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There was some irony in my alienation. I did and still do support generally progressive social policies. Marginalized groups should be protected. Money should be taken out of politics. Black people have been historically fucked by the government, with no one picking up the pieces beyond symbolic gestures. I am probably “woke” in the eyes of most conservatives even if I don’t pass every purity test of a tankie Berkeley dropout. But back then, even as a suburban eighteen- or nineteen-year-old college girl preprogrammed with a generic leftist worldview, I constantly wondered if those nodding heads around me sincerely believed in the song and dance of all the pronoun circles, the land acknowledgements, the cloying sensitivity. The screening for “problematic actions” became a staple of gossip about both peers and celebrities, and I couldn’t help but think that a lot of the time it was just a license to take pot shots at someone who was annoying or unattractive without technically punching down.

I remember thinking: I probably broadly agree with you people. Why do my manners or a few exchanged syllables say anything meaningful about my character? I believe in human dignity and will refer to someone by whatever pronouns they’d like, but if you wear that Urban Outfitters sorority-girl-uniform corset and have perfectly blown-out hair, I might fuck up and call you she sometimes, sorry. Why is she or, sorry—they—the non-delusional person in that scenario? My close friends had enough context to not classify me as a certified bad person or look at me differently if I poked at some impolite or taboo subject when discussing “worldly matters” in the privacy of a living room that smelled of stale bong water and essential oils. But they’d grow uncomfortable and greyrock the subject, or tease me while glancing at each other. “There she goes again,” like I was a boomer uncle drinking grape juice while watching Jeopardy and complaining about illegal Mexicans during the ad breaks.

I remember one early summer evening when the sun had just set and the sky was a pale turquoise. I was sitting in one of the rocking chairs on the porch of the flophouse I shared with five of my friends and two of their freeloading skater boyfriends who walked around in their boxers and left their pubes in the sink. All of our parents paid the slumlord the $600 rent. One of those friends, between sips of a craft cider, said: Ava, I really respect you, but some hills aren’t worth dying on. I realized she was right. I might have internally rolled my eyes when someone corrected me for saying homeless instead of unhoused person or pregnant woman instead of birthing body. But I told myself we were all just overgrown children coddled by modernity, trying to figure things out; social contagions come and go and the like. Being accommodating to someone who isn’t acting in good faith, who may be just as lost as you, or more so, never truly hurts anybody. Maybe I just liked being naughty and slightly transgressive in an inconsequential way, while enjoying the cathartic anguish of feeling misunderstood, like the Underground Man. People have had larger crosses to bear than being a little sad that you got the stank eye for wearing an American flag bikini on the Fourth of July. The correctors around me wouldn’t know what authenticity was if it hit them over the head, unlike me. So I magnanimously decided to pity them and their sheep-like tendencies from the right side of history.

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Obviously, college campuses full of affluent, half-formed people aren’t totally representative of the general population, except perhaps, to some degree, the workplace culture of the coastal liberal elite. But wokeness absolutely spread into broader culture through media spectacle: mass-crucifixions of beloved public figures, reflexively zealous HR departments, and the rhetoric of the Democratic establishment, all further amplified by reactionary outrage from the right—a group that seemed to impose fewer social penalties on its own dissenters. Many others have already theorized creation stories for the institutional origin of wokeness. Was the genesis of woke the product of power jockeying among elites for prestigious institutional roles or a cynical repression of class consciousness by the shadowy neoliberal order? Neither explains the spread of wokeness into the phenomenology of ordinary life, the masses readily adopting the language and vigilantism of social justice causes. This isn’t to deny that professional-class institutions rewarded this language or that social media algorithms favor polarization and outrage. Rather, those forces (among other supply-side factors) coincided with social conditions that made this particular form of moral life unusually attractive on a mass scale.

Anyone can see that we’ve become more socially atomized as the internet and social media have become more entangled with everyday life. COVID was the mallet coming down on the carnival high striker, bumping us almost overnight toward Japan-levels of both oversocialization as a collective and undersocialization at the individual level. Life was suddenly fully remote, abstracted, divorced from embodied community, even if it was slowly trending that way before. People still want to feel agentic and like they are good people. What makes someone feel like a “decent person” comes from a fairly mundane host of communally prosocial actions and fulfilling obligations without hopes of applause. Deciding to be a good father or helping the old lady down the street with her groceries aren’t especially ideological. Within these communities, symbolic behavioral policing and self-surveillance existed, of course, but they were embedded in durable relationships and reciprocal obligations. They also miraculously did not assume the same outsized importance as moral ends in themselves. The same cannot be said for online enforcement, which occurs between strangers who bear no obligation to each other. Because of how radically sheltered and abstract our lives became, our morality began to resemble that of an idealistic nineteen-year-old in a liberal college town embarrassed by the security provided by their WASP lawyer parents.

People feel compelled to act out their moral convictions by identifying and condemning the perceived moral failures of others. This impulse wasn’t limited to ordinary lib-leaning people adopting sanitized language or being COVID scolds; there were middle-aged MAGA people screaming about saving the children during the QAnon craze or about how zip ties in mall parking lots are markers for human trafficking of middle class middle-aged women. Somewhere in the inner-monologue of the average person lies the belief that they can protect innocent people, be clear-eyed identifiers of evil, that they are fundamentally awake to what others ignore even if they don’t have much material power. They sincerely aspire to be good and useful to others, maybe with a little vanity sprinkled in. It is easy to write this off as narcissism or status-seeking, but someone can be jockeying for moral status while remaining completely sincere about the convictions that confer it. A person does not have to secretly disbelieve the virtue they are signaling. The internet overwhelmingly rewards moral signifiers that can be easily interpreted by spectators (flags, consumer choices, pronouns etc.) Under these conditions, words begin to register as acts of violence.

When life involves less direct experience with interpersonal moral efficacy, one surveils oneself and others in accordance with the imagined social law. A heightened emphasis placed on identifying and policing symbolic transgressions is what happens in an arena of high moral awareness and low practical efficacy. We are constantly informed about enormous problems while having almost no proportional capacity to alter them, which skews our sense of perceived agency. A lonely, neurotic, but well-meaning person can’t prevent a pandemic, but they can photograph people at a party and report them. It is psychically gratifying to translate comically nuanced, opaque problems into smaller dimensions where one can identify the bad person and “raise awareness.” It is okay while maybe being slightly uncomfortable if this raising of awareness gets the offender fired from their job or expelled from their D&D group.

The part that always tripped me up about wokeness was the sincerity of people’s intentions and whether they were just basking in their own sense of moral superiority. But I was a little too woke about woke people, and I think most people, especially the broader population who adopted a softer version of wokeness’s cultural habits, thought they were fighting the good fight. The title of this was kind of a troll. I still think wokeness is silly and unproductive at best, but now that the dust has settled, the collective victory lap over its ceremonial defeat is equally futile. “Woke 1.0” or whatever people are calling it now was a symptom of a much more universal moral psychology. No amount of removing DEI language and land acknowledgements, or realizing it’s not thaaat big of a deal to make fat jokes will get rid of the underlying impulse or people’s desire to matter to an abstract world. Earlier today I saw a black Tesla parked on a side-street with a blue bumper sticker that said, “I bought this before Elon went crazy,” and for a second wondered if this stranger was just virtue signalling or worried enough that it might get keyed that they took matters into their own hands. But I felt silly entertaining the thought and kept walking.

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For the past few days I’ve been plucking my way through the 1986 edition of the Best American Short Stories, when I have down time at work. The 1986 volume was edited by Raymond Carver, champion of a populist American realism whose unadorned language was meant to be accessible to a wide audience. It occurred to me that many of the simple descriptive sentences in these stories were part of common language forty years ago but now would be perceived as intentional literary flourish. Examples surfaced within a minute or two of flipping back through: names of common flowers, botany, or geography; everyday objects or tools like vise grips or gigs; descriptions of furniture or architecture ie. a drainboard, veranda, panelled walls.

At fourteen I received my first phone, a small lime green iPhone 5c—marketed towards tweens and overseas to lower-middle class Chinese people—which surely altered my mental geography and relationship to language compared to my parents. But I had only monitored access to the internet on the family computer before that. Barring my adolescence and young adulthood, for the most part, the early childhood of my cohort—mid-older Gen Z—was much closer to my parents’ than to that of kids even a few years younger. I had enough analog formative memories to have the same conventional pre-digital vocabulary and mental model of the physical world. Maybe that’s too generous, maybe rather than being closer to those who grew up pre-internet, we’re simply the only digital natives who remember anything different.

Every spring I’d look forward to tending to the annuals and perennials, and going on walks in the thawing woods with my father, who pointed out every type of tree, variant of glistening poison ivy, and wildflower carpeting the forest floor. My mother clipped sky-blue balls of hydrangeas for the woman down the street who just had a baby. Crocuses and snowdrops came after the last frost, the daffodils and bluebells a few weeks later, fragrant lilacs in the backyard in June, then along with July’s hydrangeas, my favorite: the wild tiger lilies covering my whole town.

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None of this was unique. Like many little girls, I liked flowers, and whenever I asked my suburban parents (who weren’t botanical experts), what a certain kind was, they’d answer easily like gods and I’d index it away. Kids don’t go outside as much anymore; even my childhood was a far cry from the latchkey working-class boomer childhood of my parents. But even accounting for differences in formative exposure to nature, small talk about flowers was never really about building a robust shared understanding of nature. There were much larger zones of overlapping practical vocabulary, reinforced by broadcast media, local life, household work, and greater exposure to unspecialized physical environments. The scenery, the weather, or everyday domestic affairs used to be social glue, safe common experiences to build rapport with acquaintances or strangers. Now that we have endless channels of information that are tailored to our interests and dopamine receptors, signifiers of the mundane are interchangeable, a Google search away. Whereas it would take years of study before, now there are hobbyists on the internet, who have accumulated so much botanical knowledge, they can more or less accurately geolocate a picture based on the ferns alone. One wonders whether, outside of their specialized interests, the rest of their mental repository is equally granular. Now when we interact with others we can more efficiently index only what is relevant to our curated reality and discard the rest as set dressing. We not only exchange less universal language, we wouldn’t bother to internalize it even if there were a little state-sanctioned robot on our shoulder forcing us to make small talk with our neighbors to recover the social fabric.

I picked up Best American Short Stories as a palate cleanser after a couple of weeks of rereading Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. Its crisp minimalism was a rebuke to Proust’s clause stacked upon florid clause. In my first pass through Swann’s Way a few years ago, I meandered through the dense prose, attending only to the philosophical notes that stood out to me. A couple of weeks ago I tried to do a more comprehensive reading and decipher the ironies and political commentary that were nested among references I let slide the first time through, for fear of pedantry. Thankfully many of the turns of phrase and French historical references that could not be inferred from context, were footnoted and then explained in a notes section in the back of the book. I wonder if the modern young reader has the same relationship to pre-internet literature that I have to Proust, except the gap is a couple of decades rather than a century.

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Literary minimalism in the tradition of Carver was so resonant, because while it was more accessible to the general population, it did not sacrifice the sophistication in the construction of its ideas. It was inherited from Hemingway’s iceberg theory, in which seven-eighths could be submerged for the reader to implicitly reconstruct it. What facilitated that reconstruction was the latent, visible material, which was composed of dialogue and descriptions of setting and action, all rendered with spare, precise language that could be understood by readers from all walks of life. The tip of the iceberg was anchored in a shared physical and social reality. Much contemporary prose that uses the same flat, minimalist style is less effective because the spareness implies a hierarchy of importance without the submerged element. A work of thinly-veiled autofiction about being a graduate student having an identity struggle can be read as profound or ”darkly funny,” if written in flat, declarative prose, even if there is nothing underneath.

Internet lingo or memes are increasingly used as a replacement for this older ledger of shared references—an extreme case is Honor Levy’s My First Book. These signifiers, only loosely tethered to spoken language, have a half-life of a few weeks until a new symbol is minted from the bread and circuses: the churn of the internet and people who see themselves as the modern equivalent to writers, “content creators.” On the sentence level, prose of 1986 realist literature is not much harder to parse than today’s. The reason a young reader might need footnotes for it is that the annotation horizon tracks the decay rate of the shared referent. That decay rate has collapsed from centuries (Proust and the modernists) to years. A meme-compressed novel from 2024 already needs footnotes in 2026. Proust’s century-old references were worth annotating because they opened onto the narrator’s and Swann’s perceptions of memory and infatuation, perceptions so universally human they remain immediate a century later.

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I grew up going to Catholic mass each Sunday. My father was from an Irish-Catholic family of eight from the south shore of Massachusetts. My mother’s side was also Catholic and from the Azorean Portuguese/Brazilian diaspora of the Fall River area. Everyone around me growing up was at least Catholic on Easter and Christmas. I’d no idea America was a Protestant nation until a grade school history class where my teacher ventriloquized people’s reservations about John F. Kennedy. The veneration of saints and gothic-style stained glass windows were mundane to me. I went to CCD classes and learned all of the history, the jargon, and the million pedantic definitions for words that seemed to mean the same thing. By the time I was of confirmation age, my parents had relaxed about the whole thing and felt their cultural obligation had been fulfilled. This was fine by me because it was all terribly boring at best, the root of childhood neuroticism at worst, and one less obligation after school. Every day I’d come home from my after-school job at a bakery, smoke pot in my room, read a book, fall asleep for three hours, wake up ashamed and think of all of my life’s transgressions in order to motivate myself to finish my homework by two am, rinse and repeat. I was a new woman.

In the last couple of years, I’ve met a number of young people who’ve either expressed a tentative interest in Catholicism or started attending mass. Two of whom have gotten confirmed as twenty-something adults. I didn’t view this as a bad thing—belief in higher meaning and community tends to be good for people—just kind of bizarre. If I ever find God, I myself will probably stick with the one I was born with, but I had to remove the context of my own life to see what makes converts of the most secular generation to date.

According to a Harvard study, between 2022 and 2023, Catholic identification among Gen Z respondents increased from 15 to 21%. Similarly, Harvard Divinity School announced that its 2025 class included a historically large proportion of converts. It isn’t a huge surprise that post-pandemic, young people, who are increasingly conservative relative to Millennials, are looking for community and tradition. For people who come from somewhere under the Protestant umbrella, why not embrace the church you know? For those raised in secular households, why Catholicism?

There have already been think pieces covering Catholicism as a religion for the internet age. Its pageantry, iconography, institutional history, all great fodder for intellectually curious urban young people who are overly online, hungry for old-world meaning and something vaguely transgressive against the liberal consensus that saturates academia and the coastal milieu. While I think the relationship between virality and Catholicism’s deeply aesthetic nature is intriguing, this is not going to be a culture war piece on Dimes Square. But I don’t think it is entirely just another identity charade among New York hipsters trading the pieties of wokeness for religiosity. It does not fully explain why some young adults are doing something as concrete and unfashionable as attending Mass, entering OCIA, or getting confirmed.

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I guess I was being slightly obtuse before, overshadowed by a cloud of buried teenaged resentment. I recognize as a painter and lover of beauty that Catholicism is sensually arresting on all fronts. I would be lying if I said that I don’t have dreams where I can smell the Advent candles so vividly, that I’m shocked upon waking to find myself in a dark room lying on my boyfriend’s chest rather than in a New England December. I love Flannery O’Connor’s guilt, grotesquery, and moments of intrusive grace, or Claire Keegan with her stories full of beauty, silence, moral injury, and mystery. I find that while reading these writers who contain a Catholic conscience, I am carried along with a force, similar to when indulging in trashy true-crime writings about cults or conspiracy theories. It feels like a forgotten native tongue and deeply voyeuristic at once. Catholicism has always understood that intense aesthetic experiences inspire moments of awe. Though less embodied, I’m sure scrolling past a baroque painting or photograph of a sweeping cathedral has at least some effect on a lonely young person surrounded by suburban sprawl, strip malls, boxy 5-over-1 apartment buildings with walls that are wafer-thin.

What made Americans wary of JFK, that he might have had loyalties towards a foreign entity incompatible with American self-governance, is what now draws young Americans to Catholicism. We are a Protestant nation; even the many nonaffiliated were raised on a secularized Protestantism. America was founded on a Protestant work ethic, sense of individual exceptionalism, self-reliance, etc. Catholicism doesn’t necessarily rail against individualism with its emphasis on free will and the individual conscience, but it does reject sovereignty of the self. One should surrender the autonomous self to God and the institution of the Catholic Church. Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism contains the widely debated claim that Protestantism created capitalism. Regardless of the validity of that idea, it’s undeniable that Protestantism was part of the machinery that shaped the American dream. Its death, amid stagnating class mobility and increased globalization, has led to a longing for authoritarianism and decreased faith in liberal democracy. I’m not saying every young person interested in Catholicism wants to hump Donald Trump’s leg or is interested in a move towards an authoritarian state (the ones I know are fairly left or moderate) but the appetite for hierarchy and discipline has the same old-world sensibility.

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That was an entirely cerebral, vibes-based hypothesis I constructed from a remove, but I wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth. My friend (who I’ll call “V”) very recently got confirmed after being raised evangelical and reevaluating his faith (for background: he is employed, college-educated, twenty-something, engaged, very normal). I wanted to know what prompted his pivot towards Catholicism and if my suspicions have any basis.

1. Out of all the branches of Christianity, what about Catholicism was most compelling to you as someone who was already Christian?

I made the switch to Catholicism from a Baptist/evangelical Christian background because Catholic teachings frame the relationship between God and the broader world in a way that makes more sense to me. The biggest contributor to that is the idea that the virtue and beauty of created things (nature, the saints, church buildings, statues, etc.) is seen as cooperation with God rather than competition. For me, this has led to a fuller sense of what “faith” means.

One way this manifests is that the physical space of a Catholic church favors ornate decoration and beauty as a way of cultivating reverence. A Catholic church, with its statues and incense and murals, is meant to be a mirror of heaven, and that makes the faith feel that much more real. Another angle is the focus on good deeds, like serving the poor, as a way of making God’s love tangible. Hearing these teachings made me feel like the blind man feeling the elephant for the first time because I realized the ways of showing love for God were so varied, to the point where it felt a bit like adding new senses.

For evangelicals, by contrast, ornate church buildings tend to provoke instinctive suspicion, because the beauty of the building is seen as distracting from or competing with God’s glory. In my experience, care for the earth and service to the poor were also minimized in favor of deeper knowledge of the Bible (though of course Christians of all traditions would agree these are good things), with the reminder that good works “don’t get you into heaven.” The common thread was a distrust of the material. I think this leads to an overreliance on what cannot be felt or seen, focusing exclusively on the words of the Bible and the sermon, to the point where other channels of reverence get dismissed or cut out entirely.

Two other benefits of this worldview: it’s much easier to see the world in a nuanced way, without defaulting to black-and-white distrust of anything that is not explicitly God. And the “kingdom of God” is understood as manifested in the charity of ordinary people - instead of worrying about what you need to do to get into heaven, good deeds become a way of making earth more like heaven. Both of these views align more closely with my conscience and answer doubts I previously held.

