Media freaks love when a Weird Thing Happens. We are vultures scavenging subcultures like carrion, gnawing over esoteric conflicts and contradictions. Feed me your covid-conscious lesbian bar in Western Massachusetts. Toss me a morsel of that pro-data-center party in DC. Surely I’ll tear off the tastier piece of ragebait.
Gonzo journalism is back in vogue. It’s hip to be ever-so-slightly complicit in gooning subculture or agentic discourse or the dinergoth scene, as long as you can retreat to a sense of editorial detachment. These are the weirdos, not me—I’m just reporting on the phenomenon.
I went to that pro-data-center party, just like I went to the anti-data-center parties in New York City. It’s the same incestuous swarm of substackers and journalists accidentally interviewing other substackers and journalists. Everybody wants to be first to the spectacle, to have that smug victory of categorizing the sideshow into ruthlessly accurate archetypes.
And oh boy was it a thrill to actually talk to the AI finance crypto startup libertarian swamp creatures. It’s tempting to write about how the pro-data-center gender ratio was 5:1 or how that one Palantir employee proudly described himself as “spiritually Israeli” or how the protesters were booed off the stage by people chanting USA USA USA. But that’s what everybody else is writing about. It was more accurately a bunch of horny young republicans flirting with each other.
Same with the Luddite parties. I could describe the carabiner-wearing alt tattooed artists locking their flip phones in Yondr pouches, but they’re really just a bunch of horny young progressives flirting with each other.
I remember meeting the gooning article guy at a Luddite rave a while back. He’s working on a book, and I’m sure it’s going to be very well written. But you also get the sense that he’s running from something. He couldn’t go a minute without hitting his vape and making some kind of snide remark about the other party-goers.
Clearly, I’m also running from something. All the media vultures are, because we were never here for the story. That was always a pretense for the adrenaline rush of pinning up another specimen for dissection. In our briefly ironic moment of inhabiting the Weird Thing Happening, we feel alive before once again withdrawing to the postmodern discomfort of collecting ideologies like trading cards.
That Sam Kriss article covering the founders of Sperm Racing was incredible. But I also know the founders of Sperm Racing, and toured their headquarters a week before the piece came out. Everything Kriss wrote was accurate: it is a “social-media hype machine” run by agentic content hustlers. They’re also incredibly complex humans with a range of motivations and beliefs. So are the progressives and republicans and writers I’m writing about. When we categorize them, we reduce them so that we may vicariously experience their stories.
Not that there isn’t value to this kind of reporting. I think the Sperm Racers should be scrutinized for their line of work. I think there’s a public interest to reporting about gooning and data centers and the woke pockets of New England. But the main appeal, to both the journalists and the public, is a voyeuristic feeling of superiority over the Other. Our self-congratulatory critique opens a window into their lives, distracting us from living our own.
Last February, I went with my journalist friend to Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney. It was incredible. The town is covered in groundhog statues and the festival rages from midnight to the early morning. At one point, the Star-Spangled Banner starts playing and morphs into the Imperial March from Star Wars. Then Josh Shapiro gets on stage and shouts that PETA can take our groundhog over his dead body. The crowd goes crazy and fireworks explode overhead.
Part of the appeal was the gimmick—it’s easy to read the event through a camp or provincializing lens—but both of us agreed that we really just wanted to be there. Hell yeah I want to get excited over a soothsaying rodent. Maybe I should suspend my pretensions, stop labeling everything, and actually just be here. Or, you know, I could write another substack essay.
It’s as if we — the numb and helpless myriads we are — are living in the refurbished ruins of a society, perpetually deferring, through discursive means, our own genuine connection to reality in a sort of sane insanity, in a death in life and life in death. We dance with our virtual construction of les autres (no capital), and dance we must lest we default upon that cold timeless realisation that, past the living death we live, there is no ‘real life’ or ‘genuine connection’ underneath all of it to go back to. There never was.
The relentlessly online need someone who can convincingly pretend to “touch grass” so they can get an ironic view of the world outside their particular little bubble.