This piece is part of a three-part series by Randi Foyl. The first installment can be found here.
One manifestation of Gen Z’s belief system can be seen in Will Macaskill, a young Scottish philosopher who originated the Effective Altruism movement that is popular with start-up venture capitalists and Silicon Valley types, not to say some Oxford dons and AI ethicists. Macaskill is an unrepentant utilitarian. As a philosopher he advocates for doing good—really, for doing more good. His arguments, like many a utilitarian before him, boil down to economic protocols. His allow one’s actions to have bigger “impacts” as quantified in dollars or other metrics. His emphasis is not in examining in what the good life consists so much as finding ways to leverage one’s ability to navigate risks and uncertainty while evaluating potential impacts and predict effects. It’s neoliberalism with a smile. He urges people, for example, to make more money in their jobs so they can thereby give more to charity, doing more “good” than if they remained in poverty or toiled for non-profits.
But Macaskill’s emphasis on impact and influence has led him down treacherous roads and entanglements with the likes of shady figures such as Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk. In his quest for greater “impacts,” he has sought out greater sway. Rather than examine the nuances of value—especially as expressed in the small, homely virtues—he has dressed up a will-to-power as a will-to-benevolence.
As the philosopher Blaise Pascal once quipped, “All of humanity’s problems stem from one’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Macaskill would rather be in the C-suite where “important” decisions are being made, not a lonely if illuminated room, which betokens the hubris of this would-be philosopher king. Almost everyone thinks that the world would be better if they had more power—but the quest for that power is what often corrupts not only them but the world, as well. Any ethics that depends on “impacts” is fraught not only by the veiled riot of unintended consequences that redounds from human action but by the very ambition premised at this philosophy’s core.
The impact of a worldview inscribed in terms of “impact” is to reduce things to another vector of power relations; to encourage audiences to judge anything by its supposed good intentions. Sure, one can claim that “everything is political.” Yet, one can equally declare that “everything is aesthetic.” From any totalizing viewpoint, in fact, important nuances get tossed aside in pursuit of a single-minded objective. Whatever doesn’t fit neatly into its calculus is dismissed as a mere “externality” or unfortunate outlier in the evidence.
This same idea arises in artwork with the inevitable “impact statements” attached to grants, artist statements, and applications. Artwork, too, must justify itself not through its intrinsic aesthetic quality—that is, how it deals with the conventions of its chosen medium; but rather with how it hopes to affect its audiences in some political or sociocultural register. Philanthropic institutions have turned art into a utilitarian data point. Art must circumscribe the realm of its potential interpretations to an aim, reducing its multivalent meanings to a singular do-gooder “message” as if it were merely a piece of agitprop, a sounding board for some social cause. Art thereby transforms into another tool of social engineering, which is, in fact, what much of it has become—if occasionally for the better of society, then also sometimes for the worse of art itself.
To seek to measure “impacts” in art is a category error—only imaginable in our current zeitgeist of utilitarian fever dreams. Such civic-minded philanthropists and facile administrators might do better to heed Oscar Wilde who once said, “All art is quite useless.”
The Quick and the Dead
According to the new populist youth sensibility, work must be comestible, demotic, relatable, upbeat, and down-to-earth. No wonder, then, that irony, complexity, length, and nuance are out. Irony can appear too much like a “trick” on its audience or a convenient cop-out defense for its immoral author. An ironic work alienates the naïve, the uninitiated literalist reader. It sneers at heartfelt sincerity. And it provides a cover story—a subtext that’s hard to parse and that can never be pinned down. Complexity obscures essential points, the underlying and all-important “message.”
Today, everything gets repackaged and nip-and-tucked to its takeaway. Length has rapidly diminishing returns. People want soundbites, mantras, summary. Anything with depth risks a dearth of “TL;DR” eyerolls. Any nuance comes off as obfuscation or both-sides-ism. Subtleties are just roadblocks—sites of potential confusion—that distract from one’s bottom line.
Artistic work has succumbed to the urge to be as short, skimmable, and as scrutable as a boardroom deck pitch. Perhaps this is because the rhetoric of the deck pitch represents the master tropes of our thoroughgoing administrated society, a method of instrumentalist hermeneutics more potent than close reading or any critical theory for extracting a signal from the noise. But when nobody has time—when nobody gives their time—noise begets more noise.
An artist must find ways to make time. The only pay an artist gets is paid in attention. Otherwise, too many takeaways and bottom lines ultimately bottom out, and we’re never really overtaken by things, never spirited away, and we’re simply left feeling like we’ve been taken.
