Cringeworthy

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
But it's also potentially the death of taste.

Psychedelic art is often garish and hideous.

But maybe taste is just an egocentric hangup maaaan
 
Yes as discussed elsewhere bad psychedelic art is when acceptance goes too far, not enough cringe, not enough recoiling, not enough bullying, not enough negative feedback.

And digital psychedelic art (the type that tries to replicate visions anyway) can be doomed to disappoint. Even google deep dream, kind of disappointing in a way...

It’s arguably best when it’s restricted to one dimension or handmade materials, like those shipibo blankets or those ceilings in iranian mosques.
 

sufi

lala
you answered the easy one!
Cringe is increasing alongside the disparity between our new-found curated social profiles and our (shrinking?) internal selves.

As we dematerialise and externalise, it's more and more difficult to find the way back to our private identities, and so cringe could be a way to detect when the disparity is too great to sustain, or a route back to where we left our 'real' personalities, or a sign that a bit has dropped off?

is the antidote is to deal with people who know both sides of those identities? not just online, but also with other projected fake identities, like the 'work' persona - always a scene of concealed urges & secretive off-the-books happenings - which could trigger cringe as well as bigger repercussions, like getting sacked
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Wow, well put Sufi. That fits beautifully into my essential Made in Chelsea observation.
 

kumar

Well-known member
Listening to certain friends talk about extinction rebellion last year it felt like cringe could be effortlessly employed to dismantle any concerted organised protest movement until the rapture
 

sufi

lala
there was this assumption that anonymity would work online in the early days of the internet, which still resounds in the culture i reckon, encouraging people to act out fantastical extreme versions of themselves. As it's turned out it's not been so easy to keep the separation between our on and offline identities and social media has obviously played right into that, so youngers have no expectation of privacy.
I felt like keeping my online life a bit separate from my irl identity maybe hadnt been such a great move when i met a younger guy who said to me "how come you've wasted all that social capital by posting anonymously all these years" but i think i'm ok with that now.

Made in Chelsea is a peak of projected personality - these arseholes have their own tv show to act out on. I witnessed a few of them irl one time - there were no cameras but they were still acting out, i certainly cringed, but still found it hard to look away. There's a denialism there too, a bit like how we disavow hipsters.
 
you answered the easy one!
Cringe is increasing alongside the disparity between our new-found curated social profiles and our (shrinking?) internal selves.

As we dematerialise and externalise, it's more and more difficult to find the way back to our private identities, and so cringe could be a way to detect when the disparity is too great to sustain, or a route back to where we left our 'real' personalities, or a sign that a bit has dropped off?

V good.

So a distress signal that shows a norm is being violated. Social cohesion. Stay on script, in your lane.

I think it’s been useful for comedy to push that button when the script is oppressive. It’s useful to play with if we want to learn about the kind of alienation that happens as we ‘dematerialise and externalise’? I think the office taught me a lot about people and work and media.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Made in Chelsea is a peak of projected personality - these arseholes have their own tv show to act out on. I witnessed a few of them irl one time - there were no cameras but they were still acting out, i certainly cringed, but still found it hard to look away. There's a denialism there too, a bit like how we disavow hipsters.

Indeed, as I famously wrote on the Rolling TV Thread:

That's the logic of the thing: a hollow drift of non-events that simulate the motion of emotions, seem to suggest forward momentum, things happening that you cannot actually recall happening one minute after switching over to the rolling disaster that is the Ten 'O Clock News. The traumas add up to nothing even though they break like atmospheric ruptures in the weird psychic meteorology of these fabricated, yet existing, cliques. The dwarf stars that glide through the show now exist in a pretty strange place, acting out their lives like we all do but in a more extreme way, but without anything extreme (like unemployment or illness) actually happening to any of them. Being on TV is not even a big thing for them, simply another component in their surface self-actualization.

