Daily Archives: October 20, 2020

Of all the newsworthy events in the world that happened over the last few weeks, none was more ignored and underreported on than that fly that landed on Vice President Mike Pences forehead. Did anyone notice that?

In 2016, the internet went wild over Ken Bone at the presidential debate, a man in a red sweater who asked about the candidates energy policies. A plethora of memes, Halloween costumes and parody accounts came from the ether surrounding this man.

When it was discovered that Bone has a strange past on Reddit, he was promptly somewhat justifiably ridiculed, and later swallowed up by whatever internet abscess consumes the memes we outgrow.

This year, its a fly. And given the whole idea that history repeats itself, once we grow tired of memes and tweets on this bug, will we find out the fly is an incel? Is that the last gift 2020 has to offer?

I think its easy to be exhausted by our culture, or more specifically, the lack of it. Memes are supposed to be small units of meaning albeit, easily consumable and repetitive. They are supposed to tell us something funny, painful or true. So why do these fly memes feel so empty?

I dont mean to rain on everybody having fun over the fly. Ill admit it was thrilling for a bug to, at least for a moment, degrade a man who is too powerful and untouchable to be degraded by any of us.

But what is funny, meaningful or true about multiple celebrities tweeting that the fly was Pences only Black friend? What is meaningful about comparing Black people to a fly? What about that joke is funny or telling about our culture at large?

Memes are supposed to be processed and cooked. They should go through some sort of oven for cultural artifacts. What I fear about these memetic explosions from Ken Bone to the fly is that they lead us to not really process the events at hand.

No real thought was taken when Stephen Colbert implied an insect was Pences Black friend. No real thought was taken when George Takei tweeted, In the end, Pence will only say that black flies matter.

What is the function of culture, if not to process history? What is the point of any of this?

Colbert and Takeis remarks were racist and dumb. But they got a lot of retweets. And if you ask anyone on the streets, particularly those who are Gen Z, what the most iconic thing to come out of the vice presidential debate was, their answer would be the fly.

Dont get me wrong, I love our generations ability to find humor in most, if not all, things in our everyday lives. I mean, why wouldnt we? Everyday were told we are going to be the generation to fix all the worlds problems. Were going to be the ones who will have to fix climate change and widespread disparity.

Being alive at this moment in time is gray. Theres not a day that goes by when were not reminded of how messed up our world is. Its no wonder we turn to irony and humor to cheer ourselves up a little.

But our memes and jokes do not have to be meaningless and empty. They can generate meaning as much as they can destroy it.

Read the rest here:
Canceled: What the fly reveals about our culture as a whole - Daily Free Press

Every period has its great men, and if these are lacking, it invents them. Those are the words of philosopher Claude Adrien Helvtius. Or, well, they probably are. The phrase comes from Leon Trotsky, who quoted Helvtius in his memoirs as a way to dis Stalin. Rude! But also true. Inventing one's very own cult of greatness has helped political figures climb to power for as long as there have been politicians. In recent years, as celebrity culture has slowly devoured the political sphere, it has become the defining precondition. People dont just vote for politicians, they stan them. Idolatry accelerated when politicians began to appear on television. Now, the internet allows for participatory, communal, real-time adulation. Both Barack Obama and Donald Trumps presidential victories were accredited, at least partly, to their skill at cultivating avid fandomsin particular, to their skill at ginning up support on the internet and using social media to connect with voters.

During the 2020 primaries, most of the popular Democratic candidates had loud, proud grassroots fan blocs online. Andrew Yang had his #YangGang. Senator Bernie Sanders had his bros, many of whom were women. Senator Kamala Harris had her K-Hive cheering her on. The outlier of these major contenders? Former vice president Joe Biden. Biden has nothing materially consistent with that, says Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher for the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvards Shorenstein Center. Instead, Biden has had what New York Times critic Amanda Hess describes as negative online energy. Id call it NCIS energyas in the popular, long-running CBS procedural. For most of his candidacy, Biden has, like Mark Harmons open-collared shirts, managed to succeed despite generating only minimal organic online buzz and attention from social media tastemakers.

