1.

In the first quarter of 1991, the French newspaper Libération, and the British vehicle for transphobic columnists, The Guardian, both published a series of three short essays by philosopher, anthropologist, and culture critic Jean Baudrillard, called “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place”. Given that this war supposedly lasted from 2 August 1990 to 28 February 1991, this may seem like an odd statement: is Baudrillard claiming that the whole thing was a hoax? Were no shots fired, no coffins filled?

Many people who know about the essays but have not read them tend to laugh it off: after all, there very clearly was a war. Consider, on pages 30 – 31 of the collected version:

Nevertheless, from this point onwards the promotional advantages are fabulous. Defeated or not, Saddam is assured of an unforgettable and charismatic label. Victorious or not, American armaments will have acquired an unequaled technological label. And the sumptuary expenditure in material is already equivalent to that of a real war, even if it has not taken place.
. . .
Promotional, speculative, virtual: this war no longer corresponds to Clausewitz’s formula of politics pursued by other means, it rather amounts to the absence of politics pursued by other means. Non-war is a terrible test of the status and the uncertainty of politics, just as a stock market crash (the speculative universe) is a crucial test of the economy and of the uncertainty of economic aims, just as any event whatever is a terrible test of the uncertainty and the aims of information. Thus ‘real time’ information loses itself in a completely unreal space, finally furnishing the images of pure, useless, instantaneous television where its primordial function irrupts, namely that of filling a vacuum, blocking up the screen hole through which escapes the substance of events.
. . .
The media promote the war, the war promotes the media, and advertising competes with the war.

In short, Baudrillard is saying that this was not a war – it was not in the service of pursuing a political end goal, but merely an economic one. Effectively, the war functioned as an advertisement for the American system of power, our military equipment, our politics, our economics. It was not, however, about achieving anything material. It had a purely symbolic function.

I think about this sometimes, because I’m turning 36 in less than a month, and for 20 years of my life, we’ve been at war in Iraq. It’s been a symbolic exercise – and while this might mean it’s not “real” in one sense, you’re just as dead if you die in a symbolic action as you are if you die in a military action.

By this definition, the United States hasn’t been at war for a very long time, despite our bloated Military-Industrial complex and the fact that we regularly send our soldiers off to fight on every continent. That being said, it doesn’t seem to be to the end of achieving anything. It’s more like those military actions are the struts and buttresses that hold the American system of power in place.

But this piece isn’t about the military. This piece is about something else entirely. That being said, I wanted to discuss this somewhat opaque dichotomy of “real” and “not-real” as far as events go.

Because I’m coming to the conclusion that the 2010s did not actually exist. The time passed, certainly. People were born and died. But, from a cultural perspective, I think it’s a dead end that doesn’t lead anywhere in particular, and the first few years of this new decade have been about the dream-time of the post-2008 consensus beginning to crumble.

Since 2008, central banks in the anglosphere (and I believe elsewhere? I’m not exactly a finance guy,) kept interest rates low. For a variety of reasons, this meant that it was possible to get a business started and run it at a loss for a time, as loans were easy to get a hold of. This is what allowed the number of streaming services to go from a handful to hundreds; this is what allowed Uber, Lyft, PostMates, Airbnb, DoorDash, Mechanical Turk, and similar businesses to flourish; I would be willing to wager that it also played a role in the expansion of Amazon, Disney, and the companies that are owned by Elon Musk.

One of the most popular non-MCU media properties of the era, which spawned a generation of lesser imitators, pictured here mostly because the Hunger Games’ fictionalized dystopian America has been rechristened Panem. This image comes from the series’ official Twitter.

