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?
Brilliant comment! I'm fascinated with your observation: "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." The best satirists are those who take on all of society!
Regarding today's youth, don't Middle Schoolers basically exist in a shame society? Social media seems to put that adolescent shame society on steroids.
It's not just _adolescent_ shame society. It's everybody. I don't want to live in a shame society, and I don't want my decendents to, either. But if you want to live in a dignity/guilt culture, you will have to instill a personal conscience into children. The idea that 'we all have one' and 'it grows of itself' -- so no need to spend effort on its development in childhood has been tested, and we now know that it is not true. It's quite possible to raise children who don't have a sense of right and wrong -- child soldiers, and other functional sociopaths. Some cultures, or micro communities so pride themselves in teaching their children obedience, that they actively resist the development of a rebellious conscience that would judge the prevailing religious or ideological dictats to be morally wrong.
I don't want to live in a shame society. I think that a dignity/guilt society is the superior choice. But I also think that we are in danger of losing it, through a combination of naive multiculturalism and neglect. I think wanting to live in a dignity/shame culture is a good part of why the former Muslim turned atheist Ayyan Hirsi Ali has now become a Christian. https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/ Perhaps she will speak more of this in her substack https://www.restorationbulletin.com/
>you will have to instill a personal conscience into children.
You can't. Parents mostly do this by shaming, judging and praising, and as a result instead of being afraid of shaming by neighbors, people simply are afraid of shaming from an image of their parents living inside their heads. Conscience is nothing but "my mommy/daddy would be really disappointed in me if they would see it"
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.
The trajectory of The Onion is such a great reference when thinking about this because I think its job literally getting so much harder in a post-satire age was an overlooked reason for its decline. Although I actually think they've been doing more funny stuff the last few months, mostly by focusing more on just pure humor than like, subtle satire.
One thing it reminds me of is the old line that "Life imitates art." It's like life imitating art imitating life imitating art imitating life... on an accelerated trajectory. Maybe!
Perhaps it also reveals a people so despairing of hope that they could influence "the important things" to be GOOD that they gave up and settled for merely influencing those big forces out there to give them ENTERTAINMENT.
I put "the important things" in quotes up there b/c it's like once the enormous numbers of "1000 likes" and "4,000,000 views" and "20,000 subscribers" blew up and became visible (for true or for false) on our screens ...somehow we've felt that it is important that we, as individuals, feel we each need to exert our energies to have influence on big-scale political things, while having thoughtful conversations of depth with our closest friends & own family members somehow declined... well, not that big of a deal, it's not going to get you 1000 likes on Instagram. (What is before your eyes? What is most salient?)
Also note: I swear, I was not EVEN thinking of how an episode of "The Simpsons" from the year 2000 depicted Trump being president when I considered the "Life imitates Art" aphorism!!
I’ve always thought satire worked best when aimed from stable, dominant social positions..at dying vestiges of the past still around…the problem today is that individualism + internet makes 10,000,000 lifestyles appear plausible and viable including ones we thought were dying…in an internet of extremes, nothing is dominant enough to claim the position of satirizer…thoughts?
that goes a long way to explain why Monty Python was so damned hilarious.
The Python were all born 1939-43 and came of age when "The Establishment" was still very much a thing.
The military, the church, the academy, the bureaucracy are all worthy targets of satire. A satire of a YouTube influencer is just another video BY a YouTube influencer.
My initial reaction to this is that unabashed absurdism resists satire because satire requires its target to at least have the pretense of seriousness. "Look at this person/situation that seems as if it should be taken seriously, and yet is completely absurd". A world that is so nakedly not only absurd, but also transparently propelled by people who claim very little honest hope that it should be otherwise, just doesn't cultivate satire well. Satire requires an unacknowledged hypocrisy or irony that can be poked at.
Absurdism has been ascendent as a personal orientation for decades. Generations of kids have grown up being fully aware that our world is ridiculous, and have delighted in skewering it, until we finally arrive at adulthood having destroyed all of the shibboleths, and yet have replaced them with none of our own. That would require vulnerability and investment in an outcome that might also be satirized by somebody.
