[This is Part 2 of a long-ish post that began with Storytelling, which contained some of the texts that I discuss more casually below.]
Last time, at Commonplace Brooke:
Organizationally, my last post was a bit slapdash, because I was coming across links and connections as I was composing it. If this were a different sort of site, one more devoted to polished writing, I’d have taken it out and probably revised it a couple of times before posting. That’s not how I use my Substack, though. My process began by noting some resonances between Tara McMullin’s discussion of the way that our contemporary fetish for attention/engagement has warped storytelling and Blackbird Spyplane’s brief history of the way that corporate marketing has relied more and more on symbolic value to the point that we’ve internalized it, living our lives as “commercials for ourselves.” While these aren’t quite the same thing, they’re close enough that it made me think of “epic” commercials like “The Aviators,” which is so preoccupied with purely calling attention to itself that it has its own “making of” YouTube video (and only very briefly features the product or company for which it is nominally an advertisement).
This inversion (McMullin calls it an instrumentalization) of the value/virtue of storytelling is not new1. In fact, it’s so positively ordinary that Seth Godin’s equivocation of storytelling with lying (in his book about marketers) is no more remarkable than his claim that “authenticity is the best marketing of all.” When you think about it (and we don’t usually), that’s a pretty Orwellian-newspeak way to conceive of story telling. (Recall Adam Curtis on lifestyle marketing, whose goal is “to infuse goods with a perceived symbolic value, separate from literal use value, so that companies could make us desire goods we didn’t actually need.”) As I’ll talk about below, it’s interesting to note that this attitude toward marketing (and the annexation of storytelling) happens at roughly the same time that social media (and Web 2.0) begins to emerge. But first, I want to go a little further back in time, because this has put me in mind of a precursor to this discussion.
The Most Photographed Barn in America
There’s a pretty famous scene in Don DeLillo’s White Noise (adapted in 2022) where the protagonist (Jack) and his friend (Murray) drive out to see “the most photographed barn in America.” They drive 20 miles out of town, and see multiple billboards advertising the barn until they finally arrive:
We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.
"No one sees the barn," he said finally.
Murray identifies this as a sort of “spiritual surrender,” where the constructed and perceived symbolic value (the most photographed!) has completely overwhelmed any particular use value that the barn may have at one time held. “They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” Murray observes of their fellow visitors.
DeLillo’s novel, and this passage in particular, plays a crucial role in David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram,” about the relationship between television and fiction. Perhaps more importantly, Wallace’s essay was published (in 19932) just as the Web and the internet as we know it was beginning to emerge. It’s a careful reflection on irony and on the ways that fiction might complicate our growing passivity in the face of screens. Those screens change us, he explains,
Because the practice of watching is expansive. Exponential. We spend enough time watching, pretty soon we start watching ourselves watching. We start to “feel” ourselves feeling, yearn to experience “experiences.”
In addition to saying several smart things about irony, Wallace spends a bit of time towards the end of his essay responding to George Gilder’s Life after Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life, which was making predictions about the coming internet, predictions that will sound awfully familiar to those of us who lived through that time. He predicts that networked computing will free us from the technologies of the time (and television in particular), that media will be democratized, once we have the world at our fingertips. Wallace characterizes Gilder this way:
In sum, then, a conservative tech writer offers a really attractive way of looking at viewer passivity and TV's institutionalization of irony, narcissism, nihilism, stasis. It's not our fault! It's outmoded technology's fault!
Wallace’s take on this is refreshingly skeptical—as you might gather, he sees this as a species of what would later come to be known (and decried) as tech-industry solutionism: Things will be so much better if we just solve the problems technology creates with better technology, they claim (and sell). Rightly, I think, Wallace intuits that this is the equivalent of replacing one addiction with another [TC = telecomputer, a term that didn’t end up making the cut back in the early 90s]:
[Gilder’s] new tech would indeed end "the passivity of mere reception." But the passivity of Audience, the acquiescence inherent in a whole culture of and about watching, looks unaffected by TCs….Jacking the number of choices and options up with better tech will remedy exactly nothing, so long as no sources of insight on comparative worth, no guides to why and how to choose among experiences, fantasies, beliefs, and predilections, are permitted serious consideration in U.S. culture.
The Most Circulated Content in America
It’s fascinating to read Wallace’s essay alongside the texts that I mentioned in my last post. In particular, I found myself returning to Byung-Chul Han’s Psychopolitics, which offers any number of resonant observations. Han explains that “Initially, the internet was celebrated as a medium of boundless liberty,” for example, which Wallace documents in his reading of Gilder. But as Wallace suggests, that “freedom” takes place in a specific cultural milieu—in a televisual age, celebrities and public figures had access to the Audience, but now, that access has been “democratized” without reflecting upon exactly what’s being accessed.
Han has the benefit of thirty-plus years of this experiment to draw upon, but he’s pretty clear about its costs. Everything has become content and each of us an unfinished project; “now the illusion prevails that every person – as a project free to fashion him- or herself at will – is capable of unlimited self-production.” If indeed the world is at our fingertips, and we are “free” to fashion ourselves at will, then any shortcomings in that project must be personal failure, rather than societal or systemic. Han writes that “the exploited are not inclined to revolution so much as depression,” because we’ve not only subordinated ourselves to our media platforms but interiorized the power relations that generated them.