During the 12-14 year stretch after 2008, we lived in an illusory version of the economy that operated very much on a panem et circenses model. For most millennials, this meant that – while we would never own houses – we could at least get avocado toast delivered to our overpriced apartments by an underpaid gig worker between long stretches of time being that underpaid gig worker. This was enabled by the companies behind these gig economy jobs having no real obligation to turn a profit. However, in an effort to keep prices low – so that they could come to dominate the market and then raise the prices later – they opted to pay their employees very little. After all, this sort of strategy worked for Amazon and Walmart: you accept the losses early on to gain an advantage. However, if two players opt to use this same strategy, they both lose. Sometimes they lose if there’s only one player (see: moviepass. Which I’m given to understand is coming back to lose again.)

A big part of why this fails is that a market economy only works when the buyers can meet the seller’s price. Given the fact that wages have been stagnating for decades – and increases in the minimum wage are incorrectly, fraudulently, or just plain stupidly tied to inflation, which happens without wage increases – most would-be buyers don’t have any money to pump into the economy. Indeed, we can look at the subscription-based model that has become dominant as a way around the fact that most people don’t have enough money to pump into the economy: it’s a way of sucking up the dregs that would get squirreled away in coffee cans or spent on a candy bar at the register.

Many people I know of got around all of this, anyway, by just cycling through free trials and avoiding spending money on any of these services, thus making them even less profitable. Of course, so long as they had access to the level of clout that gave them free money, this didn’t matter.

Of course, now interest rates are going up.

2.

We are not going into a new crisis with this. We are instead going into the second half of an old crisis. The “millennial subsidy” was thrown to us to rob energy from various populist movements, but since nothing actually improved, that energy was only going to break through in some other way: the democrats have a long history of sniping at their own leftward flank, so Occupy faced heavy resistance as it became the Bernie Sanders campaign and similar, but the Republicans nurture their own lunatic fringe and so we got the last president.

While this was definitely and unarguably the coalescence of an incipient fascist movement, what it also did in the short term was damage the machinery that kept the crisis at bay, thus allowing the Covid-19 crisis and the other effects that the folks over the It Could Happen Here podcast call “the crumbles”.

In short, we have lived in a bubble for fourteen years. A resilient bubble, but one that has deformed to the point where it’s about to pop. Because of inflation caused by unmitigated profit-seeking behaviors, the sclerotic state is dusting off its old tools, and has begun to manufacture consent around causing a new recession. Of course, because we’ve been living in a fake economic reality over the past fourteen years, this isn’t a new recession, per se. We’re just going to get the remainder of the old one, plus a bunch of pain from the fact that we’ve put it off so long.

Of course, since 2008, we’ve been living in a completely different world from before. I don’t have any answers about the financial side of things, but I’m interested in the cultural artifacts that surround this. For example, 2008 saw the release of Iron Man, the first official entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: the world was bad, and we wanted a fantasy story about a hero who could save the world. Disney gave us this over and over again. Interest in this kind of story is beginning to wane. The same parent company behind this, Disney, also managed to run Star Wars – conceived of as a kind of cinematic infinite money cheat – into the ground and kill off the possibility of big-screen Star Wars projects in the near future. It began to get off track with the 2017 entry, when director Rian Johnson, until then best known for episodes of Breaking Bad, tried to experiment with the formula of the movie, sharply dividing the fanbase and creating a mess that J.J. Abrams tried, and failed, to fix with his final entry in the trilogy. Largely, this was caused by the creative team’s inability to plan a coherent story.

At the same time, the mid-budget movie has been eliminated, largely replaced by miniseries or longer-running series that caused the so-called “Golden Age of Television”, but just as Star Wars has few fans these days, so to is there very little enthusiasm around Game of Thrones or similar later entries – while earlier examples of “golden age” television, like The Sopranos and The Wire continue to be well-regarded.

2008 would be this era of iPod silhouette ads; this image comes from this article about the campaign.

Consider also in music that in 2008, Apple’s iTunes store became the largest music retailer in the United States, which meant that the popular conception of a song became something that cost roughly a dollar and has no larger context. What was once dripped to us through the radio and the record player and the tape deck became a gas pumped endlessly into our rooms, as ubiquitous as air.