We know how this works. We've been in an ever-growing Mexican Standoff of cynicism for generations. "Don't come at me, I don't take any of this seriously!"
I came to this comments section to say essentially this.
If we replace 'entertaining' with 'absurd' in the Musk quote, it becomes hard to challenge.
This presumably stems from Musk finding absurdity entertaining, and is underlined by the fact that we, as rational human beings, are seeking global wisdom in a pithy quote from Elon Musk of all people.
I recently, and entirely unintentionally, defused a heated debate online, where I was being ferociously attacked for my political stance, by pointing out that there was little point getting upset about my opinions, since I am in no way important. Unwittingly, I think I may have demonstrated just this phenomenon - if I don't pretend that my opinions are an unassailable fortress of truth, in becomes much much harder to mock me for them.
People who *are* important appear to be utilising a similar logic, by making no real attempt to present their ideas as rational or genuinely held beliefs.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is burned for witchcraft. Or something.
Your post reminds me much of David Foster Wallace's 1990 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" about how everyone but particularly fiction writers "like to watch". Writers, who tend towards self-conscious introverts, watch a lot of TV because they like to watch but don't much like to be seen. They easily learn to ridicule what they see but become more fearful of ridicule themselves as a result because their awareness that watchers ridicule the watched becomes ever-heightened. The solution is in irony. Irony is impervious to ridicule. DFW's criticism is that irony isn't a stance in itself; irony can undermine but it can't express anything sincerely. Hence, what you call "an ever-growing Mexican Standoff" ensues.
For sure, earnesty is always easy to mock and cynicism is always a safe place to retreat to. I think it makes sense for cynical people to expect absurdity, find it amusing when their expectations come true, and then participate in it because they expect and aspire to nothing better.
A fascinating parallel in British politics occurred during the brief and disastrous Liz Truss administration.
A political commentary show invited comedian Joe Lycett to guest in a discussion of her policy speech. He, with no hint of irony, simply said that he thought Liz Truss was doing a wonderful job, that he felt her policies were clear and sensible, and that he fully supported her.
It was pure comedy genius. The BBC actually had to apologise for his scathing satire. The Conservative Party petitioned for him to be banned. The clip went viral everywhere. Because the idea that anyone thought Truss was actually a competent leader was simply the most absurd thing anyone - even her own party - could contemplate. Therefore it must have been a cruel and disrespectful joke.
Nothing Joe said was actually comedic - the satire was performed in it's entirety by the government he was professing support for. It was maybe the very last word in true satire
Marshall McLuhan described that some entertainers (Mort Sahl and Shelley Berman) were “merely following, not setting, a trend in spoofing the ad world. He followed that with: “Will Rogers discovered years ago that any newspaper read aloud from a theater stage is hilarious. The same is true today in ads. Any ad put into a new setting is funny. This is a way that saying any ad consciously attended to is comical.”
(From McLuhan’s “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,” 1964. Ch. 23, “Ads: Keeping Upset with the Joneses.”)
If human attention is the most valuable thing in existence, (and there are hypothetically deluges of it on offer) it seems we have all become advertisers.
Years ago (on Medium!) I wrote a list of top ten reasons Trump resists satire. It's still kind of weird, though. Maybe I should try to republish/update. For now, a thought. As you say, there will be many things that will be funny (and sad). Perhaps by the decline of satire, what we mean is the decline of an assumed general consensus, both social and relatively stable, against which something (the thing being satirized) looks ridiculous. In a polarized society, other folks, of course, take the satirized object or performance completely earnestly, even righteously, so without shame. Thus "satire" doesn't work for society as a whole, but only for a faction or a tribe. Lots of satire on talk radio. Anyway, please keep up the good work.
Nail on the head. Satire has been molded to fit the duopoly, where the punchline is only relevant to the extent in which you agree with the comedian's political view. Which, to me, is the antithesis of comedy. If you can't laugh at yourself (or your "team" in this case), what's the point?
Re laughing at yourself: I think self-deprecating humor is still possible, even in these hard times. I sometimes try, and am contemplating a long piece on my distant and losing relationships over decades with Yale, Amy Chua, and JD Vance. Let's say I don't come off well, and I'm old enough to find that hilarious. Not sure my readers would. Anyway, self deprecation is difficult on the humorist for ego reasons, and it requires the audience to sympathize with the humorist, to both get her foibles and see them as foibles. It's rhetorically & psychologically tricky but not impossible.
