Not sure if people are genuinely upset about the "loss of old-timeliness", or they just pattern match any current event to "might be interpreted as woke" and pile on. E.g. if Buc-ee's hat were to change the color from red, that would be a Huge National Scandal, an anti-MAGA conspiracy.
That is why so many people confuse the output of an LLM for actual intelligence. The internet has already warped human interaction into an extremely stupid pattern matching algorithm.
I loved reading this post, but I can't help thinking that this analysis, intellectually enjoyable as it is, is more complicated than necessary. The basic fact seem to me simpler. What unite all the things Trump hates on is that explicitly or by implication they involve some moral criticism of American and "the American way of life." This is what unites DEI, any black of female person in a role of authority, EVs, windmills, renaming army bases, etc. The power of these criticisms makes people eager to be reassured by being told that the censorious "Woke" who voice these criticisms are the real problem, and that they themselves are the real victims.
"If you point out the poverty and say, “Hey, this is not healthy,” the right-wing populist move is to attack you for being a liberal elitist, which is kind of true. You are, because you don’t have an alternative except snobbery."
We find the alternative or it's game over. This is the field of public consciousness now. Adapt or die.
I'd say the answer is easy to come up with, it's to help funding and promoting the nice, easy to access, inexpensive places with a popular cultural purpose, like public libraries, local newspapers and radio stations, places to play and listen to music, bookstores, youth centers, places to hang out, etc., where people can feel like going or that they can feel like using. In the Internet age we have to make more of a case about them being relevant, but they still are. And they can also be defended against the right wing ideological warfare (the more dangerous aspect is the economic warfare).
There's also a huge case to make to fighting the bottlenecks in the creative industry which ensure that a handful giant cultural corporation have a hand on most of cultural production. If you have more diversity in creation and access, you go against the soullessness. Cory Doctorow & Rebecca Giblin's Chokepoint Capitalism gives an excellent and detailled blueprint of what could be done.
I agree. The left has to become embedded in the working class, the poor, and/or in any oppressed group. It won't be easy, but we must find a way to educate without preaching. We must aim for role reversal because ordinary people have a lot to teach us. They are the ones who will innovate resistance strategies that can succeed.
Funny that this comes on the heels of Sydney Sweeney Jeans. But unlike Jeangate, where 1-2 no-name wokistes took umbrage, electeds and intellectual luminaries of the right man the barricades in defence of the noble Barrel.
Perhaps Albert Toscano provides some psychic relief so you can enjoy your vacation. That is, assuming that fascism is a 'scavenger ideology,' scooping up scraps of Romanticism, liberalism, new technology and socialism ... "it was (and remains) able to weaponize a kind of structured incoherence in its political and temporal imaginaries, modulating them to enlist and energize different class factions, thereby capturing. diverting and corrupting popular aspirations."
This reminds me of the beginning of Slavoj Zizek's Plea in favor of intolerance (a book, not the Plea in favor of Leninist intolerance article, I don't know if it was published in english) in which he proposes we seek the unspoken and actually legitimate popular aspirations behind demands that we find bigoted or reactionary. For instance, rejection of foreigners may be an unspoken aspiration for geniune community, to which foreigners are seen as a threat. But do they have to be ? Once we pinpoint the unspoken aspiration, we may find another, better answer to it.
Yup. +1 for the Toscano book for a holiday read. Not uncritically, ofc. The chapter on Furio Jesi (who was new to me) was particularly interesting - as was a little digging into the life story of his father Bruno!
"It’s sort of pathetic to reflect that we have so few—maybe no—authentic and unmediated experiences that the thing that now really upsets people is an alteration of a simulation of authenticity. It’s felt as a loss of national identity on par with the defacement George Washington, because our national identity is now just corporate brands and consumerism."
I've been holding this theory for awhile that the loss of "identity" people blame on immigration (in Europe at least) is in large parts caused by something real, the feeling that things are becoming void of community and of soul. A loss whose root is rather some kind of very dumb corporate homogenization, made worst by touristification in many formerly nice places.
It seems like the places which are full of life and of geniune community tend to die out in the areas that are not popular ; or they become unaffordable and a rich people's ghetto, or a tourist's ghetto, in the areas that are. No wonder why people don't feel very well.
Good piece. I've been working my way through some of Baudrillard's books and have found him pretty useful for this moment.
This reminds me as much, though, of some of the discourse around the Epstein files. Specifically, the idea that the incentives of online platform monetization are deeply aligned with continuing to push various baroque conspiracies, even after they stop benefitting the Trump right. I'm not sure how that's borne out, but there's a similar materialist explanation here: controversy has to continually be produced so that it can be monetized. It's the blogger/ poster activity of sifting through the news for the opportunity for a joke or a take, just toxic and at scale.
