#post-literacy

Towards the end of this video, the essayist wonders aloud why TikTok content is so nonsensical and pointless and cringe. The question reminded me about that Barbara Walters interview, but also about when, a couple or more years back, that question was asked about meme culture.

Did we ever come up with a good answer? I think the philosophers may have come up with something, but I don’t know that the general audience cared.

But my intuition is that “TikTok culture” -- setting aside the popular conspiracy theory that for audiences outside of China, TT deliberately promotes content that warps the brains and values of the young so as to undermine the future competitiveness of other nations, which is frankly such an old strategy in the culture wars between nations that it seems performatively naive to doubt it -- is just the next iteration of a cyclical trend in media I call post-literacy.

Post-Literacy

I first grokked onto this idea when I was pondering how Jimmy Fallon could be so successful as host of The Tonight Show.

When he first got the gig, everybody who knew good TV from bad was just embarrassed for the lad. Particularly those old media folks -- Paul Simon (clearly doing Lorne Michaels a favor) comes to mind -- who would radiate anything from pity and incredulity to discomfort, disdain, and contempt from their seat on the couch.

But somehow, Fallon delivered the ratings. He kept his job. He became a hit. Or "a hit".

How? Why?

I decided it was because he clicked with the actual point and purpose of The Tonight Show: It's not meant to be watched, but rather to be "left on".

Johnny Carson learned this when a movie called Middle Age Crazy came out in 1980.

The film opened on a couple in bed having marital relations, while The Tonight Show was playing in the background. Carson described how seeing that made him realize that many of his viewers simply used his show as “a nightlight for sex”.

You didn't need to speak English to enjoy Carson's Tonight Show. His monologue was never more pleasing to the audience than when the jokes died. His comedy skits were so broad that they functioned more as signifiers of comedy, rather than, y'know, actual jokes.

Carson's Tonight Show was a bright light we all gathered around to feel a sense of community. So even if a joke might not actually be funny, it's supposed to be funny, so go along with it. You don't even really have to pay attention to what's going on, just don't sour grapes the party.

I think this is part of the reason that Letterman and Conan weren't really Tonight Show permanent host material: for their comedy to work, you had to pay attention to setups and punchlines. Also, Letterman could be a bit smug and abrasive and Conan a bit effete and elitist.

But a guy like Leno? He waggled his head, did the funny voice, and whether you were paying attention or not, you got the message: the affable host of the party just said a funny, so laugh along.

And Fallon also fills this same Johnny Bravo jacket.

He's SO enthusiastic and happy to be there, and he laughs SO HARD at his own jokes that you don't have to pay attention to the show. He's cute and friendly and almost violently inoffensive, and he'll double over in convulsions to let you know that you’re having a good time.

You don't need to listen close, or follow along, or even understand the language to enjoy the proceedings.

And you'll never feel like you're too dumb to "get" a joke, because the point isn't the joke, but the communal experience of laughing together.

Which, to my mind at least, is a key ingredient of TikTok, and of the massive international popularity of content that is -- outside of China, at least -- unfailingly silly, stupid, or pointless.

The pointlessness is kinda the point.

Call it post-literacy, post-meaning, or post-content. (ba-dum ching!)

You don’t need to think about it or understand it or seek reason or rational sense in it.

It's post- “the gatekeepers of acceptable media”. It's post-reality TV, where anybody, anywhere can be famous if they are outrageous enough.

You’re just meant to enjoy it for seven seconds and move on to the next one. It’s a world party, and we’re just here for a good time. Chug, chug, chug!

If we accept that “the Medium is the Message”, then I'll leave it to you to ponder on what message a medium consisting of millions and millions of seven-second videos -- many or most showcasing “wacky hijinks” -- is sending.

It is here, it is now, and it is the intermediate step between itself and the more extreme next thing which will elevate, accelerate, or exacerbate whatever effect TikTok is having/will have on us.

Like Rat Pack-era Sammy Davis Jr., baby!

But in the here and now, being Wacky™ and attractive and colorful and laughing, laughing, laughing is a business plan. And if it please the court, I present as evidence the subjects -- or are they objects? -- of the above video: the redheaded triplets known as Taylor Red.

They may have named themselves Taylor to capture some of you-know-who's reflected radiance, but these girls are not a band. Not any longer.

Like the Kardashians, they bypassed the intermediate step of achievement/accomplishment and went straight to celebrity -- although they kinda/sorta bypassed the "celebrity" part too, didn't they? -- and became a brand.

They are in the business of turning eyeballs into audience, and then selling that audience to advertisers.

World-Wide

The dude in the video wonders why Indonesia is their biggest audience.

Well, setting aside that there's probably some link farm-esque purchasing of likes and subscribes, one can easily imaging that three redhead triplets wearing tight costumes and jumping on balloons ticks a lot of boxes.

Language barrier, gone. Context, irrelevant. And as everyone from Florenz Ziegfeld to Hugh Hefner knew, figure out a way to commodify cute American girls laughing and having fun, and you're practically printing money -- world-wide.

A researched piece like this video getting 1-2 million views is something like a $1-2k YouTube payout. The dude suggests that the girls are likely pulling in $250k/mo just from TikTok.

From what I’ve heard about how TikTok pays creators, I find this number kinda sus, but hey, it’s not like I actually know enough to refute it.

I suppose it's just a matter of time before Jimmy Fallon invites them to appear of the Tonight Show.

Maybe they'll discuss Post-Literacy, perhaps citing Marshall McLuhan or, IDK, Bertrand Russell.

Or maybe they'll all just jump on balloons, because frankly, that's just better content.

