I think I'm hyper enough as it is.

May 24, 2018 4:37 AM

Hypermodernity, the age of the new totally electronic World Interior.
posted by spaceburglar (12 comments total)

I don’t think the author likes this post-post-internet hypermodern world thing too much.

He makes interesting assertions but I think he is a tad too certain about the positions he is staking.

And like, he goes on several times about the death of the utopia but utopias are reductive pipedreams that have a proven track record of failure. This owing to the human feature of ontological emergence which in many if not all cases, creates a condition where humans grow beyond what the original utopian vision can contain. Utopias are the future prisons built by the dreamers of the past, and thinking about it, is that not what the internet itself is?
posted by nikaspark at 5:55 AM on May 24, 2018 [5 favorites]

a planet of individuals achieving instant gratification, amoral, valueless, unmotivated and without Vision.

I don't know if it counts as a utopia, but it does sound pretty good on the whole.
posted by sfenders at 6:44 AM on May 24, 2018 [5 favorites]

This is also a very nihilistic view of what interconnectedness through the internet creates. Yes, you have the 4chans and the incels and the MRAs and Donald Trump and the lone wolf shooters and Logan Paul and all the other things that he decries. Simultaneously, we've had #metoo and Occupy, Black Lives Matter and the Arab Spring, and a growing sense that we're all one across the world, across ethnicities and genders and old ways of oppression and privilege aren't sustainable.

It is a new world, and there are sides that are forming to fight about what that new world looks like. One side, the one he discusses here as if it's the only side, is alienated and disempowered and longing for something and lost. But there's another side that looks towards a future that looks a lot more equal and better than this present.

And saying that there's no more "Art" with a capital A is just a bunch of nonsense. There's never been more art created, and it's never been more democratized. I think he doesn't like the leveling and democratization that the internet creates.

I think this article feels very pessimistic, backward looking and one-sided.
posted by MythMaker at 7:06 AM on May 24, 2018 [5 favorites]

Grand narratives are cool, and this makes some good rhetorical points, but I think it needs more space than this. Kind of reminds of Society of the Spectacle with a TCP/IP wrapper.

On preview:

But there's another side that looks towards a future that looks a lot more equal and better than this present.

Yes! It's called youth.
posted by carter at 7:12 AM on May 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

This is a pretty dim view of the connectedness that cyberspace provides. I wonder how the author is at making friends.
posted by Shitty Baby Animal at 7:13 AM on May 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

I'm just here to note the great Superchunk reference in the title.
posted by Ufez Jones at 7:23 AM on May 24, 2018 [8 favorites]

There is a certain kind of academic fashion between philosophy and art right now that is built on the backs of Foucault, Debord, The Frankfurt School (and maaaaaybe Deleuze and Guattari) among other contemporary philosophers which all seems to follow this similar combo of lenses along the lines of "the modern world is rubbish" (really, Blur wrapped that up, can we move on to more interesting philosophical debates now), "capitalism and how to resist it", "hypernormalization and the role of the collective in an individual age", "what do we do with a problem like neoliberalism?" and "appropriation: capitalism, racism, post-internet, colonization and decolonization" and finally somewhere in there Judith Butler is underpinning it all.

Which is to say I see of a lot of this kind of critical glurge from what feels like a solid mass of Generation X (a generation to which I belong, BTW) seeking to perform some kind of cynically grungy "I was there before it was there" authenticity and none of it really feels all that inspiring or authentic at all.
posted by nikaspark at 7:24 AM on May 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

Thanks for reminding me of that song!
posted by trbrts at 7:57 AM on May 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

The seventeenth century BC, for instance, was an age of horizonal demarcation with the advent of the two-wheeled horse chariot and compound bow...

Wait, what?
posted by pompomtom at 8:03 AM on May 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

Everything that we think of as “postmodern” came into being after it

[citation needed]... this guy has not spent much time studying the art and culture of the interwar years. Futurism? Dada?
posted by Meatbomb at 8:04 AM on May 24, 2018 [3 favorites]

In addition to its current meaning, "compound bow" is an archaic way of describing what we would now call a composite bow. The same wikipedia that told me this suggests that the archaeological evidence of them being a big deal in the 17th century B.C. is somewhat inconclusive, as you might expect.
posted by sfenders at 8:20 AM on May 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

Hmm, I think it makes some decent points. We're in the age of the 'content creator', which is essentially an individual turning their life and personality into something that a corporation can attach ads to, so that other individuals can consume the content. If his concept of hypermodernity exists, then I think the Insta celeb or the Twitch star are good examples. Less celebrity focused, but that also describes gig economy labor and creative and intellectual contract work. If you're a part of a team at all, you're a part of a team for a year or two, where you add to your CV and then say your goodbyes on the way to the next structure that supports you for a bit.

A big point of disagreement, however, comes from the way that he characterizes spree killers:

"Hence revolutionary protest groups such as the Weatherman underground of the 1970s, or the Baader-Meinhof group in the German Democratic Republic of the 1970s now give way to the phenomenon of the lonely, isolated spree killer who stands for Nothing and represents no one. The spree killer, disconnected from all social formations whatsoever, wishes to leave a Mark on the socius because he feels somehow disincluded from the larger project of Modernity. "

No way - at least not in America. Each of our angry (mostly young, mostly white) men who have committed acts of mass violence have been squarely bought into patriarchy, and dissatisfied of their place within it, due to encroaching changes from what they perceive as outside threats. They aren't disconnected from social formations - and in fact, they're likely MORE connected to toxic communities of supremacy than their fore-bearers in the militia movements of the 20th century, who needed far more time and effort to pursue aggrieved wingnuttery.

I think that to put it another way, in terms of work and formal supports, yes, people are moving to be more and more isolated. However, the essay discounts the power (both for good and ill) on networked sociality to support community and political action.
posted by codacorolla at 12:11 PM on May 24, 2018 [2 favorites]