The Zodiac Club #5: On Masks, Social Media, Personas and Essence
A reminder... the world is but a stage and we are all but players in it.
Hauntology Now! is the Substack of interdisciplinary artist, designer, musician, academic writer, and cultural critic J. Simpson, where he writes about all things hauntological, atemporal, philosophical, as well as sharing thoughts, reflections, and musings on music, movies, books, and life.
As an Xennial, someone born on the cusp between Gen X and Millennials, i have a funny relationship to social media. As someone of a nerdish disposition with very obscure tastes, i've used virtually every social media network rather heavily, barring Friendster. As a sometimes digital marketer, i even sometimes use social media professionally. By all metrics, i'm more online than most people.
I've been online pretty heavily since at least the early 2000s, with the advent of high-speed internet and the digitization of a good chunk of humanity's art and culture. I've watched the evolution of attitudes towards social media and how it's used evolve in real-time. These shifting attitudes reveal some interesting thoughts and insights on our attitudes towards corporations, commercialism, and consumerism.
Like virtually every good Gen Xer, i grew up being skeptical and antagonistic towards corporations. As a young budding intellectual in the early 2000s, Naomi Klein's No Logo was my bible. I'd been increasingly down on corporations since Starbucks put my favorite Chicago coffee shop, Scenes, out of business. At first, i thought it was solely due to people's laziness and the brand recognition of putting that fish goddess on the corner of Clark & Belmont. When i read No Logo, i learned the true story, which is much more nefarious. Starbucks negotiated with Scenes' landlord to not renew their lease. When i saw this referenced in No Logo, directly and by name, i was ready to start hurling molotovs.
As someone who grew up in a suburb that still had somewhat of a small town feel in the 80s and early 90s, i also witnesses the increasing strip mall-ification of small town America, as our quaint main street was slowly devoured by Big Box big business. To put it mildly, i wasn't crazy about corporations. I'm still not.
Like many punk/alt/indie Xennials, the slide from the internet going from underground to mainstream and ubiquitous has been disorienting and had its fair share of growing pains. As someone who started their writing career in the late 2000s/early 2010s, confusion, misinformation, and just plain weirdness was the order of the day. The internet of that time seemed a combination of trying to digitize all culture ever and a continuation of The Blair Witch Project's postmodern marketing. It was a complicated time, as it encapsulated the genuine passion of wanting to share good and interesting art with its simultaneous devaluing. It encouraged and rewarded well-done artifice and forgery, with the rise of media pretending to be from another era (which speaks to this larger project), helping to pave the way for the dystopia we're currently inhabiting, with its deepfakes and QAnon conspiracy theories. In many ways, it's hard not to feel that the internet should have never escaped the underground.
Social media has been the main front where these battles have been waged, making it the easiest way to track these changes. The evolution from social networks to personal brands is fascinating, although incredibly worrisome. At a certain point, maybe 2014? 2015?, people began to act more like corporations on their social media feeds. Rather than being a document of their personal lives, social media accounts began to look more like statements of company values. Is this the world we're building, where corporations get to be people while everyday humans become companies?
What a grim thought.
Meanwhile, our online interactions began to take on a more corporate feel. Old social media posts were unearthed as evidence of wrong-doing, wrong-thinking. Someone's sarcastic teen or early 20-something posts were discovered and broadcast as evidence they were a very Bad Person and should not be supported. Online bandwagoning began to take on the flavor of corporate boycotts. This was certainly not the right environment for spreading confusion and misinformation, whatever your motivation may be. Even ambiguity may be interpreted as complicity, in a world where everyone's expected to have a stance on the latest struggle. Even posting about the media you enjoy can be fraught, when every atom of the personal is parsed for its politics. Thinking about posting that Smiths song you loved when you were a teen? Best think long and hard on that, lest you also be associated with Morrissey's dogshit politics.
This suggests a world without growth, a world without forgiveness. It also suggests we are what we consume, which does have some validity, and that words and signs and symbols take precedent over absolutely everything (which is where this project begins to dovetail into my other main project at the moment, Postpostmodernism.)
From my understanding and interpretation, reinforced by the fact that i'm Gemini rising with Sun conjunct Mercury at Midheaven, Gemini understands that the people that we present to the world are not who we really are, that it's merely a mask over the ineffable mystery of our Essence.
Now, don't get me wrong. None of this is an attempt to excuse edgelord behavior, lack of media literacy or accountability. Sometimes supporting a work of art when you know its creator is a shit human being does make you complicit. It calls your empathy into question, at the very least. It's also not an invitation to resume posting misinformation on the internet. Some things are of a particular moment and cannot be reclaimed. (i'm still a lover of a good forgery, personally, though.) But this newsletter is meant as a space for messy, open-ended questions and conversations, like we used to have on the internet before Warner Bros. bought everything. Call it a provocation, a Call-to-Action in digital marketing speak. I think of all of my online activity as a kind of spell, if i were to be honest; acts of will, hurtling into the void. They are not my Essence, which is impossible to transmit and certainly not with language. With that in mind, you're free to explore, to play, remembering that all the world's a stage and that we are but players on it.
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