Grafton Tanner writes in Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, in reference to music critic Simon Reynolds that

In this over-saturated culture, we feed on media to a point beyond fullness, and that can open up within the most avid media junkie an ‘abyss,’ as Reynolds calls it, ‘the dimensions of which are in proportion to the emptiness of your life.’ Perhaps we can think of it as digital melancholia, the feeling of never being full, of never encountering an end to the information stream, of never actually catching up with all that culture we feel we must keep up with in the first place. It is a lonely, exhausting burden unique to our moment in history. After all, you are still alone in your room even after checking Facebook, downloading a trove of music, and watching pornography. This bitter loneliness, one that gives the illusion of socializing on these social-media platforms, is a facet of this digital melancholia: we surf the web alone and binge on media alone.

We cannot satisfy our desires for music. It used to be that we could attribute this to a lack of supply – the scarcity was caused by the fact that the supply was finite. But through services like iTunes – or its black-market competitor, just pirating the damned MP3 files – we reveal that the real difficulty is closer to an infinite hunger than to an overly finite supply. Add into this that the links of context are broken, and each song satisfies less and less, because it is conceived of as a complete, not as a component in a greater whole which might evoke balance. The near-death of the album, in favor of the single, has crippled music.

In addition, other forms of art are also suffering: consider the rampant growth of Instagram poetry, which is incredibly popular, but considered simultaneously incredibly vapid and possibly not real poetry. This is, of course, ignoring the accusations of plagiarism.

What does this all mean? Let’s see what Tanner has to add. Writing in reference to Naomi Klein and Slavoj Zizek, he writes that:

Klein could only predict the strange culture wars that would continue into the second decade of the twenty-first century. By exploding the world as we knew it, the September 11th attacks shocked us into a state of cultural regression. We have been living in that period ever since, plumbing the past for comforting sounds and songs, sounds from the periphery and mundanity of daily life before the great unraveling at the start of this century. The second hook to the jaw of America came in 2008 as the collapse of the economy rendered the myth of capitalism a bit harder to swallow and as Barack Obama, the progressive hope for a society that had lived through the dark age of George W. Bush, cowed before the Wall Street fat cats and then continued Bush’s hawkish tactics to police the world and erase the enemy with his ruthless drone strikes.
The shock of 9/11 was the shock of the Real, rearing its ugly head for all to see, and its arrival sounded the end of a century rife with spectacular horrors and stunning injustice. ‘In contrast to the nineteenth century of utopian or ‘scientific’ projects and ideals,’ theorist Slavoj Zizek writes, ‘the twentieth century aimed at delivering the thing itself – at directly realizing the longed-for New Order. The ultimate and defining moment of the twentieth century was the direct experience of the Real as opposed to everyday social reality – the Real in its extreme violence as the price to be paid for peeling off the deceptive layers of reality.’

Now, here he is referring to a Lacanian Real, distinct from the quality of “realness” that I refer to above, but I do think that there is a connection here, a story we could weave together about how we’re seduced by our own illusions and led astray.

3.

This brings us to what I call “Post-Enthusiasm Politics”, which is a specific form of what I’ve called in the past “the sclerotic state” and “the politics of can’t”. Post-Enthusiasm Politics is the dominant form of non-fascist politics in the United States at the moment. This is not a good thing.

When I say “Post-Enthusiasm”, I mean a sort of shambling adherence to the signifiers of political hope and change from the Obama era – starting in 2007, and reaching its height in 2008. It was fairly clear in Obama’s tenure as president that nothing would change and there was no reason to be hopeful, but we could certainly vote against the people that wanted to take away our rights. The plan in this era – and since this era – was to trade on the fact that the other side hated you, but we don’t care one way or the other about you, so we’re the safe option.

This brings to mind a conversation I had with my mother about politics a while back, when she told me that I had to “vote blue no matter who.”

