the new west?
wherein i just get frustrated with nothing academic or prolific to say. many have said these things. and maybe more. in a much more comprehensible manner.
The New West
The internet is the new West. Everything that comes filtered down to us, trickling down the Meta butthole, is always, always, a western concept. The cyber colonialism of matcha, bindi, coconut oil, parathas as pancakes, spirituality (once again), and whatnot is just a new age upheaval that we are not able to see clearly, or we choose not to. Everybody is Chinese now, everybody has a spirit animal. In the times of the internet, gentrification happens via memes and hyper-specific trends that get washed ashore in the digital graveyard, where everything rots.
Isn’t it all that one thing we saw in passing on the internet? Everything is available right in front of us. Somebody decides to be vulnerable on the internet, and the conversation gets transferred into the binary of self-absorption. This reminds me of when something just a little similar to this happened to me, I think I am YOU, but in a better way. My suffering is better!
All pinterest images sitting in your boards and mine mean something entirely else than the meaning of the image. To you, it holds a value that is rendered useless by me. But it goes on, for everything.
The need to be a VSCO girl when I was a teenager has evolved into being The Cool Girl, The It Girl, The Girl, and whatever other flowery variation the Limitations of Our Existence are decorated in. Kylie Lip Kit, Rhode Lip Balm, Skims. Homegrown solutions are packaged in neat packaging so that we don’t overdo our identity and then, sold back to us. We pretend it is something new. The elite are nostalgic for a past which was never theirs, and the rose coloured glasses are free – the most damaging thing accessible to all of us. A beautiful life is in front of us, but it is not my definition of beautiful, and it is my life.
Read a paper two years ago, The Anxiety of Indianness. Meenakshi Mukherjee is talking specifically about literature; however, it applies to everything that one has the potential to create.
Everything is a pathology; everything is a trend. Everything is the Next Big Thing. A new artist blowing up on the internet, outside of your personal web is now a fly you want to trap, even if you are the arachnid equivalent of lactose intolerant when it comes to this specific species of flies. Not everybody has to listen to Arca, not everybody has to say Weezer is valid, not everybody is going to be the next Kareena Kapoor in her prime. Should this mean you should not expand your horizons, discover things? But are you coming to these conclusions of your opinions on your own, or are you only seeing what is being shown, the photo within the frame? The intention is lost; the site of history is lost. This is how we lose every day.
A genocide cannot be something to put on the back burner when it is happening in real time. You cannot save the tab for later, when you fight against AI, and decide to write and submit a paper about it and pat yourself on the back because you did such a good job against the Death of Originality. That isn’t the point in this handbook.
Remembering Gaza Photographer Majd Arandas, Killed by Israeli Airstrikes
Everybody is Mentally Sick and Thinks That Makes Them Hot
“If then, something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism – a consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture.” – Mark Fisher
A quote which stands defeated now, but not dead
“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography
There is no point to this. I just don’t think we should create a “cult” for everything, because you don’t really let go of your beliefs, no matter how stupid or absurd, just because a new thing is out in front of you. I think we should just wring the neck of the chicken and uninstall instagram.
Meta butthole 😭