Ensippification, part 4

Not sipping but gasping

This is the final installment in an arc that looks at the way that the sip test (exemplified by the Pepsi Challenge) provides an analogy for developments over the past couple of decades across discourse and media:

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

In the second part of this arc, I drew a quick analogy between sip tests and stereotypes, both examples of overgeneralizing a small sample to the whole. I didn’t want to derail that particular episode, so I tied the comparison off with a couple of lines that I want to revisit here:

Similarly, our stereotypes often fade once we’ve had a chance to encounter others who share features but remain distinct from one another. Without even realizing it, the faulty part-whole connections we draw subconsciously to form those stereotypes will begin to dissolve.

I wrote those sentences fully aware that, at best, they were wishful thinking. I do believe that, particularly when we’re young, we can’t help but shed the vast majority of those false linkages as we gain more experience, meet more people, etc. But that doesn’t account for the stereotypes that we retain, reinforce, and even reproduce in the larger world. As judgments forged in the meager flames of our own limited experience, they harden into biases, bigotries, and ideologies. On top of that, we’ve built up a media environment that exacerbates and rewards these attitudes, to the point of inflicting long-term damage on our politics and culture.

A Single Story

I’m not sure how I stumbled upon it, but a couple of weeks ago, I ended up finding a TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, called “The Danger of a Single Story.” (It’s about 20 minutes, but you can find the transcript here.) It’s an essay in large part about the misunderstandings that ensue when all you know of a person, or a place, or a people, is the “single story,” a set of conclusions drawn from a single exposure.

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

Adichie’s talk is generous; it’s not simply a rehearsal of the stereotypes about Nigeria that she’s encountered and disabused. She roots the talk in her own misunderstandings as well, the false assumptions that she herself made about the people around her and had to overcome. For the single story “robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult.”

Part of the reason I found Adichie’s talk so resonant is that it sets the stakes for what I’ve been describing as ensippification. What was (and often still is) pitched to us as the democratization of media might be better described as our reduction to media. Adichie explains, “that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.” The acceleration and amplification we’re experiencing online focuses us into brands, into socially approved and enclosed single stories. What Adichie frames as a loss of dignity and humanity is, in the context of online culture, described instead as the secret to success.

Only Waving

I happened across a poem from Morgan Parker in the New Yorker last month, “Meanwhile It Rains for Two Weeks and the Heat Never Breaks,” and the ending in particular struck me.

…I could be drowning, and
all my friends would be laughing
at my impression of me drowning, like oh yeah
You would totally drown that way
like with your face just like that

These lines allude to a poem from the 1950s, Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving but Drowning,” which I remember from my college days as an English major. If Smith’s simple poem is about the ambiguity of the messages we send to the people around us, and their potential to be misread, Parker speaks to the way that social media instantiates that ambiguity at the core of our interactions with one another, turning us into secondary effects of our online performances.

Our algorithms amplify those who turn themselves into single stories, by paring down our ability to express ourselves, until we arrive at what Ed Elson recently described as the “clip economy.” According to Elson, and a few others writing about it, we’ve passed the point where clips are meant to connect us to longer-form media. It’s sips all the way down, leaving us with, as Ryan Broderick puts it, “An internet permanently swallowed whole by bodybuilders and pornstars and fascists and dropshippers and gambling ads and Italian AI crocodiles and all the other evils of late-stage digital video.” In Infocracy, Byung Chul-Han warns against precisely this, the erosion of the “temporal architectures that support and stabilize life and perception,” the reduction of communication (and of literacy, for that matter) to a “frenzy” of entertainment and affective performance.

We’re drowning in the noise, and our only recourse is to wave at each other. Like with our faces just like that.

“Clavicular”

The Sip Economy¹

There is a small handful of people out there who have capitalized on ensippification.² I don’t want to dwell on them too long, but I think they provide an interesting twist on Adichie’s “single story,” if only because they’ve so thoroughly monetized their dignity in the process.

