Something quite distinctive to our own time is manufactured nostalgia, the most basic sense of a ‘canon’ is the ability to organise information chronologically, when canonicity declines one of the first things we see go with it is the ability of the average person to relate to their own time. Hence why self-evidently silly ideas like “stuck culture” gain purchase, why so much of journalism involves bad attempts at periodisation or pretending something is new to our time when it isn’t, or vis-versa. When the Bloomsbury Group tried to locate themselves as a distinct ‘generation’, they did so through reference to events they actually lived through as adults and their own independent cultural output. When people today try to create a ‘zoomer’ identity, they do so through assembling pop culture from when they were teenagers and sometimes even babies to act like these things, produced by other people, are somehow part of their DNA.
This is mainly a re-cap of ideas found in an earlier article I feel will be essential for understanding this piece. Back to the subject of manufactured cultural memories, recently, a female relative declared, during a family conversation about how bloody brilliant Adolescence was, opined that ‘all this social media phones stuff is much worse now than when I was in school.’ Hearing this, for me, was as if she had just announced that Big Brother had achieved a new victory over Eurasia on the Malabar Front. I would expect this from a ‘villa fan’ but from her, I knew, that this was just factually untrue. She was falsifying her own memory because she only knew how to engage with ‘the past’, as a collective event, through media presentations of ‘nostalgia’ and taking a pessimistic line on cultural developments is basic way this is presented in the hivemind.
I know that this doesn’t reflect her real memories because I am older than her and when I was in school everyone had a phone as did everyone younger than me: instagram, BMS, facebook, twitter, imageboards and the DM system on Steam were all ubiquitous forms of communication among both autists and normies. When the school bell rung for morning break, basically 3/4s of the male population of my year would rush to the school computer rooms to play Minecraft and watch The Human Centipede 2. On the bus, the entire journey would be spent playing “addictive games” or watching YouTube videos. I find the wave of historical revisionism so baffling because these were things I noted at the time as being unique to my generation’s experience of school. Very little has changed in the media ecology since 2012. Discord and TikTok are both simply specialised apps for something you could do already in 2012. The salient technological innovation of this decade are, uncontroversially, LLMs.
This was on my mind reading, at the behest of my colleague, James Marriot’s piece on a post-literate society. Some words on Marriott the man may be wanted here from readers, I shall not, as many no doubt dearly wish, be mean to him. Marriot represents what we could call the ‘High Iconic Venues’ tendency of conspicuously millennial commentators who were rushed, overnight, into mainstream comment sections, I believe in direct response to the Britpopper meme rendering all other contributors figures of fun. The purpose of this tendency was obvious in 2023, which was to form a Neoconservative intellectual nucleus for an aborted Jenrickian restoration. The fact that Britain’s reckoning with immigration is not going to be led by canny pragmatists within the establishment, alongside a healthy dosage of banning Porn and building cycle lanes but by Nigel Farage’s Reform party, has rendered this tendency somewhat pointless.
Marriot’s piece is a good example of this sort of amnesia regarding the novelty, or lack thereof, inherent in social or technological trends. Marriot, for example, describes ‘short videos’ as a form of media in themselves, to be distinguished from, I guess, videos; as if every video on YouTube in 2008 was two hours long. Much of this piece is padded by references to Neil Postman, a journalist who plagiarised the work of Marshall McLuhan; in my last piece I described how there’s a type of right-winger who reads Spengler as someone who points out ‘things which are bad’, instead of learning to read history in a Spenglerian way, there’s an almost exact left-wing equivalent who doesn’t read McLuhan to analyse novel trends in their own lives but rather to see how they line up with McLuhan’s analysis of the specific T.V culture of his own time.
It was television which inaugurated the ‘oral’ culture Marriot spends the rest of his article, largely correctly, analysing. Television is passive, centrally-planned and collectivist; everyone watches the same programmes at the same time. A TikTok video is supposedly addictive but you can, at least, choose which videos to watch and make your own videos a notably more cognitively demanding activity than staring at a T.V screen; there is, indeed, a part of TikTok devoted to reading books. Elon Musk’s Twitter is an objectively more ‘literary’ medium compared to, say, Radio 4’s thought of the day; it entails reading and writing and people with literary educations, like Logo_Daedalus, Bronze Age Pervert or Richard Dawkins prosper on the site. LLMs, at least in their current form of chatbot-factotums, are also a ‘literary’ medium; one has to interface with them by written requests, people who are verbally fluent can get more precise answers for their tokens. That LLMs can pastiche certain styles of writing is irrelevant, people with literary inclinations will still see a premium on their skills because they can manipulate the LLM better. Example: manipulating grok to help you win debates on X.
It is too boring to further explain what McLuhan meant by an oral culture and how it was invented by T.V. I shall simply focus on one part of Marriot’s argument which is his claim that the ‘oral’ culture (of “short videos”) favours a more emotional form of debate to the detriment of logical thinking. It is true that books as a medium are responsible for the modern form of rational argumentation but I do not think you can argue the print-based media of the latter 20th century, subordinate to T.V, displayed this to a better extent than Alex Jones or Nick Fuentes. In fact, I think you can confidently say they were more emotional in their rhetoric than most online commentators. To prove this, I shall pick some random examples.
My first example is going to be the following piece from 2001 by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. It is about the recently deceased Auberon Waugh (of whom I have, personally, a dim opinion – so no bias colours this case). The internet had been invented by this point but it is safe to say both Toynbee and Waugh were creatures of a ‘literate’ world, or at least, what Marriot takes that to mean: the world of mass print. From the very title we are told that Waugh was a “ghastly man”, fair enough, invective is a valid form of debate but at no point in the article we go on to read is there even an attempt to pretend Auberon Waugh’s views are actually incorrect, or show how they might be damaging. Waugh is simply “a reactionary fogey”, the fact that the “coterie” “led the spirit of anti-Europeanism” is ipso facto declared to be evil. Thought-terminating cliches like “change” and “modernity” are used to create an empathetic response in the audience to “things Polly Toynbee likes”; it is not even explained, at the polemical or propagandistic level, why the European Union or a regulatory state are uniquely “modern.” Writers Toynbee dislikes are simply “unspeakable.”