Rowan Rabe

It is a little surprising, when one thinks on it: there is a streaming channel–replete with sudden commercials, which were immensely grating and near-profane when spliced with a soft-spoken man and soft music–entirely dedicated to episodes of painting tutorials that aired on public access television in the 80’s and 90’s. I’d seen The Joy of Painting some growing up, but I was a little kid when it aired. I can’t pretend I was a diehard fan before the nostalgia-cum-irony-soaked revival of all things sincere and pure in the 2010s, when Bob Ross tat (I can think of no better way to put it–just branded crap) started appearing at art stores and those ‘zany’ gift shops. I do not mean art supplies–I mean things like a Bob Ross chia pet or a Bob Ross waffle maker and other such tat I feel secondhand embarrassment even beholding, stuff that is purely reference and irony and no substance, meme-stuff of the meanest kind.

I’m working on a Snufkin costume for this Halloween, and I’ve been re-reading the Moomins books–I re-read a lot of children’s books while on the elliptical–so things Moomin have been hovering about just below my waking mind, or infusing it. (Also after the dentist we went to Goodwill where last week my partner saw a Snufkin painting that may-or-may-not (was not, as it turns out) still be there, so his silhouette was at the edges of my mental canvas, so to speak.) So it is not terribly outlandish or offhand that Moomins were brought to mind when watching Bob Ross. Both are un-apologetically genuine and free of the hyper-self-aware irony that has poisoned everything pop culture since the 90s. This is to say, the source material is.

Moomins have also been relentlessly merchandised, especially in Japan, but it’s stuff I admit I find charming–stationary, my bucket hat, the several Traveler’s Notebook-associated tie-ins that sell scalped for an obscene price. It’s pure mercantilism but it’s genuine in its own way; it sparks joy, whereas the Bob Ross stuff sparks revulsion, horror, almost sorrow, a desperate hoping the dead do not see into the world of the living. I may have bought some of the Moomins TN inserts and shitajiki at MSRP had I the opportunity, but I refuse to fall into one of the more corrosive and insidious aspects of Japanese material pop culture that is bleeding into the Western: limited-edition FOMO completionist accumulation.

It’s the same way I feel about gatcha mechanics and blind boxes working their way into Western products; they are immensely profitable and effective, so of course once the popularity of the Japanese model caught on it would be spread. I have bought blind-box figures and gatcha and it’s a little bit of fun, a bit of dopamine, and don’t have a problem with them any more than I do Pokemon cards themselves–it is the scalping and ruthless monetization that turns me off. Leaving the acquisition of some plastic ephemera up to fate makes of the acquisition a moment, a memory touched by the random flow of the universe. I collect memory triggers. And yet this rent-seeking profiteering was predictable given the hyper-financialization of everything in the US; I see desperation in it, the scramble to have a toehold in an economy that is pushing people out and creating more surplus labor each year. It is merely an extension of the idea of mere ownership being a means of revenue, not the creating of a thing itself.

I guess it is sincerity that I see in common in Ross and Snufkin — peddling, themselves, directly, either nothing (Snufkin, who repeatedly says that possessions are a hindrance to him and so much clutter) or the thing itself, the tools of the trade, the art, the lessons (Ross, during his lifetime), and in parallel do I see that essence of sincerity being sold with meta-products, that is, products about Snufkin and Ross, products featuring. Buying the seeming of something, of freedom, of art by one’s own hand, of living in the moment. Selling the essence of simplicity and non-consumption, the courage in living without pretense, in the doing. This is a form of pure vicariousness. I cannot imagine telling Snufkin I spent $500 on a notebook with his visage–the very idea would revolt him, having his image associated with such, used to manipulate people out of money.

I will not pretend Bob Ross’s popularity is purely attributed to his art; his personality absolutely cinched it, but it is a good personality, a genuine one on balance by all accounts, and that is the sort of charisma I don’t begrudge what-are-now-called ‘influencers’. If one is to be famous for being oneself that self should be admirable. Perfect does not exist and looking for it is seeking to get one’s own heart broken, and denying celebrities the dignity of human complexity and interiority, fallibility; expecting perfection is a form of objectification. But if we’re lionizing somebody purely on personality we can look for on-balance good, good enough. It would be a vast improvement over the current influencer archetype, which seems to be defined by impunity and narcissism and disruptiveness.

