Politics constitute an indomitable itch for those of us inclined to discuss them. This is not a post about politics. This is a post about Clint Eastwood’s chair.
Clint Eastwood’s chair was first made known to me at about 3:30 this afternoon. I know, I’m behind the times. At my ripe old age of 27 it’s hard to keep up with the world. But I made that perilous journey to youtube, and with, I am proud to say, no great difficulty, I procured a mouse cursor in a blank textbox, from whence my journey began.
Arriving at my destination, and bearing witness the public oration there displayed, I found myself not at all befuddled or amused by an old man’s rant. Quite the contrary, I thought it a reasonably clever comedy sketch in consideration of his age, chuckled at his tongue-in-cheek endorsement (which amounted to little more than a ‘lesser of two evils’ vote), and felt inclined to comment on his behalf. Then my troubles set in.
I was caught off guard. The text below the video bombarded me like an artillery barrage, every 10 seconds a new string of demented rambling surpassing all of my direst expectations for the video at hand:
“LOL do you just make shit up? California well off? LOL just keep making shit up your boy will gone in November.” (kEMCO2)
“YOU’RE PROBABLY A LOSER SITTING IN YOUR MOTHER’S BASEMENT WATCHING FADING POSTERS OF OBAMA WAITING FOR YOUR NEXT WELFARE CHECK.” (Chloe Smith)
“You’re an idiot. You’re going to get old to you moron. Old age has nothing to do with dementia. People become deranged at 35, look at your hero Obama, he is as stupid as they get.” (DonDraperism)
“Ask the ones that OUR military freed and saved! Your a pansy and have no clue! Your part of the reason we’re in the shape we are!” (bessedchevy20)
“LOL. congratz u have been brainwashed” (bobilo95)
And I realized something.
I realized something terrible.
My internet was gone.
It was gone. It was dead. The shroud tailor measured it for a deep six holiday.
I didn’t believe it at first. I panicked, frantically hammering out search terms into Google, but no relief was in sight. I turned to Gogloom, dear old friend, but its springs too had run dry; IRC, my last vestige of hope, failed me.
And I thought maybe, just maybe, this tragic loss and the verbal assault upon Clint Eastwood’s chair were somehow related.
I was born and raised on the internet. I remember when we first got dial-up in 1996. I passed the tender age of 11 sharing insightful comments much akin to those I experienced today, only geared to my youthful interests. “LOL u dont even know ff3 is rly ff6 and u wasted $200 on a PSX even tho ff7s gonna suck NINTENDO FOR LIFE” Ah, such fond memories. A prodigy no doubt, I learned quickly to curb my intellectual idioms to placate the masses, adapting to the drudgery of coherent English in my teenage years and beyond. Was it some cruel twist of fate that now finds me linguistically isolated from the very internet users for whom I learned to converse? All I wanted to do was talk about Clint Eastwood’s chair.
The fact of the matter is the internet no longer functions as an outlet for sharing free thought. Oh, I am “sharing” my thoughts here, with the four or five of you who happen to read this, but should you choose to respond you will do so in the form of a comment, in reply to my post which I moderate. I am in charge here, and that means I am not really intimately engaging with anyone. These WordPress blogs completely lack an equal playing field for discussion, but they’re ideal for sharing one’s opinion with the wind. We’re all special. We all have a voice. Here’s mine.
That’s the state of WordPress. That’s the state of Facebook. That’s the state of Twitter, I suppose. I don’t use the latter two, frankly because the notion of making an isolated personal statement bores me save on rare occasions such as these. I post here because all of my previous outlets have slowly withered away. Are new outlets out there? I suppose there’s 4chan. The launch of /r9k/ encompasses some of my fondest memories of the internet, specifically due to the brief period of intellectual discussion it spawned. Coincidentally coinciding with the launch of Project Chanology, it generated countless debates on the political and social impacts of anonymity and collective thought, perhaps culminating in a collective realization of and expansion upon the notion of Stand Alone Complex (Ghost in the Shell). We were each participants, debating and trolling in turn, in the very social experiment we were conducting. It was a grand culmination of everything I loved about the internet in the 1990s and 2000s, but it was indeed a culmination–an end–because complacency and the totality of its form of anonymity rendered it non-sustainable. I remember acknowledging that at the time, and feeling as though my online world was passing away even as it stood resplendent in its most accomplished form.
And so it did. It took me four years to admit it, but the internet is dead. The pathways and connections through which such experiments as /r9k/ emerged as hubs for collective contemplation (a great majority of us, myself included, were not active 4chan members, and that fact was pivotal to elements of the discussion) dried up into defunct forums and dead irc channels. Our mutual file-sharing ties, the final tether, were severed by delayed but decisive corporate rationality headed by the likes of Apple and Netflix. The generation-spanning cultivation of anonymity was wiped clean and even culturally discredited by Facebook, with present-day internet users lavishly emblazoning their identity upon all electronic activity. The collective internet mind dispersed into relegated pockets. I am now an individual, and I despise that fact.
