I’ve been reading things and listening to things over the past few days about the now-deceased former Cambridge professor Jason Arday. There are those who think Cambridge is responsible for his death, those who think the media is responsible for his death, those that think that “we” are responsible for his death, and those who think he alone is responsible for his own death.

Here is my belief system in a nutshell. We are living through an era of profound disconnection and alienation. I get more connection from my dog than I do from most people. And, in fact, when I walk my dog, what I notice more than anything else is the disconnectedness of others. Other people who are walking their dogs with their noses buried in their phones, as though the act of taking a beautiful animal out to see the world is so intolerable that they need a dimension-bending distraction just to bear it.

But if we are going to blame Cambridge (which, to be honest, I partially do: I think encouraging someone in their delusions because their story is profitable for you is reprehensible) and the media for Arday’s death, let’s pour some less palatable blame out to others as well.

Let’s blame Jason Arday’s neighbors. Let’s blame the people who encountered him in the flesh every single day of his life.

And let’s, if you will, go ahead and map this all back on to my dog. My dog is a pitbull mix–the most “controversial” breed. I did not necessarily actively choose to adopt my dog. A situation arose wherein my dog (who has behavioral issues, ones that were much worse when she was younger) likely would have been put in a shelter (at best) if I didn’t adopt her. I won’t get into the specifics here but boy were they messy, and I had to do something. I could either willfully deny that this dog (who I had grown very attached to) would be put into a shelter (if one would even take her) and more than likely euthanized because of her behavioral issues. Or I could adopt her. I selected the second option, because I knew I couldn’t live with myself if I went with the first. To me, she was the “one tiny creature” in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov:

Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature...in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth.

No, I would not consent.

Now, let’s look at what might have happened if I did decided not to adopt her. The “instituions:”—aka shelters, animal control, animal rescues, etc.—seem like they would provide a safety net for a dog with behavioral issues that no one wants. Right? That’s what I thought. But, when I was thrown into this situation, I soon realized that these institutions were not likely to provide this animal—one who would not be easy to adopt out and who would be taking away resources from other, more adoptable dogs–- safety. It was a struggle to even get them to help me get a trainer, and when I got one, I realized that they weren’t going to be helpful anyway. If I didn’t take my dog, my dog would have died. I know this in my heart, and everyone around me knows it too. More than one million dogs are put to death in the U.S. every year, and most of those aren’t as behaviorally challenged as she was.

Then we have the “media.” The media, social and otherwise, has a real bone to pick with dogs of this type. People love them, people hate them. When I was first around my dog, I had had little to no exposure to pitbulls (although I had grown up around all kinds of animals and had ridden horses extensively and trained them a bit, so I have a deep comfort and familiarity with animals and a confidence with handling them). I recognized something different about my dog, but it wasn’t necessarily how the media portrayed “pitbulls.” My dog is just, for lack of a better word, “extra.” Extra vocal, extra smart, extra cuddly, extra energetic, extra protective, extra silly, and yes: towards dogs she is extra aggressive. The media can communicate “pitbulls are the best”/”pitbulls are the worst,” but it cannot explain what it’s like to go through life caring about an animal that loves and hates with more ferocity than I’ve ever seen anything love and hate before. She fascinates me.

If I had left her fate up to institutions and the media, my beautiful dog would be dead. Unquestionably. Would they be responsible for her death? I mean, I don’t know. My dog didn’t need better PR or her cute picture and sob story plastered on social media (alongside a million other dogs). She didn’t need (and would likely never get) to be holed up in some version of dog solitary confinement–a roof over her head and food and water but no connection or feelings of safety. She needed someone to actively understand who she is and what she needs, and to commit to her and say, “OK, I’ll do my best.” She needed what now appears to be the most difficult thing in the world to give: love.

I am not comparing Jason Arday to an animal. I am looking at his situation through the lens of our contemporary reality. We care more about our stories (media) and our abstractions (institutions) than we do about what is physically in front of us. If Jason Arday was suffering, as a human being, did the human beings in his physical or emotional proximity bear witness to this? What did they do? Did he have a community? Loved ones? Or was he surrounded by people with their noses in their phones, reading stories about “Jason Arday”? Because I’m not sure I would have been able to endure that either.

I have, on more than one occasion, felt the bitter frost of ostracization. And I learned a lesson in those moments: cultivate a life with people who see you and love you for who you are. Build a life where people can be with you in the flesh, and check in on others who are not in the flesh to make sure they are OK. Find safe people who prioritize your best interests and don’t view you as a threat or a joke. If you don’t have much close family (I don’t have any beyond my bro), develop unbreakable bonds with as many people as you can. Finally, learn to tolerate the things you don’t like about the people you love.

This might be the most boring thing I’ll ever write, but it’s also the most true. So no: Cambridge, the media—those things didn’t kill Jason Arday. They are illusions, figments that go away the minute you set down your phone and enter reality. Jason Arday killed Jason Arday. And as someone who, once upon a time, cared more about her career than her physical existence, I know how he must have felt: alone, isolated, humiliated, afraid, unable to move forward. I have felt that. It is horrible. Learning that no career will ever be more important than the human that embodies it was very important to survival.

We have to learn how to better care for one another. We have to learn how to separate what is on our screens with what is physically in front of us. I titled my Substack The Dematerialization of the Art World because I welcome dematerialization in some forms. I welcome it because I think it should make what we choose in our material, physical existence all the more important. I can ignore what some weird stranger says on the internet. I can’t ignore my dog or my brother or my friends when they are in pain. Whoever ignored Arday’s pain—and I suspect this began long before he ever came to Cambridge—set him up for a life where stories and abstractions meant more than his own humanity. What a loss.

As an adjunct professor and a freelance writer and editor, I feel that my time in academia (most especially my time as a graduate student) allows for insight into how many people maneuver themselves in higher education. Before attending graduate school, I thought that prestige in higher education meant something, and that people who went to Ivy League schools were much, much smarter than people who didn’t. I no longer even remotely believe this.

So when I look at Jason Arday, the now-disgraced former Cambridge Professor, I don’t see someone who was too intellectually deficient to “make it” at Cambridge and who had to weasel in another way. I don’t think anyone of even average intelligence, given the correct resources, is too intellectually deficient to make it at any Oxbridge or Ivy institution in this time period (at least in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, which is where I will frame my argument).

That might sound crazy, but I have learned over time that it is very rare to encounter individuals who engage in thinking that travels beyond the simulation of intelligence. I’m not even saying that I always engage in thinking beyond this type—I just happen to know that the simulation of intelligence exists, and that it encompasses the large majority of what is viewed, in 2026, as actual intelligence.

Caveat: when it comes to specialized skills like advanced surgery and so forth, I am unsure that everyone of average intelligence could do that. I don’t want to appear as though I don’t believe that certain people possess rare and unique intellectual gifts. I simply believe that the way in which most problems of the mind are taught in the 21st century is such that anyone who cares enough about a subject, and is given enough time and resources to learn and know that subject, will in fact learn and know that subject. I don’t see a strong argument otherwise, but I would be open to hearing one.

With Arday, I believe the root of the problem was and is one of mismatched expectations. The general public, alongside deluded Cambridge academics, believe Cambridge is one of—if not the most—elite educational institutions in the world. Because of this, we were asked to believe Arday to be an excellent scholar and professor in his discipline: the Sociology of Education. But what if his actual subject of study and mastery just happened to be quite different from this stated discipline?

In my view, Arday’s real subject—the one he became the most proficient in—was, broadly, “how to make it as a hot young star professor at Cambridge University.” And he performed excellently in that subject. When I look at Arday, I see someone who assiduously sussed out and streamlined the steps one needed to take to get where he wanted to go in the most elite version of higher education. He then very deliberately took those steps.

In graduate school, I saw many people take similar (though arguably less grandiose) steps to achieve their success. I saw, for example, how much professors loved to get their asses kissed, and how willing some students were to pucker right up—knowing it would get them closer to the positions they desired (or get them out of doing work). I saw how much professors loved to feel superior to others by helping someone whom they felt was marginalized by society in some way. And I saw, most of all, how a person like me—someone who doesn’t like to kiss ass or pretend she’s weaker (or, conversely, more noble) than she is, and more to the point someone who wants to be judged on her work—would likely not make it very far at all in this current iteration of academia.

When I watched this video this weekend, made in the golden days of Arday, I thought: “Yup, that’s who these people are.” I didn’t feel anger or even resignation. I felt merely that this is what elite higher education is. This is how the game is played. When, in the video, Arday retells a story of the man who allegedly taught him how to read and write saying, “It would be the greatest story in the world if the kid who didn’t know how to read and write managed to get a PhD,” I can only agree. It would be a great story, perhaps the greatest. And what have we all learned—at least, those of us who are still capable of learning—in this time period? Whoever controls the “story” controls the game. The Kardashians know this—that’s why they obsessively talk about “the narrative.” If Arday became a star professor in academia (emphasis on star), he was likely also once an aspiring star professor. And all aspiring stars learn from the ones who have come before them and actually make it.

In the second portion of the video, Professor Hilary Cremin—positioned by the BBC as Arday’s new “boss”—seems more like a smitten schoolgirl in her short plaid skirt, seated in front of Arday and his rockstar guyliner. More in the manner of a supervisor than an employee, Arday interrogates her: “There will be those who think this is a tokenistic appointment. What are your thoughts on this?” She replies with fawning adulation: “The board of electors on your interview day were absolutely unanimous: we are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do,”

And here’s the bitter pill part guys: Even if Prof Cremin is not telling the truth, I don’t think she’s lying. Tell me who you think in academia is truly up to date about who the “best in the world” is in the Arts, Humanities, or Social Sciences. Who is really tearing it up in academia? I will take this further: I don’t think most people in academia are even educable. I don’t think Prof Cremin is educable. I think she is living rent-free in the educational model of the 20th century. I think, rather than commit herself to the grueling task of reframing her mindset for a world that is utterly different from the one she came of age in, she wants to believe in academic fairytales and flights of fancy. And I think she and her peers wanted to give themselves a big old pat on the back for hiring someone who had slayed as many imaginary dragons as the noble Lord Arday.

I think academia—at least the academia I bear witness to—is made up of Cremins and Ardays. It’s the old guard who think people still learn purely by going to the library and reading books and peer-reviewed journals (these are the Cremins, the marks). And it’s the new guard who are using this ignorance and refusal to adapt to contemporary digital society to their advantage (these are the Ardays, the players).

Here is my main theory: the majority of adults who came of age prior to the advent of Web 2.0 do not understand the difference between information hoarding through obsessive online research and actual intelligence. They think a child who has imbibed 57 TikToks about ADHD or how to make sourdough starter—and can talk a good game—is some kind of intellectual genius, and not a stochastic parrot who has made themselves into a flesh and blood version of an LLM. People, young people, are being trained (or, more to the point, training themselves by going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole) on TikToks in roughly the same manner that AI is being trained on data. And this makes them “smart” in the same way that AI is intelligent—not by cultivating actual intelligence and wisdom, but by hoarding and interpolating and repeating untested information on command.

What actually makes you smart is imbibing information and then going out into the world and testing it for yourself—this is the scientific method, and it works in all domains (and most especially in fucking Sociology). When I was 16, I read the Edie Sedgwick biography by Jean Stein obsessively and wanted to go live in New York City and party at the Factory (even though it had been many decades since there even was an Edie or a Factory). When I actually came to live in NYC at 17, I had to reconcile a place that nothing was like what it was in the book, and I had to learn the difference between what I had researched and imbibed and what I was experiencing in real life. I had to discover whether or not I even liked an NYC that wasn’t the one in my head or in pictures and stories. Imbibing information is one aspect of cultivating intelligence. Being in the world, talking to people, understanding how to navigate your work and your life—all of these are what makes someone truly wise and knowledgable, and not merely a hoarder and sorter of information.

And yes: I know academics do field research. But watch that video again, and tell me if these people seem like they’ve cultivated the wisdom of those who have lived a life of texture and contrast, a life that might test and strengthen the mind. They don’t. They seem dull and mannered and without qualities, to harken Musil.

To me, these contemporary academics, curled up snugly in their ivory tower, safe in their little warrens, are like the rubes who never venture away from their one-stoplight towns. They have found a safe space to believe in their own genius, and whither those who ride into town and suggest there might be something greater—something more intelligent or sophisticated—than what they can perceive through their own comfortable myopia.

Given this setting, I believe Arday lied and plagiarized not because he couldn’t do the work, but because he surmised—accurately, in my opinion—that it isn’t really your work that gets you your position in higher ed. Your academic work is like Kim Kardashian’s face and body—as long as it can be edited to look good, who cares if it’s natural or synthetic? People have pointed out that Arday plagiarized not from other academic “stars,” but from other academics who weren’t very prestigious. Meaning, he plagiarized from the academic “losers” who didn’t cultivate the more important qualities for academic success, and who were never going to rise through the ranks anyway.

It’s your ability to play this fairly facile game—again, set up by people who likely got their PhDs in the 20th century, and who long ago stopped really understanding what is or is not interesting in contemporary intellectual work—that gets you leverage in the world of academia. Add to that an ultra-compelling Dickensian narrative, an engaging stage presence, and a dynamic “look” (guyliner, super-long dreads), and voila: a star is born.

This begs a question: why did “becoming a star professor at Cambridge” become decoupled from “doing the rigorous academic work that would result in becoming a professor at Cambridge?” And will events like this fall from grace turn the tide? I don’t know. I think, personally, events like this signal to some kind of subconscious communal death wish in academia. I don’t know how you continue to conduct yourself as an elite institution of higher learning with this kind of stain on your dress.

To look at the bigger picture: I am not saying that higher education, at any level, means nothing or has no value. It can still be life-changing, and I believe it is for many. What I am also saying is that education is so personal and so tied to one’s own individual ability to be educated and to remain educable throughout one’s life that (for now at least) sometimes it scarcely matters whether you attend Yale or a knitting class. This is particularly true in a time when the information that was once only found in the lecture halls of elite institutions can be accessed instantly for free. I love teaching, and I teach in places where people authentically want to learn. And I make the content of my courses something you can’t just pick up on YouTube. As a student, I experienced other forms of “teaching”—classes that felt more like an exercise in how to directly cater to the professors’ ego—and they are not for me.

Knowledge isn’t locked into an ivory tower anymore—only academics live there now. And I predict that the idea of getting a degree to prove something about your intellect or your abilities is one that will disappear in the same manner as VHS tapes and pay phones did—slowly, and then all at once. Then, the Ardays of the world will have to find a new hustle, and the Cremins will be viewed as the dinosaurs of a past—the ones that sold out their academic integrity for the willful delusion of pretending to benificently employ “the best in the world.”

Like everyone else in NYC and perhaps globally, I have become obsessed with Angela Nikolau, the female portion of the Russian rooftopper couple who scaled the Empire State Building and got engaged.

I scrolled Nikolau’s Instagram looking to get a better sense of this person (I have not seen the couple’s Netflix doc, but I want to). In images, including those made on the Empire State Building, Nikolau often wears a little black balaclava with pointy cat ears (a nod to her catwoman climber identity). She also sometimes, as in the selfie above, wears a pink one with ears.

Now when have we seen a woman wearing a pink hat with ears before? Or, pardon me, when have we seen what appeared to be millions of women wearing them? 2017. The Women’s March in Washington D.C. “This pussy grabs back.” The oft-hand-knitted “pink pussy hat” was a collective aesthetic response to the release of a recording wherein President Donald Trump tells Billy Bush (regarding the sexual pliability of women once a man becomes famous): “They let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy.”

This quote always reminded me of my time working at a women’s magazine, when I was but a nerdy little editorial doormat. A beautiful editor whom I envied (and who I still like and admire to this day) was regaling us doormats with a quintessentially naughty aughties story about an encounter with her friend, the notorious Gavin McGinnes—then I believe the former editor of Vice magazine, eventually to become a Proud Boy. I don’t remember the entire story or its context, but I do remember this part: the beautiful editor was apparently joking with him about her not actually being a woman (she was in fact a woman, this was just a bit of some kind). His response was to stick his fingers in between her legs, pull them out, sniff them, and say: “Smells like cunt to me!”

This story was not told with any degree of sadness or rage or humiliation. She did not, at least at that time, view this as an assault or even really a transgression. It was more like an outrageous prank. The story was, in some way, delivered to us as a good-intentioned flex: I hang out with Gavin; I’m sexy and don’t take things seriously. Gavin wants to stick his fingers inside me. And Gavin could “get away” with it then because he was Gavin: famous and infamous in the 2000s NYC magazine world, if not the world writ large. At that time, magazine girls of a certain type absolutely loved him. And this wasn’t like “back in the bad/good old days.” This was 21st century dynamics, only about ten years prior to #metoo and pink pussy hats.

You can do anything.

I came to NYC as an inexperienced seventeen-year-old, and, despite being a nerd, I went out almost every night of the week for many years. My exposure to—and even, to a far lesser degree, my own involvement in—experiences similar to this one was formative to my worldview. These types of experiences, and my eventual willingness to view them without hard and fast judgments about what people wanted or needed or felt was OK for them, deeply affected me. I was and am also friends with a ton of gay men, whose own social and sexual codes are often infinitely creative and in many instances do not align with the mores of other communities. This inspired—and still inspires me—to think differently about what I must put in the categories of “right” and “wrong.” This is not to say that I think assault is OK—I have been assaulted more than once, at varying points in my life, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. It is to say that I believe grown adults, those who have agency over where and with whom they choose to hang out, have the right to their own interpretations of what is pleasurable and painful for them.

Bathed in the light of these uncomfortable and inconvenient personal truths, when women began to don the hats in 2017 I thought they looked ridiculous and I would not humiliate myself by wearing one. I expressed this view regardless of whether or not it placed me in direct opposition with the political and aesthetic proclivities of my gender. I thought that the sentiment behind the hats was incredibly hypocritical. It seemed to be more based on what the women who wore them wanted to believe about themselves as a gender—that women are immune to seeking male validation, that women always support each other, that women are the good guys and men are the bad guys, and that if only a woman were president, everything would be OK—versus the truth, which is murkier.

So what does this have to do with the aesthetics of female power and empowerment?

To put it bluntly: I think many women derive the bulk of their self worth from how much men want to sleep with them. I think many other women derive a much smaller but not insignificant portion of their self worth from this. And I think some women derive none of their self worth from this. Further, I think there are women who attach themselves socially to other women who are more overtly sexually desirable than they are, in order to claim some degree of second-order power from being in that circle. And, to complicate things even further, I think there are women who define their value, negatively or positively, by how much men don’t want to sleep with them. While these motivations are often unconscious, there is nothing truly wrong with any of them—everyone has their own values, and as a human you have to decide what your’s are and ideally make them conscious and live in as close proximity to them as possible. But wherever a woman may find herself on this scale of desiring male sexual validation, to insist that the scale doesn’t exist is a false claim.

To that end: suggesting that no woman in history has ever allowed, or more to the point wanted, a famous or otherwise high status man to “grab her by the pussy” is not accurate. I have proof otherwise. And to think that no woman has ever conferred to herself some sense of value from a man’s desire for her—even if that desire was communicated in the least gentlemanly, most pussy-grabbing way possible—is also not accurate.