The emergence of literacy and its role in society is a large and complex topic, one deserving of much debate and conversation. But it’s important to me that the reader of my essays is aware of my discomfort with, and ultimately rejection of, literate-centricity. It seems implied by the writing and publishing of my thinking that I must view literacy as a neutral, if not necessary or important, tool in the spreading of ideas. But this is not the case. In fact, I believe that a better world, an anarchic one, would have difficulty making a place for it. It would have to be an imposition, a misplaced, ill-fitting carry-over from the old world into the new.

Literacy presupposes many relationships between humans and between humans and their environment.

Is orthography more important than say community songs and dances? In an ecologically sane, imaginative, horizontal world, are there going to be school buildings in which we are forced to sit quietly as children, being taught how to write and spell, or will we be at the river learning how to fish, or in the field learning how to gather medicinal herbs and edible plants? Will we be laboring at a printing press, with its machinery and oils and noise, or honing our oratorical skills at gatherings? Will we be in the machine shop making parts for the press or reciting poetry from memory to our lover in a meadow?

To my mind, books are like cars or computers or electric guitars. We make use of them today, within the context of this particular social order, but I assume that we have no intention of maintaining the cultural values and social relationships necessary for their survival in a post capitalist world without centralized political power enforcing a homogeneous culture on a population. If anarchy is renewal, is a liberatory explosion of the imagination, a rejection of coercion, of monolithic lifeways, then I fail to see how literacy would survive in such a de-commodified, horizontal, de-massified existence.

I admit that I have greatly benefitted from books, from poetry and radical theory to how-to and fiction books. I’ve been enriched by their possession. But I’ve also enjoyed my toaster, electric piano, disposable lighters and automobile and sincerely hope and doubt that any of these would survive the dismantling of the global grid of authoritarian institutions and a rediscovery of our kinship with nature.

Historically elite classes kept a great deal of knowledge to themselves, keeping the peasantry ignorant of important facts, which made literacy and books sort of levelling tools, a way to even the playing field. Clearly, in that context, we seem better off with them. But are we really? Aren’t there other ways to impart important knowledge? If all the municipal buildings and the banks were burned to the ground, if there was no longer records of ownership or debt as everything was freely shared, what sort of information would still be necessary to record and store?

So I am encouraging us to look more closely at literacy, the social order and relationships that created it and the way it forms our thinking, reinforces unhealthy habits, and reproduces oppressive and uniform social orders. I am also speculating that truly free people deep-rooted in habitats would probably not pursue literacy. Without elites that have an interest in keeping certain knowledge for themselves, facts and philosophy would be shared and debated equally through daily activities, not contained in books.

Books are not just one feature of a beautiful web of learning. They are more like the hub of a mechanical wheel, with a set of hard spokes emanating from it. Each spoke represents a static, simple fragment of what might have been a holistic and complex culture. One spoke points to the alienation and coercion inherent in schooling as an institution, another to the ossification of language as the organic is forced to bend to the inorganic, another to alienated labor making the machinery and paper and ink and glue, and yet another points to a society of experts and the division of labor, etc. It seems so obvious that, given the choice, only some people might choose to maintain literacy and books, but many others, likely most, would not and it would be difficult to argue that the literate culture would be superior to the illiterate. In fact the literate one would plainly need a social order very similar to the one we are trying to dismantle!

There is a big difference between language/oratorical skills and the ability to communicate using script. If we were to live in organically self-organized communities that are entrenched in habitats, would we have an interest or the time to teach script and copy texts? Wouldn’t we be busy mending fishing nets, making medicines, repairing our structures, preserving food and other daily necessities of survival? Isn’t it likely that as authentic communities form and separate from the massified cultures of capitalism, localized dialects would emerge? Does it make any sense for local dialects and languages spoken by small numbers of people to have their own script? To what purpose?

Without authoritarian institutions, private property records, large homogeneous territories controlled from above, there would be an explosion of new languages blossoming over the planet as centralized control, colonialism, compulsory education and mass media disappear. We know that there was once an enormous diversity of languages, and that they were erased by economics, political imperatives, outsider interests, subjugation, invasion... If this is the case, ridding ourselves of these forces would lead to a re-emergence of this diversity. And in that scenario, why would small villages, isolated regions, roaming clans of nomads, experimental unions of egoists, autonomous tribes, etc ever want to take the time to build a script that reflects their language, perhaps only spoken by a few hundred or thousand people?

It seems plainly ridiculous to assume that literacy will endure everywhere or even anywhere where anarchic social relations prevail. I doubt that the interest, ability and energy will exist to ensure its universal continuance. A few texts in some places might be copied and reproduced in some fashion, but we shouldn’t project a literate world into a decentralized, non-industrial, de-massified and ecological existence. It seems much more likely that the average inhabitant of any given area will be expected and encouraged to nurture highly developed memory and oratorical skills rather than literate abilities. Of course there are social and pro-industrial anarchists committed to maintaining urban civilization, and, in the beginning at least, they would recognize literacy as an essential cog in that machine and therefore try to maintain it, but it would likely be a difficult proposition if coercion were truly absent, and overtime the effort would fail.

In the meantime I want to encourage face to face conversations and debates, public speaking, memorization of texts and other forms of direct, non-literate communication not only among eco-radicals, but among all who truly want demassified societies, anarchic relationships and orientations, authentic upheaval, etc. Even reading to each other is probably better than reading alone. Instead of handing someone a zine or an essay, why not try to memorize it, make it your own in some way, then share it with your friends/comrades/neighbours?