**I would also like to report everything looks “excellent” and the gum-pocket test was aced.

*I could not hear Mr. Ross’s voice over the scrape scrape scrape whiiiineeeee going up my jaw and into the roots of my eyes, though I am sure it would have been quite soothing. What I DID hear was the sudden jump in volume and “ARE YOU PAYING TOO MUCH FOR YOUR CAR INSURANCE???”

I’m seeing this pilgrim-crawling-to-the-altar and “hello fellow kids” everywhere now even more than I once was; it was bad enough when I suspected people of karma farming and astroturfing, but it was at least a human putting the work in–I could only hope, sometimes, a human who was asking some questions they genuinely wanted to ask as part of their karma-farming, something. Now we are also being triggered into providing some deep, insightful discussions to train an AI algorithm to have deep, insightful discussions. In any case, OP made an astute observation with some concrete evidence of seeding, with more being added down the thread.

Weighted Blanket of the Absurd

Yes, I’m well aware this might be AI-calling-out-AI. Anything might be anything. Fuck it. If I’m going to bother participating on the internet at all I at least need to delude myself that there are some signs of life out there. I’m coping with my aughts-adolescent cynicism and ennui with absurdist nihilist flip. Which, let’s be honest, isn’t the most unhealthy coping mechanism I’ve used, and can be quite fun. There’s that old saw about the funniest people you know being the most depressed people you know and having a lot of practice in defusing psychological agony with humor.

Ultimate attention economy redux

I still maintain I am right about this.

Let’s for the moment focus on the aspect of AI that relieves one of having to do things like pay attention to and think about things that are boring, like books and philosophy and history and Big Ideas, that the gatekeepers of your degree/ license to work a more than subsistence job tend to think are Big, Important things for humans to think about. The sort of person who becomes a teacher tends to be the sort of person who believes in the inherent value of Truth and Thought and cultivating the life of the mind and becoming a well-rounded human-cum-citizen, and that sort of person is the the gatekeeper standing between you and your license to work a bullshit white collar job that pays something more than a subsistence wage. You used to have to indulge them, to some extent, or go to effort and expense to get somebody else to do it for you, but there is now an algorithm that pays granular and close attention to those gatekeepers talking amongst themselves in the brainy tl;dr wall-of-text subs about the things they’re going to ask you to write about and grade you on. That’s a lot of attention-energy somebody else already expended and you don’t want to on things that don’t matter to you.

A bullshitter or conman used to have to be a good listener, and good at guessing what people wanted to hear. That skill, bullshitting, is being de-professionalized, too, now; the algorithm whispers into your ear what to say to bullshit or con. Quality bullshitting and knowing what people want to hear is a skill–another one that is being lost. Again the middle is falling out of an entire profession and the only conmen who make a living will be those exceptional individuals with genius charisma. Workaday mediocre conmen need jobs too–more argument for UBI I guess.

I feel the desperation of realizing every safety valve and escape is being shut off or turned into a honeypot or corrupted–‘escapes’ for ‘intellectuals’ or ‘genuine people’ or however we style ourselves are weirs.

Marketers desperately seeking organic ‘cool’ cred for their product isn’t new; shilling and guerilla marketing are nothing new; influencers are just now up front about it, which I find refreshing. There is a desperate cynicism in capitulating to it all being about the game–we’re far from the gen X obsession with not ‘selling out’. Indeed, to care about ‘selling out’ or ‘authenticity’ is seen as a naive, childish, unsophisticated concern, and while gen Z /alpha may be well on to something, it is part of the pattern of their generation never being raised on ‘hope’ or optimism for the future like Millennials-and-older. When I was in middle school ‘poseur’ was a deadly fucking insult if you were in any sort of ‘scene’ with pretensions to authenticity–skating, music, art, fashion. I remember rumors about who had used a butter knife to scuff up the underside of their skateboard to make it look broken in with the sort of wear pattern you would get with ‘hardcore’ use. That was a fighting accusation. And these so-accused were not attempting to be influencers or anything with a monetary reward; they just desperately wanted to be cool and authentic. Authenticity had enough intrinsic value to be something to lose, something precious. It was, in the minds of these middle schoolers, a very real and deadly serious thing. I wonder if younger generations see that sort of totemic belief as naive in the way that believing in ‘capitalism’ (as an ideology of ‘freedom’ or something) seems now, or ‘free enterprise’, or ‘the American dream’.