I pointed out: “they have to give me a reason to vote for them, not just against the other guy. What have they done for us?”

She responded, quite quickly with “the voting rights act.” This, of course, refers to an act gutted in 2013 by the Supreme Court.

My response was something along the lines of “no, I mean something within the span of my lifetime.”

She could not think of a single thing.

What Post-Enthusiasm Politics imitated was a hot house plant. It thrived in the conditions of 2008, and survived long enough to give Obama a second term, but by the time of the 2016 election, it had withered and died. The simulation was beginning to wear thin, and it was impossible to rally support around Hillary Clinton. Now we just have a cargo cult adherence to the form of this prior politics, because it worked twice before.

Handily, Shepard Fairey has produced a tribute to Justice Ginsberg, so here’s that.

Of course, the Democrats haven’t actually learned a lesson since the defeat of utopian democratic candidate George McGovern – a legendary defeat, certainly, one only slightly eclipsed by the tragicomic defeat of the centrist Walter Mondale, who lost twelve years later and managed to get 3 fewer electoral votes – so they’re going to stick with the aesthetic that is Post-Enthusiasm Politics.

This is the aesthetic that brought you Parks and Recreation, the art of Shepard Fairey, the recent resurgent popularity of The West Wing, pussyhats, and all kinds of Ruth Bader Ginsberg kitsch. It’s a very particular brand of cringe, and it’s the reason that Nancy Pelosi didn’t think there was anything wrong with sending emails asking for a particular number of “gifts”. It’s an infantilizing aesthetic that privileges softness and comfort to the exclusion of all else: and while people going through hell want softness and comfort, it isn’t exactly the sort of thing that inspires drives towards change. It tends, instead, to inspire a retreat from conflict.

4.

So did time pass between 2008 and 2022? Sure. Of course it did. But did that time matter? Will it have a historical weight to it? Will people be nostalgic for it, or will it vanish from our recollection like the 1930s did? Or will it be a lightning rod for nostalgia, sandwiched as it is between two recessions?

My guess is that it’s going to be more like the former – and I like a lot of cultural artifacts from this time. I have an intense affection for many of the indie video games and tabletop games from that stretch. But those are indie. They’re niche. There aren’t really any indie films or indie bands these days. Not really.

Fundamentally, whether or not that decade mattered isn’t visible from where we are.

But if you listen closely, you can hear time’s gearbox groaning, you can hear the world starting to slip a sprocket and a sort of dread silence as the machineries of the world begin to drop a decade. Nothing’s going to rewind, the world in January of 2008 won’t be restored, but what we’ve built since then will start to crumble even more.

Of course, history is neither the action of vast impersonal forces nor the whim of lone Great Men at hinge points in time: it is the sum of collective human action, tallied every minute of every day.

Economically, we need to be prepared for the floor to fall out. The growth of worker power is good, and solidarity between workers will help blunt the intended effect, which is to raise unemployment in a bid to stop inflation.

Culturally, I think we need to hasten the change: returning context by celebrating albums that are conceived of as complex wholes, reading more poetry and abandoning nostalgia-driven projects that seek to strip-mine the childhoods of the viewers.

Politically, we need to abandon the cargo cult mentality that has reigned over the big-D Democrat party for more than a decade. This means, frankly, abandoning the concept of heroic political actors – these are not celebrities, nor are they icons worthy of worship. They are public servants, and a public servant that is not going to deliver improvement in our material conditions needs to be thrown aside.

Being a leftist is, fundamentally, about having a belief in a future. Not the future, but a future. For the longest time, we haven’t been able to articulate what that was, but now I think that it’s going to get harder and harder for people on the other side to articulate the opposite position: were the good old days real, or are you nostalgic for a simulation that was made impossible by your own politics?

If there really are no “good old days”, maybe you should try building something new for once.

Twenty Faux-Teen: the Phantom Decade and Post-Enthusiasm Politics