Minimal, though, doesnt mean zero. As the election approaches, many liberal and left-leaning digital organizations and influencers have rallied behind Biden, creating a late-breaking wave of online support. Rafael Rivero, the cofounder of Occupy Democrats, created Ridin With Biden, the most visible pro-Biden meme page on Facebook, which has had some posts reach millions. Actor and writer Michael Imperioli, beloved for playing Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos, recently started using Instagram to post pro-Biden fanfiction about Tony Soprano and the fictional DiMeo crime familys admiration for the Democratic candidate. (Tony got woke in recent years, Imperioli wrote in the comments of one of his posts.) Meanwhile, the Biden campaign is working with an influencer marketing agency to set up digital interviews with celebrities like Keke Palmer, and it is deputizing the Biden grandchildren as surrogates on platforms like Instagram. In one of their more popular appearances, they talked with Kaia Gerber about the Supreme Court.

And Biden does have some organic fan hubs onlinethey even include Gen Z members. I talked to one 16-year-old in Long Island who hangs out in the r/JoeBiden subreddit simply because he ardently supports the former vice presidents candidacy. (Although he did briefly switch allegiances when Pete Buttigieg was in the race.)

Still, even with this push, the memetic activity that Ive seen around Biden is largely negative, Friedberg says. Its easier to pull up an anti-Biden meme page on Facebook, for example, than it is to locate a genuine fan hub. Meanwhile, 4chan is crawling with plots to meme the Democratic candidate into defeat. One involves doctoring images to look like Biden is using the Pedobear as a mascot, an attempt to link Biden to the conspiracy theories about elite Democrats and pedophilia. Its grim.

Part of this is a function of Bidens personal relationship to the internet. He simply isnt as online as his predecessors and competitors, nor is he as internet fluent as the new class of rising political stars like US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is exceptionally gifted at Twitter retorts. He bills himself as a transitional candidate, but with his distant, milquetoast internet presenceits extremely clear that staff control his social mediaBiden is a throwback, less instantaneously accessible and less interested in the internet as a site of connection. The former veep, and his lack of ardent online fandom, are also a direct result of his politics. Bidens stanceshis support of fracking, for instancehave been calibrated to appeal to as wide a berth of voters as possible. Thats a good political strategy, but it has also alienated the robust progressive movement, which trends young and online.

Read more:
Joe Biden Is Very Offlineand Thats OK - WIRED

Jordan Ogihara October 15th, 2020 - 11:29 AM

On October 14th, Showtime announced that Showtimes Miami-set crime dramaDexter will continue by way of a ten-part limited series scheduled to air in 2021, according to a network press release.The shows official Twitter account confirmed the announcement with a brief video and a caption referencing a memetic catchphrase spoken by Sergeant James Doakes, played by Erik King (Oz, National Treasure).

Surprise Motherfucker.Hes back. #Dexter pic.twitter.com/EDXov06rot

Dexter on Showtime (@SHO_Dexter) October 14, 2020

Dexters season eight finale aired back in 2013. The original broadcast was allegedly watched by 2.8 million viewers, a record total for an individual episode of a Showtime original series at the time, as reported by New York Daily News.

The revival has already secured the participation of the showrunner from Dextersfirst four seasons, Clyde Phillips (Feed the Beast, Nurse Jackie), and Michael C. Hall (Six Feet Under, Netflixs Safe), who portrayed the eponymous forensic analyst-cum-serial killer and currently sings in the indie pop trio Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum, as reported by Deadline. Both Phillips and Hall will occupy executive producer roles, per Showtimes official press release.

Dexter is based on a crime novel series by Jeff Lindsay, formerly playwright Jeffry P. Freundlich (The Cave, Just Watch Me). Lindsays eighth and final novel in the series, Dexter is Dead, was published in 2015, two years after the Season 8 finale. Lindsay explained why he had to move on from the character in an interview with Crime Reads: It was a very durable, very comfortable relationship and that was part of the problem. Comfort is the enemy of quality. He told Crime Reads that he felt like he finished Dexters story before he got tired of it: I always promised my readers I would quit if I just started to phone it in. So I quit before that happened.