While waiting for laundry, you wrote a very interesting and thought-provoking take on the Cracker Barrel crackup, placing it in a broader cultural context. I have read so much over so many years leading up to the world we now live in but your analysis brings together a lot of writings in sociology, anthropology, politics, etc. Keep up the good work, John, and have an enjoyable vacation.
I guess I’ve been absent from the corporate world for a few decades so its hard for me to speak too knowingly here. But, it sure seems like the populists have bought this MAGA world propaganda that the libruls now control corporate America and business decision-making in general. Somehow, the thinking goes, the old school capitalists that used to support the Republicans went to the never Trump camp and are now supporting the libruls.
Seems to me pretty much totally false. The kernel of truth underneath is that liberal values color a solid portion of investment and consumer decisions as well as individual expectations in workplace culture. As in…that is the will of the free markets that so-called conservatives purportedly revere so much.
But I see zero evidence that actual corporate decision making has shifted to be more in the hands of liberals. Its still mostly conservatives making decisions …but based on changing market demands. And this bothers them so much, they are trying to dictate those market conditions.
All that said, I really have no idea how the change in logo reflects anything but an aesthetic shift and corporate idiocy.
One frustration I have with modern controversies: how am I supposed to know exactly what fraction of the public is genuinely upset by this? Am I supposed to go by social media likes and retweets, which is just a relatively tiny number of posters boosting their analytics with bots? Am I to assume that most folks care about this because the dumbest, loudest people on the platforms are pretending to? How do I even know if I’m in a minority or majority of reasonable people?
“It’s a gimmick to sell gas, thought up by a Shell executive.”
What’s more authentically American than that?
Not sure if people are genuinely upset about the "loss of old-timeliness", or they just pattern match any current event to "might be interpreted as woke" and pile on. E.g. if Buc-ee's hat were to change the color from red, that would be a Huge National Scandal, an anti-MAGA conspiracy.
That is why so many people confuse the output of an LLM for actual intelligence. The internet has already warped human interaction into an extremely stupid pattern matching algorithm.
yeah. for rufo this is no doubt just opportunistic grist for the mill.
I loved reading this post, but I can't help thinking that this analysis, intellectually enjoyable as it is, is more complicated than necessary. The basic fact seem to me simpler. What unite all the things Trump hates on is that explicitly or by implication they involve some moral criticism of American and "the American way of life." This is what unites DEI, any black of female person in a role of authority, EVs, windmills, renaming army bases, etc. The power of these criticisms makes people eager to be reassured by being told that the censorious "Woke" who voice these criticisms are the real problem, and that they themselves are the real victims.
"If you point out the poverty and say, “Hey, this is not healthy,” the right-wing populist move is to attack you for being a liberal elitist, which is kind of true. You are, because you don’t have an alternative except snobbery."
We find the alternative or it's game over. This is the field of public consciousness now. Adapt or die.
I'd say the answer is easy to come up with, it's to help funding and promoting the nice, easy to access, inexpensive places with a popular cultural purpose, like public libraries, local newspapers and radio stations, places to play and listen to music, bookstores, youth centers, places to hang out, etc., where people can feel like going or that they can feel like using. In the Internet age we have to make more of a case about them being relevant, but they still are. And they can also be defended against the right wing ideological warfare (the more dangerous aspect is the economic warfare).
There's also a huge case to make to fighting the bottlenecks in the creative industry which ensure that a handful giant cultural corporation have a hand on most of cultural production. If you have more diversity in creation and access, you go against the soullessness. Cory Doctorow & Rebecca Giblin's Chokepoint Capitalism gives an excellent and detailled blueprint of what could be done.
I agree. The left has to become embedded in the working class, the poor, and/or in any oppressed group. It won't be easy, but we must find a way to educate without preaching. We must aim for role reversal because ordinary people have a lot to teach us. They are the ones who will innovate resistance strategies that can succeed.
Excellent point!
Funny that this comes on the heels of Sydney Sweeney Jeans. But unlike Jeangate, where 1-2 no-name wokistes took umbrage, electeds and intellectual luminaries of the right man the barricades in defence of the noble Barrel.
Tat for tit, one might say
Perhaps Albert Toscano provides some psychic relief so you can enjoy your vacation. That is, assuming that fascism is a 'scavenger ideology,' scooping up scraps of Romanticism, liberalism, new technology and socialism ... "it was (and remains) able to weaponize a kind of structured incoherence in its political and temporal imaginaries, modulating them to enlist and energize different class factions, thereby capturing. diverting and corrupting popular aspirations."
