Dark Ages: Closing Shift
Make it stand out
Fatalism is very in. A series of systematic setbacks which, today at least, require that I take a nap after answering two emails. I guess we have become so familiar with victim rhetoric that we’re comfortable repurposing it to suit our whims. It’s tempting to think everything is out of our control. I’m all for easy outs… which is to say, life has gotten much, much better after unfollowing the digital sinkholes which insist I care about dumb shit.
No one I’ve met has a healthy relationship with social media, yet we engage as though we have no choice. “I have to stay up-to-date for work,” is the favorite lie. But when you let go of the compulsion to be an authority on culture, you will probably find yourself more informed. Someone will always jump to tell you what’s happening.
A boy at a bar shows his friends the suicide note of a 23 year-old who dived off the 86th floor of the Empire State Building. “Isn’t it poetic?”
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
I used to think it was my job to understand the internet. I worked in media—whatever that means—a field convinced the source of its failure is diminishing readership and not a collapse of the advertisement model. Consequently, reader interest became overemphasized, magazine writers are now effectively marketers, and like the host who asks are we having fun yet, the effect is awkward.
So I quit, realizing I can’t revolutionize any industry (weak knees). Six years on the stuff before finally kicking the Boomer syringe of ambition. These days, my peers and I favor more organic opiates, like booze or sex or taking a walk. It turns out not all knowledge is power.
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A proposed reality TV competition called the “The Activist” got shelved after being criticized online by the very culture it sought to represent; a too-good-to-be-true metaphor for this dark age wherein human rights are best understood by how marketable they are. It almost makes you think, maybe social media is not the best forum through which to tackle the complexities of history’s crimes? That arbitrating identity on a feed might lead us to conflate visibility with progress. Put an 18 year-old Swedish girl with Asperger’s on stage to perform climate outrage. “Blah, blah, blah…”
Someone tells me, “My friend meant to call me a nihilist but she confused the word with narcissist.” I smile. It’s all a meme.
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I stay up late and worry about my generation’s collective soul. I worry that our understanding of art is inextricably linked to commerce and that we’ve developed a digital stockholm syndrome. That these nerd apps have rewired us to think something is only worth doing if you can show it. That we think all the wrong things are cool.
Time will tell if my resignation is the byproduct of something darker, but for now, I’m having so much fun.
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My mother listens to a group of 20-somethings complain about how their jobs are hard. “But if you weren’t challenged, you’d be bored!”
“I’m not so sure. Our generation is less ambitious. I think we’re mankind’s closing shift.”
DARK AGES is a gonzo column about art, commerce and crisis by Jacob Seferian.
Illustrations: Hannah Ross.
