(inspired by an old Instagram story)
The usual suspect would be to point to the surface-ness of a “social media” as exemplary of our inability to distinguish comparative reading and judgment. Or rather, there’s a problem with the way people identify success and achievement, as though adding up is the only metonym available to measure that performance. I’m writing this in a backdrop of reading about linkedin, which by itself I find a highly endearing platform; but I suppose I’m always taken by the nearly-infinitely varied ways people try to put themselves up in sequences of episodes and events that bear semblance with conventionality; that regularize a way of feeling about the historical present to many different aesthetic ends.
But this isn’t to infantilize the many; it’s not to say that the thrashings of a consumer public on a consumer electronic is nothing but the scurrying of ants under a thoughtlessly lifted rock, though at a certain psychic and alienated distance that might be the case. It’s not to say that there’s some sort of moral episteme that comes with a self-presentation, or that there should be one; maybe the point is to demonstrate how form and genre always find their footing even in the wake of what’s supposed to be the end of metaphysics. In another idiom I’m also thinking about hyperconnectivity and scrolling out, like how eye saccades engender muscles that can withstand constant discretized motion. A heart rate is continuous; a saccade cannot but be discrete.
I feel little silly to say that I find a certain optimism in watching life pass around on these platforms, as overdetermined their different figurations might be. Maybe what’s virtualistic about potential in a bottle of coke is the sign-value it accrues within circuits of signification (this is not too far from a similar argument made in simulacra); so even the most deeply disturbingly consumerist commiserations have in them this impulse towards reifying the historical present. I cannot judge style in that case, nor can I disavow the senseless joy that comes with judgement.
I’m collating responses to this failure of judgment: comparison is the thief of joy, find your own meaning in life, it’s your own path to take, everyone has their own story, success and happiness is subjective/choice-based, don’t run in the rat race, run your own race, everything is a construct so nothing means anything, or that you can build your own meaning, look at the empty moralizing of the elites, they owe us nothing, you owe yourself nothing, no one owes you anything, they’re so pretentious, you’ll never truly be satisfied if you keep chasing, find your own strengths, run the race and choose your battles,…