Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye. - Matthew 7.3
Here’s how social media works these days: Someone prominent does something weird or something unusual happens. Immediately masses of people jump on it with little context to pronounce feckless snap judgments. They immediately hype the weird thing to their feeds to amp up their fragile relevance. The Greek chorus of negativity belts out its refrain, and that person who did or said that weird or off-color thing is pretty much permanently smeared and dismissed by a large swathe of the multitude, who remain scornfully ignorant of the truth, and of any larger social repercussions caused by their knee-jerk reactivity.
Basically the omnipresent surveillance ambience of social media has created a climate of tense, near hysteria waiting to explode at any moment. There is a collective feeling of hypersensitivity, anxiety and anticipatory dread that compels a new self-policed normativity.
I just discovered the fun essayist Sam Kriss who writes amusingly on the death of the hipster, among other subjects. Kriss argues that the hipster was a cultural filtering mechanism, like a human algorithm. Now all that data is sorted for us by digital algorithms. We don’t need arbiters of taste and culture in the same way. While I agree that the hipster seems to have vanished along with any sense of a scene (like CBGB’s or Max’s Kansas City in the past), I believe it is the omnipresent continuous self-surveillance of social media that makes “hipsterism” — I mean the older, Marlon Brando/Neal Cassady ideal of the hipster as the flamboyant, irascible rebel against current norms — impossible.
To be a hipster, a punk, a rebel or a trickster meant you sometimes acted in deviant, nonsensical, or self-contradictory ways. Traditionally, the rules that you flouted include those around sexuality, propriety and in other areas. But in our contemporary Panopticon, any deviation from ever-tightening culture-specific norms sets off alarm bells. A long roster of hipster indie rockers, comedians, actors, and fashion photographers, once celebrated for their transgressive edginess, are now canceled for the same reckless approach that once made them exciting and cool. Once-renowned authors like Norman Mailer and Phillip Roth are posthumously shunned for their sexual transgressions, whether in art or in life.
This spidery sense of constant social surveillance is also one reason why so many teenagers are suffering from depression and other forms of mental illness. One’s early years should be a time when you can make occasional jarring mistakes as you discover your unique self. Today any mistake can lead to Internet immolation from which there may be no recovery. Ostracism can be immediate and permanent.
Let’s take the recent incident with the 87-year-old Dalai Lama — avatar of the Buddha of Compassion in his 14th incarnation — who has led an exemplary, scandal-free life up to this point, dedicated to knowledge, science, and truth while seeking to rescue his devastated people from horrific totalitarian oppression. The video has of course gone viral: at some recent function, a little boy was brought up to meet the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama gave the boy a kiss, chuckled, then said, “Do you want to suck my tongue?” He then stuck out his curled up tongue, which the boy did not actually touch. Understanding this to be a joke, the crowd laughed. His Holiness and the boy then exchanged a hug.
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