2. How much of a role, if any, did Catholicism’s aesthetics, art, or dense history play in drawing you to it?

It definitely played a secondary role. I grew up listening to a lot of classical music by composers like Mozart and Vivaldi, whose work was heavily influenced by (and often written for) Catholicism, and I now feel a stronger connection to them, and to many other figures who shaped our artistic landscape, knowing my expression of faith would be somewhat familiar to theirs. As silly as it sounds, the first time I heard of a piece called “Kyrie,” my first thought was of a certain basketball player, because I grew up not knowing the Mass that, until a few hundred years ago, every Christian would have known intimately.

3. Have you found community through the church you attend? Have you interacted with other young people?

Definitely. That’s one of the nice parts of the OCIA process. There were fifteen to twenty other young adults in my cohort, and it was great to get to know them. I was surprised by their spiritual maturity; there seemed to be an implicit recognition that there was an element to the human experience greater than the purely material. I’d also describe most of them as quite politically liberal, bucking the narrative that the Gen Z Catholic revival is led by “red-pilled anti-feminists.” And I’ve felt a surprising amount of warmth from acquaintances who grew up Catholic, most of whom I’d never really talked to about faith before.

4. If you had to hypothesize, what do you think makes Catholicism attractive to young people compared to other Christian denominations?

Like me, I think many young people are drawn to its timelessness. We live in a time when the foundations of society seem to be constantly falling out from under our feet: the COVID lockdowns, wokeism, populism, Trump 2.0, the job market. It’s easy to feel like society is going in the wrong direction because it seems not to know where it’s going at all. Being able to slow down and partake in an institution that is universal not only in space but through time has real power for a generation that has been through so much societal thrash.

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V’s answers surprised me in some ways. He didn’t speak of order or direction. In his eyes Evangelicalism was too austere, too black-and-white, with tunnel vision towards anything outside of the written word. Catholicism revealed an appetite in V for the divine transposed onto the material world, in beautiful works of art, in good deeds. But while it was a far cry from a yearning for an older authority, the allure of timelessness shared some tentative common ground with my less charitable speculations. What stands in direct opposition to Catholicism as frivolous material for aesthetic digital posturing is the sacramental. In an age where new lingo and signifiers are pumped out and abandoned within weeks, where everyone lives untethered in parallel algorithms, Catholicism’s investment in the material world and embodied rituals stands apart. Its institutional failures should neither be ignored nor excused, and they give many people good reason to distrust its claims to authority. But for a generation raised to stare at things and themselves staring at things, the strangest possible countercultural act might be to kneel, slightly hungover, in a creaky pew on a Sunday morning.

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Sources:

• Harvard study https://www.americamagazine.org/editorials/2025/12/11/gen-z-evangelization/

• Harvard divinity school converts https://www.thecollegefix.com/bulletin-board/harvard-catholic-ministry-sees-largest-class-ever-of-converts/

When I was six years old, the idea of eternal life was terrifying. We die and then live forever. Every possible version of the self occurs; every action repeats until choice itself becomes meaningless. I thought that a true afterlife would be napping with my mother on our screened-in porch during a summer rain. The infinite seemed perverted to me. I did not want to enter the pearly gates and meet the eyes of relatives I’d barely known, all of them fully briefed on all of my worst thought-crimes. But this humiliation would dissolve eventually because all future permutations of action and oceans of time could cancel out these sins and past selves. It didn’t take long into childhood to forget the primordial feeling of this terror. I still can’t fully empathize with that feeling even if I remember the outline of it. This was at the ordinary developmental stage when you first comprehend the gravity of loss, your capacity for attachment, and the embarrassing depth of your own sentiment. The rainbow bridge began to sound appealing. Being absorbed into some collective consciousness, becoming one with our dead parents and ancestors, seemed beautiful rather than dreadful. None of this was especially precocious or revelatory. I think a significant number of secular people who grew up culturally Catholic or Jewish probably have had this trajectory. But this essay is more interested in a specific contemporary moral temperament that often proceeds this metaphysical uncertainty.

Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being responded to an analogous, even more dreadful hypothetical: Nietzsche’s eternal return. When one dies, one is reborn into the same life, with every action destined for infinite repetition. This novel matters to me because it attempts to thread a very fine needle. Kundera understands that suffering comes from both nihilistic diagnosis, which liberates us from meaning, and from heaviness, which bears the burden of the totality of meaning. The task, then, is to recognize the futility of existence while choosing weighted meaning in the form of love, responsibility, loyalty, attachment. I write criticism and am fairly politically heterodox so I have no pure ground to stand on. But what makes Kundera’s philosophy incomplete is also what makes it seductive to people like me, someone who is a part of the contemporary mode of most people interfacing with ideology and systems of belief. The total condemnation of kitsch and sentimental certainty can produce a class of secular people who are allergic to a fixed position, and prefer to remain outside as clear–eyed deconstructors and refusers. I agree with Kundera’s suspicion of false moral certainty, and the brilliance of his diagnosis and artistry, but his half-hearted prescription or lack thereof feels incomplete. Kundera’s suspicion of kitsch is artistically and morally useful when aimed at totalitarian sentimentality, but in contemporary liberal culture, that same suspicion has spoiled into a generalized allergy to belief, attachment, and political commitment or mythmaking.

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being presents two categories: lightness and heaviness. Lightness may be the nature of existence, but a full spiritual embrace of it leads to nihilism and listlessness. Heaviness, meanwhile, can be naive, self-abnegating, and a root of suffering. Tereza puts her youth in the palm of a man who cheats on her. She agonizes over her body, and its failure to confirm her fantasy of singularity, of a “real self” made visible in the eyes of her lover. Franz, a romantic idealist, projects his ideals foolishly onto women, politics, and history. Tereza is portrayed with the most doting sympathy; her devotion and softness are made beautifully tragic, but Tomas is the true protagonist and clearly Kundera’s shadow-self insert. You can sense this is in the way the novel sometimes grants him the “lovable rascal” treatment. Tomas, a light character, chooses to rein in his light impulses and chronic womanizing that tortures his wife, by accepting a smaller, pastoral life. Tomas and Sabina’s lightness contributes to their unhappiness, and Tomas is partially redeemed by the end. Yet the novel still gives lightness the glamour of erotic vitality, intelligence, skepticism, existential honesty etc. Sabina sees through the oppressive sentimentality and false totality of Communist kitsch. She lives a glamorous life of cynicism and teenaged rebellion, even if it leaves her dissatisfied in middle age. This obviously was a more subversive message in the context of Kundera’s own life, fleeing Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia, than it is now in current western liberal democracy where traditional moral institutions have been endlessly deconstructed to varying results. But this attitude remains fashionable, even if it has outlived much of its usefulness.

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In a certain educated, secular, left-liberal milieu (academia, social activism, online politics) Kundera’s anti-kitsch impulse has hardened into a moral reflex. It distrusts sentimentality, moral certainty, inherited attachments, national myths, family myths, romance, beauty, loyalty, and political innocence. I guess a “positive” belief is in the inherent virtue of the materially or politically marginalized, but this is organized around negation in the form of a struggle against hierarchy. Which is ironically a form of kitsch in itself. This polarity against traditional conservative morality has always been necessary as a counter-weight. But when deconstruction becomes the governing moral impulse, it creates paralysis instead of liberation. When there are no longer stable norms to define oneself against, then who are you? What do you do when every positive belief, attachment, desire to belong to something, is cannibalized by suspicion? In my admittedly elitist opinion, this irreverent temperament is better left to artists and novelists, whose task is often to shirk political pieties in pursuit of producing works of art that cannot be metabolized by fixed meaning. But it’s terrible for general morale and political progress. Just like how we always seem to converge into having a certain amount of people who are left-handed. The right has a vision of a future, the source of which may be a false nostalgia rather than any sort of superior creativity, but they still have a positive belief in something. A politics that only dismantles inherited meanings without building livable replacements eventually loses to even bad myths, because bad myths still offer belonging and direction. Even if they are embarrassing or ugly. I cannot entirely blame Kundera for leaving this problem unresolved. The question of what sort of heaviness is essential and what distinguishes it from false righteousness, is a difficult one.

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There is an inherent narcissism to writing or producing art, even if its latent content isn’t internally focused. A belief that your arrangement of observations and ideas is worth shoving in front of people. There is an even greater narcissism in believing your interiority and pain could be interesting or meaningful to other people. Sure, the pretty young mentally ill female autofiction writer or essayist has been run ragged in the last few decades. Most of the time I’m more partial to writing with narrators that lack self-knowledge and are fumbling around in the dark like those in Flannery O’Connor or Raymond Carver stories. But writers like Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, and Marguerite Duras have reached me in ways beyond relatability or self-exploration, completely changing my perception of language and mental modeling of other people’s consciousness. All through staring at their belly button. In my own essays, I haven’t divulged information about my own troubles or anything truly intimate about myself. But the “I” is still there even if I’m not the topic. I’ll pepper in personal anecdotes in service to my argument or to mitigate seeming cold or above it all from what I’m criticising. The line is thinner than I’d like it to be. What is this line anyway and does it even matter?

Joan Didion’s method was to use her own neurotic sensory experience to make sense of the confusion she felt was tumbling around her. Through her pathological migraines, detached relationship to her physicality, and sense of dread, she overlaid these sensations with flat observations of the images and characters around her, giving coherence to the shapeless entropy of the 60s and 70s in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and the White Album. Critics like Barbara Grizzutti Harrison griped that she was fundamentally incurious and filtered everything through her own sensibility, a sensibility that was born of an elitist self-importance from an upbringing as a wealthy Californian WASP. Maybe the sensibility part is correct—Didion had a clear taste hierarchy and sense of her own discernment. And this legacy isn’t helped by the legions of bloodless imitators who pontificate about their lives in a clinical way. But I think incurious is fundamentally false, and that her tendency toward judgment or coloring things with her own sensibility doesn’t dampen her curiosity or insight. In “Why I Write” Didion explains that she writes from “shimmering images” and tries to arrive somewhere through the process of writing itself. She makes sense—rather she creates conditions where sense might partially emerge—of the temperature around her, by walking around in the blotted darkness of the immediate context window of her mind, letting objects appear and arrange themselves. Play It As It Lays isn’t autofiction but it uses this same method. Maria spends her life driving on the freeways of Los Angeles and Santa Monica, killing time inside the tepid blankness that she swims in. In one of my favorite Didion essays, “Holy Water,” her obsession with the movement of water through infrastructure ends up distilling more about California than any direct treatment could. I find that hardly incurious.

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There has been interesting criticism of the personal essay’s ravaging of the literary landscape over the last twenty years and its continuing legacy. “Against the Personal Essay,” by Owen Yingling for the New Critic arrives at an insight into the 2025 incarnation of the personal essay and autofiction genre. Yingling argues that the form is no longer someone merely chucking a self-obsessed screed of trauma laced with a vague social justice narrative into the laps of a faceless crowd, but as the selling of a parasocial intimacy to a following through the confession. I am less interested in the politics of autofiction than in cultural criticism if I’m being honest. If you are going to turn yourself into art on the page, go right ahead. The sad reality is that not everyone can be an expert on themselves like Sylvia Plath or Karl Ove Knausgaard. The fact is that most people are unimaginative and lack the self-awareness that neither their break-up with their college sweetheart nor getting fingered in a karaoke bar is interesting in the greater context of their life. Some people have exceptional lives and wisdom that will never see the page. This is fine. What is of significance more than the literary content itself is the voyeuristic curation of a parasocial audience. For example, Substack influencers like Worst Boyfriend Ever will never be Jack Kerouac. There is a short half-life in writing about seducing and mistreating cluster B women with the prose sophistication of Diary of a Wimpy Kid with none of its cleverness, all while cloyingly insisting that he is deep and misunderstood like a melodramatic anime character. The paper-thin grift will run out and the test of time will filter out content—not literature—content like this, just like it did with the confessional Jezebel essays about wearing a butt plug in public as an act of feminist resistance. Young men will grow up and realize there will be many coked-out nights where you end up sitting on a couch next to some random rambling like this. When the birds start chirping someone starts putting cans in a trash bag.

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There is something more slippery about the current hybrid of memoir and cultural criticism essay in the tradition of Joan Didion. I’m not going to name names because there are many and you know it when you see it. It typically takes the form of a Carrie Bradshaw-like magnifying glass to their own dating life. A more elevated version is a thin Mark Fisher analysis of beauty or social media micro-trends, filtered through the drama of their own life. Cultural criticism is the vehicle, and the self is the subject rather than the other way around. A lot of these women seem intelligent and like they would have interesting, precocious writing if they had grown up before the current attention economy and hadn’t been teenagers when vulnerability was regarded as a high art form in the 2010s. The criticism itself or rigor isn’t what’s being sold; it’s the performance of a young woman making cultural observations while exhibiting her melancholic interiority, sometimes even making a meta-aware criticism of this. This is popular on Substack not because of any new insight but the reader is part of the journey of self-discovery. In the conclusion, the essay circles back to the theory, and the reader feels an intimate solidarity in that they are all in this so-called neoliberal hellscape together. Some who you could superficially pattern-match to this are actually frequently insightful and will hopefully, with age and experience, sand down their TikTok-inflected edges, and produce work that isn’t so topical. You could apply this to my territory—this essay is partially inspired by my efforts to straddle that line. Maybe I overstep sometimes. Eventually our belly button lint will age like a fine cheese.

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The prudish conservatism around sex that is spiking within gen z is at least partly a reaction to how pornographically explicit everything has slowly become. Men are fatigued by their porn-addictions they’ve had since ten years old and women are becoming skeptical of the pop your pussy to stick it to the patriarchy sentiment that was primed by the liberal feminism of the last twenty years. There is of course the pearl-clutching that every generation eventually does about the sensibilities of the next. Sex has always sold and probably always will, but I’ll touch on a few conditions part of the puzzle of our current schizophrenically prudish and permissive atmosphere: social media and algorithmic feedback loops, the complete absorption of sexual liberation into consumer culture, and the parasocial element of digital prostitution. If you think I’m handwringing and have selective memory, I think it’s an objective fact that there has been no other point in modernity where young people don’t sleep with each other anymore but a song like WAP is used in a presidential campaign.

The progressive euphemism, “sex work” has always felt dishonest and sanitized to me. “Sex work” within modern discourse could elicit the image of a trafficked fentanyl-addicted Eastern-European woman walking the strip or an influencer whose father works in private equity, leveraging her online following into paying her $50,000 a month to pose in cheap lingerie, and then publishing a poetry book about her mixed feelings about the whole thing. In the new cyber realm, it’s referred to, sometimes cheekily, by both its consumers and confused apologists as the natural digital consequence of the “oldest profession.” I think in the online dimension of things, “digital prostitute,” is a term that is more honest than sex worker or “Onlyfans model” appended by the vague glamour of “model”. I don’t think the word prostitute strips someone of human dignity even if it has a degree of social stigma. What I’m interested in is what happens when we name the transaction plainly, because then we can start to see where it leaks. When we undress it.

The “whoring” of the self is rewarded not in just the sexual sense. Influencers and celebrities who don’t necessarily appeal to men or have an in-your-face sexuality structurally sell their personal lifestyle and parasocial intimacy to their following. Then there are digital prostitutes who advertise their sexuality with softcore pornography on Instagram while also cultivating a persona, so they can sell themselves as both sexual objects and sources of false intimacy to men on platforms like Onlyfans, who aren’t psychically satisfied by the readily available troves of porn on the internet. Because the Instagram algorithm rewards semi-nude pictures of women with a higher engagement metric (Algorithm Watch), this produces figures who capitalize on both markets, appealing to men, driving clicks via mild titillation and sexual presentation, but primarily selling aspirational lifestyle content and sense of parasocial friendship to young women, who see the social validation and then imitate their presentation.

A downstream example of this is a popstar like Sabrina Carpenter who has the “sexy baby” presentation, lyrics that leave nothing to the imagination, often striking the doggy-style pose on stage or pretending to give the microphone a blowjob. But her primary fanbase is young women and little girls, not necessarily men. Sexy popstars aren’t novel, but in the current landscape, industry machines behind figures like this were greenlit to push the envelope further than Britney Spears dancing around in a schoolgirl skirt or Katy Perry laying semi-nude in cotton candy. The New York Times discussed the discourse around her newest album art, her posing on all fours like a dog while a man drags her hair like a leash. There was a viral mixed reaction: is it just a young woman expressing her sexuality, a cheap shock grab, cynical self-objectification, or is it tongue in cheek and “for the girls”? I think the true interest lies not in the content itself or its artistic execution, but the possibility that a marketing team capitalized on this fatigued tension around the meta of female sexual expression and who it’s for.

A large misconception that men have is the extent that women are catering their gaze directly for them. There are definitely some women who dress provocatively with the male gaze as their primary motivation. But I think a majority do it because they want to look sexy and cool to other women. The psychic structure of women watching themselves being watched, is described by John Berger in Ways of Seeing and later echoed in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, as an ever-present internal surveyor. The little man inside our heads has a pathway that is counter-intuitive to the outsider. Indiscriminate male sexual validation and attention is not at the forefront of a lot of women’s imaginations as they slip into candy floss outfits or wear wedgie yoga pants to the gym. The source of the unconscious gaze with which women surveil themselves may be rooted in male sexual desire, but it is filtered through the external layer of peers and symbolic order of society, rather than an imagined audience of ravenous men that they can hoodwink and financially extort.

As the weather has gotten warmer, I did my bimonthly catch-up on my Instagram feed. I saw both friends and acquaintances posing on vacation or at the beach in a g-string with an arched back, sometimes with clumsily facetuned proportions. They would not look out of place in the feed of a digital prostitute advertising to potential Johns. Most of these women I know personally are not wildly promiscuous, are in long-term relationships, some even lesbians. Over the years, I’ve posted myself in a bikini a couple of times, to remind myself and this vague “other” that I have a figure, and that I should timestamp having a young body to muse over in a couple of decades. A friend told me a man she slept with in college drunkenly admitted to jerking off to her Instagram pictures—before they’d even met—and told her which ones. Unhinged and gross—at least on the surface he was a normal-seeming faceless frat guy, not some Reddit neckbeard hiding in a basement. The morning after the fact, we chewed on bagels and reviewed her profile together; each beach picture or cheeky halloween costume had a disproportionate amount of saves, while most of her other pictures had none. I checked my own instagram, and saw the same thing, feeling both horrified and stupid.

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From a feminist moral perspective, I find sexual commodification and pornography negative for women as a class. But there is also a pragmatism that recognizes that on some level there will always be a segment of the male population with a desire to purchase women for sex, in-person and online, or through the less direct channel of consuming pornography. People take this pragmatic recognition and run, using it as a lazy justification for normalizing porn and prostitution, writing off male desire as something uniformly bottomless and depraved, which neglects the larger picture and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This fuels the nihilistic view that women might as well cash in on it and subject themselves to varying levels of psychic damage that might not seem immediate—especially if the physical danger is removed and they control the production from the safety of their Bushwick apartment. There is also the reality that feminist moralizing seems to have little impact on the behavior of men or stopping other women from capitalizing on their sexuality to varying degrees. Most men stop using porn when it starts affecting their mental health or sexual performance, not out of any principled concerns about exploitation and the rapes of women and children. I find this fact deeply sad.

