He was briefly the most memed man in Manhattan, from circa June to September 2021OK why are you talking about this bloke?
A great honour.He was briefly the most memed man in Manhattan, from circa June to September 2021
Thousands of words have been written, asking this question, but no satisfying answer has ever been foundWhy so?
This is like everything to do with twitter culture, podcast people isn't it. There's nothing actually at the bottom of any of it apart from party gossip.Thousands of words have been written, asking this question, but no satisfying answer has ever been found
It's like cryptocurrency. Network effects. Value built on memes. The home range of hyperstition. No grounding, only pure belief. Suspended reason. A cathedral in the sky. Roadrunner falls when roadrunner looks down. These are beautiful things.This is like everything to do with twitter culture, podcast people isn't it. There's nothing actually at the bottom of any of it apart from party gossip.
It's like cryptocurrency. Network effects. Value built on memes. The home range of hyperstition. No grounding, only pure belief. Suspended reason. A cathedral in the sky. Roadrunner falls when roadrunner looks down. These are beautiful things.
Yes.the question is: doesn't the shallowness, or hollowness, of it all eventually get a little tiring and depressing? isn't there the eventual creep of emptiness, the wear of an entertaining shell game for people privileged enough to be able to indulge without worrying about real life? pure belief and suspended reason have led some dreamers to come up with amazing discoveries that change the world, but most of it, as catalog says, amounts to party gossip (which is fine for what is, but hardly something to base one's life around).
there's no there there.
There was Angelicellectuals, Containcellectuals, Howlonggonecellectuals, Ioncellectuals, Taolincellectuals, Wetbraincellectuals, Cellectualcellectuals, and so on, most of which were eventually banned, or have just disappeared or ground to a stop. On these pages, fan culture and meme culture were combined in novel ways. Most of the posts were not jokes, but copies of images other people posted and things they said, collaged, combined, and remade to be weirder. A postmodern act, Sean Monahan writes in our current print issue #69, of “making content out of content”. There was clowning, shitposting (absurdist posting intended to confuse or provoke), hard-to-parse esoteric nonsense, quotations and found images, beautiful sentiment, deconstructions of identity, annoyance and frustration, all joined by a shared aesthetic of bold text and degraded images.
Also important to point out that we already have massive economies built on this second-order, ungrounded, "it's valuable if other people find it valuable" mentality. A lot of sexual fitness, runaway effects; the value of gold above and beyond its material qualities; the fashion world.A lot of it, such as in crypto, runs on "community value" or "cultural value" or the like, things that are intangible and abstract but can nonetheless be substantial.
If the particular culture or community itself has nothing more than ephemeral gossip to base its value on, then the value is not only abstract but also insubstantial.