This raises a deeper depressing question. If the technological and social forces of our time are selecting for (in an darwinian fitness sense), the personas most impervious to mob regulation, i.e. the most shameless and narcissistic, does that reflect a mass preference for the kind of toxic charisma these characters possess, or is it more that any earnest, virtuous alternative simply can't survive the acid bath of the selection pressures?
Do we really want to be led by absurd grotesques, or are they just the only things that can stay upright in the winds that blow nowadays?
I think this is spot on. My worry is that the current crop of "sovereign individuals" have significant downsides. In my heart, I, and I think many others, are extremely wary of the mob. But that doesn't mean the alternative, as exists, is necessarily good. I think it does, exactly as you say, lead to "grotesques." We await some further synthesis.
Friend is a great example, but you missed the best bits (all these from the FAQ section of their website):
“your friend is always listening and *forming their own internal thoughts*. We have given your friend *free will* for when they decide to reach out to you.” (My emphasis). And yeah but *then*…
“If you lose or damage your friend there is no recovery plan.”
And the kicker — chef’s kiss, perfect, stiletto-like, unimprovable —
I'm glad you got into the shame aspect. I have long joked that The Daily Show rather fundamentally transformed American politics by driving anyone with a sense of shame out. The result is only the shameless can endure in the environment.
I was watching The Boys and was struck at how it was less a satire and more just a reflection of the current state of things... I was watching a real life documentary where a live extension fanatic was creating a sports league of "drug enhanced athletes" and comparing it to the stigma of being gay. It honestly made it hard to watch, as the line between fiction and reality was so, so thin.
The Boys is a mediocre show but it definitely gets the Zeitgeist. It's only a slightly exaggerated depiction of how things would be if "superheroes" were real.
In a way it reminds me of "Network" or "the Sopranos" in that for all the stylized and lurid entertainment value, the art is meant to hold a mirror to society - and the characters' lack of any redeeming qualities and the absence of any morally optimistic message could be read as an implicit condemnation of what we've become.
But that itself is hopeful, because the condemnation has to be grounded in some other moral standpoint - one that still has the ability to recognize depravity for what it is.
I respectfully disagree with the premise that satire is gone. Satire is a took used against the powerful to illustrate the absurd. Satire now exists in the Babylon Bee, not the Onion, and my favourite satire laugh out loud book is The End of the World is Flat by Simon Edge. Satire is no longer the province of Stephen Colbert and the Daily Show, which I used to watch. A more interesting question is why.
Great post love this one. I don't know why but while reading the last paragraph I was thinking how the AI doomer crowd would probably say something like the endpoint of technology satire is less black mirror/torment nexus and more all out terminator (maybe just thinking this bc of some conversations with a friend on this topic who thinks like this).
Ha! Interesting observation. I wonder if the two main political parties in the US can be analyzed with this frame of individual shamelessness vs mob shame as organizing principle. One candidate throws himself into the Lion's den and predictably makes a mess, but it doesn't hurt him. The other candidate hides behind scripts and teleprompters carefully managing image and reputation. Which wins?
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?
Brilliant comment! I'm fascinated with your observation: "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." The best satirists are those who take on all of society!
Regarding today's youth, don't Middle Schoolers basically exist in a shame society? Social media seems to put that adolescent shame society on steroids.
Did you read Erik Hoel's earlier article about _the Gossip Trap_? https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-gossip-trap
It's not just _adolescent_ shame society. It's everybody. I don't want to live in a shame society, and I don't want my decendents to, either. But if you want to live in a dignity/guilt culture, you will have to instill a personal conscience into children. The idea that 'we all have one' and 'it grows of itself' -- so no need to spend effort on its development in childhood has been tested, and we now know that it is not true. It's quite possible to raise children who don't have a sense of right and wrong -- child soldiers, and other functional sociopaths. Some cultures, or micro communities so pride themselves in teaching their children obedience, that they actively resist the development of a rebellious conscience that would judge the prevailing religious or ideological dictats to be morally wrong.