Considerations of ‘specialness’ aside, this is why people in subcultures condemn ‘selling out’–you make something profitable and the vultures come in and shit all over it. I’ve watched it happen. Anti-gatekeeping rhetoric is being co-opted to stifle conversations about this.

I realize it’s not just getting people to buy shit, monetarily, in a material sense. It’s also political astroturfing, and the everything-sucks-fuck-you pissed off adolescent nihilist philosopher* inside me firmly maintains it’s all the same thing anyway. It is and it isn’t. A healthy criticism of all parties so often just becomes this nihilistic centrism that, functionally, is no different from political neutralization. Trying to sell me mediocre terrycloth hoodies on Instagram is obnoxious but I’m not going to pull the galaxy brain take that it is equivalent to influencing elections. Same tactics, yes–a ‘sale’ is a sale, of ideology or terrycloth hoodies–but equally urgent a threat it is not. The corrosive effect on mutual trust that comes of suspecting either in every interaction is a social enshittification agent, all linked, ultimately, in the big cosmic sense, on big time frames, but in the immediate sense one makes you regret buying bad clothes and the other effectively legalized suspension of due process.

It was mentioned in the original post that many of these suspect accounts also posted in job hunting subreddits, which are utterly lousy with recommendations for resume editors and other magic bullet solutions for desperate over-educated under-employed professionals DOGEd or AIed out of an already shit market**. Maybe this is my naive Millennial belief in the concept of ‘earnestness’ or ‘validity’ but this seems particularly scummy, preying on a need instead of a desire. Doing so is not new but it seems to be one of the few hustle avenues still (or even increasingly) profitable in a collapsing postindustrial economy.

Say something interesting, damn you.

Anyway, back to the reddit thread.

Reddit user lebowskisd: “Yeah, it has really dissuaded me from engaging to the extent that I used to. What I want to believe used to be some earnest questions are now repetitive variations on a theme that feel more like some malevolent entity tapping on my glass enclosure to get me [to] react and be interesting. But, since this is one of the few places I can actually have a discussion about what I’ve read, I keep coming back.”

The Dude(‘s D?) puts it well. Some entity listening in to the place where the eggheads go to escape and trying to prompt discussion to harvest.

Reddit user Beneficial-Neat-6200: “Agreed. Over on r/wallstreetbets the prevailing theory is that the value of rddt more related to monetization of user content for Ai training than from advertising”

This is probably correct. I still see a market for vendors of niche products to hobbyists, many of whom, if they are on Reddit, have disposable income and tend to limit Google searches of product reviews to Reddit or other websites where ‘real people’ used to hang out. They’ve always been lousy with shills, and everybody knows it, but it was also one of the few places to get an honest opinion mixed in there.

Reddit user Possible-Advance3871: “I know the common theory is they’re used to inflate Reddit user stats or train AI, but I think they’re also being used for guerilla marketing. I saw something similar in the television subreddit. I searched for discussions about a certain show and found one from a while ago. Randomly in the middle of the passage, they mentioned a gambling website which was curiously in a slightly different font so it stood out. It said the post had been edited a week after its initial posting. I suspect they make posts like these to build credibility for the user accounts and to create discussions that hit all the SEO bullshit so they pop up in searches. Then they edit in product placement for people who search for them later. Since all the comments have already been made, no ones going to talk about the product placement and they won’t get reported.”

I admit I had never noticed this pattern before, even though I’ve been trawling through ‘old’ threads looking for info my entire internet life. Such product placements probably just got caught in my bullshit filter and immediately disregarded as brand shit, but I never bothered to look up the editing timestamp because I did not care. But this is critical–it is a piece of what, exactly, bolsters the monetary value of a ‘trusted source’.

Reddit user Ill_Refrigerator_593: “Personally I find it hard to resist a Le Guin post.” User robot_rabbit: “that’s why they used her name specifically”

Me too, Ill_Refrigerator-san. The authors being featured in these suspect posts seems to be a who’s-who gallery of what I have heard referred to as “your favorite author’s favorite author” – highly-praised literary luminaries who may (Le Guin) or may not (most of the rest of them) be popular. Also likely to be the favorite authors of the sort of person who is going to put themselves into the position of gatekeeping your degree or interview vis-à-vis going into teaching, or the authors people list as ‘favorites’ if they want to seem intellectual and deep and from that trustworthy, above petty considerations such as money and popularity, genuine.

