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
irony—exploiting gaps between what’s said and what’s meant, between how things try to appear and how they really are—is the time-honored way artists seek to illuminate and explode hypocrisy.
David Foster Wallace • A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
exactly—irony was defeatist, timid, the telltale of a generation too afraid to say what it meant, and so in danger of forgetting it had anything to say.
D. T. Max • Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace
not many brands are built wholly on irony in this way – however perhaps they should be, given how meta and self-referential popular culture has become.
alex • Taste: The secret ingredient - Basic Arts
then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today's avant-garde tries to write about? One clue's to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after thirty long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It's not a mode that wears especially well. As Hyde puts it,
... See morethefreelibrary.com • E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.
She’s not wrong. In recent years, I’ve noticed that, as a culture, we struggle to engage sincerely with art – or with life (at least, that’s how it seems online). I first observed this in 2016 when Donald Trump ran for president; his actions and comments were defanged as he was endlessly memed because no one thought he’d actually win. I saw it... See more
Halima Jibril • Ethel Cain says we are in an irony epidemic – is she right?
There are countless examples of how we turn everything into a meme or a joke online. Musician Ethel Cain (Hayden Silas Anhedönia) has noticed this too, ranting on Tumblr earlier this week about how “nobody takes anything seriously anymore“. “It makes me feel so crazy and annoyed because I am constantly bombarded by jokes,” she wrote. The... See more
Halima Jibril • Ethel Cain says we are in an irony epidemic – is she right?
As a result, rather than their ideas being explicitly and logically argued for, they are slipped into the zeitgeist through the use of humor, both in the positive sense and in the snide, sarcastic sense. This cynical “It’s just a joke!” façade is a convenient mask for an ideology that dare not expose itself completely.
Michael Malice • The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics
Never in human history have we possessed so capacious a knowledge of the various and specific iniquities of the world — and so little hope of them ever being rectified.