The holy war of our era is the war against bullshit: bullshit in the Frankfurter sense, the kind that isn't primarily false so much as it serves to gum up our radars altogether, overwhelming us to the point that we're too exhausted to search for truth, or too despairing to believe in it.
Political lies. Corporate lies. This is nothing new.
What's newish is the emergence of content: that unit of media which exists solely to be consumed, and has no purpose other than to be something that you can take in. On some level, this succeeds an earlier trend—the pairing of media with avarice stretches back in human history, and the twentieth century in particular was defined by yellow journalism and "24-hour news." But the Information Age, in which everything became available, quickly became overwhelmed with misinformation, and with sources of information. The word "information" is itself utopian and misleading: we're really living in the age of stuff.
In many ways, this is a golden age buried deep beneath a dystopia. There's a chance that more good things exist than ever—but who could tell, beneath the layers of caked shit? Leave aside the machine-generated bullshit, the waves of web sites and emails and YouTube videos that algorithmically emulate "real things," and you're still confronted with entire industries that crank out useless, useless garbage.
In the commentary for the film Mister America*, Gregg Turkington marvels at the phenomenon of old VHS tapes for movies nobody cares about anymore. Entire studios and hundreds of people devoted themselves for months to produce hours of footage that, nowadays, we care so little about that we sell them for quarters. Elsewhere, he's talked about how many of these VHS-era films were so unloved that we haven't bothered converting them into digital formats; the only evidence of their existence is now these clunky relics of a bygone time. Endless mystery and wonder, apart from the fact that, well, the majority of these movies are hacky junk.
Nowadays, we get both the hacky junk and the hackier clingers-on. Our dominant medium is the franchise: TV shows and games predominate because they're the two mediums which most envelop us, movies are shifting to favor endless conglomerate series, and the most popular form of literature is the YA novel, in part because YA lends itself to sequel after sequel after sequel. But there are also the parasitic mediums: Twitch streams of games, episode-by-episode TV recaps, "thought pieces" in publications that are equally willing to cover the Republican party or Taylor Swift,** the endless stream of a million different podcasts.
(Then, of course, there's social media, which encourages us to dump ourselves into the sewer, encouraging our most solipsistic tendencies and convincing us that our opinions on every subject are important. "Sincerity is bullshit," concludes Frankfurter's On Bullshit; no one phrase better describes the trap of social media, and why it's so tricky to convince yourself to stop posting.)
The mediums themselves are not to fault, but they are enablers. Enablers, specifically, of "content", and of the idea that making things is valuable for the sake of making things. They encourage narcissism of every stripe—some people seek money, others seek influence or fame, some crave respect and authority, and still others hunt merely for validation and self-worth. They encourage, in other words, people motivated by literally anything other than substance. And I am convinced that substance, that surprisingly tricky and nuanced thing, is the only thing that can pull us out of this whirlpool of filth.
In his stand-up special Content Provider, Stewart Lee literally wades through an ocean of his competitors' cheap DVDs—no set decoration, he claims, is cheaper than this. His set boils down to a simple statement: we stop seeing the world when we grow too preoccupied with ourselves. Adam Curtis makes a similar argument in his new documentary Can't Get You Out Of My Head: the age of individualism, he claims, has pushed us into living in "dream worlds," in which we exchange any potential we have for real power for the blissful illusion of power. That illusion persists only until something goes wrong, at which point we realize we are cripplingly, utterly alone.
So too it is with Lee's lampoon of selfie sticks: we are addicted to likes and faves because, without that dopamine rush, the world goes dark. How can it not, when we stare so intently at ourselves that we push the rest of the world away? In a segment for Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipe, Lee criticized the popular teen drama Skins,*** for glamorizing and sexualizing teenage life in an unrealistic way that belied the sheer self-centeredness of all its miserable characters. It's a neat trick: we're taught to feel worthless and unloved in this culture where the Desirable Individual is the only one with any worth, even as we simultaneously suggest that all Desirable Individuals are miserable. But what else is there to look at, apart from ourselves? When we insist that only we can be special, we create a belief system in which the world can only hold special things inasmuch as those things resemble ourselves.
