BOOK CLUB: Kill All Normies Ch2+3 (Patreon)

[Pictured: first page of Justine, one of the vulgar pornographic works for which Marquis de Sade was imprisoned in the early 1800s]

Well, you're not gonna believe this, but chapter 2 made me uncomfortable! There were hurtful words and subjects discussed that i would consider taboo!!!!!!!!!!

I would've warned you about the horrible RIP trolling stuff that 4chan does in this chapter but I didn't know about it, so we are all just experiencing it together! How exciting. 

I could reconfigure my life so that I read the entirety of books in advance of Book Club but honestly I kind of prefer to be doing it with everyone in real time, which leaves me incapable of trigger warning everything, much like real life. So instead let it be known we do swashbuckling adventures in the Kill The Internet Book Club! Tightrope walking above an inferno with the safety of our community to balance us out.

I'd say this is the second kind of difficult spiky text we've done (I see you Lila vets) and I always look forward to just how people peel it apart.

Speaking of which, the How To Do Nothing Book Report is done! It's 31 pages, and I'll release it + a new essay on my freshly redesigned website sometime this week!

Here's another hit of it:

So remember to take littol pics of yoruself and your environment and your annotations as u read Kill All Normies and type out your wonderful reflections because we would love to include you in Book Report #2.

Transgression

I guess I am a transgressive person in a fundamental sense, but I really don't consciously value being transgressive. I like dark humour and I'm interested in conversations that seem too dangerous to have, and stuff like that, but that's just a personality trait, and ultimately I don't think those are smart or proper behaviours to exercise constantly publicly without some judiciousness. As I get a little older I notice how badly i want to be able to be like, normal at parties lmfao. I also notice how bad I am at it, how much of a skill it is to be considerate.

I am quite risque and disruptive and sacrilegious, if you know me. But I'm also very reverent to tradition and practice, If you really know me.

It's kind of similar to the place Nagle believes transgressive feminists find themselves in. Transgression is obviously a major tactic in the history of social justice activism. After all, any disruption of the status quo and assertion of an alternative value system will necessarily be interpreted as transgressive to the dominant order. 

Stallybrass and White considered the carnivalesque to be a form of radical transgression against hierarchy and hegemony: 'The grotesque tends to operate as a critique of a dominant ideology which has already set the terms designating what is high and what is low' (p. 35)

But when transgression itself is taken as it's own value, we confront the pure potential of chaos without direction, without limitation. It can dynamically enhance the badassery of bigotry precisely as well as it can enhance the badassery of a moral cause.

I sometimes think that because I'm a naturally revolutionary and transgressive personality, it is my lot in life to move towards tradition, peacemaking, collectivism. It's what my heart yearns for, what I was born without. I'm never gonna lack the ability to make highly individualistic Death Instinct things about how special and unique I am, so I should be stretching to reach for the Life Instinct values of community service, conforming, for lack of a better word.

Tying Trangression to the Ukeles's Death Instinct actually makes it very clear very quickly.

Baille revered transgression in and of itself, and like de Sade viewed non-procreative sex as an expression of the sovereign against instrumentalism, what he called 'expenditure without reserve'. For him excessive behavior without purpose, which also characterizes the sensibility of contemporary meme culture in which enormous human effort is exerted with no obvious personal benefit, was paradigmatically transgressive in an age of Protestant instrumental rationality. (p. 35)

I had a very fascinating conversation with an artist in her 40s that I briefly cohabitated with in Parkdale. She was expressing concern that in our modern era we've increased our language for accountability and safety around sex, but had sacrificed a lot of the sexual liberation that she and her culture had pushed for in her 20s. She thought in chasing a moral cause, we'd lost some of the play  and fortitude that transgression allowed for, and hoped we would try to reclaim some of that moving forward.

The Gen Z Sexual Puritanism is much discussed I think on Tik Tok? But I don't look at Tik Tok because it makes my head hurt, so I leave that to you.

During the recent online culture wars, and their spillover into campus and protest politics, feminists have tried to embrace transgression with the Slut Walk movement and sex-positive pro-trans, pro-sex worker and pro-kink culture that was central to Tumblr. However, like the right, it has run up against a deep philosophical problem about the ideologically flexible, a style, which can characterize misogyny just as easily as it can sexual liberation. (p. 37)

This, by the way, is why I don't tend to love dirtbag left style stuff. "Edgy" content creators. I just think that ironic, post-ironic edginess slides so easily into transgression for transgression's sake, and ultimately a lack of care.

