Social media and the "genius" syndrome: why you are crazy and are signing up to go even crazier.
The amount of man-made electrical fields on the planet has increased a million-fold since the late 19th century. We are living in a fantastic cacaphony of electrical signals and fields that has never existed on the planet before. And we don't have a clue about its impact on biology. On our bodies. Studies verifying the correllation with childhood leukemia, birthdefects, glial cancers, etc are buried under mountains of ads for cellphones and home wi-fi. This fact of physics and invention has a parallel in the less tangible realm of human sociology. The amount of artificial stories and mythologies on the planet has increased apace with the rise of electrical novelty, and we have not taken any measure of its cost to our souls. The latest round of this glut of shoddy dreammongering comes in the guise of online "community". How did we get here? What is the mechanism we obey?
I imagine the last two hundred years as an era of frenetic activity. In my minds eye, I see thousands of "geniuses" whipping through their labs and studios tossing invention after invention out the windows to the street below, where capitalists and merchants wait to get the next innovation to market. The average person is brow-beaten into admiring this spasm of novelty, or is demoted to a new species of human, devoid of intent or will, called a "consumer." Or a "user." An audience.
The hyper activity of the geniuses and their exploiters is mirrored in the hyper passivity of the consumer and their handlers -- the teachers and merchants.
At the end of the 18th century the school systems of northern Europe became laboratories designed to identify and reinforce the nascent genius, capitalist, marketer, and consumer from among the hapless children fed into their entryways. Generation after generation of witless parents sent their spirited and joyful children into the sorting yards of schools, to see them return beaten or crazed by the relentless overspecialization that occured there.
After a few years in school, every student was supposed to know their place in society. They were either a genius, destined to produce novelty, a capitalist, destined to hold genius in financial thrall while exploiting its fruits, a keeper, destined to shepard the feckless consumer through the labyrinths of learned submission, or a consumer, the great mass of humanity consigned to cycles of shame, frustration, and penance for their shame and frustration.
While the geniuses are extolled by the keepers as role models, in fact they are tormented, and their torments are romanticized. Their torment consists of an emotional isolation from all other humans, an exaggerated and unfulfilled sense of their own importance, and an enraged dependency on manipulative mechanisms of reinforcement and reward designed by their capitalist owners.
The capitalists own everything but are kept in check by the vicissitudes of the market and politics, which periodically thin their foraging herds in a climate of lethal disrespect.
The keepers are teachers and merchandisers, the marketing and public information shills who keep doling out mythologies of impotence to the crowds. The basic mythology of impotence is that of scarcity. Its story depicts the 'average' person, i.e. not a genius, capitalist, or keeper, who is within striking range of getting out of their miasma of debt, boredom and fear. They are tantalized by images of the ferrari and supermodel that comes with it, until the lust that throbs in their amygdala unabated finally turns to sour dust over time, and age itself becomes the final keeper of the consumer's wan vitality.
In my experience of social media, I see the larger macrocosm of social ferocity and futility played out in smaller scale, with clearer delineation of role. But it is the same basic four roles: the genius, who once was Steve Jobs and now is Ashton Kutcher, who once was Beethoven and then was Einstein and then was Chuck Barris, inventor of the Gong Show, and now is simply "Ev" or "Yuri." The Capitalist who once was Krupp or Morgan and then became virtually anonymous with the rise of 20th century financial technologies that eroded national boundaries, ransacked global resources indiscriminately, and plundered every storehouse of social good with the rapacious fiasco of "going public." The handlers probably deserve the worst opprobrium of our collective judgement. The teachers are culled from idealistic types. The merchants are dynamic and optimistic. Combined, they have achieved the reduction of the modern mind to a blank dough, which must be baked and rebaked through daily doses of false hopes and fantasies, while remaining forever half-baked in its career toward fulfillment.
What is to be said of the consumer audience user that hasn't been said? My point was about the latest twist in the switchback tale of the modern individual: the empowerment of social media. By signing up for facebook, one becomes faceless and culturally illiterate, dependent upon the twitching attentions of a small group of co-sycophants to feel any identity at all. And the identity that is shored, eroded, and shored briefly again by such vacuous tides of clicks and phatic shout-outs is the identity of a lab rat never more than a few minutes away from the electric prod of correction, interference, manipulation -- relieved briefly by the appearance of a gnarled pellet of attention in the beginning, which disappears after the usual effusive introduction to the online cult.
Watch the dynamics of the social media. Try to be objective. See if you don't find that the schema of the genius, the capitalist, the handler, and the user fits the main ebb and flow of the daily parade of wiles, come-ons, blandishments, and apothegms.
Someone has invented a new hand-sized surface-mount bluetooth-enabled hi-definition purveyor of your self image! Its hotter than the one you bought yesterday. Someone is selling this lithium-ion powered mirror with a million apps ready for instant download. Follow them! Hang on their every eructation, sebaceous emission, secretion! There is something to be gained by proximity to notoriety, by dependence on aggrandizement. Follow them, and spend your spent self on the indispensable what-not of the moment. The heart, stopped, is vouchsafe of our mortality. The self, bled, is bleedable again and again. It will grow back, like a salamander brain and eye excised for scientific progress.
Follow the genius. Pay the capitalist. Fear the handler's scorn. Sign up here, and be ready to start a whole new life all over again, every day, every mouse click you can manage as you fall toward some unspeakable solitary end.
And now, after painting a dour bleak vista of our prospects in this new world, I offer you a ray of hope. A sop to your self esteem and a fulcrum to restore your balanced, sober calm. But I have reached the bottom in my survey of Pandora's FedEx package. And there is nothing there. Not even the antidote that Pandora found in that winged miniature Hope which fluttered from her dowry. Nothing. Just another come -on to join her brother-in-law Prometheus upon his rock, and subscribe to a trickle of updates about his torments as the eagle redacts his liver, forever, in real time.
Here is the unimaginable truth, then. I really don't want anything from you. There is nothing here to sell, or subscribe to. Don't linger. The lights and novelty are over there, on the shore of a polluted sea of history. This is a burning ground, where dreams hang in the gibbets, and men's lives are the byproduct of the folly of dreamers. Go join the fun. Tell them Sisyphus sent you.
Posts
