Let's Play Life

tags

Art

Notes

last year's California Problem post

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Part 1: The Memory Office

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sometimes you worry that you have no real distance. can you ever grow past these stories? do others want you to grow past these stories? hasn't the strange ritual of sharing them simply begun to make less sense every time you do it?

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urgently remind you any time you unearth long-dead feelings that you can't really put into words, that what you really feel is the ache of the call home.

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from the 17th to 19th century, nostalgia was originally considered a medical sickness so severe that, if left untreated, could lead to death.

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until i attended this middle school, i'm not sure i fully grasped why school shootings seemed to happen so often in America. after that, i began to wonder why they didn't happen more often. maybe that's why the administrators were so nutty about students carrying their coats and backpacks around. maybe they knew

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Part 2: The Dream of 2008

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it was, in the end, a losing battle - there was no way to keep up that internal cohesion in most smaller spaces when the big money really started flowing into the online content industry.

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this culture was also predicated on the idea of exclusion.

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my former online forum experiences felt really tangible, and way less imaginary in how they went down. even when they were filled with drama, and even when everyone was relatively anonymous and using a pseudonym… they were real. these spaces were almost all teens and young adults figuring out everything for themselves, more or less without older adult knowledge or supervision.

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the 2010's was a decade filled with mass protest in numbers never before seen in human history. people were grappling with the power of decentralized organizing tools that new forms of mass social media provided us with, and using it as a way to try to fight our increasingly contradictory and morally bankrupt reality. and yet, as we know, it all had startlingly little impact on changing the existing order.

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once the extent of the impacts of the pandemic truly sunk in around 2021, it was impossible to ignore all that we had lost anymore. we never really moved out from underneath the shadow of the recession or recovered from it. a lot of culture, and a lot of lives have been destroyed in the process. and now in the 2020s we seem to be experiencing a massive cultural malaise as a result.

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maybe if more of these guys had the vocabulary to identify what was going wrong in their lives, or the ability to hit the breaks on their careers, more of them would still be here. but so many people, especially younger people, never felt like they had been granted any space or ability to do that. when the machine is fully set into motion, you're supposed to just keep going. so many people depend on you to keep going. so this is just what you have to do now.

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the sordid rubbernecking fascination that drove vulturous tabloid media to cheering on the extremely public 2008 emotional breakdown of Britney Spears or the decline and death of Amy Winehouse. those are things that invoke tearful apologies now from parties involved, of course. but now that we're doing this all to random people on the internet, and it's coming from a bunch of totally unaccountable sources who don't have to answer to anything… many people suddenly don't seem to notice or care again.

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the implications of a bullying culture that delights in the death and misfortune of others is also completely impossible to ignore when you watch all the current images of Israeli Zionists actively celebrating the destruction and murder of Palestinian lives in the most grotesque and strange ways possible.

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we seemingly lack the collective ability to put words to the complex emotions our cultural moment produces.

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these fleeting moments can serve as a path forward to a far more interesting and enlightened cultural space than the dead husk of one we currently have right now. and a big failure of post-Great Recession culture was in the inability to recognize this latent possibility.

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this is the kind of moment of true cinema the phenomenon of Let's Plays introduced to the world - the times when genuine humanity seeps out behind the facade of the usual production of media consumption, before being beaten back into line.

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the failed dreams of a bygone era now much more overtly fuel the despair machines of the present. perhaps this apparent death of culture, this death of accountability, this death of conscience is just the pit we'll be stuck wallowing in for a long time to come. it may be an exceptionally bleak future. but hey, at the end of the day, if you're still functioning: at least you've got a job.

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Part 3: The Waste Land

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fascistic governments aim to maintain the status quo by providing citizens with the means to express themselves aesthetically without reforming their lives materially.¹

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any and all culture that comes about on the internet serves as potential raw fuel for this new personality-based content creator class to exploit and make money off of.

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an ecosystem of parasites. the many creative people who struggle to fold themselves and their work around this reality, who increasingly feel like sell- outs who lack the opportunities to establish real integrity in their work, have good reason to feel tremendously resentful.

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virality does not coorelate with quality. even independent of these massive disparities, i just have real fundamental problems with the idea that presenting my work in the form of a four hour youtube essay is more culturally valuable or important than presenting it here on my blog. maybe some of us don't want to play the lottery and subjugate ourselves to an ecosystem that feels totally arbitrary, and that no one knows how long it'll stick around anyway. maybe it's more valuable to not further feed this beast if we're able to.

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"The Nostalgia Critic Principle", a philosophy that i believe is central to art in the social media age: you must sacrifice yourself under the worst possible working conditions in order to make the shittiest possible art. the art must be entirely constructed around what your frothing fanbase demands and nothing else. the art must therefore be the most insular, the most ephemeral, the most dated to its very specific moment in time. as long as you still have a career, you will be forced to make it forever.

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it's outsider art where you can witness none of the joy of expression of most outsider art.

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something is illuminated when one makes a piece of work that shows such a profound, cruel laziness in all the important places, but such a high amount of effort in all the wrong places.

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makes channels that can effecitvely explain insular internet phenomena to a large audience a really powerful force for internet culture.

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if anything, unique work will often be castigated for its failures to fit into whatever dominant aesthetic or modes of expression exist in the space it's from.

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with unique artistic vision often comes an unwillingness or inability to engage with more popular categories and genres in a way that easily tracks.

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you might think popular youtubers are positioned better than anyone else to break this trend and highlight obscure works born from insular internet communities. but the complete unreliability of algorithmic engagement means the biggest youtubers usually tend towards safer topics, which further reinforces whatever dominant discourse already exists.

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capitalism can easily contain anti-capitalist ideas and practices so long as they are internal expressions of belief and morality that are never truly externalized by larger outward action. this phenomenon occurring in art is just one symptom of a much broader problem.

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the question of whether art can challenge the existing order in some fundamental way appears to have been settled long before many of our lifetimes.

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it's not simply that new modes of culture aren't springing up - it's that they have existed deep on the margins. they have not been allowed to become a larger cultural force outside the context of spaces that are designed to beat them back down into conformity.

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a critical mass of people occupying ambiguous roles with ambiguous interests means a crisis for the market - our ultimate arbiter of power.

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the facade of normalcy must be maintained even though no one really believes in it. in other words: it's hypernormalization.

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there's always a lingering feeling that if those adults fully knew about what was in the games you were playing, they might think twice about letting you play them. they're not just idle trinkets to be consumed and disposed of - there's something greater there than that. perhaps that's why so many adults with children are now so fully insistent towards overbearingly imposing themselves in the private spaces of kids today. there is something that is kind of dangerous, and weirdly undefinable there. there is a path into something potentially profound, but as-yet completely undefined.

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eventually people will grow tired of this desire to over-reduce and over-explain, and we'll be right back to where we started. perhaps that's why nothing feels really resolved at all since the age of The Waste Land or L’Âge d’Or.

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