If you like the topics discussed in this newsletter, you can buy a copy of my Patchwork Manifesto here.
My investigation draws on ancient teachings to explain why we stand at the edge of radical change.
It’s a challenging read. Consider this tiny manual if you are just starting your journey.
Last week or so, I was driving in rush hour traffic and spotted the now familiar stack of colors: sky blue on top of bold canary yellow.
It was Ukraine’s flag, of course. But the context was riddled with strangeness.
I saw the flag not hanging from the stoop of an urban home, but on the back of a tractor trailer that had been contracted out by a logistics company. I couldn’t make out the text, but in a punkish font that would’ve been right at place on an album by The Clash, I could make out a rally cry, like “Fight” or some such thing.
There’s perhaps nothing more boring and mundane than a tractor trailer for a logistics company. A dullish khaki vehicle, like the color of water when you’re cooking oatmeal. But here, in the middle of a mundane Tuesday, was. . .a hero? Certainly someone who thought themselves to be participating in a wider heroic narrative.
And this is qualitatively different than if I had seen it as a bumper sticker on the back of, say, a civilian’s Nissan Altima. In that case, bumper sticker activism is nothing new at all.
But here, it was like reality—or what passes for reality these days—trying to suggest an inspiring narrative. Posing as if it were a lush flower in the desert of content.
This was no different than if I had wandered into a big box grocery store and, next to the bar of Snickers, seen a large sign suggesting that it was up to me (and my fellow citizens) to fight inflation.
Now, I know what you might be thinking: “But hasn’t America done that in the past? Why is it so different now?” Indeed, during World War II, it was common for President Truman to say “we should” or “we must” do things to improve the wider economy—referring to the American populace and society as a whole.
The difference now is twofold: First, the messaging isn’t omnipresent. It’s tacked to the corner of a tractor trailer, stumbling off into the distant horizon. Second, the reason it isn’t omnipresent is because there is no “we” anymore. The Public Square dissolved in 2020.
We lack a macro context in which to send messages to each other.
And so these little glimpses of “we”—in this case “our” fight for Ukraine—point to a contradiction embedded in the message.
Precisely because there is no “we” in the grand societal sense anymore, there is more insistence on its existence than ever. That’s the entire reason for the existence of that truck’s flag. It’s not about Ukraine. It’s not even about geo-political war. It’s about raging against an unprecedented loss of macro meaning.
The current globalized world was built to facilitate the sharing of a grand context, but this globalized world can no longer do the thing it was intended to do.
A ship stuck in the sands, in the desert of content.
So now imagine a man running towards the horizon, carrying a flag, some tatter of meaning, blind with fury and inspiration, not realizing that there is no army behind him to fight whatever grand war he champions.
This is the tribal man of the 2020s. This is. . .the Nowhere Man.
Wandering the desert of content, armed with some utterance that he hopes will restore what is now permanently lost. A denier of death, but for sure all the more charismatic, dangerously persuasive and cultish due to that denial!
In recent newsletters, there’s been discussion of hashtag revolutions and doublethink and the word salad that has consumed our public dialogue.
Moving deeper into December, it will become apparent that the grand “thing” behind most proclamations doesn’t exist, except as a ghostly trace or a great assumption or a projected hope.
This will usher in the dramatic events of late January and February, when it will dawn on the masses that fractionation is here to stay—gone is the Big Tent paradigm where “we’re all in it together.”
Freedom to do your own thing will rush in as a result. But most of the readers here are early adopters of such freedom.
In the meantime, keep your eyes out for the Nowhere Man phenomenon—those who are full of fury and inspiration, pointing to some horizon, but really in effect undergoing a grieving of their belief systems.
This biggest loss for Nowhere Man is the loss of his primary axiom: “All things which occur to me must necessarily occur to others, in equal synchronicity and simultaneity.”
Destabilization of simultaneity is here, and that’s like kryptonite to our dear tractor trailer driver. Whereas in the past the mere presence of Truman’s voice would’ve been enough to rouse national spirits coast to coast, today the modern brain scrambles multiple codes at once, until sky blue on top of bold canary yellow dissolves away from its hard shell of militant inspiration, eventually bleeding and becoming indistinguishable from the avatar of a half-naked Instagram influencer or the jingle playing across satellite radio in the aisles of a grocery store.
The strings which hold together concrete action in the world. . .these are fraying.
The partitions which separated one’s private curated life and the Public Square are disappearing. Consciousness is fracturing as a result. No one believes in anything anymore, except their own experience in the desert of content.
But this uncanny state of affairs opens up optimistic avenues for true adventure, where you don’t have to fool yourself that you’re participating in some grand narrative (which really doesn’t have your back at the end of the day, anyways). That tractor trailer driver might as well have placed Ronald McDonald on his truck, rallying for cheaper hamburgers.
Because that’s what matters to Nowhere Man: the chance to elevate a piece of the desert to some transcendental status, and therefore hope to regain the religious experience once imparted to us all by Big Tent society.
He is a man pining for the scent of a rose when nothing surrounds him but a receding line of sand dunes.
At one time, watching Seinfeld for people was like church. You could speak about it with any stranger. Connect, unify. Now that version of society is gone, even though people try to project it into reality.
So let’s dive in.
Religious Revival
After the encounter with the tractor trailer, I went on a walk in my neighborhood later that week.
The neighborhood is what you might call “historic”—lots of old, interesting architecture. It’s not uncommon to see Ukraine’s flag hanging from any number of homes, along with other trendy hyper-liberal banners for Black Lives Matter and such.
But there are pockets where the old is just allowed to be. . .old. I passed a house that had this sculpture on wheels, quietly nestled in the front yard. A moveable symbol of a different sort, compared to the tractor trailer from earlier.