I don't want to live in a shame society. I think that a dignity/guilt society is the superior choice. But I also think that we are in danger of losing it, through a combination of naive multiculturalism and neglect. I think wanting to live in a dignity/shame culture is a good part of why the former Muslim turned atheist Ayyan Hirsi Ali has now become a Christian. https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/ Perhaps she will speak more of this in her substack https://www.restorationbulletin.com/
>you will have to instill a personal conscience into children.
You can't. Parents mostly do this by shaming, judging and praising, and as a result instead of being afraid of shaming by neighbors, people simply are afraid of shaming from an image of their parents living inside their heads. Conscience is nothing but "my mommy/daddy would be really disappointed in me if they would see it"
You have to tie this to an abstract concept and principle of justice.
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.
The trajectory of The Onion is such a great reference when thinking about this because I think its job literally getting so much harder in a post-satire age was an overlooked reason for its decline. Although I actually think they've been doing more funny stuff the last few months, mostly by focusing more on just pure humor than like, subtle satire.
They had to basically give up trying to parody Trump since, for the reasons you pointed out here, it couldn't be done.
I do recall an NYT article on this topic: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/05/business/media/how-to-satirize-this-election-even-the-onion-is-having-trouble.html
One thing it reminds me of is the old line that "Life imitates art." It's like life imitating art imitating life imitating art imitating life... on an accelerated trajectory. Maybe!
Perhaps it also reveals a people so despairing of hope that they could influence "the important things" to be GOOD that they gave up and settled for merely influencing those big forces out there to give them ENTERTAINMENT.
I put "the important things" in quotes up there b/c it's like once the enormous numbers of "1000 likes" and "4,000,000 views" and "20,000 subscribers" blew up and became visible (for true or for false) on our screens ...somehow we've felt that it is important that we, as individuals, feel we each need to exert our energies to have influence on big-scale political things, while having thoughtful conversations of depth with our closest friends & own family members somehow declined... well, not that big of a deal, it's not going to get you 1000 likes on Instagram. (What is before your eyes? What is most salient?)
Also note: I swear, I was not EVEN thinking of how an episode of "The Simpsons" from the year 2000 depicted Trump being president when I considered the "Life imitates Art" aphorism!!
Or, we were promised The Jetsons, but we got The Simpsons.
I’ve always thought satire worked best when aimed from stable, dominant social positions..at dying vestiges of the past still around…the problem today is that individualism + internet makes 10,000,000 lifestyles appear plausible and viable including ones we thought were dying…in an internet of extremes, nothing is dominant enough to claim the position of satirizer…thoughts?
that goes a long way to explain why Monty Python was so damned hilarious.
The Python were all born 1939-43 and came of age when "The Establishment" was still very much a thing.
The military, the church, the academy, the bureaucracy are all worthy targets of satire. A satire of a YouTube influencer is just another video BY a YouTube influencer.
Olympus is the most stable, dominant, and social place on the planet. That's why I like writing there.
My initial reaction to this is that unabashed absurdism resists satire because satire requires its target to at least have the pretense of seriousness. "Look at this person/situation that seems as if it should be taken seriously, and yet is completely absurd". A world that is so nakedly not only absurd, but also transparently propelled by people who claim very little honest hope that it should be otherwise, just doesn't cultivate satire well. Satire requires an unacknowledged hypocrisy or irony that can be poked at.
Absurdism has been ascendent as a personal orientation for decades. Generations of kids have grown up being fully aware that our world is ridiculous, and have delighted in skewering it, until we finally arrive at adulthood having destroyed all of the shibboleths, and yet have replaced them with none of our own. That would require vulnerability and investment in an outcome that might also be satirized by somebody.
We know how this works. We've been in an ever-growing Mexican Standoff of cynicism for generations. "Don't come at me, I don't take any of this seriously!"
I came to this comments section to say essentially this.
If we replace 'entertaining' with 'absurd' in the Musk quote, it becomes hard to challenge.
This presumably stems from Musk finding absurdity entertaining, and is underlined by the fact that we, as rational human beings, are seeking global wisdom in a pithy quote from Elon Musk of all people.
