President Duckface 2040
Rubbernecking on the Information Superhighway
In internet time, a month is a year (or more). And it was just about a month ago that a friend of mine “liked” a video on Facebook of Danielle Brigoli’s Dr. Phil appearance. Don’t know who Danielle Brigoli is? You may be more familiar with her internet nickname: “Cash Me Ousside Girl.”
I hardly ever see this friend in real life, so I was curious what had piqued his interest.
I watched the video. I was appalled. I was particularly appalled by the fact that it seemed to have generated thousands of “likes.”
And then I forgot about it. And so did everybody else. Presumably the hive mind had moved on to the internet’s next 15-minute insta-celebrity.
Until a few days ago when another friend posted a link to this story: Cash Me Ousside Girl just signed a production deal for her own reality TV series. She just turned fourteen. She’s demanding thousands of dollars for celebrity endorsements. And she’s made a music video that of this writing, has chalked up 29 million views.
“What’s wrong with this country?” my friend raved.
This article is my attempt to answer my friend’s question.
The Problem with Freedom
First of all, my friend is asking the wrong question.
The proper question is, “What’s wrong with this world?”
The Internet insta-celebrity is a global phenomenon. South Korea updates its celebrity websites literally by the second.
Social media, especially YouTube, has changed the celebrity landscape. (One early YouTube celebrity is Justin Bieber.)
YouTube’s celebrity-minting properties have proved so lucrative that the Russians created their own version called RuTube while the Chinese have YouKu.
What fuels this preoccupation with celebrity? One could point to any number of moral, intellectual, or social lapses on the part of human beings. But really, the problem is a much simpler one, and technology is key to it: Technology has freed human beings from the routine demands of existence in ways that were almost unimaginable, even as short a time as 100 years ago. Human beings in the 21st century have practically limitless amounts of leisure time on their hands, and the only thing they can imagine doing with this leisure, this freedom, is to pursue entertainment.
The Problem of Purpose
Understand that this kind of enjoyment, made possible by technology, is a totally new phenomenon. The entertainment we’re pressured into participating in is not the same type of indulgence that the wealthy, powerful, and privileged have historically gloried in as a type of birthright. As children of the 21st century, we are not libertines in any mal du siecle sense. We’re not allowed to be decadent. We’re made to understand that our obligation to enjoy includes certain built-in constraints so that our participation must be “sustainable”. We must drink responsibly. We must gamble responsibly. We must waste responsibly, recycling whenever possible. We must laugh at jokes responsibly and never at jokes with sexist or ethnic slurs. We must have casual sex responsibly with requisite layers of latex in place and concern for our anonymous partner’s orgasm. Our pharmacological excesses must be limited to the use of “harmless” drugs like marijuana.
As Slavoj Zizek has remarked since the 90’s: We are ethical hedonists. This is something quite different from the selfish consumers of the 1950s.
Concerns about sustainability may give us the illusion we have taken some kind of moral stand, but they really don’t ground us in any kind of meaning.
Don’t get me wrong: There’s nothing wrong with enjoyment.
Except that as a species, we have nothing else to do but to enjoy ourselves.
Entertainment as Harmful Fun
Let’s sidebar and talk about entropy for a moment here, shall we? Bear with me. It’s relevant because keeping ourselves endlessly entertained takes energy.
In its simplest sense, entropy can be described as disorder. Entropy is the chaos factor; its properties are famously defined by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In any dynamic but closed system, over time, energy can only be transferred from an organized to a disorganized state. The higher the entropy of a system, the lower the availability of energy in that system for useful work.
Humans create entropy when humans create deeper states of order. These orders can be religious, technological, bureaucratic or economic. With cloud computing and multiple platforms overlaid upon each other, we create contingent states of data, all of which seem meaningful because the data stratums overlay one another, mirroring applied relationships between humans, finances, government agencies, business corporations. Whether the networks be new media, old media, government, banking or otherwise, the net effect is to maintain the market and disseminate consumer-related info.