Side note: I constantly observe both heterosexual men and women valiantly trying to remove the equation of desire from their lives, to act as though the gender they are attracted to doesn’t exist or has no worth. It is a fascinating thing to behold.

Trump’s individual claim related to pussy grabbing is obviously not every woman’s, or most women’s, story. So his making that kind of generalization was certainly ridiculous and evidence of someone with a distorted reality and morality. I think Trump is gross and a terrible president. I am not defending pussy grabbing, or any other kind of brutish behavior. I think a man in control of his sexual prowess understands how to wield it in a far more interesting and seductive way. But let’s be real. Some woman, somewhere, at some point in time, allowed Donald Trump to grab her by the pussy, simply because he was Donald Trump. If you do not believe that, I don’t know what to tell you. And if you think she is somehow less of a woman than you, I also don’t know what to tell you.

*****

Now back to Angela Nikolau. Thank god. Nikolau is also a wearer of pink cat-eared hats. In her images and videos, she often takes on a standardized “hot influencer girl” aesthetic of tight, athletic clothing and sexy poses. Yet, in her ability and choice to climb tall buildings with cat-like grace and agility, she represents a completely different type of female empowerment than that of the traditional pink pussy hat wearer—or the consumption-minded influencer girl.

So why is she like this? While browsing her Instagram, I came upon this story she wrote about her childhood:

I was 12. And that’s when I found out hunger can make you throw up bile.

When my parents divorced, my mom fell into a deep depression. She tried to find work — nothing came through. She started selling off watches and whatever small things we had around the house. The money ran out. None of our relatives knew how bad things had gotten — my mom didn’t want anyone to know.

At first we ate what was left in the fridge. Then whatever had been forgotten on the back of shelves. At some point all that was left was cornstarch and cloves. Mom would make kissel and throw in the cloves — for flavor. To this day I can’t drink kissel, or eat anything with cloves in it.

A week later, the starch ran out too.

The next two weeks, we ate nothing. My sister and I tried to keep ourselves busy, distracted, not thinking about it. But by the end of that second week, our bodies just gave out. We sat in the long hallway of our empty Stalin-era communal apartment — too exhausted to do anything.

We split a construction bucket and its lid between us.

We sat there and threw up bile. That was the first time I learned that was even a thing — that your body can do that, bring up bile when there’s absolutely nothing left inside. I still remember that green lid I was throwing up into. My little sister sat beside me, no strength left, holding the bucket.

It hurts to write this. My stomach literally aches as I type. But this is my story. 🤍

And if you want to know what I’m made of — there’s your answer.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I appreciated reading this. I did in fact want to know what Nikolau was made of, and why and how she does what she does. In fact, reading this brought me to tears. Could it be fake? Sure. But I don’t think someone who talks to death as often as this woman does needs to tell a fake story to impress anyone or explain herself. And the simple fact is that brilliance—including the brilliance of cultivating a mind and body capable of free climbing one of the tallest buildings in the world—doesn’t often grow from an easy childhood where all the lights automatically turned green for you. It usually grows from suffering.

This is a woman who was debased not by a man or by an impropriety, but by the circumstances of her own childhood. And she empowers herself not by huddling with the masses to declare her victim status in a silly hat, but by doing what almost everyone else can’t do (albeit in a slightly chic-er silly hat).

And in a full set:

Nikolau and her mate consider themselves artists, and while I’m not super in love with their aesthetics (there is a strong whiff of shock value Russian contemporary art that just isn’t my thing—see Pyotr Pavlensky for further insight into this), I think it is obvious that these people know how to garner attention. And as w writer I do love the wink on “getting engaged at the top of the Empire State Building.”

More interesting to me is the fact that Nikolau represents some break from the way in which women have presented themselves in the past decade or so. I think this, along with the engagement stunt itself, is what is making her so interesting to people.

I myself am more interested in what the aesthetic of an Angela Nikolau-type figure means in this time period. Does her image say something different about women? That they are strong? That they can withstand pain? That they can even choose it? I felt something similar watching the Venice Biennale stunt performer Sophie Duncan (who performed as the human clapper of a bell in Florentina Holzinger’s piece SEAWORLD VENICE) and reading her take on what she does. This isn’t the only version of female empowerment, but in a rapidly dematerializing world, this emphasis on testing the limits of one’s physicality recalibrates something for me.

It also tests the boundaries of the oft-repeated “IT’S HER BODY” rejoinder, which often comes on the heels of a celeb getting mocked for too much, or too obvious, or too unclaimed, plastic surgery. It’s her body, and no one has the right to judge what she does to or with it—she gets to choose that. But while some super invasive plastic surgeries (the dreaded BBL for example) are in themselves tests to the limits of one’s physicality, there is something interesting about a woman agenticly putting her body in danger in a way that doesn’t find her comatose under the knife, aching to be more sexually desirable to men.

*****

My mother used to tell me I could be anything I wanted when I grew up. A lot of little girl’s mothers tell them this, I think. Yet, when you grow up, women often expect you to “be” just like everyone else. Sure, you can do whatever you want—but you’d better do it wearing that pink pussy hat like the rest of us. You’d better be like us. Debasement is often seen as something men do to women. Empowerment is seen as something women do for each other.

Is that true?

There is a female debasement that goes unseen in the culture of womanhood. The petty humiliations, like forcing a bridesmaid to not only wear but actually purchase a dress she hates and will never wear again—all so that she can look like all the other maids, and not outshine the bride in her virginal white. The insistence on Byzantine pecking orders and obligate conformity. The knee-jerk misandry that often underpins female friendships—in my experience, many women who date on the apps do so purely so they can have negative stories about men to laugh over with their friends. The knee-jerk misogyny that also underpins them—the Nicki Minaj friendship song from SNL is funny because it’s true. Female relationships, in both work and life, are often forged in the fire of throwing some other woman under the bus.

(This is not to say that I don’t have great female relationships. It is to say that I’ve work hard to cultivate relationships with women who have developed themselves beyond these frameworks).

So what is empowerment? What is power?

To go back to Trump: his thesis on self-empowerment seems simple. By cultivating the right qualities, you can achieve the access to anything. Cultivate fame, and fame grants you access to pussy—and you don’t even have to ask nicely, or at all. You can just reach out and grab it, like the golden ring. Cultivate wealth, and you get the spoils of Mar-A-Lago. Cultivate both, and you become the president. Is he wrong?

I am speculating here, but Nikolau’s thesis on empowerment appears more mystical, anarchic, immediate and dematerialized in orientation. Nothing gives or grants you anything. You just take it. Human life is finite, and if you want something, you don’t waste time cultivating some other thing in order to get it. You just go get it. It is, I presume, something more akin to this famous line of dialogue written by Nikolau’s fellow Russian, Ayn Rand. As she wrote in The Fountainhead:

Dean: “My dear fellow, who will let you?”

Howard Roark: “That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?”

So who is the more empowered here? One can’t imagine Nikolau climbing the Empire State Building on her own—it seems like the magic with her is that she’s part of a romantic coupling that allows her to do what she does. And yet I can’t help but think that if she were part of a pink-hat-wearing female friend group, she would likely never even have climbed the first rung. She would get pulled back down before she even began.

Trump can’t imagine anything coming to him without a deal or a transaction. I think he has never known anything even remotely adjacent to the feeling of risking his life for an experience that goes beyond the synthetic satisfactions of lukewarm delivery McDonald’s and the compromised pussy that’s only there for the fame or the money.

By dint of mortality, no human is ever truly or uniquely powerful. We all face death, and it takes from us in a moment that which we took a lifetime to build. Perhaps power comes from from making friends with this truth, and then climbing forever toward it.

This is a very long and loose and rather meandering essay that I started writing at the end of March. I wanted to compose something that made sense of my experiences on what I term the “social internet”—as I have now largely moved on to other experiences.

I first heard the term “pipeline” while chatting with a filmmaker from the world of TPOT (don’t worry, all will be revealed). Starting in the mid-2010s, I found myself more and more confused and depressed about the world, and particularly about the people around me. I felt like many of my three-dimensional friends had largely become two-dimensional reflections of whatever content they were imbibing on social media. It made them, by degrees, superficial, mercenary, pious, boring and incurious. I felt trapped in my life with these people, with their shrinking minds, and I wanted to see what was out in the world beyond them. I wanted to get beyond myself as well, and beyond the life I had created, which had begun to feel like one big giant misstep.

So I undertook an undefined project that entailed engaging with people far outside my little NYC art world bubble. I did this dominantly in online interactions.

At the time (and this remains true), I was a person who found meaningful connection out and about in the physical world. I had never been on a dating app (still haven’t), and at the time I didn’t have social media (I do now, but it certainly does not have me in the way it seems to “have” so many). So for reasons that were ultimately rooted in a dissatisfaction with the direction that my social and creative life seemed to be hurling itself toward, I began contacting people “from the internet” whose work (usually writing, sometimes video essays) I found not only interesting and valuable, but also filled with ideas outside the confining pen of those that were produced by people in “my” world.

Because I didn’t have social media and therefore didn’t have DMs, I would root around on the internet for these people’s emails and then send them my thoughts on their work (which was very thinky and nerdy and had to do with internet culture, the digital revolution, cryptofinance, emergence, etc.). I also often offered a casual invitation to collaborate on something, which was and is very common for me to do in my “real” life (I work in creative worlds, mostly magazines and online publications, where people collaborate a lot). The people I contacted often seemed to have a hard time believing my interests were what I said they were. They met my emails with a curiosity laced with friendly suspicion, but perhaps also felt drawn to the flattery my words conferred to them (I wasn’t trying to flatter anyone but people take things the way they take them). It was interesting to me that my interest in their work was met with suspicion, given that none of them were famous, or, to my knowledge, especially wealthy or anything. One had to be on some level a likeminded, tapped-in nerd to care about what they were doing. And I had a hard time understanding what they thought I could possibly get from them other than what I had plainly stated.

This suspicion foreshadowed the changing shape of fame in the minds of the chronically online, which I didn’t understand then and find ridiculous now (the concept of a microcelebrity is hilarious to me). But I also didn’t really care or put much thought toward their reactions to my emails. Since I had never met them and didn’t know them, I didn’t really care about them at all–-they were just strangers whose work I found interesting. This was a no-stakes, no-goals endeavor which bled over into the pandemic era, giving me an unexpected and useful pastime. I filled my pandemic days teaching on zoom and writing and giving my dog endless walks around my silent neighborhood. My nights were spent running around the temporarily abandoned industrial areas of Brooklyn and Queens, feeling like the only free person in the world. Chatting with these people rounded that schedule out nicely.

In my online adventures, only two of the people whom I was in somewhat regular contact with met with me in-person (in NYC). This surprises me to this day, but I also later learned that a lot of these extremely online people were most comfortable being extremely online—that’s why they were there in the first place. The two people I communed with in-person (neither of whom live in NYC) turned out to be the most “wow,” the highest quality, the nicest, the most socially sophisticated, and the most interesting of the bunch. I would describe them both as scientists (though not occupationally). These people came from completely different worlds than my own, yet we were able to connect fairly seamlessly for some reason. They both gave me what I felt to be invaluable insight into several categories that were previously opaque to me (such as the theoretical underpinnings of crypto finance and blockchain, integral theory, evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology–-among many other topics I knew nothing about at the time). I liked meeting and spending time with both of them, and the fact that I met them in real life and have sensory memories of them makes it sweeter and more meaningful to me.

There is a naughty saying: “Want to learn a foreign language? Sleep with a dictionary.” That doesn’t absolutely map to my experiences, but I did find myself, in the years of this online adventure, spending time with people who felt “foreign” to me, people whose interests, knowledge, and education were completely different to mine. People who spoke a different conceptual language. Learning this way—by talking to actual people in private online discussions rather than consuming mediated material and discourse online—was like reading primary source material, unaffected and undiluted. And despite the initial suspicions, these people were mostly very unguarded and direct with me, providing a window into their minds that I value to this day. They were perhaps less interested in my mind than I would have liked, but given that I come from the worlds of art and magazines and aesthetics and creativity, this did not surprise me. For the most part these people didn’t really understand or care about stuff like that, and even the few who reckoned they did were inaccurate. Sometimes woefully inaccurate.

The best part about this was that despite my becoming disillusioned with the trajectory of my “real world,” I could engage with and learn from people outside of it without having to suffer the indignity of moving out of NYC (only to inevitably move back with my tail between my legs) to garner this knowledge. It was there for the taking, found first in private conversations and also in these little shanty towns of online communities that were quickly thrown together before and during the pandemic. I was and remain private about my dealings with these people. These were good-faith personal interactions that I used to help me make a better map of the world, at a time when I felt a little lost within it.

So what does this have to do with radicalization? When the TPOT filmmaker I mentioned in the opening of this piece first namechecked this idea of a “pipeline,” we were playfully discussing the “trad” phenomenon. They mentioned that there was a “‘PostRat’ to Trad pipeline,” and I knew what they meant without really connecting to this heavily jargoned phrasing. TPOT is “This Part of Twitter,” a loose coalition of “Post Rationalist” types (PostRats) who chat with each other on X (I believe it was then still late-stage Twitter). I’m not going to go into what the Post Rationalists believe, because there are many ways you can find that out, and I am certainly not an expert. Defining what people believe was not and is not interesting to me. I just wanted to see what people who weren’t in the NYC art world were talking about. And the one thing I can confirm is that these people were definitely not in the NYC art world, or any other art world for that matter.

People in these worlds would (and likely still do) talk jargonese to each other all the time, and when I would point out that none of my friends in NYC would know what they were talking about, I was met with incredulity. I found this amusing, since the art world is infamous for its gospel of jargon, its International Art English that I’m forever imploring people to refrain from using (“You don’t need to write like that to sound knowledgeable about art!”). Were I to drop some of the terms and phrasing common in the art world, these TPOT-ers would likely find that terminology-loaded language equally incomprehensible.

Hermetic terminology does have purposes, one of which is to determine in-group allegiances. Speaking in code allows people to produce culture simply by building walls around who can understand it, and keeping those who can’t understand it outside the bubble. And these TPOT people loved loved loved jargon: steel man, multipolar traps, Moloch, the metacrisis, the blue church, egregores–-there was a lot of this kind of language, which I was fine with: I am a theory person. I spent a year studying with the person who translated Adorno (he even let me audit a class, which was apparently very rare for him), and going from Frankfurt School theoretical language to TPOT’s grab bag of philosophical anthropology wasn’t a stretch for me, intellect-wise. The TPOT people worshipped a person named David Chapman and were heavily influenced by René Girard's "mimetic theory.” They all seemed to view the world through a largely deterministic lens, and while I am quite fluid in most of my beliefs, I do consider myself a free will absolutist (I did meet a few Libertarians in this time period and while I am not a Libertarian, I think we were able to commune because of this specific mutual belief structure).

So while I was happy to jump into the TPOT from time to time, it wasn’t a world that I felt super aligned with or drawn to (and I don’t think they were very drawn to me either). It is no coincidence that one of the few people I connected with from that world was a filmmaker—I like people who are artistic and make things, and a lot of these types were not artists. They mostly seemed like normal, highly rational post-rationalists with regular jobs who liked to chat and gab and gossip and pontificate on the nature of the social human.

The one collection of ideas I did get pretty far down the road with was Game B, which is (from my frustrating experience) seemingly next to impossible for me to explain and/or to rationalize to my NYC friends, so research it on your own if you’re curious. I recognize that I am slightly more sympathetic to The California Ideology as compared to many of the materialist NYC socialist types I consort with, whose structure of beliefs is very much (in my opinion) based in the Frankfurt School constellation of ideologies (which anyone who attended an art school in the U.S. in the past 40 years would also have been influenced by to some degree). I went to a little manifesto-themed event recently where a Marxist art critic proclaimed, in their spoken manifesto, “We need a materialist criticism.” My knee jerk response, which was verbalized before I remembered my manners, was “NO!”. I still think that there is a kernel of something in the Game B structure that predicts a future in more sophisticated dimensionality than older and perhaps more shopworn political models (and I still consume some content from the Game B adjacent maestros).

The biggest thing I found in my adventures with online people was that, for all its endless frustrations, I like my life in NYC better than anything online. I found people from other parts of the world who gravitated to these spots (often called dark forests or the cozy web) to be interesting but usually much less socially sophisticated than people in NYC. I love socially sophisticated people. I think of NYC as a dance, maybe a dance marathon, and for me it is enjoyable to negotiate that. I also found, in these online enclaves, an obsession with gender and gender conflict that I didn’t really relate to. In NYC we are all just trying to make rent and survive while also fulfilling the promises of our intellectual and creative gifts, and from my experience this leavening seems to make people less gender focused and a little more–dare I say–performatively androgynous. At the very least in terms of overall competence.

I also felt like in the online realms there were a lot of unspoken sexual dynamics at play that seemed at best transactional and at worst hamfistedly exploitive and greedy. Or just dumb. A lot of the women drawn to these spaces often seemed to beguile men by being themselves low-key misogynists, or at least haters of lefty feminist types, and there was some kind of “the enemy of my enemy is my crush” thing that seemed to be going on. Their sexual allure was, in my opinion, broadcasted (sometimes with comically catfishy, thirst-trappy thumbnails) to draw in more males to already highly male-dominated spaces. In turn, the women were seemingly using these spaces as a marketing opportunity to casually funnel men to their own monetized online endeavors. That their anti-feminist transgressiveness conferred a “sexual marketplace” value (another concept that I find hilarious)—that was a little too on the nose for me, too performative to be authentic. Really they were just too unlike NYC cultural conventions, which I began to see the value in more and more. And I felt like many of the men just seemed, if nothing else, a little inexperienced and “pilled” into being knee-jerk misogyny-lite due to insecurity, groupthink, and too much time spent online (and probably a few neurotic mommy issues).

I don’t belong to a “men this/women that” school of human identity—not in 2025. Intergenerationally, there was not one woman in my working class upbringing who could afford to not work outside the home, nor was there one man who could afford to skip out on his share of domestic duties—so the concept of trad has always elicited a “trad for whom?” response from me. I also don’t belong to a “marketplace” ideology of human connection, because I think there is something ineffable about love and desire that transcends the idea of value accrued or divested (I experienced the death of a close family member at a young age, and the idea that humans are fungible and you can replace some people with other people is not one that I have found to be true). I also don’t belong to the “you are what you believe/you are your opinions” school of human identity. I do belong to the “you are your values, choices, actions, and character” school of human identity. It is more important to me that people show themselves to me to be quality human beings and less important for me to know what they think or believe. This is perhaps why I like art, which in the olden days of the early 2010s was not about beliefs and opinions so much as it was about experimentation and expansiveness of thought and action. I like the idea that someone can be a bad person and a good artist. There’s freedom in that. I like the idea of being able to like something someone made without liking the someone as a human being.

