No, it’s never OK

In response to a recent tumbl I was asked whether is was ever OK not to worry about the “Grim Meathook Future.” The answer, I believe, is no. More importantly though, the question has finally prompted me to get on with this project. The concept of the GMF might not be the best vehicle to explain myself, but it seems to be one that works.

Some might not be familiar with this charming turn of phrase. Its centrality to what I am about to write thus merits a bit of an introduction. A fellow name Joshua Ellis, who is credited with coining the phrase explains it thusly.

I think the problem is that the future, maybe for the first time since WWII, lies on the far side of an event horizon for us, because there are so many futures possible. There’s the wetware future, the hardware future, the transhumanist future, the post-rationalist (aka fundamentalist) future.

And then there’s the future where everything just sort of keeps going on the way it has, with incremental changes, and technology is no longer the deciding factor in things. You don’t need high tech to change the world; you need Semtex and guns that were designed by a Russian soldier fifty-odd years ago.

Meanwhile, most of the people with any genuine opportunity or ability to effect global change are too busy patting each other on the back at conventions and blue-skying goofy social networking tools that are essentially useless to 95% of the world’s population, who live within fifteen feet of everyone they’ve ever known and have no need to track their fuck buddies with GPS systems.

[...]

The upshot of all of this is that the Future gets divided; the cute, insulated future that Joi Ito and Cory Doctorow and you and I inhabit, and the grim meathook future that most of the world is facing, in which they watch their squats and under-developed fields get turned into a giant game of Counterstrike between crazy faith-ridden jihadist motherfuckers and crazy faith-ridden American redneck motherfuckers, each doing their best to turn the entire world into one type of fascist nightmare or another.

Of course, nobody really wants to talk about that future, because it’s depressing and not fun and doesn’t have Fischerspooner doing the soundtrack.

There are two things here that I take as definitive of the GMF:

1. “Everything just sort of keeps going the way it has.” That is to say, there isn’t going to be some radically game-changing discontinuity between our present horizon of expectations and how things will be down the road. This isn’t a particularly radical notion, but it’s an important prophylactic against various forms of millenarian thinking, of which techno-optimism and apocalypticism are the best examples. This is not to say that things aren’t going to change—they most certainly will and that’s the point of all this—but that change will take place in this world, not one we might imagine. The Grim Meathook Future is the future that comes unannounced, the one that is basically already here, if not yet recognized as such.
2. “The future gets divided; the cute, insulated future that…you and I inhabit, and the grim meathook future that most of the world is facing.” This is the more important of the two points. The Grim Meathook Future exists in a certain sort of opposition to a bright, shiny future that is reserved for what is ultimately a very small proportion of the world’s population. The interesting thing here, though, is the supposition that anyone reading the original post “inhabits” the cute future. This is true almost by definition. Writing and thinking about “issues” the way Ellis does—the way I am doing right now—is an indulgence of the Decadent, Detached future against which the Grim Meathook one is defined.

This other future—not the discontinous fanciful one, but the painfully immanent detached and decadent one—is closely related to what I intend by “hypegeist.” Like the GMF, it’s functionally already present, but is sufficiently unfamiliar, sufficiently unscrutinized to remain in something of subjective tense. Hypegeist is the emerging system of social reproduction, relevant to a small but significant minority of the world, that serves the critical function of helping one (everyone whose anyone) avoid confronting the disturbing and potentially frightening future that is descending on everyone else.

The Silicon Valley/BoingBoing version of this that Ellis alludes to is only one aspect of it. I mean to include a whole range of contexts that owe their existence to a closed circuit of self-reference. Information technology (the internet, basically, but also mobile phones, an evolved form of television and perhaps a few other things) plays an enormous role in this, but I don’t want to reduce it all to that, at least not quite yet. What I’m talking about developed along side these technologies and is not only influenced by them but is also an influence on how we use and understand them.

But why Hypegeist? Because of what happened to zeitgesit. The idea of a “spirit of the age” has come into a new sort of vogue that obliterates its meaning at the same time as the concept ascends to a new omnipresence in its total and obfuscating senselessness.

The best example of the transformation undergone by the specific term is probably Google Zeitgeist: “search patterns, trends, and surprises.” Like Digg but with more pretensions towards cultural insight, this “service” (?) alleges to tap into the soul of culture by charting what people are searching for. There are plenty of other examples of the use of the term zeitgeist to mean nothing more that “what’s going on at this website.” Sadly, this metric is becoming accepted by the marketing industry in a way that reinforces its tenuous claims to meaningfulness. Forbes:

If you visited the news site Digg.com on Tuesday afternoon, you likely spotted quirky news stories chosen by the site’s largely 18- to 24-year-old male audience, including “Woman Steals Man’s Genitals” and “Mother Gives Birth Then Flushes Twins Down Toilet.”

But an audience of search marketers examining Digg at a conference the same day saw something else: a goldmine of lucrative Web traffic.

“Social media” sites like Digg, Reddit.com and Newsvine.com let users submit and rank news headlines and other links to sites around the Web. Sites voted to the top of these news aggregators receive tens of thousands of visitors. But the online marketing professionals gathered at New York’s Search Marketing Expo this week were interested in tapping into a different feature of these sites: their growing power to affect Google and Yahoo!’s search results.

[...]