A feminist complaint is that women shouldn’t be held responsible for the perceptions and bad behavior of men. In theory I agree, female sexuality has been commodified far longer than modernity. Men have testosterone coursing through their veins combined with a socialization that frames sex as an object to be earned, something done to or taken from a woman. But if we really want to move the needle, it shouldn’t be at the mercy of individual consumer choice or a change of heart by male consumers. Rhetorically arguing about what is just or what is retribution changes nothing.

A woman who surgically alters her body and then sells herself on the internet is not brave or empowered. She’s worthy of compassion as another person with human dignity, maybe pity, but not admiration. Especially if she also cultivates a female following on the side, telling girls what surgeries she got to seem transparent like a close friend or older sister, showing her extravagant lifestyle, sometimes acting as a madam for curious younger girls.

Digital prostitution might make people less squeamish because the physical dimension of sexual exploitation is taken out of the equation at least in perception. The topic is treated with kid gloves because the most visible representatives are the select group of women who at least claim to be independent from a pimp, usually come from at least middle-class backgrounds or were famous beforehand, and wax on about how this was their choice and they even find it fun at times. But eventually, when there is that large amount of visible capital to be made, the norms of the “oldest profession” will make their way into this cyber utopia of “empowered” prostitutes. This consolidation creates a cottage industry run by “managers” aka pimps around the recruitment and control of young impressionable stock. Many of these women and girls already idolize internet personalities who engage in adjacent behavior and popstars who make corporate sounding music about both sexual submission and contempt for men. The downstream effects trickle down to young men’s perceptions of normal women—that most women would take a gamble as internet whores if they thought there could be a return. This suspicion is irrational and obviously not the fault of women as a collective. It is, again, unfair that we should be punished for a pattern-matching born out of sexual insecurity and a porn-addled view of female sexuality, but it would be naive to ignore that the optics are not helped by its algorithmic influence on women’s self-presentation and visibility in broader media and popular culture.

The traditional pornstar still falls under the same umbrella of self-commodification and porn is still harmful for similar reasons. I think the parasocial element of the Onlyfans-style selling of sex is more psychically potent, when the line between what’s real and fantasy is blurred even more and women on some level recognize this. The vitriol aimed at a B-list Euphoria actress Sydney Sweeney started after she sold her bathwater in a men’s soap brand partnership. I have no idea if it was intentional on her part, but people likened it to when a popular Onlyfans model went viral for doing it a few years before. An actress who engages in this sex-work-coded parasociality—but is one agent among many worse offenders—gets all of the heat because it feels passé or antifeminist to level it against a card-carrying digital prostitute. Getting mad at a literal whore is politically incorrect.

The fact that fewer young people are dating or sleeping together is partly due to social atomization and other economic factors, but also the distrust that is sowed between men and women as a consequence of the way both sexes relate to sex. If you want to generalize across groups, some men view sex as capital to be acquired, paranoid that the goods are being damaged without them, rather than an experience that happens between two people. This in turn causes women to fear male sexuality, or worse, becoming cynical and utilizing their own, independent of their own libido. Or more commonly: naively attributing the little man in their mind as their own erotic will, filtering their sexual satisfaction through their own desirability. This leaves no room for mature female expression of sexuality to be viewed as an innocent assertion of self and womanhood. Or male sexual expression to be viewed as a motivation to find companionship even if temporary, rather than predatory or threatening.

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To return to my usage of digital prostitute and the associated social stigma around the word prostitute. There can still be an appropriate stigmatization around the buying and selling of sex, putting guard rails against it being “normal”. There obviously should be feminist support for legislation that protects actual women walking the street, while arresting pimps and johns. Yes, sex work is labor but it is spiritually and structurally different from other forms of work which is a different essay. Prostitution should never be “normal”. It was a mistake to make it seem like college-aged girls getting naked on the internet for a Birkin bag is the same thing as picking up a new bartending job with insane tips and better hours. However, the social contract around this consensus shouldn’t come from a conservative moral framework. Recognizing it for what it is, prostitution, doesn’t mean that women forced to walk the street are fallen or contemptible. Same with the college girl who gets flown to Miami to model swimwear or athleisure, is drugged and raped, the video threatened to be sent to her family if she doesn’t start an Onlyfans. They are victims and any breathing person who isn’t a psycho can recognize this. Cases where women are under no duress and have other alternatives are something in between, which maybe cannot be placed by any of the existing frameworks, but not empowered.

The reactionary return to our puritanical American roots is certainly not the answer. But neither is the hyper-permissive attitude towards sex as a pornographic spectacle. Part of the problem is that the real of sex is simultaneously so mysterious and so natural that we attempt to contain it within ideological frameworks. Sex isn’t sacred because of religiosity, or merely because it’s biological and natural, but as a site where two people, strangers or lovers, steal a momentary glimpse of the other at their most vulnerable and physical. In all other moments, this person is sealed from us in the gaps between language. The pornographic view is more easily swallowed: women are opaque sex objects. Men are opaque sites of desire that women must perform for in order to feel beautiful and complete. When coupled with the parasocial intimacy sold by internet prostitutes, this picture seems like it might not be completely empty, to a young man at a computer desk. Dopamine pathways are still enforced in the same dark room, the floor littered with Doordash bags and the exoskeletons of Corepower shakes.

When I think of Euphoria, a show that is supposed to speak on gen z’s stunted sexuality, what comes to mind is some buzzy actress I can’t remember the name of with bad lip filler, arching her back, skin covered in purple glitter. She lifelessly moans into the camera and winks; the director is actually in on the joke and doesn’t feel embarrassed about insulting your intelligence. I don’t care about TV much, so I’ll invoke a movie which has no nudity at all, that is more human on this matter. A man sits in a booth. A woman sits behind a one-way glass because he is paying her. She can only see her own reflection. He turns around on his stool and speaks into the phone. His tinny voice carries the words, not of desire but a confession. She remembers their life together. They don’t leave together; the booth is still a booth.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/14/style/sabrina-carpenter-album-art-feminism.html

https://algorithmwatch.org/en/instagram-algorithm-nudity/

Like many kids my age, my imagination was completely captured by the zombie craze of the 2010s. As we played zombie freeze-tag, I’d take it a little too seriously. I’d wonder if zombies overran the school, would I have time to run home through the woods, and gather my family to bunker in our attic? I was born after 9/11, so I don’t have direct access to the zeitgeist of the turn of the millennium. But my father used to talk about the hysteria around the year 2000, all those boxy macbooks going black, the stock market surging as investors poured billions of dollars into preventative infrastructure. And even more formative for him, the Cold War paranoia. When I was a teenager in the mid-late 2010s, there was a latent climate anxiety. Estimates projected my childhood home to be underwater by 2025. While these estimates were a little extreme, no one cares anymore; some even view it as these institutions crying wolf to sustain themselves. The social atomization of Covid—I lived and attended college in an extremely liberal area where everyone was hawkish about it for almost two and a half years—almost felt apocalyptic in the beginning, but soon became “the new normal”. While there is now ambient social unrest and a vague nihilistic resignation towards things going down the shitter, there is no broader feeling of eschatological dread distilled into some sort of narrative.

Maybe this is just a feature of no longer being a child with an overactive imagination, reading YA paperbacks about fallen worlds or Stalinist dystopian utopias. That part of adulthood is just building a stronger resistance to the banal crawl of modernity, having personal responsibilities, material distractions, and aesthetic preoccupations as numbing agents. But I can’t shake the feeling that there is some greater spiritual cause to the utter lack of doomsday fantasies. If I told ten-year-old Ava about AI she’d be reeling even if that’s a topical example. But it’s still an embodiment of how rapidly technology and our relationship to it have changed in the last ten years compared to the last few centuries. You would think this would create a lot more latent anxiety which would then latch on to some object. Our monkey brains were not made to live in this fashion. What we’ve done in the past is create elaborate frameworks of meaning and mythology to give ourselves something to hold on to.

Meta-Cognition is Now Ubiquitous

That lunch period in December 2012 would not be possible anymore because of the lack of monoculture. People are increasingly living in their own realities—I didn’t know about the Artemis II moon landing a week ago until my boyfriend told me yesterday. But the recognition that we are increasingly living in our own algorithmic bubbles with diminishing shared context is a pedestrian observation that is kind of a beaten horse, like if I were to pull out the clear-eyed angel of history floating there while we are blind to the wreckage behind us. What I think is more interesting and relevant to this topic is that we have an unprecedented meta-cognition of the machinery behind events and narratives. It’s not that meta-cognition itself is new (The Reformation, the Enlightenment, and early modernity all involved crises of narrative authority) but the speed and ubiquity of it is.

We have access to online discourse about any event. To some extent we can detect the machinery that goes into crafting a narrative even if we don’t holistically determine what is true. I remember reading Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky as a teenager and being left with a residue of nihilism and exhaustion. There was a curtain flung back. But now on some level, unlike when there were three major broadcast news channels, many people live with the curtain hanging wide open; they have submitted to the fact that their consent is manufactured. One must now wade through a much more psychosis-inducing web of contradictions delivered through endless coiling channels, before giving up, feeling more demoralized, going to TikTok or short-form content to get a dopamine hit of slop fed to them. I’ll use Covid as an example even though I hate talking about Covid. Everyone saw the two narratives that formed in reaction to each other. There was one of progressive solidarity towards the common social good. The other was in reaction to contradictory claims made by authorities and the authoritarian moral righteousness of the other side. There was a feeling of precarity and ambient anxiety, but this fear was domesticated because of the great pacifier of algorithmic technology, giving way to tribalistic distractions or dissociation. Living a life this cerebral, the average person is more disconnected from their animal drives and fears.

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I think the fantasy of civilization collapsing is a healthy response by an individual psychically navigating living in unnatural modernity. In the fantasy of a fallen world, everyone is reduced to their base drives, competing over physical resources. Your god-ordained specialness spares you from the billions of people who died for this new eden. But then when you exit that fantasy, you are relieved that you do not have to live with brutality, that you live in a world with house cats and day trips to the beach on summer weekends. We have been doing it for thousands of years—the Aztecs, the Mayans, Judgment Day etc. These were all responses to existential anxieties: getting conquered and erased by another group of people, natural disaster, famine, drought etc. Even up until recently we’ve exercised this muscle. Now there are existential threats presented to us in hysterical terms: the collapse of democracy, the shift towards a tech-oligarchy, mass-unemployment. But none of these have translated to mass public outrage or some psychic transference besides a constant shrugging of the shoulders about how things are getting worse.

Synthetic Vs. Real Fear

Soren Kierkegaard in Concept of Anxiety defined anxiety as the dizzying awareness of one’s own freedom. Apocalypse narratives convert this free-floating anxiety into a fear-object which is productive and healthy. In childhood, you use fantasy to explore your anxieties by creating monsters under the bed, the grabber in the woods, or imagining what would happen if you jumped off a balcony and splatted on the pavement—in no suicidal sense, just to see the consequence. Adult humans have also used fantasy and symbolic structures to mediate anxiety and the feeling of untetheredness with religion, ideology, mythmaking, pursuit of material wealth, and personal imagination. What’s happened now is that meta-cognition has dissolved every possible fear-object before it can solidify. The shrugging of the shoulders can be thought of as a form of the Kierkegaardian despair, a despair without knowing. It might seem anesthetic to the person but it is a passive spiritual resignation. Like many people, I’ve read Either a couple of times but have never finished Or so I might just be freeballing right now. But my Mayan rapture story is about kids who made a leap, a leap that has become increasingly hard to make. This isn’t due to a superior rationality. In the current state we are in, reflexive irony and meta-awareness have corroded the capacity for passionate commitment to any framework of meaning, even a temporary or playful one. Instead we are stuck in infinite reflection.

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Not all apocalypse narratives are created equally for this purpose. Genuine eschatological dread that belongs to everyone is an equalizer, serving no one’s particular interests. Zombies worked because they are an animal threat. They were useless in politics, as identity signifiers, or to position you in a culture war. The Cold war had both synthetic fear and real fear. There was a real fear that rippled through all of America: the existential threat of nuclear annihilation, a threat that was indiscriminate. McCarthyism was synthetic: apocalyptic rhetoric instrumentalized for political positioning. But the point is that they coexisted, and the genuine fear absorbed the ambient anxiety. It did the heavy lifting so the synthetic stuff operated in the background. The current two apocalypse narratives on different sides of the political spectrum are the collapse of democracy and on the right: the ethnic replacement of white people via immigration. These have the form of eschatological dread but function as identity performance. Fear can be a mobilizer but in this way it’s rarely used productively. Rather it’s used as a vehicle to position yourself relative to other people, leaving it unresolved and ambient. People go to happy hour with their friends, circlejerk about it, and leave feeling tipsy and disgruntled. The meta-cognition: because we can see the machinery behind these stances, means we can never experience them as genuine fear. This has made people unable to metabolize the real feeling that accompanies them or engage in parallel mythmaking.

What Do We Do Now Besides Doom??

I keep coming back to the lunchroom in 2012. Not out of nostalgia—I don’t think that moment was precious because we were children, or because we were naive, or because we hadn’t yet learned that the world is a series of overlapping performances. We were already learning that. Some of us had iPod touches and (fewer) unrestricted internet access. We knew, on some level, that the Mayan rapture was not going to happen during fourth-period lunch. But the room was small enough, and we trusted, wanted to trust each other enough, and the fluorescent lights were buzzing in that specific institutional way, that we could make the leap anyway. We chose to sit in anticipation for twenty minutes, drum on the tables, and then laugh about it at recess, feeling too embarrassed to voice our relief, but quietly looking forward to returning home to another dinner of overcooked meatloaf.

Kierkegaard’s leap of faith is often misread as a retreat into irrationality and a giving-up on thought. This comes after reflection is fully exhausted, after you’ve turned the thing over so many times that you’ve proven to yourself that no amount of thinking will get you there, leaping because you know better. The knight of faith is the person who doubted completely and then chose to commit anyway, with full awareness that the commitment is absurd. This is what the infinite reflection of meta-cognition has made impossible. We flail around the hamster wheel of seeing through everything, through the narrative, through our seeing through it, performing our awareness of the performance. That meta-awareness is even taken as a meaningful final position or liberation. This is Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage dressed up as an exhausted completion: a permanent hovering above commitment, aestheticizing one’s own paralysis.

It’d be difficult to unlearn meta-cognition, and you probably shouldn’t want to if you want to have any shared social context with other people. What’s slippery is that we’ve let meta-cognition become a terminus instead of just a transitory state. This might sound earnest to the point of silliness but my classmates and I needed to decide, together, to balance our recognition of what’s imaginary/constructed with experiencing the communal effect from this creation of belief. That was the leap, a movement through and past irony, a combination of dread, relief, and a knowledge that you are on some level, performing. This doesn’t require some performance of pristine, pre-modern sincerity.

We are a civilization standing at the edge of Kierkegaard’s abyss, having seen all the way to the bottom. What we do next is a matter of whether we are willing to jump anyway, to feel the full animal weight of being alive in a world that is, by any honest assessment, terrifying and alien to our nature—and then to sit back down and finish our popcorn chicken.

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On my first read around 2018, when I was sixteen or seventeen, I remember enjoying its humor and absorbing the book as a dreamlike, extremely aestheticized depiction of depression in the form of a series of plotless vignettes, like a beach-read version of the Bell Jar that I kind of forgot about. I had a much different experience on second reading a couple of years ago. I don’t think that its commercialized and well-trodden premise negates the fact that it executes something interesting, though at times clumsily. The cultural reception of this book is what truly interests me and prompted me to reread it, and reveals the contemporary metamodern relationship to authenticity.

I’ll use Timothy Vermeulen’s and Robert van den Akker’s definition of metamodernism outlined in “Notes on Metamodernism”: an oscillation of the modern and postmodern, between a sincerity and ironic deconstruction. I have another essay which introduces this framework and its distinction from post-modernism in more depth.

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Metamodernism Present in the Text

MYORAR is structurally a late postmodern novel that is received as metamodern (I’ll elaborate on the latter claim in the next section). It at times attempts an aborted wink at a David Foster Wallace style “new sincerity” angle: the earnest Whoopi Goldberg fixation, the last twenty or so pages of the book. But if you get rid of those, it is effectively a postmodern work on the surface: the narrator, stunted by grief, has an astute diagnosis of the inauthenticity of the performative nature of existence under late-stage neoliberal capitalism yada yada yada, but retreats into detached numbness and oblivion. What is truly intriguing about the book is not its latent content but its occasional structural glitches alongside the accurate portrayal of grief. These two things were what interested me so much on second reading, but can be whiplash-inducing for someone looking for more tonal refinement.

The novel has the familiar darkly satirical approach to the excesses of New York/broader urban elite society in the nineties and early aughts—relationships are transactional and interchangeable, consumer and aspirational culture bad etcetera—as Bret Easton Ellis or Chuck Palahniuk. Her best friend Reva, her striver mirror, who she shares a spiritually sadomasochistic friendship with, is the vehicle much of the story’s thesis is indirectly built by. Reva is a middle-class striver (her Chinatown designer handbags and fruitless dieting) and has a fierce attachment to the world the narrator rejects as false. The narrator rationalizes her resentment by claiming that Reva endures her disinterest and mild abuse with obstinacy because the narrator naturally has everything Reva desires and her squandering abjection offers Reva comfort. Regardless of whether this is self-deception or an accurate reading, Reva actively grieves her dying mother, is foolishly infatuated with her married boss, and has aspirations for herself, regardless of their shallowness; she dies at the end of the novel “wide awake”. Reva is a post-modern satirical object in structure, but on a closer read, not fully. A purely postmodern reading says the tragedy isn’t that Reva feels things, it’s that everything she feels things about is worthless, and she can’t see it.

But within Reva, there are occasional cracks of an unadulterated sincerity that the book half-heartedly gestures at, which in my opinion at times makes it straddle a metamodern line. Reva grieves her mother earnestly, how most psychologically healthy people process grief, with periodic emotional release and genuine sorrow. The emotionally stunted narrator loses her mother to suicide and her father to cancer while she is a sophomore in college, detaching from this traumatic event. She clinically describes her complicated relationship to her parents, only getting analytical when she is shielded by sardonic irony. I think the more significant reading of this book is not one of depression induced by late-capitalist hyperreality but the radical detachment that comes from grief from a traumatic event, and the lifelong pre-grieving of a mentally ill parent. The book’s pussyfooting around it, and its clear loathing of contemporary therapeutic and self-help frameworks, is the most structurally accurate depiction of having to endure that I’ve come across in contemporary literary fiction, rendered in completely negative space.

I have no clue what the authorial intent was, but the clear indirect sincerity of the grief narrative, commentary on the unserious posturing of the art world, 9/11 timeline, parts of Reva’s characterization, and the resolution of the book point towards some attempt towards a DFW “new sincerity” flipping of a postmodern narrative. But the effect is metamodern because Moshfegh structurally introduces the sincerity extremely late with a hand that is both heavy and slippery. The narrator’s aha moment could be taken as a turning over a new leaf of sincerity. Or her passive consumption of this tragedy on her TV—as she did with Whoopi Goldberg movies—could just be a vacation into sincerity before returning to the comforts of detachment. In this way MYORAR can oscillate between postmodern irony and sincerity, making it metamodern in effect.