Showtime has pulled off revivals of shows even less likely to return than Dexter in the past. The L Word: Generation Q, a sequel series to The L Word, one of the networks most groundbreaking programs from the 2000s, was renewed for a second season in January, as reported by Deadline. Furthermore, in 2017, the eighteen-part limited series Twin Peaks: The Return improbably brought viewers back to the uncanny world of the postmodern primetime soap Twin Peaks, which had originally aired on ABC in the early 1990s.

The first eight seasons of Dexter are available to stream through Netflix. They are also accessible via Showtimes own streaming service, available through select television providers and priced at $10.99 a month.

View post:
Dexter Returns With Limited Series Announced at Showtime - mxdwn.com

This spring, the fashion house Balenciaga launched its latest line with a fictional news broadcast from dystopia. Repurposing the uncanny valley as virtual runway, the video features prosthetically altered models with blackened mouths speaking in electronic blurts over a grim techno soundtrack, pantomiming headlines from a world of disappearing water, robot control, and planets realigningall while wearing austerely futuristic new couture apparently designed to aesthetically summon this grim tomorrow into being, as the conceptual chyron crawl scrolls enigmatic koans like In space humans cannot cry, Mushrooms have thousands of genders, and (perhaps grimmest of all) Its always Fashion Week somewhere. While it may not make you want to buy the clothes, it provides another remarkable example of people explaining what it feels like to be alive right now through reference to our darkest science fictions.

You dont need to trawl avant-fashion shows to find itjust check your news feed.

As I write this, a search of The Washington Post reveals three headlines from the past week describing the days events as dystopian. From Tucker Carlsons histrionic fear-mongering about the anarchic mobs of his American Dystopia to the laments of The Guardians post-pandemic cricket writers covering matches without spectators, the d-word is routinely used by journalists across the political gamutusually as grim foreboding, sometimes as gallows humor. NBC News reporter Ben Collins even proclaims that he is working the dystopia beat. When they say it, you know just what they mean. Even as you cant help but wonder whether, in their invocation of Orwellian analogies, our pundits and reporters are doing exactly what Orwell warned againstobfuscating the real truth with imprecise language, and thereby helping to usher the real dystopia into being.

The blurring of the boundary between dystopian fiction and the evening news is not so new. It goes back to at least 2017, when White House talk of alternative facts put Orwells 1984 back atop the bestseller listsdriving sales of that 70-year-old masterpiece up 10,000 percent in the week following the inauguration. Hulus adaptation of Margaret Atwoods The Handmaids Tale and Amazons take on Philip K. Dicks The Man in the High Castle delivered authoritarian alt-Americas whose underground resistance movements seemed equally aimed at the real-life regime. Publishing began a wave of new novels that imagined a Second Civil War, including Omar El Akkads American War and my Tropic of Kansas (followed in 2018 by books like Lilith Saintcrows Afterwar and Claire ODells A Study in Honor, and in 2019 by Craig DiLouies Our War and my Rule of Capture)just as our partisan divisions began to make it seem like such a conflict was about to erupt in real life. The gun lobby launched a series of ads that looked like trailers for those books, narrating fiery news clips with a dark vision of the self-proclaimed Resistance as revolutionary saboteurs seeking to drive their daggers through the heart of our futureso they can build their utopia from the ashes of what they burned down. A vision so extreme it seemed like parody, until a few weeks later when similar scenes erupted on the streets of Charlottesvillecomplete with brownshirts in white polosand real people died in the conflict.

Flash forward to 2020, and the scenes on the news look more dystopian than the darkest new Hollywood futures streaming to our living rooms. The fear factor gets dialed up every day, fueled by genuine concerns about everything from contagion to climate crisis to the coming political reckoning, but amplified by an overclocked media environment that profits from its ability to stoke our anxieties. And those of us who craft even darker futures in our fictions are forced to wonder whether we might be contributing to the problem, cranking out the memetic fuel that lets a clickbait-driven culture turn up the algorithmic volume in a way that summons its own most hysterical fears into being.

