Si nihil novum

Si nihil novum
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker

Soapboxes for everyone. Me too. And while we're at it, fuck you.

The thing I notice most often these days -- the thing that makes me madder than anything else -- is how people don't converse.  They don't talk to communicate.  They don’t listen.  When you say something, they don't respond; they resume their monologue.  Everything they say back to you is a non-sequitur.  Noticed?

And they can't, can't, can't ever hold a conversation with more than one other person.  That above all.  Oh no -- they can't wait that long to resume talking.  If there are four of them, they'll break into two -- "conversations."  A conversation among four people?  Or five, or six, or (god forbid) ten?  Just think how inefficient that is -- that is, when your conversational MO is to maximize your own floor-time.

Who are "they"?  I'm not sure, but it's kids primarily that I have in mind.  The under-30 crowd.  I spent a semester in close quarters with them, teaching abroad, and that's when this phenomenon was really shoved in my face.  Now that I'm "back" I see it everywhere, all the time.  They do it like clockwork.  How, when you added people to them, conversations would with mechanical precision split into proliferating pairs, as regular as cellular division.  I even started experimenting with it, there in that semester with our cultural future.  I'd be in a four-way convo that'd pair off.  I'd keep an ear open to what the other pair was saying and, after a bit, respond, trying to reunite the four.  And every time, as soon as the one I'd addressed replied, the other two would realign and form their own pair.  If you bet on it you could make millions.

I'd seen how low the quality of communication was, even among grad-students and academics (who are supposed to be in the business of interlocution, but who instead repeatedly sacrifice communication and rational mutual critique to grandstanding).  But these undergraduates were different creatures altogether.  It's as if even the traditional social roles that made some kids talkers and some wallflowers -- as if even these roles had given way to the new dynamic.  That of narrowcasting -- of Warhol's "15 Minutes of Fame" meets the Internet, the medium that can simultaneously realize Warhol's promise and make it -- not absurd, because he intended it as an absurdity, but real, quotidian and pathetic -- just another tool of entertainment, of distraction, of control. 

Sit in a group of kids and watch.  See how often they do it.  The default interlocutor ceiling is 1.  As you add interlocutors, discomfort increases.  The grandstanders, the storytellers, the charismatic "life-of-the-party" good-time guys and gals -- these personality types still exist as much as ever, but they don't play the social role they once did.  Grandstanders can't hold the stage.  Narrowcasting -- niche markets -- My Computer, My Music, My Weather, My News, My Opinions, My Reality, My World.

It's so fucking ridiculous, all this MyCasting that the mature persuasion machine is cashing in on.  An example close to hand being the icon in the top left corner of your PC's "desktop" (itself a homey euphemism for the cold "screen").  Customization (of course) has always been a marketing edge, and it's NEVER been in the consumer's interest -- not to mention society's interest, which of course we can't even mention -- which is, to our own Neocon public "guardians" like former FCC Chairman Michael Powell, an utter fiction, a pipe dream of utopian college profs productive of nothing more than a savvy, dismissive laugh.  Customization isn't in the consumer's interest any more than the difference in the lifestyle-brand auras hazily surrounding two otherwise-identical pieces of useless, obsolescence-engineered crap.

Fucking crap.  A culture of crap.  Entertainment crap.  Even the Romans with their races and occasional bloodsport wouldn't settle for this crap.  Sugar-coated dogshit that passes for food.  Sugar-coated dogshit that passes for religion.  Sugar-coated dogshit that passes for political policy.  A pox on all our houses!

 

 

Jesus vs. Mohammed, Coke vs. Pepsi.

Protestantism was originally a marginal fanatic theological sect later co-opted by power (rising middle-class Parliamentarians) for its political utility.  JUST LIKE early Christianity was a fanatic marginal sect co-opted by the late Roman emperors to unify the empire.  JUST LIKE "Islam" served as a mere tag under which to unify disparate and disempowered Arab populations to grab land back from the domineering Christian empire in Europe.  "Religions" -- a misleadingly broad term -- are only actual philosophical/theological belief systems in their early gestation days; mainstream “religions” are political power-plays at work.  The Heaven's Gate cult, the Branch Dividians: these are "real" religions, if by "religion" one means a philosophical belief system and spiritual practice -- which is what people DO mean.  Surely no religious apologist would say that "religion" is simply a meaningless group-identification tag, and a misleading tag at that.

 

But natch.  An esoteric spiritual practice WOULDN’T become widespread on its own.  Average folks don't give a fuck about Spiritual Exercise or Life’s Great Questions.  They care about immediate well-being: food, shelter, power, social standing.  A “religion” only BECOMES mainstream when it allies with a widespread political power-shift that delivers those things.  Once mainstream, it can hang about as a useful fiction as long as it doesn’t obstruct well-being -- or get out-competed by a new political force uniting under a different religious brand logo.

 

Religious faith is brand loyalty.  Theology is advertising. 

 

Like mainstream religious "belief," brand loyalty is radically divorced from the utility or function of the product.  We eat billions of dollars of "fast" food because we're biologically programmed to hoard sugar and fat and because mega-corporations make gazillions by stimulating and exploiting this biological predisposition -- NOT because the food is "fast," or fresh or tasty or inexpensive or sustaining.  It's none of those things.  Physiologically, it's not even food: if you tried to live on it, you'd get sick and die.  (And we Americans do -- get sick and die.  #1 in obesity, diabetes, heart disease.)  We're #1 in debt per capita because (again) humans are naturally lazy and want something for nothing, and (again) because ultra-mega-corporations with armies of marketers and psychologists in their service spend billions to stimulate and exploit this natural predisposition.