Reddit user chrooooo: “A movie based on a Le Guin will be announced soon.”

Fucking hell, you may be right. Now I’ll be suspicious and surly instead of mildly, reservedly interested. While I never had much hope for adaptations from other sources, Ghibli Earthsea burned me too badly. I’ll be bitter about that one until the earth falls into the sun.

Daily I am more convinced of the existential need to retreat to a shack in the woods.

Fine. Those online spaces are all compromised. So now what? Limit ourselves to the people within easy physical meeting distance? That’s lonely work if you have niche interests. The internet was the first time, for better or worse, all these niche weirdos found a welcoming lounge-cum-echo chamber, and it was the most high quality social interaction many of us had for years, especially if we lived in a small town in what is now MAGA country. Part of how those spy camera/microphone ‘glasses’ are going to pay for themselves in data harvesting is through eavesdropping on these conversations we take offline, if we can, when we can. When might somebody get paid hourly to hang out in a bookstore or coffee shop wearing those***? Your employment manual will recommend very obviously ‘reading’ a book that may start the conversations your client wants, or painting, or wearing a shirt with an unfortunate opinion. If there is a hierarchy in pay based on how pleased clients are with the information you get there will be an incentive for the best bullshitters do this work–a resurgence of the ‘peer influencer’, who influences people who do not like influencers. AI paranoia is going to creep into IRL conversations–not just in the sense of AI being fed as answers through an earbud or lens so you can get laid or get a job or sell something, but also in the sense of being harvested, used to train skinwalkers to seem more human. ‘Authenticity’ will always be the most coveted thing a marketer will seek, no matter what the product being sold.

Paranoia is isolating and exhausting. I keep seeing reasons it is an accurate response to one’s environment, not an individual pathology, necessarily. The same issue with depression or anxiety being an appropriate response to life circumstances.

——-

*This is the same entity that thought Trent Reznor’s rendition of Closer at Coachella was fucking sick as fuck.

**Hi.

This is a book seemingly tailored to my interests–sociology, mythology, anthropology, a generous helping of annotations from scholars, a clean minimalist book cover that would pair in a lovely way with other volumes of the same series on my bookshelf, sturdy paperback. I do like the use of large blocks of pattern and the sidebar summary in this Pantheon printing; the entire effect is charming, gives a clean ‘universal’ impression, free from proprietary this or that or over-reliance on one person’s interpretation based on their illustration. Anyway, I’ve been picking through it between other books and I last night got to the portion on war-and-valor-related myths, the introduction of which mentions the coup stick, which triggered a memory that has not been unearthed for probably thirty years. Proust’s madeleines and involuntary memory again. I was familiar with this concept. I had heard about it, a time buried in the distant past. I had not since read about it, so I was inundated with that-timeness; I was for that moment a schoolchild in awe of the ways of others, so different from my own that they seemed inherently mystical.

The untouched memories

These are my memories before I taint them with further research, using the terms my memory uses (i.e. what I would have learned as a Texas schoolchild in the 90s):

A notion of a special “coo stick”. I visualize something like Sokka-from-Avatar’s war club, an embedded jewel the stick cups like a wave. A sense of an Indian warrior sitting straight and proud, very proper, on a horse, riding up to a white invader, tapping them gently on the head, and bolting. No sense of hurry or danger from the Indian. Serenity and poise, making a game of something the White man treats as deadly serious. A child’s budding sense of ‘are we the baddies?’ I am in a classroom. Classroom walls, the bright primary colors, construction-paper cutout headings on bulletin boards. When I visualize-read the term “coo stick” so Anglicized it further triggers the memory–this must be phrase I had only ever heard, specifically.

Rarity of experience

Well, I feel as though I am–I see some of the elaborate builds people did within the first week of release and wonder if I should invest more time. This middling time-sinking feels the ultimate waste — either go into it fully or don’t at all. But that’s always been my problem — obsession with optimization to the point of paralysis, do it all or don’t do it at all, do it right or don’t bother. Even if it’s a damn video game. Somebody years ago on the internet said “Do not treat games like homework,” and it has stuck with me. This means not forcing oneself to finish games one really is not feeling, nor getting into a perfectionist snit. When it stops being intrinsically fun, the value is lost.

