things i am explaining to nihil: picopop
@anonymusbosch: What’s that
picopop was a japanese microgenre that was popular in the late paleozoic era of the internet, by which i mean ‘around 2004′. it developed out of either yellow magic orchestra’s influence or a chamber pop revival movement depending on who you ask, and evolved into, well, nightcore versions of yellow magic orchestra covers of chamber pop songs.
the unusual thing about picopop imo is that the best-known (at least in my circles at the time) band in the (micro)genre, plus tech squeeze box, was doing something completely different from the (micro)genre as a whole – bands like floppy, capsule, the aprils, and macdonald duck eclair were putting out fairly straightforward pop songs, but plus tech squeeze box took a lot of aesthetic influence from (of all things) western cartoons, and put out unusually detailed sound collages grafted onto a pop framework. which happened to fit perfectly into the aesthetic of the late-paleozoic western internet, which is how this got made:
now, you can look back at that and cringe, or (if you were around back then) look back and that and go “man, how the hell is neil cicierega still an internet celebrity?”, tho you could ask the same thing about dril, who back in those days was a newgrounds superstar who i will not reference or link out of courtesy / a sense of shared guilt – christ, some of my old shit is on youtube too, apparently i was an ~indie animator~ worthy of archiving when i was 12 – but imo the interesting thing here is how the transition from paleozoic (specifically, permian) to mesozoic (the current era) internet culture occurred alongside a total shift in aesthetics. if you’re old enough to remember the permian internet, you look back on it and cringe – you can’t help it. why?
fashions change, of course, but fashions change in response to changes in the economic, social, political, etc. landscape. off the top of my head, there are four things that i think contributed to the shift in internet culture, aside from the usual factors.
the first is the obama presidency. dubya was a joke – a comedic figure more than anything else. no one knew who voted for him – the fundies in flyover country, presumably – and no one could respect him enough to even see him as a threatening enemy. the same thing happened with el yebe in the alt-right – people like steve sailer tried to sell the narrative that he was a threat, and in terms of policy and temperament he of course was, but the man was such a joke that it couldn’t catch on. everyone had nü-atheist, tits-n’-beer liberal sympathies, which of course were aided by people like jack thompson. the satanic panic, the d&d scare, and all the other overreaches of ‘80s cultural reaganism were fresh in the internet’s memory. (they still are in some parts of the internet, hence both gamergate [via ‘censorship is bad’] and race-progressivism [via ‘reaganists are racist, so here’s how we can shock them’]. both of those had other causes, of course – keep reading.)
now, dubya was a joke, but he was a contemptible joke. ‘how could this country have been so stupid as to elect this idiot twice?’ so when it became clear that obama was going to win… well, one of the internet right’s major anxiety triggers is groupthink sweeps. you wake up one morning and suddenly everyone is militantly, triumphantly excited about the same thing. even rod dreher, who’s 49 years old and not active on the internet outside his blog, does this – here’s how he complains about trans acceptance:
In subsequent correspondence, the reader told me that this trans thing is a much bigger fad than many adults realize. He mentioned family members in a particularly conservative Southern parish who told him it’s all the rage in the local public school.
and:
By “the issue” he means those who will ferret out suspected thought criminals, interrogate them, and force them to come clean about their bigotry. Gushee lists all the kinds of people and institutions of American life that embrace homosexuality and transgenderism and, crucially, stigmatize those who do not. It is a sobering list for those who are not on it. And he’s right. He also says that the Republican Party might still be officially on the side of moral traditionalists, but it’s plain that that stance is fast eroding (he’s right about that too).
it’s a much bigger fad than many adults realize. it’s all the rage. and opposition is fast eroding. you wake up one morning and suddenly everyone is, well…
that’s what happened in 2007. i was in high school then. i knew two people who supported mccain (both from military families, so), and one of them got jumped for it. everyone woke up one morning and decided obama was practically the messiah – he was going to get us out of iraq, close gitmo, pass single-payer health care (just like europe!), put the bible-thumpers in their place, and Make America Cool Again. he gave chris matthews a thrill up his leg, and chris matthews said so on tv. that sort of thing.
imagine if everyone you knew jumped on the trump train. well, ‘everyone’ is an exaggeration – some people didn’t care or weren’t excitable, and some people were really excited about ron paul. which was the second contributing factor, but we’ll get to that later. but i was there and most people i knew did.
once obama was in power, liberal internet culture didn’t have an outgroup president to rebel against. and that’s what a lot of this stuff was – a weird sort of rebellion. same deal as tumblr dadaism, but much more upbeat. (and much more ‘implicitly white’, as they say, since black twitter didn’t exist then. twitter is decidedly mesozoic.) dubya was, imo, the force holding tits-n’-beer liberalism together, for two reasons. first, the president is the chief celebrity of the country, and anti-authoritarian liberalism is only viable when the president is a member of the outgroup. dubya, remember, was an ex-alcoholic who quit drinking through evangelical christianity and pitched himself as a ‘compassionate conservative’ – the perfect set of outgroup signifiers for tits-n’-beer liberalism to posture against. second, ‘tits n’ beer’ and ‘liberalism’ were mostly held together by the collective concept of College Life, which was prestigious because college, but obama was a professor – this was one of his big selling points! – and he’s not the tits n’ beer type. (biden was eventually cast as the type, but it didn’t matter much.) this could have tipped the concept from ‘tits n’ beer’ to ‘sociology and puritanism’, tho of course sociology-and-puritanism leftism didn’t originate in this era – it came out of the rise of feminism and maoism on campus in the ‘70s.
