The revolution has been televised, is being televised and will go on being so in whatever today’s definition of TV is. Filmed on mobile devices, going viral on social media and then once the trend changes, quickly forgotten.
TV as the ubiquitous touch screen monopoliser of attention in the attention economy has made marching students count less than Instagram images of marching students and their resultant ‘likes’. Whereas just a few years ago it was a fairly simple task to date a photo or film clip, today’s marchers can enjoy the ‘chic’ nostalgia of Paris 1968 with none of the analogue inconveniences of the time.
What really count are the clicks, views and algorithms divvying up the rich nutrients of marketable data swept up from the depths into the jaws of awaiting predators. This is the inexorable cycle of sincere but ultimately vacuous individualism co-opted by forces once considered the ‘enemy’. The revolution isn’t the one of Gil Scott Heron’s famous line; that one has been bottled in every sense, packaged and sold back to consumers as trend. The revolution is a rolling newsfeed and attention is the both the biggest prize and casualty.
Figures from times gone by decorate memes and t-shirts with context free platitudes underscoring how everything can be repurposed. A Rasta lion with dreadlocks wears Raybans as Che Guevarra sponsors almost any half hearted pseudo radical brain-fart. Like zombie mercenaries for anyone who has the few shekels to rent their services; their words bent to virtue signal today’s thought. They lift the burden of responsibility from the wearer; all the heavy lifting done by others in days past and possibly for quite different reasons. Is this what a public that doesn’t know what it wants wants?
As fashions go, having a tattoo is something of a commitment. Like all questions of taste they range from the artistic and impressive to the cheap and tawdry. Whilst youthful commitment to ideas has produced some of humanity’s greatest artistic triumphs, just imagine a world in which the 80s mullet haircut was permanent.
In haste to express one’s individuality and also fit in, the tattoo is a one stop shop. As often as not they resemble doodles in the margins of notebooks where attention gave way to reverie.
Unconnected in any perceptible way but to the bearer, they stray down the thighs in search of blank skin to ink up, turning young bodies into lifers in a prison drama. Just how deep and long lasting a commitment to nebulous script must one have to avoid permanently wearing long sleeves in later life?
There’s no rebellion in having what is normal and I fear the day when beige screams out like a high-vis jacket from a blurred background of tattoos.
For a country which believes itself exceptional, a social media sized hole of cognitive dissonance is required to claim that America needs making great again. It’s a dark comedy role reversal in which the anger and conviction heard in the trembling articulation of the righteously indignant can get miles on fumes alone. Slipping the bonds of reasonable argument, the discourse goes straight to hyperbole knowing there will be no requirement to explain a position once something else trends.
The often cited fact that 90% of drivers believe themselves to be above average, is something of an insight into our perception of the world beyond our heads. We’re all rather special but end up acting in similar ways, subscribing to similar narratives and much like the driver who blames traffic for a late arrival, we see ourselves from outside the picture when things are not as we’d wish them.
This is democracy without signposts, the freedom to choose, the right to be whatever is on your mind at any given moment. This is the age of the five minute conversation Churchill once cited as the best argument against democracy. All those grass roots making politics local and not about the elite have born a child high on the Kool Aid of individualism.
Guessing the weight of the bull at a country fair is said to illustrate that the collective knows better than the individual. That is however contingent on everybody seeking a similar objective. When everybody involved is expressing just their own fleeting individual interest, the bull becomes both bigger and terser in meaning.
The revolution is considerably greater than the number of its known parts and resembles a town meeting at which nobody can nail down a common idea before demanding action. Add to the mix the sound bites by anyone and everyone on anything and we reach a true cacophony. This shrill, unmelodic noise is rebranded polyphony, given status in the media as a bottom-up, anti-elite movement and marketed back at itself with some spit and polish as democratic expression. It is a kind of skin suit cut from the great and good of a sanitised yesteryear shoehorned around shape shifting individualism with just the loosest of thread holding together the oddest bedfellows and their myriad of single-issues.
The revolution is being televised on a device near you.
Good times.