(I’m well aware how familiar this (bonus: ‘this’ is about Book of the New Sun) sounds. I can’t be arsed right now to explain how it’s different; it just is and everybody damn well knows it.)

Video games are tricky, especially games with a creative element like Pokopia or, oh, Minecraft is next to come to mind, or games that require strategy. There is a creative element in playing them that goes far beyond simple consumption of Funko Pops or whatever. It is the relationship between the brickmaker* and the architect. To be generative within the milieu that is already established (example: to be one of the most influential Pokopia build gurus) means a time commitment to a very deliberate and intense delve into somebody else’s product, something that does take considerable time and dedication. The Serebii Pokopia controversy lays bare the exhaustive labor that comes of being The Authority on a game–clearly, it is labor, it has value, otherwise why would people try to (1) appropriate it and (2) avoid it. This is the literary critic who has built their career around one author, writ with a more populist bent. It is painstaking, exacting work, the sort we acknowledge with the title ‘doctor’, and not undeservedly. This is something adjacent to science, but within this analogy God is the game creator(s), and we are laboring tirelessly to understand their design. Part of the sale point of the game is the mystery that was created, left to be enjoyed on levels from just-dicking-around (hi) to excavation and cataloguing, experimenting. But games have always been ‘pointless’ and yet what we live for, something that compels us as much as art.

The game designers, however, designed their worlds for maximum engagement and enjoyment–this means a universal constant of (ultimate) fair play, of getting out what you put in being guaranteed if you stick with it. “God” or whoever is responsible for this ‘real world’ was not so generous. The game is rigged not to be rigged against you. It certainly is rigged for you, which gives one a sense of effortless agency.

I’ve talked about the idea of future-nostalgia, also within the context of a video game that gives me an immense sense of peace. Pokopia is this soft post-apocalypse dream manifest — an empty world, green, cleansed, healed from the excesses of former civilization but retaining many of the fruits of that excess. The payment has already been made and we the innocent Pokemon are here to collect and rebuild. There is enough housing–more than enough, for each person to have their own customized space. While this isn’t in Pokopia as much of an issue there are jobs, ‘places’, for everybody; everybody gets to contribute in a meaningful way, best according to their talents. The world has room. And it is eight billion of us all dreaming of a world scoured clean of probably seven billion of our fellow humans, eight billion overlapping dream worlds in 7/8 of which you are in the way.

That is something I notice with a lot of ‘cozy’ games, a lot of speculative-utopian settings: there’s a damn lot less of us humans taking up space, resources, jobs, making traffic. And there are few enough humans that each person has a chance to be known as an individual, in some capacity, by a community, has a ‘place’ for their talents and interests. This is the world dreamed of by the person who sends out hundreds of job applications to get no response, who cannot find work in their degree field, who cannot afford a home, who cannot get noticed or published or discovered or an audience and can only pray for the capricious selection of virality to make them one of the ones who made it. But we want this already-done, not a decision we had to make or an atrocity we had to commit–that is the key cozy component.

