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anorthiteSTILL no "things I am reading pt. insanity" has been produced, will be complaining to management. Hence no "year in review" for 1) not like the others reasons, 2) I don't have energy, 3) it would be deranged. Spoiler alert though: all the books I've read recently have been like ... tantalizing glimpses at the Subject I want but not enough of the real thing. Cue endless moaning about how nobody has written the perfect book/is rotating the same cube in their mind that I am rotating.
Anyway, this book is in essence about the way we in secular modernity are seeking elements of of Durkheim's sacred in our own lives, and so it's pretty appropriate that I read it in pretty much the most non-substance-affiliated altered mindset possible, which was: all in one day, starting at 5 am when the dog woke me up, and finishing on a 6 hr road-trip with a migraine while listening to Mahler.
This book was released in 2020, and therefore offers pretty much the last glimpse of a thesis on modern alternative religions without mentioning Qanon/neo-Satanic Panic that we are every probably going to get. The thesis is that the every-growing "spiritual but not religious" demographic is the result of a societal shift away from the institutional, community-centric religions of the past, and towards an increasingly bespoke, consumerist, individualized, and therefore syncretic/"remixed" version of personal spirituality. There are chapters on the overall trajectory of this trend in American religion (Great Awakenings and the personal God of even very old American Evangelicalism, the early 20th century popularity of theosophy and New Thought, the prosperity gospel, etc.), fandom, neo-occultism, wellness culture, technofuturism, social justice culture, and atavism/IDW reactionaries.
he fandom chapter focuses on the modern urge to "remix" or take ownership and individualize our experience of media products (re: fanfiction, fan entitlement/writers apologizing for character deaths). It talks about fandom as a source of identity, source of community, the snapewives, the ways that Harry Potter and Star Wars have provided a kind of language for talking about ourselves and our personalities. There was also a really, sincerely miserable-making example of MSD students protesting for gun control with Harry Potter-related protest signs -- Dumbledore's army still recruiting, Hermione used intelligence, not force. The idea of kids forced to advocate for their right to go to school in safety and having as the strongest rhetoric available to them the taglines of a multi-million dollar media franchise is just like ... the substitution of mass media for culture ... the appealing to people's sense of human empathy via characters who don't even exist ... (edvard munch the scream dot jpeg) I'm absolutely carrying this on too far but again, really miserable stuff. I think there was something of a missed opportunity in this chapter to further pursue the role of capitalism in fandom, because this "remixing," the application of a media product into various facets of your life, isn't without capitalist consequences. "Pop"-anything ... books, music, movies, TV ... that becomes a point of reference in society is a point of reference as advertisement, and is ultimately going to be used by SOMEONE to make you keep spending. The proliferation of these media products, no matter how much you transform and adapt and make them "your own" is never really going to come for free. Of course there's a kpop right turn to be taken here, but isn't there always.
I think the chapter about technofuturism and social justice culture, which the author posits as two competing contemporary civil religions, was also pretty interesting. Here we did get a bit more analysis of the ways in which both have become baldly capitalistic. She also continues the thread from the wellness chapter: you have to constantly strive for purity, for the removal of any and all toxicity from your surroundings, or else bear responsibility for the failures of yourself and others. It's really clear how this is the case in technofuturism, which of course is basically all about the Worst Guy You've Ever Met who is also incredibly wealthy getting on stage at a TED talk and telling you to optimize yourself by doing unpleasant things and being unpleasant to others. The close-cousinism to MRA/atavism/carnivore with a Roman bust avatar/neo-reactionary swampland is painfully clear even without the Peter Thiel connection.
The way that Burton ties in social justice culture with her overall thesis, aside from the ritualism of call-out-culture and the required striving towards purity and absolute correctness, is in the prioritization of individual lived experience over all other forms of knowing. I think about this a lot on twitter, where the constant application of this rule can create bizarre, nonsensical, and sometimes needlessly cruel results, particularly when two conflicting personal experiences butt heads. It reminds me a lot of some of the crazy and absolutist things that go on in twitter Marxism spheres, and I wonder if this is the result of pop-culturifying what are essentially two VERY pure materialist branches of sociology -- which is ultimately unquantifiable (cry about it C W Mills) in a way that DOES make personal experience important in an outsized proportion, and where the power dynamics that these fields are entirely focused on do shut out marginalized and oppressed voices in a real way. It's the difference between using these frameworks to understand the world and try to do something about it -- to use them as tools, to actually attempt change, or discussion, or literally anything constructive -- and viewing them as an unerring gospel.
