Atomization
A writer and editor I know got hooked up with the Direct Action Everywhere folks a few years ago.
He was posting a lot on social media about attending their rallies and about the hardcore protest work they were doing.
Direct Action Everywhere is an international grassroots network of animal rights activists founded in 2013 in the San Francisco Bay Area. DxE uses disruptive protests and non-violent direct action tactics, such as open rescue of animals from factory farms.
A noble cause, I guess, but as an omnivore I’m not exactly hoping for the elimination of a good-ass steak from my life forever.
As the Simpsons joked, about being a superior vegan - “I don’t eat anything that casts a shadow” - fringe interests get more ludicrous - to the relative center - the deeper the heartfelt specificity.
I am going to quote David Foster Wallace by way of a Substack piece I read this weekend, so bear with me.
Jim Gaffigan voice: “He’s quoting David Foster Wallace again, really?”
“Television is the way it is,” David Foster Wallace wrote in 1993, “simply because people tend to be really similar in their vulgar and prurient and stupid interests and wildly different in their refined and moral and intelligent interests.”
If there was a better explanation for why we find ourselves in the place we are in, as a nation, as communities, as people, I’d like to see it.
It’s that old straw about Underwater Navajo Basket Weaving. Or saving the blue whales, while people go homeless on the ground.
Your personal cause is not always universal.
Meanwhile, the right has a way of making the lowest common denominator causes the easiest to rally around.
Too much government. Food’s too expensive. Gas is outrageous. The Church tells me the left kills babies.
And when you have the church on your side, it’s a lot easier to slide tax protection for the rich into the menu, alongside no more of those poor babies being killed.
If you have right-leaning friends from back home, you’ve seen the memes. Dyed hair, nose pierced, trans folks in punk garb as the image of the disillusioned barista waiting for a handout (eg a service tip) for a presumed over-priced coffee.
There seems to be an obsession with hair dye on the right these days - if you have blue hair, you’re either Aunt Gladys or a godless Communist trans groomer.
It used to be that you could tell someone a mile away as a sympathetic soul.
This is gonna go straight “old man yelling at cloud” for a minute, but bear with me.
A Cure t-shirt, for instance.
I was in the original “trenchcoat mafia.”
Not that I knew it at the time.
We were just disaffected kids in the suburbs who knew the mainstream was a bunch of abusive jocks and girls who didn’t have the time for us.
We shopped at Ragstock to gear up for Sunday Dance Parties at First Avenue.
Because you heard “alternative rock” there and you were around people who seemed like you.
Causes, interests, things to fight for hadn’t yet atomized in the narrow-cast channels of the internet.
Hell, Springsteen hadn’t written “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)” yet.
We liked Sandman comics and bought Clash records and Siouxsie t-shirts and thought this aesthetic brought with it a sense of intellectual import.
But now, the easiest targets become the most massive, and easiest to rally the slack-jawed masses around.
And the spurious interests splinter.
You might wear that Cure t-shirt, but you might be:
a Tony Tulathmuitte slope-shouldered, incel rage monster or
a keyboard warrior progressive who doesn’t leave the house or
a frat boy with good taste who realized the smarter, hotter girls liked alternative rock or
a self-diagnosed neurodivergent tech bro who likes to troll Reddit anti-natalist boards like Shitty Thanos or
Fuck. ME.
My friend Ed used to rail against the co-opting of mod culture iconography by, say, Target.
It was no longer as easy to see a Fred Perry shirt and know that person was a sympatico soul.
But of course, even then, there were subgroups and kinks and festishes off the alternative mainstream of the Smiths, Bauhaus and Depeche Mode.
There were phone phreakers, fanzine addicts, Samizdat micropublishers, every color of weirdness on the visible and invisible spectra.
Compuserve and the earliest Bulletin Boards were gathering places for every type of loner’s loner, and the four people who loved them.
Culture is cyclical, although it does seem to accelerate its gyrations.
The center might not hold.
The wheel is definitely on fire.
Instead of nuclear drills, we send our children under their desks to game out mass shooter incidents at the local level.
Atomization has reduced the globally cataclysmic to the merely local disaster.
Meanwhile, the algorithm charts our peculiarities in order to feed us relevant ads, paid for by the highest bidder.
Atomization requires relevancy.
Tik Tok and other media get smarter about how they track our interests, so regardless how “moral and intelligent” your higher tastes, they feed you reels of buxom MILFs to parse your prurient and base interests as well.
Eye movement tracking can go a long way to determining what you really glance at, no matter how hard you try to stay above the fray.
You can’t force-feed the algorithm by chanting “Pampers! Diapers!” into it, either. It’s too smart.
I’ve tried.
No matter how many times I talk about my love of Charles Portis and Cormac McCarthy, I’m still fed a steady stream of fear, anxiety meds and colorectal cancer cures.
This is the future we earned.
Is it any wonder a former reality TV star who wants to Make America Great Again, instead of the church-free Sodom and Gomorrah hellscape trans kids and rappers have made it - is it any wonder he’s the president?
I don’t have the proper background to go deeper at a sociological or political level than this.
Consider this more a visualization of a commonality, among the atomized brethren.
It’s true everyone wants to save their own endangered species.
And I don’t want to paint this as rallying around “a common enemy,” either. Plenty of my family and friends don’t share my particular world view. I don’t consider them malevolent.
I do believe, though, that the atomization of culture and media has taken our eye off the ball, pulled in every direction by a million different distractions.
(I really had to stop myself from writing “the larger ball” there.)
While I don’t share Direct Action Everywhere’s urge to free every turkey from every cage, I like the words Direct and Action and Everywhere.
Maybe there’s something to be gathered and embraced from the ideas of Direct, or focused, Action, or doing something, and Everywhere, or across all atomized ideologies.
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The atomization of culture is another way for The Machine to divide and conquer (by setting us against ourselves around relatively insignificant issues) while they further entrench the rules that benefit themselves.
People forget that belonging to a tribe, club, or society can feel really good. But, paraphrasing Peter Gabriel, you can't be inside unless there is an outside where "the others" are.
You may not consider your friends and family who don't share your views "malevolent", but I am pretty sure at least some of them consider those who don't share their views "evil", "demonic", "ANTIFA", and so on. It doesn't matter if someone is "misguided" or "uninformed" if they're trying to kill you as a result of that. The outcome is the same.
For me, the difference is about how you deal with difference. Can you accept it? Or are you compelled to make people conform? Yes, I'm aware of Popper's "paradox of tolerance", and I agree with him, but that already requires more nuance than at least half of the population possesses.
Some people say we live in "bubbles". I think another word for "bubble" is "community" -- and why would I want to be spending time with a bunch of people who keep screaming that I'm wrong and evil, etc.?
One thing about gatekeepers and somewhat restricted communication: to a large degree, it kept the crazies out. Now we put everything -- articles from the NYT, government communications, cat videos, memes from your racist friends, conspiracy theories from crazy relatives, and advertising in the same frames, with the same weights. It's no wonder everyone picks the truth that feels good to them.