dream Boy. Be a man. That doesn’t mean act like Don Draper—Jerry Seinfeld had way more success—it means know how you appear to the world.

On the internet and in life, I meet a lot of people who have given up. “I’m not X, therefore I can’t Y.” You know, part for the whole. But man, no one thing is ever that important. And if this essay has a clean conclusion, it’s that nobody cares about most of what you say or do. They care about the prototype you communicate. They care how you fit into their story. You are the only who pays attention to your details.

If you do not feel attractive, work to become your nearest prototype. The nice thing about Halloween is that there’s a sexy version of every costume. You can’t sustain “be confident”, but you can become confident. Get older. Level up in your chosen class. 

You don't have to have confidence in asking your crush out, you have to have confidence in yourself, even if that means—weirdly—that you have confidence in the fact that you're not confident.

I wish you the best of luck.

[1]. Conversations about weightlifting do not violate the bro code because physical strength is seen as a) obtainable (“I could get that way if I wanted to”) and b) not a meaningful measure of power (“He’s tough, but my lawyers could take him.”) This defense collapses when a guy shoves you in the bar, or in any other direct challenge, e.g. arm-wrestling with a girl present. (Note that guns are the ultimate identity-preserving trump card: “You may be on the winning side of the past 70 years of cultural warfare, but I could kill you dead.”)

[2a]. Evo psych fanboys like to invoke hormones, namely that the female brain can’t handle them, we never should have given them the right to vote, etc., but the evidence for a mate-choice effect of ovulation (e.g. preferring high testosterone mates) is very weak. Even if it was real, the effect would be minimal: you can’t smell for shit in the club, and women do not go around taking blood samples to find the highest androgen/mL. Low T is only a problem insofar as it influences behavior: an anabolic steroid addict biting his nails and looking at the floor is as seductive as anyone else humming Mad World. Same goes for women/estrogen. Only Pfizer employees are turned on by thrombosis risk alone.

[2b]. Indeed, most arguments of evolutionary psychology disintegrate if you look at them for more than five seconds and are not currently high on nitrous. Evolution acts primarily on DNA. There are only 20,000 genes in the human exome. Do you really think a subset of them encodes a preference for big butts and the inability to lie? For 0.7 over 0.6 or 0.8, starting at puberty but not before? What do those proteins look like? 

Don’t get me wrong, wide hips (or, upstream, high estrogen) may increase fertility and thus be selectively advantageous, but this has nothing to do with the male gaze. If you don’t get this, please take a break from this essay and come back when you’ve finished Hooked on Phonics.

[3]. This essay is totes heteronormative, but the similar principles apply to LGBTQ relationships. Sexual orientation does have a significant biologic component, but note that monozygotic twins can differ in sexual orientation. Epistemic status = low, but epigenetics and the intrauterine environment seem a likely culprit, especially given the fraternal birth order effect. Further:

Retrospective studies, as well as prospective studies that follow children through to adulthood, are in agreement: Children who eventually become gay are different, at least on average, from those who become straight. Pre-gay children are, to a variable extent, atypical or nonconformist in a number of gender-related traits, meaning that these traits are shifted towards the norms for the other sex, as compared with children who grow up to become straight.

It is difficult to explain these [personality] shifts in gay people as the result of being gay. Rather, it seems likely that they reflect differences in the early sexual development of the brain, differences that affect a “package” of gendered psychological traits including sexual orientation. (Source)

It appears that orientation results from an upstream developmental glitch which is then shaped by cultural norms of what homosexuality looks like. (See: ancient Greece, the Marind people, OKCupid, prison). This sort of implies that queerness is an evolutionary “bug”, but so is oral sex, so let’s collectively agree that natural has nothing to do with good and move on with our variably Kinsey’d lives.

[4]. This definition of power (“ability to control the universe”) is broad and metaphysical, I am aware. However, it explains why controlled pain—pinching yourself, cutting, sad music—can be pleasant, while uncontrolled pain is not. It explains why ritual (prayer, but also nailbiting) makes us feel less anxious. It also explains why turning off the forebrain—huffing paint, heavy alcohol use, inhaling CO2—feels good. The less variables you have to consciously contend with, the more you feel in control.

[5a]. We find people “creepy” when they miss one of these developmental steps. The evil child archetype of horror movies is a kid who “doesn’t get” how to be nice, the stalker/serial killer archetype is an adult who refuses to play the normal games of status (e.g. Norman Bates). A lunatic in a hockey mask is scary but never creepy: “Yes, he wants to kill teenagers with a machete—but let’s be honest, we’ve all been there.”

[5b]. Epistemic status = low, but I think a subset of post-SSRI sexual dysfunction cases have a developmental basis: if you take SSRIs as a teenager, you won’t form the normal links between stimuli and desire. Similarly, abstinence from masturbation will grant you an initial testosterone surge, but after a few weeks you lose the desire for masturbation or sex. The brain just gives up. harvardmedical thinks that kids should be “encouraged to pursue sex as soon as possible,” which is maybe a bit radical for your local PTA meeting, but the alternative is that kids will learn about sex through Newgrounds flash games, and nobody wants that.

[6]. In grade school, kids that politely and cheerfully signal low status can wind up weirdly popular. (“You’re, like, the school mascot!”) It’s when a low status kid infringes on high status territory—asking too many questions during class, flaunting his niche interests—that bullying tends to occur.

[7]. When porn uses the label “slut”, it’s not (always) intended as misogyny. It’s a reminder: “This is what you are supposed to want.” I do not say this in defense of porn.

[8a]. The internet loves stories about burn victims (always male) who wind up with hot wives, but severe-enough deformity actually helps your odds: once you fit the Heroic Survivor prototype, physical attractiveness becomes besides the point. (For the same reason, scars look better on a bouncer than a ballerina.)

[8b]. Take a look at that /r/ladyboners picture: all the guys are white with dark hair. Why? White people are the consumer majority, the media will always favor the majority (first footnote of this essay), and if fewer people see you, fewer people will find you attractive. Consider, for example, the preponderance of Asian women who “aren’t into” Asian men. How many Asian romantic leads have you seen?

[8c]. Why are foreign accents sexy? The evo psych explanation is that accents signify “member of different tribe” and thus prevent inbreeding. Trick question, though: most foreign accents aren’t sexy. British accents, sure, French accents, maybe, but male Indian or East Asian accents are rarely a turn-on for American women. Accents are simply strong identity markers: a British accent instantly links a guy to Benedict Cumberbatch or Tom Hiddleston, an Indian accent links a guy to racist sketch comedy about tech support. Being a minority sucks.

[9]. With regards to attraction, normal = good, but note that prototypes are not necessarily the average of a subculture’s real-world members: the “prototypical” athlete is a really good athlete, for example.

[10]. This is sometimes incorrectly described as “identity.” To be clear: identity as “chosen, untestable self” is a fake idea, I love Halloween but it won’t bring a paycheck. Contrast with image, “the way you appear to everyone who knows you,” which has consequences that are painfully real.

[11]. Men and women are equally likely to be fantasists, but rationalists are mostly male. Arguments about “fake geek girls” seem to hinge on this point: plenty of women play Mass Effect, but few play Dwarf Fortress and other data-heavy narrative-light games. Rationalism at least partially accounts for the male majority in engineering, surgery, etc.

[12]. cf. a rabid grizzly bear in your kitchen, which induces fear, not anxiety. Fear is a conditioned reflex: it is System 1, pre-thought. PTSD patients often have a fear response to social interaction, but this is distinct from anxiety and benefits from different treatment. (Also, fear is often correct. “I have a bad feeling about this” is different than “I’m worried about this”, and you know it.)