obama, of course, did not close gitmo, pass single-payer health care (just like europe!), put the bible-thumpers in their place, Make America Cool Again, or even Get Us Out Of Iraq. he got us out of iraq, technically, for three years, but he put us into even more iraqs. a lot of people were very disappointed. what were they to do?
here’s where the second factor comes in. the somethingawful/4chan schism was before my time, so i can’t say much about it, but it happened. now, on somethingawful, there were a lot of people who were really excited about ron paul. the decision was made to cordon them off into their own subforum, called Laissez’s Faire.
somethingawful, remember, was where 4chan came from. the culture was both as creative [see: ‘photoshop phriday’] and as malicious as you would expect. there was, for example, a subforum called ‘helldump’, which was dedicated entirely to digging up as much dirt as possible on people and posting it in one thread. (zoe quinn was active on helldump, btw.) so people went into LF to troll the ron paul fans by posturing as communists. then people started trolling the people who postured as communists by posturing as even more communist communists, then people started getting sincerely radicalized. eventually they shut it down for some reason. one story i’ve heard is that someone made threats against obama and lowtax (the SA admin) got a call from the secret service about that.
after LF got shut down, the regulars migrated to a few off-SA forums they set up for themselves, but also to twitter, where they caught the attention of clickbait journalists, especially max read, katie notopoulos, and john herrman. some of them (jeb lund, sam kriss) became clickbait journalists themselves. here’s a profile john herrman wrote of a guy he knew on twitter who tweeted a lot. a lot of big names in ~internet media~ came out of or drifted toward that milieu – anna anthropy, porpentine, zoe quinn, weird twitter, gawker, the awl, the baffler, and about a third of commie tumblr.
(remember the somethingawful/4chan schism? at the same time somethingawful was drifting left, 4chan was drifting right. there may or may not have been causal influence there; i was never on either SA or /new/, so idk. and (to speculate about broad cultural generalizations) the ethos of SA, exemplified by helldump, naturally conflicted with the ethos of 4chan, exemplified by /d/. (/d/ is a fetish hentai imageboard with trollish gender politics discourse of a sort totally orthogonal to tumblr’s trollish-til-people-start-taking-it-seriously gender politics discourse. it also functions as a kink discussion board and a trans support group – yes, really.) insofar as gamergate isn’t tits-n’-beer liberalism vs. puritanism (or, more charitably, the idea that media consumption can have deleterious psychological effects) that’s realized that anita sarkeesian’s sociological leftism is a more sympathetic idiom than jack thompson’s christianity, it’s 4chan vs. SA.)
the mishmash of ha-ha-only-serious stalinism, academic maoism, and feminism that spread into the clickbait world through LF, of course, offered answers as to why obama wasn’t the promised secular messiah. obama, you see, was evil all along – he was a liberal politician, operating within the ideology and the economic system of liberal capitalism, which controls the world and turns it all to shit.
…which implies that all the world has been turned to shit. eric hoffer would say (and i’d agree with him) that there’s a psychological type that goes in for political or religious radicalism of any sort, regardless of the contents, as long as it says that all the world has been turned to shit. maybe it offers hope, maybe it only offers blame. it doesn’t matter. scott alexander has a good description of the type in his post on malcolm muggeridge:
I sometimes have patients with very severe depression who tell me that everything they look at is infested by maggots. They won’t eat, because the food is infested with maggots. They won’t hug their children, because their children are infested with maggots. Sleep disgusts them, because the bed is infested with maggots. Et cetera.
And other times, when they have a little more insight, they’ll say something like “Okay, my food isn’t literally infested by maggots, but I get this feeling from it, this overwhelming feeling, such that the feeling would only make sense if the food was infested by maggots. I know deep down it’s not infested by maggots, but it has some metaphysical quality which only things infested by maggots have.”
Poor Malcolm Muggeridge feels this way about everything. …
Leaving Nazi Germany for neutral Switzerland, he says he had a pretty good idea even at the time how everything was going to end. And I believe him. By temperament, he expects everything to end in horror and madness and total collapse of civilization, so props to him for choosing the proper time and place for his temperament to be exactly correct.