There is no ideology, no creed, that will save you from this phenomenon. Mark Fisher argued a decade ago that intersectional identity politics, on its surface an extraordinarily admirable movement, risked atomizing its participants, encouraging them to define themselves and isolate themselves according to their chosen labels, developing vocabularies that only their particular microcommunities could possibly understand. These traits, Fisher said, were corrosive to the solidarity that intersectionality needed in order to create meaningful change; by encouraging individuals to focus on "ideological" wins over genuine action, it risked robbing its participants of any real power beyond smug self-satisfaction. And I think it's fair to say, at this point, that there's a difference between the "cancel culture" that speaks out against the wrongdoing of the powerful, or organizes to protest institutional injustice, and the "cancel culture" that functions, as Fisher feared, as a "pedantic hipster priesthood", obsessing over impossibly particular slip-ups, reveling only in the fiery condemnation of those who deviate ever-so-slightly from norms that were only invented an hour ago.****
If bullshit is, not lies, but a complete neglect of truth, then I'd argue that content is, not meaningless, but a complete neglect of meaning. It's not that all content is worthless: it's that content is not particularly concerned with being worthwhile. Perhaps we're all drawn to memes and cats because memes and cats are the only two forms of content that openly admit their own meaninglessness, and in doing so affirm the possibility that there is such a thing as meaning.***** The purity of Vines and TikToks is that they're pure cotton candy, and don't pretend to be anything else—though it's amazing how some people have managed to turn TikTok, the medium of filming yourself dancing, into a platform for lecturing, disseminating false information self-righteously, and generally injecting more bullshit into the world.
What is meaning? What makes something worthwhile? The answers to those questions are what define substance, but those answers are elusive and difficult; it's not a stretch to say that substance consists of the attempt to answer those questions, and takes a different form every time. The ongoing striving for meaning, the continual attempt to capture that which is rich and fibrous and non-obvious, produces something which resonates more deeply within us, planting seeds that grow us, weaving and twining things together that otherwise feel separate, sinking roots into otherwise loose and unsteady soil. This is the birthplace of sanity, of knowing yourself rather than looking at yourself, of looking up from your reflection in the pond and seeing the beautiful, shadowy forest beyond. Bullshit uproots us, and leads us into madness—look at how the Trump presidency birthed the deranged logics of QAnon.
Substance is clearing. But the tricky thing about substance, the thing that makes it so delicate and tender and vulnerable, the reason it requires such tolerance and patience, is that the hunt for substance always starts with feeling so fleeting, awareness and observation so flickeringly difficult, that for a while it feels like a new kind of madness. The birth of anything new starts in a deep uncertainty, bordering on religious doubt, mixed with the intuitive conviction that something was there, even if that "something" was barely-seen and misunderstood. Jump to too quick a conclusion, and you've created a new kind of bullshit, the kind of dogma that spawns cults and Meyers-Briggs; stay patient, and ignore all the people rushing to judgment, and you will eventually find something worth finding.
If I'm returning again and again to the intersection of self-centeredness and content, content and bullshit, bullshit and self-centeredness, it's because these things all influence and feed into one another. Bullshit is the phenomenon, self-centeredness is the interior, and content is the exterior. What is content? It's when that which we express and share and publish and create is divorced from the long, hard process of taking the world in, and letting it percolate within us, and ignoring our impatient urge to push it right back out again the moment it's been dipped ever-so-briefly into Us. Substance grows slowly, and requires a long period of patiently letting ourselves react to the world, not giving back to it until we have something worth giving. Content is impatient and cancerous. It loves nothing more than to seem urgent, because urgency reflects the only truth that content allows for: that if you're not listening to me and looking at me, than my existence serves no purpose. Consume me, consume me, consume me now!
