Now, the sign seems to be that one can
no longer keep up with the meme economy.
I only just became aware of the Doomer
meme, which apparently has been making the rounds of the fuck-my-life
Internet for the past few months. And has become the topic of a whole
Subreddit which seems to consist of sad young men with a fondness for
walking around dark places late at night.
 | |
| The original version, first seen September 16, 2018 |
As in the Book of Ecclesiastes: nothing
new under the Sun. For at least as long as the period known as the
“modern,” there have been subcultures that are reliant on the
fundamental tension between a vague sense of hope that fails to
coalesce into any kind of coherent vision and a more overwhelming
sense of impending doom. When I was in high school, there were emo
kids. Before then, goths. All the way back to the Dadaists, and
before them the youth across Europe with Goethean pretensions who
dressed like the titular character of his 1774 novel The Sorrows
of Young Werther, and perhaps
all the way back to Diogenes the Cynic, who jerked off and shat
himself in public and then said something along the lines of “sorry
for being REAL, you fucking sheeple!”
Some wallow in
self-hatred. Others plot grand unworkable theories of human past and
future, whether fascist, Maoist, Salafist, or whatever, to invoke
some specter of power in the face of powerlessness. And some move on,
get married, have kids, live happily ever after.
This is just an
iteration in the era of late-capitalist accumulation and climate
change, and as far I can tell a relatively small one, one which will
in all likelihood barely if at all be remembered by history.
On the one hand,
I'm tempted to view this as mawkishness and sentimentality –
emotional bathos deployed in lieu of genuine connection – but
that's a cheap shot, and ultimately one that comes off as
condescending, and much to my horror, condescending to my younger
self. For some reason, I'm paying attention. Maybe it's the fact that
people are finding a common experience revolving around an inability
around a sense of personal failure and misery that doesn't actually
seem to fetishize that failure and misery, but instead seem to
genuinely want to get better in the face of insurmountable odds.
Maybe it's the fact that these seem to be people who realize the
bullshit of late capitalism but haven't found a way to articulate it,
especially given the absolute drought of humanistic education at the
present moment.
And what triggers
the most empathy is the having tried and tried again, and still
failing. There's the tendency to turn inwards into poorly defined
concepts of self-improvement, or into chemical self-medication, or
into its close cousin technological self-medication. Which is
something that comes so, so close to something that could have
happened to me, and that kind of did happen to me.
Particularly, it's
the nightwalk concept that actually interests me – another subject
that has its own Subreddit – which given the isolated young men
with poor prospects that seem to be attracted to this particular form
of communication, often tends to be the aggressively bland streets of
suburban and exurban and small-town America.
And I can so
distinctly remember the vibe of isolated walks around a town in Iowa,
tract housing and highway bypasses, a Panera and a Long John Silver's
and a Hobby Lobby, the cardboard signs for discounts on 30-racks of
Natty Ice and cartons of USA Gold cigarettes, the frigid fluorescent
lights over rows of Monster energy drinks, the flash of an old boxcar
– Denver, Rio Grande, and Southern – an iconic design from
another era, a poem from the past, the bilious lights coming on in
the old hotel downtown, peering into the lives of its residents, an
ancient man with a bottle of Cutty Sark in the window, a mentally
disabled woman in her 30s with a hacked-off blonde bob and a stained
pink hoodie, seeing them look out into the February night and
wondering what the fuck they saw in it all.
The
only difference is that instead of listening to Soundcloud rappers
and Spotify ambient mixes, I was listening to a Limewire'd and burned
CD of Godspeed You Black Emperor's F#A# (infinity).
I
avoided the worst. I didn't become an insufferable gamer, a vile
political reactionary, an otaku. I became someone who more or less
passes in polite society. But there's a performative quality to it,
and nothing will shatter the mask more than, say, listening to a song
I like on Youtube, only to have it followed up by an ad with a
cheerful voice telling me to buy Head and Shoulders. And at the end
of the day, I find a greater sense of kindred understanding in a W.G.
Sebald novel, a Joan Didion essay, or a Joy Division album than
anything else.
