Episode 140: Katherine Dee (@Default_Friend) Explains The Internet To Jesse
Episode 140: Katherine Dee (@Default_Friend) Explains The Internet To Jesse
(He still doesn't get it)
Appears in this episode
Jesse’s been off in Israel resolving and/or exacerbating tensions between the Israelis and Palestinians, FAR too busy to talk to some distant goy like Katie, so here’s an interview he recently conducted with Katherine Dee, an extremely smart and perceptive writer and podcaster on internet culture. Topics include the very… *particular* nature of rationalist gatherings, the perils of parasocial relationships, and the question of what identity means when it’s severed from any sort of embodied, real-world existence.
Links:
Aella comes on BARPod:
Some of Dee’s favorite articles that she has written:
Tumblr Transformed American Politics
https://theamericanconservative.com/tumblr-transformed-american-politics/
Mass Shootings and the World Liberalism Made
Rise of the Female-to-Female Transsexual
The Ghost of Adam Lanza, Pt. 1
The brief and wondrous life of a scene.
The image is the ace pride flag: https://grpride.org/product/asexual-pride-flag/
Episode 140: Katherine Dee (@Default_Friend) Explains The Internet To Jesse
I wanted to echo something Katherine brought up at the end about people searching for structure. I think this is the driving force behind almost every cultural phenomenon of the past decade and probably will be for the coming decade as well.
I grew up in a secular, relatively liberal family that never really put any constraints on my behavior beyond very basic things like "don't get arrested." There was flexibility around gender roles, hobbies, academic interests, extracurriculars, college choices, career paths, sexuality, religion, politics and even drug and alcohol use. I say this not to blame my parents for my problems as an adult but only to illustrate the kind of environment a lot of upper middle class American kids have grown up in since the 90s.
After you finish the race to get into an elite college there is no predefined life path to take if you're inclined to conformity and no predefined life path to reject if you're inclined to rebellion. This leaves the high achievers flailing once they graduate and have no more brass ring to grasp for and the outcasts making increasingly extreme choices - like gender transition and willingly pursuing sex work - in a desperate bid to shock the normies, for whom tattoos and piercings and weird hair colors and starting a punk band and doing drugs are now utterly routine. This state of affairs is not liberatory but paralyzing. You have too many choices for how to live your life and the stakes of those choices are terrifyingly high because if you make the wrong one and fuck it all up you have only yourself to blame (and you have no easy alternative path if you decide you fucked up and want to change).
This is a particularly upper middle class western phenomenon because it's a struggle that takes place within the top layers of Maslow's pyramid; you can't really have these problems when you don't have physical and psychological safety and a relatively stable home life. But at the same time, these problems aren't trivial or stupid - they're very deeply embedded in the human psyche. It's not really possible to be above this kind of search for meaning. Even the self-styled millennial Marxists who pride themselves on their "materialism" are acting out this very immaterial impulse towards self-actualization.
It just so happens that the same people who are the most likely to end up in this situation are also the most likely to end up in the "cultural class" that sets the tone for the discourse in our society. They look insane to people who grew up differently: the working class with their actual material problems, the children of immigrants with their strict rules and very specific parental expectations, people from conservative religious communities with their predefined gender roles and overarching belief systems. Structurelessness seems like paradise when you feel like you don’t have enough choices, but in many ways it’s its own special kind of hell that’s hard to understand until you’ve lived it.
I don't really know where I'm going with this except that I'm a young-ish person who's had a pretty objectively good life and yet I struggle every day with the tyranny of structurelessness. I know there's more meaning, more value, more SOMETHING to be found in this life but I just don't know where to find it. I completely understand why so many millennials and gen z'ers are becoming nuns and following Jordan Peterson and dedicating their life to stanning Taylor Swift and declaring themselves communists and self-diagnosing with chronic lyme disease and pursuing gender transition and making their choice not to have children their entire identity and living the #vanlife and going vegan etc etc etc.
OK, as someone who never got the hang of Tumblr, I could be totally off base here. But the dismissal of postmodernism as the source of "wokeness" reminds me of the left's dismissal of concerns about CRT in schools. "This is an obscure theory that's taught only in post-graduate courses. No one's teaching it to your children!" No, but the teachers who were exposed to these theories then develop curricula and activities that focus on racial differences among the children they teach.
To say that "woke" concepts arose independently on Tumblr waaay back in 2013 ignores the fact that critical theory had been percolating for decades in the academy. There's no reason to think that Tumblr would have been so isolated from the real world as to be immune to this influence. In fact, a Google search for "foucault" on pre-2013 Tumblr turns up hundreds of results. And as Dee's article states, "Tumblr’s user interface made it very difficult to avoid certain topics without serious curation."