Future generations will not be able to make sense of the way we have all memory-holed 2020. I have like three particular grievances that will never get a proper airing, and one of the most unique ones is about PBS American Portrait. It might be the thing that totally distanced me from public media in the US.
What is PBS American Portrait? It is the most 2011 project you've ever heard of -- and yet it wasn't created 2020.
The basic concept was that PBS would pay a production company to host a website where people would "crowdsource" template-based videos about what it means to be an American in 2020. As if people don't have other, superior platforms to share their perspectives without constraints. Then PBS paid this production company to edit together some of the garbage into some thematic episodes. And also, because this is supposed to be interactive, they half-assed some "national" events and murals.
I put quotes around "national" because most everything was in NYC, naturally.
The thing that really grinds my gears about all of this is that by 2020 we all knew the problems with the Web 2.0 project that this represented:
- all of the standard critiques of reality TV and "authenticity" apply
- all the standard critiques of platforms and epistemic bubbles apply
And lo and behold, PBS paid this production company a gigaton of cash to make a bland, inoffensive, and thesis-driven piece of shit
The whole thing was funded by a big grant from Target, and you can definitely tell because there's a bunch of shit in this project that smells strongly of American non-profit grift. Take this, for example:
https://www.amacad.org/news/pbs-project-partnership-announcement
By the time a big non-profit is paying a "big name" (big in the world of American 21st C. poetry, I guess) to do something aas useless as a "crowdsourced poem," I want you to think about a nature documentary where hundreds of hyenas feed on a single kill. Feeding frenzy
Everybody got a slice of the grift -- painters got thousands to paint Corporate Memphis murals, NGOs got thousands to host community events, educational consultants got thousands to create fake and stupid lesson plan templates -- and because it had all of the clarity and direction of a feeding frenzy, none of it contributed any vision to the ultimate product. What we got was the most bland, cathedral-flavored left-of-center pablum imaginable. "We're stronger together," etc. etc.
"We're stronger together"
"We have more in common than our differences"
"Everyone has a unique and valuable story to tell"
Fucking BULLSHIT. People went fucking NUTS in 2020. The most tempered, polite people I knew were going full-fascist in 2020, and every public space became a showdown between middle-upper class anarchists and the revolutionary vanguard of biopolitics. Service workers were worked to the fucking bone.
THERE WERE RIOTS IN THE STREETS
THERE WAS A GLOBAL PANDEMIC
And so my judgment of this media project is that it's a piece of propaganda for an elite project that launders the appearance of mass participation into a celebration of institutional dominance in the year 2020. I use this term carefully -- it is the most *conservative* piece of art that I think I've ever seen. It promotes and celebrates an outright denial of the radical social eruptions that happened all around it.
As such, this piece makes me think of late Victorian or Edwardian propaganda
In *Empire*, Niall Ferguson features a cute little recipe that was promoted by the BBC for Dominion Day that included ingredients from all of the Crown's dominions. In a world in which people like Gandhi were actively organizing anti-racist politics in EG South Africa and India, this kind of propaganda is outright denial of reality.
But PBS American Portrait is far worse because it lacks the courage to acknowledge its celebration of cultural power and domination. It launders that message!
I just watched Civil War, and while I think that the film overall pulled a switcharoo in its marketing (selling boomer dads on a political thriller), I do think that the film resonates uniquely well with the feeling of societal breakdown in 2020-1:
- it's not full-stack collapse, but only partial-stack
- breakdown is not emancipatory, but instead turns power over to small-town big-dicks
- sites, locations, and clearings are the root of biopower
The film also does an excellent job pointing at the gap between propaganda and reality.
When the President would recite pablum over the radio about "I pledge allegiance to the American flag," I was reminded of the stupid goddamn bullshit I had to listen to about how "we're all in this together."
And the thing that grinds my gears the most about this is that the big interactive project -- which was supposed to be a PORTRAIT of AMERICA -- was being recorded in 2020, and yet all that we got was PABLUM.
I think that future generations would really benefit from understanding what 2020 was like! I think that it's going to be really hard to explain to people in the future how we were thinking and interacting in 2020! And yet all that we get from this product is heavily curated TRIPE.