It is what the pioneers who went West were promised — an empty world, a canvas that has already been broken in and made hospitable by a previous people, except in the case of the real American West the “people” were not as gone as the pioneers were led to believe. I was reading about the Donner Party again (my Libby hold for The Indifferent Stars Above finally came available after some weeks) which is possibly the clearest illustration of the dire risk taken by families striking out west–basically, the worst that could happen, did happen. This is supposedly my blood, these people (Westward pioneers, not the Donners), and yet I find myself questioning if I would have the stomach to risk such a fate, or if I would have stayed east of the Mississippi, or, going further back, in Europe. It is hindsight that tells me this “open land”, this massive safety valve for the discontent of the masses, was not actually free real estate but seized from a dispossessed people who were cleared out with genocide and disease to make room for the white influx. Whether or not the first wave of disease was intentional or not is immaterial; it happened. I understand why the pioneers reacted with rage when they got to the promised land and found it taken. They had indeed been lied to–sold a bill of goods. They had risked and lost immensely for that lie. They were indeed brave, they did hold up their end of the bargain. But no disappointment, no pain, excuses taking it out on an innocent party. The overwhelming bone-deep feeling of ‘it’s not fair!’ does not excuse harm done to others. Coexistence would have been one thing, a compromise, but they wanted what was promised–what, indeed, is owed to every person, what every person deserves, freedom, self-sufficiency, dignity, but cannot be seized from an innocent other if you lack it. But rage for elites thousands of miles and years away by wagon doesn’t have much of an outlet; it tends to boil over onto what is closest, what manifests the ‘obstacle’, what, if only it did not exist, would make the world perfect. The fly in the ointment, the other person laying down a boundary. If I had the knowledge of history I would have migrated acknowledging that I was an immigrant into somebody else’s land, not pushing into terra incognita, and would make my calculations knowing this. And, had I migrated late enough in history, it would indeed be a (relatively) cleared-out frontier; all that unpleasantness would be in the past and I could reason that me not going west was not going to bring those Indians back to life. I can understand the bitterness of people who do awful things at being vilified; later generations get to recoil from what was done to ensure their current hegemony or prosperity and pretend they would never, while reaping the benefits. People are awfully eager to bury the hatchet when things have already shaken out in their favor–because they get to be technically right (eye for an eye makes the whole world blind and all that) as well as sitting safely in a position of material advantage.

I will bet in a generation or so Israel will be all over itself to apologize for the genocide its ancestors committed, but, oh well, what is done is done, and here we Israelis are in a Gaza that was ethnically cleansed to make room for us. A people being very contrite from their wadi bungalows and seaside condos. I know this because my own people did it and I find it exhausting, the land acknowledgements and all that. Either give the land back or shut up; at least conservatives are being honest when they say they do not intend to make right. It is very convenient to have a cultural belief that contriteness after the fact erases the burden of sin. It is a belief rooted in truth–that the past is past, and cannot be changed, and we are flawed–but who benefits?

We’ve (white Americans) also overpopulated such that we can’t just go back from where we came from–Europe (the world, really) hasn’t the capacity or desire to absorb all of us, as Americans looking to expatriate in this political climate are finding out. So, yes, there is nothing to be done, the guilty parties either got their cosmic justice or never will, and it all works out rather neatly because the sins are in the past. 仕方がない.

We’re still dreaming of the frontier–just an ethical frontier, where this time the former occupants really are all gone and have left behind a world of ruins upon which to build a new society. The self-poisoning excesses of the former society killed them, ultimately, but we (the future people) benefit from the hyper-accumulation they’ve left behind. It’s all out there to be salvaged. The infrastructure and general world-shaping that was barely keeping up with an overpopulation is, transplanted to this new, much smaller population, abundance for all. Much as Marx argued that industrial capitalism must precede communism, hyper-exploitation and excess set up the infrastructure for a comfortable post-scarcity. The evil’s been done, the bill paid, and we the innocent current generation inherit Elysium. And we are truly innocent–we did not do any of the misdeeds of the past, did not commit the sins of our fathers–but we must acknowledge also that we benefit. Those who ‘lost’ the conflict and might be owed something have been buried by clean, healing time, the slate wiped clean.

So, you can find a church and deconstruct it brick by brick, move it to your own homestead, and what you’ve done is entirely a creative act, dispossessing nobody–indeed, an act of redemption, of recycling, of thrift and industriousness. The people who originally built the church are conveniently gone to allow that. And there is excess for everybody, and the world was allowed to heal from its accumulation, but we get the benefits.

————

*All my fire Pokemon: I told you to get to work on firing bricks and you’re just lounging around; when there is clay in the community box that means SOMEBODY needs to step up. I don’t have this much trouble with the concrete mixers or the furnaces**; somehow Pokemon know that raw materials laid out beside them mean it’s time to step up.

**It’s also the fire Pokemon. They’re good about the furnaces. I have to drag them by the ear to the community box and show them up close and very specifically that there is clay waiting to be fired, and yes, the community box is usually right next to the furnaces, so they’re clearly walking past the entire setup with selective vision. The recycling Pokemon ignoring the trash in the community box also need to step up or I need to deputize Scyther*** to be an enforcer because he’s clearly the only one who checks the damn box.