We Need More Content!
Why do we want other people to make memes about things?
I want to show you some examples of an internet phenomenon that I have been unable to unsee. The phenomenon, as I see it, has a few steps:
People would like others to be convinced to take up a certain ideology.
They believe that if those others saw a certain kind of content, it would make them take up that ideology.
They call publicly for someone to create this memetic content.
I think this is a wacky way of thinking about beliefs, desires, and social media influences; let me try and explain why. Here are some examples:
Here’s a second, another tweet:
And here’s a third:
The people behind these posts feel they are discussing some of the biggest problems in public life. We don’t produce great works anymore; we’re a godless nation; we don’t have a coherent vision of human flourishing, we don’t inspire kids to become scientists. Presumably, these problems could have all kinds of solutions: political, spiritual, personal, psychological, military, virtue-ethical. But what they call for instead are aesthetic solutions.
I reviewed a book called The Conservative Futurist for The Dispatch last week, which is basically all about this. In it, James Pethokoukis explains that certain types of content are “Up Wing.” That is, they share his aesthetic sensibility and inculcate an optimism about the future. Things like Star Trek and the TV show For All Mankind are Up Wing. I’ve been stuck on this example, because it’s a key throughline of the book: if people would make more consciously ideological art of a certain mode, that ideology would perform better in the realm of public opinion. From the review:
“Rather than spend much time arguing with today’s Luddites, Pethokoukis calls for the creation of inspiring Up Wing content that will win their hearts. American society was better when it produced and consumed cultural products that were optimistic about the future, and is worse now that it produces and consumes apocalyptic, dystopian imaginary futures.
He calls for “Up Wingers with resources to directly finance Up Wing cultural efforts,” to fight back against a Hollywood which “rarely makes Up Wing content.” Those cultural efforts could include more World’s Fairs that showcase new technology, and a “Genesis Clock,” to counteract the pernicious influence of the Doomsday Clock.”
There are many funny things about this phenomenon. One is that consuming content is not traditionally understood as a fix to major problems. When a charity wants to “raise awareness” for something by creating content, it usually means it doesn’t know how to actually solve the problem.1 What happened to Joseph Kony anyway? We increasingly see “Instagram activism” as meaningless.
But what’s wrong with calling for cultural production? People have always thought ideas matter! But classically, the way to push an idea into the mainstream is to do it yourself. Socrates argues in the agora, Paul preaches to the crowds, Marx and Engels write books.
But the call I’m noticing is always for someone else to create media that will convince other third party observers. What gives?
One way to understand this phenomenon is as an inversion of the cancel culture instinct. In the digital age, the crowd is assumed to be endlessly pliable and susceptible to coded messages: this is, partially, why it’s so important to stop this speaker from attending a conference, or that blogger from being hosted on Substack. The crowd is always about to fall for some evil contagion, and only ceaseless watchfulness can prevent the danger.
Inverted, this instinct becomes a call for positive content; perhaps the crowd can be made virtuous by clicking through an implicit bias training, say. Maybe it’s subtler, with a call for representation in media. Include the right human types in the content people consume, and the training can be implicit, sub rosa.
When the Israel-Hamas war kicked off, young people began relentlessly commenting under Selena Gomez’s Instagram posts.2 In a tidal wave of comments, they called for her to make a statement in support of Palestine. Why did they do this? Wikipedia explains. “Selena Gomez is the most-followed woman, actor, musician and North American on Instagram” (429 million). It was understood that Selena has a media platform that other people care about. Therefore, she can influence those other people with her choice of media creation and curation.
This creation of an imaginary crowd separate from oneself is very funny to me. Everyone demanding that Selena speak out is imagining some other group of people scrolling their phones and being led like sheep toward the correct stance. No one calling for memetic content to be created justifies it by asking for it for themselves. I don’t need you to post the black square; they need you to. This is true even though often the askers are devoted followers and consumers of the content. Selena fans ask her to post, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs consume stories about cool scientific innovations. Pethokoukis is a super-fan of Star Trek. What these people are calling for is often simply the kinds of material they like consuming.