If I'm being particularly critical of progressive movements here, it's only because I don't believe these movements are immune to this particular craze. More than anything, I am concerned with the cause of pursuing substance, promoting the value of substance, and teaching people to look for it and value it as dearly as I do. That cause will often overlap with other causes, because those causes do have substance: their tenacity is due to the fact that they have genuine gravity, and something meaningful at the core. But that gravity attracts the same old storm of content and bullshit. I have known people who participate in feminism or anti-racism or queer theory or Marxism solely through Instagram stories and Tumblr posts; on these platforms, it's impossibly easy to promote wildly contradictory values as belonging to the same "ideology". You can sell capitalism as Marxism or puritanism as radical acceptance and nobody will bat an eye—the more hyperspecialized your terminology becomes, the more fragile it is, and the more easily you can twist it into knots without anybody noticing. People engage with that kind of content well-meaningly, but sincerity is bullshit, and all the good intentions in the world won't turn a hosepipe's worth of backwash into milk and honey.
And to be clear, I criticize progressive movements specifically because I champion and share their values. Libertarian technocrats and STEM disciples deal with their own flavors of bullshit—and, hilariously, have convinced themselves that they're too rational to be susceptible to precisely that, all while developing their own bizarre "atheist"-branded religions. The conservative right is clearly spiraling off the deep end, thanks to the aid of their highly-specialized content farms, Fox becoming Breitbart becoming OANN. And centrist neoliberal sorts might be the most insufferable of the lot, if only because they still hold more power than anybody, and thus can insist upon their bullshit values more loudly and smugly than even the right.
I am optimistic even in these troubled times, and if you want to boil down the reasons why, it's ultimately that I share the same awe for computers and the Internet that the 60s neckbeards did. Computing technology allows us to create our own systems, our own platforms, our own rules for the world. Those systems can't annihilate the old ones, but they are shockingly good at growing, and have proven in a handful of decades to be able to drastically transform the world in less time than we could imagine. This power has given us a bizarre, upsetting world thanks to a combination of ignorance and institutional entrenchment: all new developments favor the already-powerful, and on top of that, we fundamentally don't understand the technology we've created, and are all learning how to use it together.
This generation gave us Facebook, Bitcoin, and Breitbart, but these things will pass, and a newer, wiser—or at least more-informed—batch of people will get to take their own stab at creating and defining the world. Platforms and mediums that were once forced upon us are now ours to create, provided we take the first difficult step of divorcing ourselves from all the platforms that aren't forced on us but sure would like it if we gave them all of our time and attention. We are more empowered than we've ever been, even if it doesn't always feel that way. But to truly harness that power, we have to abandon the illusion of power, the lie that makes us powerless, and focus ourselves only on the real thing.
That power, like substance, grows slowly. It consists of seeds, not explosions. Its strength, as with solidarity, is in its resilience—and, just like with solidarity, it takes shockingly little of it to make a real impact. It fills the void lastingly, but slowly. We must resist the urge to uproot it, to replace it with flavors-of-the-moment that will be gone before we know it. It will not reveal itself easily. Anger and impatience and urgency will scatter it to the winds.
But it is also hardy stuff. It isn't going anywhere. We will always have the means to find it—and once we learn that, we will be able to return to it again and again. More people will find it, and find each other. We will find new ways of sharing, not only amongst ourselves but with others. It will emerge slowly, but it will emerge. And, I hope, I hope, it is in its own difficult way inevitable, if only in the sense that everything else will pass away before it does. I've believed this for the whole of my adult life, and every strong doubt that passes through me only winds up reinforcing my faith.
I've come to an end here, and realize how many things I nearly touched upon but didn't quite—Roberto Bolaño's 2666, the architecture of Friedensreich Hundertwasser and Christopher Alexander, James Paul Gee's theories of learning and education, Steve Aylett's manifesto of originality, the metaphysics of Diana Wynne Jones, the Summerhill School. Suffice it to say there is a there there, a movement that doesn't bother labeling itself as a movement, a cause clear as day whose only calling card is meaning against all odds, and substance in the form that feels truest and most delightful: an almost implausible substance, presence where you cannot imagine presence, truth undeniable because it has proven itself merely by existing.