Pictured above is Braden Peters, a 20-year old beauty influencer and aspiring Newspeak practitioner³ who presents himself online as “Clavicular.” He’s become the viral face of a fringe community (rooted in a couple of different “manosphere” subcultures) devoted to the practice of “looksmaxxing.” Much like the sloppiness of turning “gate” into a suffix to denote any sort of controversy, “-maxxing” has been haunting online discourse recently. I won’t describe it as interesting, because it’s actually pretty repugnant once you dig into its source material, but it’s kind of this strange combination of manosphere entrepreneurialism and incel culture, cloaked in (or aspiring to?) pseudo-science.

My interest, such as it is, is much more simple. Maybe a month or so ago, Peters made a splash when he sat down for an hour-long interview with Andrew Callaghan, a YouTube journalist. I ended up watching chunks of the piece thanks to Ana Yudin, a YTer who responds to online trends and draws on her own background as a doctor of Clinical Psychology (though she no longer practices). Yudin examines the interview in order to entertain the hypothesis that looksmaxxing (and similar sorts of trends) appeal to and potentially exploit folks who are neurodivergent⁴. While I find that hypothesis pretty persuasive, what was more compelling to me was how invested Peters seemed to be in the practice itself, to the point that he frequently deflected questions that weren’t “relevant” to looksmaxxing. And after 40+ minutes of inquiries about the practice, he describes Callaghan as doing a “shitty job” for not asking any questions about it. Eventually, Peters ends the interview because Callaghan says that he’s happy with his own appearance; Peters dismisses him as disingenuous and seems to decide that he has nothing more to say.

It’s a strange moment, but also oddly sympathetic. It reveals Peters’ hyperfixation, but it also reminded me of Natasha Dow Schüll’s description of gambling/slot addicts who will literally ruin their lives in order to chase a fleeting sense of interior numbness (which I’ve mentioned before). Callaghan spends the entire interview asking about looksmaxxing, but he does so in a way that tries to connect it to an “outside” world, the messy place from which Peters has devoted his life to insulating himself. It’s only there at the end that Peters seems to realize that Callaghan is trying to put the practice into a broader context, and that’s when he shuts it down. Peters is so invested in embodying a pure, immediate, single story that I’m not sure that it even occurred to him that someone might exist, quite happily, outside of the “content” that Peters generates. Difficult as it might be for most of us to understand, Clavicular almost embodies the Platonic ideal of value capture, someone who has monocropped his own life so thoroughly as to make it nearly unrecognizable.

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Around the same time that this was going on, British documentarian Louis Theroux released a show on Netflix, Inside the Manosphere. Again, my exposure to it was largely second-hand, as I subscribe to a few different podcasts that Theroux visited on his promotional tour. For a week or two, he was on heavy rotation on my feed. So I’ve seen a number of clips and listened quite a bit to Theroux himself talk about the experience. The documentary itself focuses on a small handful of manosphere content creators, at different scales; given its reach and impact, Theroux frames it (to WIRED) as something of a culmination of his previous work: “It combines cultlike groupings, misogyny, adult content, creation of pornographic content, and obviously racism. All these taboo areas of life that I've spent my TV work documenting in different forms come together in the manosphere.”

Some of the documentary’s reviews are quite negative; I think it’s fair to say that some of the critics would have preferred Theroux position himself more explicitly against this network of creators rather than inside of it. But Theroux’s long career has been spent engaging with some of the worst human beings around, and the fact that he’s still able to gain access to them has required him, I suspect, to maintain a better poker face than I’d be capable of. At least, that’s the impression that I had from seeing him speak with a variety of interlocutors about his show. He risks the accusation of platforming some truly awful people by remaining sufficiently neutral in order to gain access to them in the first place.

There’s a lot that we could say about the footage he collects, and the influencers he profiles. But in keeping with the theme here, I think that Theroux does something more subtle. In a sense, he is platforming some of these men, but those of us who see his work on YT or Netflix aren’t likely to fall into their orbit. And the young men who’ve already been taken in aren’t likely to seek out secondhand accounts when they spend their time mainlining the original. There’s something subtler happening with Theroux’s coverage of them. However temporarily, he’s drawing out the hypocrisy and performance behind them, by forcing them to step outside of the single story⁵ that they tell about themselves (macho, misogynist, materialist). Under the guise of exploring the story that they tell their followers (and themselves), he encourages them to speak and interact outside of the parasocial grifts that they perpetrate online.