So, essentially, I fell down a rabbit hole to an alternative world where people were smart in a few of the same ways that New York art world people were smart—but with completely different interests, drives and preferences. Or I guess I peered inquisitively down a few connected rabbit warrens for a time. I noticed that intelligent people are not necessarily always very curious people, although sometimes they are. And I noticed a less attractive trend (meaning attractive to me personally), which was that a lot of these people seemed rather socially inexperienced, and appeared to live very insular existences.

I also saw that they were not immediately turned off by what were then and would always be “no trespass” zones for me, ideas-wise. Sometimes, during this time period, I became fearful that, like Alice in Wonderland, I would find myself in the Garden of the Queen of Hearts—meaning, I would unwittingly find myself consorting with people who were dangerous and who would harm me. It was a weird time then, and it remains a weird time now, and some of these online people would giddily skirt the edges of worlds I found abhorrent—they weren’t really out-and-out edgelords, but they were far more sympathetic to edgelordism than I am. I developed a theory that sometimes intellectual people who valued “free thinking” really valued more a kind of transgressive discourse that delved into what for me is the obscene and unpalatable (meaning racism, misogyny, and so forth).

But were they really that bad?

I wouldn’t use the term “bad.” I would use the term bored, like “idle hands are the devil’s playground.” Moreso, inexperienced and sheltered or perhaps a little battleworn from unfortunate life experiences—which would, ironically, likely only be transmuted through more character-building life experiences and more IRL socialization. Not by hiding away online. A portion of these people (who were all well into adulthood) seemed very easily impressed by any “successful” online huckster with a gimmick to espouse, however intellectually invalid or just plain dumb their schtick might be. And that, along with other factors, allowed in the subtle creep of weird misogyny (I experienced this far more than the subtle creep of racism or homophobia, at least with the groups I consorted with–-but I know that exists as well and did see a bit here and there).

In these arenas, I noticed that if someone, say, wanted to create a manosphere platform that highlighted the “naturalness” of men leading and women (known often as “our beloved mothers, sisters, and wives,” as though that’s the only kind that exists), this kind of ideasmanship–-such that it was—would be met not with a “ewww” but more like with a “hmmm ok well maybe… Rock on brother!” There was a saying that became popular at one point, in a certain online circle: “Men test ideas, and women test men.” This wasn’t offensive so much as utterly priceless to me given my experiences with men. Men, like women, like everyone, are all very, very different. Some are manipulative, some are sincere, some test your loyalty and boundaries, some don’t… And I have found myself being “tested” by many men. I also seem to have enough brain cells to rub together to test an idea or two. Are we in kindergarten—do boys rule and girls drool? Have you people ever even talked to a person of the opposite sex? Or the same sex?

I often felt like a portion of the the manosphere types were not incels (I didn’t meet with with very young people) so much as they were what I would call div-cels, as in divorcees who had placed too much hope in their early-in-life marriages (which is part of our socialization process in the U.S., and something that I do think needs reexamination), and were now intent on positioning all women as having the exact same motives and characteristics as “that bitch” (aka the ex). This seemed like a problem of, again, experience (meaning the lack of experience).

Even more commonly, these guys were just closeted lifestyle doms who ironically didn’t have the balls to claim their kink as such, and instead wanted to foist their kink upon the world in the guise that it was just “nature.” It often felt like I was witnessing people who were afraid of experiencing life making excuses for their predilections or inhibitions or blind spots. Which we all do (I have certainly been through my fair share of misandry-laden girl dinners, so this is hardly a one-way street).

I should say that the people I was meeting with were mostly “YouTube people,” versus social media influencers. This is important, because on YouTube, there is a tendency for people to create content that is not just “buy this product,” but more like “believe my beliefs, act as I act, say as I say, do as I do.” This fits in with an idea proposed by Alexander Bard, also known as “the Swedish philosopher of the internet,” who makes the claim that, in the 2020s, YouTubers are fulfilling the roles of big brothers and big sisters for their followers. This is distinct from the internet of the 2010s, says Bard (in a recorded interview on Youtube). In that time: “We ended up with the influencers writing their own fan clubs, [which we] called echo chambers… That's now dead and over…” Instead, we have the YouTuber. As Bard states:

“This is why I emphasize this enormous difference between the Youtuber and the Influencer, because a Youtuber is somebody who takes on the role of being an older brother, an older sister to your kid brothers and kid sister. And you basically guide them through the world and you problematize the world… that is how you learn. So you just find the people out there who are credible, who love you like an older brother [or] an older sister would, and [they] guide you with their expertise through the landscapes… This is deeply human. This is important…in the tribe, you always look for a mentor and we become their mentee and we become younger versions of them and they have the same archetype that we have, the same personality traits. The same talents. And they just show how to do things so we can mimic creatively and learn. This is what people are doing now… This is the 2020s..”

Indeed, the online manosphere of the early 2020s did produce a YouTuber who fit the stereotype of the big brother perfectly: Andrew Tate, a guy who can get the cars, women, money, and clout any young boy could only dream about. Tate created a persona that completely absorbed the idea of the older brother archetype, to the point of hyperbole. Even Tate’s eternal sidekick is his actual biological younger brother Tristan, whom Andrew presents as not just a partner in crime, but essentially a life partner—they share both a home and a bank account, as well as their seemingly unending indictments for crimes against women. Perhaps sussing, in terminally online young men, the same need for mentorship and stewardship that Bard describes (and also wanting to monetize this need), in his earlier, less legally fraught years, Tate seemed to parlay his relationship dynamic with little Tristan into an ironclad identity that had extreme levels of marketability to young men.

An interesting phenomenon when one travels into the Tateosphere on YouTube is that the platform begins to also recommend videos from Tony Robbins, who is (in internet terms), a far more palatable male mentor and role model for both men and women. But when you scratch the surface, Robbins often employs the same brand (if a bit softer and sweeter) of big brother-style friendly humiliation to his younger male followers as Tate does (who infamously calls guys who aren’t as wealthy as him “brokies”). And, while this may come as a surprise to women (we usually don’t bond with another by making cutting jabs at each other’s shoes–-we instead bond by making cutting jabs at some other woman’s shoes), these young men eat up every crumb of Tate’s degradation sandwiches. The popularity of both Tate and Robbins leads me to believe that the young men of today—the lost boys, as many view them—are not simply or merely searching for their own identities, but specifically for this big brother/little brother relationship dynamic where the big brother serves as a relatable guide and mentor, and (perhaps most importantly) a true blue friend to his “little brother.”

Tate first came into public consciousness as a star on the British TV show Big Brother, in 2016. I find this so amazing that it makes me want to cry. This is an individual so cosmically aligned with his Big Brotherness that he was magically called to star in a show that would forever link him to this role. Now, you might say: “Hold on. Isn’t that just a coincidence?” That show, which began in the year 2000, clearly chose its title as a reference to George Orwell’s Big Brother character and symbol from his novel 1984. The term is therefore used by the TV show to signify surveillance, not siblinghood. However, according to Anthony Burgess (author of A Clockwork Orange) in his book 1985, Orwell came up with the idea of Big Brother after seeing advertising billboards for educational correspondence courses depicting a stern-looking Big Brother character. The original posters supposedly showed the owner of the school, J.M. Bennett, an older man, with the phrase "Let me be your father.” As Burgess states: “You had a picture of Bennett père, a nice old man, shrewd but benevolent, saying, ‘Let me be your father.’” Apparently, after Bennet senior passed, his son took over the company, and began to star in the ads himself, replacing his father’s kindly image with a more foreboding one: “Then Bennett fils came along, taking over the business, a very brutal-looking individual, saying: ‘let me be your big brother.’”

For many, “let me be your big brother” translates to: “let me be your torturer and idol all in one.” This role of the brutal big brother figure and its importance in the development of young men has probably not been explored and understood fully, particularly not in contemporary terms (and nor has the role of the big sister, or sibling hierarchy in general). That Andrew Tate specifically offered men a chance to explore this relationship is likely one of the main ingredients determining his victory in enticing young men to worship him. A key factor in the big brother/little brother dynamic is presumed or default authority; big brothers are not necessarily that much older or more mature than their younger siblings, but they are placed in a position where they have to act that way. Similarly, Andrew Tate’s “authority” over both his fans and his younger brother Tristan doesn’t feel particularly wise or paternal. He wants to brag about girls, houses,
“always ordering the most expensive steak on the menu,” Bugattis, and his victory over the Romanian legal system (though not the British one)-–in a way that suggests a younger man who hasn’t sewn all his wild oats and desires a stable of younger men to applaud his many purchases and exploits, aka his “boy’s dream” lifestyle. The comedian Ryan Long does a bit about the radicalization of adolescent males through this type of content, making the point that this material appeals to boys because it is puerile, not despite this.

Living in New York City, I have encountered some men with a similar value structure. And, to be fair, I’ve encountered many misandrist women who seem to acquire a boyfriend or husband specifically because having one completes the suite of status symbols successful women are “supposed” to have. Is there an Andrew Tate-shaped hole that exists in the hearts and psyches of young men, which can only be filled by the ideologies of Tate? I feel like many of the adults of our world have abdicated the responsibility of actually rearing their children, and instead just allow the medical industry and the internet to pick up the slack. I, as a grown woman, can happily dip in and out of the internet unscathed. But if I were an adolescent being stewarded by parents and other adults who refused to grow up and guide me (a few years ago I took on a project where I worked with a group of high school AP art history teachers, and while they weren’t necessarily bad teachers, I could tell that they didn’t just tolerate the immaturity of their students. They related to it and perhaps identified with it—which was a little terrifying to me). So if I were growing up now, I would probably find some weirdo like Tate (or at least the femme version of Tate) on the internet and make them my digital big sibling too.

I am also, I should point out, a little sister to an older brother, which is an interesting thing to be (I have an extremely close relationship with my brother to this day and we are very aligned in our tastes and interests and pet peeves. We also share the same MBTI: INTJ–-something another manosphere-lite type, Andrew Bustamante [whom I like], says is the most consistent and accurate predictor of behavior throughout the course of one’s life). I grew up in a neighborhood of boys, I started going to mostly male-attended hardcore punk shows when I was a tween, and I’ve always had a number of male friends. So I might have had less of a problem dealing with the misogyny that I encountered in male-dominated online spaces. I didn’t like it, but it made me roll my eyes more than it made me run for the hills. And, unlike the types who did like it, and who did represent the dominant number of the few women in these online spaces I visited, I didn’t feel flattered to be included by these men. I was fairly agnostic, just there to try to learn something.

A small percentage of people I talked to in my online adventures had some affiliation with this dude (the Canadian one) and I think it’s interesting that the Left has largely abandoned its historic connection to psychoanalytic theory (apparently in favor of Big Pharma) while many on the Right have openly adopted a Jungian perspective that I would argue is far more uplifting than just endlessly bitching about life. Or swallowing an antidepressant cocktail of pills in the hopes of feeling better about a world that’s not running correctly at the moment. The Left has mostly taken to dismissing Freud (a man who lived in a time before women’s liberation, when everyone including–I would argue–most women thought that women were unequal to men) as a sexist pig. As someone who looks at the world primarily through a psychoanalytic lens, I cannot tell you how stupid I think this is. I feel that the Left’s abandonment of psychoanalytic theory is a monumental mistake, leading to a deleterious outlook that to me is not an accurate reflection of the human experience.

***

But, like I say, what I personally encountered in online realms was misogyny-lite versus truly Tate-like, borne seemingly more of inexperience than true malevolence. As for the more nihilstic world views displayed by a certain percentage of these online types, I started to think that some people were so smart that the only thing they had left to do, brain-wise, was to turn around and get really, really, really fucking stupid. And the amount of trouble these people got into for tweeting abhorrent things proved this out more than a few times (I am no fan of cancellation, but I’m probably even less of a fan of complete social idiocy, particularly among intellectuals who should know better). Be it by rubbing elbows with the legendarily bepunched of the Alt-Right or having thinly veiled “alternative accounts” for which to engage in Groyper hijinks, there was a level of recklessness and idiocy that some of these people displayed that was just gross to me.

I don’t know why smart people fell into these cess pools, but when they did it all appeared to be in the hopes of getting what the majority of these people, even the “good” ones, seemed desperate for: attention. Good or bad, positive or negative, for richer, for poorer, ‘til death do us part. They were wedded to attention, I guess in the quest to become microcelebrities (lol). And this came mostly in the form of online attention—the annoying little sister of real-world attention. And it seemed like if they couldn’t get attention for being a thinker of substance, they would happily switch to being a thinker of style: often ugly, tacky style. And since the world continues to build up a vibrant, and often vibrantly stupid, economy to support these squeaky wheels, there was a large incentive for them to continue with their regularly scheduled programming. It’s the same strategy used by Kanye to the point of total self destruction, only these people weren’t mentally ill per se—mostly they were just terrible.

Even though I deeply feared becoming online-chummy with someone who would ultimately turn out to be repugnant (this almost happened twice, but luckily I appeared to repel these people—who were both women, I should note—before they could net me in their weird web), I never felt like I myself was in danger of sliding down a pipeline, slipping through a funnel, only to get sealed off into a bubble or a bottle or whatever.

****

Which is not to say that the internet has not radicalized me. It is my theory that the internet has radicalized everyone, and the only problem with this—or perhaps the most confusing part—is that it has radicalized people in radically different ways.

I use these analogies of funnels and bottles thinking of those brought up in this conversation from a while back (titled “Pipelines and Rabbit Holes”) between host Joshua Citarella and guest Faraday Speaks on the Doomscroll podcast (this was one of my favorite episodes of this podcast, although I also like the Catherine Liu one and the Matty Healy one). Citarella often seems intrigued by the concepts of the rabbit hole and radicalization (which also appear to be the theme of this newer episode, which I haven’t listened to as yet—and Citarella wrote a theory of radicalization which I also have not read but I’m sure is interesting). In the Faraday Speaks episode, Citarella asks the guest (they are discussing young men who have been shunted into the world of alt-right extremism): “Do you feel like these young men who you know went down the rabbit hole, so to speak, did they mostly have agency? Or were they just a discardable example of somebody who got impressionably shaped by their recommendations?” Faraday Speaks believes that this might culminate in the idea that “...we take the funnel and we flip it upside down and we turn it into a bottle and at the top there's a neck and then there's a cap on top… if we get into a situation where conditions cause pressure to build up in that bottle it'll push everybody up to that bottleneck and then that's when it will explode.” The two go on to use the analogy of the pipeline and the funnel, ideas which I believe began in sales marketing and which ultimately both lead (in my limited understanding) to people with a cursory interest in something becoming more and more radicalized toward their investment in this interest.

Obviously, in the case of Faraday Speaks, this is not good: it is not good for very young people to be radicalized into Alt-Right ideology (or, I would argue, any political ideology–-I think kids should be kids, and should have extremely limited access, meaning no access, to worlds and ideas that their brains aren’t yet prepared to understand and discern). But I also think that there might be something about humans being radicalized by the internet that is endemic to both the internet and to human nature and psychology, particularly in its relationality to images abstracted from the third dimension. In my online adventures, I came to understand the social internet not as a place one travels through (like in the idea of “surfing the web”), but as a stage, in both the temporal and structural meanings of that term: 1. a point, period, or step in a process or development: "there is no need at this stage to give explicit details" and 2. a raised floor or platform, typically in a theater, on which actors, entertainers, or speakers perform. "there are only two characters on stage.” It began to feel obvious to me that being “radicalized by the internet” was simply a stage of development, and that one could become arrested within that stage or one could evolve through it to other stages (and, for what it is worth, it appears that Faraday Speaks’ experience affirms this hypothesis).

Which makes me think that perhaps the social internet, or at least the phase where one socializes heavily on the internet, is also in and of itself a stage of development. I am fascinated with neo-Freudian psychoanalyst Erik Erikson’s theory that life is composed of eight stages of psychosocial development, with each stage culminating in a breaking point (known as an “identity crisis,” a term coined by Erikson) that must be overcome in order to reach the next stage (why has no one created a game themed on this I wonder)? The stage of life that the social internet most corresponds to in my eyes is Erikson’s concept of Stage 5, i.e.Identity vs. Role Confusion, which he positions as occurring between ages 12–18. This is the stage when and where teenagers experiment with different roles and character types, trying out and performing different identities and aligning with different peer groups in the quest to solidify one’s identity and role in society–-the jocks, the goths, the stoners, the nerds, the metalheads. You can see this stage in a movie like the Breakfast Club, where the actors each play fairly one-dimensional interpretations of archetypes, and the point of the movie is to watch the drama of these cartoon-like characters colliding against each other.

I believe the internet has radically changed our structures and timelines of maturation and psychosocialization (at least in the U.S.), and I think it might be prudent to address the social internet’s disruption of Stage 5 (and perhaps all the Stages as outlined by Erikson). I think that people spend a lot longer languishing in Stage 5 than they did when Erikson published Childhood and Society in 1950. And I think that, potentially, there might even be a call for a revision on these Stages in lieu of the manner in which socialization has changed and will continue to change through the digital age. While many people still seem to travel through the correct stages of development at the correct ages, mentally they may be permanently stuck in Stage 5. A good example of this might be an adult who is married and has children and a full time job–aka all the earmarks of Stage 7–yet then “blows up their life” and reverts back to behaviors, relationships and pastimes from a previous stage of life. Such a stunt (or a stuntedness) is often called a “midlife crisis,” and illustrates the failure of an individual to align with the stage they are “supposed” to be in. Instead, they consciously or unconsciously choose to slide back down to a previous developmental stage (usually Stage 5) and start the climb all over again. Often, however, this is not a regression at all, so much as a return to a stage they only left performatively.

The question then is: why is Stage 5 so sticky? If the social internet is just one big Stage 5 (and I believe it is), why do so many grown adults find themselves still drawn into it? I believe this is because this is the stage of “becoming” versus “being,” the stage where and when one’s role and identity are still in flux (when I entered these online worlds, as I stated, I did so after becoming disillusioned with my “real life”--I felt lost and wanted to escape to a zone of exploration). This brings into question the roles and identities we are “supposed” to inhabit in the first place. In an agrarian society, it made sense for a man and woman to couple and have a large number of children to work the land. If you live in an urban apartment building in 2025, a large or even a small family is more of a financial burden than a benefit (which isn’t to say it’s not a benefit in many other ways). Therefore, conservative, “trad” relationships in non-rural areas often seem (to me, at least) more based in aesthetics and sexual tastes (including a taste for either transactional sex or dom/sub dynamics) than anything truly “traditional.” Trad may also speak to more universal needs like belonging and family, but structures like polycules also speak to those needs-–they just do so with a completely different aesthetic signature. To say that trad has anything to do with ”tradition” is like saying that people who only wear neutral tones are honoring their ancestors who came of age before the invention of modern fabric dyes.

