#100: New idea trending

What politicians promise in campaign speeches, for example, is laughably different from what they do when they’re elected into office, and that’s because political speeches are about signals. Like wearing a Nirvana t-shirt from Forever21, the signifier is more important than the object or act it signifies.

Those of us who participate in this dance understand it’s not necessarily building to anything. It’s odd to see movements like anti-capitalism and Catholicism treated with the same frivolity. They’re in, they’re out, you try them on like low-rise jeans. In the process, ideas get watered down.

Like clothes or memes or slang, we try ideas on for a while—put them in shareable graphics, temporarily link them in bio, express them via viral tweet or op-ed, maybe print them on a T-shirt—before putting them aside for something more relevant.

In politics, cosplaying as the type of person you’d like people to think you are is the same thing as being that type of person. Plenty of us critique that sort of thing—call it electability politics—but when we absorb and regurgitate orthodoxy because we want to belong, to be centered, to be seen as moral and good, we’re performing the same trick.

Online discourse has an impressive ability to die on the vine, reaching its apex of visibility—and value—before it’s put to any discernible use.

Obviously ideas have always gained and lost popularity throughout history. But I think it’s fair to say the conditions that disrupt the so-called arc of progress have intensified beyond comprehension. Mass media’s emphasis on images and appearances has shifted the political discourse to a facile imitation of its former self.

Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle: “Debord introduced the concept of recuperation: the process by which subcultural ideas and images become commodified and reincorporated into mainstream society,” she writes. In other words, ideas that subvert the establishment tend to get adapted by the establishment in their most docile forms, and are thu... See more

Social media was designed to sell ads and then evolved to do it better. Everything else it promises is functionally neutered in that process. The internet may be a good place to start a conversation, but it’s not built to finish one.

Here are the first two sentences of Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle: “In post-industrial societies where mass production and media predominate, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly experienced has been replaced with its representation in the form of images.” He wrote that in 1967! Imagine wh... See more