It’s the future now, and everything cool on the internet is about God

August 18, 2022 10:12 AM

At the heart of all this motion is a lust for crawling through someone else’s ambiguity, in staring at a post or profile for longer than the machine’s trained you to, in the toothsome frustration of trying to figure out what’s a revelation, what’s a dark joke, and what’s just the result of a chemically imbalanced brain and an eternally available keyboard. […] You can’t really make a name for yourself as an authenticity-poster and then pivot to posting unhinged textsprawls. Well, you probably can, and people probably will as this type of online life drips into the mainstream, but it will be in mimetic microdoses.

— Intimacy and the Machine: Godposting – or: New Internet Esotericism, by Biz Sherbert (Sept 2021)

Potentially related: Aaron Z. Lewis on Being your selves: identity R&D on the pseudonymous internet (Feb 2020)

posted by wesleyac (10 comments total)

I know that the thin line between revelation and taking the piss is thin. But I'm going to need someone to pick out a few things for me to hang on to here
posted by wotsac at 10:56 AM on August 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm not sure what language this article is written in, but it's not one I understand.
posted by Billiken at 11:18 AM on August 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

my brain drew up its defences
my heart spread its legs
posted by elkevelvet at 11:37 AM on August 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

The "phalanxes of pretty e-girls roped in cross necklaces" turns out to be one retro-1980s-style selfie. The person "writing about the internet in a way that reads like an evangelical speaking in tongues" turns out to be garden-variety incoherence. The "meme pages posting sweet little sentences about God’s light" turns out to be the old Serenity chestnut, predating the internet by half a century. Those aren't "kabbalah diagrams", they're just graphs.

"Admissions and confessions, baroque and obscure infographics, and individual mythologies" are not the uniquely-operated domain of Catholicism. The author is seeing exactly what they're looking for, but not necessarily because it's there
posted by ook at 11:43 AM on August 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

Or, alternatively, Biz Sherbert is shitposting about shitposting, and I fell for it
posted by ook at 11:44 AM on August 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

For some more context: I thought this article was a interesting exploration of the pendulum of internet expression swinging from straightforward openness to a sort of defensive inscrutability, which is something I've seen in a lot of weird niche internet communities, not just the one the article is about. The decision to write about that in a sort of poetic, semi-coherent ramble struck me as intentional. The second link provides a more easily-parsable discussion of a similar phenomenon, if that's more up your alley.

I do think that the subculture the author is talking about is maybe a little stranger than you give it credit for, though, ook — I don't know how to explain this properly, but that blog that is just "garden-variety incoherence" is actually a pretty notable social force in a nebulous extremely-online social scene which includes a fascist NFT project run by someone who also runs a sex cult that tries to recruit teenagers with eating disorders and a weird Manhattan-based party/"art" scene that got funding from Peter Thiel. It's maybe one of the stranger subcultures like this (to the point where I've seen a lot of takes about how everyone knows about this and Can We Please Stop Writing Thinkpieces About It). The angel girl/doll twitter aesthetic/philosophy is more broad than that, though, and I think actually started out fairly left-wing before the fascist weirdos got ahold of it. (yes i am aware that knowing all this is just a sign of how completely internet-poisoned my brain is thank you)

The author chose a particularly weird subculture to write about, probably since it's large and relatively well-known, but if you look for it, there are thousands of these weird post-ironic subcultures where it's basically impossible to parse anything at all if you're looking in from the outside — I think that's new, and worth trying to understand.
posted by wesleyac at 12:36 PM on August 18, 2022 [6 favorites]

See, now "a pretty notable social force in a nebulous extremely-online social scene which includes a fascist NTF project run by someone who also runs a sex cult that tries to recruit teenagers with eating disorders and a weird Manhattan-based party/"art" scene that got funding from Peter Thiel" sounds like a potentially really interesting thing!

But this author referencing it as "an evangelical speaking in tongues but covered in kawaii runes" doesn't so much get at any of that, and the God framing of the whole essay is seemingly pulled from thin air. Writing about subcultures that are completely inscrutable from outside, by being completely inscrutable about them, is maybe a cool meta move but yeah not my jam. I prolly should have just kept quiet, sorry.

TL;DR I am an old and my memes are increasingly uncrispy
posted by ook at 12:53 PM on August 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

thousands of these weird post-ironic subcultures where it's basically impossible to parse anything at all if you're looking in from the outside

A corner of every coffeehouse back when we had coffeehouses tho? Possibly each corner, we sure didn’t understand each other.
posted by clew at 1:09 PM on August 18, 2022

great post -- helped put name to meta-meme categories and concepts that i know through exposure in the feeds, but didn't know the names for, and it's always a pleasant feeling to fill that metadata in.

These conceptual maps are repost candies with more complicated base notes—vanilla with some metal and ozone. You get an immediate hit of satisfaction through knowing you possess the cultural cleverness necessary to recognize the signifiers strung together on your screen, but the diagram format also makes these images feel less like pedestrian memes and more like pages ripped from A Thousand Plateaus and annotated in pink gel pen.

yep, spot on. similarly with this bit:

It doesn’t really matter what it is; it just matters that people keep guessing—the incoherence is what’s transgressive. At the heart of all this motion is a lust for crawling through someone else’s ambiguity, in staring at a post or profile for longer than the machine’s trained you to, in the toothsome frustration of trying to figure out what’s a revelation, what’s a dark joke, and what’s just the result of a chemically imbalanced brain and an eternally available keyboard.

it does sometimes feel like the aggregated feed has emergent properties that intentionally add a kind of targeted noise, testing the tension between novel stimulus attention from a degree of incoherence and sustained attention from coherence. that is a boundary in constant flux -- the social internet co-evolves with the brains of the people being shaped by it.

found myself thinking of bo burnham a bit as well, and the intentional inscrutability of the meta layers in the scene where he is making a special and in the special he is reacting to footage of himself reacting to the footage of a scene he shot in the special. but i am probably only really connecting it with him because he's one of the few artists that are both doing interesting things with meta-meta-meme internet culture and also 'mainstream' enough that i have heard of him.
posted by lazaruslong at 1:29 PM on August 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

Reading the second link and how he talks about alt accounts just emphasizes how much the internet has changed to me. I remember having actual class time in school being used to say never put your real name, info etc. etc. on the internet in order to protect yourself. Now, people just straight up use their full first and last name on twitter with a picture of their face.
posted by ockmockbock at 8:16 PM on August 18, 2022 [1 favorite]