In general, many romantic relationships now often seem more based on codependency, the satisfaction of a specific sexual proclivity, or just plain old economic necessity (it’s easier to share the expense of a one-bedroom apartment, to combine laundry and groceries, etc.). App dating particularly seems to be designed in line with these protocols: people couple on apps because they can’t not be in a relationship, which is the mindset of either the codependent or the economically challenged, or because they’re looking for their ideal sexual situationship (which is only part of what defined dating in the past–-dating before the digital age was often thought of in terms of “falling in love,” not in terms of checking off a list of requirements). Thus, people in NYC talk about things like “I won’t transfer trains to go see someone I’m dating” or “I won’t date someone out-of-borough.” Romance, if not dead, is certainly disinterested in extended transit times (one wonders if the planned Interborough Express will usher in a golden age of previously unimagined medium-distance romances).

Nothing is “wrong” with transactional or provisional dating per se, but it certainly calls into question the necessity of couplehood and marriage. And it certainly illustrates the idea that the roles of humans in the 21st century look very different to those of previous time periods. Another great example of this is work: when, as a freelancer with an array of skill sets, I tell people what I do for a living, many who are still in 20th century labor modalities look at me with incredulity. My work — which is often internet-dependent (I edit online, I teach online, I write for online, I writing coach online, etc.) — is more like a collection of skills bundled in an intellectually and creatively flexible human that I sell to various buyers for various prices. Classic gig economy. This is a direct turn from the paternalistic “jobs” that lay out your future before you, promising a good health insurance plan, retirement at 65, and social security. And it is also a direct turn from the narcissism-dependent lives of artists in the past, who basically had to make a commodity of themselves and their identity in order to be successful (although we all know who has carried on that little tradition).

So, if the nature of roles, professions, and identities are all in a stage of reformation, it makes sense that Stage 5 feels like a good place to be: in later stages, you are your role, you are your identity. Those aspects are integrated into one’s human beingness to the point of inseparability. In Stage 5, there’s still some wiggle room. And when you look at the “careers” the social internet has invented, they basically revolve around someone performing their role and identity in an attempt to get others to buy into their performance (this is basically what both influencers and—sorry Alexander Bard–Youtubers both do). Youtubers may be big bro or big sis, but influencers are like the most popular girl or guy in high school. What they represent is something on the balance of popularity qua popularity: Want to be a hot girl? Buy all this skincare and makeup and hair care and clothing and you are well on your way there. Want to be a hot dude? Buy this jaw-enhancing gum. Were there no financial benefit to “influencing,” no one would do it—remember, no one did do it—before social media. But what is the consumer benefit? The chance to “buy into” an idealized role or identity. Unlike in the past, wherein one would become a hot girl by aligning oneself with other, likely older hot girls and following their lead, the social internet allows people to buy into transactional relationships with Youtubers and influencers who act like encouraging big sisters or aspirational high school cheerleaders, but are in fact more like traveling salespeople who zoom into your world through a screen, rather than knocking on your door, to sell you things you don’t need. Including themselves.

Going back to Erikson, the interesting thing about the term “stage,” as opposed to the term “phase,” is that a stage implies a more enduring period of life, while a phase is usually a shorter and perhaps less serious aspect of one’s life (“I went through a phase where I ate blackberries and yogurt for breakfast every single day”). The etymology of stage, from Vulgar Latin is “staticum": a place for standing, from Latin statum, past participle of stare: "to stand." If the online social world equals both a stage for performance and a stage of development, both of these imply a distinct point in a process. Meaning, a stage is something you arrive at and perform on for a time. At some point, you have to step off the stage and get on with life, which also means stepping onto a different stage of development. I think the manner in which the internet functions at this time doesn’t make that moment, one’s stage exit, very graceful, or very crystal clear, for many.

The problem with the social internet is that much of it (even the manosphere) is steeped in the language of self-help and therapy. So you can be at Stage 5 but have the language of someone much more advanced in their psychosocial development. Language writ large, in fact, is what I believe is wrong with the social internet and the world at this moment. We think we can talk our way into mental health and maturity. We think we can talk our way into or out of anything. We think words are things, instead of being merely the way we point at things. But language is just one way that people communicate (and I say this as a writer who has put almost all her eggs in the basket of written language). Sometimes it’s not even the best way. Sometimes it’s just a way of keeping the truth from touching us. If mental health becomes, for example, about validating any individual worldview as “the truth,” and getting mad at anyone who disagrees with you, this is neither psychological nor social development. It is in fact what I would view as antisocial development based on a negative form of word play.

And what of the people who don’t just have their psychological health determined by internet patois, but in fact make money off offering their brand of "advice" to the masses? Even if you do want to mature out of the realm of the social internet, Influencing is a profession for Stage 5, by Stage 5. If you as an individual mature out of this stage, is it really all that easy to just leave your profession (one that gives you not just an income but also clout and an enviable identity) behind? Enter, once again, radicalization. As I said before, I think the internet has radicalized everyone. I almost think the point of the social internet is to radicalize us. Here’s my theory: all people have certain pockets of reality that cannot be integrated into their psyche, typically some form of childhood disturbance that remains charged or unresolved for them. And I think it is these pockets of psychological “stuff” that are the most vulnerable to be filled with what we think of as radicalization. This equates to the suffix: “pilled.” In the definition proposed by Caleb Madison in The Atlantic: “To be X-pilled meant to learn new information that made you an enthusiastic lover of X.” This term refers to finding an online-centric interest or belief that “hits,” one that you feel inexplicably drawn to, aligned with, and affirmed by. Incels are famously redpilled, but in the world of the social internet you can be pilled in a million different ways.

Art sidenote: this is why I love contemporary art tendencies like “core core” and “internet cinema” and projects like Open Secret and specifically the artist Redacted Cut. These makers are considering these phenomena from the inside out, and perhaps turning them outside-in.

And what is being “pilled” and searching for “core” on various “sides” but a form of radicalization? If, as Faraday Speaks and others suggest, the process of radicalization is a marketing pipeline that funnels casual interests and distills them into radical ideas: the social internet has radicalized all of us. If you are, say, pitbull-pilled (and I very well might be!), you go to the pitbull side of tiktok to consume pitbull core. Once you’ve been pilled, you search out the “core” of your interest, which is basically just the content made by others pilled in the same direction, on whatever “side” of Tiktok. Then you can just imagine the whole world as a bunch of pitbull lovers who think that pitbulls run the world and are the best things in existence. That is your bubble.

But, pretty quickly, the “searching out” of this content turns into the “all I see is this content.” As social media recognized my interest in pitbulls based on my own rescue dog, it decided I am no longer just a pitbull owner or even an animal lover. Now: I got that animal whisperer autism. On the social internet you can’t just be an animal lover or good with animals. The social internet makes something you’ve always gravitated to but maybe don’t “identify” as your “whole ass personality.” If you look at my Instagram, the feed is pitbulls and other rescue animals all the way down. Am I that simple? No. I love animals along with many, many other things (my profession has nothing to do with animals at all). But the algorithm says something different. It turns everyone with an interest that can be codified into a simpering adolescent who defines their whole existence by their favorite things, the things they “fangirl” over.

But fans are not just lovers. They are also passionate haters. This is again what I’m talking about regarding the internet radicalizing everyone. I used to just love and be “good at” animals—it was one facet of me that was fairly straightforward and one dimensional. Now, because I do look at the animal stuff on my feed all the time (meaning every time I am on social media, which is far less often than most people), I know facts and statistics about pitbulls that would blow your mind. I am kept up to date on the Humane Society’s latest raid on illegal pitbull fighting rings. I have made a mortal enemy of Michael Vick, someone I have never met but revile. I have become incensed by cruel, mercenary breeding practices that are like some bizarre dog eugenics program, creating unhealthy animals and allowing perfectly healthy shelter dogs to be killed for no reason. And this bleeds out into reality. When I see an objectively cute French Bulldog puppy on the street, instead of just basking in the joy of watching this tiny, furry toad navigate its world, I silently judge the owner and think, “Hmmph. Nice designer dog. Did you know it’s mother had to have a C-section because they’ve been bred so that their heads are too large to fit through the birth canal? And have you thought about all the dogs in high-kill shelters who you could have gotten for free instead of spending $3000 on an asthmatic Gucci bag?” You know, perfectly sane, normal thoughts like that. My adolescent loneliness and anger, my deep connections to animals in childhood, all of which I thought I left behind, gets fed through my feed, and then (if I’m not careful) unleashed into the “real world.”

And what’s so wrong with that? We all need to have a moral compass, and the conviction to follow its direction. But what if curfew demands that you be home before you can get to your compass’s intended destination? The frustration of being an adolescent lies in one’s inability to really do anything or go anywhere—nearly all gestures of adolescent independence or rebellion are just that: merely gestures. Because you are still under the guardianship of authority figures, you don’t really get to “do” anything as an adolescent, you only get to try out different roles and base your personality (and often your friend group) around your likes and dislikes. Remember: in the Breakfast Club, those kids were being forced to spend their whole Saturday at in-school detention. When’s the last time you were forced to stay in one room with three other people you hate for a full day and monitored by a jerk (without being paid to do so)?

Similarly, awareness and protest on the social internet is primarily composed of (let’s be honest please) raging slacktivists engaged in the impotent act of posting. It is the equivalent of a child pretending that they are a fireman and spraying a fire with an imaginary hose. Nothing has really happened other than what has happened in the mind of the pretender. The real fireman knows the existential risk of their profession, and holds the gravitas of fully embodied maturation. The social internet poster only play acts this knowledge, yet also steals the valor of the hero who actually put their life on the line.

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But let’s get back to the ways in which the Stage Fiveness of the social internet reveals itself in our psyches and interactions. The most obvious phenomenon is the dynamic of fandom. Some of the less mature individuals I was in contact with when I was socializing online immediately treated me as though I were an aspiring “fan” of theirs—which I found at first humorous, and at last insulting and repugnant. But I can kind of understand it—parasocial relationships are typically seen as a fan projecting onto a figure they empower through their fangirling. But the sword cuts both ways: there are people who can only function in a relationship where they are the star and you are the stargazer, and if you try to have a different style of interaction with them, you will quickly be thrown aside in favor of someone who will happily put them on the highest pedestal. On the social internet, as I’ve written about previously, it’s basically fan or be fanned. If you aren’t the person with a following, you are but a mere follower, and the power structure is that cut and dried (and demented, in my opinion). Therefore, among aspiring influencers and social internet “personalities”–aka “microcelebrities”–there is an obsession with developing a following, which likely finds its roots in the economic structure of the social internet itself, and the fact that it incentivizes solo performances over jam sessions (never mind big brass bands or orchestras). So everyone wants to be a Madonna or a Britney. No one wants to sit in the back of the orchestra playing the glockenspiel.

This necessity builds a kind of false celebrity persona, which can work OK online but seem like the height of delusion in real life. There are people in my neighborhood who livestream their little coffee runs and bodega trips and it is very crazy to watch—compared to the cool, tough, playful vibe a lot of New Yorkers give off, these people seem very corny, almost like the performers at Disney World or Colonial Williamsburg who have to stay in character no matter what. They also seem self-obsessed, with little to no obvious reason as to why they should be. Money allows the delusion to persist in the face of reasonable evidence to the contrary. These people are not celebrities in the traditional sense, but if they don’t act like celebrities, are they then becoming just fans themselves? This appears to be the crisis these people have to navigate.

And of their fanbases: where once being a weeping, screaming diehard fan was thought to be a phase that began in tweendom and petered out as a child matures into adulthood and begins to integrate the disowned aspects of their own sexual power, the social internet has legitimized fandom well into late stage adulthood. Unfortunately. I am often reminded of an afternoon I spent, in my 20s, with the girlfriend of one of my friend’s older brothers. She was in her 30s, and a fan of the band My Chemical Romance. She was in fact such a fan of “My Chem” that she and a group of women followed them around the country on tour. I had never heard of such behavior before–especially by someone who was not activley, pardon my French, fucking these musicians. I was rather shocked that she and her “My Chem” cohort could find the time and money to commit to such a lifestyle, while also having a fulltime job and a boyfriend. Which is just further evidence for my theory that the social internet is locked into a Stage 5 level of maturation, and that the relational structures formed on the social internet mirror those of adolescent idol worship, rather than mature bonding based in mutual respect. After all, what are adolescents if not little sponges waiting to be influenced?

I titled this piece A Report on the Banality of Internet Radicalization not to diminish Hannah Arendt’s obviously much more important work, but to suggest that, like the evil she perceived in Adolf Eichmann, internet radicalization is not necessarily born of wanting others to suffer. It can simply be the byproduct of a certain mentality that views the external forces that govern existence as the arbiters of moral behavior. In Arendt’s final work, The Life of the Mind (1977), she stated that, “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” Famously, Eichmann cited the reasoning for his acts of evil as not of his own choosing, but because, as he stated at trial: “all my life I have tried to live by Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. …the principle of my volition and the principle of my life must be such that it could at any time be raised to be the principle of general legislation.” According to Simone Brott in “Observations on the Architecture of Evil: A New Reading of Eichmann on Kant” (2016): “By principle of volition Eichmann is referring to Kant’s concept of the ‘will,’ meaning the decision to conform to the absolute principles of a ‘general’ or ‘formal logic,’ the ‘science of the necessary laws of thinking’ abstracted from all objects of knowledge.”

As stated by Tessa McKeown in “The Defence of Superior Orders in International Criminal Law: The Eichmann Trial and Kant’s Philosophy” (2014):

“Arendt argued that Eichmann distorted the Categorical Imperative to mean that one should act in a way that the supreme ruler (in this case, Hitler), if he knew, would approve of your actions. Where Eichmann erred, according to Arendt, was to consider the source of duty as Hitler’s will, rather than practical reason, which she argues is what Kant’s philosophy is based on. Eichmann’s distortion of Kant to read ‘duty’ as blindly following superior orders has been argued to be a ‘…grotesque perversion of the Categorical Imperative in a bureaucratic state that made mass extermination possible.’ Arguably, Kant envisioned that duty was something we imposed on ourselves internally; focusing on practical reason and ‘man’s faculty of judgment’.”

Eichmann’s claims, which famously did not work, are now known as the Nuremberg defense or Superior Orders, and problems around the idea of “just following orders” as a defense exist to this day, often as a complement to “command responsibility,” a concept we saw play itself out in its most debased form in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. But if perversions to the idea of Kant’s Categorical Imperative still exist, if we were all just following Kant’s orders in whatever way we imagine them to exist to our own benefit, our crimes are now contained less within the banality of evil, and more within the banality of how the internet functions. We can say this is just mimeticism, but I would argue that it’s a radical form of mimeticism that refines and distills the similar to the point of becoming exactly the same, i.e. a meme. And there is little on the internet, from behavior to perspective to aesthetic, that is immune to becoming a meme.

Watch female influencers. See them do a little happy shoulder dance when they eat a bowl of yogurt or chia seed pudding (they all do this). Listen to the sound of their fake nails as they tap on the surface of a pink box of Crumbl cookies (they all do this). The way people act on the internet is simply about following in line with the way everyone else acts. If one influencer does a DIML, WIEIAD, or GRWM—they all do it. There is an influencer accent. While I wasn’t completely sold into the PostRat worldview and their obsession with Girard and mimetic theory, it is true that if you spend even a short time online, all you see is mimetic theory. So I understand the inclination to herald Girard as the most important thinker of our time for this reason alone. But if we use Kant’s concept of categorical imperative, there appears to be almost a moral imperative to meme with the best of them. We live in a time where there is no such thing as selling out, so why wouldn’t someone copy a behavior that has obvious financial benefit?

There is a focus on the individual in internet culture, but only so long as that individual acts just like everyone else. This is what narcissism is: narcissists aren’t any more special than anyone else, they just think they are and act like they are in the hopes that the more persuadable among us will buy the grift. While narcissism insists on its specialness, the fact is that when you’ve met one, you’ve met them all–-and there are relatively few Influencers who don’t seem like narcissists to me. It is the process of individuation that is lacking in social internet culture, the vision quest of solitude and transformation that takes one from being someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s friend, someone’s lover, into their own person. It is in my opinion, and I belive in Jung’s opinion, only through the process of individuation that a human can truly love and find meaning in their life. By becoming an individual, you are then capable of returning to the fold as someone who can give to society rather than take from it.

Jung “For a boy to become a man, he must experience the death of his father,” though he apparently also stated that this can be a symbolic death rather than a physical one. I think there are several processes that were common at a certain point in time (warfare for men, motherhood for women) that can help accelerate the processes of individuation. At this point in time, one often has to metaphorically travel through these phases instead of physically. I am a person who has had a fair share of her developmental stages accelerated and decelerated (or paused) due to external circumstances. I have on occasion had to retroactively, and somewhat subconsciously, create situations that would allow me to travel through certain stages, and that hasn’t always been easy. In fact at times it has been completely humiliating. But staying stuck in a certain stage well after you were supposed to leave that stage is worse. You can get into certain realms, such as the realm of contemporary art, that allow for looser definitions of what it means to be a mature, individuated adult. I like the art world for that reason: it allows for a loosening of definitions. But you have to mature and grow up. You just have to. And right now the social internet is not making this very easy to do.

I am left with the question: what rites of initiation today might turn two dimensional people into three dimensional people? What will make the social internet itself exit Stage Five? Because let’s be honest: you can make a lot of money being an Influencer or a Youtuber. But, with a handful of exceptions, these are finite circumstances that many choose without understanding that this involves, in the words of Rob Horning (as he critiques the mercenary agenda of Big Tech), “having people turn their friendships and their family relations into pretenses for generating more ad space. We had this baby to help clear some ad inventory. It entails convincing people to live their lives as advertisements, as with influencers, and it depends on users’ deliberately producing content instead of merely being content.”

So what’s wrong with getting paid good money to pretend you’re the most important thing in the world? What’s wrong with podcasts as fren-tertainment and Youtubers as big bro and big sis? What’s wrong with everything shimmying close to the real without actually having the will to be it? I’m not Christian, but within this I’m brought to the theory of vocation, “a strong feeling of suitability for a particular career or occupation.” I think everyone is meant to do something exceptional in their life, and that exceptional thing is singularly defined by their own alignment with it and pursuit of it. I think the social internet flattens success into success as defined by its stunted terms, and I think that is damaging young people’s ability to dream of what success could be beyond Stage 5.

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If there are Golden Ages in civilization, surely there must also be Ages of Cesium, dangerous and combustible, defined by softness and malleability, highly reactive, and igniting spontaneously when in contact with air. Seemingly bent on disaster. While I might seem a little critical, I can't emphasize enough how much I learned, specifically about people and about the time we are living in, from my online adventures. I have friends who are bewildered by the time period we are all living through. I am not bewildered. When they try to make sense of things, I tell them that the people that they are analyzing have a completely different set of values and interests than they do, and acting as if they don’t will not get you anywhere. If you ever want to win anything ever again, you need to start understanding people not through the mediated content of your own comfort media, or of online media in general, but by actually putting yourselves in the spaces of people with completely different lives than your own.

