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.
Recently I was watching a movie from 1999 called “Jawbreaker.” Well, not really watching for the plot, per se—a bit of a dark comedy spin on teen drama, when a group of girls accidentally kill the most popular girl in school. What captivated my attention was the use of bright colors, creative hairstyles and even facial expressions that seem to have been nuked from the cultural landscape—at least on a dominant, day to day level.
Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been wading back into X, formerly known as Twitter, inspired by feelings such as this. Call it a mix of respect for past artistic accomplishments plus a hope for what could come next.
In the course of doing this, I’ve been taking a hammer to what, in my opinion, is an overcrowded arena. It’s like people who’ve remained at the fringes of Twitter are nonetheless bottlenecked at the exit doors of society, along with all the “normies” they like to dunk on.
So many people are looking for a way out, some way to feel inspired again, and it leads to a noisy uproar, with people drawing arbitrary lines in the sand, curious about the new world out there but wanting to stand rooted at the exit doors. If one stubbornly stays there, they can at least hold onto old forms of authority, where the “unclean” ones are not permitted into the tribe—or the micro-tribe, even.
Here’s my response to someone who really tried to separate “right wing” into solar and lunar micro tribes, pitting hippie fashion against retrospective nostalgic military fetishes:
This was preceded by another knuckle-headed take on equating “right wing” with “aesthetics”:
Neither of these tweets netted much engagement. In fact, I lost about a handful of followers after posting each.
No pushback, no attempt to argue or discuss the truth…just, poof, gone. You have to ask why, especially when most of the viral tweets in this corner of Twitter deal with controversial topics like race and sex.
What is so off-putting to people about saying “politics =/= aesthetics” and showing why.
The reason is because is goes to the very heart of people’s identity now, and how, in the absence of a shared culture, they are desperately reaching for meaning, and grabbing whatever crumbs they can within micro-tribal modes of socializing.
It’s kind of like the crackhead who ends up smoking mostly lint after he’s scoured the carpet for another piece of crack rock, getting high on the placebo effect. This is why so many people online are obsessed with mindset, claiming that belief shapes reality, with silly faux-ironic in-group sayings like, “Diet Coke is an anabolic pre-workout.”
This desperate crackhead logic holds strong in an era when so many other people around them are flailing in the absence of order. So anyone who shows a modicum of cultish charisma immediately gets traction for their most schizo social media posts.
The problem is exacerbated when you step back to realize that “fringe Twitter” isn’t really fringe anymore. The “manosphere”—a kind of breakaway movement in response to the hyper-feminism of the 2000s—has pretty much leaked into all versions of conservative discourse online, even if referenced in humor. Trad conservatives will reference the “green lines” of Rivelino, a poster who imposes those lines on photos of couples to show if the man is dominant in the relationship or not.
In other words, if one is operating at a low resolution of consciousness, it seems as if “right wing” is one monolithic “thing.” Everybody seems to be moderately aware of the same memes, lingo and concepts, even though they may consider them differently. There’s a very broad sense, too, that familiarity with these threads is due to the fact that everybody generally dislikes all that is opposite of post-manosphere fringe Twitter—leftist, woke rhetoric.
But that’s really the issue. When you actually talk to people, or peel back the layers of social media posts, you realize there really isn’t much in common between conservatives or rightists—and that it’s all too easy for leftists to pose in “conservative” fashion, like the breastfeeding homesteading momfluencers on TikTok.
The issue is that lifestyle and image cannot mean anything politically in the present era, because they’ve all been untethered from lineage. Ok, so a woman breastfeeds and bakes her on bread and a random right wing poster is STILL surprised that her philosophy might be left leaning?
How can anyone be surprised by that?
The way they end up surprised is because they believe the world is still segmented into counter-culture versus mainstream, like in the 90s or early 2000s, when “Jawbreaker” was set. That movie played with so many tropes: the dumb jock, the homely nerd, the hot bimbo, the sexy but artsy girl who was popular yet too empathetic to let bullying continue. It was in this context that aesthetics expressed a deeper, shared consensus, however arbitrary and fragile.
