From Hanzi Freinacht’s latest article on Medium:
“Cultural evolution simultaneously drives forth two interrelated processes of transformation:
– More civilized, universal, and non-violent values.
– Innocence lost, a more penetrating and revealing gaze and imagination, including a more disenchanting and critical viewpoint.
Simply put, as society “advances”, people and their values become less barbaric, more universal and abstract, but also more XXX-rated, more pornographic in every (sexual an non-sexual) sense of the word. As such, even if society escapes the ecological dead-ends of modernity, we are headed both towards a cute and idyllic future of softer and more inclusive values (take the bike-path to the vegan café run by a now fully respected minority!), and towards a rawer and more cynical culture (sit down in the same café and discuss psychedelic deconstructions of reality, the inescapable unfairness of life, the profound meaninglessness of most jobs, and the rarity of relief of sexual ecstacy).
The social logic behind this is that the two cultural properties — universal values and a penetrating, revealing, critical gaze — are both generated by the same variable: the degree of mediation of society.
By “the degree of mediation of society” I mean the sheer amount and variety of thoughts, messages, images, symbols, and other information that are being sent and received throughout society (in our case, planetary civilization).
Digital society produces more information in a few days than all of human history prior to the advent of the Internet. This means that there is always an immense abundance of information vying for attention — and to gain more attention, a meme must recombine what has hitherto been communicated in a manner that carries forth an element of surprise. You get simulacra of simulacra of simulacra, to speak with the terms of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. If people have already said A, B, and C, you can make a whole career out of saying D. And so, everyone scrambles to figure out how to say what follows from A, B, and C. That propels a rapid and powerful cultural evolution towards universality (if you’ve said “free all slaves”, and the Dalai Lama says “all sentient beings”, I’ll add “free all non-human animal slaves”, and so forth)…
… and it produces pornographization (if ABBA was racy in the 1970s by wearing wide, colorful pants, popstars in the 1980s started showing more skin, until Rihanna, the idol of every little schoolgirl, starts singing about how BDSM excites her, and Billy Eilish finally declares that she, the musical and cultural child genius, is the bad guy, not those older creepy guys out there, Lana Del Rey singing nostalgic farewell hymns to an America who’s innocence is lost… all of which is of course matched with, well, unimaginable amounts of literal porn — i.e. more and more extreme images of all kinds, anything that stands out by being more explicit, more real, more raw, more revealing, from weird and degrading sex to social realist reality soaps). You even have a combination of the two tendencies in the kind of critical theory popularized by intellectuals like Slavoj Žižek, which penetrates the perversion and all-too-human patheticness of us all, manifested as capitalist society. And, of course, Žižek makes his own movies, all about revealing other movies. Increasingly revealingly detailed news and journalism do a similar thing to our people in power and positions of prestige. Behavioral science and the social sciences make short notice of the rest of us: we’re revealed in our all-but-dignified gore and grime.
The emperor is not only naked. He’s downright see-through. You can watch the emperor’s skeleton, his whole wardrobe, when he’s taking a dump, and so forth. It’s the meta-naked, X-rayed emperor, and everyone competes to be the pointing kid in H.C. Andersen’s iconic tale. Or that’s the point we’re heading towards. Surveillance capitalism or China’s social credit system are just extensions of this same tendency.
To remake the point as simply as possible: Our grand-grandmother was fairly barbaric, but also quite endearingly innocent, as compared to people today. She was all for beating children with a belt (or a slipper if in a good mood or she couldn’t find the belt), she warned us of the child-abducting gypsies, she thought everything in life was about getting more food, including the pet rabbit that she viewed as a piece of potential pâté and did everything in her power to fatten for the same reason. But her “sins” amounted to reading romance novels and fawning over a game show host in a nice suit. Her entertainment was the circus, literally.
And she was, despite having lived a tougher life, relatively mentally stable and emotionally healthier than most of us. She could be relied upon.
As society complexifies and shifts in “effective value meme” (we go from traditional values, to modern ones, to postmodern ones, and perhaps on to metamodern ones), we become more civilized, less violent, less bigoted, but also less innocent. Where does this leave the minds of younger generations?”
https://medium.com/@hanzifreinacht/digital-madness-and-pornographic-civilization-51ed16c200ad
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| medium.com |
Why digital society brings forth cynicism and anxiety — and what we can do about it. [A very French piece of theory: READERS BE WARNED.]
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