Maybe I am wrong or don't understand and am thus incapable of understanding because I don't have the requisite personal experience, but I think by viewing people in the real world and not just the department study room as the sum only of their experiential identities is not much more helpful than historical materialism is as predicting, from where Marx sat in the London library, why we've achieved peak atomization with no revolution yet. Just because you CAN apply a rigid theory to everything in the world -- and you absolutely can -- the warm fuzziness of self-righteousness and comfort of molding the world onto your lens of choice doesn't mean that you are actually doing anything positive for anybody. I don't know; I still have a lot of thinking and reading to do about this, and both Marxism and critical theory have been hugely enriching to my perspective of the world. Also ... I don't want to offend people or cause them distress! I don't want people who are horrible to get away with it, even on the internet! I want to own up fully to unfair benefits I have received from society, and the real harm it does to others. But I'm not sure that the things I see on twitter -- the gospelification and absolutism put to work in the real world -- are doing this for anybody, and I think sometimes in addition they carry a harm of their own.
Ok, now I feel unburdened -- onto the final atavism/alt-right/IDW chapter. It's pretty clear the ways in which this segment ties in with the themes of the book, but this was also the site of my biggest topic-specific gripe. This is absolutely to do with my own lurking internet experience, but I feel like there is not enough emphasis put on the destructive capabilities of pure black-pill nihilism in ideologically agnostic internet cesspools. Some of the most prolific kinds of accelerationism on the internet have nothing to do with any of the other ideological flavours mentioned in this chapter, although they're often pinned to one of them in the wake of violence. I just think this would have been an interesting thread to tie in with the others in this book, since what could be a more appropriate capstone for individualistic, capitalism-ravaged religion than a totally atomized, nihilistic and yet accelerationist belief in nothing?
This chapter HEAVILY cited "It Came from Something Awful," and "Kill All Normies," and yet I feel like both those books did It better. This was a constant issue in the book for me, and the bibliography is mostly full of journalist articles and original sources rather than research papers or books, which I felt was disappointing. It would have also been interesting had this book been written in the age of tiktok Satanic Panic/Qanon/JFK conspiracist/True Crime (although this article, which made me feel crazy, does: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22832827/manifesting-tiktok-astroworld-conspiracy-qanon-religion). What I felt was really missing was a sense of WHY we are here specifically -- beyond the identification of these forces of individualized religion in our world, although their history was discussed, why are we seeing this prevalence now? Is it truly just the result of slow-moving temporal trends, or the result of the crises of our era? This is how it ties into MY recent reading-books thesis -- I wanted MORE. Maybe this is in fact my own fucked up secular modernity religion search, a book that explains the problems of the world just as I want it to, and throws everything I've every thought about into clear and interconnected relief. Maybe this is a sign -- from the universe even! -- that in 2022 I should tally my losses, chill out, find a peaceful and ensconcing mass movement, and try yoga.
PS thoughts and prayers to Marin Honda ... some in FS may have forgotten Shoma's leaked incel moment but NOT ME!
Anyway, this book is in essence about the way we in secular modernity are seeking elements of of Durkheim's sacred in our own lives, and so it's pretty appropriate that I read it in pretty much the most non-substance-affiliated altered mindset possible, which was: all in one day, starting at 5 am when the dog woke me up, and finishing on a 6 hr road-trip with a migraine while listening to Mahler.
This book was released in 2020, and therefore offers pretty much the last glimpse of a thesis on modern alternative religions without mentioning Qanon/neo-Satanic Panic that we are every probably going to get. The thesis is that the every-growing "spiritual but not religious" demographic is the result of a societal shift away from the institutional, community-centric religions of the past, and towards an increasingly bespoke, consumerist, individualized, and therefore syncretic/"remixed" version of personal spirituality. There are chapters on the overall trajectory of this trend in American religion (Great Awakenings and the personal God of even very old American Evangelicalism, the early 20th century popularity of theosophy and New Thought, the prosperity gospel, etc.), fandom, neo-occultism, wellness culture, technofuturism, social justice culture, and atavism/IDW reactionaries.