So, now we see how convoluted the rabbit hole is, and how deep it can go. But this depth requires the understanding of a context for the complexity system. You need to ask yourself the question, “How far up is the ground?”
The Second Law of Thermodynamics necessarily dictates that the degree of complexity within any system must be simpler than its surrounding environment. Human society cannot be more complex than the global environment. The only homeostasis possible in the long run is for human society to lower its complexity order and/or become the global environment.
In other words, so long as our only purpose is entertainment, we will create a system that destroys our planet’s order. And, inevitably, humanity’s struggle will be broadcast as entertainment.
(For further reading, see Manuel González de Molina and Víctor M. Toledo’s The Social Metabolism.)
The most sustainable types of entertainment include voyeuristic experiences like reality TV.
Watch, now, the way the life of a spoiled teenage girl changes when we add vast amounts of money and attention. The results will be equally entertaining whether she trashes the world she lives in or whether she grows into a productive adult.
Scratch that. It’s actually more entertaining if she trashes her life. In that way, Danielle Brigoli is very like another popular reality television star, President Donald Trump.
What’s most troubling about Donald Trump is that with his election, reality TV leaked into the “real” world. The coordinates of that shift are so subtle that even veterans of the reality TV industry are running scared. Understanding Trump’s behavior as a “distraction” is only possible if we assume that his behavior as a reality TV star is manufactured.
The situation is even more complicated by the fact that social media makes us all reality TV stars. We have become the television, and the television has become us. With selfies, vlogs, online diaries, and all the accoutrements of a busy social media presence, “reality TV” is just another phrase for where we are and what we do.
Within the echo chamber of the consumer-advertising-media complex, there was already an enormous amount of pressure for us to look a certain way and to inhabit a certain image. But with the advent of social media, suddenly there’s an audience watching us.
Indeed, InfoSec Taylor Swift, indeed.
Entertainment as Purpose
Believe it or not, a lot of people voted for Donald Trump in the last presidential election because they like train wrecks.
This rationalization? It doesn’t matter who the President is. Every four years, huge amounts of money changes hands; people rally; politicians insult each other; leaders (domestic and foreign) rattle sabers. So fucking what? Nothing really changes except that the electorate becomes exhausted.
But exhaustion breeds nihilism. To an exhausted voter, the President is so far removed — economically, politically, bureaucratically, socially — that nothing is real about the President. If there are riots, protests, angry tweets, then good! These things are very entertaining as long as they remain safely on the other side of the TV screen.
And whether or not you voted for Trump, regardless of what you think of him or his followers, the fact remains that unless you live in a Ted Kaczynski cabin and line your bike helmet with tin foil, you’re gonna see plenty of Trump in the next four years. There will be no escaping his face.
Trump has always been lurking about the corners of the media, even back in the days before the interwebs and social media (web 2.0) were around.
In this way, Danielle Bregoli and Donald Trump, are the same product — one junior-sized and one super-sized — whose real value can be measured in clicks, click-baiting, sharing, LOLs, and the other currencies of attention. For those who have ownership of media distribution channels, currencies of attention translate into real money.
The net effect is much like rubbernecking on the freeway. Rubbernecking is a minor distraction on a participant-by-participant basis, but its cumulative effect has consequences. Rubbernecking leads to traffic jams and more accidents.
Similarly, the internet may seem harmless since we’re separated from it by our phone screen or our computer screen, but the attention it drains from us is released back into the planet in the form of entropy. We may have more information, but we have less sense of what to do with it. We have major difficulties separating out the signal from the noise. And if most everything appears to be noise to us, then it follows it must also be noise to other people.
The End of History
Social media was created by capitalism, and thus operates to further capitalist activity.
