satire is a collective sedative
Satire is a creative superpower that has the ability to liberate us from the status quo, but our overreliance on it has turned it into a collective sedative.
satire is a collective sedative
There are obvious downsides to this line of thinking. It’s anti-intellectual, for one. But also, the incessant caricaturing and dumbing down of major life events numbs us to their significance. If a meme pokes fun at someone’s bad behaviour, it gives the bad behaviour a pass. Through our rapid meme-fication and IJBOLing, we obfuscate the evil of... See more
Have We Lost Our Minds?
“Sometimes those ironic and satirical memes are too heavy-handed, and they go into things that, at a certain point, it’s not really a joke anymore,” Mr. Luna said. He said he appreciated wholesome content instead. Watching cat videos is one of his favorite pastimes. “I really enjoy seeing that type of content as opposed to people making fun of
... See moreSadiba Hasan • When Did ‘Wholesome’ Become a Gen Z Compliment?
“Satire is meant to ridicule power. If you are laughing at people who are hurting, it's not satire, it's bullying.” – Terry Pratchett
The critic Roy Christopher has called irony “the most abused trope of our time, a ‘get out of judgment free’ card, an escape route, an exit strategy.”
Ian Bogost • Play Anything
“We need to believe that the powerful can suffer, that they can be humiliated, that they can be made to feel there is no way out,” theologian Adam Kotsko writes of this dilemma. “If there can’t be any hope for us, we can at least hope that one day there will be hopelessness for the destroyers of our hope.”
Sam Adler-Bell • The Movie Industry’s Confused ‘Eat the Rich’ Fantasy
The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.
thefreelibrary.com • E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.
A client and I were recently analysing the surprising success of the canned water brand Liquid Death, now valued at over $700 million. In case you’re not familiar with it, Liquid Death is notable because the entire brand is essentially one big joke – it’s water (obviously a pure and healthy substance), presented in a “dangerous” heavy metal kind of... See more
alex • Taste: The secret ingredient - Basic Arts
What if there’s nothing we can do,
and we’re just stuck in a creatively stagnant era? Well, stagnation can lead to explosive change. The Renaissance in Northern Europe came after war, the Black Death, and religious turmoil. The Harlem Renaissance of the ‘20s and ‘30s sprang out of segregation and poverty. The counterculture movement of the ‘60s
... See moreThe New York Times • The Algorithm Has Been Hiding Something From You | NYT Opinion
Sometimes, things are serious. Not everything needs to be turned into a joke. As Anhedönia said, we can still make jokes and laugh, but we’ve lost the ability to know when to stop – and it’s time we learned how.