I’ve been wrestling with an idea lately, something along the lines of what it means to have or create legitimacy in a given domain, and how legitimacy begets expertise, which then begets success. I teach a history course on the evolution of images, and I often tell my students that if they are looking for a quick and dirty history of photography download, they could easily find that on YouTube. What I offer is something unique to me, and my knowledge and experience. I value my ability to teach effectively (when I first began teaching I would have highly embarrassing panic attacks that my students had to watch me struggle through, though I have since found my confidence and composure). I have what I think is an uncommon studiousness and seriousness around my subject matter (I began reading Sontag at age 17 and have immersed myself obsessively in the critical, theoretical and practical analyses of images ever since) and a lot of real-world experience (I have worked at many magazines, I was photographer Bruce Weber’s casting director, I have written art criticism for the most respected international art publications, etc.). I place a high value, perhaps the highest value, on legitimacy. Just as I would never walk onto a construction site and expect a job when I have no experience with or facility for construction, I would also never try to sell a skillset I didn’t feel 100% confident that I owned.

I grew up working class, and as a young girl my oldest cousin—who was incredibly intelligent and is now a molecular biologist—was admitted to Harvard University. For my family, this was basically like winning the lottery. It was probably better than winning the lottery, which is reliant on chance and luck. For my family, my cousin getting into Harvard was undeniable proof of her work ethic and commitment to intellectual pursuits, which were the most valued characteristics for this side of my family. I remember being a kid—and I mean a kid-kid, like 3rd grade, the time when you start to receive letter grades instead of pass/fail—and my father telling me that the only grades I was allowed to bring home were A’s. My father was terrifying to me, so I took this as the rule of law. As a rule, my brother and I weren’t allowed to stay home sick unless we physically couldn’t get to school, we weren’t allowed to watch TV (unless there was something on about aliens or UFOs—our grandmother had had a sighting), and we weren’t allowed to be anything other than smart.

While neither of my parents had attended college and both struggled to make ends meet working in factories and nursing homes, they prided themselves on being working class intellectuals and artists (they both were very smart, very cultured, and extremely well read, and they had side occupations in painting and music). The life they had planned out for me and my brother was one where our cultivated—read: not our innate—knowledge, talent, and hard work would lead to our success. I remember as a little girl telling them that I wanted to be a hairdresser (this was a passing interest), and them both laughing at me telling me that this dream was never going to happen for me. In their eyes, the only future I would have would be one where my intellect and creativity were my most prominent features. Whether that was a foregone conclusion or a fate nurtured into reality, they were right.

So I can say there is a precedence, a familial inheritance, that informs my values, particularly my value of hard work as the cultivating force of legitimacy. I can also say that, as I have educated myself and ventured forward in my life, I am often met with evidence that the concept of legitimacy has lost its way. When I decided to go to graduate school, it wasn’t a super easy decision for me, financially and otherwise. While my parents championed formal education, their own lack thereof made it hard for me to imagine I was worthy of being admitted to something so prestigious and high-ranking as graduate school. Finishing college already seemed like a big deal (and my parents were unfortunately gone from my life before they could watch me graduate), so the next leap seemed almost impossible. I had a vision of graduate school being for only the most intelligent and privileged people in the world, and I had no illusions that I could place myself in that category.

Then I actually went to graduate school. It was there that I learned a fascinating truth: your family of origin almost 100% guides who you will be in life, and it certainly informs your ability to achieve what we look upon as success to a huge degree. I can safely say that no one I attended graduate school with had a working class background—at least no one who completed the program I was in. And very few of my peers questioned, for one second, the legitimacy of their attending graduate school. In fact, they were more prone to questioning the legitimacy of their professors and of the school in general. While they had all the confidence in the world, very few of them were notably hardworking, and fewer still were serviceably good or interesting writers and thinkers (I attended a writing MFA program). I don’t mean to bash my peers, but it just didn’t seem like getting good at what we were studying in school was their primary or even their tertiary motivating factor.

When I began to meet PhD students in the Arts and Humanities, I was struck by how these people also didn’t really seem to really sparkle with a cosmic intelligence or a driving ambition wholly unlike that of we common folk. Truthfully, outside of a few striking examples (I have met some very, very intelligent and hardworking people in many “worlds”—including, perhaps unexpectedly, the fashion world), what I have come to learn about education is that it is much more about ingrained expectations than it is about legitimate intelligence, whether cultivated or innate. Just as I have met countless PhD students whose defining trait was their rock solid confidence that they had every right to be a lazy and undisciplined scholar and still deserve their degree, I have met many, many working class people blessed with what I would describe as a very strong “natural” intelligence. But while these working class types might think of themselves as smart in an everyday sense, they would never imagine that they would be capable of earning a PhD—simply because they have no idea how illegitimate (in my eyes) such a designation can be.

I remember reading a passage by the Scottish comic book writer Grant Morrison about his graphic novel trilogy Wonder Woman: Earth One, which retells the origin story of Diana, aka Wonder Woman. Morrison was talking through his thoughts on the original Wonder Woman story, composed by psychologist William Moulton Marston (inventor of the original truth lasso: the polygraph). Marston’s tale features the all-female tribe of immortal Amazonian women living on Paradise Island in the archipelago of Themyscira for 3,000 years without men (a kind of Wakanda for women).

In reconceiving the original story, Morrison posited how—absent any outside opposing or antagonizing influence, including men and death—the sexuality and culture of the Amazons would have reified into that of pure symbolism and ritual:

“I imagined 3,000 years of being on the same island with all the same women. They've done every possible arrangement… I imagined that timescale, taking that seriously, 3,000 years of the same people. I figured by the time we meet them everything about their sexuality and about their culture is kind of… it's all about using ritual and symbolism and they repeat gestures, and they all kind of role-play…. So we get the sense that their culture is very advanced, and it has its own way of looking at the world, its own way of presenting things. At the same time, I imagined it being quite -- their behaviors were quite repetitive, and that's what Diana is trying to escape from, that sense of just things as they are and never changing and always just repeating on cycles.”

So essentially, Morrison is saying that because the Amazons are never going to die, the inevitability of their experience draws their sexual lives on the island into the realm of the aesthetic. Like Japanese tea ceremonies, which are highly symbolic and ritualistic, with an emphasis on the “meaning” versus the action or the result, in Morrison’s world the Amazons “have sex,” but it is a higher order gesture that is only tangentially related to the earthly, primal act of fornication. Similarly, I have felt like PhD programs (at least those in the Art and Humanities) are mired in a similar adherence to ritualistic displays that have little to do with the action of education, and much more to do with simply collating a certain type of individual into a certain status designation. (I know that many PhD candidates and recipients have worked hard for their degrees and put meaningful work into the world—the point is that many also don’t, and yet they still receive the same designation, along with its attendant professional and class benefits.)

Morrison’s words make me think about how you don’t really need to reside on Paradise Island with a bunch of immortal women and no men to encounter cyclical, mannered approaches to life. I think about legitimacy, and how it was historically an “alive” trait in human beings. For your survival, you once had to not only prove you were good at things not through certifications and degrees and accolades and so forth, but by actually being good at them. Is legitimacy alive now? Sometimes, and certainly in some professions and cultures, it still matters. However, I think in many instances the processes of cultivating legitimacy have reified into ritual, perhaps because we no longer care about the project of expanding human potential and instead are more interested in jockeying for positions of power. (This is obvious in Cartherine Liu’s depictions of the professional managerial class,)

In the late 20th century, professional legitimacy became largely relegated to what one was able to accrue through either birthright or higher education, as if those two things were interchangeable: if you were not born into wealth and success, you could just educate yourself into a profession that would allow you to accrue wealth and/or success. This idea seems almost laughable now. Sure, you can attend any somewhat affordable, middlebrow institution and by some magical power of God become an important and successful millionaire just by studying really, really hard, right? Not really. At this point, I believe many higher education programs are not primarily about education at all, but about funneling the correct people into the correct positions. Yale University remains singularly and strategically beneficial for people to attend, for many reasons. Yes, one gets an amazing education at Yale—and that is far from nothing. But—provided one submits to the systems and mechanisms of the institution—one is also brought into the fold of power at Yale, and attending Yale begets a process of professional legitimization just as much as it begets a process of education. If not far more so. To that end, attending community college might also legitimize someone—not as the best and brightest, but as a serviceable cog in the machine (no matter how brilliant many students and professors at community colleges may be—and I know that many are incredibly intelligent).

This is not to say that it’s easy to get into Yale, and all you have to do to get in is be a rich kid. It is to say that if you are a child born into privilege, and every moment of your life you are met with an abundance or resources that help you achieve success—and, even more importantly, you are around people who are universally capable of seeing the inherent value of those resources—Yale might be, more than anything, a forgone conclusion and a strategic step forward for you. Versus, say, an achievement on par with what my cousin and our family felt when she was accepted to Harvard (which she ended up ultimately not attending—it was simply too huge of an expense to negotiate for a working class family). Absent the idea that you can only learn from school (in the 21st century, the world of learning has opened up exponentially), certain processes of legitimization have become more and more ritualistic and symbolic, which is to say, aesthetic. And this is particularly true in the realm of the arts and humanities, which are heavily reliant not on auxiliary resources like state-of-the-art laboratories, but on the acumen and dexterity of the professors themselves (which is inherently hard to quantify–-I’ve known amazing artists who were terrible professors, and mediocre artists who were amazing professors).

I teach and have taught at many schools in New York City, as do many of my adjuncting peers. What I notice about my students is that they seem to get the most out of their education, no matter what school they attend and how humble or prestigious it is, when they see the city itself as their primary educator. Because, like I wrote at the beginning, a certain amount of information imparted by professors can also be found on YouTube—and if a student has the bad luck of encountering a professor who is willfully or sincerely oblivious to this fact, they will not be getting their dollar’s worth, in my opinion. The information imparted by learning how to make it in New York City is, I have found, a great equalizer and a more than decent measuring stick for success. I have seen the most poorly resourced students find their footing in New York, a city that demands not just intelligence but an insane amount of mental toughness and flexibility. And I have seen privileged students quit after their first semester, unwilling to be leveled by the city’s unique penchant for doling out life lessons free of charge. And vice versa. I like that the city is truly a melting pot, combining everyone into a stew of blood, sweat, and tears that for some (like me) is addictively delicious.

And it is here that we can begin to press upon the aesthetics of legitimacy, and reason out what this term may or may not mean in this time period, and in time periods previous. I was accepted to the New School as an undergraduate with a shockingly low 1.9 grade point average (after my parents divorced the “all A’s” dictum slid out the window and I had a few rough, hooky-heavy years in high school before realizing that if I didn’t get my act together, I would certainly live out the rest of my years in my small town). I happened to do incongruously well on my SATs, I won a county math award, I had a Rousseau-inspired painting chosen as a semi-finalist in a nation-wide art competition, and I had two English teachers who couldn’t sing my praises more loudly, giving me a sense of self worth that I would have never developed on my own. I found out about the New School all on my own, got accepted out of (I guess) some blind faith that my GPA didn’t tell the whole story of my abilities as a student, and made a success of my time there. My decision to go there (I would have to take out loans and pay them back myself, a not insignificant feat which I accomplished) marked a llfe-long obsession with putting a goal in my crosshairs and achieving it by any means necessary.

What I notice now, and this is something I talk to my own students about constantly, is that young people seem to lack the self-determination and clear sense of agency that came fairly natural to me, helped along by teachers and people who could bolster my not-great self worth and self image. When I came to New York I didn’t know that the game was rigged, and that gave me some freedom in feeling like I could accomplish my goals. So I accomplished my goals. Now, in 2025, it’s almost like there’s a feeling that everyone has been born into a caste system, and that one’s ability to cultivate legitimacy on a quest toward achieving success is all but hopeless. So why even try? Sure, once in a while a working class kid gets into an Ivy and wows everyone, but in general it feels like people feel very much tied to their lots in life.

And yet, now, there is also another type of success that many, many young people feel called toward, and it has almost nothing to do with legitimacy or expertise in the traditional sense. It has, instead, to do with the Wild West nature of internet fame and fandom, and the idea that you can venture to the land of online and pan for follower gold with no other tools than your innate—read: uncultivated—personality and physical appearance. And this will win you your fortune, divvied out in likes and subs. So many young people are looking for success this way. They aspire to be influencers or some sort of online professional in a landscape that seems to hand anyone who presents themselves as an expert on any subject, no matter their education or experience, the keys to the castle.

If you are not born on the path that takes you from prep school to the Ivy League without passing go, this is largely the most immediate and obvious route to the “good life.” It is like a loophole in the established laws of legitimacy that destroys the notion of expertise, replacing it with a model of success that directly mirrors that of the world’s oldest profession: you sell a little bit of yourself to each buyer and gain your riches through your strategies of seduction. As Luca Vergano wrote recently: “We are not in the attention economy, we are in the performance economy.” Unlike studying to be a doctor or a lawyer in order to do something, building an internet career often requires no formal training—and, in many cases, you can make more money than a doctor or a lawyer. The only requirement is a total submission to the laws of the algorithm and to one’s own innate, uncultivated gifts, and the idea that those gifts require no improvement from outside sources. You do not train or educate yourself to be an influencer, you simply submit to becoming one.

Let’s just say that a world where only generational wealth holders and online attention whores are viewed as experts is a little scary for me. While there are many, many actual experts who also have an online presence, and I like and appreciate learning from those people in an unstructured way (this is not about them), I think the glut of the influencer-type model is made up of people whose first order of business is selling themselves. This type of person might appear friendly and knowledgeable and even aspirational, but, as the recent “confessions before the Tik Tok ban” revealed, they ultimately have no legitimacy. They are the type of people who are grifters because they see everything in front of them as one big grift—their view of the world reminds me of the description of the goblin’s looking-glass in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen:

…One day, when he was in a merry mood, he made a looking-glass which had the power of making everything good or beautiful that was reflected in it almost shrink to nothing, while everything that was worthless and bad looked increased in size and worse than ever. The most lovely landscapes appeared like boiled spinach, and the people became hideous, and looked as if they stood on their heads and had no bodies. Their countenances were so distorted that no one could recognize them, and even one freckle on the face appeared to spread over the whole of the nose and mouth. The demon said this was very amusing. When a good or pious thought passed through the mind of any one it was misrepresented in the glass; and then how the demon laughed at his cunning invention. All who went to the demon’s school—for he kept a school—talked everywhere of the wonders they had seen, and declared that people could now, for the first time, see what the world and mankind were really like. They carried the glass about everywhere, till at last there was not a land nor a people who had not been looked at through this distorted mirror. They wanted even to fly with it up to heaven to see the angels, but the higher they flew the more slippery the glass became, and they could scarcely hold it, till at last it slipped from their hands, fell to the earth, and was broken into millions of pieces. But now the looking-glass caused more unhappiness than ever, for some of the fragments were not so large as a grain of sand, and they flew about the world into every country. When one of these tiny atoms flew into a person’s eye, it stuck there unknown to him, and from that moment he saw everything through a distorted medium, or could see only the worst side of what he looked at, for even the smallest fragment retained the same power which had belonged to the whole mirror. Some few persons even got a fragment of the looking-glass in their hearts, and this was very terrible, for their hearts became cold like a lump of ice. A few of the pieces were so large that they could be used as window-panes; it would have been a sad thing to look at our friends through them. Other pieces were made into spectacles; this was dreadful for those who wore them, for they could see nothing either rightly or justly. At all this the wicked demon laughed till his sides shook—it tickled him so to see the mischief he had done…

This degree of deep-cut cynicism erases the people who might have the most to offer: those who feel like they have to put in the work to get better at things, and those who view with skepticism any unearned privilege that floats their way. And this, oddly, has very little to do with money. One can find a spiritual poverty–-in all walks of life—from those who believe the idea that working hard is stupid and that it’s much better to lean into the current paradigm that rewards shaking one’s ass (literally or figuratively) on the internet far more than it rewards spending years toiling away in obscurity to get good at something. I notice that people have no patience for anything anymore. They won’t sit and read. They want everything instantaneously. This is a feckless and undisciplined existence that does in fact cultivate something: a crippling neurosis. Like my parents, I believe that legitimacy is something you earn. It is not someone you just are. And I think it’s good to doubt yourself, to tremble in front of a crowd, to think you need to work extra hard to be good at something. I don’t know what else feels more like success.

She used to conduct food drives for the Oglala Lakota tribespeople living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota (this reservation is the site of the 1975 FBI shootout incident that Peltier was subsequently accused and convicted of participating in). I remember the first time she drove to South Dakota to deliver the food she had collected. She told me, “Aimee, these people have nothing.” My mother was a very compassionate person with a great fire for justice. The earnestness and selflessness of her intent was not lost on anyone she tried to help. She would have been so happy that Peltier has finally been commuted—at age 80, after almost 50 years in prison. I wish she were here to learn this news.

In just a decade and change, we have disposed of what could be termed a photographic approach to life, which dictated much of what we regarded as “true” for the better part of the 20^th and early 21^st century. In the photographic life, we relied on that which we documented—i.e., captured—in a photograph as the objective truth. The truth was caught in a photograph, and that captive image represented to us a memory clearer and more faithful than the recollections tumbling around freely in our own minds. This meant that, at one point, we collectively believed that what was held within this four-sided, two-dimensional document was a truth more reliable and more complete than the truth that lived inside of us.

As digital images have become ubiquitous, things have changed. The life we live now is the pixelated approach: the truth is an endlessly morphing data stream ubiquitously translated into the visual. It is continuously constructed and reconstructed through unlimited edits and feeds. The truth is what we make of it, not what it makes of us. This, perhaps more than anything, is what separates Industrial Age (with its Enlightenment values) from our contemporary, amorphous, pluralistic digital epoch. The Enlightenment favored measurable results and material phenomena, and the analogue camera, an industrial tool, helped it achieve those goals. Our “new truth” favors individual perspective and the deconstruction of hierarchical systems of belief—and our personal digital devices have proven to be the perfect tool to render the visual evidence of this new approach.

It is possible that the truth, in a court of law, will begin to amount to what someone can convincingly perform as their own holistic truth narrative. As most major disorganized crime will, in due course, become obsolete via preventative surveillance and geo-tracking of weaponry—along with many other digitally determined crime prevention measures—courts of law will increasingly set the stage for truth duels. In contrast to litigation that strives toward the objective analysis and judgment of facts in accordance with established laws and legal precedent, in truth duels, objectivity and adherence to the rules of common law will become less and less of a consideration. Instead, cases will be judged on the ability of an individual to collect and represent their truth cohesively and effectively—which is to say, in a codified structure that reveals and establishes narrative dominance. Truth duels will amount to personal wars conducted primarily through images and other encodeable, verifiable digital data sets (voice recordings, texts, posts, etc.).

Blockchain's distributed ledger system (as well as CCP’s social credit law) foretells this transition: the truth will begin to exist as a personal value system one can encode and collect, rather than as a system of beliefs one is forced to agree with and “follow” under the regulatory gaze of democracy or church or law. This bizarrely mirrors—or at least reflects through a prismatic, pixelated image sensor—the one state in the United States governed by civil law, Louisiana, which is based on the Napoleonic Code rather than common law (which governs all 49 other states). Civil law is code-based, and judges interpret the codes to apply to cases, with little reference to precedent. Common law relies on precedent and legislation to guide judicial decisions. While it may seem that I am suggesting that the New Truth means the end of the rule of law as we know it, a form of anarchism, it might actually be that the New Truth ushers in a return to governing body that is much more top-down, and focused on narrative limitation versus human liberty. (this is still a very hazy speculation but it feels potentially accurate…)

The truth is becoming that which we can fashion and fabricate into reality, that which we can edit into believability, that which we can encode into existence. To make this new truth “work,” continuous self-surveillance and self-tracking will be required by all, in direct competition with the behavioral surveillance our devices and social media already employ “against” us. Using tracking and documenting devices, we will collect data to provide alibis for our every behavior, belief, gesture, thought, and action. Counting steps and geotagging were just the beginning of this form of self-surveillance. The nascent battle cry of “Receipts!” heralds an age where one must meticulously record and collect evidence from every interaction, so that one might arm oneself against potential future narrative attacks.

