More Hippie Sh*t and Mindless Cheug (Part 2)
From cool ground to cheugy figure
Remember when “Electric Youth” was a cool Debbie Gibson album? Now, they’re old and they’re turning Facebook into a Digital psych ward.
New day, new barrage of cheugy sh*t on Facebook from activist friends rapid-fire reposting everything that comes into their field of vision from Moon Child Wild Child, Universoul Consciousness, Occupy Democrats and Woodstock Council of Elders #1969. It only seems to get worse with time.
With Trump back in charge, the psychic spasms intensify, and thanks to social media, we have to observe everyone’s midlife crisis unfold in real time.
At least the “liberal meltdown videos” on YouTube are fun—it’s a great way to start your day.
This is happening because the ground of Western society is no longer TV, but Digital, which means that TV-era values once taken for granted are now under scrutiny. “And so, every time a new medium arrives, the old medium is the content—and it’s highly observable, highly noticeable” (McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage).
Memes were supposed to be cool, organic, and irreproachable, but when elites and activists clumsily promulgate them as slogans, the spell is lifted and the memes shift from imperceivable ground to dated figure. These bits of Electric culture and ideology may still be in your face today, but in broader terms of paradigmatic flow, they’re very much fading out of view.
So, the hippie counterculture and its TV memes no longer seem cool and natural, but cheugy. That’s bad news for administrators in a system that operates according to the subliminal trickery of memes. Politics in a TV culture requires suspended disbelief, but TV hypnosis today is jolted by data from a myriad of sources.
Alas, most of our elites can only grasp Digital technology in terms of yesterday’s ideals, and they’re getting pummeled for it. “The real, real roughing up and messaging is done by the new medium, and it is ignored” (McLuhan, The Media is the Massage), This is also traumatic for the rest of us, as we “Electric Youth” all suffer the psychic fallout of the Digital bomb. A lot of what we once assumed to be true is now sus.
Before Digital, memes were not “funny”—they were instructive. Now, memes are a source of humor, and people are compelled to ask deeper questions in search of deeper answers.
And memes are not an “answer” to anything—they’re not coherent or meaningful enough to be so. Memes are tidbits of Electric culture signaling selective elements of thinking bequeathed to us from previous paradigms, and which are supposed to seem natural, desirable and cool in a culture geared toward (TV-induced) individualism and idealism.
Memes convey fragments of concepts that sometimes seem totally disconnected, and which can even contradict each other. But the anti-tradition messaging binds them all in the end, including:
• Abstract thinking and adoration of new gimmicks, care of our alphabetic writing system;
• Biblical eschatology arising from (though largely ignored during) Scribal-Medieval culture;
• Individual perspective, popularized in the era of Renaissance art;
• Perfect, standard, linear, infinite repetition (for industry and humans) per Gutenberg print;
• Material science and dialectics of the Enlightenment;
• Universalism, transmitted to our psyches via the “unified field” of electricity;
• Accelerated notions of science and progress from the heyday of Radio (propaganda);
• Sex, drugs & rock n’ roll and other pagan cheug pushed into overdrive by TV culture, paired with countless other fantasies that arise from the atomization and inner trip of television hypnosis.
If you can subject yourself to enough hippie sh*t for extended durations, you will find traces of many of these concepts underlying any text, work of “art” or policy proposal.
And if you’d rather just ignore all the sh*t, remember that many of our political leaders and Facebook friends are trying to unleash or to impose these memes by force. We must protect “democracy” and “trans kids” against “the far right” and “forces of hate,” after all.
Fortunately, high-intensity Digital light is proven effective in killing the “woke mind virus.” Unfortunately, fevers must peak before they subside, and a lot of people are going to freak out and push these concepts more feverishly in the coming months.
If we wish to move on beyond hippie sh*t and cheug, we need to sift out the ideological chaff of the last 400 years to get to our civilizational nutrition, which does not include concepts aimed at the deconstruction of our civilization. We need new thinking to get there.
Technological Constructivism
Beliefs are not “constructed” or “negotiated” through “interaction” (in social constructivist thinking), nor are they somehow transmitted to the collective by the Ruling Class, in Marxist terms. Beliefs arise from the subliminal software imparted by our mediums, which condition our inner senses with different forms and patterns. That’s what we mean when we talk about the “logic” of the technology. As McLuhan put it, “the medium is the message.”
We can call this analytical approach “technological constructivism,” and we can take faculty psychology as its baseline.