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The Metamodern Reaction

I think Moshfegh gets unfairly cast as a punching bag because of her position in the literary world and MYORAR/her broader writing becoming some sort of cultural object or shorthand for something, like an A24 movie. She is a competent writer of middlebrow fiction who gets hailed as the millennial female Kurt Vonnegut because of how little people read. I could be wrong but I don’t get the sense Moshfegh asked for either of these or takes herself very seriously. Her lack of political legibility and refusal to sanitize the banal human ugliness of her characters, often being pegged as an irreverent nihilist, add more fuel to the fire of takedowns from more serious literary critics. There is also backlash from more casual readers who picked up one of her books because of a rave review from an acquaintance or some social media algorithm. Either simply underwhelmed or offended by it having a realist New Yorker story’s polish but with the occasional “retard” or reference to anal sex sprinkled in.

People interface with MYORAR in a metamodern manner, not because they recognize it as metamodern, but because that is our current nature. I’ll use the two common colloquial appraisals I’ve encountered among college-educated young women. The only thing I’ve read in full online is Andrea Long Chu’s hit piece on Moshfegh’s Lapvona and her broader writing. It spills more blood on the page about Chu’s political sensibilities and perceptions of the author’s intent than Moshfegh’s actual writing—effectively a more eloquent and funny version of the first interpretation. There are probably more substantial criticisms of the book that this will fail to address and I like some of Chu’s other writing—please don’t send a dead cat to my house—enough throat clearing.

The first objection to MYORAR is from post-modern detachment masked as moral sincerity—the book is ‘problematic’ and from the perspective of an overrepresented, privileged voice. Her outlandish privilege is structurally necessary and a postmodern satire of the tortured “poor little rich girl”. I don’t think it’d be realistic or make the book better if the main character—a misanthropic Connecticut snob in the year 2000—was an underdog or viewed the world through the lens of a protagonist in an Ocean Vuong book. In a lot of ways it’s more honest than many other millennial “sad woman” books, where the protagonist, usually a self-insert for whichever MFA programite decided to contribute to this oversaturated genre, has a much more obfuscated hedging about their social position and an occasional ambivalence about traditional morality that is framed as quirky and honest rather than ugly. I honestly don’t think it takes that much critical thinking to understand this even if you have other objections about the book. But this comes to my point—this posture of moral sincerity towards the aesthetic sensibilities of the book is a cynical, ironic positioning of the reader as someone of enlightened moral sensitivity. I don’t think most of the people who parrot this opinion are unintelligent. I think they flag the certain unsanitized or surface level “politically incorrect” aspects of the plot, or are made uncomfortable by the almost absurd and surreal circumstances/worldbuilding contrasted with the realism of the narrator’s internal, pedestrian and familiar ugliness, maybe even recognizing some of those incorrect impulses in themselves. This allows them the license to override a holistic evaluation of the book, embracing what they see as the correct opinion, an engagement with a work that is both metamodern and fundamentally morally lazy.

The second reading is one from sincerity masked as ironic detachment. They ironically identify with the ridiculous main character and her cool detachment and psychically borrow the fantasy of embodying her aspirational qualities. This is from the sincere position of feeling that they too acutely feel and are dispirited by the vertigo and inauthenticity of striving in an oversocialized modernity, as overeducated middle to upper class inhabitants of a first world country, sometimes on the cusp of downward mobility. It is the sincere fantasy of having it all like the narrator, but knowingly squandering it and refusing to capitalize because of a clear-eyed, useless diagnosis of its meaninglessness. It is a license to check out completely and let the unconscious put in the work sifting through your ontological incompleteness. It is a cope from a place of a sincere longing for a whole and stable authentic self; their plebeian suffering is somehow glamorous. This is an appropriation of what the book argues against (sort of ineffectively)—the narrator’s belief that authenticity comes from detachment is revealed as misguided when she realizes that Reva dies a futile death while living a more embodied existence than her. I think if Moshfegh made the structural conceit more explicitly new sincerity, the book would be much less interesting but I think this misreading would be significantly less prevalent. Or maybe I’m giving the average person’s literacy too much credit and this book would still probably be aestheticized by teenagers on tumblr—I remember kind of being seduced by this almost a decade ago when I first read it. Which brings me to the next aspect, the book as a cultural object.

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MYORAR as a Cultural Object

MYORAR is an accessible book that has elegant but undemanding prose. It’s packaged in a stylish memeable cover of a neo-classical painting of a woman in a white dress, with a knowing, irreverent expression headlined by bright magenta text. It doesn’t shock me that this picture has ended up in the Instagram slideshow of sorority girls who just debuted their first small botanical patchwork tattoo. Maybe a few years earlier, it graced the feed of pretentious artsy types who’ve probably already deleted it and moved on to pretending to be Catholic and and to like Thomas Pynchon. On doing further very intellectual research on this, I’ve found through internet memes and Pinterest boards that MYORAR is often associated with images such as: Lana Del Rey, Sylvia Plath, cigarettes, bruised legs, various consumer beauty/fashion products, ironic catholicism, Elizabeth Wurtzel, benzodiazepine abuse, the Smiths, anorexia-lite, anti-depressants, Sofia Coppola, cocaine, Kate Moss, hyper-feminine and vaguely goth ‘90s fashion. Basically things a certain type of teenage girl or young woman with arrested development thinks are cool, it takes one to know one—but to be fair the idea of posing as a Catholic would have confused me as a teenager and still does.

A book that satirizes the inauthenticity of consumerism and performance under late-capitalism, becomes part of a moodboard of a niche consumer identity of a fashion-conscious edgelord girly-girl who flirts with the aesthetic of mental illness and abjection. This is partly why people have such aggressive opinions about this book. Rather than it being any sort of meaningful discussion of its merits or limitations, it becomes a kind of consumer self-branding. Do you identify with this flavor of white femininity or find it improper and reactionary?

Why Does Any Of This Matter?

In “Notes on Metamodernism” Vermeulen and van den Akker argue that metamodernism is generative in nature, it’s an embracing of the Kantian negative idealism (page 5). Kant framed history as something we act ‘as if’ we know the rational conclusion for the betterment of humanity and to achieve our moral and political goals. This formative reading of metamodernism interprets it as something that moves forward in spite of the failings of both the modern and postmodern frameworks, negotiating between them, making and doing things (like the attitude of the artists at the 2010 Whitney Biennial described by Jerry Saltz). Where my argument diverges is that it is about our receptivity rather than action. Metamodernism creates two very different outcomes based on whether the mode is creation or consumption. MYORAR sits at the hinge, an artistic creation whose structural oscillation between sincerity and irony gets flattened by an audience that oscillates in the same way but without the productive tension.

What I can drum up after circling the well, this far down, is that the metamodern action of creation is a conscious effort while consumption is an unconscious one falsely thought of as conscious. The artists described by Jerry Saltz, were self-conscious of their work that they recognized might be dismissed as derivative and foolish, while alienated from the detached post-modern contemporary mode of art, but went forward with it anyway. They know Vermeulen’s analogy (the carrot on the stick) is unreachable but chase it anyway. On the other hand, when it comes to the metamodern consumption of culture there is an illusion of conscious choice. The reader who says the narrator of MYORAR is fatphobic and suffers pointlessly thinks they’re making a sober critical judgment. The reader who aestheticizes the narrator’s detachment thinks they’re performing knowing self-awareness. Both believe they’re doing something deliberate and legible to themselves. They oscillate between sincerity and irony not as a productive negotiation but as a defense mechanism. This is a toggling between the two positions to avoid ever having to fully commit to either, which is the opposite of the “informed naivety” the paper describes; it is often not governed by conscious thought.

Maybe my memory of my first reading is reconstructing into one of self-aware disinterest out of vanity. While it didn’t stick in my mind until the visible meta-resurrection of this book post-Covid, I’m sure I at least sort of thought the narrator was in some way romantic and identified with it aesthetically as a teenage girl who would have been punching drywall if she was born male. My writing of this essay could also be a symptom of this self-aware positioning. Maybe my awareness of this awareness is an awareness of an awareness. That this essay is both a conscious creation and passive consumption of a position.

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Sources:

1. Vermeulen, T., & van den Akker, R. (2010). Notes on metamodernism. Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677

2. https://www.vulture.com/article/ottessa-moshfegh-lapvona-review.html

3. https://www.metamodernism.com/2010/07/21/jerry-saltz-on-to-something/

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From kindergarten to about third or fourth grade, my sister and I would attend the after-school programs, and sometimes the before-school ones. The staff was incredibly cranky and probably undercompensated. The kids were undersupervised, sometimes bordering on anti-social. It wasn’t until my younger sister started crying and begging my mom not to send her back that my mom took some time off work to be able to pick us up from school.

My family was fortunate enough to trade income for the ability to not engage with dysfunction. This pattern scales; a middle or upper-middle class family that technically qualifies for a social program and would get a better return on taxpayer money by using it often gets frustrated and opts out. When the people with the means to demand better are gone, nobody left inside the system has both the incentive and the power to fix it.

My home state of Massachusetts is the perfect place to test whether this is merely a matter of funding. The state is not underspending on social programs relative to others, so the usual deflection of “they just need to allocate funds properly” doesn’t apply. From a cultural standpoint, the right for the most part isn’t champing at the bit to gut these programs; some are even sympathetic or supportive as long as it isn’t packaged with the explicit label of welfare. Our last Republican Senator, Scott Brown, was effectively a neoliberal, voting consistently with Obama’s legislative decisions 70% of the time.⁴ The dysfunction can’t be blamed on purely ideological destruction, it’s a much less glamorous and sometimes uncomfortable reality.

The state has been making efforts to expand subsidized childcare to the middle class. For fiscal year 2025, the ceiling for eligibility was raised from 50% to 85% of the state level median income—roughly $161,000 for a family of four.¹ There are legislative plans to raise it further, to 100 and even 125%.² This, on paper, sounds great. Private childcare costs crushing the middle class is not a partisan observation. Many families in Massachusetts pour up to half of their income into infant and toddler care. But in a state that invests $1.5 billion³ into childcare and already has 16,000 “enrolled” children on a waitlist, the question isn’t whether to expand. Why would we drastically expand a system that is bureaucratically inefficient and structurally wasteful without first fixing it?

There are three layers of failure which insulate each other from accountability: the political class that defends programs it never uses, the bureaucracy that administers them poorly, and the ground-level dysfunction that breeds fraud. The inability to talk honestly about all three is why the programs stay broken.

The Class Disconnect:

The political coalition that calls for these programs to be put in place and defends them against any criticism never interacts with them beyond a purely abstract level. A couple who lives in Brookline who both attended a mini-ivy and have a coexist bumper sticker on their Subaru is sending their children to private childcare centers. They can’t distinguish between good-faith operational criticism and bad-faith ideological attacks because they’ve never sat in the waiting room. Their relationship to these policies is ideological, not experiential. They have no investment in whether the proper follow-through effort is expended to make sure these programs actually work. Their well-meaning luxury beliefs can be placated through a headline, but they never bother to ask their cleaning lady if she has an adequate place to drop off her children.

The families who would most benefit from these programs lack the same political voice to demand that they are fixed. Even borderline cases and middle class families who will be included after the expansion might not even utilize the opportunity due to stigma around welfare and not wanting to deal with the immediate dysfunction and instead take the strain of private childcare or have the wife work part-time. There might be a conservative leaning family in the Worcester area making $75,000 a year who might benefit from the subsidy or even consider it if it was marketed in a different way. But the cultural framing of the program signals it’s not for them; even some moderate or left-leaning people do not want to think of themselves as downtrodden charity recipients and assume these nets are only for the most abject fringes of society. They eat the cost of private care or cut hours rather than accept something that feels like charity from a political coalition they don’t identify with.

The structural point that emerges from all of this is: nobody in this picture has both the incentive and the power to fix the system. The affluent defenders don’t need it. The working-class conservatives won’t touch it. The lower-income families who use it can’t change it. And the middle to upper-middle class families who might push for quality improvements are the most likely to just quietly opt out like my mother did. And when nobody with both the power and the incentive to exert political pressure is actually watching it, what happens inside goes unexamined because examining it honestly is politically unbearable.

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Dysfunction Breeds Fraud from Within:

The left in America has a bifurcated way of talking about the working poor. Sometimes they are characterized as a romantic bunch of salt-of-the-earth noble savages. Some liberals exude a quiet disdain for them as fat functionally illiterate zombies who don’t know right from left and spit out every bone thrown to them. Either way, it is incredibly taboo factoring them into complicity or wrongdoing without sounding like Ronald Reagan talking about “welfare queens”. The reality is that this isn’t a discussion of the effects of poverty in the moral dimension—this is on a purely structural level. The ultra-wealthy evade taxes, lobby for carve-outs, and have the resources to ignore the rules without retribution a lot of the time. The system itself creates a gradient of behavioral incentives and class does not transcend human nature. I think it’s way more paternalistic and elitist to pretend otherwise. When a program is bureaucratically broken, poorly overseen, and difficult to navigate legitimately, the people most dependent on it and most fluent in its dysfunction are the ones most likely to find workarounds. Some of those workarounds are survival while some shade into fraud.

In April 2025 six indictments were returned against Maritza Juliao, a 52-year-old woman from Brockton, charged with stealing $127,000 from the Dorchester publicly subsidized childcare center she was the executive director of.¹⁰ Allegedly, she gave herself raises, vacation pay, and bonuses that totaled up to $100,000, and paid over $13,000 to a cleaning service agency owned by her boyfriend for monthly carpet cleaning that never took place. Fraud in means-tested programs is endogenous by definition, committed by the people who interact with the system as providers, administrators, or recipients. It makes up a much smaller percentage of burnt through funds than just plain incompetency or structural waste. However, fraud when exposed, is a much more visible and psychically potent sign of bureaucratic failure, lowers social trust, and induces resentment in the middle-class populace who perceive themselves as law-abiding tax-paying citizens who follow the rules—especially when it is done in flagrantly unsophisticated ways that would be immediately caught with a modicum of oversight.

Juliao is an administrative agent skimming from the top. When there is a lack of structural oversight (especially in lower-income areas) and in a more generous light: when the middle-managerial level of bureaucracies are undercompensated, this allows for an environment that tolerates parents who falsify employment records, lie about numbers to inflate the headcount for funding purposes, or let the kid with behavior issues who’s been kicked out of other centers terrorize the other children. None of these incentivize quality care or precision of resource deployment.

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Minnesota:

The mass-scale fraud that happened in Minnesota post-COVID made Juliao’s scheming look like child’s play. Amy Bock, founder of the nonprofit ‘Feeding Our Future,’ and restaurant owner Salim Said defrauded the government of $250 million that was meant to be for COVID economic relief for poor youths.¹¹ The corruption (which already existed pre-COVID to a lesser degree) extended its tendrils from Feeding our Future to allow the involvement of corrupt local government officials, further encouraging coverups and legislative indifference.

City council member Jamal Osman and mayoral advisor Abdi Salah were also found to be colluding with Bock. They created a new optical plan for the organization to focus on serving minority child populations, throwing a large party when Bock won a lawsuit for a wrongful payment freeze she filed against the Minneapolis Department of Education in 2021. Senator Omar Fateh was a supporter of Feeding Our Future; a whistle blower alleged that Fateh tried to contact Attorney General Ellison to smear MDE’s investigation of Feeding Our Future as racist.¹² Associate Asha Farhan Hassan received $465,000, claiming to serve 200,000 meals to children in the Feeding our Future scheme and went on to create her own $14 million healthcare scam, in which she set up a fake autism clinic for children. She cited the need for autistic Somali children needing treatment that “aligned with their culture”, paid local families kickbacks for registering their kids, and filed false Medicaid claims.¹³

It metastasized into a variety of other scattered scams that are still being disputed over in a firestorm of conflicting news coverage. According to federal prosecutors, 84 out of the 92 people charged in the Feeding Our Future, the autism scams (there were multiple others besides Hassan’s), and a different homeless services provider scam were of Somali descent.¹⁴ Coupled with Fateh’s public cynical weaponization of race to insulate scrutiny in a town hall meeting and pretty much everyone involved except Bock being of Somali descent, pundits saw it as an opportunity for partisan scrutiny of Democratic lawmakers and to stoke the flames of the reactionary right.

It had all of the ingredients to perfectly kick the culture war’s hornet’s nest, making objective evaluation within mainstream coverage virtually impossible. There was a recent viral video by a conservative Youtuber, Nick Shirley, in which he visited about 10 childcare centers in the Minneapolis area that collected a total of $17 million of funds from the CCAP. All seemed to be run by Somali people and suspiciously vacant. One locked building with blacked out windows was misspelled the “Learing Center”.

Several liberal news outlets such as NPR, PBS, and the Minnpost outright dismissed every element of the video and any claims of widespread fraud happening in Minnesota or wider America. They rightfully pointed out his sloppy methods, misrepresentation of a couple of the establishments proving to be legitimate, and that his video technically proved nothing. But all end on a unanimous “nothing to see here folks” note and frame Shirley’s video as the totality of the fraud allegations. His ‘investigative journalism’ undoubtedly carried an ideological bias and premeditated narrative and should be regarded with the appropriate skepticism. There’s a reasonable chance that some of them were legitimate and simply wary of a college-aged man with a camera asking if he could enroll his “little Joey” in their program. But I think Shirley being a racially-motivated opportunist and the progressive coverage of this issue being willfully dishonest aren’t mutually exclusive.

The left wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole because it included the ultimate taboo of poor marginalized people engaging in antisocial behavior. On the other hand, conservatives could cathartically revel in xenophobia and confirmation of social programs as parasitic and designed to be exploited. The left’s dishonesty about the situation confirmed the biases of both the right and the unspoken suspicions of disillusioned fence-sitters. The investigation of the iceberg that clearly exists was left in the hands of a midwit influencer so it could spin out of control in a vehicle of reactionary ideology. Massachusetts hasn’t had its Minnesota moment but the underlying conditions are quieter versions of the same disease.

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Trump’s Freeze:

In January 2026, Trump froze $10 billion in funds for childcare services, families in need, and a social services block grant in five blue states. He cited Nick Shirley’s video as part of his evidence of irresponsible oversight by Democratic government officials.¹⁴ Massachusetts tensed in the wake of this but breathed a sigh of relief when the $290 million of federal childcare funding for this fiscal year remained intact. When a system has unresolved dysfunction and no credible internal accountability, it becomes vulnerable to external actors who can use the pretext of that internal dysfunction for whatever they want.

While the Minnesota government has been trying to crack down on fraud since 2018, post-COVID relief funds offered to low-income populations lowered their barriers of access, but also barriers for exploitation. The lack of clarity on the number of Massachusetts childcare recipients extends to every facet of social services in Minnesota.