I mention these all now, not to be fancy or to claim authority, but to say that what I'm talking about here runs far deeper than just the vein I'm bringing to light, and to suggest roads still untraveled, paths yet to come. Once you hunt for it, once you insist upon it, once you find it, it becomes almost impossible to see anything not of substance; the rest of the world seems to somewhat melt away. How can you focus on it, when it was never really there in the first place? Mystics of every faith insist that this world is illusory, that its true form lies hidden beneath the surface, that far fewer things are permanent than we believe. In this sense, I'm talking, not about this modern era, but about something impossibly ancient, something as-yet-unbirthed, something that swims vast and undeniable in the darker trenches of the ocean. The world is not unlike an optical illusion, or a Magic Eye: one moment you see one thing, or nothing, and find it impossible to imagine that anything else could ever be; then, at once, something clicks, and something shifts, and you realize you will never be able to look away.
* I remember this being where this was said, but am not rewatching it to confirm. This was, in fact, said, but it may not have been said here.
** This is not intended as a diss of Taylor Swift, please don't @ me
*** Bilge.
**** The socialist left has been critical of identity politics, and of intersectionality as a movement, for a long time. Typically, they're critical of this particular form of the two, opposing aspects of the movement while remaining staunchly pro-equality on a broad spectrum of fronts. Still, I'll admit that their criticism at times leaves me uncomfortable; I think that plenty of people who find intersectional feminism speaks to them more than any other movement both mean well and achieve real, lasting change. So don't take this bit of writing as an endorsement of people who see only ill in that movement; I wish to say only that bullshit "content" infects this movement as much as it infects everything, drowning out substance in favor of unhealthy, nutritionless palp. And to be clear, the socialist left is infected with this (and gets correspondingly smug and self-centered) just as much, and is only spared to the extent that it's not quite as mainstream of a movement.
***** This sounds pretty and transitions me nicely between two ideas, but I don't actually believe this, and think the claim is itself pretty pretentious. Rather: it's bullshit.
Political lies. Corporate lies. This is nothing new.
What's newish is the emergence of content: that unit of media which exists solely to be consumed, and has no purpose other than to be something that you can take in. On some level, this succeeds an earlier trend—the pairing of media with avarice stretches back in human history, and the twentieth century in particular was defined by yellow journalism and "24-hour news." But the Information Age, in which everything became available, quickly became overwhelmed with misinformation, and with sources of information. The word "information" is itself utopian and misleading: we're really living in the age of stuff.
In many ways, this is a golden age buried deep beneath a dystopia. There's a chance that more good things exist than ever—but who could tell, beneath the layers of caked shit? Leave aside the machine-generated bullshit, the waves of web sites and emails and YouTube videos that algorithmically emulate "real things," and you're still confronted with entire industries that crank out useless, useless garbage.
In the commentary for the film Mister America*, Gregg Turkington marvels at the phenomenon of old VHS tapes for movies nobody cares about anymore. Entire studios and hundreds of people devoted themselves for months to produce hours of footage that, nowadays, we care so little about that we sell them for quarters. Elsewhere, he's talked about how many of these VHS-era films were so unloved that we haven't bothered converting them into digital formats; the only evidence of their existence is now these clunky relics of a bygone time. Endless mystery and wonder, apart from the fact that, well, the majority of these movies are hacky junk.
Nowadays, we get both the hacky junk and the hackier clingers-on. Our dominant medium is the franchise: TV shows and games predominate because they're the two mediums which most envelop us, movies are shifting to favor endless conglomerate series, and the most popular form of literature is the YA novel, in part because YA lends itself to sequel after sequel after sequel. But there are also the parasitic mediums: Twitch streams of games, episode-by-episode TV recaps, "thought pieces" in publications that are equally willing to cover the Republican party or Taylor Swift,** the endless stream of a million different podcasts.