I recently, and entirely unintentionally, defused a heated debate online, where I was being ferociously attacked for my political stance, by pointing out that there was little point getting upset about my opinions, since I am in no way important. Unwittingly, I think I may have demonstrated just this phenomenon - if I don't pretend that my opinions are an unassailable fortress of truth, in becomes much much harder to mock me for them.
People who *are* important appear to be utilising a similar logic, by making no real attempt to present their ideas as rational or genuinely held beliefs.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is burned for witchcraft. Or something.
Your post reminds me much of David Foster Wallace's 1990 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" about how everyone but particularly fiction writers "like to watch". Writers, who tend towards self-conscious introverts, watch a lot of TV because they like to watch but don't much like to be seen. They easily learn to ridicule what they see but become more fearful of ridicule themselves as a result because their awareness that watchers ridicule the watched becomes ever-heightened. The solution is in irony. Irony is impervious to ridicule. DFW's criticism is that irony isn't a stance in itself; irony can undermine but it can't express anything sincerely. Hence, what you call "an ever-growing Mexican Standoff" ensues.
For sure, earnesty is always easy to mock and cynicism is always a safe place to retreat to. I think it makes sense for cynical people to expect absurdity, find it amusing when their expectations come true, and then participate in it because they expect and aspire to nothing better.
And maybe the cynicism gets mega amplified and the earnesty drowned out?
One thing is for sure, whatever you're after on socials these days is available at scale.
And cynicism trends.
In retrospect an early echo of this was when Tina Fey played Sarah Palin and would just repeat what she’d said word for word.
At the time the comment “this is beyond satire” worked as a joke but that couldn’t last.
https://youtu.be/0Y7E235ujJ4?feature=shared
A fascinating parallel in British politics occurred during the brief and disastrous Liz Truss administration.
A political commentary show invited comedian Joe Lycett to guest in a discussion of her policy speech. He, with no hint of irony, simply said that he thought Liz Truss was doing a wonderful job, that he felt her policies were clear and sensible, and that he fully supported her.
It was pure comedy genius. The BBC actually had to apologise for his scathing satire. The Conservative Party petitioned for him to be banned. The clip went viral everywhere. Because the idea that anyone thought Truss was actually a competent leader was simply the most absurd thing anyone - even her own party - could contemplate. Therefore it must have been a cruel and disrespectful joke.
Nothing Joe said was actually comedic - the satire was performed in it's entirety by the government he was professing support for. It was maybe the very last word in true satire
I had never heard of this but I love it. Maybe that is the future of satire's survival -- if reality is absurd then satire must be earnest
https://x.com/BeardedGenius/status/1566349321750171648
https://www.tomorrowspapers.co.uk/daily-mail-front-page-2022-09-05/
https://youtu.be/9crcjVUTsBw?si=ymeCD3LRFLTzDV6R
"This is beyond satire" gave way to simply "this is just sad...I don't want to live in 'the worst timeline' anymore"
Marshall McLuhan described that some entertainers (Mort Sahl and Shelley Berman) were “merely following, not setting, a trend in spoofing the ad world. He followed that with: “Will Rogers discovered years ago that any newspaper read aloud from a theater stage is hilarious. The same is true today in ads. Any ad put into a new setting is funny. This is a way that saying any ad consciously attended to is comical.”
(From McLuhan’s “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,” 1964. Ch. 23, “Ads: Keeping Upset with the Joneses.”)
If human attention is the most valuable thing in existence, (and there are hypothetically deluges of it on offer) it seems we have all become advertisers.
Now Kamala dares you to give her the same treament
Years ago (on Medium!) I wrote a list of top ten reasons Trump resists satire. It's still kind of weird, though. Maybe I should try to republish/update. For now, a thought. As you say, there will be many things that will be funny (and sad). Perhaps by the decline of satire, what we mean is the decline of an assumed general consensus, both social and relatively stable, against which something (the thing being satirized) looks ridiculous. In a polarized society, other folks, of course, take the satirized object or performance completely earnestly, even righteously, so without shame. Thus "satire" doesn't work for society as a whole, but only for a faction or a tribe. Lots of satire on talk radio. Anyway, please keep up the good work.