I wanted to talk about Clint Eastwood’s chair, but I couldn’t. I could tell a few people about it. I’m not really doing so at the moment, but I could. I could also scream at the wall, as so many youtube users of voting age are doing right now. And indeed, they’re relatively anonymous. Chloe Smith and blessedchevy20 will certainly never know that I read their banter, and, though I could probably trace down their thorough identities with easy today, apathy preserves them. But they aren’t engaging anything. Their ‘thoughts’, if what they wrote even amounts to thinking, involved not but petty rebuttals to the most recent of 12,000 comments, by now surely buried behind thousands more. The /r9k/ ideal, of thoughtful engagement under the shroud of total anonymity, was short-lived. Perhaps it carries on in some diminished form. But the long-sustained anonymous community is what we’ve truly lost. The modestly sized forum; the casual irc channel; the self-contained communities where one could engage under independent but locally consistent identities: it’s their loss that we now suffer.
Would so many adults scream at the wall if they had any alternative? In an age where everyone has access to the internet, would we be so simultaneously excitable and yet devoid of well-formed opinions if we had any means of discussion? I can talk here and hope you hear me. I can shout on youtube knowing you won’t. In neither medium am I well positioned to receive an intelligible response by an identity in equal social standing. You’re either on my turf or in the combat zone with barely time to breathe before taking aim. And even if the spirit of youtube calmed down a bit, what can you meaningfully say in 500 characters?
I don’t want to talk about Clint Eastwood’s chair anymore. I was going to say some silly crap about a metaphor for lack of political leadership that would sound corny as hell but would spark up some discussion. But I can’t do that here, because as an editor I’m in charge and that means I have to maintain boundaries. And there’s no point in doing it anywhere else. I guess I’ll just go back to playing Warcraft, maybe discuss the new expertise cap or auction house inflation. In the absence of loosely-moderated discussion boards and public chats those seem to be the approachable topics we have left on the internet.
Through the Shattered Lens 
I’ve realized the internet we all grew up on really just a fond memory. I mean this is the Internet 2.0 they’ve been touting for years. I still remember those times you speak of. While I can’t say those were “free thought sharing” times. I remember some very frustrating and maddening moments over at FFG boards when old-time members would go on rants and just shout down anyone who disagreed with them, but those days were still more open than now. More civilized actually despite some bad moments I mentioned.
Now, too many people comment without a thought about whether they actually make sense. It’s the “I’ll shout the loudest and angriest” mode of commenting that wants to be accepted as fact and everyone to wholeheartedly agree with them, but also rude and assholish towards anyone who may disagree.
I’ve thought about setting up a forum to link up to the site since we’ve received more followers and subscribers the last couple months, but the fear that so much time would be taken up moderating the idiots and screamers would take up too much of our time is what’s keeping me from pulling the trigger.
The comments on the site may not be as numerous as some other places, but for the most part the discussion that do begin I’ve seen to be more thought out, at least not as combative as most places though we still get them.
I think this new internet you’re either a moron shouting at the moon thinking what you’re spewing is witty, intelligent and/or important when they’re not or you’re a silent visitor whose fear of being made fun by those mentioned above keeps one from leaving comments and/or participating. I’m optimistic enough to think that there’s more of the latter than the former and in time the latter realizes there’s places to talk without the fear of being singled out.
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I remember that, at one time, I was really quite enthusiastic about us having a forum at this site and a part of me still thinks that it’s a good idea. That said, forums do tend to bring out the trolls.
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Oh yes, I’m not suggesting there was some idyllic state in the past where no one fought and everyone settled their differences calmly. But we did all interact. People did not just cheer or scream without any expectation of a response as they do now. The content cap on shout boxes, the physical structure of Facebook forums, they all favor minimal input, and when people are forced to sum up their thoughts in a paragraph it rarely amounts to more than banter.
If you think about some of the bad seeds on FFG for instance, the troublesome threads they started were also some of the longest. They stuck around, continuing to contribute under the pseudonym they chose for the instance, and at the end of the day whether their horizons were consciously broadened or not they were at least exposed to a lot of other people’s thoughts and opinions. Modern structures simply do not favor interaction. When most thoughts are forced to be summed up in a paragraph, no one can stop and meaningfully engage the previous poster. Meanwhile, it’s almost impossible to post under a pseudonym unique to the topic or to the small community in which it appears, what with email, Facebook, and every other popular medium all connected to identify the same individual. Content becomes increasingly less thoughtful and interactive, and at the same time much of what people say sticks with them forever. I fear over time it’s creating an atmosphere where the sort of shouting I quoted from youtube does in fact sum up the majority of an individual’s opinion; they’ve never found cause to think it through further or read other people’s ideas, and they’re totally apathetic to the standing of their public identity.