I blame science fiction dystopias, jokes cyberpunk progenitor Bruce Sterling in a popular running gag on his Twitter feed. Its funny because it uses the platforms own exclamatory tendencies to riff on the way such narratives distract from the very real problems driving the state of the world. But its also funny because it tells the truth, especially about the way our most dismal narratives can excuse or encourage our failure to take agency over our own futures.

As a writer, its an uncomfortable feeling when the parallels between the evening news and your deliberately provocative worldbuilding make you feel like someone is taking your books and using them as manuals. The similarities are there. Science fiction has a knack for drawing out the immanent now, using a fun-house mirror to show what it really feels like to be alive in the current momentan oblique realism that often passes for prescience when it mostly just magnifies emergent aspects of the observed world. The dystopian lens is a useful tool to shatter exceptionalist myths and amplify whats wrong with the real world, all while telling compelling stories. But when its dramatic devices are imported into the days headlines, it distorts the truth, achieving an effect like those chumbox ads that stroke our darkest fears and creepiest curiosities. In fiction and in real life, overreliance on dystopian framing reflects a failure to imagine futures we would actually want to live in.

One reason the real world feels yoked to our dystopian imagination may be the failure of other science fictional futures to deliver the goods. The techno-utopian Tomorrowland 20th century science fiction promised us this century would bring turned out to be something much darker. Real life never lives up to the movie version our popular culture and politics teach us to expect. The End of History and the birth of the World Wide Web promised us a cyber-utopia of peace, progress and prosperity just around the corner, but the first two decades of the 21st century delivered a very different story, from 9/11 and its dark aftermath to the financial crisis and the resurgence of ethno-nationalism. Now our response to the pandemic has the world looking at the U.S. as a declining nation with some of the characteristics of a failed state. You cant blame science fiction dystopias for all that, any more than you can blame the mirror for how you look in the morning.

Dystopia is the kind of science fiction you can expect when the whole world seems unable to get a handle on what tomorrow will bring, let alone the future. It is a powerful form, with the capacity to draw on the worst of human history to highlight the injustices of the present. At its best, it is a fiction of resistance. Tiny acts of courageous dissidence by horrifically oppressed characters are what enable us to endure stories as grim as The Handmaids Tale and 1984, providing flickers of hope. Writing Tropic of Kansas, I learned I had to dial up the worst injustices of contemporary American life in order to plausibly conjure the positive revolutionary change that was my real goal. Dystopian storytelling has the greatest power when it births a vision of utopian possibility that gives real meaning to the struggle. Fighting the Empire is great, but what comes after the Ewok party?

Science fiction has produced many plausible but compromised utopias, usually by putting them in tension with equally plausible dystopias. Consider masterworks like Ursula K. Le Guins The Dispossessed, Kim Stanley Robinsons Pacific Edge and Green Mars, Joanna Russs The Female Man, and Octavia Butlers Earthseed books. But there are far fewer such books than there are popular dystopias, especially in recent years. Part of that has to do with the narrative challenges of writing stories set in places where conflict is minimal, or where the novelistic preoccupation with self has been replaced by a focus on community as protagonist. But science fiction has unique tools to tackle such challenges, and has already done an amazing job lately of showing its capacity for imagining more inclusive futures. As pandemic compounds political uncertainty and climate angst to further confound our ability to get a bead on the present, SF has an opportunity to provide fresh visions of what could lie on the other side, and help us stop doomscrolling our way through this dystopian Groundhog Day. We might even make the future feel like the Future again.

Christopher Brown is the Campbell and World Fantasy Award-nominated author of Tropic of Kansas and Rule of Capture. His latest novel, Failed State, is now available from Harper Voyager.

See the rest here:
Dystopia as Clickbait: Science Fiction, Doomscrolling, and Reviving the Idea of the Future - tor.com