Metamodernism and its Discontents

Thoughts on The Great American Scam and Emerge 2022, a conference I didn't attend

Once upon a time, if you didn’t happen to own a printing press and you wanted to get your ideas out into the world, your best option was a mimeograph machine, which produced copies of your brilliance in bright purple ink.

Media moves quickly these days. It is literally impossible to keep up. The media-sphere flies at the speed of thought. Thoughts, by their nature, are mercurial, fleeting, instant, multitudinous. Actual material processes (the time it takes to build something useful like a house or a power plant) take longer and are inherently cumbersome. If talk is cheap, thoughts are cheaper.

In the past, the technologies of media set limits on who got to have their thoughts amplified and distributed. If you wanted to get a message out, you needed a papryus scroll, a printing press, a Xerox or mimeograph machine, a radio station, a video production studio, plus a means of distribution — a channel, newsstands, a chain of bookstores, a network of churches. This meant you needed some combination of excess capital and extra time. Now, with the Internet and social media, those boundaries have dissolved, for good and ill.

We’re seeing a massive competition for people’s attention. Attention remains a limited resource. As we know, people’s attention can be most easily hijacked through all kinds of exploitative and manipulative tricks. Reliably, by stimulating the amygdala, the fight or flight response, or by sexual attraction lures, or by mobilizing anger (which explains why “cancel culture” is so addictive).

I find I want to comment on an ever-growing number of articles, videos, podcasts, books, and films, but lack the capacity to assimilate even a fraction of it. Sometimes I feel like a hamster paddling frenetically on a wheel, pursuing some ever-receding chunk of virtual cheese. Finally, one has no choice but to surrender to the deluge.

Over the last few weeks, I earmarked a number of pieces of media I wanted to go back to, to write essays / thought pieces about then… I will link and list a few of them here and provide a brief, off the cuff, note-like versions of the essays I can’t quite get around to writing.

First, I was pleasantly surprised by this editorial in The NY TImes: “It’s Time to Stop Living the American Scam,” by Tim Kreider. It was one of the most honest pieces I have ever seen in The Times, which still tries to maintain the intricate ideological defense-structure for liberals of the upper middle class persuasion. A disaffected Gen X-er like myself, Kreider writes: “To young people, America seems less like a country than an inescapable web of scams, and “hard work” less like a virtue than a propaganda slogan.”

Other quotes I enjoyed from the piece: “More young people are opting not to have kids not only because they can’t afford them but also because they assume they’ll have only a scorched or sodden wasteland to grow up in. An increasingly popular retirement plan is figuring civilization will collapse before you have to worry about it.” In fact, that has always been my retirement plan too!

Some more from this enjoyable piece:

“In the actual dystopian future we now inhabit, the oligarchs have realized they can work everyone harder, pay them less, eliminate benefits, turn every human institution from medicine to corrections into a racket, charge far more for basic rights and services than people in any other nation would stand for without revolting, and get rich beyond the penny ante dreams of a Carnegie or Astor. … In the past few decades, capitalism has exponentially increased the creation of wealth for the already incredibly wealthy at the negligible expense of the well-being, dignity and happiness of most of humanity, plus the nominal cost of a mass extinction and the destruction of the biosphere…”

I suppose The NY Times feels free to publish such a truthful essay because the potential for any kind of actual insurrection or revolution — to address wealth inequality and systemic injustice, rather than to support more bigotry and fascism — seems so incredibly distant at this point that it doesn’t actually matter. I know from my daughter and her friends (all around 21) that, despite having great educations at private schools and prestigious colleges, none of them want to pursue professional careers. They think the corporate world and the nonprofit world are complete frauds at this point. I am curious to see how they will choose to move forward.

Emerge 2022

Another essay I wanted to parse in a more elaborate way was this piece by Brendan Graham Dempsey on the Emerge 2022 Summit in Austin a few weeks ago. A number of friends and past associates attended this. I considered going at the last minute, but I didn’t make it, probably to my good fortune. Dempsey’s piece suggests I would have felt agitated, cantankerous, at the event.

Organized by Tomas Bjorkmann, John Rowson, and others, Emerge gathered “an eclectic assembly of thinkers, thought leaders, digital luminaries, sensemakers and visionaries, engineers and designers” to try to articulate and architect a new system for the future… this is so aligned with my work that it seems bizarre I would feel as alienated from this scene as I do. But there you have it.