Some thoughts on recent diabolicals

It has filtered down to my attention, as such information is often conveyed nowadays, that the transvestites have finally come for a certain streaming service. Obviously, a minority cannot successfully execute a hostile seizure of any platform without making common cause with certain elements of the reigning establishment. Of course, there is some question as to who is using whom here, and the relationship between "wokeness" and capital may not be as asymmetrical as it first appears. Capital sees opportunity, and as it did at the height of the counter-culture movement, when it appeared that anti-establishment sentiment was broad and deep enough to produce tangible results, it has chosen to co-opt what appears to them to be the zeitgeist of the moment. It is here that they have made a crucial misstep. Appearances, as any good Pyrrhonist understands, are often deceiving. But when the only clear path seems to lead straight off a cliff, why, the answer seems obvious, doesn't it?

Those on the cutting edge of the woke-spectrum are very pleased to be invited into the corridors of power, and it is much harder for me to blame them than to applaud them. They have played the game spectacularly and they have done so on the backs of those who first gave them the armaments needed to breach the gates, and whose ire they and their corporate sycophants have now aroused. The dog is not wagging them; they are wagging the dog. There is much to be learned from their efforts.

But they too have plunged headfirst off the precipice and straight into the vipers nest of cardinal error. It is my contention that a minority cannot for long dominate a majority, though this is not merely a matter of numbers or demography. I would just as soon assert the inverse. As Herodotus reminds us, human affairs are a wheel, and the wheel is always turning. Still, the minority will always have a more difficult time masking their intentions when it is clear that a majority is opposed to their program. And within the context of this sub-cultural conflict, who, exactly, is the majority?

If you're reading this, is it more than likely that you already know. The millennials are all grown up now, too busy trying to live up to their image as the cosmopolitan elite, a creative class, an urban gentry, enlightened, spiritually unshackled, the inheritors and rightful possessors of innovative, technological marvels bequeathed to them by their fathers and role-models (there is no difference). The past twenty years have had a nasty tendency to drag them back down from the heavens (those who have graduated from their more 'undesirable' pastimes or who have managed to conquer their pathologies in the name of cool a la Elon Musk). But where once they were the trailblazers, giving life, form, and money to new and exotic mediums of entertainment (video games and anime), now those who have not yet offed themselves or rendered themselves obsolete have found it necessary to hitch their wagons to ever stranger destinations: furries, trannies, and ponies. Prometheus discovers fire and immolates himself.

All well and good. Subcultures transmogrify with the times. But it is a truism that when old radicals stultify, new radicals take their place. What is born anew is often more virulent, aggressive, determined to smash old boundaries, to go where their predecessors would or could not. Now the new generation has arrived, the boundaries have been (allegedly) smashed. They have crowned themselves 'Z'. They are disciples of acceleration, they fancy themselves "right-wing" in opposition to the "progressives", they have taken the new and exciting tools of social media (inherited from their predecessors), twitch, discord, twitter, and have deployed them in service of their self-conscious performance art - or irony. They lament the loss of pure entertainment, they long for a time when social agendas were not imposed upon them, they see themselves as the aggrieved victims of something vaguely and ironically reflective of "society". Their intelligentsia pretends to read, and what filters down (always filtering) to the masses are absorbed into the vernacular and regurgitated in an eclectic blend of low and high culture: simp, cuck, e-girl, e-boy, coom, zoom, doom, gamer, pleb, patrician. Information flows both ways. These are the new kids on the block. And make no mistake, they are entirely sincere in their irony. Irony is a means to an end, the medium is the message and so on. They have goals beyond mere performance. However different they may feel, hiding on their image boards and discord groups, they know they are among friends.

All participants in an in-group need to feel that they belong and their social signaling is a reflection of that fact. Man is a political (social) animal. Their insulation is not an artifact of exclusivity but rather exclusive. They're attractive, witty, precocious (most won't admit to these things, of course), they deploy words and images that outsiders and naysayers can hardly hope to decipher. They're the new cool kids. But every in-group needs an out-group. Obvious, yes? And even easier to identify who the out-group must be, correct? It is so clearly the target of their efforts, the "establishment", which has misidentified their enemies as representative of themselves. Now, in their epochal error in judgment, they have awoken a sleeping giant.

At least, that's what we are being led to believe. That is certainly the impression that one gets. It's the one I get. But is this right? What was that about appearances again? Something in this story doesn't add up. How did the culture change? How did we get from anime and video games to ponies? Why does every insufferable twitter handle with an anime avatar seem to communicate in ebonics? The new cool kids are supposedly dissidents, but they love hip hop. Hip hop, if we can muster enough brainpower to think back far enough, was once also a dissident subculture, born in the ghetto projects, opposed to the reigning construct of "society", a voice for the voiceless. Now it's the largest and most profitable genre of music in the world, a cultural powerhouse on a global scale the likes of which history has hardly seen. Curious, that.

And where are the voiceless now? Who exactly has been forgotten in this latest manifestation of the culture wars? Those rendered obsolete by the changes in their own subcultures don't tend to find their way back. Not without changing and certainly not without matching the ferocity of those who have displaced them. Where are the basement pioneers, the losers, the geeks, the dorks, those who couldn't get a date if their life depended on it? A big show has been made of today's tendency towards atomization, but the cool still gravitate towards the cool, the in-groups continue to coalesce and build parallel structures. What of the freaks? Their institutions have been demolished. Discord replaced IRC. E-Sports replaced LAN parties. Highly organized, ideologically committed (bolshevized, in essence) cadres of opposing interests have displaced the common man. Here's a little irony for the ironists: both sides want the same thing - power and sex. There's an asymmetry there for you to figure out.

They would do well to remember that pre-2016 political debates are rather different from those post-2016. The fifteen percent bedrock support that backed Donald Trump in June of 2015 did not come from the progressive or conservative of the day. It came from the voiceless. Change tends to follow collapse, and the collapse of civil society in the American heartland is more than reminiscent of the sudden and dramatic shift in the composition of certain subcultures. An entire way of life has changed before the eyes of those who once had something to call their own. They have either grown up, moved on, or transformed into an "influencer" for either side in the battles of the new day. Perhaps it may be that some even remain. We fall prostrate at the altar of technology, at the siren call of streamers, at the ululations of the latest rapper, at the latest tweet from our obscure idols. If you're not with it, you're not "with" "it". No one spares a thought for Jimmy in the basement, alone at the keyboard, a spectator to spectacle. It's the roaring twenties after all. Things are moving quickly. Is he even there?

What does a mass movement of the forgotten look like? What are its goals, its composition, its disposition? An outline will suffice. It is honest, sincere, it is integral in that its membership acts in solidarity, it is apolitical, non-ideological, it draws its membership from the truly aggrieved and alienated, it is limitless in its appetite, it is adaptive, it sees enemies all around it and emulates them, its paranoia serves it well, it crushes those who oppose it on the grounds of some commitment to dogma, its goals are nostalgic, what has been taken must be restored, what has been lost must be regained, it will level all that is present and much of what has come before, contradiction is its strength, rage is its power.

We could hardly have known, at the meridian of the previous decade, that we were in for a paroxysm of populist grievance. Now, at the dawn of a new decade, we grow content in grievances that miss the mark. The zeitgeist may be on the side of the "dissidents", but they are phony in their dissidence and when they have felled their opponents, superficial distinctions and ostensible "goals" aside, they will quickly adopt their mannerisms. Minorities do not rule for long, especially when they believe themselves to be the majority. The wheel turns inexorably.