Psychopolitics is about the shift from repressive, disciplinary power relations—which are negative and inhibitory—to the seductive, positive illusion of the frictionless circulation of our self/projects. “Such a dynamic seeks to activate, motivate and optimize – not to inhibit or repress.” This dynamic
…does not impose silence. Rather, it is constantly calling on us to confide, share and participate: to communicate our opinions, needs, wishes and preferences – to tell all about our lives.
By now, we all know where this ends up: our lives are grouped, collated, sorted, and divvied into data structures that are packaged and sold to marketers of various stripes. Much of our online engagement now converts us into information; as Han puts it, we “are being positivized into things, which can be quantified, measured and steered.” He explains that we surrender our interiority in this process—we become the projects that we project into our online spaces, and those projects “circulate independently, free from any and all context.” As Anna Kornbluh detailed in Immediacy, unfettered circulation is the goal here. We accept (and repeat) the story that the world is at our fingertips, when what we’re doing is placing ourselves at the world’s fingertips. But, like DeLillo’s characters, “We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura.”
Our Parastories, Our Paraselves
Part of Wallace’s point in linking television and irony is the former’s ability to subsume even the most trenchant critique. “How to snap readers awake to the fact that our TV-culture has become a cynical, narcissistic, essentially empty phenomenon, when television regularly celebrates just these features in itself and its viewers?” There’s an old episode of Black Mirror called “Fifteen Million Merits” that dramatizes this problem, well before most of us were asking the same questions about social media. At the climactic moment of the episode, the main character (Bing3) threatens to kill himself on the live feed (of an American Idol-style talent show) in protest of the artificial, cruel, and pointless system that they’re all trapped in. But the judges praise the raw authenticity of his “performance,” and Bing ultimately becomes the star of his own weekly show on the network where he rants against the system that has now made him wealthy.
If this sounds like a depressing end to the episode, you’re not wrong about that. It’s a compelling narrativization of the ideas I’ve been talking about here, and it ends in a typically (for Black Mirror) unsettling and unsatisfying way. But the episode demonstrates the near inescapability of the televisual aura, the way that even the most heartfelt struggles and deeply rooted opposition can ultimately be coopted by the distance that our screens install between content and audience.
It’s that distance that alienates us from the stories that circulate so overwhelmingly around us4. Murray notes in White Noise that no one sees the barn; in the same way, we are so inundated with stories that it becomes difficult to connect to them, and even that challenge assumes that connection (rather than attention) is the goal. For a lot of early writers, the net (and later social media) was intended as a vibrant alternative to the parasocial passivity of television/mass media. That was the story, anyway. As I wrote a bit about the influence industry back in February, it crystallized for me: the story we’re sold about social media functions as cover for just how expansive parasociality has become. I wrote back then that much of social media was “advertising disguised as friendship,” and that rings even truer to me as the tools for manipulating our images become more accessible to us. Why bother remembering reality when we can sell ourselves the photorealistic fantasy?
I don’t doubt that some of the “instagram boyfriend” memes that India discusses are tongue-in-cheek, but at the same time, there’s more than a kernel of truth to them. As she writes, “it’s another example where the virtual world is becoming more real than the real world.” Parasociality isn’t just competing with sociality—it’s crowding it out, and I think that this has more than a little to do with the mental health issues we’re seeing. When people, especially those who didn’t experience a pre-internet world, go looking for connection and find only commercials, it can’t be healthy. As India explains, “I don’t think it’s trivial, for example, that we’ve been conditioned to use the person we love as a tool,” but I found myself thinking about this from the opposite direction as well. It’s equally demoralizing to think that the people around us see us only as tools (or NPCs). This is perhaps the most pernicious element of storyselling, the idea that we’ve become so adept at the appearance of authenticity that we’ve lost the ability (and the communal spaces) to practice it.
I think that’s all I have for the moment. I’ve been reading around a bit lately, so I’m going to share some of that work over the next week or two. Catch you soon.
For examples, Facebook did a series of commercials featuring tales of people connecting through Facebook Groups; Google told stories through search terms and their “Dear Sophie” ad featured her father’s use of GMail as a scrapbook; more recently, we can see how “It starts on Tik Tok.”
NCSA Mosaic was released in 1993, followed quickly by Netscape Navigator in 1994.
Bing is portrayed by Daniel Kaluuya, several years before he appeared in Get Out, Black Panther, Nope, et al.
I just picked up Annalee Newitz’s new book Stories are Weapons, so don’t be surprised if I return to this idea later.
This is rhyming with many things hard to un- see since, I dunno, '16? Or '94, '74? The black mirror image of an image you'd included, of the beautiful food, which was being made, shared or enjoyed by EXACTLY NO ONE except as an 'image', recalled the fancy restaurant meal portrayed in Gilliam's "Brazil". I'm wondering again what becomes of love interest- renegade truck driver Jill Layton in the story. I'm wondering what becomes of all of us Sam Lowrys as we're just absorbed.
PS: just heard Cory Doctorow respond to a "your favorite film?" interview question, instantly: "Brazil".
I have encountered Byung-Chul Han's work everywhere in the last few months. I have put several of his book into my cart. I enjoy reading, Collin. Please keep it up.
~John