Chris Winfield, president of search marketing firm 10e20, enumerated some subjects that are sure to get approval from Digg’s largely libertarian and adolescent user base. Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, the NBC show Heroes, and the iPhone, for instance, are favorites among Diggers. President Bush, Fox News and the Recording Industry Association of America, on the other hand, are hated topics that companies should avoid.

[...]

Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?” video series–in which a company representative puts a different household item into one of its blenders in every two-minute episode–has gained enormous popularity on sites like Digg. A clip devoted to blending an action figure of Chuck Norris was especially popular, Winfield pointed out. “Blendtec really grasps social media,” he said. “They know that Diggers love Chuck Norris and they love things being destroyed. “

There are two halves to this. First, information extraction (Ron Paul and Heroes: good, President Bush and the RIAA: bad); second, informed strategy (Chuck Norris + destruction = profit). But it’s a most wonderful circle: Ron Paul’s campaign was built on internet hype, even on hype about the internet hype. Heroes was (is?), however unsuccessfully, an attempt to replicate the popularity of Lost in no small part by engaging in similar “viral marketing” tactics. The iPhone’s release was a meticulously calculated effort to build hype around the “secret” product—it was finally revealed to an auditorium full of live bloggers whose sites all crashed because of frantic refreshing for the next breathlessly ungrammatical update. All of these things are significant mainly by virtue of their deliberate strategy to be so. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but the fetish of “buzz” creates an ever more insipid loop.

Yes, there is a lot of buzz about “buzz”, often under the dubious moniker of “social media.” Insisting that this is silly doesn’t make it untrue or mean that it doesn’t have very real consequences. Enthusiasm over Second Life among marketing types led to millions of dollars of basically pointless investments, almost entirely because they “had heard so much about it”. I’ll not take the time just now to map out how extensive or irrational this whole business is, but will get to the matter later.

The phenomenon extends beyond the purview of those paid to promote specific products and services. The term “hype cycle” is discussed by both Gartner and n+1 (Gartner first, though, coining an established technical term, which n+1 either cheerfully ignored or managed to be unaware of—but again, this is for another time). From corporate-catering research firms to “avant garde” literary journals, the theme pervades and doubles back on itself as a result. People can make themselves famous merely by demonstrating their ability to do so:

“[Julia Allison] used this medium and became unstoppable,” says Choire Sicha, former managing editor of Gawker. “She just made it happen in a way that seemed seamless and kind of magical.” [...] Self-promotion is no longer solely the domain of egotists and professional aspirants. Anyone can be a personal branding machine.

That’s from Wired. It’s the cover story (is two of these a trend?). Gawker, of course reports on this one too, further exacerbating the self-generating reality of self-generated selves.

In addition to what passes for “technology” these days and what (relatedly) passes for “culture”, this is a problem for what (relatedly) passes for “politics”:

It was not exactly Walter Cronkite declaring that the Vietnam War would end in stalemate. But the impact was apparent almost immediately, starting with The Drudge Report, the online news billboard that is the home page to many political reporters in Washington and news producers in New York. It had as its lead story a link to a YouTube clip of Mr. Russert’s comments, accompanied by a photograph of a beaming Mr. Obama with his wife, Michelle, and the headline, “The Nominee.”

The thought echoed throughout the world of instant political analysis, steamrolling the Clinton campaign’s attempts to promote the idea that her victory in Indiana was nonetheless an upset in the face of Mr. Obama’s heavy spending and his campaign’s predictions that he would win there, or that she could still come back if delegates in Florida and Michigan are seated.

As if The Times wanted to confirm beyond all doubt the ridiculous extent of the political-news media echo chamber. This is just a particularly outstanding example. The campaigns are consistently covered almost exclusively in terms of their relative failure or success, the viability of their strategic decisions, and what other outlets are saying about them. The MSNBC political blog First Read regularly refers to “the CW”—conventional wisdom—when reporting on the daily “political” “news.” Polls are taken about what voters think other voters think about non-issues.

“Technology“, “culture”, and “politics” have all become their own little universes that seems to function quite happily without much reference to anything really outside themselves—without really running up against events. For the sake organization (and so that I never write a post this long again) I’ll use these three admittedly loose and artificial categories to divide up discussion of this whole Hypegeist business.

For the sake of symmetry, I intend to divide the Grim Meathook Future and related matters into three parts as well. There’s science, economy, and war. For the sake brevity, I’ll save an explanation of those for later. What’s important to note now is that I don’t want to imply an opposition between Made Up Stuff From The Internet That Doesn’t Matter on the one hand, and Important World Events Happening In Real Life on the other. It’s not that all the hypegeisty stuff distracts us from the GMF-y stuff. On the contrary, the two are become ever more intertwined. This entanglement, the cross-pollenation of enthusiasm over networks and the collapsing of borders of both territory and identity, all of it makes things…complicated.

The reason the whole hypegeist business is problematic is that it thrives on these complications and interconnections in a way that can all to easily become self-referential and pointless. The solution is not to be dismissive or derisive of the things I have put in quotation marks. The solution is to always and at all times be concerned about those things that slip too easily from view and how it is that this can happen. That is to say, it is never OK not to worry about the Grim Meathook Future.

When asked that question, I realized that’s mainly what I’d been doing here already. So I finally moved the thing to WordPress and wrote this attempt at a manifesto. This’ll be followed by another, prompted by a different interlocutor.

Tags: Gawker, google, Grim Meathook Future, Marketing