The internet has exploded all of that—and so did the lockdowns of 2020, which have sent ripple effects through the early 2020s.
We’ve never been here before, and that’s terrifying to people. Instead of walking towards a creative renaissance where they could have some of the order of the 90s or the 2000s or even earlier—without the arbitrary trappings of those periods—they attempt to act as if cultish, micro-tribal ways of organization are valid, stable and unquestionable, when they are in fact perma-fluid.
So let’s dive in and explore.
Different Ideas of Beauty
Art is the experience of tapping into a cosmic sea of meaning. Aesthetics, on the other hand, are tools.
These tools translate the artful experience for others, helping them share the feeling. Both the modern right and left fail at using aesthetics because they gatekeep "correct" ways of experiencing art.
We've all heard that modern leftist art is degenerate or woke or subjectivist ("the correct truth is your truth"). Meanwhile, modern rightist art tends to be boring, pedantic or obsessed with a marble past ("the right way is the classical way").
Together, these two approaches to beauty are locked in a simulated war of order versus chaos.
Already you’re seeing this in the Biden ads, where conservatives are shown organizing in fascist mobs. It’s only a matter of time before leftists are portrayed creating hyper-inflated urban wastelands.
Each camp uses art to push a version of correctness, leaving our culture uninspiring, ugly, black and white, lacking color. It shows up in entertainment, too: the woke left gives us microwaved remakes of old popular blockbusters, while the right beats us over the head with “returns to tradition” and rule-bound ways of living.
It’s hard to sell things in such an environment, which is why, I believe, business is getting squeezed at both ends. People are on the one hand bored, and on the other hand fearful. This disrupts demand from consumers, because they see no benefit of being out and about in public on a consistent basis—people are suspicious of each other, and in the back of their head, they’re rattled by the lack of shared values and consensus. Service, too, can be wonky, as I described in the previous newsletters: many workers aren’t inspired by what they have to deliver on their end.
Beauty suffers, all around, and it’s not just because artificial intelligence is usurping the role of the creative.
There is a gaping hole in our society and, instead of rebuilding, plenty are content to kick around at the edges, hoping to denominate new forms of currency—even if it’s only accepted by an equally strange, equally small group, like say the crunchy, all-natural Ray Peat fanatics who might entertain a sales pitch for synthetic methylene blue.
Let’s keep going.
Here’s A Cult, There’s A Cult
People might’ve initially chafed at my insistent use of the word cult, and perhaps even still, but this week I noticed several uses of it.
The word has seeped into people’s vocabulary, because it’s precisely what they see: a kind of tightening around some holy concept that will redeem the loss of bright technicolor culture.
Sometimes the word is used with faux-irony in a way that masks an urgent need to form little organizations that can give spiritual comfort. Such as:
At other times, it’s used seriously, by those who are disturbed when they began to look at the landscape with new eyes, as with this poster, who realized his associations were discouraging him from questioning dogma:
In the end, one of the most taboo things someone can do right now is suggest other ways of being outside these cultish trappings—because it speaks to the fear many have at moving on into new territory, where we’ve never been, and where the authority of rigid identitarians is hardly guaranteed.
I’ve heard a lot of people say “the internet is stale” lately. For awhile, it was a refuge, because offline life had become so stale and fearful, post-lockdown.
Now, though, pressure increases, and one’s experience of bigger platforms like Twitter becomes more fragmented as ideologues insist on stable, commonly shared definitions of big concepts like right wing, liberalism, beauty, art and aesthetics.
The house of cards is crashing down on this push to revolutionize the world with edgy takes, but the half-hearted subcultural wannabes hope you won’t utter a word about the new, fluid opportunities you have to paint the world with color again—no permission from your local cult needed.
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.
Stumbled here, as one does, through Substack-magic. I thought I was the only one remembering Jawbreaker! I mentioned it a few hours ago to a group of disgruntled friends (they didn't like Mean Girls, and I kindly reminded them everything is underwhelming after Jawbreaker). I never thought 'Live Laugh Love' to be right winged, but I can see how some people may decide to connect the aesthetics and the message.