It’s of course a reference to the Christian apocalyptic prediction that “the lion will lay down with the lamb” during end times, revealing the unity of opposites, predator and prey. (Yes, there is debate that the real verse is “wolf and lamb” and there’s a big rabbit hole about that. Another time.)
At any rate, if I had to guess the age of this sculpture, I’d say it’s probably from the time when America emerged from World War II or thereabouts. Likewise, I’d guess that the owner didn’t buy this secondhand at an antique store, but probably is the original owner or at least had it passed down from an older family member.
Yet, when I reflect on what passes for “trad” today on social media, especially Twitter, I can’t help but imagining how Neo-Trads would react to a piece of conservative sculpture in an liberal neighborhood:
“We’ve gotten away from the core values of our society. Just like we need to be learning how to homeschool, we need to be adorning our homes with proper art.”
If the post got enough traffic, the others would begin to adopt the imagery, this time to appeal to their audience’s sense of disenfranchisement. “At one time society was like a lamb, and we had real men and women step up to be the lions to protect it.”
As the message grasps at finding a macro context that everyone can nod in synch to, the iconography is gradually stripped away from its original context, zooming around in a desert of content, just as the adopter tries to evangelize to us that the original context is here, in living color, in the presence of some fragment.
Fragment fetishization is now how culture forms online in the absence of a Public Square. The disciples of San Pellegrino sparkling water will preserve the food heritage of Western Civilization. The anti-polyester crowd will combat plummeting fertility rates. Etc. etc.
Fragments cannot project full contexts. They originally helped build out those contexts, as pieces and codes. It was difficult to isolate them outside of that context, as if piece and context were inseparable. Even the memorization of Bible verses and the concretization of them in sculptures (such as above) took the entire context with them.
Which is to say, the society that produced the sculpture above is not the society today that would revere and fetishize such a sculpture. The mere act of excess elevation, especially online, is actually a process of de-sanctification while believing that an act of sanctity is occurring.
A deceptive religious revival.
In other words:
Lifestyle =/= Values
The society which produced the sculpture was a society of values, which is why many of us tend to revere both that society and the sculpture.
Today, there is a society of lifestyles. Anybody, like the Nowhere Man truck driver above, can wave fragmented fetishized images in the desert of content.
This has led to destabilizing revelations in small corners of Twitter, like the fact that Carnivore Aurelius—supposedly a super masculine account promoting masculine values like exploration and, uh, red meat consumption—is actually a woman who simply grew a following by posting lifestyle images.
Deception is not sacred, and neither is the elevation of fragmentary images, which is precisely why much of today’s media relies on pedestalization of fragments—because it’s inherently a game of deception.
Values are security. But they are hard to create and hammer out. You can’t mime or role play the society that produced this sculpture. You have to create it and sustain it, not merely produce artifacts or bake homemade bread.
The artifacts are a byproduct of something bigger, and in the absence of that Big Tent society, we’ve replaced values with lifestyles.
And for that reason, many are going nowhere fast, following a dusty truck into a horizon, ready to fight, and only finding more desert on their crusade.
Who among the modern “leaders” and influencers is truly fulfilled by the Holy Ghost of their message?
Let’s keep going.
Microwaved Hot Takes
Sticking with the Biblical and religious theme, many of you will no doubt remember the story of the golden calf—an idol worshipped as Moses ascended a mountain to receive the Ten Commandments.
His people were worried that he wouldn’t return, and they needed a god to worship in his absence.
Today, though, the situation is much more diffuse, fragmentary and wildly unpredictable than a small group of people in the desert near Mount Sinai.
Now, the desert is the entire globe, as the populace seeks to grapple with the mess of codes that bleed from mediated spaces like the internet, into daily life.
At one time, everything was neatly trafficked, even as technology began to spread rapidly. Big Tent sitcoms threatened to spill over into daily social codes, but it was always assumed, perhaps at the last minute, that that was “screen culture” and this was “real life.”
Transmogrification occurs now as TikTok memes burst into reality, altering consciousness and matter, which then relays and feedbacks into online culture again, reshaping the memeplex. Ad infinitum.
What happens is you not only have more truck drivers putting the Ukraine flag on their truck, but microwaved content where the American flag is literally stitched with Ukraine’s.
But as recent newsletters have discussed, this is a kind of false choice designed to distract people from the truly new patchwork adventures they can send themselves on.
Instead, it creates predictable binary responses in the comments: “The freedom and democracy flag!” “No, the democrat flag.”
In the end of 2023, it’ll be a time of swirling messages that urge us to fashion a new understanding of logic and sense.
Many of us will be left wondering why we’re being pushed to join a bandwagon that has a driver asleep at the wheel.
Time to go somewhere, but on your own time.
If you like the topics discussed in this newsletter, you can buy a copy of my Patchwork Manifesto here.
My investigation draws on ancient teachings to explain why we stand at the edge of radical change.
It’s a challenging read. Consider this tiny manual if you are just starting your journey.
Keep going....but it’s difficult...discouraging...where is hope?
Interesting and a bit of a bleak read. I've felt this same fragmentation -- it feels like we've deconstructed the infrastructure that both constricted yet made shared moments of "greatness" possible.
Drawing a line to trauma and the individual, this could be used as a tool to work through specific pieces separately, heal them, and then come together/join once more.
What do you feel the forecast is for unity? I have this image of art being able to stitch together the most difficult tapestries. Are the borders between polarities capable of healing? Can we learn to acknowledge the different and multifaceted needs we all have and build a language capable of interfacing between them?
Just questions/riffing, curious to hear more of your thoughts!