“When it is more important to be seen than to be talented, it is hardly surprising that the less gifted among us are willing to fart our way into the spotlight,” sneers Lakshmi Chaudhry in the current issue of The Nation. “Without any meaningful standard by which to measure our worth, we turn to the public eye for affirmation.” -- Emily Nussbaum, New York Magazine
This sort of visceral reaction in such a place as The Nation, and this sort of stiff-lipped piece at New York, holds great promise for the future of civilization as I want it. 'Free love' has been replaced with 'free attention,' a principle that includes the subprinciple of attaching paying ads to everything free. Despite Google technology, the ads that pay are oh so often ads for stupid, mundane, trivial, profane things. Things people should neither want to cloud and clutter nor tolerate clouding and cluttering their eyes and minds. But we've been well-prepped. How many times last night did GM play that wretched, forced, pathetic 'hip hop President's Day sale' commercial?
If you don't know what I'm talking about, I refer you to the Commercials I Hate Forum. I can do this because my interest in arguing against the cheapo publicity racket taking over the Youth Internet is not in obliterating it or even claiming that it's the worst. I've seen some teenagers handle their internet lives in pretty decent fashion, by which I mean essentially (a) no naked pictures (b) no oversharing of private information publicly and (c) no tapes of bum fights. The bigger issue is what sort of societies you can maintain full of people like this:
I tell Xiyin about Susie and her sex tape. She’s sympathetic with Susie’s emotional response, she says, but she’s most shocked by her decision to log off entirely. “My philosophy about putting things online is that I don’t have any secrets,” says Xiyin. “And whatever you do, you should be able to do it so that you’re not ashamed of it. And in that sense, I put myself out there online because I don’t care—I’m proud of what I do and I’m not ashamed of any aspect of that. And if someone forms a judgment about me, that’s their opinion.
“If that girl’s video got published, if she did it in the first place, she should be thick-skinned enough to just brush it off,” Xiyin muses. “I understand that it’s really humiliating and everything. But if something like that happened to me, I hope I’d just say, well, that was a terrible thing for a guy to do, to put it online. But I did it and that’s me. So I am a sexual person and I shouldn’t have to hide my sexuality. I did this for my boyfriend just like you probably do this for your boyfriend, just that yours is not published. But to me, it’s all the same. It’s either documented online for other people to see or it’s not, but either way you’re still doing it. So my philosophy is, why hide it?”
Why indeed. If we can't answer this question for other people we can hardly answer it for ourselves, contrary to popular opinion that inarticulate, unjustified personal opinions can live happily in an ontological vacuum. The death of Privacy is like the death of God and Man before it: a begged question of the possibilities of power we have lost the capacity to answer. Hamlet fiddled with himself while Denmark burned; many of us, if not yet all, are Hamlets now. Other more enterprising people, the Fortinbras types, will also come marching in from offstage, if we give them enough time.
“For me, a fundamental principle is that if you like something, you should show your love for it; if you don’t like it, ignore it, don’t waste your time.” Before that great transition, some Susies will get crushed in the gears of change. But soon, he predicts, online worlds will become more like real life: Reputation will be the rule of law. People will be ashamed if they act badly, because they’ll be doing so in front of all 3,000 of their friends. “If it works in real life, why wouldn’t it work online?”
It wouldn't work online because it isn't working in real life, and because real life has been colonized by the endless power games of the self-referential regime, where personal control is measured by the extent of its own public surrender. The private person is out. The public personality is in. Democratizing fame means the famous matter that much less. That people nonetheless eat it up -- oh the thrill of being the 53rd-season American Idol, of getting on TV during tryouts, of having your fifteen seconds -- reflects not a cool new world of empowerment but a vast false luxury shot through with a deep moral panic, a desperation, a mass dementia, a culture swooning at the brink of oblivion, and that can be pushed.
"Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We no longer partake in the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication." (Jean Baudrillard)
How do you find Baudrillard, Mr. Puolus? I've been reading PoMoCo for some time but haven't noticed you writing anything about J.B. Do you think anti-culture and simulation kinda go together?
Posted by: Postmodern conservative from Finland | February 24, 2007 at 05:19 AM