However, most experts continue to advance theories arising from Print and Electric paradigms, and which therefore buttress the assumptions and identities of the experts. Indeed, the transition from TV hypnosis to Digital memory intensifies all of the outgoing values, concepts and aesthetics. This is because “we approach the new with the psychological conditioning and sensory responses of the old” (Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, 1967).
The rearview mirror
Put another way, McLuhan suggested “we look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future” (McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage). In gestalt analogy, we lose sight of the ground for all of the shiny figures. Today, we struggle to make out the Digital edifice emerging around us as we fixate on the fixtures week seek to install from the old structure.
New mediums (Scribal, Print, Radio, TV, Social Media) rework human psychology in ways that few understand. Crucially, the interval between old and new involves a feeding frenzy of all that came before. This happens for two reasons: the new medium amplifies the content of the old era, which makes it all more visible, but less “natural.” Second, the paradigm shift sows mass anxiety, which causes people to double-down on their pre-existing beliefs and sensibilities. It’s coping.
People don’t handle change well—especially if their identities are on the line. “From the moment of birth people sense that the environment—the new environment around them—is hostile; it’s a real threat to their whole existence. And, so, every time an environment changes, we hasten to seek security and comfort in the old environment” (This is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage, 1967). That was America in McLuhan’s time, and it’s America today.
The old environment
The “old environment” animates many of the absurdities you now see on your screen, like Elon Musk’s “trans” offspring, Vivien Jenna Wilson, lip syncing to Divine in PInk Flamingoes: “Kill everyone now; condone first degree murder; advocate cannibalism; eat shit; filth are my politics—filth is my life!”
Yes, the hippies and their grandkids just want to make the world a better place by turning it into a John Waters movie. After all, filth is “freedom,” and “[today] art is anything you can get away with” (McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage).
The old environment is the hippie elders offloading drugs, escapism, free love, gender dysphoria, climate hysteria, militant activism and pagan mysticism onto youth who eagerly seek their elders’ approval (like poor Greta), and then feeling supremely self-satisfied for doing so.
The old environment is open-borders politicians who strive to unify the world, and then gaslight the rest of us into accepting that our “bigotry” is the reason for the catastrophic results.
The old environment is Europe’s supranational bureaucracy engineering de-industrialization, demographic ruin, as well as harsh crackdowns on dissent—and then blaming it all on Russia.
The old environment is parasitic bureaucrats, NGO workers and “community organizers” who thrive off of social problems because they get a paycheck and an opportunity to virtue signal.
The old environment is Rachel Zegler as Snow White “coming to terms find herself, and finding her inner voice, and finding her sense of agency so she can be a just ruler” (Sky News Australia, “Lefties Losing It: CNN viewers need a trigger warning after positive Trump polls”).
The old environment is the perpetual crusade against racism, sexism, agism, ablism, populism and any other “ism” conjured up by “social scientists” and activists to explain away their failures.
And the old environment is much of what you see on Facebook: Ukraine and Palestine flag overlays plus a barrage of cheugy graphic meme quotes expressing notions of selfhood and self-care, as well as every other form of clickbait and attention-seeking you would expect to see from supremely self-centered humans who desperately need to spin their loneliness and depravity as some kind of “virtue” or “transcendence.”
These are, after all, the kids who literally grew up trippin’. “It’s psychedelic. When you step up the environment to those speeds, you create the psychedelic thrill. The whole world becomes kaleidoscopic, and you go inward, by the way. It’s an inner trip, not an outer trip” (McLuhan, Conversation with Norman Meiler, 1968).
McLuhan was right: “Television is directing our energies inward.” However, it’s not clear he understood just how awful that can be in the end—both for the human soul, or for the societies that coalesce around such behavior. When everyone has their own “truth,” there’s no Truth at all. Without Truth, humans become beholden to little more than their own animal instincts.
Giving ourselves over to our animal instincts rather than abiding by our rational souls gives us more hippie sh*t and mindless cheug—and we certainly don’t need any more of that. Worse yet, when we cede rationality to impulse and animal instinct and then group together online, we cede our free agency to the Digitally-enabled hivemind.
And that’s why McLuhan can only take us part way in this exploration. Our new environment is Digital, whereas McLuhan was occupied with our previous socio-psychological paradigm shift—the rise of Radio and Television against the backdrop of a fading Print paradigm. McLuhan’s observations will not address the emergent sensibilities and aspirations of Digital youth, though he does help us to understand the absurdities of their parents and grandparents.