The universe suddenly hates satire
Predicting the most likely outcome (by teleological reasoning)
There’s a saying on the internet: “The most entertaining outcome is the most likely.” People like to say this saying. Here’s Elon Musk saying it to 58 million views:
I don’t know if he originated it. Probably not. Although I understand its attractiveness: it does a good job at capturing the telegenic insanity that has been American politics this past decade (and to a similar degree American culture at large). There was some sort of phase shift whereafter the arc of history has always seemed to bend with a teleological purposefulness. And if everything is now trending along some unseen arc, it makes sense to speculate on what that arc is.
“Entertaining” does kind of work—albeit entertaining in the way a car crash is, where you can’t look away. But I don’t think it’s specific enough. It’s not the real measurable angle. Instead, what I think is that if you look at America from around a decade ago, say, 2012 on, the more apt descriptor is that American culture is increasingly unable to be satirized. Aesthetically, it becomes ever more resistant to the artistic medium itself, like some sort of satirical immune system is developing. Satire slides off of us, water to our glossy duck backs. So I prefer:
The outcome that makes satire harder is the most likely.
This, I think, fits the directionality of our cultural teleology best: whatever is going to happen, it is ordained that the world will out-satire any satire you throw at it.
Consider satire during the Bush years: that was easy! George standing under the waving MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner in a flight suit. A golden age of satire, its halcyon days. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report were so popular at the time precisely because satire was so easy, so applicable. Now, satire, real deep cutting satire, is basically the hardest thing to pull off in the world. Trump, for instance, at first seems so deeply susceptible to satire, and yet actually he cannot be satirized, because no one is more Trump than Trump and nothing can ever be more Trump than Trump. He maxes out the Trump-o-meter, and you can’t go past it any more than you can go faster than the speed of light, and a bunch of stuff is like that now.
While it may be too far to say that satire is fully utterly dead, I think it is far significantly harder than it used to be across a bunch of domains. Not just politics, obviously. Culture at large. Technology, as well. Look to the ever-increasing applicability of the “Torment Nexus” meme.
Just last week was announced the launch of the latest AI wearable, “friend.” Your new “friend” is a Large Language Model made to predict text, one probably prompted with a context window that will inevitably have pretty minimal information about you—likes cats!—and also likely will never be able to see the world well through the fisheye lens of its camera you’re supposed to wear around your neck (oh, and all your conversations will now be recorded—including, presumably, anyone you talk to, which on paper seems to, ah, violate a number of state’s laws, but who cares right?). Of a 2.5 million dollar raise, they apparently committed 1.8 million to buying the friend dot com domain. Even their launch advertisement had a leading tech reviewer saying “Wait, this isn’t a skit?”
In a sci-fi book a world where people wear cameras around their necks hosting pretending-to-care AIs (especially those that are just BSing most answers, as here) all to deal with the crippling human loneliness brought about by other technological inventions and modern “progress,” would obviously be depicted as a dystopia. But people are just shamelessly going for it, because (now reasoning teleologically and therefore backward here) it then makes any satire you could write about how stupid and counterproductive fake AI “friends” are completely impossible to pull off from a literary perspective, since those already pushing malicious uses of this technology are simply saying the things that EvilCorp would say in the book, using the advertisements EvilCorp would use, and therefore rendering the whole thing inert, toothless, a less-exaggerated version of reality.
To be clear, the death of satire doesn’t mean outcomes won’t be funny. Oh, they are going to be funny. And probably very sad too. It also does not mean that people cannot find many, very many, things to make fun of in culture, be it on one side of the political aisle or another. But “making fun of” or “dunking on” (the majority of humor now) is actually different than real satire, deep satire; that’s supposed to be a quick cut with a blade so fine it takes a long time to even notice the wound. Some never do, until they keel over. That blade is what is being dulled, destined to become just a rubber sword waved around ridiculously.
I agree it is an odd new bent for our universe to suddenly possess. I don’t personally know why the laws of physics have developed an emergent cosmic drive to make satire inaccessible for artists and writers and commentators everywhere. Perhaps we were abusing our powers, and now they are being taken away.
