You say you want a revolution,
February 23, 2015
The classic criticism of the old media vanguard (e.g. The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and the Times) and its readers is that they are bland, archaic, and afraid to take a stand on anything meaningful, willing to quibble about fine points of gun control and healthcare policy but too stodgy and corporate to take on the deeper issues of consumerism, exceptionalism, and privilege.
And while this condemnation is probably apt, it does not apply to the way you and I consume news.
The danger of internet-age media—the millions of bloggers and columnists typing and the thousands that cater to exactly your niche—is not complacency but provincialism, that hearing what you want to hear over and over will fuel your outrage and narrow your world so much that you won’t bother—or even be able—to communicate with anyone who does not already share your point of view. “The system is corrupt. The only solution is revolution.” You know which political group says that? All of them. No, literally—I’ve heard it shouted by the Tea Party and blackgirldangerous.org, on reddit and FOX, on Jezebel and the National Review. All of these people are revolutionaries, but they’re not talking about the same revolution. Why do you think your revolution is special? 100 million tugs in opposite directions has a net effect of zero.
The system is always one step ahead of you. In the 90’s, Americans thought they could rebel through irony, through detachment and disaffection and nihilism. The system came up with ways to put that on a t-shirt and sell it. Fight Club was put out by 20th Century Fox. Nirvana and NIN were on major labels. Ennui and subversive satire elected George W. Bush.
You know that David Foster Wallace quotation? The famous one at the end of E Unibus Pluram, the one attacking the hollow cynicism of the 90’s, the one about TV and irony, the one that starts with “The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles."
DFW was probably right. Maybe we are the prophesied anti-rebels. But the system is always one step of ahead of you. Because even though we endorse single-entendre principles, be they Women’s Rights or the Right to Life, even though we risk "accusations of sentimentality, melodrama,” with our trigger warnings and reblogs of passionate quotations-in-italics and one-sided anecdotes, even though, in our art, we have gone from sincere to hypersincere, millions of aspiring artists competing to see who can confess more sins, admit more flaws, and appear more banal, the net effect of our rebellion is still zero.
Irony is dangerous because it makes meaningful communication impossible—what use is talk if neither of us is sure what the other is really saying? But sincerity is only valuable insofar as it makes communication possible, and in the 21st century, the system has somehow managed to conflate sincerity with individualism. The only way to prove that you have “real opinions” is for your opinions to be different from those of everyone else. The Right is thus locked into an arms race of extremism: you win if you are more radical than your neighbor. Meanwhile, the Left divides into smaller and smaller groups. “Enough about your privileged white feminism. We need to talk about feminism for poor people of color.” “Enough about feminism. We need to talk about transpeople.” “Enough talk. We need action. We need protest.” “Enough protesting. It won’t work. The system is corrupt. The only solution is revolution.”
By teaching you that disagreement on one point means that you can’t find common ground on another, the system prevents any movement cohesive enough to make a difference. By convincing that you revolution is the only answer, the system protects itself against the slow, boring, local-politics-and-letters-to-senators change that is actually possible. And so the irony of modern politics is that the more "uncompromising” your convictions, the more impotent you actually are. Cooperation is necessary. We all want to change the world.