Why do we think media products will fix other people? Debord says it’s because we live in the society of the spectacle. He says we’re right to think about arguments in terms of the memetic vehicles that carry them, because that’s our world now. Our focus is dedicated to content, to ideas that have taken form in public discourse. “When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real beings – dynamic figments that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic behavior.” So we’re not wrong to think media conditions everything: in the society of the spectacle, it does. “Everything that was directly lived has receded into representation.”
Another friend suggests that there’s something Lacanian about the whole phenomenon, and points me to Zizek: “the subject supposed to believe” is “the constitutive feature of the symbolic order.”
On this account, some beliefs are really more like lifestyles for us. We don’t have the belief so much as we like the idea of living in a way prescribed by that belief. When primitive peoples are asked about some mysterious myth they have, about being descended from a fish or a bird, they often say “Of course not - I'm not that stupid! But I have been told that some of our ancestors actually did believe that…” Zizek ultimately describes this arms-length relationship to belief as a feature of post-modernity. If it feels false or inauthentic to claim an earnest belief, try displacing it onto someone else, and enjoy it vicariously through them.
“In an uncanny way, some beliefs always seem to function at a distance: in order for the belief to function, there has to be some ultimate guarantor of it, some true believer, yet this guarantor is always deferred, displaced, never present in person.”
Over text, my friend notes a strong instinct to moralize one’s consumption.3 I was struck by this: “Because we cannot stop ourselves from consuming content (we crave the stimulation, we crave the social access this stimulation gives us) we need something to justify the compulsive rhythm of this act.” This is one answer to why the phenomenon exists. It may be awkward to say “I like Star Trek because I like science fiction,” but acceptable to say “Star Trek is a compelling vision of a better world.” Consumption can be redeemed by being morally meaningful consumption.
When we actually catch people in the wild claiming they’ve been transformed by a piece of content as shared content, it can feel unpleasant to watch. Marvel taught me how to be strong, Jungkook gave me a reason to keep going. This is language from within the logic of fandom, spectacle, mass-cult. By contrast, we don’t feel as weirded out when people talk about being shaped by things outside of the mass-cult, even if they’re things that are popular. It’s not as skin-crawling to hear about the effect The Brothers K had on someone. The less of a mass-cult that is formed around the object, the more unselfconsciously one engages with it. Compare reading Infinite Jest on the subway to reading a book of unfamiliar David Foster Wallace essays on the same subway.
If everyone approaches the spectacle as a way to fix other people’s philosophical and spiritual problems, the spectacle can’t actually do those things. If we all self-consciously process the signals of the mass-cult, engage in media literacy, then the spectacle can’t be especially effective at transmitting messages at the conscious level. All parties are attempting to engage in memetic warfare while battening down their own hatches. Debord says that the spectacle “presents itself simultaneously as society itself… and as a means of unification… it is the focal point of all vision and all consciousness…But it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.”
If we’re not all picking up new conscious directives from our content, whether about progress or family life or techno-optimism, why are we demanding that others create that memetic material? At least one answer is “It feels awfully good to do so.”
But as any artist worth their salt will tell you, the creative spark comes from a completely different place. The muse doesn’t whisper “write propaganda.” When you start from that instinct, you get crappy AI-generated cover images. The arts and culture you love were created through acts of care and sustained attention. If you want to move the masses, start there.
Thank you Nick Whitaker for this example.
Thank you Holly for this example.
If you're interested in seeing the Lacanian/Zizekian argument fleshed out further (in an approachable way), I highly recommend Robert Pfaller's "On the Pleasure Principle in Culture:
Illusions Without Owners", where he takes up the question of "the Other's illusion" ("I may be enlightened, able to see right through it, etc, but THEY believe it") in a lot of detail and extends it to questions of religion, politics, etc., incl. my favorite ever analysis of Pascal's wager.
Feels like there's a subtle difference between two kinds of ideological media: the type that says "this kind of world would be good" and the type that says "this kind of world would be possible" (ie, here's a concrete way it could look). For this reason I think the middle tweet isn't as bad, in theory, as the others.
One way to put it would be propaganda versus a vision (or in its highest form, a demo). Propaganda is a commodity, because you can say it over and over again in different ways, so its production can be outsourced. Whereas with visions, you only really need one good one – but you can't just tell Hollywood to make it, the spec *is* the product.