Yet this desire for the quick, the literal, the synoptic is understandable. It is a hunger for validation. It is a hunger for revelation. It is a hunger for the key to some elusive material benefit, an iota of wisdom, a promise of ecstasy (or even just respite, contentment) in an overwhelming and bewildering world. It is a craving for the immediate. Yet, all knowledge is mediated; is, in some respects, the patient sensitivity that comes from dwelling in that mediation. We quicken the language when we slow it down.
Fad diets, happiness gurus, lifestyle coaches, false business prophets, advice columns all prey upon these desires to bypass the slow process that is being. If many have lamented the fact of fake news, relatively fewer have observed that the supposedly legitimate news has condescended more and more to a discourse of populist appeal, one in which it increasingly resembles tabloids and clickbait. All around us, words ricochet and blip, with bots sharing byte-sized bits and bobs.
Basically, We’re Basic
The notion of any difference between high and low cultural expressions has evaporated. Social media—corporatized, algorithmic—have conflated everything by automated organization; this leveling effect results not in middlebrow kitsch, exactly, but a sense that “highbrow” novelist Cormac McCarthy and a “popular” influencer such as Olivia Dunne, for example, occupy the same cultural space that traffics in the currency of fame, money, recognition. They are both just one more item to click through or scroll past in one’s feed, that apotheosis of the appetitive maw.
Any latent notions of the “heroic” seem merely naïve in this space, the space of the screen which lacks depth. Which is to say, all items and artworks are flattened into what is popular: what can be promoted, consumed, and excreted as waste. It is the centrifugal press of the media cyclorama, the 24-hour press cycle, the restless recycling of the next new thing that induces a fugue state of both satiation and nausea.
Palatable “upmarket” novels with a marketing push behind them, for example, are predestined to succeed whereas midlist authors keep getting eked out. A very few artists possess commercial viability, which has little relation to their artistic merit; a handful of folks find themselves plucked out of obscurity by the prestige machine with a lucky prize or big grant. The vast number of bottom-feeders publishing with small presses flummox in the pay-to-play system where they rarely if ever see any royalty checks. Influencers and Instapoets—those with readymade large followings—are more likely to sign book deals than artists who have been quietly toiling in the trenches. Popular culture is so ubiquitous there is hardly any other kind.
The internet once promised an endless wonderland of consumer choices. The theory of the “long tail” posited that a platform could profit from offering, say, a smorgasbord of countless cult classics, foreign films, and weird B-movies—all the niche stuff, not just the big Hollywood blockbusters, Disney films, and popular action flicks.
Those days are over. Consumer research shows “a greater concentration of demand at the top” of the market, claims Wharton business professor Serguei Netessine. Journalist Sam Adams writes that, “Estimates suggest that Netflix now offers fewer than 4,000 movies at a given time, less than a hundredth of the vast universe it once provided.” Research suggests that more options depress consumption, perhaps because one gets lost searching rather than making a choice. And when the variety is too overwhelming for folks, they settle back to the hits. Not only do platforms such as Netflix, and Amazon, and Google already bottleneck traffic, shutting out alternative sources through their monopolistic practices, but they also increasingly limiting the buffet of selections they offer to a narrower spectrum and curating lists and suggestions for you.
The pluralism of niche tastes fostered by internet empowerment has proven to be a fantasy. Cultural critic Mark Grief has described the late 90s and early 2000s hipster as someone (archetypically, a privileged white male) who leveraged their position of leisure, social capital, and mobility to become a “rebel consumer,” employing a more-knowing-than-thou savvy to buy the brands, sport the styles, and attend the concerts that paradoxically represent anti-consumerism.
While there is a modicum of truth to the characterization of hipsters as some twee offshoot of trust-fund punkdom, rich kids living in bad faith by dressing up their youthful slumming as fashionable, there was likely more of an outsider, anti-consumer ethos to hipsters than Grief credits them with. Secondhand clothing, DIY bikes, pirated music, artisanal beer, and local coffee shops expressed a genuine distaste for commercialized homogeneity. Of course, that didn’t mean that the hipster’s style—like hip-hop or punk styles before and after—weren’t soon co-opted by companies who evacuated the style’s social content to replicate it into an image, commodify it into a mere brand.