As we move toward omni-surveillance conducted by each individual, all-party consent laws related to the recording of interactions between groups will become a thing of the past. Individuals of all stripe—and this term will expand to include corporations, families, nations, and couples (really any group or singular person who establishes and codifies a specific and “ownable” perspectival truth)—will use personal devices to record each and every encounter, and this information will be immediately uploaded to the blockchain. Additionally, the telematics devices used by insurance companies to track behavior and record data will be reformulated, repackaged, and sold to individual consumers, so that we all may have proof of record for our every behavior. This will be our new truth: something we intentionally create and codify at all times, in direct opposition to that which we passively observed and documented (old truth). The new truth is created versus observed. Codification is the new documentation. The new truth is pastiched individual perspective that will be qualified and quantified in the realm of the digital.

It is currently believed by some that the more images are “corrupted” through manipulations like deepfakes, the less we will tie ourselves to the notion that “seeing is believing.” This seems doubtful. As long as the sense of sight dominates our course of action, as it surely does, it will sponsor belief. It is therefore belief itself that has already changed. This transformation will affect both what we regard as acceptable forms of truth, and how we create, consume, and digest that truth. In the United States, the admissibility of photographic evidence in a court of law—the beginning of which began as early as 1879, with this statement by the U.S. Supreme Court: "By the employment of the beautiful art of photography, this tribunal can examine the assailed title, and contrast it with papers of undoubted genuineness, with the same certainty as if all the originals were present, and with even more convenience and satisfaction."—is currently based on two different theories, according to a statement from the website of the law firm Keis George LLP. These theories are termed, respectively, “pictorial testimony theory” and “silent witness theory.” Under pictorial testimony theory, “…such evidence is admissible when a sponsoring witness can testify that it is a fair and accurate representation of the subject matter. It is important to note, this theory is based on the personal observation(s) of the witness. Under the ‘silent witness’ theory, such evidence is admissible if the process used to produce the photograph is accurate and reputable. This theory speaks for itself, hence the ‘silent witness' designation. These two theories represent a departure from earlier requirements, which required authenticating testimony from the photographer and/or an expert witness regarding the reliability of the recording process.”

As the “expert” photographer has faded from legitimacy in legal settings and elsewhere, a vacancy has formed: within images, there is now a you-shaped hole where the truth should be. The new truth will demand even further departure from so-called “expert authentication,” and will employ a novel theory for the use of images—distinct from the use of photographs—as evidence. The new truth will view the subject of each image as its author, and will take into account (among many other considerations): personal expression, hierarchical concerns, and the very nature of subjective, two-dimensional reality. Mostly, it will take into account the codification methods used for each image’s editing and upload, as well as the intention of the subject, who will now also be considered the creator of the image (even if they didn’t physically click the shutter). According to the rules of the new truth, you are your image, and you must be responsible at all times for how your image is rendered and reproduced.

In the court of the new truth, individuals will present their own personal image narratives as both witness and evidence. The new truth will be a mix of individual expression—via edited images—and omni-surveillance, a continuous narrative with each modality bolstering the other to ensure we reside in a world wherein everyone is free (and consequently chained) to “live their truth.” Such truth will be recorded and edited into a subjective semblance, or a “likeness”—versus an objective document—of one’s individual perspectival belief structure. The new truth accepts manipulation and editing if it leads to a more coherent and cohesive narrative structure. The new truth contends that facts are merely raw data, and it is what one crafts with that data that matters most.

The Old Testament required at least two witnesses for the conviction of a crime. Under the new truth, the silent witness of surveillance footage will contend with one’s personal “eye witness”: self-authored surveillance footage with precisely the same perspective and focus as one’s own vision. Previous to this time period, the personal narrative arrived after one died, typically crafted by a journalist in the form of an obituary. A highlight reel in narrative form, the obituary “made sense” of a life, creating a story arch complete with climax (death) and denouement (the funeral details). With the new truth, our personal image narratives will showcase an ongoing highlight reel of achievements, behaviors, and beliefs. In court, this will be crafted and edited to produce what will be akin to a character witness. The winner of each case will eventually amount to the individual or collective body who can most convincingly and persuasively represent their narrative as the better—meaning the most complete and comprehensive—truth. That which sounds or seems the most true will triumph over incomplete, nonlinear, or contradictory presentations that fail to establish an orderly perspective. The new truth is not a game for the inconsistent. Truth duels will be less about establishing a case against the other, and more about establishing one’s own truth narrative as superior. The initial conflicts that give rise to truth duels will mostly comprise events wherein one or both parties feel that their personal truth has been violated. Therefore, the roles of plaintiff and defendant will no longer define the dynamics of court cases.

This begs a question: In the order of the new truth, what will constitute a lie or a falsehood? In the domain of the new truth, one has only to stay the course of a chosen narrative. What comprises this narrative can be fanciful or dull, but it cannot be contradictory or overly confusing. The new truth is defined by nothing more or less than a coherent narrative that is verifiable and that does not break from an accessible storyline. Plot twists are acceptable only of they feel “true” to one’s story arch. To be most believable, the new truth must adapt the storytelling structure commonly found in narrative cinema. The new truth is not scaffolded by what is collectively factual or real. It is defined by what is presented by the individual as factual and real. So-called objective scientific facts—such as climate temperatures or the chemicals found in a water sample—will be brought into court cases with the notion that they have no intrinsic, self-defined value or meaning. They will serve only to strengthen or add character or plot development to an individual’s truth narrative. Facts will become akin to show notes, and will cease to exist in their current role of objective phenomena. When this happens, the transition of the truth as “belonging” to one’s personal value system, rather than to a collective belief system, will be complete.

The new truth is creation, versus fixation. It is supple and in constant motion. The new truth is ownable and promotional; it is something that one crafts carefully with the intention of making others want to believe you, in a similar modality to the one that public relations and advertising have functioned within for decades. The new truth is something that will unite believers of like minds into tribes and affinity modules. So-called universal truths or age-old truths will only be deemed as such by the individual who feels that they can incorporate them persuasively into their personal truth narrative (i.e. Trads).

Under the new truth, we will no longer live lives—we will craft compelling narratives. Showing respect for the truth of another will weave its way into our social mannerisms, and becoming another form of handshake. If one’s truth directly contradicts the truth of another, efforts will be made for the separation of these individuals before conflict. The new truth is about the needs of the individual above all else, and those needs will dictate our social behavior. The new truth is inherently narcissistic, but those who wield it wisely will understand how to create a consciously narcissistic personal truth narrative. The greatest hope the new truth has in evolving toward a unifying omni-belief structure will be found in those consciously evolved humans whose sense of “I” is porous enough to understand and include beliefs that lay outside their own personal truths and values. When the narcissistic “I” can begin to hold opposing truths within it simultaneously, without cracking in two, we will begin to function holistically as a species. This will be a form of robust, anti-fragile new-truth narcissism, distinct from the personality disorder that currently defines the term. We can say that the new truth is inspired by narcissism, but that, in its better moments, it transcends the brittle limitations of the pathology of contemporary narcissism.

While on first blush the new truth seems like the culmination of feckless self-involvement, the logistics required for its deployment will not be so easy. The new truth will demand a lot from those who practice it. The new truth is an unending performance; it is defined, in fact, by both its performativity and its demand to be performed at all times. I think it’s necessary to compare this type of human performance to the one Jean-Paul Sartre analyzed in his 1943 writings on his then-novel concept of “bad faith” in Being and Nothingness. Sartre illustrates his concept by describing a waiter in a café: “His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes towards the customers with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the client… All his behaviour seems to us a game. He applies himself to linking his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a cafe.” The performativity of the new truth will be a practice toward a new form of self-authored authenticity, versus (as Sartre describes) a bad-faith mask to cover one’s inability to transcend into the authentic.

Thus, counterintuitively, the new truth will couple with a strong emphasis on individual responsibility. Controlling one’s narrative will be of utmost existential importance, as important as securing shelter and sustenance (and in fact integral to securing one’s physical and material safety and wellbeing). Woven like spiders’ webs, these incessant truth narratives will demand a great amount of time and energy, and their construction might make one feel like Scheherazade, crafting stories in order to stay alive. At first, New Truthers will behave a bit like the waiter in the café, moving just a hair too rapidly. Tap dancing on the head of a pin. (One can already recognize this manic, queasy performance in many a social media influencer. And the popular concept of “cringe” is a factor of this phenomenon as well, a notation of failure to display one’s truth with a perfected seamlessness.) But, before too long, performative gestures will settle into a rhythm of beyond-performance, the way a ballerina’s footwork only looks natural and fluid after hours of grueling drills. We will fake it until we make it. We will become our avatars, but it will take some practice. Future generations will come to this with greater ease, having been born into the practice.

The new truth will set the stage for endless self-invention. Reinvention will prove trickier, as the new truth will insist that individuals stay the course of their perspectival, narrative identity. As we steadily create and live out our unique, self-contained truths, toting our carefully curated baskets of beliefs hither and thither, we will become further separated from one another. Without a singular truth to calibrate to, we will feel profound disconnect as a species. When together, our lives will begin to resemble an ARG (augmented reality game), and our ability or inability to collaborate and interweave our narratives to compose coherent poly-truth narratives will likely reveal whether or not our human species has the chops to make it through the 21^st century. Those dexterous at code switching and keen to take on the challenge of learning the new truth will be most adept at these games. Of course, the new truth will mostly lead to intense polarization and separation between individuals. Much more intense than even what exists now. It might even lead to the end of the human race.

But this is the path we’ve chosen to walk down. If we can make the new truth work to our benefit, it will lead to an omni-belief structure that is potentially more durable than any found in previous epochs. If we are to create a new omni-belief system, it will be from a mycelium-like network that spreads its hyphae slowly outward, connecting tentatively and deliberately to others. It will not be from the dictatorial force-flowering of collective belief structures (which are likely what spawned this turn to the new truth in the first place). The new truth will tear us apart before it can knit us together again.

**

This knowledge forms the basis of an iron-clad social contract that extends into adulthood. And this (the business of being sick as an out clause for any engagement we wish to avoid) forms a responsibility loophole that very few individuals find themselves above taking advantage of at least once in a while. If you don’t want to do something (including your job), being “sick” is your get-out-of-jail-free card. Therefore, in contemporary society, minor illness has major purchase: it gets you a day off for free. Provided you don’t sick-out beyond what is considered reasonable by your cohort—and provided you are not an on-the-clock worker who does not have the luxury of getting sick without an attendant financial penalty—claiming sickness will get you out of many things you don’t want to do without losing pay, credibility, or social standing. Which makes all claims of sickness both morally unquestionable and deeply suspect.

This sneakiness around sick days dovetails with an overall regard for the medical as the ultimate authority. We can get away with saying, “I can’t go; I’m sick,” because our relationship with the medical is so universally submissive that we will do literally anything it tells us to do. The medical has taken up residence in our collective psyches to a degree that we do not feel capable of viewing our own health through a process of individual self-assessment. We might know what we want to watch on TV or eat for dinner, we might proclaim whom we find sexually attractive and where we want to live, but we cannot discern on our own whether we are sick or well. This ignorance is fortified by the medical in many ways. We are told constantly about “silent killer” diseases and imperceptible chemical imbalances, and we are castigated if we do not get regular checkups. And let’s not even start on those reckless members of society who do not have health insurance—a term that is now used interchangeably with health care. We are beseeched by the medical community to “get our numbers checked,” with these quantitative analyses being viewed as the holy and righteous truth of contemporary health. Measurable, quantifiable data—the type of information science stakes its ironclad reputation for objective reliability on—has become the truth of our health. We can feel great, but beware of our “not great” numbers, which signal death looming unseen at the door. Or we can feel terrible, and be met with a shoulder shrug if our tests and numbers come back “within normal range.”

Science and the medical world are intimately connected, but they are not synonymous—they are simply now viewed as such. Science informs the medical, but both the medical industry and the realm of science are coupled to a larger global system of industrial capitalist consumerism. To assume purity of intent in either science or medicine is to cast a blind eye to the structures that fund and influence them. It is akin to believing that the church and clergy have a direct line to God, and one must obey their every word to receive God’s love and protection.

The reality of the medical industry can be more transactional than vocational, which means that patients expect something in return for their copayments. In contemporary times, when a patient goes to a doctor with a problem, a solution is nearly always presented (even when the problem resides outside the scope of the medical). Philosopher and priest Ivan Illich wrote his 1974 book Medical Nemesis as a repost against what he viewed as an increasingly medicalized world. In reference to the tendency for medical personnel to assume solutions in nearly all instances, Illich wrote, “To ascribe the pathology to some Tom, Dick, or Harry is the first task of the physician acting as member of a consulting profession. Trained to ‘do something' and express his concern, he feels active, useful, and effective when he can diagnose disease. Though, theoretically, at the first encounter the physician does not presume that his patient is affected by a disease, through a form of fail-safe principle he usually acts as if imputing a disease to the patient were better than disregarding one. The medical-decision rule pushes him to seek safety by diagnosing illness rather than health.”

The term medicalization was conceived by sociologists in the ‘70s to describe the reassignment of previously quotidian human circumstances, behaviors, and problems as medical conditions. Under the collective ideological mindset of medicalization, many formerly unmedicalized human attributes and experiences—shyness, thin lips, pregnancy, and boredom, to name just a few—now demand a medical resolution in the form of a pharmaceutical prescription or a surgical intervention. Illich commented on this phenomenon by writing “…a society [that] transform[s] people into patients…inevitably loses some of its autonomy to its healers.” This now visibly manifest psychosocial hierarchy has been building itself, brick by brick, for decades. Today, we live in an omni-medicalized world, with medical professionals wielding unprecedented authority.

There has been an extended public response to the phenomenon of Covid that dovetails with this overwhelming belief in medical guidance as the ultimate human authority. Were the church equally empowered by the general public in this time period, we’d likely see a growing number of public sermons, group prayer circles, and requests for divine salvation. Instead, all protective and restorative power has been granted to the medical, and medical advice about social distancing, mask-wearing, and vaccination takes on almost a liturgical mean (one that might arguably transcend measurable benefits). Were these phenomena carefully measured in the first place. The medical world's mutually beneficial affiliation with science has led to its ongoing presentation as not just the leading experts on how to prevent the transmission and contraction of Covid, but also the only reasonable and intelligent voice one might listen to. Yet, prior to this pandemic, scant research was done on the one thing our medical officials eventually seemed the most solidly confident about recommending: the use of face masks. Apparently, conclusive results had never been firmly established on the particular efficacy of face masks in response to severe respiratory illnesses spread from human to human by viral contact (though masks had been used for decades by citizens, and became especially popular after the 2004 SARS outbreak). In the abstract of a paper published in September 2020 by Nature, the authors stated: “Although mask wearing is intended, in part, to protect others from exhaled, virus-containing particles, few studies have examined particle emission by mask-wearers into the surrounding air.”

The level of authoritative supremacy the medical industry has obliquely claimed—think, for instance, of the transactional value of a diagnosis, a vaccination card, or even a simple doctor’s note—has allowed this industry overwhelming jurisdiction over the lives of common people, particularly in the time of Covid. This phenomenon, labeled “diagnostic imperialism” by Illich, gives “medical bureaucrats” the power to “…subdivide people into those who may drive a car, those who may stay away from work, those who must be locked up, those who may become soldiers, those who may cross borders, cook, or practice prostitution, those who may not run for the vice-presidency of the United States, those who are dead, those who are competent to commit a crime, and those who are liable to commit one.” In 1972, sociologist Irving Zola published a paper titled Medicine as an Institution of Social Control. In this paper, Zola—one of the first theorists endeavoring to describe medicalization, and also the one credited with coining the term—illustrated a society where the medical was becoming “…a major institution of social control, nudging aside, if not incorporating, the more traditional institutions of religion and law. It is becoming the new repository of truth, the place where absolute and often final judgments are made by supposedly morally neutral and objective experts. And these judgments are made, not in the name of virtue or legitimacy, but in the name of health.” Meaning: these judgments appear to have the power to keep humans upright and alive.

Because those in the medical field have been granted and have also assumed this authoritarian role, the average American has largely divested themselves of the view that their mental and physical health is within their personal responsibility to assess, uphold, and maintain. Instead, many view maladies as events that just happen to them, something for a doctor to figure out and fix—in the same manner that the mechanically challenged bring their car to the shop when it’s making that funny noise again. The average Western human feels helpless to the vicissitudes of disease, and can do nothing but call the doctor, get a test, pick up a prescription, or schedule a procedure. Indisputable medical advancements—antibiotics being one major lifesaving milestone, vaccines being another—help bolster the medical’s lifesaving reputation and allow for this industry to make broader and deeper authoritative claims.

So where is the line one might parse between medical assistance and medical supremacy? It is important to note that Zola, who the New York Times valorized as “a Sociologist Who Aided the Disabled,” was not some magically self-healing guru who viewed himself as exempt from medical need. He was a survivor of childhood Polio and a later car wreck that left him with permanent injuries. But he was also an individual interested in transcending the boundaries of ability and disability, somewhat in the manner that Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing rejected the medical model of mental illness by complicating the binary of sanity and madness. In Zola’s 1989 paper “Toward the Necessary Universalizing of a Disability Policy,” he wrote that “…the issues facing someone with a disability are not essentially medical. They are not purely the result of some physical or mental impairment but rather of the fit of such impairments with the social, attitudinal, architectural, medical, economic, and political environment.”

We currently have a very hard time understanding our own suffering—never mind the suffering of those around us—in anything but medical terms. Many people who are not elderly or infirmed take prescription drugs (including and especially psychological pharmaceuticals) for years and years, and do not have any solid plans to wean themselves off these medications. The same is true for cholesterol and blood pressure medications, both of which may become unnecessary were the “patient” to make a few permanent lifestyle changes. For many people, the idea of getting better is a fairytale. They are complacent with and complicit in being eternally medicated, and thus in maintaining a system of medical and pharmaceutical dependence. Many people believe that “healthy” is not something they are or could ever be. They view health not as the general set point of many if not most minds and bodies, but as something external that must be consumed.