(Then, of course, there's social media, which encourages us to dump ourselves into the sewer, encouraging our most solipsistic tendencies and convincing us that our opinions on every subject are important. "Sincerity is bullshit," concludes Frankfurter's On Bullshit; no one phrase better describes the trap of social media, and why it's so tricky to convince yourself to stop posting.)
The mediums themselves are not to fault, but they are enablers. Enablers, specifically, of "content", and of the idea that making things is valuable for the sake of making things. They encourage narcissism of every stripe—some people seek money, others seek influence or fame, some crave respect and authority, and still others hunt merely for validation and self-worth. They encourage, in other words, people motivated by literally anything other than substance. And I am convinced that substance, that surprisingly tricky and nuanced thing, is the only thing that can pull us out of this whirlpool of filth.
In his stand-up special Content Provider, Stewart Lee literally wades through an ocean of his competitors' cheap DVDs—no set decoration, he claims, is cheaper than this. His set boils down to a simple statement: we stop seeing the world when we grow too preoccupied with ourselves. Adam Curtis makes a similar argument in his new documentary Can't Get You Out Of My Head: the age of individualism, he claims, has pushed us into living in "dream worlds," in which we exchange any potential we have for real power for the blissful illusion of power. That illusion persists only until something goes wrong, at which point we realize we are cripplingly, utterly alone.
So too it is with Lee's lampoon of selfie sticks: we are addicted to likes and faves because, without that dopamine rush, the world goes dark. How can it not, when we stare so intently at ourselves that we push the rest of the world away? In a segment for Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipe, Lee criticized the popular teen drama Skins,*** for glamorizing and sexualizing teenage life in an unrealistic way that belied the sheer self-centeredness of all its miserable characters. It's a neat trick: we're taught to feel worthless and unloved in this culture where the Desirable Individual is the only one with any worth, even as we simultaneously suggest that all Desirable Individuals are miserable. But what else is there to look at, apart from ourselves? When we insist that only we can be special, we create a belief system in which the world can only hold special things inasmuch as those things resemble ourselves.
There is no ideology, no creed, that will save you from this phenomenon. Mark Fisher argued a decade ago that intersectional identity politics, on its surface an extraordinarily admirable movement, risked atomizing its participants, encouraging them to define themselves and isolate themselves according to their chosen labels, developing vocabularies that only their particular microcommunities could possibly understand. These traits, Fisher said, were corrosive to the solidarity that intersectionality needed in order to create meaningful change; by encouraging individuals to focus on "ideological" wins over genuine action, it risked robbing its participants of any real power beyond smug self-satisfaction. And I think it's fair to say, at this point, that there's a difference between the "cancel culture" that speaks out against the wrongdoing of the powerful, or organizes to protest institutional injustice, and the "cancel culture" that functions, as Fisher feared, as a "pedantic hipster priesthood", obsessing over impossibly particular slip-ups, reveling only in the fiery condemnation of those who deviate ever-so-slightly from norms that were only invented an hour ago.****
If bullshit is, not lies, but a complete neglect of truth, then I'd argue that content is, not meaningless, but a complete neglect of meaning. It's not that all content is worthless: it's that content is not particularly concerned with being worthwhile. Perhaps we're all drawn to memes and cats because memes and cats are the only two forms of content that openly admit their own meaninglessness, and in doing so affirm the possibility that there is such a thing as meaning.***** The purity of Vines and TikToks is that they're pure cotton candy, and don't pretend to be anything else—though it's amazing how some people have managed to turn TikTok, the medium of filming yourself dancing, into a platform for lecturing, disseminating false information self-righteously, and generally injecting more bullshit into the world.
What is meaning? What makes something worthwhile? The answers to those questions are what define substance, but those answers are elusive and difficult; it's not a stretch to say that substance consists of the attempt to answer those questions, and takes a different form every time. The ongoing striving for meaning, the continual attempt to capture that which is rich and fibrous and non-obvious, produces something which resonates more deeply within us, planting seeds that grow us, weaving and twining things together that otherwise feel separate, sinking roots into otherwise loose and unsteady soil. This is the birthplace of sanity, of knowing yourself rather than looking at yourself, of looking up from your reflection in the pond and seeing the beautiful, shadowy forest beyond. Bullshit uproots us, and leads us into madness—look at how the Trump presidency birthed the deranged logics of QAnon.