The most cloying fault of hipsters—their overweening pretentiousness—was also, at the same time, their greatest virtue. They were hypocritical, top-lofty, idealistic, and pointy-headed; they were aficionados of obscure bands and out-of-the-way books; they were condescending savants and hairsplitting connoisseurs. They strived to live—faddish, fickle, foppish, fussy—as in some artificial pastoral, playing dress-up with countrified trucker hats or lumberjack plaid shirts with an arch and urbane knowingness. Their favorite game, a kind of one-upmanship about arcane trivia in whatever genre (music, literature, politics, coffee), solidified their role as tastemakers in a knowledge-based economy. Their virtue, in other words, was that, for all their pompous faddle, hipsters were a coterie who believed almost religiously in the value of taste and knowledge. Like the decadents and aesthetes of the fin de siècle before them, their contemptuousness was joined at the hip with their enthusiasm because they always sought to surpass each other with finer and finer distinctions. Hence, Teju Cole defines a hipster as “someone with an irrational hatred of hipsters.”
I bring up the figure of the hipster not to offer some ironic elegy but to provide a stark contrast with the current Instacore generation. The younger generation are more likely to be Swifties than swept up in their zeal for any little-known band. When they read, it’s YA novels and bestsellers, not Žižek and Walter Benjamin essays or abstruse foreign poets. They cosplay as superheroes and anime, acting out compensatory fantasies, in a world that is utterly monotonous, dismal, and nigh apocalyptic. Knowledge is more often a source of resentment, an airy concoction of elites, symbolized by their monstrous college debt. Taste-making, such as it is, gets outsourced or crowdsourced to Yelp, Goodreads, and Amazon product ratings; algorithms, search filters, AI programs; and marketing campaigns decided by consultants in some boardroom. Haul videos celebrate name-brands, nothing too esoteric. Instacore youth seek to live a glammed-up lifestyle of mainstream looks and fashions, driven perhaps by an underlying longing to feel “normal” in the face of downward mobility and the world’s unrelenting dumpster fires.
The Noise of History
Given this distrust—even disdain—of knowledge, it is not surprising that Gen Z’s attitude toward history is that it’s irrelevant. Yet there may be more to it than this. New Historicism authorized a slanted viewpoint of history, premised on the truism that any account must be constructed. Having a decided slant is fine, therefore, so long as it’s progressive and politically kosher according to the values du jour. It’s a theory that, at heart, is cynical, converting historical scholarship into activist propagandizing. In the wake of this New Historicism, history might seem unmoored. One can find whatever truth one wants. The truth takes a backseat to the cause one propounds.
Simply put, there’s too much history, and any narrative can cherry-pick anecdotes to fit the story one’s already biased toward telling; differing interpretations make the welter of facts appear fungible. Those on the right expose the (self-owned) bias of the revisionary New Historian, then set to work constructing their own version of events without acknowledging any prejudice or slant, only good old right thinking.
How naïve to think there’s some fated arc bending toward one’s favored views, one that will eventually scold one’s opposition. Leaving them on the “wrong side” of history.
The internet’s easy access to information was supposed to make us more connected, immune from off-the-wall claims and bizarro conspiracies. It hasn’t worked out that way, obviously.
Maybe information itself is more pernicious than the dis- or mis- varieties. The glut of facts can feel—in their sheer impenetrable volume—anxious-making, anomic, and numbing. We’re whelmed in wall-to-wall data with nary any elbow room: in such a loud and toxic environment of pure noise, everything fades into the background. There’s a general ancillary buzz, a nonstop ringing in the ears. Too much information becomes constant hype and humdrumming, a salesmanship that tries to cut through the muddle but only leads to more braindead cacophony. We’re left with midnight doom-scrolling wherein every feed feeds upon itself like an ouroboros.
Conspiracy theories hold out the promise of giving us a secret key to making sense of events, at least. The louder the noise, the easier it is to become seduced by them. More subtlety, serious historical claims, with their acknowledged slants, seem to resemble conspiracy theories. And while some may fall into conspiratorial beliefs, others, to avoid being a sucker, might become skeptical, indifferent. One simply tunes out.
In such an ahistorical framework, artworks must carry their own contexts. Besides, for Instacore youth, artworks are not created for some mythical posterity: they are disposably for the moment. A piece must be agreeably engagée.
If things don’t change, there won’t be any next moment. With little to envision for one’s future— what with climate change, the failure of global democracies, and a hundred other catastrophes on the horizon—there’s no sense in having any historical sense. One needs to be able to look forward if one’s to have a reason to look back.
This piece is part of a three-part series by Randi Foyl. Please tune in next week for the rest of their essay on the aesthetic of Instacore.