Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

oooo
shakalakalaka
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I don't know what happens in the long run, but I know that LegacySite.com is still losing money for its Nth owner and even Pitchfork is dead these days. It's getting harder and harder for these overproduced elites to leverage the MFA into a byline someplace. Hateclicks still sell ads, but not so many. TikTok doesn't really honor credentials.

The sun is low and it's getting cold.

So for practical purposes, this is what you see:
(combining the 1st and 2nd bullet) LegacySite.com publishes steady drumbeat of headlines promoting wildly unpopular politics, like reparations or degrowth, driving popular political conversation from discussions of the plausible to the fantastical
- (combining 2 and 3) a concept like "degrowth" is genuinely not appreciated by these the freelancers for LegacySite.com, whose personal catastophe has consisted in failure to launch to the middle class

Some aspects of this dynamic to highlight:
- the overproduced elites are the ones who are still trying to keep the culture war bubbling because they have sold their MFAs as a way to get clicks on LegacySite.com
- for these people, the worst-case economic catastrophe has already happened, and so they no longer have any fear of radical redistribution being imposed on the rest of the world, and might even see themselves as the beneficiaries
- they genuinely do not think in terms of labor or output

I think that the "elite overproduction" narrative basically conforms to reality, I think that a lot of credential-elites are downwardly mobile, I think that a lot of them have turned to a kind of politico-cultural resentment to ameliorate their weakness to the narratives that they learned during their erstwhile ascendancy, I don't necessarily think that they've been defeated by a meritocracy, and I don't think that that reactionaries get to count this as a "win" for their worldview either.

Above all, fight the kulturkampf because it is your way to participate in a vast decentralized ARG with graphics and characters that are way more stimulating than anything else that could come from your idleness. And you are so idle. There are so many days that you've let slip into the grave and nobody even noticed. But at least in the kulturkampf you are needed on the front lines! If you miss even one hour you will have let your enemies rise in your absence! You must stay logged on to win!

Fight the kulturkampf because you are so very bored and because you may not matter very much in the big scheme of things. Fight the kulturkampf because your peers did a little bit better in their fleeting chances to climb the meritocracy. Fight the kulturkampf because you believe in nothing, because the most you can believe in is a belief-in-belief, and because in this whirling void of genuine compelling virtue you will substitute your own consumer preferences for one brand of 20th C. nostalgia.

And nobody was very happy with this because it kind of meant that History Ended and All I Got was this Participation Trophy.
So the suplus elites, the over-educated downwardly-mobile failsons and faildaughters, summoned up a hundred thousand Tumblr conversations about the unfairness of the world (from a puerile perspective) and latter-day GamerGaters took the opposing side. Now we have dumb goo goo ga ga shit as the kulturkampf -- except nobody's even really trying to win. The struggle is all.

Say what you will about GWOT culture, but there was a definite aesthetic stack:
- muted color palette, blue-orange filters, shaky-cam midwit culture
- (post-90s post-Baudrillard) pop-as-surreality porn, complete iconoclasm of "reality" in popular mass media, neon casino pornified pop culture
- emplotments of suspicion and constructed truth in high culture (see McKewon's Atonement)

It's bonkers how much everyone's just larping late 20th century culture because we reached a point of absolute disgust with the GWOT-era culture of the early 21st century.

Ja, wer auch nur eine Seele
Sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund!
Und wer’s nie gekonnt, der stehle
Weinend sich aus diesem Bund!

Freude trinken alle Wesen
An den Brüsten der Natur;
Alle Guten, alle Bösen
Folgen ihrer Rosenspur.
Küsse gab sie uns und Reben,
Einen Freund, geprüft im Tod;
Wollust ward dem Wurm gegeben
und der Cherub steht vor Gott.

The reference at the heart of all of this is impossibly obscure. It's impression on your will is crooked and self-mocking. But in all of it there is enough looseness, enough play between the elements that there is the possibility that it is all redeemed by this experience of beauty. You cannot say that this beauty is what the roaches felt, or even what your human neighbors feel, and you cannot say how the cereal makes it possible. But the possibility is undeniable, and it stirs in you a theme:

The more you find yourself contemplating the aesthetic the more it becomes a source of profound inner clarity, deeper even that what you can even articulate in private words.

Beauty. Beauty itself. Beauty in its endless resplendent array of senses. Beauty from the senses but beyond the senses. Beauty that seems somehow beyond the whole world, even though it's only glimpsed in such things as the groin of a tree or an unexceptional historical tea set. Here too beauty is rescuing the world.

The doubts that you hold about pheromones also rupture into your mind at terrible times. Your boss tells you to "follow your nose" in an important meeting and you can't recover after that. Or more accurately you insist on trying to recover but do it in a method that is so pained and self-aware that the episode becomes a major entry in your collection of memories that inspire self-loathing.

And yet even in the midst of all of this there is one aspect that hovers over everything else, like dawn.

You can't give up, or at least you find yourself doubting whether little choices betray you.
One day you hesitate before pouring boiling water on some ants. You cannot convince yourself that you know why you do this: hesitate, then torture. You do not know what this means, but you feel strongly that if you had forgotten about the Christmas Ghost as well as you thought you would have, you would have been certain in either killing the bugs or sparing them.

But the roaches died when the archipelago was contacted by European missionaries. This at least opens up to research, and you get several solid theories about what specifically killed the roaches and how their sense of pheromones might have been physiologically felt, at least.
So now you've got the aesthetics of the pheromones, the way that a qualitative dimension might have felt to a distantly extinct animal population, and you feel like the whole thing turns absurd again.
You try to give up.

You tell yourself that it was a hallucination but the visit is dimly, distantly, but unmistakably captured through the window by a neighbor's doorbell cam.
You don't remember the breakfast cereal, and it has no Wikipedia page, but then you spend so much time trying to remember it that you can no longer say with certainly whether you partially remember it or whether you've fooled yourself.
And then there's the roaches. Wikipedia says that they once inhabited a certain Pacific archipelago.

The Ghost of Christmas Gray-Orange morality appears in the corner of your room with a version of you that is visibly confused. It explains that this is what your life would look like if in terms of specific pheromonal aesthetics, appreciable only to small subspecies of roaches, if your mom had let you have a certain breakfast cereal during your youth. The pair disappear into thin air.

I use every opportunity to say "fingerspitzengefuhl."