Substance is clearing. But the tricky thing about substance, the thing that makes it so delicate and tender and vulnerable, the reason it requires such tolerance and patience, is that the hunt for substance always starts with feeling so fleeting, awareness and observation so flickeringly difficult, that for a while it feels like a new kind of madness. The birth of anything new starts in a deep uncertainty, bordering on religious doubt, mixed with the intuitive conviction that something was there, even if that "something" was barely-seen and misunderstood. Jump to too quick a conclusion, and you've created a new kind of bullshit, the kind of dogma that spawns cults and Meyers-Briggs; stay patient, and ignore all the people rushing to judgment, and you will eventually find something worth finding.
If I'm returning again and again to the intersection of self-centeredness and content, content and bullshit, bullshit and self-centeredness, it's because these things all influence and feed into one another. Bullshit is the phenomenon, self-centeredness is the interior, and content is the exterior. What is content? It's when that which we express and share and publish and create is divorced from the long, hard process of taking the world in, and letting it percolate within us, and ignoring our impatient urge to push it right back out again the moment it's been dipped ever-so-briefly into Us. Substance grows slowly, and requires a long period of patiently letting ourselves react to the world, not giving back to it until we have something worth giving. Content is impatient and cancerous. It loves nothing more than to seem urgent, because urgency reflects the only truth that content allows for: that if you're not listening to me and looking at me, than my existence serves no purpose. Consume me, consume me, consume me now!
If I'm being particularly critical of progressive movements here, it's only because I don't believe these movements are immune to this particular craze. More than anything, I am concerned with the cause of pursuing substance, promoting the value of substance, and teaching people to look for it and value it as dearly as I do. That cause will often overlap with other causes, because those causes do have substance: their tenacity is due to the fact that they have genuine gravity, and something meaningful at the core. But that gravity attracts the same old storm of content and bullshit. I have known people who participate in feminism or anti-racism or queer theory or Marxism solely through Instagram stories and Tumblr posts; on these platforms, it's impossibly easy to promote wildly contradictory values as belonging to the same "ideology". You can sell capitalism as Marxism or puritanism as radical acceptance and nobody will bat an eye—the more hyperspecialized your terminology becomes, the more fragile it is, and the more easily you can twist it into knots without anybody noticing. People engage with that kind of content well-meaningly, but sincerity is bullshit, and all the good intentions in the world won't turn a hosepipe's worth of backwash into milk and honey.
And to be clear, I criticize progressive movements specifically because I champion and share their values. Libertarian technocrats and STEM disciples deal with their own flavors of bullshit—and, hilariously, have convinced themselves that they're too rational to be susceptible to precisely that, all while developing their own bizarre "atheist"-branded religions. The conservative right is clearly spiraling off the deep end, thanks to the aid of their highly-specialized content farms, Fox becoming Breitbart becoming OANN. And centrist neoliberal sorts might be the most insufferable of the lot, if only because they still hold more power than anybody, and thus can insist upon their bullshit values more loudly and smugly than even the right.
I am optimistic even in these troubled times, and if you want to boil down the reasons why, it's ultimately that I share the same awe for computers and the Internet that the 60s neckbeards did. Computing technology allows us to create our own systems, our own platforms, our own rules for the world. Those systems can't annihilate the old ones, but they are shockingly good at growing, and have proven in a handful of decades to be able to drastically transform the world in less time than we could imagine. This power has given us a bizarre, upsetting world thanks to a combination of ignorance and institutional entrenchment: all new developments favor the already-powerful, and on top of that, we fundamentally don't understand the technology we've created, and are all learning how to use it together.