It could be said that the medically dependent are disabled in a way that can’t be immediately understood or diagnostically determined. In the foreword to his 1982 memoir titled Missing Pieces, Zola writes, “…I already have the stigmata of the disabled—the braces, the limp, the cane—though I have spent much of my life denying their existence." For Zola his limp and cane were a visual cue that he was “invalid.” He found this personally undesirable. But such an immediately recognizable stigmata of illness might in fact become desirable to those whose maladies go unseen and misunderstood, for people who need help and who cannot get it from anyone other than a doctor. It’s now a legally defined aspect of American social values that our ill must be cared for to some degree, whether they can afford this care or not (a 1985 federal U.S. law requires all hospitals to stabilize and treat patients even if they cannot pay for it). And, for many, perhaps for most, the only time they can be assured that another human being is going to show genuine concern for their well-being is when they enter the doctor’s office or an emergency room. Stigmata are colloquially the marks of either disgrace or martyrdom, but they also signify open wounds that need immediate attention.

Where we as a society often talk about the negative impact of industrialization when it comes to environmental pollution and factory farming, we rarely talk about the fact that many other human practices, including what was once termed “doctoring,” have also been industrialized in the factory model—particularly in the realm of pharmaceuticals. Illich claimed that, “Effective health care depends on self-care; this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.” Which is interesting, given that the term “self care,” when employed in contemporary dialogue, has morphed meanings. It is now used to describe a consumerist, luxury-based approach to personal grooming, emphasizing the creation of a self-care “ritual” inclusive of the use of a dermatologist's private skincare line and plastic surgeon's signature lip injections.

While self-care as a term has been appropriated by the beauty and wellness industries to promote the consumption of goods and services that are meant to make consumers feel pampered, the term, as Illich uses it, was originally coined by nursing theorist Dorothea Orem. In grand nursing theory, self-care is used to describe the responsibility an individual has to the management and maintenance of their own health. It is essentially self-doctoring that takes individual responsibility along with body sovereignty as a given. It also puts forth the idea that a patient should not become overly dependent on the medical system. Instead, patients must practice self-care by looking after themselves up until a “self-care deficit” occurs—and this is the point at which a nurse should step in. This belief structure—that the health of an individual is primarily their own responsibility, and that nurses should provide assistance only when it is absolutely necessary—has been endemic to nursing since its inception, with Florence Nightingale stating that the “…role of a nurse is to put her patient in the best position to be able to self-heal.”

Yet, where once the medical was a place of last resort, it is now typically the first line of defense. Thus, it has become an obligatory rite of passage for young people to receive their first identity-defining diagnosis—ADHD, depression, anxiety—and to be set forth on a life’s journey of prescriptions and check-ups. While technology's manifest destiny has resulted in an abundance of innovative quasi-cures, we cannot deny that (given the significant amount of medical and pharmaceutical treatment the average American consumes) we are not a people who are overwhelmingly “healthy” on our own—we are often simply medicalized and medicated into living longer lives of mediocre health. The result of medicalization is the diagnoses of ever-increasing existential threats; illness is the marauder who knocks upon the door at midnight. Medicalization “heroically” fights this enemy through endless courses of treatment designed to conquer and control looming health catastrophes, rarely considering that the reliance on this form of care might be the problem in the first place.

Our health care officials are guardians at the gates of doom, a militarized hierarchy to whom we have given almost complete authority. Without them, we’d be dead—or so the story goes. But we will all die someday, and there is a stark difference between quantity of life and quality of life. We seem intent on viewing death as the ultimate tragedy. Perhaps life and death have more in common than one might think. When the average Western individual remains in a stalemate with their own pharmaceutical-infested mind and body, one wonders if they are truly living. Or just waiting to die.

There is something under the surface here, related to body sovereignty, physical ownership and the fact that 9 to 5 jobs often pay one not for their products, performance, or ideas, but for the seconds stolen from the duration of that person’s lifespan. In a sense, your job owns your body. At least sometimes. And health insurance—which is almost ubiquitously tied to employment in the United States—ensures that a company’s investment is well tended to. As Illich posits, “The higher the salary the company pays, the higher the rank of an aparatchik, the more will be spent to keep the valuable cog well oiled. Maintenance costs for highly capitalized manpower are the new measure of status for those on the upper rungs. People keep up with the Joneses by emulating their ‘check-ups’...” But health insurance is a relatively new invention, and its alliance with employment began as a perk rather than as a necessity or a human right. As reported by Alex Blumberg on NPR, “By the late 1920s, hospitals noticed most of their beds were going empty every night. They wanted to get people who weren't deathly ill to start coming in. An official at Baylor University Hospital in Dallas noticed that Americans, on average, were spending more on cosmetics than on medical care. ‘We spend a dollar or so at a time for cosmetics and do not notice the high cost,’ he said. ‘The ribbon-counter clerk can pay 50 cents, 75 cents or $1 a month, yet it would take about 20 years to set aside [money for] a large hospital bill.'”

So, in the classic manner of all capitalist enterprises, the entrepreneurial Baylor hospital, “…started looking for a way to get regular folks in Dallas to pay for health care the same way they paid for lipstick — a tiny bit each month. Hospital officials started small, offering a deal to a group of public school teachers in Dallas. They offered a plan for the teachers to pay 50 cents each month in exchange for Baylor picking up the tab on hospital visits,” writes Blumberg. And, as with many great American business success stories, the hospital was able to turn catastrophe to triumph: “When the Great Depression hit, almost every hospital in the country saw its patient load disappear. The Baylor idea became hugely popular. It eventually got a name: Blue Cross.”

Blue Cross proved to be the blueprint for the employer-based health insurance system, but, writes Blumberg, “The modern system of getting benefits through a job required another catalyst: World War II… The government rationed goods even as factories ramped up production and needed to attract workers. Factory owners needed a way to lure employees [so] owners turned to fringe benefits, offering more and more generous health plans. The next big step in the evolution of health care was also an accident. In 1943, the Internal Revenue Service ruled that employer-based health care should be tax free. A second law, in 1954, made the tax advantages even more attractive. By the 1960s, 70 percent of the population is covered by some kind of private, voluntary health insurance plan. By [then] Americans started to see that system — in which people with good jobs get health care through work and almost everyone else looks to government — as if it were the natural order of things.”

The paternalistic “naturalness” of employer-provided health care, which always takes the form of health insurance, has created a society that wants to be kept healthy via extrinsic forces like “a great health care package” (complete with unlimited sick days to get us out of doing a job we've likely taken to acquire health care in the first place). We are not a society that wants the ultimate responsibility of keeping themselves healthy. The Oremian concept of “self-care” has been replaced with an dependency-based mindset that refuses to take responsibility for its own physical, mental and emotional health–primarily because it has been brainwashed into thinking it can’t. As a consumerist society, it has been decided that life itself must be consumed, rather than created. We have outsourced our health, and created a system wherein we must buy it back via the time we spend on the clock at work.

In America, we find pills as a general category not just easy to swallow, but infinitely palatable. And there is something about the medicalized mindset, which views individuals first and foremost as a collected set of health problems—and life as an unending diagnostic test—that seems to have no issue with the specter of sickliness as a coat of arms. It is those possessed with this mindset who might strive for themselves and others to wear their masks of illness forever, if it comes with the promise of safety. In his 1993 Reith lecture, philosopher Edward Said stated that, “The [role of the] intellectual ... cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d'être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.”

As a people, we must provide space for embarrassing questions, especially in relation to our own bodies and minds. We must enter a liminal zone of unknowing, and begin to look with new eyes at the structures we regard as unquestionable—particularly those that assert themselves into our existence under the guise of universal safety and protection. More than anything, we must begin to enact daily rituals of self-care for our own thoughts and ideas, lest we begin to transfer the sovereignty of our minds to our fractured and increasingly enfeebled governing systems.

My previous post War Lore, published with Do Not Research, critiques, among other things, initial reactions to the film’s trailer. To me, Civil War demands visual analysis because of how much nuance is embedded within its imagery (some of which I confess to not exactly knowing what to make of). I think it’s worth noting that Alex Garland clearly cares a great deal about the aesthetic of his films. He was also trained as an art historian at the University of Manchester, and in my opinion (like fine art) the images that comprise his films lean heavily on formal composition, symbolism, etc. Which is to say, I think his pictures speak louder than his words. 

Here, chronologically, are the visual moments that I found intriguing, effective or memorable. I don’t think these are spoilers because I am not writing about plot or anything like that. 

1. Early in the film the protagonist, a photojournalist named Lee, converses with an emerging photographer named Jessie in a hotel lobby filled with other conflict journalists. Jessie mentions the coincidence of Lee’s first name matching with that of her hero, the photographer Lee Miller (Art News notes this as what they term a “surprise shoutout,” which I find amusing). Lee Miller’s most well-known photograph is a portrait of her bathing in Adolf Hitler’s bathtub, captured by photographer David Scherman but typically credited as a self-portrait. On April 30, 1945, both photographers went to Dachau to photograph the camp the day after it had been liberated by U.S. soldiers. Miller and Scherman were subsequently given sanctuary at an American command post in an apartment building in Munich. The Munich apartment they stayed in was, unexpectedly, that of Adolf Hitler’s. Both photographers reportedly made pictures of each other in the tub, with Miller stating, in an interview: “I even washed the dirt of Dachau off in his tub.”

This epoch image, to use Umberto Eco’s term (meaning an image that represents more than its subject matter, serving as a touchstone for larger historical events and themes), shows Miller looking like a beauty model posing elegantly in the tub. Her face is tilted pleasingly upward, and her arm is crossed in front of her, with her hand reaching behind to wash her own back. She looks like a blonde goddess Hitler himself would have admired, and to complement this, to the right of the tub stands a small Grecian statue of a nude female figure whose pose mirrors Miller’s exactly. In this compositionally perfect image, there are two giveaways to the horror under its surface. One is a portrait of Hitler that sits on the far left hand corner of the tub. The other is the mud from Dachau, which Miller has wiped all over Hitler’s fluffy white bath rug before perching her equally muddy boots on top. 

In Civil War, right after Lee and Jessie discuss Lee Miller, Garland cuts to an image of the contemporary Lee chastely taking a bath in the bathtub of her hotel room, wherein she proceeds to conjure visions of her own “epoch images”-- horrific moments of conflict she presumably experienced and captured firsthand as a photojournalist. These images include a slow motion moment of a man being set on fire, which for me references an epoch image from the Vietnam era: the self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức (and, of course, there is also the more recent image of the U.S. Marine Aaron Bushnell self-immolating–which is obviously, given the timing, not a direct reference). Importantly, the immolation scene Lee recalls is not an act of suicide, and it seems likely that the director is obliquely referencing conflict photojournalistic images that depict torture of and brutality towards the innocent. These are images that often become indelibly etched on the consciousness of their viewers (I would add the epoch image of Kim Phuc being burned with napalm to this list). The effect of all this is to figuratively place the film’s protagonist in the same bathwater as both Lee Miller and the extended community of photojournalists, past and present, who must live with the psychological burden of their profession. 

2. The second image comes early in the film, and is for me related to images of both hunting and of lynching, and also to the torture images of Abu Ghraib. Lee composes a photograph to document the horror she unexpectedly encounters while stopping to get gas, and the scene serves to showcase her courage and professionalism. Where others might turn and run, she sees only an important image in front of her and becomes herself a hunter, using the tools she could likely only learn through trial and error on the field to cut through the threat and terror of the situation. With her calm, dignified, slightly bossy demeanor, she effectively convinces the perpetrator of the violence depicted in the image she goes on to create to pose in front of the people he is torturing, as though he were proudly posing with his kill.

   

   3. At one point, Lee and Jessie and the other main characters in the film–all conflict journalists–descend upon a shootout scene between two warring factions. They begin photographing this rather movie-typical hide-behind-cars-and-cement-pillars parking lot affray. Who is fighting who is a little unclear to me personally. However, one group ( I believe the Florida Alliance) is wearing Hawaiian shirts. 

As I lay out in my previous War Lore essay, when I began looking at reaction videos for Civil War’s trailer months ago, I came upon this one, which initially noted the faction wearing Hawaiian shirts in the trailer. The commentator here, a self-proclaimed former “Boogaloo Boi,” made the inference that perhaps the director was signaling to the Boogaloo movement–a loosely structured ideological confederation that, from my limited understanding, promotes rhetoric for a second civil war in America and favors wearing Hawaiian shirts as an unofficial uniform. Many report the real-life Boogaloo movement to be white supremacist in orientation, though the Anti-Defamation League states, “Most boogalooers are not white supremacists, though one can find white supremacists within the movement.” In Garland’s film, it is notable that the people wearing Hawaiian shirts appear to be of different races. This leads me to think that Garland included Hawaiian shirts not as a direct nod to the Boogaloo movement we know, but more as a way to signal toward current-day memetic tribes as a whole, without depicting their attendant agendas verbatim.

4. This next image contains a formalistic motif that might be the least clear to me in terms of “what it means.” During a shootout between two warring factions, the character Jessie is depicted sitting in front of a wall. The wall is marked with three bright colors–bubblegum pink, teal blue, and forest green–which are rendered in rough stripes that extend from about human-height level down to, and including, messy blotches on the ground.

   

   While conflict graffiti and combat colors are often a major part of war, it is not obvious to me what these particular colors are meant to represent. The movie has at least four warring factions, but I am not sure which ones are using these colors (if they are), or what they mean. Later, the photojournalists run into two ghillie-suited men in another shootout. One of these men has a bleached buzz cut with faded green and blue splotches, and his short nails are also painted (from what I could register) pink and green. The man he is partnered with appears to have splotches of the same colors on his face and hair, making him look like he was just in a paintball fight or like he was celebrating Holi. The events of this scene and the corresponding dialogue make it clear that, in the heat of ballistic conflict, asking “Who’s side are you on?” is a bit beside the point–everyone in this moment is on the side of whomever or whatever will keep them from getting killed. I found the “war paint” in this scene to be kind of pop and girly, which creates a striking effect against the drab palette of army fatigues and dirty faces. The “Boogaloo Boi” reactor speculated that the man’s painted fingernails suggested he was the father of a little girl, which is an interesting conjecture that seems inaccurate given how these colors are repeated throughout the film. I do wonder what bubblegum pink and teal blue could mean in a political sense. 

   

5. Continuing with the color theme, we arrive at a scene that was featured and widely commented upon in the trailer, where a blond man holding a gun and wearing fatigues and red sunglasses with matching red lenses asks, “What kind of American are you?”. While many speculated that these sunglasses signaled a Republican or Red State affiliation, it is not completely clear why this man is wearing these glasses–if it’s an allegiance statement or a personal preference. They do look very creepy. And meme-able. They are now being sold all over the place. A Twitch streamer-themed Reddit conversation suggested that American Civil War-era sharpshooters wore red-tinted glasses, which seemed plausible (many of these types of antique glasses are sold online). Unfortunately, this theory has been debunked. This thread on Reddit questions whether or not the glasses the character wears in Civil War would prevent the wearer from seeing the red reticle, and also suggests that red lenses would make anything green (like foliage) appear white (though I doubt any store-bought glasses have that much power). My final speculative thought on these glasses comes from Neil Strauss’s 2005 PUA handbook The Game, and specifically the concept of “peacocking” as explained by The Game’s Mystery. A predator hunting for prey may use a distracting accessory to attract them. I also thought of the metaphor having “blood in one’s eye,” and how these glasses visualize this motif.  

6. In a scene shot at night, the main characters drive through a forest fire. I thought of the popular 2020 dash cam footage of the California wildfires, and how that type of footage appeared both heavenly and apocalyptic, and became memeable for this effect. One poetic moment captures a character who is falling in and out of consciousness reaching out to touch the embers swirling around the enclosed vehicle, which I thought was beautiful and which also kind of reminded me of the POV videos people post of Disney rides. Here, Garland explains how he filmed the sequence, and his filming process in general.

   

    

7. Throughout the film, Garland shows the “product” of his photojournalist characters' efforts by composing scenes through the perspective of their cameras (replete with shutter clicks), and then showing the resulting black-and-white still image. At the end of the film, a woman is shot and killed, and the resulting “photograph” shows her falling, with her legs giving out from under her. It is by far the most effective moment from Garland’s filmic device. The most obvious reference is Robert Capa’s 1936 photograph The Falling Soldier, which appeared in the Life magazine captioned as, “A Spanish soldier the instant he is dropped by a bullet through the head.” This image has been called the first to depict a human at the moment of their death, though it is unclear how true that statement is. A newer reference would be found in The Falling Man, the famous “epoch image” made by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew of a man falling from the World Trade Center during the September 11 attacks, and the subject of a titular documentary. Both images aestheticize death to some degree (as does Garland’s fictional take on this genre of images), though as photojournalistic images they were first and foremost composed as documents. The tragic beauty of these images also reminds me of the Mexican art photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s 1934 photograph Striking Worker Murdered, which was, as the New York Times says, “a rare photojournalistic image” for the artist.  

   

8. The denouement image is composed, again, as a still photograph. This image was not particularly interesting or memorable from my perspective, but Garland speaks about it a bit in this piece, which contains a lot of information about the film that may be spoilers for those who haven’t seen it. 

Gustave Courbet painting The Kill of the Deer, photograph by Etienne Carjat (1867)

When I went to graduate school for art criticism at the end of the 2000s, I assumed that I would be submerged in a community of other young writers. At the very least, I thought my peers would be people who had some degree of interest in, or facility for, writing. I was wrong.

Though the graduate program I attended at SVA was officially an MFA in art criticism and writing, most of my peers had only ever studied art history, and many had never written anything beyond papers in undergrad. What I noticed most about these people was: A. They were often very well educated in art but they were not writers, and B. They hadn’t simply studied or majored in art history—they were kind of obsessed by it. I found them to be romantic people who loved to talk breathlessly about Piet Mondrian donning a suit to paint in his studio or Frida Kahlo’s affair with Trotsky. To them, that was cool. I mention this because, at the time, I didn’t understand why most of these people wanted to be art critics. To me, an art critic was at the very least a communicator, if not absolutely a writer. The study of art history seemed like a different kind of interest, one that, if it used it at all, employed writing as a secondary mechanism—a means to an end. That they were historians also didn’t make sense from the perspective of criticism in general: film critics aren’t obligate film historians, fashion critics aren’t obligate fashion historians. They are writers with a specific interest or “beat.” Obviously the great critics in these genres are deeply versed in the attendant histories of their subject matter, but to me there is a world of difference between criticism and history.

Simply put, for me it is the difference between the living and the dead. 

I mention this because our professors at the program were also a mix between the living and the dead. The original program chair, Thomas McEvilley, left his post the summer before I matriculated, and died shortly after of cancer. During school we were brought on what felt like a religious pilgrimage to meet the art critic Leo Steinberg, who also died shortly after our visit. Dave Hickey and Peter Schjeldahl visited the program, and both are gone now. Then there were a few professors who are still alive, but who just seemed dead to me: people who had been teaching at the school since (I am not kidding) 1970, and who were so mannered in their skill that it was like watching the animatronic robots at Disney World. Unlike me, the art historians loved these people. The older and more out of touch, the better–as long as these automatons could regale them with stories about the good old days of the art world. What was it like at Cedar Tavern?