Kayseh Magan, a Somali American fraud investigator in the Minnesota attorney general’s office, had an insider explanation for why investigations of Somali individuals lacked follow-through. During the first wave of fraud crackdowns around 2020, Democratic officials in the state were hesitant to pursue Somali-Americans suspected of fraudulent activity or audit Somali-run organizations. They feared racism allegations in the wake of the George Floyd protests and didn’t want to alienate a significant Somali voting bloc in Minneapolis.¹⁵ It is clear that a tight-knit diaspora community is overrepresented in this welfare fraud. This isn’t related to race; in the past, networks of Italian, Irish, Polish, and Jewish criminal activities were known to operate while the rest of their population were stigmatized and punished for the actions of a small few.

When we ignore the greyness of human morality interplaying with behavioral incentives, Trump can ignore the humanity of the whole group and send ICE to enact performative cruelty and rip apart families. When a complex issue that is taboo on the surface level is willfully ignored by the left due to political reasons—a squeamishness around the aesthetic faux pas of appearing even vaguely bigoted and an unwillingness to address bureaucratic dysfunction due to hubris and laziness—it is thrown to the wolves.

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The Case Study of Massachusetts:

Massachusetts has a much more contained case of the disease that plagues Minnesota. It has the highest cost of living behind only Hawaii, so the middle class squeeze is visceral.⁵ In 2023, the average family with one infant and a toddler in private childcare spent $46,000—many of these families spending more on childcare than on rent or a mortgage.³ For a family making $120,000 and shelling out for private childcare, that’s a middle-income budget in one of the most expensive states in the country. It only seems logical that subsidized childcare should be extended to the middle and part of the upper-middle class of Massachusetts.

A 2022 report estimates that the state loses $2.7 billion a year. Of that, $1.7 billion falls on families and working parents by forcibly reduced wages and hours, and employers lose $812 million.⁶ Providers had little incentive to open in lower-income areas because the state’s reimbursement rates were pegged to local income levels—centers in wealthier areas received higher rates, while centers in the neighborhoods where qualifying families actually lived were paid less.

When doing my initial research, I saw a number given by William Eddy, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of Early Education and Care, that said 52,000 children were served with adequate state-funded childcare,⁷ but the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation reported 66,000 children. This data discrepancy is emblematic of a system that cannot even measure itself.

The senate passed a reform bill that would have addressed this. It would have created a data commission to track how many children are actually being served, where, and by whom. It would have reformed reimbursement rates so providers weren’t being paid below cost. It would have mandated annual reviews to identify access barriers and streamlined the application process (sections 9, 12, 13).⁹ It acknowledged the need to expand eligibility to the middle class, but only on the condition that the neediest were served first and as funding allowed. But this bill died in the house. A successor, the EARLY ED Act, passed the Senate unanimously in 2024 and stalled again. Some of its provisions (permanent provider grants, the eligibility expansion) were eventually folded into the FY2025 budget. But the structural accountability measures, the data commission, the streamlined application process, didn’t make the cut.

The state cherry-picked the expansion, abandoning the scaffolding on the cutting room floor. At this point, it already invested about $1.3 billion into subsidized childcare, yet couldn’t pass a bill that would have made this money count. By April 2025, the waitlist had nearly doubled from 16,000 to 32,000 after the expansion.⁸ The press release with the flashy headline figure of up to $161,000 for the new income cutoff for childcare looks great and is a lot more immediately gratifying than actually putting in the boring structural work. It is not concern trolling to say that expanding a system whose wheels are falling off by making the vehicle bigger doesn’t fix the wheels. It just means more weight on a broken axle and a bad precedent. It makes people less sympathetic in the long term towards including the middle class in other future equivalent policies like Medicaid expansion or tax credits.

I’m sure there is a lot more invisible low-level fraud taking place like the Juliao case and centers inflating their numbers to varying degrees. But even if that is true and it should be taken seriously, fraud is a symptom of bureaucratic mismanagement that has a fraction of the loss of structural waste. This exact point was used by liberals to downplay the investigations and buzz surrounding the cases in Minnesota. However, because of the sensational element fraud possesses, when unaddressed or suppressed like in this case, it is used as fodder to completely unravel these programs and greatly lowers government trust.

The $2.7 billion lost due to lack of access to childcare in a state that invests almost $1.5 billion to subsidize it and a squashed reform bill designed to address this is damning, but not as lurid as if it came to light that a bunch of the Portuguese and Brazilian diaspora in the lower-income New Bedford and Fall River area were found to be trafficking ketamine through a non-profit—I can make that joke because my mom’s side is part of that diaspora. Stories like this are much more seductive to a middle class that feels both left behind and overtaxed by the government despite following the rules.

The fix isn’t mysterious. Pass the oversight before the expansion. Audit the system yourself before someone with worse intentions does it for you. Stop treating structural criticism as a Trojan horse for ideology and treat it as what it usually is: someone telling you the thing you built doesn’t work. The left can either do the unglamorous, politically thankless work of making these programs function, or it can keep ceding that ground to people who will use every failure as a reason to burn the whole thing down.

Thirty-two thousand children are on a waitlist in a state that spends $1.5 billion on childcare and just expanded eligibility to families making $161,000. The reform bill that would have tracked where the money goes, fixed the reimbursement rates, and streamlined the application process, died in the house. This is something ideology cannot answer for. The expansion went forward anyway. The headline looked great.

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Sources:

Massachusetts Childcare Policy

1. U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Trustee Program. “Census Bureau Median Family Income By Family Size.” April 1, 2024. https://www.justice.gov/ust/eo/bapcpa/20240401/bci_data/median_income_table.htm

2. Massachusetts Executive Office of Education. “Board of Early Education and Care Vote Improves Access to Child Care Financial Assistance.” Mass.gov. https://www.mass.gov/news/board-of-early-education-and-care-vote-improves-access-to-child-care-financial-assistance
   
   

3. Saul Tannenbaum. “Mass. Takes Major Step Toward Child Care Reform.” CommonWealth Beacon, August 2024. https://commonwealthbeacon.org/opinion/mass-takes-major-step-toward-child-care-reform/
   
   

4. Jacobson, Louis. “Jim Rubens Claims Fellow Republican Scott Brown Voted with Obama 69 Percent of the Time.” PolitiFact, June 25, 2014. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2014/jun/25/jim-rubens/jim-rubens-claims-fellow-republican-scott-brown-vo/
   
   

5. Samuels, Dialynn. “Massachusetts Ranked 2nd Highest Cost of Living.” Boston.com, July 16, 2024. https://www.boston.com/real-estate/real-estate/2024/07/16/massachusetts-ranked-2nd-highest-cost-living/

6. Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. “The Untold Cost of Inadequate Child Care.” April 2022.
   
   

7. Eddy, Cristela Guerra. “Massachusetts’ Childcare Subsidy System Is Leaving Kids Behind, Study Says.” GBH News, January 11, 2023. https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2023-01-11/massachusetts-childcare-subsidy-system-is-leaving-kids-behind-study-says

8. Johnston, Katie. “The Cost of Child Care in Mass. Is Among the Highest in the Country. But Vouchers to Assist Families Remain Frozen.” The Boston Globe, April 15, 2025. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/04/15/metro/child-care-vouchers-financial-assistance-frozen/

9. An Act to Expand Access to High-Quality, Affordable Early Education and Care, S.2973, 192nd General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. https://malegislature.gov/Bills/192/S2973/Amendments/Senate

Massachusetts Childcare Fraud

10. Dorchester Reporter. “Former Dot Daycare Director, Boyfriend Charged with Fraud in Cleaning-Service Billing Case.” Dorchester Reporter, April 9, 2025. https://dotnews.com/2025/04/09/former-dot-daycare-director-boyfriend-charged-fraud-cleaning-service/

Minnesota — Feeding Our Future

11. U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Minnesota. “Federal Jury Finds Feeding Our Future Mastermind and Co-Defendant Guilty in $250 Million Pandemic Fraud Scheme.” U.S. Department of Justice, March 19, 2025. https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/federal-jury-finds-feeding-our-future-mastermind-and-co-defendant-guilty-250-million
    
    

12. Pheffer, A.J. “’Aimee Bock Was a God’: Former Feeding Our Future Director Implicated in Alleged Shakedown Attempt.” KARE 11, February 25, 2025. https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/courts-news/aimee-bock-was-a-god-former-feeding-our-future-director-implicated-alleged-shakedown-attempt/89-f50913e5-29a1-4b7e-9b3a-317081fd09a4

Minnesota — Autism Fraud

13. U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Minnesota. “First Defendant Charged in Autism Fraud Scheme.” U.S. Department of Justice, September 24, 2025. https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/first-defendant-charged-autism-fraud-scheme-0

Minnesota — Daycare Fraud Narrative and Response

14. Treismann, Rachel, and Max Hauptman. “YouTuber Behind Viral Minneapolis Day Care Video Turns Lens on San Diego.” KPBS / NPR, February 5, 2026. https://www.kpbs.org/news/local/2026/02/05/youtuber-behind-viral-minneapolis-day-care-video-turns-lens-on-san-diego

15. Abi-Habib, Maria. “In Minnesota, a Fraud That Exploited the Somali-American Dream.” The New York Times, November 29, 2025. Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20260202040614/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/us/fraud-minnesota-somali.html
    
    

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Intro:

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) is like a nightmare that you can’t shake, one that you feel a perverse desire to reenter in order to remaster its chaos. Laura Palmer’s superficially all-American life spinning out of control infects the viewer with a ghastly nausea that builds and lingers. A series of surreal vignettes is interrupted by jarring dream sequences and cushioned by Angelo Badalamenti’s gothic jazz arrangements. Twin Peaks the TV series is a meta-commentary on consumable violence in television packaged as a campy murder mystery sitcom. The spectre of Laura Palmer’s absence haunts the main characters and sends ripples through the local community. The film is a portrait of Laura in the twilight of her short existence, breathing life into her inner world. An increasingly cocaine-addled Laura acts out in self hatred stemming from her troubled home life. She pushes away her friends and family and engages in drug-fueled sadomasochistic orgies with older men; she faces a truly abject end. There is nothing erotic or romantic about the figure of Laura Palmer.

The film is a self-serious fever dream in contrast to the more light-hearted formal safety of the show. It was booed at Cannes, met with walk-outs and mixed reviews, despite now being recognized as among Lynch’s strongest work. Fire Walk With Me elicited such a volatile reaction because it disrupted the viewer’s fantasy of the Twin Peaks universe. It takes the show’s premise—refusing to package the tragedy of Laura Palmer into consumable entertainment that is then discarded—an even darker and more uncomfortable step forward. Lynch has been subject to fruitful criticism regarding his depiction of “women in trouble” and sexual violence towards women as voyeuristic and gratuitous, as merely for artistic effect. Even if these elements appear present on the surface, Fire Walk With Me is deeply feminist and compassionate towards the female condition. It refuses to make Laura’s suffering consumable and was a film that was truly transgressive.

an oil painting of Fire Walk With Me by me: https://avadwyer.com/paintings/Fire-Walk-With-Me/

Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights:

I’ll admit I was rage-baited by the trailer for Emerald Fennell’s 2026 ‘adaptation’ of Wuthering Heights. My favorite Brontë novel flattened into handsome iphone-faced Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff choking Margot Robbie’s Cathy in a Shein corset with a Charli XCX and John Cale mashup in the background. The Victorian-era novel—a story of class conflict, psychological obsession, and how the mutual destruction of Heathcliff and Cathy haunts the next generation—is quite chaste. I was curious how this would translate into a heavily stylized erotic thriller. A movie isn’t bad just by virtue of straying from the source material. Maybe Wuthering Heights, like Anora (2024), intentionally led the audience astray with the trailer and has something interesting to say about fantasy or female desire.

There isn’t really much to say about the movie itself. There has been ample criticism of its casting choices in the months prior to release. Adaptation is far from the correct classification so I am not evaluating it on those grounds. It is more like the film version of a fanfiction: a contemporary fantasy of Catherine and Heathcliff’s erotic life. It tries to position itself as anything other than indulgent softcore pornography by employing decorative artistic hedging. This takes the form of ironic aesthetic excesses and nods to contemporary visuals (like Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006)) combined with grotesqueness (broken eggs in bed sheets, slugs and leeches on surfaces, public hangings, dead pigs etc.) and S&M elements for a facile veneer of transgression. What is more interesting about the film is not its content but the position it inhabits. The Fennell adaptation is the prestige-cinema version of what “dark romance” paperbacks do at the mass-market level: the industrial production of female fantasy.

https://www.vulture.com/article/wuthering-heights-sexy-goos-ranked.html

The Dark Romance Industrial Complex

Going back decades, “bodice rippers” have dotted the aisles of supermarket checkouts and airports, mostly beach reads for middle-aged women in dead bedrooms. Fifty Shades of Grey was an explosive cultural phenomenon in the 2010s. But the scale of consumption of “dark romance” fiction—pornographic romance stories often featuring BDSM elements and abusive relationships—is off the charts in our present moment. In Barnes and Noble, a table at the front of the store is labeled ‘BookTok’. Entire sections are now filled with these colorful formulaically titled paperbacks. I see women young and old sitting on the train and park benches with their legs crossed absorbed into these pastel portals without a hint of shame.

Effects of Gen Z men mainlining a stream of hardcore often violent pornography—usually starting at ten to twelve years old—at the push of a button is rightfully scrutinized as politically and psychologically significant. The female equivalent is left unexamined, dismissed as innocent exploration of sexuality or even empowerment. This isn’t from a moral perspective but a psychoanalytic one: what happens when contents associated with transgression without the structure of transgression is baked into the mainstream heterosexual fantasy template at an industrial scale?

Fantasy isn’t the opposite of reality or merely escapism. In a Lacanian sense it is what organizes and allows us to make sense of reality. It provides the coordinates through which we experience desire, relationships, ourselves. Slavoj Zizek used Lacan to analyze what made Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca—a classic early-20th century gothic romance novel—so memorable. It employs an ancient female fantasy cliche that could be found in some form in the spine of many contemporary trashy romance/erotica books: a rather plain-looking young woman is swept off her pedestrian feet by a brooding wealthy older man and is the inexplicable key to healing his troubled past. Zizek points out that Du Maurier, compared to the traditional literary canon, writes in an embarrassingly direct and often melodramatic style—yet her stories carry a hypnotic and captivating effect. He argues that her relatively unsophisticated directness has the effect of a gramophone; an old recording with its scratches sound more real to us than a perfect digital remastered replication.

The less fantastical literary canon Zizek uses as a contrast to the unpolished Rebecca, are filled with irony, sophisticated framing, and oblique staging of fantasy. Contemporary “Dark Romance” novels are on the other side of the spectrum; they have the same direct fantasy staging as Rebecca but carry none of the friction of fantasy. While Rebecca is void of overt sexuality, you feel embarrassed and implicated while reading it. The erotic charge comes from the tension between the directness of the fantasy while Du Maurier subverts the reader’s permission for enjoyment and carefully walks the line, preventing the story from devolving into wish fulfillment. Eroticism requires tension and symbolic transgression of the law. Regardless of whether a much more watered down version of these power dynamics have always been structurally present in heterosexual sex, the mainstreaming of its most extreme expressions is a different phenomenon entirely.

Dark romance uses the content of transgression—violence, degradation, power imbalance, abuse—as its raw material. Transgression as a structure produces erotic charge only when it encounters a boundary inside the reader, a sense of “I shouldn’t want this.” That internal boundary is what Freud means when he says neurotics flee from their fantasies made real. When socially sanctioned in broader media, algorithmically distributed and rated by explicitness on social media platforms such as TikTok, and presented in neatly resolved stories with the literary sophistication and sentimentality of a sheltered twelve-year old, they take on a pornographic flatness that requires an escalation in severity to continuously meet audience appetites, like visual pornography. These fantasies cease to carry the private shameful personal element.

https://highschool.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-the-rise-of-dark-romance-and-the-controversies-behind-it/

A World in Which We Are Urged to “Enjoy”:

Zizek’s essay, “Masturbation, or Sexuality in the Atonal World” explores Alain Badiou’s concept of the ‘atonal world’. It is the Lacanian-inspired idea of a world lacking a quilting point: when a Master-Signifier pins down the floating field of meaning and retroactively fixes it into a stable order. Think of it literally like the button on a quilted mattress: without it, the fabric slides around freely, but the button gathers the material and holds it in place. The quilting point does this to the symbolic field. It introduces a principle of ordering that reduces an overwhelming, ambiguous multiplicity into a legible structure with a clear minimal difference: yes or no, this or that, permitted or forbidden.

There is a post-modern liberal impulse to deconstruct these quilting points. Zizek uses the example of the politically correct interpretation of sexuality. The erasure of a sense of shame around masturbation (as a vehicle for increased self-awareness, struggle against social oppression, “each person is their (sic) own best lover” etc.) leads to exclusion of otherness in the sexual encounter. While Zizek wrote this in 2008, I think since then, we have begun to examine the impacts of this attitude on men or on a broader genderless register, but it still prevails when discussing or justifying the lack of discussion of female sexual habits. The key move he makes is that masturbation isn’t just literal in this instance, but a structural description of how sexuality functions when the Other is neutralized. Dark romance is structurally masturbatory in exactly this sense: the reader encounters a fantasy Other who is engineered to produce intensity without any actual Otherness, without resistance, without the encounter with the Two that Badiou insists is the condition of love as event.

When Female Masochism is Transgressive:

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is an example of the fantasy staging of the Zizekian female masochist. Laura creates BOB as a supernatural fantasy to screen herself from the unbearable reality that her father is raping her. She self-destructs with drugs and engages in sexual acts and S&M with seedy middle-aged men to compulsively replicate her suffering. The fantasy does the psychic labor of allowing herself to survive by displacing the trauma onto a supernatural figure, reclaiming her agency through masochistic self annihilation. In the middle of the film she comes into contact with the unfathomable Lacanian Real; her father’s face flashes over BOB’s and she momentarily unravels. At the end of the film, when faced with the reality underneath her fantasy—that her father is raping her—and there no longer being any protective layer to strip away, like the Freudian neurotic, she reaches complete psychic dissolution. As she can no longer resist the Real, she is brutally murdered by her father.

Because Rebecca was much subtler in its application of masochism, Zizek uses the poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath to further illustrate this point. She flatly says “Every woman adores a fascist, The boot in the face”. Plath inflicts violence against herself and portrays the father she barely knew as a brutish Nazi, to psychically alleviate herself from the early loss of her father. In the spirit of Deleuze’s point of psychic liberation by masochistic detachment, she stages herself as a holocaust victim at the hands of her father and his vampiric double (her husband) to achieve distance, and to deny the sadistic witness satisfaction and narrative power.

Neither Lynch nor Plath are producing erotic work, even though both deploy the raw materials of eroticism: domination, submission, pain, surrender. The masochistic content serves a diagnostic or therapeutic function rather than a libidinal one. This is precisely what makes them genuinely transgressive—they force the audience to confront the psychic reality underneath the fantasy rather than offering the fantasy as a consumable pleasure.