Of course, if you must be boringly materialistic about it, there are social forces that can be ferreted out. We don’t have to be mystics, although perhaps a little bit of that helps. My own personal explanation is based on “Hegelian Dialectics for the 21st Century,” in which I conceptualized our era as a dialectical struggle between online mobs and sovereign individuals.
Sovereign individuals are the antithesis of the 21st century. Yet they are pitted not again nations, but against the mob. For in the past decade we have seen the recent rise of many figures who might be described, whether you like them personally or not, as sovereign individuals. The mob cannot hurt them. No scandal can unseat them, no judgement can cancel them.
To be a sovereign individual now-a-days usually requires being shameless, for shame is the main weapon of the mob. But a funny side effect is that you cannot satirize the shameless. The shameless are immune to it. I’m rubber, you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you. Our culture is being filled up with exaggerated caricatures because they are the only ones who can combat the tidal surges of opinion and sentiment and resentment that is the mob-based starting thesis of our century. Expect more of that.
So if you want to predict the future, just think about whatever outcome will leave you unable to top it in any satirical form. A process that looks to continue until satire itself is dead, forgotten, atrophied into nothingness. Just another artistic movement people used to do, once, long ago, and now has been abandoned. Like Impressionism, or something.
There is a profound difference between a dignity/guilt culture and a reputation/shame culture.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%80%93shame%E2%80%93fear_spectrum_of_cultures:
One of the problems we got with the internet was 'liking' and 'reputation scores' -- which may be good for figuring out who to trust to buy from on EBay, but appears to have caused our consciences to atrophy. It's never been easier to find out what the neighbours think, while grappling with our own deepest moral feelings remains as hard as ever.
In all cultures there is always a possible tension between 'what my conscience says I should do' and 'what the neighbours think'. But in guilt/dignity cultures the usual resolution is that you should 'do what is right' and resist the social pressure to do what is wrong. Or you should learn the error of your ways, and do what is right because now you agree with your neighbours. Satire thrives where there is a profound tension, and works directly on the consciences of the audience. Everything from 'gentle, chiding, mocking' to the biting thrust that wounds you to the core before you know it -- serve to awaken the conscience to the notion that something isn't right with one's behaviour. On the other side, various satirical takes on respectability and hypocrisy can serve to give the neighbours notice that the social pressure they are applying is in itself wrong, and an affront to human dignity.
Shame/Face societies don't have a lot of satire. See: Understanding Humour in Japan. https://wsupress.wayne.edu/9780814331651/ Historically, the resolution between one's conscience and what the neighbours think has always been that you must do according to what the neighbours think. In Japan this could go to the length where a Samurai, ordered to commit suicide, might do so leaving a death poem as a last reflection on how wrong this outcome was.
There's nothing gentle or funny here. Indeed you end up with cutural norms set up to keep people from having to suffer from criticism that would cause them to 'lose face'. Satire then becomes something that is always very, very, biting and dangerous.
So Japanese people who wish to be witty and clever pick something other than satire to do. There is a enormous amount of humour dedicated to how people 'give face' and 'preserve face' and the like, and most of it falls flat to western audiences because they don't have a face to maintain. By the standards of a Face culture -- they are shameless.
When you look at all this talk about how the mental health of today's youth is suffering, I think a certain amount of it is because social media gives them a huge dose of shame culture before their consciences are well enough developed to resist the pressure and insist on their right to their own consciences and dignity. But how would one design an experiment to measure that?
This is a clever angle. It makes me think of how the Onion really struggled to adapt to the post-2016 moment, especially when (in hindsight) their "Shrieking White-Hot Sphere Of Pure Rage" video from 2012 proved so disturbingly prophetic.
It's affected cultural criticism across the board. I've long been a fan of the cyberpunk genre, but stories like Neuromancer or even Snow Crash (which was such a ridiculous satire that the main character was named Hiro Protagonist) seemingly weren't pessimistic enough about how, well, dumb everything would get.