A WordPress blog leaves a lot more room for interaction, and indeed I think it’s the best option we have right now, but they’re generally highly isolated based on content, and contributions frequently amount to comments on someone else’s thoughts rather than engagement in an open-ended discussion. It always amazes me when someone resurrects an obscure two year old post of mine to say “lulz ur an idiot”. I could brush it off as trolling, but I don’t think it is. If it was, surely they’d be speaking under a pseudonym and not their internet-wide identity. No, I think that’s honestly all the more a lot of people have to say, because they’ve never experienced an online environment in which further thought is necessary.
And yes, I definitely think a lot of intelligent people avoid posting because of it, not so much out of ‘fear’ of being verbally assaulted as out of disgust/disinterest stemming from the fact that they’re conditioned to assume that only a verbal assault or petty “I agree” will follow.
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I think the biggest problem with how low interactivity between people on the internet has come is in part due to the so-called anonymity the net allows people to have. Like you said in the beginning of your post it would be simple enough for some to find out the real person behind the username no matter how anonymous they try to make it sound. Then again it was that ver same safety of anonymity which allowed for frank and intelligent discourse to flourish in the past.
I think that for us who grew up on the dial-up internet, or for those even older the BBS boards, we earned and learned how to not abuse that sense of being anonymous. We didn’t learn to use it to attack others verbally because there was a good chance no real consequence can come of it, but that we saw it like the old CB handle of the past. We didn’t see usernames as a way to be anonymous but to stand out from the crowd, to be unique in a sea of internet voices.
Hell, my original FFG username of Tullaryx got more than it’s share of inquiries which got me noticed when I did post.
Nowadays, people (especially the younger ones who grew up on the internet without ever having to learn it’s “etiquette”) use username as a way to keep themselves hidden from everyone while at the same time giving them a sense that they can say whatever they want and nothing comes of it. This breeds a sense of meanness and entitlement that because no one knows who they really are (a falsehood that they tend to ignore) they can spout off idiocies and “l33t-speak” nonsense. I can’t blame it all on the youngin’s though Sailor would say I should since some of the older and idiot elements who grew up like us during the non-high speed internet days came up with such shortcomings when it comes to active interaction.
The funny and ironic thing about the young people today is that within a decade they’ll be just like us, bemoaning the downfall of internet civilization and then they’ll realize that they help contribute to it.
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While I’m generally on the far “left” side of the political ledger, I do hold the occasional opinion that’s more in line with some of the more “conservative” folks out there, and I do opine on these types of things on twitter, facebook, etc. with regularity, so I can tell you this from personal experience — having had times where my opinions have pissed off both “liberals” and “conservatives,” there’s just no comparison — so-called “conservatives” are much more rabid and mouth-foaming here on the internet when you kick over their hornet’s nest. Yeah, it’s pretty easy to get a so-called “leftist” of any sort riled up as well, but at some point they usually move on to something else or just shrug their shoulders and forget it, like all reasonable human beings do when they see nobody’s opinion is going to change. Piss of the right wing, though, and it’s like throwing raw meat to a starving dog. Dozens, even hundreds, of them will descend upon you for even the most mild criticism of one of their so-called “leaders” and not let up on you until they’ve exhausted their supply of insults, innuendo, hysterical overreaction, and general rabid cliche-mongering. I noticed this as well when a media figure says something one group or the other may perceive as being “out of line.” When the Dixie Chicks merely stated they were “embarrassed” to be from the same state as Bush — hardly the most stinging insult — they had their music banned from several stations, mass record-burnings were held, they were burned in effigy, church sermons were delivered on what a mortal sin they had committed, etc. Yet when loose cannons on the right like Ted Nugent threaten, in public, on numerous occasions, to assassinate Obama, there’s no similar reaction — people griped for a day, he got the obilgatory secret service visit, and that was it.
I’m not saying the overreaction can’t get ugly on both sides. Quite clearly it can. But it pretty much ALWAYS gets ugly from the righties, and this type of “agree with us 100% or you’re a welfare-sucking, commie-loving, America-hating, God-denying,pink-panty-wearing nancy-boy who hates our troops and burns the flag” is the reason so many of us wonder if the conservative movement as we’ve known it in the past has devolved from being a legitimate political school of thought into becoming — and I use this word with precision — a cult. A cult based on symbology (the flag, the cross), authority, military might, and economic might (don’t tax the rich, let poor go without health insurance and food stamps). And frankly I find it ironic that so many members of a bunch that claims to work hard and value their families so much seems to have so much free time to kill on the internet.
