Chronicle of an abomination

I promise this post won’t be an inane whinge about the evils of social media. That would be terrible and a waste of everyone’s time. The reason for the headline however is that social media keeps giving more and more. More what, you ask? It’s giving more reasons to take the medium with a sceptical cast of the eye because it just jumped the shark.

How could something that’s already completely broken – and I’m talking about the poster boy for degeneracy, the platform formerly known as Twitter – get even worse and, in fact, practically cease to wield any power at all because it’s reached beyond the unforgivable into the heretofore unchartered realms of parody.

It’s truly jumped the shark.

“This must be bad,” I hear you say. And I say to you: “It’s so enormously terrible that there’s no mountain high enough to allow you to get up the slope and see just how enormous the terribleness is.” It’s that bad.

Many moons ago when I was still noodling about in Blogville, dreaming of writing the most awesome film script to accompany my failing to be an influencer, I came up with the idea of a paramedic who, during the day, strains every muscle and mental ligament in an effort so save lives. But at night he’s an online troll, someone who seems to have so little concern for the wellbeing of his fellow man or woman that he drives someone to suicide. The screenplay would elaborate all the details, cross all the “i”s and dot all the “t”s, so that you would get a visceral impression – in the same way that Samuel Richardson three hundred years ago did for the unfortunate Pamela – of the man in question.

Something like evil.

Worse because cloaked during work hours (night shifts included for those who were thinking to trip me up with an interruption) with the mantle of the bringer of succour and the bearer of beneficence.

A veritable demon.

Well, I sat on this idea for years without ever working up the wherewithal in the talent department to make a start on a script. But it was unnecessary because in the meantime life had caught up with my dreams and had delivered a guilty party in the form of a medical doctor and user of X who in his regular downtime writes the most appalling troll-like tweets. A man who works in a hospital. Who no doubt saves lives. But who despite all his virtues is a degenerate troll. A bringer of suffering and mental anguish. A stoker of hatred. An abomination.

And what’s more a man who, when he was brought up on related charges in the court of X wrote two tweets in his own defence and then unceremoniously DELETED THEM!

Who will write the summons to appear before this esteemed court. Who will sit in judgement on this corrupt doctor, a man who uses the most extreme language to achieve his no doubt estimable because progressive goals. Who else but ME!

A challenge for culture warriors is keeping the community engaged

American broadcaster NBC has said it won’t screen the Golden Globes Awards for a while because of underrepresentation of minorities in the voting panel. This comes on the back of revelations that the number of people watching the Oscars had halved in the last year. Just as Netflix had started to capture a quantity of gongs commensurate with its reach, people had started to abandon awards nights, and even traditional allies had turned sour.

This reflects a wider problem with awards of all kinds. I’ve written before elsewhere about how, in literature, there’s a too-small pool of talent choosing who wins prizes. Everyone knows everyone else and no-one’s honest so the same people keep getting accolades. We need to make sure the pool of talent used is as wide as possible, but we should be careful not to be complacent and just award prizes to the products that tick all the right ideological boxes but that are otherwise ordinary.

When Elon Musk came out with his “Aspergers” revelation we saw the community respond mostly with positive comments. Some people were not happy but most people said nice things about the billionaire, and whatever you might think about moneybags like Musk taking credit for being a little different the episode showed us how important identity is for the way that people value cultural products. 

If Musk is anything, he’s part of popular culture. If Andy Warhol were alive the artist would make a screenprint of Musk’s face for use on T-shirts. Responses from RW culture warriors to the NBC story, however, show that a backlash has already started – even before the project has fully worked itself out. Many people are unhappy with the “woke” factory that parts of the industry have become. This path is still unrolling itself along time’s bright axis so it’s too early, now, to give a definitive answer based on evidence, but I predict that the two sides will continue to bicker online until someone sets up a “Just Art” award committee somewhere that has as its overt focus the ignoring of ideology as a criterion for valuing such things as books or movies. 

“The Purelys” might be given each year to TV shows that are good despite the use of a wide range of gender-identifying types from many ethnic backgrounds, but who will be on the panel of judges? A random cohort of Twitter users, chosen on the basis of their visibility on the Netflix hashtag, perhaps. Or else a committee of university academics, following the Nobel’s methodology. Who gets to choose what is “good” and what is merely pedestrian? Do we allocate value on the basis of dollars alone, or do we wait, like patient children, until posterity tells us what is worth caring about?