As Lach understood, for progressive politics anti-moral transgression has always been a bargain with the devil, because the case for equality is essentially a moral one" (p. 38)

I try to strike a careful balance with my content and online presence. Don't make it safe, don't make it fall over itself apologizing for things, but don't give people permission to just Not Care. I've been happy with the results so far.

"... the transgressive anti-moral style, its final detachment from any egalitarian philosophy of the left or Christian morality of the right." (p. 39)

This quote strangely brought Andrew Tate to mind very vividly. I don't spend much time thinking about him! Becuase I find him very ugly, and I try not to think about ugly things (caus theyre ugly). However this description of transgression without reference to equality OR divine order, justifying itself on vague allusions to both, made me think of that ugly guy. Skimming the surface of ideology and philosophy, but the only thing really tying it all together is the petty, cheap, social media savy transgression.

I've always been so furious at people's inability to ignore such things, to ignore people who gain power when you say their name. Covering the raucous antics of Trump, even making jokes about them or being outraged, kind of reminds me of publicizing the names of school shooters lmfao. Sorry is that too fucking opinionated of me?! Are we POLITICAL NOW?!?!?!

Just my feelings. What are yours

Politics & Culture

And now we dig into some repressed memories!!!

I FORGOT about the Buzzfeed Listacle Quiz era. I forgot about Upworthy and the pervasive liberal clickbait Facebook trashiness of the early 2010s. Absolutely bonkers to be throttled back into my 13 year old body on such a Sunday as this.

Nagle, ever the opiniated historian, describes Vice magazine as "the most degenerate combination of vacuous hipster aesthetics and pornified transgression". I admit I am laughing. 

Ben Shaprio: I dislike him greatly. I'm not very interested in him he doesn't appear particularly talented or necessary or useful to me personally. Sometimes I get close to regretting that moment in my Bo Burnham video where "my heart lurched towards Ben Shapiro". Yet this chapter reminds me why I felt that way, and why I decided to include that moment in my piece on internet insanity. 

Shapiro wrote that under Bannon's leadership, 'Brietbart has become the alt-right go-to website... pushing white ethno-nationalism as a legitimate response to political correctness, and the comment section turning into a cesspool for white supremacist mememakers." (p. 48) 

This fact he has his faith, and that his faith pushes him away from the most decadent transgression of his own culture war faction, gives me hope. Not for him, I don't care about him (ugly), but hope for humanity to prevail in some of these uphill climbs. Hope that even people I disagree with and dislike have some shards of common humanity within them that can be accessed and cultivated by the right story. Hope that there is some sort of Ugly and Beautiful that we can agree on, that can work somehow.

Yet the raw realities of audience capture and capitalistic growth via riding the flames of the division repulse me, and it's hard to sympathize with Shapiro when he so gleefully rode the culture war to fame and fortune in the most shameless manner possible. 

those whose ascendant careers depended upon not punching right." (p. 49)

I can never get over Shapiro's past as a failed screenplay writer, and the current attempt of The Daily Wire to move into culture creation. It fascinates me. You can't make culture, so you instead make your money and fame as a transgressive culture critic. Then use that money and fame to try to make culture, and fail, because you still don't have the juice. To have worshipped this pattern of outrage and mockery, then try to pivot to art, but lacking the muscle mass to do what Art is supposed to do. So tragic. 

There's this old long lesson that I really... want to believe is true? That integrity wins somehow? That poisonous spiritual behaviour begets rotten fruits. Of course, there will always be the God of Job: things can go sideways for reasons totally out of your control, genuine random tragedy. But I *think* it matters whether or not you join the leopards eating people's face Party, so I'm kind of encouraged and depressed at how quickly Milo's snarky ironic reactionary fanbase dropped him as an icon when his opportune fun dissipated. 

"...today, since Milo's career has been destroyed, to the indifference or even glee of the alt right he was promoting..." (p. 49)

I try to tell people with my job to think carefully, stop tweeting, slow down. Think. Integrity.... has an impact. In the Quality, if not Quantity, of your successes in the world.

It is important to make the number go up, but if you don't make the number go up the right way, you might find yourself very far from where you intended to be.

This is why I've grown so interested in Pragmatism as a philosophy for the digital age. What works? And works for what? These are the questions I find infinitely more pressing than "What is Objectively Correct?".

Ahhh, always so fun to launch my vulnerable thoughts out there on these. I have to speak first! Imagine my shaky knees.

I compile my quotes & thoughts Saturday, then I wake up early Sunday morning and refine it over coffee. Then I post it and go to church. 

So off to church I go.

Let me know what you thought:

Transgression & Religious Dogma Below!