This generation gave us Facebook, Bitcoin, and Breitbart, but these things will pass, and a newer, wiser—or at least more-informed—batch of people will get to take their own stab at creating and defining the world. Platforms and mediums that were once forced upon us are now ours to create, provided we take the first difficult step of divorcing ourselves from all the platforms that aren't forced on us but sure would like it if we gave them all of our time and attention. We are more empowered than we've ever been, even if it doesn't always feel that way. But to truly harness that power, we have to abandon the illusion of power, the lie that makes us powerless, and focus ourselves only on the real thing.
That power, like substance, grows slowly. It consists of seeds, not explosions. Its strength, as with solidarity, is in its resilience—and, just like with solidarity, it takes shockingly little of it to make a real impact. It fills the void lastingly, but slowly. We must resist the urge to uproot it, to replace it with flavors-of-the-moment that will be gone before we know it. It will not reveal itself easily. Anger and impatience and urgency will scatter it to the winds.
But it is also hardy stuff. It isn't going anywhere. We will always have the means to find it—and once we learn that, we will be able to return to it again and again. More people will find it, and find each other. We will find new ways of sharing, not only amongst ourselves but with others. It will emerge slowly, but it will emerge. And, I hope, I hope, it is in its own difficult way inevitable, if only in the sense that everything else will pass away before it does. I've believed this for the whole of my adult life, and every strong doubt that passes through me only winds up reinforcing my faith.
I've come to an end here, and realize how many things I nearly touched upon but didn't quite—Roberto Bolaño's 2666, the architecture of Friedensreich Hundertwasser and Christopher Alexander, James Paul Gee's theories of learning and education, Steve Aylett's manifesto of originality, the metaphysics of Diana Wynne Jones, the Summerhill School. Suffice it to say there is a there there, a movement that doesn't bother labeling itself as a movement, a cause clear as day whose only calling card is meaning against all odds, and substance in the form that feels truest and most delightful: an almost implausible substance, presence where you cannot imagine presence, truth undeniable because it has proven itself merely by existing.
I mention these all now, not to be fancy or to claim authority, but to say that what I'm talking about here runs far deeper than just the vein I'm bringing to light, and to suggest roads still untraveled, paths yet to come. Once you hunt for it, once you insist upon it, once you find it, it becomes almost impossible to see anything not of substance; the rest of the world seems to somewhat melt away. How can you focus on it, when it was never really there in the first place? Mystics of every faith insist that this world is illusory, that its true form lies hidden beneath the surface, that far fewer things are permanent than we believe. In this sense, I'm talking, not about this modern era, but about something impossibly ancient, something as-yet-unbirthed, something that swims vast and undeniable in the darker trenches of the ocean. The world is not unlike an optical illusion, or a Magic Eye: one moment you see one thing, or nothing, and find it impossible to imagine that anything else could ever be; then, at once, something clicks, and something shifts, and you realize you will never be able to look away.
* I remember this being where this was said, but am not rewatching it to confirm. This was, in fact, said, but it may not have been said here.
** This is not intended as a diss of Taylor Swift, please don't @ me
*** Bilge.
**** The socialist left has been critical of identity politics, and of intersectionality as a movement, for a long time. Typically, they're critical of this particular form of the two, opposing aspects of the movement while remaining staunchly pro-equality on a broad spectrum of fronts. Still, I'll admit that their criticism at times leaves me uncomfortable; I think that plenty of people who find intersectional feminism speaks to them more than any other movement both mean well and achieve real, lasting change. So don't take this bit of writing as an endorsement of people who see only ill in that movement; I wish to say only that bullshit "content" infects this movement as much as it infects everything, drowning out substance in favor of unhealthy, nutritionless palp. And to be clear, the socialist left is infected with this (and gets correspondingly smug and self-centered) just as much, and is only spared to the extent that it's not quite as mainstream of a movement.
***** This sounds pretty and transitions me nicely between two ideas, but I don't actually believe this, and think the claim is itself pretty pretentious. Rather: it's bullshit.