this is also what i’m getting at when i talk about depression spreading memetically. there’s a set of interrelated concepts that fuel this mindset, and can probably induce them (see, this is why i make a point of not being too uncharitable to ‘puritanism’) – ‘depressive realism’, ‘the authenticity/deepness of suffering’, etc. i think a large part of my recovery from depression involved jettisoning the concepts that led me to, for several years, reject the possibility of recovery and actively choose to be depressed for self-concept and group-identity reasons, rather than a ‘superficial’, ‘normal’ type who can’t ‘see things as they really are’ – namely, covered in shit. this is the sort of depression that can lead someone to be viscerally horrified by demo emails at an apple store, and then pass it off as insightful social commentary, the goal of which is to spread this depressive worldview. were people as depressed then as they are now? i don’t know. i remember objecting to ‘that hallmark card bullshit’ early on in my depressive phase. but i didn’t notice much memetic propagation of depression until the mesozoic. what i’m getting at here is that i want a cultural movement that, rather than fighting the culture war, addresses it at [one of – there are ofc material/economic/etc. factors, but those are out of our control] its roots: the psychological underpinnings of hoffer’s ‘true-believerism’.
how does this relate to the cultural divide between the eras, you ask? well, with the ‘culture-war’ factionalization of the internet (remember, in the bush era, everyone on the internet was on the same side – and that side doesn’t and probably can’t exist now), the stakes rose. suddenly you had to pick a side, and you had to fight for that side, and fight against the other side, because the other side is fighting against you.
now, one of the things about this sociological depressive mindset is that it offers an idiom for the expression of nerd resentment. ‘bro’ just means ‘jock’ – there’s nothing else there. and, for all the internet left postures against ‘nerds’, a lot of these guys started their posting careers in places like neon genesis evangelion fandom forums. you go back and read their posts from the paleozoic and they’re completely within the nerd idiom. (the right has its own idioms for nerd resentment, of course – PUA, moral outrage at ‘dysgenic decline’, etc. (tho the question of the existence of dysgenic decline is strictly an empirical one, as are questions relating to capitalism etc.) – but the right doesn’t posture against nerds, so there’s less of a reason to point it out.) these people aren’t nerds in the classic sense, of course – they don’t Fucking Love Science; they conspicuously do the exact opposite. what they are is humanities nerds.
(or Theory nerds, social science nerds, etc. – the departmental distinctions aren’t terribly important here.)
(also pop culture nerds, but certain subfields of the humanities have been interested in pop culture for a while.)
humanities nerddom is the third factor. how did it arise? well, notice that humanities nerddom sees itself as above STEM/meme nerddom (while simultaneously feeling nerd resentment for ‘tech nerds’/’tech bros’). what happened was the commodification of STEM/meme nerddom – especially by thinkgeek, but later by neil degrasse tyson, bill nye’s bid for celebrity status, the big bang theory, superhero movies, and so on. too many people got into it, so the people who were there earlier had to move on. and some moved on to academic humanities nerddom.
now, the myth of paleozoic nerddom ran something like this. you, the nerd, are unpopular now, unattractive, socially awkward, lonely, depressed, bookish, etc. the world of tits n’ beer, sex, drugs, and rock and roll is totally shut off to you. it belongs to the jocks. the jocks are disgusting, thuggish brutes who shove us nerds in lockers. they’ve never read a single book. they get terrible grades. they know nothing. but they’re athletic, they’re attractive, and, despite (or… because of? enter PUAism!) their repulsive loutishness, they’re popular. but it’s ok – in ten years, they’ll be bagging your groceries. you, nerd, are destined for economic success in a world that favors intelligence over strength and charisma. you’ll leave all the jocks behind to rot in the hometown you’re stuck in now, and, when you’re rich and successful, they’ll have nothing but a dead-end job and fond memories of high school/college, which was, of course, the best time of their lives.
and the thing about that is that humanities nerddom can’t credibly promise economic success. “but it should, dammit! we’re so much better than the jocks! we *know things*, and isn’t that what’s most important? we should be philosopher-kings!” (fun fact: boris groys said the soviet union was the realization of plato’s republic.) what is nerddom to do when the paleozoic myth falls apart – when it becomes apparent that the nerds will be bagging the jocks’ groceries? one thing it can do is accept that knowing things isn’t what’s most important, but where’s the appeal in that? another thing it can do is forget its origins and radicalize. (this, ofc, describes the nerd right almost as well as it describes the nerd left. different canons and different emotional valences, that’s all.)
the fourth factor is the change in media between the paleozoic and the neozoic eras of the internet. youtube and twitter became popular and flash fell out of use. the nice thing about flash was that it was incredibly easy to use – anyone could make things with very little effort. movies, games, whatever. (if you think ease of use isn’t that much of a barrier, consider game maker, rpg maker, and twine.) no one makes the sort of low-effort loop that used to be incredibly popular on the internet anymore, now that flash is dead, and imo that’s a significant loss. [i had to link to that on youtube because this browser doesn’t even have the flash plugin installed.] youtube and gif-tumblr have a much higher barrier to entry (to this day, flash is still the only vector art program and the only gif creation program that i can stand to use), so if you want to make things without learning how to use a program vastly more complicated than flash, you’re stuck with either static images or text. flash died a just death because adobe is garbage and horrifically mismanaged the product it inherited from macromedia, but imo the ~internet ecosystem~ is worse off for its loss – youtube can’t come close to replacing newgrounds or 4chan’s now-dead flash board.
where was i? picopop. fuck it, i don’t have anything else to say about picopop
The Internet Historians have arrived :P