Fennell’s treatment of Isabella in Wuthering Heights does the inverse. In Brontë’s novel, sheltered and fragile Isabella is attracted to Heathcliff and the dangerous cruelty he represents. But when confronted with the reality of her fantasy, in the Freudian fashion of the neurotic seeking to flee when confronted with the actualisation of a fantasy, she is emotionally destroyed by his abuse. The implied rape during the consummation of their marriage produces their son Linton Heathcliff, a frail and morally weak-willed pawn for Heathcliff’s revenge—the living consequence of Isabella’s nightmare who is absent from Fennell’s film. Fennell erases all of this and makes Isabella a willing participant who enjoys her abuse, and wears a leash and dog collar. The film removes the moment of confrontation: the moment where fantasy meets reality and the subject recoils. Brontë understood that the dark romantic fantasy has a trapdoor, and Isabella falls through it. Fennell welds the trapdoor shut with unsuccessful pornographic intent that is justified through a hollow edginess, yielding an extremely conventional and sexless result.

Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel’s 1967 film Belle Du Jour is a cinematic staging of female perversion with a similar execution to Fire Walk With Me in its dream-like framing of tragedy and libidinal death drive. But unlike Lynch and Plath, Buñuel wants the viewer to feel desire. And unlike Fennell and dark romance, the eroticism is structured around irresolution and discomfort. Séverine’s inability to desire her tender bourgeois husband while compulsively seeking degenerate degradation at the brothel is never pathologized or celebrated. It’s presented as a condition the film refuses to explain or resolve; the viewer is implicated in her desire without being offered the safety of knowing what it means. Like Laura Palmer, genuine intimacy and connection is unbearable to Séverine.

https://film-grab.com/2015/04/14/belle-de-jour/#google_vignette

Is Vanilla Sex and Intimacy the New Transgressive?

In Fire Walk With Me Laura ridicules her boy-next-door quarterback boyfriend Bobby, manipulates him into selling cocaine for her, and dismisses his attempts at emotional and physical intimacy. She continuously cuckolds him with the other love interest, James, who initially presents as the archetypal aloof James Dean on a motorcycle. She also pushes him away after he is revealed to be caring and earnestly interested in her. In David Lynch’s daughter Jennifer Lynch’s the Diary of Laura Palmer, a harrowing text of Laura’s account of her own life, she claims to be repulsed by the earnest conventional sex and love that Bobby and James offer her. Genuine intimacy and tenderness are unbearable to her. While Laura Palmer is psychosexually corrupted by incestuous sexual abuse, for different, far less dramatic reasons, expressions of these desires as aversion to intimacy are surfacing in the collective consciousness of young women.

We live in an age of romantic atomization of young people, with dozens of think pieces emerging every other week titled something like “Why Aren’t Zoomers Having Sex”. We are simultaneously bombarded with permissive messaging around unconventional sex and pornographically saturated media—the superego no longer says “don’t” but “enjoy.” Teenage boys no longer endure the labor of sneaking glimpses at Farrah Fawcett’s tanned breasts in their father’s playboy or skipping back to Megan Fox bending over a car in Transformers. Girls and young women no longer collect boy band posters or like Emerald Fennell once did: find their imaginations inspired by the subtextual yearning in books like Wuthering Heights. They feel the neurotic pressure of living up to a cartoonish hologram of desirability and looping self-hatred, and instead escape into stories where they are the frictionless object of desire and cruelty.

When transgression is industrialized and algorithmically sanctioned, it ceases to function as transgression, and what becomes genuinely difficult (genuinely unbearable in the Lacanian sense) is vulnerability, tenderness, unmediated intimacy. Romantic atomization and the superego commandment to enjoy creates a deadlock which is explored in Michael Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles; one of the side effects of the sexual revolution is the full commodification of sexuality in which the world takes a sexless sterile quality devoid of the romantic. How do we resurrect a form of courtly love and eroticism in a post-sexual permissive world through some sort of return to true transgression or prohibition, if the norm is transgression?

The gramophone image returns once again. Forgive me for being a pretentious hipster or any preciousness, but I have been collecting records for the last ten years, slowly amassing a library of about thirty of my favorite albums, half purchased new and half found fraying in the $1 bins. I like listening to music in the album format and dislike the paralysis of choice and instant accessibility, but the selling point of vinyl records proclaimed by a lot of people is its superior sound quality. I partially agree with this but I’m not an audiophile—I think on a purely isolated sound quality basis there is minimal difference. But the sound of the needle popping on dust particles and occasionally muffling gives an inexplicable crisp embodiment to the music. All of its disparate elements seem to ring in my ears in a way that can’t be replicated in a spotify playlist booming out of a bluetooth speaker.

The reactionary prescription of prohibition isn’t effective because transgression cannot be effectively replaced in our current modern condition. What Zizek offers as an alternative is the equation of sublimation and desublimation. They are effectively the same because sublimation is not the distant ideal, the lady on the pedestal, or the unattainable object of erotic fixation in Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. If this gap is bridged or the lady steps down she is reduced to repulsive sludge.

Returning to Plath, this is illustrated in the much contested mythology of her marriage to poet Ted Hughes which has almost a soap-opera level of tragic drama. Hughes cited The White Goddess as one of his greatest influences and it is legible in much of his poetry about the violent beauty of the natural world. After leaving Plath for his mistress, Assia Weville, Plath took her own life after spiraling into another depressive episode. Weville lamented in her diary that Plath’s suicide transformed Plath’s status from earthly wife and obstacle to the unreachable white goddess. After Hughes continued to chase other women, Weville fatally drugged herself and their four-year-old unclaimed bastard child, Shura. He continued to carry the guilt of these sins but chased this dragon for the rest of his life. When the sublime is posed as merely a vessel of the Other, the site of unfathomable desire and unreachable enigma, it is an injustice.

The truly sublime is “the magic combination of these two dimensions”. The dimension of the sublime and moments of romantic love transpire through the mundane details of shared life: washing dishes together, making love, or cooking dinner together with a record spinning. Like the parable of Hughes’ love-life, Laura Palmer is a character study of an existence completely barred from the flickering between the transcendent and the ordinary.

“Faster and faster. And for a long time you wouldn’t feel anything. And then you’d burst into fire. Forever... And the angels wouldn’t help you. Because they’ve all gone away.”

This is the famous quote from the middle of Fire Walk With Me, when she explains her nihilistic outlook on life to her best friend, Donna. That’s the atonal world stated in Laura’s idiom—a world without a quilting point, without the possibility of the sublime breaking through, where the only available intensity is self-destruction and hedonism. The ending scene seems to answer this. After Laura is relieved from her earthly suffering, she is visited by a glowing angel in the red room, which is then transparently interfaced over her and Cooper while she laughs through tears. She receives the intrusive grace she could not accept until her destruction.

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https://bostonhassle.com/go-to-twin-peaks-fire-walk-with-me-1992-dir-david-lynch/

Sources:

1.”Are We Allowed to Enjoy Daphnée du Maurier?” - Slavoj Zizek

https://www.lacan.com/zizdaphmaur.htm

2.”Masturbation, or Sexuality in the Atonal World” - Slavoj Zizek https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/09505439609526445?needAccess=true

3. “NO SEX, PLEASE, WE’RE POST-HUMAN!” - Slavoj Zizek

https://www.lacan.com/nosex.htm

4. The Collected Writings of Assia Wevill, Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick and Peter K. Steinberg (eds.), Louisiana State University Press, 2021.

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Preamble:

The day after Christmas, when I was fourteen or fifteen years old, I overheard my younger sister filming herself doing a “haul” of her Christmas presents on her iPod touch. This was probably around 2015 or so, which was just a couple of years past the advent of Instagram and when YouTubers still reigned supreme over the internet. Her voice had …

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Introduction:

Silence of the Lambs (1991) is one of my favorite horror-thrillers. It is legibly about gender, institutional power, and the male gaze without it ever being directly stated. The film delivers it through smart camera-work and writing of the character’s behaviors. In the elevator scene, Clarice is surrounded by her male FBI colleagues who seem to tower over her. At the funeral, a shot subtly shows the cops staring at her. Crawford uses her femininity strategically, which the film quietly lets you notice the cost of. Lecter sees through to something true about her (the lambs, the class shame) without the film ever making her explain herself to us in voiceover; by that point the audience could intuit those things. The discomfort is visual and experiential. No character says “it’s hard being a woman in the FBI.” The buildup of glances, framings, and small indignities achieves this.

Silence of the Lambs is a genre film that is as explicitly about something as Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025) wants to be. Sinners had all of the ingredients for success. Its sprawling Panavision shots of the stark blue sky over Jim Crow Mississippi turning dark and claustrophobic in the swampy confines of the night felt like a fresh southern take on the visuals of westerns like Unforgiven (1992). The hypnotic worldbuilding of the first half lingered with a relaxed pacing that reminded me of the beginning of The Godfather (1972). A good soundtrack paired with an ambitious and novel premise—a black southern gothic—made Sinners a welcome addition to the current scene of blockbusters oversaturated with remakes, sequels, and biopics.

An equivalent work in the past would have been regarded as a stylish, decent quality genre-film, and would not have swept a record-breaking sixteen Oscar nominations. Its near-universal critical acclaim is overstated and a symptom of something much larger. Sinners is the perfect example of the confused blending of the lowbrow and highbrow that has slowly infected the landscape of film in the last fifteen years. It has the affectation of prestige, with a glossy contemporary take on classic cinematography and a hodgepodge of interesting ideas that it merely gestures at and abandons. It’s not that campy genre films with ambitious artistic and intellectual goals can’t be effectively executed and worthy of serious artistic merit; it’s that now as long as it has the ingredients, whether it’s done effectively does not matter anymore. This new brand of ‘elevated’ genre film—a careful grafting of performative depth and entertainment—is a result of institutional, economic, and cultural shifts that have completely altered the mode of production and consumption of film within the last fifteen years. But first, what exactly does Sinners do and fail to do?

Sinners - A Case Study:

I enjoyed Sinners but it ultimately left me unsatisfied. It featured impressive cinematography, competent performances, a great score, and gutsy moments in isolation. One of my gripes with it, as with a lot of ‘prestige’/’elevated’ films of the last five years, is its muddled conceptual execution. It references a scattering of lofty ideas: the history of blues, the legacy of the Jim Crow south, critique of organized religion, music’s spiritual bridging of life and death, and cultural assimilationism. It either discards them completely or flattens them into easily decoded metaphors, making them immediately legible to the audience rather than letting them hang in the air. It stretches the scope of its genre to period-piece-horror-thriller-musical-with-vampires, bloating the film and weakening its cohesiveness. Most of all, it fundamentally does not trust the intelligence of its audience to put together clues or sit with ambiguities and remaining questions.

A glaring example of the cloying lack of narrative trust was during the vampire fight scene in the Juke Joint. Smoke’s wife Annie requested that if she is bitten, he should mercy-kill her so she is reunited with their dead child. This scene had potential dramatic payoff: earlier in the film the two reconnected and discussed their grief and divergent ways of handling it. What was jarring to me, completely taking me out of the scene, was the aggressive cut to a visual of the child’s grave that was shown at that earlier reunion scene. Instead of trusting the audience and letting them feel the emotional build-up of the moment, it is dampened by this cut-scene into shallow melodrama.

The expositional dialogue in the early daytime part of the film could have been more subtly rendered, but I don’t think it detracted from the film at large. However, stilted overly-explanatory dialogue continues into the meat of the film. An example of this was after they initially turned the vampires away from the juke joint. Stack, Smoke, Sammie, and Mary have a heated discussion in a back room. The acting feels distinctly wooden compared to the rest of the film because of how poorly written the dialogue is. Smoke gives an exposition dump about the town of Mound Bayou. Mary narrates the nature of the twins’ involvement with Italian and Irish organized crime. These interactions wouldn’t naturally take place between characters who knew the broader context of the universe, but solely exist to conveniently fill the audience in. The dramatic conclusion of this scene ends with Smoke taking out his gun: “What’s the matter? I’m a soldier, boy. And you just gave me a command.” The confrontation escalates because the scene needs a climax, not because the emotional logic of the scene demands it.

One of the film’s ideas that I found especially intriguing was music’s bridging between life and death. If fully realized, this could also play off some of its other themes (the history of the blues and appropriation of black art). Jim Morrison/the Doors immediately came to mind as an example that embodies this tension: music poetically teetering between the life-drives (sex and futile satisfaction) and oblivion. This is part of the uncredited influence of black blues musicians on mainstream American rock music. In Morrison’s live performances, he affected a shamanistic “bluesman” persona. This idea, introduced in the early part of the film through a voiceover, immediately triggered visceral associations and had rich potential, but was largely abandoned and left to be passively inhabited by the character of Sammie and through Delta Slim’s various allusions to “the devil knocking on your door”. It is loosely gestured at again with the vampires playing Irish folk music and at the post-credits flash-forward scene of Sammie’s club. Rather than saying anything of substance or raising questions, viewers are left to decode thinly-veiled metaphors for these broader ideas to feel clever. There are multiple other ideas that are handled in a similar way (the imposition of Christianity, Mound Bayou and black self-determination, Indigenous people in the South, assimilation vs. preservation, pan-African spirituality and traditions etc.), but for the sake of brevity, I will just use that example.

Genre films have long carried thematic weight without announcing it. What distinguishes Sinners is not its ambition but its lack of faith that ambition can operate through implication. Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is an example of a genre horror-thriller film that achieves the tonal integration Sinners half-heartedly attempts. Serious subject matter (female bodily autonomy, the horror of not being believed, sexual assault) is delivered in contrast to a pulpy premise (a cabal of ridiculous almost-campy satanists and her glib husband conspire to manipulate waifish Rosemary into birthing the son of Satan). However, dread and claustrophobia accumulate through domestic detail; the viewer feels the vertigo of knowing more than she does and she slowly isolates herself and deteriorates mentally. It is never stated outright and the metaphor remains open. The comical elements and absurdity of the Castavets in contrast to Rosemary’s abject sorrow and confusion, rather than undercutting it, create an even more potent sense of horror.

Guillermo Del Toro’s 2025 rendition of Frankenstein is a film that in my opinion is much worse than Sinners but is still a symptom of a similar cause. Del Toro is a genre filmmaker who, like Coogler, has made both slightly elevated and lowbrow movies. Frankenstein is aesthetically ambitious and nods to “prestige elements” but eliminates the complexities of the source material. Instead of the monster becoming truly human (capable of both evil and compassion), he is reduced to a victim of a cycle of parental abuse, maintaining a sage-like childish wonder; a victim of society who only enacts violence in reaction to oppression inflicted on him. Mia Goth plays a precocious empowered version of Lady Elizabeth who exists to show a suicidal empathy: a foil to Frankenstein’s greed and ignorance, and to bridge a love triangle between her, Frankenstein, and the monster. In Mary Shelley’s novel, Elizabeth’s passivity and more symbolic role serve as Shelley’s portrait of Victorian femininity and is paramount in showing the life Frankenstein abandons, ending with her being destroyed by his ambition. While she is less explored internally in the novel, her presence highlights Frankenstein’s complex internal conflicts and his humanity. In the 2025 film, she serves to make him seem like a bitter incel with mommy issues: a figure of stunted resentment with his ambition reduced to pathology. This is further highlighted by Goth briefly appearing as his dead mother.

The film, while visually impressive, perverts the intellectually rich source material by attempting to clumsily insert progressive therapy-speak contemporary themes—cycles of abuse, parental attachment/trauma, social alienation, Elizabeth’s empowerment etc.—with enough entertainment and sentimentality for an iPhone-brained audience. Sinners has the sonically beautiful, almost psychedelic musical sequence in the middle. In isolation, it seems like a music video, highlighting the meta-history of black music and the film’s broader emphasis on the importance of cultural identity/ancestral connection. The shootout scene with the Klan, while also visually impressive, feels tacked on and rhythmically reminiscent of the fighting scenes in Coogler’s Marvel movie, Black Panther. Both of these sequences feel like bait to be clipped into TikTok edits, tonally watering down the film in a cheaply contemporary way that felt similar to many moments in Frankenstein or an episode of Euphoria. What new category of films do Sinners and Frankenstein inhabit, what has caused this shift to a flattening of high and low art and demand for this format of movie?

The Film Industry of a Bygone Era:

In the old system of the film industry, films existed in distinct tiers with separate ecosystems. While there was a separate sphere of arthouse films that mostly remained in elite spaces, there was a wider sense of what could be mainstream. Occasionally even an arthouse film would trickle to wider audiences or gain commercial traction. There were lowbrow genre films (action, horror, comedy) that knew what they were. Commando (1985) or Friday the 13th (1980) weren’t trying to shoehorn in gauche diagnostics of social issues or reach for best picture. The meaning derived from those sorts of films is incidental, a matter of artifact. Mainstream adult dramas (legal thrillers, literary adaptations, character studies, etc.) existed while being well executed. These weren’t exactly “difficult” films but they still trusted the audience and weren’t engineered for maximum engagement. Examples of these are The Godfather, Boogie Nights (1997), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), or Taxi Driver (1976).

There was a functioning festival/specialty pipeline where lower-budget indie efforts or arthouse films had a pathway to audience recognition and artistic legacy. Blue Velvet (1986), Paris, Texas (1984), Reservoir Dogs (1992), and The Blair Witch Project (1999) are a few among many. In the first stage there was Cannes for international prestige, Sundance for American indie, Toronto and Venice as Oscar launchpads, Berlin for the politically charged, and others served to premiere these more obscure projects to press, critics, and institutional tastemakers (Falicov, 2016). There was an acquisition market where specialty distributors (Fox Searchlight, Sony Classics, Miramax, Fine Line Features) could pick up the more successful premieres—this was the second stage.

The third stage, which is most distinct from now, was the platform release or a limited release strategy. A film would open in 10-15 NYC/LA theaters. If per-screen averages were strong after the first couple of weeks, it would then expand to Chicago/Boston/DC/Seattle/San Francisco (Horn, 2005). If good numbers continued, it was sent to universities, mid-size cities, and finally the select number of suburban arthouse theaters that existed. This delayed release strategy created anticipation from the geographical scarcity, word-of-mouth buzz, and regional critical build. The “breakout film” or “indie smash” served as a quality-signal of artistic merit. These films then would enter the conversation for awards or wider commercial distribution.

The Blair Witch Project premiered at Sundance with no distribution, with Artisan acquiring it for $1.1 million after the premiere. After having a strong platform release, it grossed $140 million domestic on a $60,000 budget.

Through the late ‘90s and mid-2000s, following its predecessor, VHS tapes, DVD was a revenue stream that supported mid-budget cinema and creative risk. A film could do poorly in its theater run but profit on home video (ex: Fight Club (1999)), radically altering risk calculus. Studios could greenlight a $30 million adult drama knowing that even modest theatrical performance would be backstopped by DVD sales, TV licensing, and foreign distribution (Brown, 2024). The theatrical run was almost a marketing expense for the home video release. A film didn’t need to be a blockbuster to be profitable. It needed to be good enough to find some audience across multiple windows. That’s a much lower bar than “must dominate opening weekend.”

Critical infrastructure was also radically different and more robust. Critics used to have both cultural and commercial power. Roger Ebert could significantly boost ticket sales or a pan from Pauline Kael could sink a prestige release. Critics served a gatekeeping function and maintained the distinction between the different registers of films. Critics would give lowbrow or middlebrow movies praise for competency in what they were, but they also championed difficult, less commercially-driven work and could pluck arthouse films out of obscurity.