All of which is not to say that there aren’t thoughtful and intelligent right-wing conservatives out there. Of course there are. But their voices are being drowned out on their own side by the “raw meat” crowd — those who don’t just disagree with Obama on the issues, but insist that he’s a socialist (or fascist, or commie) who was born in Kenya and wants to turn us into a nation of full-time welfare-scroungers, claims which don;t just reflect a differing view, but have NO BASIS IN REALITY WHATSOEVER. In that sense, a bitter old rich white guy having a conversation with an imaginary version of Barack Obama that doesn;t even exist is actually a pretty apt metaphor for modern conservatism in general.
And while we’re on the subject of geriatric celebrities at political conventions, I see the Democrats have hired Betty White to speak at theirs. Whatever one’s political leanings, it’s pretty clear they’ve won this little Campaign 2012 version of “Celebrity Death Match.” Everybody LIKES Clint Eastwood — everybody ADORES Betty White.
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For what it’s worth, I can’t stand Betty White. I think most people are scared to admit that they’ve grown tired of having to deal with her every time they turn on the TV. That’s something that she has in common with President Obama.
I follow both liberals and conservatives on twitter and I tend to keep my own personal politics to myself. However, I have to disagree with this whole argument that the conservatives are naturally more obnoxius than liberals. So far, as far as this election year is concerned, they’ve both been equally obnoxious, equally annoying, equally self-righteous, and (oddly enough) equally sexist and racist. (Seriously, guys, I don’t care if you like how she votes or not, it’s still not cool to just casually toss around the “c” word.) As far as cults are concerned, there’s nothing more cult-like than some of these Obamaniacs, who continue to insist that their leader is some sort of liberal messiah despite the fact that he’s pretty much made himself at home in Wall Street’s back pocket. I recently got an email from one of them that read, “Don’t worry! We’ve got a real-life super hero and his name is Barack Obama!”
The Obamaniacs remind me of the election night episode of South Park, when Randy Marsh stood out in the middle of the street and yelled, “I CAN FEEL IT! THE CHANGE IS COMING!”
These are the same folks who, right now over at sites like AwardsDaily.com are still crying because one of their icons — Clint Eastwood — has now publicly stated that he doesn’t vote the same way that they do.
(And, quite frankly, considering how massively uneven Eastwood’s films have gotten as of late, I’m not sure I would want him endorsing any candidate that I was planning on voting for.)
And that is why I’m voting for… (drum roll)
Actually, Lisa doesn’t do endorsements. 🙂
Well, that and I have yet to actually make up my mind. I’ve got it narrowed down to three candidates. Now it’s just a question of do I want to vote for someone who could win or do I want to use my vote to make a statement about the way I think things should be. It’s sad to say but with the current state of American politics, I can’t do both.
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There truly is something “cultish” about the breathless Obama-worshippers, I have to agree. But they don’t concern me that much because when he’s out of office — which probably won’t happen this year, they can all go back to being sane again (should they desire). But watch. If it’s Hillary Clinton for the Dems the next time around, the internet conservatives are going to paint her as being, if anything, even worse than Obama, and their rhetoric is only going to get more heated, more ferocious, and more unhinged. They’ve been on a steady trajectory since about 1980 or so of farther and farther and farther “out there” in terms of their positions while denouncing their opponenets in ever more brazen terms. I would agree that at this point, though, any vote for either of the “big two” candidates is a vote for Wall Street to keep having its way with the rest of us. I don’t think my own personal opinion carries any special amount of weight around these online venues we all participate in, so I don’t mind in the least admitting that I will be voting for Green Party nominee Jill Stein for president this year. But I’ll still probably watch Betty White’s speech at the DNC next week.
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Actually, since we have about 150 subscribers right now and get around 3,000 page views a day, I imagine that more than four or five people are going to read your thoughts. 🙂
But, otherwise, I have to sadly agree with your point. The Internet brings out the worst in people. I have to admit that I’m somewhat addicted to twitter and yet, this past week, I hardly logged into the site at all because I simply could not deal with all of the hatred that was being spewed by people on both sides of the political divide.
Unfortunately, it’s not just limited to politics. I can still remember some of the names that I’ve been called as a result of not loving Avatar or David Fincher’s rip-off of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
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you have my votes both as favorite to win *and* as representative of how things should be (win what, I’m not exactly sure – but whatever you want!)
🙂
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Truer wordss have never been spoken. When I first mentioned on twitter that I thought “The Avengers” was nothing too terribly special, just an average super-hero flick, I was laid into for days on end by the Cult of Whedon. Now there’s an online cult that can put both the conservatives and Obamaniacs to shame Talk about blind, ferocious loyalty!
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