Here’s a quick example. If you follow the link above to the trailer for Inside, you’ll see what I mean. The trailer opens on one of Theroux’s subjects speaking directly to the camera, much like he would for one of his streams. But then the camera angle shifts slightly, and Theroux enters the frame and asks him, “Who are you talking to?” It’s a lightly funny moment that establishes the difference between the 2nd person address of the online content creator and the 3rd person perspective of the documentarian, hinting at the unnatural and asocial qualities of the former. Other than a sardonic comment (“We’re not on social media now.”), Theroux doesn’t do much with it, but it’s a crack in the facade that these influencers rely upon, an alternative story that they suppress.

I’m sympathetic to those who aren’t satisfied with this sort of tactic, who wish that he would go at these scambags a little harder, but at the same time, I appreciate the opportunity to learn about them without having to engage directly or spend time in the bubbles that they construct around themselves.

Photo by Vitaliy Shevchenko on Unsplash

Last Gasp

Adichie gave her talk about the danger of a single story in 2009, back when social media was just beginning to emerge. At the time, the discourse was flush with those (including me) who believed that those platforms would provide us with access to multiple stories, additional context, that it would enrich our lives in unforeseen ways, without the mediation and gatekeeping of bloated, traditional, economically and culturally conservative media conglomerates. We wouldn’t have to see and hear the same things over and over, until they’d coalesced into a single story.

What I don’t think any of us anticipated at the time was the extent to which our new internet values would capture us just as completely as those offered by traditional media. Han argues that we’ve moved from the “amphitheatrical structures of mass media” to a “theatrocracy” where we’ve internalized those old values and commercialized ourselves to the point where discourse and truth no longer matter. We don’t take the Pepsi Challenge. We enact it over and over, relentlessly, engineering ourselves for likes, clicks, follows, and subs, submitting ourselves to the immediation and extraction by bloated, self-aggrandizing, politically reactionary tech conglomerates.

Peters (and others like him) feel like the endgame of ensippification, staring at us their cameras with dead eyes, encouraging us to reduce ourselves to decontextualized, single serving interactions, awash in a global flood of information, our reflexive sips growing indistinguishable from gasping for air.

Like with our faces just like that.

1. I’m not sure I’ve spent as much time on the clip economy here as I probably should have. In addition to the pieces I’ve cited, there’s a really interesting piece at The Verge on “The Clippening.” I’ve thought a bunch about the resonance between sip and clip, and not just because they rhyme. Four posts in, it’s too late for me to call this enclippification, but if I’d started this arc more recently, I might have.

2. I should distinguish between the platforms themselves, who have thoroughly and ceaselessly capitalized on this “democratization”, and the handful of lottery winners who collectively function to provide the illusion that “anyone” can succeed in the content mines. I’m talking about the latter here.

3. The weird vocabulary spawned by this fringe subculture has been all over the internet for the past couple of months, so I won’t be repeating it much here. Ian Bogost had a piece in the Atlantic back in late March about the discursive and cultural implications of “looks-maxxing,” which I only name here so that I don’t have to talk around this deeply stupid idea above. And it’s a little unfair to credit Peters himself with the acronym-laden, algebraic jargon that they apparently all use, but oh well.

4. I should note that Yudin is very careful not to “diagnose” Peters, although he has publicly spoken about the challenges of appearing neurotypical. Instead, she refers to multiple clips of the interview to point out correlations between Peters’ behavior and those that are associated with various types of neurodivergence.

5. To be “fair,” most of them aren’t especially up front about the misogyny, bigotry, hatred, or cynicism that is their stock in trade. Instead, they pose as role models or life coaches, exploiting the dissatisfaction and rage of their audience to channel them towards pornography, investment scams, gambling sites, garbage merch, and the like.