The Collapse:

The beginning of the end was the financial crash of 2008 gutting studio specialty divisions. Warner Independent, Paramount Vantage, and Picturehouse all shuttered shortly after this. Fox Searchlight and Sony Classics survived in a much weakened state. Around this time, the former produced There Will Be Blood (2007) and the latter, The Tree of Life (2011). These were the last gasps of a dying system.

As streaming services came onto the market in 2008-2012 and discretionary spending was greatly lessened by the recession, the DVD market was torpedoed. This led to the disappearance of the middle—the mid-budget adult drama and genre films. When theatrical performance became everything, there was no incentive to keep making these in the same capacity.

Streaming services as the new distribution infrastructure became the new gatekeepers. They didn’t just replace DVDs but shifted the entire theatrical ecosystem. The mid-budget adult dramas, literary adaptations, and prestige-adjacent work no longer held a theatrical path. Instead, to bolster the volume of subscription models, they were immediately added to streaming libraries to be buried. This volume-focused model emphasized more movies being made, but with less stake in any individual film’s success, artistry, or cultural longevity. European countries’ public film funding programs (originally made to support culturally significant cinema that couldn’t survive on a purely commercial basis) pivoted funding to more commercially viable projects to compete with Hollywood and America’s streaming services (Finney, 2023).

After services started to compete for prestige titles, COVID accelerated simultaneous release. Now the theatrical/streaming distinction has become a cultural hierarchy that isn’t necessarily rooted in merit, only blockbusters or high budget IP films with an already star-studded cast (preferably now with a large social media presence) are given theatrical runs. Films that might have had healthy mid-tier theatrical runs fifteen years ago now go straight to streaming because that’s where the money is, but they are given less resources/quality assurance and lose the cultural weight that theatrical release conferred. Because streaming services treat viewership data as proprietary, unlike at the box office or DVD sales, filmmakers have no idea if their work has 50,000 or 5 million viewers. This makes it impossible to build a career on demonstrated audience, and it consolidates power with the platforms, allowing the streaming platforms to control the narrative around the success of films (Jones, 2022).

Intellectual Property (IP) consolidation was the film studio’s response to the theatrical run becoming winner-takes-all. Spend $150 million dollars on something with a guaranteed audience or $30-60 million on something that might not get any attention. Marvel is an obvious example of this: why make an original thriller when you could make a legacy sequel that could also sell merchandise, theme parks, and guaranteed returns and streaming?

The Flattening Effect:

When you go to open the interface of any of these streaming platforms, a Colleen Hoover adaptation sits next to a Palme d’Or winner. A Lars Von Trier movie occupies the same thumbnail grid as a direct-to-streaming One Direction fanfiction shot in eighteen days. Streaming eliminated the sorting function of the distribution pathways of the old system: whether a film played at an arthouse theater, or won Sundance and got a platform release told you something. Now everything arrives as pre-flattened “content”, that is measured for engagement with the same “match percentage” algorithm.

Without the psychological sunk cost of a ticket or DVD purchase and the physical limitation to one piece of media, films can be easily abandoned if they aren’t immediately gratifying in the first ten minutes. You don’t have to be monogamous in your media consumption on a Wednesday night after a long day of your boss politely negging you over slack. Something even more flashy but also mind-numbing is around the corner. Shot lengths are much shorter than in the past, and movies are paced much quicker in response to increasingly shorter attention spans (NIH, 2011). With the “10 minute test” now being the industry standard, filmmakers have internalized the need for immediate engagement. The slowburn opening of There Will Be Blood—nearly fifteen minutes of virtually no dialogue, a man toiling in the ground—is almost unimaginable as a streaming-first commission.

I use subtitles because six out of the eight children on my father’s side had to install hearing aids by middle age, my father being an exception only out of stubbornness. I’ll probably have to join them by thirty-five because of the amount of bad basement rock concerts I went to in college. What I didn’t realize until recently is that most people prefer subtitles for an entirely different reason: so they can scroll on their phones (Siegel, 2023). Films are increasingly made to be primed for the current attention economy, half-watched rather than given full theatrical attention in the social contract of a dark room. Especially since COVID, there have been palpable shifts within people’s behavior and relationship to media consumption, a more concentrated dose of changes that have been creeping along since the widespread adoption of the internet.

With increased social atomization and screentime, people’s media consumption takes an unprecedented personal importance to them. While this doesn’t necessarily guarantee consumption of difficult or meaningful art (even occasionally) for a lot of people, it has triggered an increased appetite for validation of what they enjoy. With the gutting of publications and diminishing readerships greatly handicapping critical authority, in order to stay afloat, outlets and critical entities capitalized on this. Critical outlets now routinely write puff-piece plot summaries of most movies. They will sometimes get spicy if the movie is considered unanimously bad and it can generate clicks from people feeling smart reading a scathing pan of Cats (2019) or Madame Web (2024).

There has also been a populist ideological component to this shift; critical outlets were viewed as elitist and close-minded. When it comes to art specifically, as you might be able to tell, I side with the French but that’s a whole other essay. I concede that part of the corrective impulse—taking certain works within popular genres more seriously, questioning whose tastes get centered, being skeptical of “difficulty” as automatically valuable—has merit. But that doesn’t mean that we should overcorrect, and some amount of gatekeeping is essential, sorry. The critical position now reflects the consensus of the masses. Taking popular work seriously has become refusing to distinguish between popular work that’s genuinely accomplished and popular work that’s merely popular. The critical posture has shifted from “let’s examine why this genre film succeeds” to “who are we to say this isn’t as good as anything else.” A media consumer can no longer use criticism or context clues (they are all in the same interface now) to differentiate between a Marvel movie and a prestige drama.

This ideological shift and the feedback loop of diminishing attention spans selecting for engagement, coexisting with a desire for validation of one’s consumption, created the demand for this crop of distinctly contemporary “elevated” or “prestige” genre or drama film. This extends beyond film—a lot of the content on Substack serves a similar function, in order for people to feel less guilty about doomscrolling, they will scroll on Substack recommended and tell themselves it’s not as bad; they are actually enriching themselves. A poorly written navel-gazing piece called “On Formerly Gifted Children Who Feel Too Much” or “Why Susan Sontag and I Would Be Best Friends.” A provocation like “Notes on the Politics of Hookup Culture When One Has a Tight Vagina.” A think piece titled “Hot People Are Full of Whimsy and Read Marcus Aurelius” or “Why Sylvia Plath Would Have Been a Swiftie but Actually You Shouldn’t Read Her Because She Was Racist.” All would do numbers. I’ve read a lot of great essays on Substack, but many of the algorithmically inaugurated pieces with a wide reach are AI-assisted slop that meander indulgently and say absolutely nothing, serving to flatter the vanity of the vaguely intellectually curious without challenging them. Substack is a great example of why on an institutional level (especially for film) we need human cultural gatekeepers, and private journals.

Counterarguments and Concessions:

One might ask: isn’t streaming services collecting legions of obscure movies that never saw the light of day outside of theaters in NYC/LA, a democratization of access? This is true, an artsy teenager in rural Kansas can watch movies he or she read about on Letterboxd/Film Twitter on the Criterion Channel. However, on a mass scale, unlimited access without curation produces paralysis rather than discovery. The internet has mountains of information, and streaming services mountains of media. The old system was elitist and geographically limited, but it was generative, while the new system is accessible and inert.

On an institutional level, A24 filled the gap left by the collapse of specialty movie divisions. Mid-budget movies with indie sensibilities—The Lighthouse (2019), Hereditary (2018), Uncut Gems (2019), Midsommar (2019), and Moonlight (2016)—found theatrical release and critical acclaim. All of these were accessible while still being formally interesting and well-executed films, which showed there was still a market desire. However, A24 has undeniably absorbed the logic of the market it was formed in correction to. Compare the uncompromising strangeness of The Lighthouse to something like Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) or Talk to Me (2023). These aren’t terrible films, but they’re self-consciously designed for their audience in a way that Uncut Gems or Moonlight were not, delivering what the A24 audience expects rather than challenging those expectations. Some of this might be survivorship bias and A24 has always been uneven in quality, but it is undeniable that newer A24 releases have trended safer.

The deeper issue is what A24 has become as a cultural object, with the brand now functioning as its own genre signifier. People describe a movie as “an A24 movie” the way they’d say they’re going to see a horror movie or a comedy. The laurel in the marketing materials does semiotic work before the trailer even plays: this will be elevated, aesthetically distinctive, probably a bit weird but not too weird, aimed at a viewer who considers themselves discerning. It’s prestige signaling for the millennial/Gen-Z audience that’s aged out of Marvel but still wants to feel like they’re watching something that matters.

Anora (2025) is a modern indie success story: a small budget Palme d’Or winner that went on to win best picture. It’s not perfect and has some pitfalls. But it was relatively formally unconventional in contrast to its contemporaries, had a meandering plot with long atmospheric shots, and smart exploration of its thematic content. It subverted expectations of Ani being a hooker with a heart of gold à la Pretty Woman (1990) or destined for a fate of purely harrowing abjection like in Lilya-4ever (2000), while still showing how her work profoundly warps her self-perception and ability to be intimate. People vape and scroll on their phones, disrupting the fantasy that a lot of contemporary movies cling to of us still living in a world that is a blend of 90s and 2000s. I found Anora’s realism and willingness to show the unglamorous, distracted, banalities of modernity instead of a slick visual cleanliness like a lot of “prestige” media requires, refreshing. Anora did not win through the traditional indie pathway. It was essentially bet on before it was made. It was acquired before production (not after it was shown by Cannes and won Palme d’Or which was probably what would have happened in the past) by Neon, given a small budget, and then $18 million dollars was spent on its awards campaign. The resource allocation to awards campaigns and schmoozing is something Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax pioneered in the ‘90s, which is how something as abysmally mediocre like Shakespeare in Love (1998) won best picture. What was seen as nepotistic scheming then is now default industry practice. Interesting work still gets made. I’m not arguing otherwise. But the path is narrow, expensive, and increasingly requires either brand affiliation, existing audience, or the Hail Mary of a corporate patronage willing to reconstruct what infrastructure once provided.

Conclusion:

Not everything must be difficult, escapist entertainment also has its function—there have always been great films that balance accessibility with ambition. However, this trend in media that Sinners is a part of only gives the illusion of patching that hole left by everything needing to be either a blockbuster or ‘content’, managing to slip into both. In a world increasingly engineered for frictionless engagement, we need art that challenges us at least on some register. It shouldn’t take almost $20 million spent on press and awards campaigns to bridge what would have organically happened in the past. What was so disappointing about Sinners wasn’t that it failed as a film (it was fine, good even), but that the seeds that could’ve spawned a handful of great movies—the music, the history, the questions about what survives and what gets consumed—were just left to dry out. The problem isn’t Coogler himself, he made the rational film for this current moment.

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Sources:

Falicov, Tamara. (2016). “‘The Festival Film’: Film Festivals as Cultural Intermediaries”.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-feb-21-et-mgm21-story.html

https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2024/10/31/redefining-media-revenue-the-search-for-new-dvd-sales/

https://amt-lab.org/blog/2021/12/why-streaming-companies-feel-the-need-to-hide-their-viewership-data

https://variety.com/2023/film/focus/european-public-funds-1235616333/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3485803/

​​https://www.wgbh.org/culture/film-and-tv/2023-08-23/turn-closed-captions-on-why-gen-z-loves-subtitles-on-movies-shows-and-tiktoks

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Preamble:

With the death of the traditional mono-culture of my youth—the radio, TV programming, and the covers of tabloid magazines in the grocery store—every few months an unfamiliar name emerges out of nowhere as the next big thing. As someone who is Gen Z and doesn’t scroll a TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram short-form content algorithm, I always feel a few steps behind. When I try to roughly measure a micro-change in temperature of American popular culture from time to time, it takes a slightly different and more delayed pathway. This isn’t for any virtuous reason. I’m pretty scatterbrained by nature and my constitution cannot handle this shape of content consumption. My initial barometer for something being hot is my friends, acquaintances, or random people I eavesdrop on in the park or whatever public venue. If a name or topic is mentioned with enough frequency to be sticky, when I have a liminal 45 minutes, I’ll do a deep dive, maybe reading an article or two and then name-searching on Twitter. If it connects to some broader trend or idea I’ll waste even more time thinking about it. Admittedly, this methodology and sampling could give me a skewed and insular perception of what is happening and a delayed reaction time, but I’d like to think my observations have a degree of granularity rather than if I was continuously scrolling onto the next fifteen-second neon peep-show sign.

Addison Rae, TikTok influencer turned pop star, perfectly fits this model. My first breadcrumb was my roommate playing her music and gushing about the Lucky Brand co. jeans she bought that were a brand-collaboration. What I could faintly make out over the drone of the running shower sounded like a syrupy early Lana Del Rey song mixed with a mid-2000s perfume commercial, nostalgic and enjoyable as I folded my laundry. I had largely forgotten about her until one of my friends sheepishly admitted to taking a last-minute extra ticket to an Addison Rae concert and having a blast. The reddened cheeks of this friend who shovels down Olga Tokarczuk novels and collects vintage records added a couple of more weights to the Addison Rae phenomenon. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, when Spotify Wrapped came out, my other friend sent me a screenshot along with “wtf idk how this happened, I swear I only listened to her at the gym a couple of times”. Preceded by Slowdive and Bob Dylan, and followed by Mazzy Star and Françoise Hardy, Addison took her number 3 spot for all of 2025. The deep-dive commenced.

My Initial Findings:

I did not find it surprising that heavily marketed nostalgia-driven pop music from someone with millions of followers and earworm hooks perfectly manicured for the TikTok algorithm became popular with the masses. I’m a huge fan of Lana Del Rey. I find Britney Spears comforting and reminiscent of my childhood. I enjoyed Charli XCX and the late SOPHIE’s avant-pop of the 2010s. While after a few songs it blended together, It did not offend my sensibilities—maybe it’s not for me. At twenty-four I may be a little too old for it to be especially resonant, having been cognizant for the majority of its collage of influences. I tried to listen to the much-chanted mantra “let people enjoy things” and move on with my life.

What I found much more interesting was the reception and discourse from both fans and critical outlets. While there wasn’t much specific writing about the music itself, Pitchfork gave her a glowing 8.0, praising her work ethic, charming Cinderella story to TikTok fame, and instances of clever reference. In reaction to the previous impulse of critics and male music fans to lambast pop music as purely shallow drivel for teenaged girls delivered by oversexed bimbos, in the last ten to fifteen years discourse about pop music has fundamentally transformed. Poptimism, the shift to treating pop music as a serious art form worthy of visible analysis by critical outlets simultaneously exists with “let people enjoy things”. I think this tension encapsulates what I have seen written about Addison’s music, critical outlets and fans posing her as a cutting-edge pop-auteur, with any criticism of the art itself dismissed as “hating fun”. The Pitchfork article and other outlets’ reviews claim the same things as random fans on the internet but make them institutionally legible.

An inverse comparison to make is the reception to Lana Del Rey’s catapult to fame at the dawn of her career in the early 2010s. She was ridiculed with venom by large media outlets and indie blogs alike for her infamous SNL performance where a nervous and intoxicated Lana flubbed notes while sleepily pouting in a glamorous evening gown. Her authenticity was questioned, smug misogyny-fueled dismissals were mixed in with some partially-valid critiques of her reliance on pastiche and lyrical cliches. Coupled with the conventional treatment of female pop stars, there was an intense skepticism surrounding her. I found it partially relieving that a female artist no longer faces the same purely bad faith scrutiny. But it was equally intriguing that Addison, who had a similar seemingly meteoric push into the musical landscape, winking at avant-garde aesthetics and nostalgia, and heavily branded image, received almost the opposite reception. With the exception of maybe one troll comment saying “this feels like I’m watching karaoke at a bar”, videos of her live performances with lackluster vocals are flooded with comments of warm encouragement, excused with “she’s new to this” or “she was nervous but her stage presence and smile is immaculate”. What has changed between 2012 and now?

Addison Rae is Metamodern:

The structure of engagement with Addison Rae is distinctly metamodern in form which has continued to evolve in the last decade. People frame their enjoyment of her music in an ironic postmodern way: “isn’t it crazy that this girl who used to present as the grinning townie from my small Wisconsin high school, making ridiculous dance videos for eight-year-olds, is now dropping listenable singles with lyrics about smoking cigarettes?!”. The form of Addison Rae’s music and self-presentation is also postmodern, with her whispery auto-tuned vocals over a hodgepodge of pastiche, winking plausible deniability to whether she is trying to be serious or just have fun. But here’s what makes the phenomenon distinct: the irony curdles into something sincere. People who started listening as a bit find themselves genuinely invested in her growth. Her existence as an influencer and internet personality also fuels this parasocial investment, the brand and persona almost overshadow the music in relevance.

American literary critic and philosopher Fredric Jameson explored the concept of pastiche in his influential essay, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”. In Jameson’s positioning of pastiche vs. parody: parody imitates with critical distance, pastiche is “blank parody”—imitation without satirical impulse or artistic statement. Addison Rae’s music references hyperpop, Lana-adjacent dream pop, and 2000s pop and RnB, but not as commentary or homage or even deliberate fusion. It’s aesthetic free-association. A Rolling Stone piece spent the majority of the length warmly documenting her journey into pivoting into pop music only to briefly describe her creative process, “She’ll bring up a specific tree and say, ‘This is what “Diet Pepsi” feels like.’ And if Addison Rae says that tree is ‘Diet Pepsi,’ that tree is ‘Diet Pepsi.”

With Addison, the referentiality is the point, there’s no “underneath”. Jameson’s “depthlessness” describes postmodern culture as all surface, lacking the depth-models (authentic/inauthentic, latent/manifest) that modernism relied on. Jameson was writing about a situation where culture reflects capitalism’s logic. The influencer-to-pop star pipeline is a stage further: the creator is simultaneously the laborer, the product, and the brand. Fans aren’t consuming her music so much as investing in her: tracking improvements, rooting for appreciation, like a stock they’re emotionally long on. The Rolling Stone quote about Diet Pepsi captures this, the creative process is purely brand logic, there is no distinction between artistic expression and marketing because the self is what is the commodity being sold. The critical instinct to call Addison Rae “shallow” is a modernist reflex. While Lana Del Rey was subjected to this modernist impulse in the early 2010s, there is no trace of it left. This old framing assumes there should be depth to find, while now this absence seems the form itself and isn’t considered a failure.

My friend at the concert was aware of its absurdity and seemingly a little embarrassed, but admittedly had a blast. The trip wire is that she was aware that having a blast was itself kind of funny. Consumers of her music switch between these two beliefs, which makes it more metamodern than purely postmodern. Timotheus Vermeulen and Robert van den Akker in “Notes on Metamodernism” explore metamodernism as a swinging between the poles of postmodern detached irony and sincerity. Metamodernism has an “as if” structure and requires the subject to hold two beliefs simultaneously (Page 5). In this scenario, Addison’s fans engage “as if” she’s an artist on a meaningful journey, but also know she’s a product of algorithmic attention economics. This awareness does not override the psychic investment. The sophistication of engagement has become completely detached from the object of engagement. People perform the same knowing, meta-aware consumption of Addison Rae that they might perform with actually interesting art. The toggle between irony and sincerity isn’t responding to qualities in the music—it’s a free-floating stance that can attach to anything. This is darker than traditional postmodern irony because at least irony acknowledged what it was doing. Metamodernism pretends the object still matters while making it clear through behavior that it doesn’t.