This reminds me of the beginning of Slavoj Zizek's Plea in favor of intolerance (a book, not the Plea in favor of Leninist intolerance article, I don't know if it was published in english) in which he proposes we seek the unspoken and actually legitimate popular aspirations behind demands that we find bigoted or reactionary. For instance, rejection of foreigners may be an unspoken aspiration for geniune community, to which foreigners are seen as a threat. But do they have to be ? Once we pinpoint the unspoken aspiration, we may find another, better answer to it.
Yup. +1 for the Toscano book for a holiday read. Not uncritically, ofc. The chapter on Furio Jesi (who was new to me) was particularly interesting - as was a little digging into the life story of his father Bruno!
"It’s sort of pathetic to reflect that we have so few—maybe no—authentic and unmediated experiences that the thing that now really upsets people is an alteration of a simulation of authenticity. It’s felt as a loss of national identity on par with the defacement George Washington, because our national identity is now just corporate brands and consumerism."
I've been holding this theory for awhile that the loss of "identity" people blame on immigration (in Europe at least) is in large parts caused by something real, the feeling that things are becoming void of community and of soul. A loss whose root is rather some kind of very dumb corporate homogenization, made worst by touristification in many formerly nice places.
It seems like the places which are full of life and of geniune community tend to die out in the areas that are not popular ; or they become unaffordable and a rich people's ghetto, or a tourist's ghetto, in the areas that are. No wonder why people don't feel very well.
Honky Bucket.
Whether antifascism is a simulacrum seems less important than whether it can be effective.
Good piece. I've been working my way through some of Baudrillard's books and have found him pretty useful for this moment.
This reminds me as much, though, of some of the discourse around the Epstein files. Specifically, the idea that the incentives of online platform monetization are deeply aligned with continuing to push various baroque conspiracies, even after they stop benefitting the Trump right. I'm not sure how that's borne out, but there's a similar materialist explanation here: controversy has to continually be produced so that it can be monetized. It's the blogger/ poster activity of sifting through the news for the opportunity for a joke or a take, just toxic and at scale.
While waiting for laundry, you wrote a very interesting and thought-provoking take on the Cracker Barrel crackup, placing it in a broader cultural context. I have read so much over so many years leading up to the world we now live in but your analysis brings together a lot of writings in sociology, anthropology, politics, etc. Keep up the good work, John, and have an enjoyable vacation.
God is dead and we have replaced him with cracker barrel
Rufo is absolutely nuts.
I guess I’ve been absent from the corporate world for a few decades so its hard for me to speak too knowingly here. But, it sure seems like the populists have bought this MAGA world propaganda that the libruls now control corporate America and business decision-making in general. Somehow, the thinking goes, the old school capitalists that used to support the Republicans went to the never Trump camp and are now supporting the libruls.
Seems to me pretty much totally false. The kernel of truth underneath is that liberal values color a solid portion of investment and consumer decisions as well as individual expectations in workplace culture. As in…that is the will of the free markets that so-called conservatives purportedly revere so much.
But I see zero evidence that actual corporate decision making has shifted to be more in the hands of liberals. Its still mostly conservatives making decisions …but based on changing market demands. And this bothers them so much, they are trying to dictate those market conditions.
All that said, I really have no idea how the change in logo reflects anything but an aesthetic shift and corporate idiocy.
John, hope you don't mind me linking to a stack post on the same topic by music/culture observer Ted Gioia:
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/weve-reached-the-sad-cracker-barrel?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=296132&post_id=171784454&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxOTg1MzQwLCJwb3N0X2lkIjoxNzE3ODQ0NTQsImlhdCI6MTc1NjA2MjMyNiwiZXhwIjoxNzU4NjU0MzI2LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMjk2MTMyIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.lMKO4bKAqofJ_37_cxLYxO5StB7I43NkDo-k1OQA7Y4&r=16jwc&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Professor Ealy's take for your reading enjoyment. https://open.substack.com/pub/professorealy/p/cracker-barrel-jesus-and-the-maga?r=uekwl&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=post%20viewer
Hey, thank you ! I've been meaning to buy Ted Gioia's book (Music, a subversive history) for awhile now but I never suscribed to his substack.
One frustration I have with modern controversies: how am I supposed to know exactly what fraction of the public is genuinely upset by this? Am I supposed to go by social media likes and retweets, which is just a relatively tiny number of posters boosting their analytics with bots? Am I to assume that most folks care about this because the dumbest, loudest people on the platforms are pretending to? How do I even know if I’m in a minority or majority of reasonable people?
You should write some more stuff while you're waiting for your laundry, John. This one's a zinger.
"The whole world adheres to it more or less in terror of the collapse of the political."
"“The melancholy of societies without power,” that is to say, societies that have no real way to express the democratic will."
It's true of America and it's true of anything I can see in European countries.