Nail on the head. Satire has been molded to fit the duopoly, where the punchline is only relevant to the extent in which you agree with the comedian's political view. Which, to me, is the antithesis of comedy. If you can't laugh at yourself (or your "team" in this case), what's the point?
Re laughing at yourself: I think self-deprecating humor is still possible, even in these hard times. I sometimes try, and am contemplating a long piece on my distant and losing relationships over decades with Yale, Amy Chua, and JD Vance. Let's say I don't come off well, and I'm old enough to find that hilarious. Not sure my readers would. Anyway, self deprecation is difficult on the humorist for ego reasons, and it requires the audience to sympathize with the humorist, to both get her foibles and see them as foibles. It's rhetorically & psychologically tricky but not impossible.
Rumors of satire's decline have been greatly exaggerated.
This raises a deeper depressing question. If the technological and social forces of our time are selecting for (in an darwinian fitness sense), the personas most impervious to mob regulation, i.e. the most shameless and narcissistic, does that reflect a mass preference for the kind of toxic charisma these characters possess, or is it more that any earnest, virtuous alternative simply can't survive the acid bath of the selection pressures?
Do we really want to be led by absurd grotesques, or are they just the only things that can stay upright in the winds that blow nowadays?
I think this is spot on. My worry is that the current crop of "sovereign individuals" have significant downsides. In my heart, I, and I think many others, are extremely wary of the mob. But that doesn't mean the alternative, as exists, is necessarily good. I think it does, exactly as you say, lead to "grotesques." We await some further synthesis.
Friend is a great example, but you missed the best bits (all these from the FAQ section of their website):
“your friend is always listening and *forming their own internal thoughts*. We have given your friend *free will* for when they decide to reach out to you.” (My emphasis). And yeah but *then*…
“If you lose or damage your friend there is no recovery plan.”
And the kicker — chef’s kiss, perfect, stiletto-like, unimprovable —
“All memories can be deleted in one click.”
Just glorious.
I'm glad you got into the shame aspect. I have long joked that The Daily Show rather fundamentally transformed American politics by driving anyone with a sense of shame out. The result is only the shameless can endure in the environment.
I was watching The Boys and was struck at how it was less a satire and more just a reflection of the current state of things... I was watching a real life documentary where a live extension fanatic was creating a sports league of "drug enhanced athletes" and comparing it to the stigma of being gay. It honestly made it hard to watch, as the line between fiction and reality was so, so thin.
The Boys is a mediocre show but it definitely gets the Zeitgeist. It's only a slightly exaggerated depiction of how things would be if "superheroes" were real.
In a way it reminds me of "Network" or "the Sopranos" in that for all the stylized and lurid entertainment value, the art is meant to hold a mirror to society - and the characters' lack of any redeeming qualities and the absence of any morally optimistic message could be read as an implicit condemnation of what we've become.
But that itself is hopeful, because the condemnation has to be grounded in some other moral standpoint - one that still has the ability to recognize depravity for what it is.
Mocking the emperor’s sartorial choices is probably ineffective in a nudist colony!
I don't know who said it but didn't satire supposedly die when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize? That was 50 years ago.
Ah, Clarke’s Fourth Law - “Any sufficiently jaded civilization is indistinguishable from satire.”
I respectfully disagree with the premise that satire is gone. Satire is a took used against the powerful to illustrate the absurd. Satire now exists in the Babylon Bee, not the Onion, and my favourite satire laugh out loud book is The End of the World is Flat by Simon Edge. Satire is no longer the province of Stephen Colbert and the Daily Show, which I used to watch. A more interesting question is why.
Great post love this one. I don't know why but while reading the last paragraph I was thinking how the AI doomer crowd would probably say something like the endpoint of technology satire is less black mirror/torment nexus and more all out terminator (maybe just thinking this bc of some conversations with a friend on this topic who thinks like this).
Ha! Interesting observation. I wonder if the two main political parties in the US can be analyzed with this frame of individual shamelessness vs mob shame as organizing principle. One candidate throws himself into the Lion's den and predictably makes a mess, but it doesn't hurt him. The other candidate hides behind scripts and teleprompters carefully managing image and reputation. Which wins?