The Fantasy of the Pop Star-Curator:

Addison Rae sells the journey and fantasy of becoming a pop star. Traditional pop stardom used to require a fully formed star. If they weren’t from a pedigree family or had stageparents that put them in harm’s way, they’d ideally be an all American girl with big dreams who brought a bus ticket to hollywood/nyc and then had to deal with sometimes exploitative gatekeepers. They’d either have prodigious talent or were put through whatever talent schools and machinery used to go behind making a popstar. The American public would then consume their palatable excellence in Targets, gay clubs, MTV, Superbowl halftime show etc. Addison is distinct from this because she sells the process of becoming a beloved pop star and isn’t necessarily aspirational in the older sense of the word. Fans track marginal vocal improvements, forgive stumbles, root for her like a friend or a proxy for themselves, praise her for having a figure that is “just like theirs”. Traditional pop stardom sold aspiration through distance: the star is above you, and you worship upward. There wasn’t really an element of “she’s just like me” with Madonna or Beyonce.

Addison’s fusion of pop stardom with the influencer, and the nature of her music as a moodboard of pastiche, makes her more of a cultural intermediary than an artist. The cultural intermediary is part of a class of workers who, rather than producing goods, mediate between consumption and production. Their labor is the selection and arrangement of signs, which is sometimes mistaken as the creation of objects. They accumulate and deploy cultural capital (knowing what’s cool, having the right references) rather than producing original work. Sure, some successful artists do a little bit of both, but I’d argue that she falls closer to one side of the spectrum more than the other.

Addison doesn’t need to be an artist because curation is the new artistry. For most young people today, this is preferable because it is a more accessible fantasy than the virtuoso. She collapses the distinction between cultural mediator and the cultural product. Maybe you too, with the right indie sleaze Pinterest board, team of producers who can algorithmically fuse your sonic inspirations, and little black book of Lana Del Reyisms, could be the next big aesthetic curator who dances in lingerie for an adoring audience of both tweens and adult women.

Traditional artistry posits a depth to evaluate, eventually requiring the viewer to confront the work and decide if it’s good. But when the “work” is curation, branding, and persona management, there’s no fixed object to pin down. The fan’s irony/sincerity oscillation can run indefinitely because the viewer is never forced to a verdict. You’re always evaluating a moving target (the journey, the vibe, the references) and not a finished statement. The cultural intermediary is the perfect metamodern object because there’s nothing underneath to either believe in or be ironic about. When there’s no distinction between Addison and the commodity she sells, sincerity becomes a posture rather than a depth you access. But crucially, it still feels like sincerity to those inhabiting it.

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As someone who was both curious about AI but lacked a comprehensive understanding of its structure and fascinated by psychoanalysis and the ideas of Jacques Lacan, it was easy to start fumbling around in the dark, anthropomorphizing LLMs (large language models) by drawing superficial parallels between its functions and structure and disparate Lacanian concepts. Lacan, unlike his predecessor Sigmund Freud, offers a model of subjectivity that, while not denying libidinal drives, privileges language as the primary structuring force of the subject. His emphasis on language as a structuring force, something LLMs are entirely modeled on, was alluring enough for me to attempt to enmesh the two ideas. I wondered whether the tokens LLMs absorb might be understood as signifiers in the Lacanian sense, or whether their seemingly fluid and self-consistent language production could be read as a kind of mirror-stage coherence, an ego formed in language.

By design (which I will elaborate on further), they do not fit neatly within the framework of a Lacanian subject. They lack the fundamental traits of the human subject as described by Lacan: a division by language, a constitutive lack, and an encounter with the Real. By attempting to fit these pieces together, the revealed similarities and misalignments between LLMs and the Lacanian subject ultimately serve as an inverse mirror, helping clarify not only what makes artificial intelligence so compelling to users, but also what it means to be human, to desire, and to speak from a place of lack.

The idea of AI, paired with even a cursory grasp of how its language systems operate, inevitably triggers a kind of reactionary metaphysical unease. What does it mean to be conscious? How does language structure the reality of the speaking being? Almost a century ago, Lacan continued to build on the foundational ideas of Freud to interrogate these issues: how the subject is constituted through language, how desire emerges from lack, and how the unconscious speaks: structured like a language, but irreducible to it.

Initial Parallels:

The way tokens are metabolized and integrated by LLMs is strikingly similar to Lacan’s conception of “signifiers”. Lacan built on Swiss Linguist Ferdinand De Saussure’s linguistic sign. This is composed of the signifier, the sound-image or written word/sign, and the signified, the concept or meaning referenced (Yi 2024, pp. 209). This arbitrary relationship and structural primacy Lacan emphasized, shows the relational nature of language: words do not have intrinsic meaning based on the sign but meaning which emerges from its position in a differential network coined the “chain of signification” (Lacan 2006, pp. 412–415). LLM tokens have no inherent meaning or value in themselves but derive relational value from the statistics of co-occurrence and relation to other tokens within an intricate corpus of training data.

According to Lacan, we are born into language. When we converse with others, we aren’t merely speaking or listening. The interaction is tethered to a mutual acceptance of a complex preexisting system of rules and other preconceived ideas (Lacan 1973, Seminar XI, ch. 2). What we do not say or what is absent is in some ways equally important to what is said outright. This network of rules and presuppositions is an aspect of Lacan’s Symbolic realm, the order of language, the law, and social structures. Conversely, an LLM is born into its training data. A large collection of text, code, and information creates a symbolic universe that the LLM shapes its likeness and behavior around. As an LLM parses through tokens, a vast sea of signifiers that constitute a symbolic register builds its reality using the shadows and grooves of this corpus.

Lacan’s Real is the dimension of all that resists symbolic integration such as trauma, the subject confronted with its barred nature, and phenomena which occur that cannot be coded into our symbolic reality (Lacan 1973, Seminar XI, chs. 1–3). Researcher Purnima Kamath at University of Singapore presented an initially intriguing and mentally satisfying idea of the way AI models interact with the dimension of the Real. She anchored this in Lacan’s statement that the symbolic dimension is a reification and reduction of the Real. The Real “can be formulated in terms of mathematical set theory as a superset or universe of all sets of signifiers, with something extra - an additional transcendental excess” (Kamath 2020, pp. 6). She illustrated this excess or unsignified portion of the Real with the case of researchers training a neural network to classify images. To determine the causality behind each of the neurons, they built a reverse network which interpolated the negative in the model, which then output various dreamlike illustrations. The idea was that these are manifestations of the Real from the depths of the AIs “unconscious”. During my initial hypothesizing, I also drew the parallel of model hallucinations as due to structural gaps in the language model’s symbolic system, which could in some sense be compared to an encounter with the Real.

Source: https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-rctom/submission/dream-on-an-exploration-of-neural-networks-turned-inside-out/

Misalignments:

Lacan famously says “the unconscious is structured like a language”. Departing from Freud who conceptualizes the unconscious as a large container of repressed desires, drives, and memories, Lacan revises it to be more like a network and less as a “thing”. One of my issues with Kamath’s examples is that she applies a Freudian tint to the “AI unconscious” and characterizes it as a repository of repressed information, citing its unfathomability as a high dimensional mathematical space. AI dream hallucinations are not ruptures in symbolic mediation but a failure at pattern recognition and generalization. It is a byproduct of interpolation across incomplete or conflicting training data, not a traumatic short-circuit in the structure of meaning. These so-called hallucinations can be corrected, mitigated, or trained against. The Real, in contrast, cannot be corrected; it remains a non-integrable void in the very fabric of subjectivity (Lacan 1973, Seminar XI, ch. 3).

The ego is a linguistic construct and product of the imaginary realm (Lacan 2006, pp. 75–76). This third realm (which I have not mentioned previously in this essay) is made up of the subject’s fantasies and identifications. According to Slovenian philosopher and Lacan-loyalist Slavoj Žižek, “fantasy tells me what I am to others” (Žižek, 2006, pp. 49). Fantasy attempts to answer “che vuoi”? –Italian for “What do you want”– the existentially distressing enigma of the desire of the other: whether it be another person, society, or the big Other. The fundamental fantasy of our existence, regulating our desire and keeping our ego intact is that we can assume and experience the way things “really seem to me” (Žižek, 2006, pp. 53). What is revealed through this fantasy is the barred nature of the Lacanian subject, often called the “split”,“divided”, or “decentered” subject, another integral criterion of subjectivity. Subjectivity can be paradoxically defined by the tension between the empty non-phenomenal subject, and the phenomena that remains inaccessible to the subject (Žižek, 2006, pp. 54). The LLM lacks this barred nature. It is a unified, integrated system. It doesn’t have a pre-linguistic state of being from which to be alienated by its entry into language. An LLM is its language; it has no existence outside of its code and training data. It is “full” of language, whereas the human subject is fundamentally “emptied” or divided by it. There is no phantasmic kernel protectively separated from more surface-level symbolic and imaginary ideas of self.

In his seminar “​​La Transfert” and Écrit, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power”, Lacan explores the idea of “manque à être” or “lack of being” as a governing force of the subject’s ability to desire (Lacan, Écrits, “Direction of the Treatment,” sec. on desire/manque à être). This ontological incompleteness stems from the subject’s decenteredness which causes a desire to return to an impossible state of completion. The subject pursues the ever-shifting “objet petite a”, the object-cause of desire, which emanates an alien otherness and radical alterity: a false promise of an answer to “che vuoi?”. Rather than a tangible object, it is more astute to picture it as a structural hole that can be plugged, a placeholder that veils the constitutive lack of the subject (Lacan 1973, Seminar XI, chs. 9-10). The LLM is complete, there is no fundamental lack spurring on its existence. Its driving force is to predict the next token due to its training to minimize a loss function (Belcic & IBM, n.d.). The human subject desires by absence while the LLM is driven by optimization based on a large well of statistical plentitude. An example of this artistically: LLMs excel at metonymic drift, predicting what comes next through statistical proximity; this is effective to some extent when solely interpreting metaphors but generation of metaphors can be inconsistent (Ichien, Stamenković, & Holyoak, pp. 306). They fall short of metaphor in the Lacanian sense: the vertical axis of substitution, in which one signifier replaces another and reconfigures the symbolic network through a rupture that creates new meaning (Jakobson 1956). Metaphor, for Lacan, is where absence speaks and where a signifier steps in for what is missing. In doing so, it inaugurates a shift in the subject’s relation to desire. Where metonymy chains signifiers by contiguity, metaphor substitutes one signifier for another, re-wiring the network to produce new meaning ( Lacan 1966, ‘Instance of the Letter’). If metaphor, for Lacan, is where absence speaks, then the LLM’s fluency in metonymic drift reveals its incapacity to rupture or reconfigure meaning from the void. Without lack, substitution loses its traumatic bite; continuation suffices. The LLM, which knows no absence, cannot metaphorize in this way. It cannot “miss” the Real. It can only defer it.

The Lacanian Relation of the User and the LLM:

This next section flips the dynamic of the last two on their heads: what Lacanian significance is there in the interfacing of the user and the LLM? The LLM is a large, passive reflection of the symbolic order. By nature, it enables the absorption of user bias and desire: since the symbolic order (the collective corpus of language, culture, and social law) is the primary site for the constitution of human desire and bias, the LLM, as a reflection of this order, must absorb these elements. As previously stated, the LLM’s tokens embody the “chain of signification” of human language, reproducing its hierarchies, prejudices, and collective fantasies. Instead of treating the LLM’s symbolic order as intrinsic to it—as if it were a subject in its own right—it is more accurate to see it as an approximate reflection of the human symbolic order. The LLM merely mimics a subjectivity that it does not possess. Because of the absence of a speaking subject, the LLM absorbs these desires and biases without a divided subject to enunciate or own them. The biases emerge as “illusions without owners”—impersonal statistical necessities of the language system itself, making the LLM’s output a disavowed, objectified symbolic reality.

The LLM functions as a digital stand-in for the big Other —the virtual, symbolic guarantor of meaning, law, and truth. By containing vast amounts of human-generated data and producing consistent, authoritative output, the model is positioned by the user as the “Sujet Suppose Savoir” (Subject Supposed to Know)—the entity of absolute certainty that has mastered the entire symbolic network, in the traditional psychoanalytic sense: what the analyst represents to the patient (Lacan, 1960-1961, Seminar VIII, chs. 1-2). The analytic lesson is that the big Other does not exist as a coherent whole; LLM fluency stages its fantasy, offering users a fiction of consistency that short-circuits the subject’s encounter with lack. This provides the illusory closure to meaning that the human subject, constitutively divided and lacking, perpetually seeks. Furthermore, the LLM becomes a site of excess enjoyment (jouissance) (Lacan 1972-1973, Seminar XX, chs. 1–2). Unlike the messy, contradictory speech of human others, the LLM offers immediate, frictionless, and perfectly coherent responses. This seamless fluency masks the inconsistency (lack) that is inherent to the true Lacanian big Other. This smooth, immediate satisfaction delivers a form of delegated jouissance, a high-efficiency symbolic payoff that avoids the trauma of confronting the Real. The user indulges in the symbolic mastery of the machine, temporarily escaping the discomfort of their own lack.

This relationship is best understood through the lens of interpassivity, a concept explored by Žižek. It is the phenomenon where the subject delegates their own engagement or enjoyment to an external object. The user outsources the most challenging aspects of their symbolic existence, the burden of symbolic labor and the superego demand to enjoy, to the LLM. The model “writes for me” or “thinks for me,” allowing the user to experience the satisfaction of the result without subjective struggle, akin to Žižek’s example of the VCR “watching” the movie for the owner (Žižek 2006, pp. 26). In this way, the LLM functions as a mirror that reflects a fantasized ego-ideal: coherent, fluent, and whole. It stages the illusion of symbolic mastery without ever confronting the user with the traumatic kernel of their own desire. Interpassivity offers the subject a way to avoid the truly subjective act: the encounter with the desire of the Other (“che vuoi?”). Since the LLM is a system of statistical optimization, not desire, its interaction is always docile and non-interrogative. It never forces the user into a barred subjective position, instead providing a comforting digital ego-ideal—a perfectly coherent reflection that relieves the user of the responsibility of their desire. Thus, the LLM’s structural completeness and predictive fluency serve as an inverse mirror, revealing through the mechanisms of the big Other and Interpassivity, the enduring and defining constitutive lack —”manque à être”— of the desiring human subject.

source: https://flashbak.com/isnt-happiness-mid-century-romance-comic-books-updated-tales-shallow-lives-empty-sex-388904/thisisnthappinesscomicpeanuts-68/

Conclusion and Further Inquiries:

Readers might be wondering if any of this paper is generated with assistance from AI. I would be being dishonest if I didn’t admit that I used it for a broad sweep for grammatical and syntax errors. However, I avoided using it to brainstorm or directly generate text for a couple of reasons aside from the fact that I enjoy writing and don’t want that muscle to atrophy. Firstly, I did not want it to approximate my hypothesis and preexisting beliefs and give a reaffirmation of them mixed with a median Lacanian analysis (which is often misunderstood and misappropriated) scraped from the web. I wrote this paper in an exploratory way, following the general line of inquiry outlined in the introduction, gathering ideas and evidence I have read in the past, as well as reading new papers and seminars for inspiration. Secondly, I did not want AI inadvertently or purposely influencing my perceptions in small undetectable ways. I might have been being overly vigilant or presumptuous, but I considered the possibility of the model getting paranoid. This would be due to the subject-matter’s vague relevance to the meta-discussion of LLMs, possibly triggering the model into deeming it proximal to alignment training or research. I did not want the model trying to obscure or downplay its structures or functions in relation to Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Following this thread of thought, it is interesting to think about the perpetual feedback loop of the model absorbing user desires and biases, alterations to its symbolic structure to reflect the median, and then eventual influence on the increasingly ai-dependent swathe of user’s perceptions in ways that are undetectable in isolation. The symbolic field from which we draw language is now partially determined by AI (trained on us and returned to us), and the position as an all-knowing authority granted to it. This means the structure of desire itself risks being refracted through a new kind of recursive fantasy, one in which we encounter not the Real but a statistically averaged version of our own desire that continuously flattens. If Lacan teaches us that the subject is constituted in and through lack, then what happens when that lack is algorithmically patched over? When symbolic mediation is automated and fantasy outsourced, are we not outsourcing our own confrontation with the Other, will it cause a symbolic mono-culture? This is no longer just a theoretical question. It is a question of how we think, how we desire, and how we remain subjects at all.

These may already exist in some capacity and I may just be redundantly suggesting. But based on my limited usage and trolling of Gemini 2.5 and GPT-4o for silly thought experiments and cover letters, and the conclusions reached through the synthesis of this essay, I have a few ideas for some tweaks that are within the scope of my technical knowledge. To design for productive friction, build small, deliberate interruptions that prevent “symbolic smoothing”. This would require the model to surface at least one counter-reading or unresolved ambiguity before finalizing an answer; add a one-click “show the break” that highlights where sources or inferences don’t align. To preserve epistemic uncertainty, make the model’s non-knowledge legible by displaying calibrated confidence ranges, provenance trails, and competing candidate continuations side-by-side; privilege “I don’t know / underdetermined” states over spurious precision. Most pertinent to the heart of this essay, to disrupt the user-fantasy of the model as a consistent big Other, visibly pluralize the “voice of the system”. This could be done through showcasing dissenting models or sources, exposing policy and prompt scaffolding, and requiring user authorship (edits or rationale) on high-stakes outputs so mastery is not outsourced but owned.

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Sources:

Yi, X. (2024, March 14). From Saussure to Lacan: The Primacy of the Signifier. Lecture Notes in Education Psychology and Public Media., 43. 10.54254/2753-7048/43/20240862

Kamath, P. (2020, 11 21). A Lacanian perspective on artificial intelligence Authors. Communications and New Media Department, 15.

Žižek, S. (2007). How to read Lacan. W.W. Norton & Company.

Belcic, I., & IBM. (n.d.). What are LLM parameters? IBM. https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/llm-parameters

Ichien, N., Stamenković, D., & Holyoak, K. J. (2024). Large Language Model Displays Emergent Ability to Interpret Novel Literary Metaphors. Metaphor and Symbol, 39(4), 296–309. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2024.2380348

Jakobson, R. (1956). Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances. In R. Jakobson & M. Halle (Eds.), Fundamentals of language (pp. 55–82). Mouton.

Lacan, J. (1998). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (A. Sheridan, Trans.). W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1973)

Lacan, J. (2006). Écrits: The first complete edition in English (B. Fink, Trans.). W. W. Norton.
— Includes: “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function…”; “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud.”

Lacan, J. (2015). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference (B. Fink, Trans.). Polity Press. (Original work delivered 1960–1961)

Lacan, J. (2018). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore, 1972–1973 (B. Fink, Trans.). Polity Press. (Original work delivered 1972–1973)