Sophie "Habbs" Habboo has just ditched perpetual goon Sam Thompson, but it's hard to even determine what effect this had on her if any: it was just a plot point in her summer, which happened to coincide with the filming of the Croatia junket, for which it was scheduled neatly in the first place. This is a complicated way to live. Habbs is self-employed, an entrepreneur; her job is that new thing, the CV staple that is The Social Media Influencer, a role she crafted on the back of a degree in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, surely a legitimate way to use such a qualification. Her zone of influence is her Instagram account, upon which she reclines in expensive bikinis, skirts and drapes, gripping niche beauty products and fellow Made in Chelsea cast members, and friends. In her friction-less negotiation of tangled layers of reality and fiction -- emotional murmurs at the service of self-presentation/self-fashioning -- she is the latest exemplar of the Made in Chelsea condition that was once given the definitive model by the legendary Oliver Proudlock.

...

Maybe there is nothing wrong with this at such innocent, extreme points, like Proudlock. There was no crisis in this, none of the existential angst displayed by Donald Trump in his psychotic Twitter war with the forces of the Mainstream Media, a fight to the death to wrest control of his self-image. Proudlock and Habbs can do this without any internal turbulence whatsoever; they don't even seem to be surprised, let alone confused, by the spectral, multi-layered lives they now lead. They cannot be said to be unreal, even as they shed huge chunks of their identity to whatever notion of reality can be said to be left to navigate.

*Cringe!*
 

sufi

lala
this is a bit like that
From award-winning director Caveh Zahedi, The Show About The Show is his self-referential scripted metaseries about a Brooklyn filmmaker trying to make a TV show.
i'd be interested to hear what you all think. absolutely embracing the cringe, the public/personal thing completely exploded all over the place
 
Listening to certain friends talk about extinction rebellion last year it felt like cringe could be effortlessly employed to dismantle any concerted organised protest movement until the rapture

Can you elaborate on this a bit
 

Simon silverdollarcircle

Well-known member
I agree we're cringing more nowadays.
I wonder if it has something to do with the homogenisation of language and thought that the comes from being on line so much. The boundaries of the self are much less defined than previously. We laugh at the same memes, talk about them in the same way, use the same emojis at the same time etc etc.

There's this sense that we are genuinely part of this big hive mind that programmed to react in set ways. And so it's much easier to get embarrassed for other people's behaviour because really, at root it's the same as our behaviour.
 
We laugh at the same memes, talk about them in the same way, use the same emojis at the same time etc etc.

This makes me think of something a mate said about cringing when he’s leaving the cinema and hears everyone talking about the film. Something to do with an intimate shared experience with strangers feeling uncomfortable.
 

sufi

lala
This is very symptomatic of the so-called attention economy isnt it - and the cringe is some sort of lowest common denominator reaction, maybe not so qualitatively substantial, but at least it's something, a click instead of complete indifference

now we're all instantaneously connected like this, teh zeitgeist is strong like it never has been before - i worry somewhat how easy it is to exploit us using this always on panopticon

the odd thing is that no-one, or most people seem not to stand by their online identity over their reallife persona, so we're all acting up in order to achieve this profile, which nobody gives a shit about, most definitely not the people running these things
 

Simon silverdollarcircle

Well-known member
This makes me think of something a mate said about cringing when he’s leaving the cinema and hears everyone talking about the film. Something to do with an intimate shared experience with strangers feeling uncomfortable.

Yeah this is the worst.

Perhaps what we cringe about has flipped around. It used to be that we'd generally cringe about people trying too hard and failing to hit the mark. The example of teenagers at the start of this thread.

But now do we cringe when we realise that others, and by extension ourselves, are not really trying hard enough. That we're just parotting the standard lines that everyone thinks because we realise we're all thinking the same thing
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
i don't know exactly what a cringe is. when i'm in the subway and the wagon is silent and everyone is minding his or her business and i run into an acquaintance, which then shows me a video on his or her phone with the audio loud it makes me want to be invisible, it makes me want to escape, to not be there, i feel the eyes burning. i don't like to be in the middle of the attention and i think it's embarrassing to take the space by being loud. is that a cringe?
 

version

Well-known member
I think if any of my normcore friends were to find dissensus and read out my posts in front of (I was going to say a group of people but actually) just me, I'd cringe until all my ribs cracked.

I reckon this cuts both ways though. I'd also cringe if someone I knew irl were to transcribe the boring, fumbling conversations I have with them and post them on Dissensus.
 
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