As Deleuze and Guattari pointed out in AntiOedipus, capitalism has no exterior limits. Capitalism only has:
interior limits under the specific conditions of capitalist production and circulation, that is, in capital itself, but it functions only by reproducing and widening these limits on an always vaster scale. The strength of capitalism indeed resides in the fact that its axiomatic is never saturated, that it is always capable of adding a new axiom to the previous ones.
While this logic is inherent in the dynamics of capitalism, these dynamics already include the transactional reality of social interconnectivity.
Let’s apply Deleuze and Guattari to the Cash Me Ousside Girl. The normalization of click bait and trolling undermines our relationship with the future because the future depends upon respectful mutual collaboration — which is the very opposite of the types of behavior that elicits clicks and admiration from trolls.
A troubled girl named Danielle Bregoli is about to be rewarded for crass behavior. As part of this process, she sets a behavioral limit that someone else will exceed when we get bored with her — as inevitably, we will. Others will have to top her act to get an equal amount of attention.
Thus in a conservative view of capitalism, society must always appear to be deteriorating as the default norms for acceptable behavior shift. When this happens, a new behavioral boundary emerges as the wheels of capitalism go round. This boundary stands, for a short while, as an example of extreme behavior until it, too becomes a norm.
The sense of disorientation is one that affects us as a group — as a species, if you will.
The economist and political scientist Francis Fukuyama claims that humans have reached the end of history because we can’t develop an alternative to capitalism. I disagree. History may be ending, but it’s not because of our lack of inventiveness where economic models are concerned. History is ending because meaningless consumption and accumulation has become the norm. History is ending because we can’t tear ourselves away from our screens.
iIRL
Of course, life seems to be about amusement only because we think it’s about amusement. If we thought life was about love, we’d see everything in terms of love. If we thought life was about family, family would become the conceptual lens.
As lenses go, entertainment is meaningless — by definition: Entertainment is socially isolated — staged — so as to be purposefully removed from reality. We know Game of Thrones isn’t real, so we can view it, watch people be hurt, killed, and have their livelihoods destroyed without real horror. Fictions may extort real emotions but only to a limited degree.
Reality TV is different, though. True, more often than not, reality TV as a show is staged, but its characters are living inside their own realities, with possible spill over into our daily lives. (With President Trump, the “spill over” is increased incalculably because a Presidency is not a scripted show, and has, as a matter of course, far reaching policy/reality changes). In reality TV, complex human interactions are caricatured, diminished into easily digested mimetics that bear the same relationship to reality that Chicken McNuggets bear to Coq au Vin. How can we not expect negotiations between Merkel, Putin and Trump to go a certain way?
As long as we continue to allow ourselves to be titillated we will continue to remain confused. Our curious mammalian brains will continue to be bewildered and thrilled. Our dopamine reward systems have been hacked, and that form of hacking consists of signals purposefully designed to provoke and entice us. Since social media is full of signals, the ones that get the most attention are the ones that hack the hardest. And that’s negative because it’s purposeless behavior that incentivizes ever more purposeless behavior… purposeless because it goes nowhere and ultimately does nothing but drive traffic and create more entropy.
For many trapped — willingly or unwillingly — within this cycle, life seems increasingly meaningless. Not because of modernism or existentialism or neoliberalism or the apocalyptic specter of the atom bomb. Life is meaningless because there is no coherent framework that can help us determine our place in the world.
Problems without easy solutions have no authorities willing to take responsibility for them. As a result, doomsday scenarios and conspiracy theories proliferate, and those, too, become entertainment.
But since we’re all waiting for someone to do something about the future… How about we start a campaign? Brigoli for President in 2040! Hey, she’s got the duckface for it.
And, in the meantime, let’s watch this:
For those who are are interested in discussion, elaboration, and action around these ideas, check out the Facebook Group: Rally Point Alpha and the subreddit: Rally Point Bravo.
Rally Point Alpha: https://www.facebook.com/groups/625210141012983/
Rally Point Bravo: https://www.reddit.com/r/Rally_Point_Bravo/