I am not being ageist. People like Scheldahl and Hickey (the latter of whom I consulted with before attending grad school, because I liked his work so much) were inspiring people—ageless in their skill, beliefs and ideas, and not ones to casually dispense dated advice to writers of another generation. During my time in this program I also attended a required art review writing class with the New York Times art critic Ken Johnson. Johnson was one of the very few writing professors I ever encountered who actually made my writing noticeably better (rather than, for instance, advising me to make my writing sound more like their own), and this set him in stark contrast. As someone who paid for her entire undergraduate and graduate education herself (largely through loans), it bothered me beyond belief when a “dead” professor would pretend to teach me—performing the service as though just sitting in the same room and breathing in their exhalations was something I should feel grateful for. Johnson’s feedback, though sometimes a bit vinegary for my sensitive taste buds, was constructed in a way that allowed me to feel like learning from him wasn’t a complete waste of my time or my money. He was also nice to me in a gruff, avuncular way: he knew my favorite artist was Ryan Trecartin, and introduced me to Trecartin at an art event (this, by the way, had no bearing on my “success” as a critic—I’d hobnobbed with artists far more influential than Trecartin). It was just a kind gesture that I remember to this day.

And it is with Johnson that we alight upon one of the signature events that would come to define the purview of the past 10+ years, one that will hopefully prove the thesis of this bit of writing (i.e. that the art world and perhaps the world in general has chosen the dead over the living). As a portion of you may remember, in 2012 Johnson was at the center of a controversy that painted him as being at best an out-of-touch art critic and, at worst, a racist. In a review for the New York Times, Johnson examined an exhibition that featured, among other things, the historic work of black artists who used assemblage in their practices.

His review irked a few people, which rolled into a great number of people, and there was a big hullabaloo about this event that seemed to go on and on. There was repeated questioning of why someone like Johnson was given “power” in the art world (a query that, to me, drastically misunderstood what power in the art world looks like). I defended Johnson throughout this and lost one of my closest friends (an individual who’d attended Choate or somesuch rich kid incubator but who was newly identifying as both the oppressed and as a self-styled warrior for the oppressed) for doing so. I was accused of being basically a feckless teacher’s pet, revealing a great misunderstanding of my fundamental character (I have a knee jerk resentment toward all presumed or unearned authority and would never view a professor or anyone else as someone to defend or even respect purely because of some baseless hierarchy).

In my heart, I believed that those (dominantly caucasian, by the way) who read Johnson’s words as racist (and, with another piece, as sexist) were not reading them closely enough–or, more importantly, in good faith. Reading art criticism is not like skimming a celebrity profile on vanityfair.com. With good criticism, a great deal of nuance is folded into every sentence. I believed then, and still do now, that too many people who weren’t accustomed to reading contemporary criticism regularly were making comments about a piece of writing that they were not endeavoring to understand in good faith. It seemed to me like most people who involved themselves in this debacle came for the racism and stayed for the sexism—and could only view Johnson’s writings through those lenses. I was reminded of myself at seventeen, newly power drunk on critical feminist and race theory, drafting an essay on (of all things) Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête that vilified the work as sexist and racist. 

The chair of my program at SVA (and someone whom I considered to be a mentor) David Levi Strauss publicly penned a denunciation of Johnson—a critic he’d previously included as a professor in his own program. I saw this maneuver as calculated to distance himself from the now-sullied Johnson, and potentially as an attempt to place himself in the pockets of the virtuous. Part of Strauss’ scolding included the fact that he himself used this whole Johnson kerfuffle as a “case study” for a class he taught, which seemed pretty wild considering when I took the exact same class with him a few years earlier we focused feverishly on the study of magic and its relationship to religious images in the Renaissance—which I enjoyed learning about but which in no way felt directly relevant to contemporary art criticism. Johnson replied to Strauss’ arrow, and his final words outlined a shadow of things to come: “What kind of a lesson is this for student critics? If I were in Strauss’s class, I might conclude that the only safe route is to avoid writing anything contrary to today’s academically orthodox wisdom regarding race, sexuality, gender, identity and other such sensitive topics. If the petitioners have their way, criticism will be bland or it will not be at all.”

And he is correct: criticism is now bland (“You can always scold the Whitney Biennial, the longest-running survey of American art, for not being better—but, then, you can always scold winter for being cold and gray.”—it’s true, you can!), or not at all. And most good art has followed suit. The show Johnson got pilloried for writing about somewhat represents a movement of so-called corrective exhibitions that seek to examine and set right past inequities, and to present the work of marginalized communities who were and still are left out of what the art world calls “the discourse” because of structural and systemic biases. (All of which I believe to be largely valuable and predominantly in good faith.) But because these exhibitions are viewed as both righting and rewriting the erasures and assaults of the past and present, they are seen as having an unquestionable social good coupled with an almost magical curative value.

This means that they were and are immune to any form of what is now known as “traditional” art criticism, because to most people “criticism” means to criticize negatively—and in this milieu that would amount to punching down. To my mind, the art world has finally found an irresistible loophole in its own system for both evading expert criticism (which is rarely one dimensional and often examines the good and the bad in presentations–adding to their overall meaning) and for ostracizing those who don’t signal unquestioning devotion to its implicit or explicit objectives. The question is: who will ultimately benefit from this? I have strong doubts, given my knowledge of who ultimately holds the reins in these worlds, that it is or will be the populations that many have pinned their hopes on. I have even stronger doubts that an art world exempting itself from the stress tests of serious criticism has a great chance for long term survival. 

Indirectly, the idea that the main goal of contemporary art is to rewrite oppressive or dismissive histories has also created a default assumption that there is and will always be a yet-to-be-discovered history of oppressed creators buried under the boot of colonizers—an underground art wellspring inhabited by the populations who were shoved to the side in favor of the “winners of history.” It would seem to many that the “work” of uprooting these narratives and exposing them to fresh air is never done—one must “ABC”: Always Be Correcting. As an adjunct who teaches the history of photography, I often have to assure my students that, hand to God, there truly isn’t an alternative history that finds cameras and film first invented and used by, say, Arctic indigenous populations. 

I would argue that the Johnson event and the exhibition that inspired his review (which, after reading his words over and over for going on a decade now, I think Johnson ultimately found flawed but valuable, like most things in life), were the first steps for the dead overtaking the living in the art world. I realize that this sounds like a harsh criticism and perhaps to some like I’m defending a racist (I am not), so I can phrase it differently. It was the first obvious indication that a perpetually reimagined past would overtake a forsaken future. The world of culture we live in now is largely hauntological, a never-ending attempt to evade creating the future by recreating the past. You see this in music, in movies, everywhere. People are unable to let go of the past, even if and perhaps especially if, it is a past that wouldn’t have included them warmly. It’s funny that Trump uses the phrase “make America great again,” because this idea—that one can bring aspects of the past to the present and somehow create a better future by default—appears to be the way everyone thinks now, not just Conservatives (or Americans). With this predilection, the horseshoe theory seems intent on proving itself correct. And just like how the bourgeois lefties of the past rubbed elbows with Black Panthers to show just how revolutionarily en pointe they really were, the radically chic move today is to shoot a few rounds with Alex Jones. Everything has changed, nothing has changed. 

In a recent interview on the Nota Bene podcast, critic Dean Kissick reviewed the Whitney Biennial with the following critique: “It’s so conservative and looks so lifeless. And when I walk around a show like that, I feel like contemporary art is dead. And I don’t want contemporary art to be dead. I don’t think it is, but I think a show like that just makes it look so lifeless and over. And I think it’s very bad for art.” So I can trash talk all the art historians with whom I went to school, but it is their purview—modernized to be righteous and not merely romantic—that has dominated the art world for the past decade. Not mine. They won. I scrape by every month on my adjunct work, terrified I won’t make rent. I look around in despair for communities to commune with and places to publish my writing that aren’t steeped in toxic ideologies on “either side,” and am forever worried that I will mistakenly align with the wrong people and be permanently stained in the colors of their war. Not mine.

Fittingly, it now seems that Ken Johnson is only occasionally tapped to write for the New York Times, and when he is, it is to pen obituaries. He is locked in the art world bardo. Some would say he put himself there. Alas, if only he had just gone with the Times. 

Where to begin?

At 17, I moved to NYC to attend Eugene Lang College The New School, studying theory and literature. No one in my small town had ever heard of The New School, but the moment I touched the course catalog in my guidance counselor’s office, I knew I would end up there. The following year, I got an internship at W magazine, the first in a string of fashion world internships and joblets that soon led to a junior-level editorial position at a women’s magazine. This initially felt like a real accomplishment (and not so long after, a real punishment). After quitting the women’s magazine, I ended up at fashion photographer Bruce Weber’s studio, working as his in-house casting director. As an emerging adult who had yet to self-define beyond “look at what cool place hired me,” this was to be the final stop in my whirlwind adventures working in fashion (though this joblet actually had some logic to it: I loved Weber’s 1988 documentary Let’s Get Lost—an Oscar-nominated film that featured artist Jeff Preiss as Director of Photography—and was deeply intrigued by his process as a strictly analog photographer in a world that had swiftly gone digital). 

Almost immediately after taking this job, I realized that I had completely lost my desire to work in this world (at least not full time), and began to find my attention drawn toward the world of contemporary art, which seemed to be exploding open. My evenings were spent going to little gallery openings with my friends, and I was especially drawn to what was then termed “video art” or “digital art”—often performative work that was usually shown, rather awkwardly, on flatscreen TVs that you would just stand in front of. I had also seen, a few years earlier, experimental filmmaker Jonathan Caouette’s film Tarnation, and was especially taken with the fact that Caouette had made his film entirely in iMovie for a budget of $218.32. At that time, a film like this straddled the line between the film world and the art world, and I saw it at both Film Forum (where I sat through it once, then remained in my seat to watch it a second time) and at a small gallery event, where Caouette and digital artist Corey Arcangel spoke (I was a Mario-addled child and loved Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds, and during this event I remember Arcangel telling a story about Guns N Roses singer Axl Rose being stopped at the Mexico border carrying a duffel bag holding just two items: a pistol and a crystal ball. Though I may be remembering this wrong).

At this time, I had never really studied art history, but I was in love with this new art, and I decided to get my MFA in Art Criticism at a fairly recently launched program at the School of Visual Arts. I had been attending the program’s public talks (featuring people like Arthur C. Danto and Carter Ratcliff) regularly, and was very inspired by a professor who taught there, David Levi Strauss, and particularly his book Between the Eyes: Photography and Politics. For my application, I wrote an essay on Ryan Trecartin’s work, my favorite artist at the time. I met with the now-deceased then-director of the program, Thomas McEvilley, author of The Shape of Ancient Thought, and sat in on his art history survey. I can still recall the feeling of his large, soft hand shaking mine, and how kind he seemed. During his survey, he talked about the Western interpretation of yoga, and how one traditional Eastern yogic practice consisted of a man and a woman squatting in front of each other. The woman would menstruate on the ground and the man would subsequently ejaculate on her blood, and then they would mix the fluids togethers and lick them off each other’s hands. I thought: this seems like a program that I would like to attend. 

Because I had many contacts in the magazine world, I was able to get commissions to write about art (and in particular to interview artists) fairly easily, before I even started grad school. And at the start of the 2010s, the first wave of the online journalism shakeup meant that there were a lot of opportunities for emerging writers. Particularly, it was fertile ground for those who could understand the cultural dispositions of 20th century old guard (the types of editors with whom I had worked since I was a teenager), yet who weren’t above writing for “online,” which was then seen as pretty low status. A guy I briefly dated would goad me with the taunt, “Art in America online. T Magazine online,” making sure, in a friendly-yet-competitive way, that I understood that it wasn’t as good as print. So I got commissions, and I ran around interviewing artists, and I eventually started publishing reviews in Art in America print–a symbol of my rising status. I was also working on my thesis at school, which was a history and phenomenology of the pixel. I had recognized the same phenomenon James Bridle codified in his work The New Aesthetic, and was attempting to build my own story of “the way things are now” through my own work. So everything was quite interesting and bubbly at this time, and yet something felt off. Somehow, I knew the world I had entered into and loved so much was crumbling from underneath my feet…

Through a 20th century, Modernist lens, emphasizing the material, this is an easy question to answer: they crack and fall. Beyond any other, the skyscraper is the ultimate Modernist structure–the only era when a secular, man-made Icarus would dare to climb up and rake the sky. Yet the most indelible images we have of these Modernist structures do not depict their soaring majesty. They document their collapse. 

Without downplaying the tragedy of 9/11, the factors that caused the Twin Towers to fall could be focused toward one point of logic: the ideas held within them–the tallest man-made structures in the world at one point, housed within the greatest empire the world has ever known–became heavier and heavier over time. The 20th century notions of what it meant to be powerful, to be merciful, to be conscionable, what it meant to be fair, what it meant to stage and conduct ethical warfare, what it meant to be free, to love God and country, what it meant to be right, or to be wrong, to be segregated or integrated–these ideas and countless more could no longer be contained in these structures. Even ones as big as these were. Those buildings, incidentally, were designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the same Modernist architect who designed the doomed Pruitt-Igoe housing projects in St. Louis. When Pruitt-Igoe fell, and then later when the twin towers fell, large and dense ideas were let loose on the world. And they remain free, in the wild, still.

When the platforms of social media–our 21st century skyscrapers of the mind–first began to claim dominion over our lives, my opinion of Facebook was that it was about the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. But I understood the logic. While it proposed to be “about” connection, it was really about democratizing attention and acclaim. Facebook accounts appeared, from my perspective, like desktop publishing versions of the celebrity profiles found in the magazines I worked for. Looking at them, I thought, “Oh, I guess now everyone can pretend like they have their own feature in a magazine.” That pretending seemed to really strike a chord with people. In the early 2010s I was asked countless times why I wasn’t “on” Facebook, and always answered that it was simply too ugly to look at. I thought that was a good reason then, and I still think that. 

I was deeply attracted to and involved with the world of sophisticated visual seduction, and it was an affront–an insult–to look at something that wasn’t at least attempting to seduce me with its visual presence. Why hadn’t these people hired a top-notch creative director to make this thing look cool? I was far too enamored with the worlds of art and fashion to understand that Facebook wasn’t made for people like me. Fashion and art people might have joined Facebook–and subsequently Instagram, which was a little more their cup of tea. But (unlike the latest art star or a new shade of sweater) these tastemakers were never going to be the ones to shepherd these platforms into public popularity–and in fact it would be the platforms themselves that would soon steal their power to make taste for good. While social media was “new,” it was hardly avant garde, and it went mainstream in the blink of an eye. Facebook was basically McDonald’s for an acclaim-based form of global communication: fast, cheap (literally free), easy, addictive, and meant to satisfy middle-of-the-road tastes. Facebook hadn’t hired a cutting edge visual team in the same way that McDonald’s doesn’t hire Michelin-starred chefs to plan its menus. Instead, McDonald’s oversalts, overfats, and over-sweetens its food to make it appeal to the most basic appetites far and wide–and in doing so, it is a far more profitable business than any one Michelin-starred restaurant could ever dream to be. 

All the 2.0 versions of social media platforms were engineered to appeal to the most mass-market of tastes, and to addict users through their well-known dopamine hits (which occur not because they satisfy our desire for “connection,” but for attention and acclaim). I’m not stating anything new here, but more setting the stage. The structures that govern our reality have specific phenomenological frameworks that in turn have birthed a set of values and behaviors that can arguably be traced directly to the platforms themselves. 

For me, one of the more striking analyses of a platform’s phenomenological character is comedian Bo Burnham’s White Woman’s Instagram video, from his 2021 Netflix comedy special Inside (itself a phenomenological meta-response to the internet and digital culture as a whole). What I think Burnham reveals in this piece is the way in which different platforms give form to the desires of differing populations, but also–and perhaps more so–dictate the way desire itself is understood and expressed. The piece also indexes the character of the Instagram user in a manner akin to French-Italian theory collective Tiqqun and their 2012 thesis (first published in France in 1999) Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl. Burnham’s “white woman” is not obligatorily caucasian or female, but more the mediated representative of what we collectively think of as a typical Instagram user: self-involved, shallow, mid, corny, and performatively political–the pumpkin spice, pussy hat chick. 

What I liked so much about Burnham’s video is the feeling I had watching it. It made me feel like the world wasn’t simply divided into the greedy architects of 2.0 web platforms and the naive, dogfood-chomping “users'' who dwell within them. There was a third category of human that could accurately assess these structures without feeling like their only choice was to boycott them completely or submit to them totally. If one could grok the phenomenology of a platform, one could play within its structures without becoming possessed by its veiled intentions. It struck me as a new form of critical awareness. Burnham also elucidated the way in which certain meme-motifs captured the attention of certain people in a manner where the tail begins to wag the dog–Am I me? Or am I just a collection of inspiring quotes and images of cute and cozy things? 

Through Burnham’s lens, one could also understand the behavioral phenomena of 2.0 platforms as being in some large or small way sponsored by the platforms themselves–even when it translates directly to IRL mores and consequences. For example, “canceling” could be seen as almost exclusively a Twitter phenomenon, in that Twitter is the “place” where an organized boycott can swiftly and effectively extinguish businesses and livelihoods. Images that can be categorized as “thirst traps” are distinctly an Instagram trope–one could relate them historically to the cheesecake images of the 20th century, but it is notable that those images were rarely self-portraits, whereas thirst traps are predominantly selfies made by women to gain attention from men. Expanding out even further, one could view “ghosting” as a Tinder phenomenon–prior to the rise of dating platforms, particularly those with a more casual interpretation of the rules of romance–people often met one another through friends, and the idea of simply never talking to a person after sleeping with them wasn’t poplar, as it would likely negatively disrupt one’s social circle. And OnlyFans has basically democratized and destigmatized the phenomenon of a zipless form of prostitution for a whole generation of female suppliers and male consumers, serving as a rite of passage for many young women. 

Whatever one makes of these phenomena, there is a burgeoning community of artists, writers, thinkers and cultural critics who are able to see the forest for the trees, and who are able to make work that engages with our contemporary digital structures in ways that feel new and useful. When I think of them, I think of my favorite architectural structure of the 20th century: the densely populated and functionally anarchic Kowloon Walled City, an enclave in British Hong Kong that seems more like the setting for a science fiction novel than a real location. The builders of Kowloon Walled City–none of whom were 0 professional architects–used the forms invented by High Modernist architects to create homemade high-rises of their own imagination: 

“As modern high-rises grew up in Hong Kong, the builders of Kowloon copied what they saw, erecting tower blocks of their own. Thin columns, established on foundations often consisting of thin layers of concrete poured into shallow trenches, started to extend skywards. With no requirement for planning permission, structures were thrown up with amazing speed.... Because the high-rises would often lean against each other, residents called them 'lovers’ buildings'.”

If the new platforms that shape and contain are existence are to be purely digital, if we are now all essentially dual citizens in both IRL and online worlds, we need to create structures of imagination like Kowloon Walled City. Citizens need to take the forms of existing edifices and build them into their own unique structural realities, meant to serve their own needs. The creators I am most interested in are perhaps the spiritual grandchildren of the builders of Kowloon Walled City, intent on crafting spaces to grow and think in out of pure thin air.