he fandom chapter focuses on the modern urge to "remix" or take ownership and individualize our experience of media products (re: fanfiction, fan entitlement/writers apologizing for character deaths). It talks about fandom as a source of identity, source of community, the snapewives, the ways that Harry Potter and Star Wars have provided a kind of language for talking about ourselves and our personalities. There was also a really, sincerely miserable-making example of MSD students protesting for gun control with Harry Potter-related protest signs -- Dumbledore's army still recruiting, Hermione used intelligence, not force. The idea of kids forced to advocate for their right to go to school in safety and having as the strongest rhetoric available to them the taglines of a multi-million dollar media franchise is just like ... the substitution of mass media for culture ... the appealing to people's sense of human empathy via characters who don't even exist ... (edvard munch the scream dot jpeg) I'm absolutely carrying this on too far but again, really miserable stuff. I think there was something of a missed opportunity in this chapter to further pursue the role of capitalism in fandom, because this "remixing," the application of a media product into various facets of your life, isn't without capitalist consequences. "Pop"-anything ... books, music, movies, TV ... that becomes a point of reference in society is a point of reference as advertisement, and is ultimately going to be used by SOMEONE to make you keep spending. The proliferation of these media products, no matter how much you transform and adapt and make them "your own" is never really going to come for free. Of course there's a kpop right turn to be taken here, but isn't there always.
I think the chapter about technofuturism and social justice culture, which the author posits as two competing contemporary civil religions, was also pretty interesting. Here we did get a bit more analysis of the ways in which both have become baldly capitalistic. She also continues the thread from the wellness chapter: you have to constantly strive for purity, for the removal of any and all toxicity from your surroundings, or else bear responsibility for the failures of yourself and others. It's really clear how this is the case in technofuturism, which of course is basically all about the Worst Guy You've Ever Met who is also incredibly wealthy getting on stage at a TED talk and telling you to optimize yourself by doing unpleasant things and being unpleasant to others. The close-cousinism to MRA/atavism/carnivore with a Roman bust avatar/neo-reactionary swampland is painfully clear even without the Peter Thiel connection.
The way that Burton ties in social justice culture with her overall thesis, aside from the ritualism of call-out-culture and the required striving towards purity and absolute correctness, is in the prioritization of individual lived experience over all other forms of knowing. I think about this a lot on twitter, where the constant application of this rule can create bizarre, nonsensical, and sometimes needlessly cruel results, particularly when two conflicting personal experiences butt heads. It reminds me a lot of some of the crazy and absolutist things that go on in twitter Marxism spheres, and I wonder if this is the result of pop-culturifying what are essentially two VERY pure materialist branches of sociology -- which is ultimately unquantifiable (cry about it C W Mills) in a way that DOES make personal experience important in an outsized proportion, and where the power dynamics that these fields are entirely focused on do shut out marginalized and oppressed voices in a real way. It's the difference between using these frameworks to understand the world and try to do something about it -- to use them as tools, to actually attempt change, or discussion, or literally anything constructive -- and viewing them as an unerring gospel.
Maybe I am wrong or don't understand and am thus incapable of understanding because I don't have the requisite personal experience, but I think by viewing people in the real world and not just the department study room as the sum only of their experiential identities is not much more helpful than historical materialism is as predicting, from where Marx sat in the London library, why we've achieved peak atomization with no revolution yet. Just because you CAN apply a rigid theory to everything in the world -- and you absolutely can -- the warm fuzziness of self-righteousness and comfort of molding the world onto your lens of choice doesn't mean that you are actually doing anything positive for anybody. I don't know; I still have a lot of thinking and reading to do about this, and both Marxism and critical theory have been hugely enriching to my perspective of the world. Also ... I don't want to offend people or cause them distress! I don't want people who are horrible to get away with it, even on the internet! I want to own up fully to unfair benefits I have received from society, and the real harm it does to others. But I'm not sure that the things I see on twitter -- the gospelification and absolutism put to work in the real world -- are doing this for anybody, and I think sometimes in addition they carry a harm of their own.
Ok, now I feel unburdened -- onto the final atavism/alt-right/IDW chapter. It's pretty clear the ways in which this segment ties in with the themes of the book, but this was also the site of my biggest topic-specific gripe. This is absolutely to do with my own lurking internet experience, but I feel like there is not enough emphasis put on the destructive capabilities of pure black-pill nihilism in ideologically agnostic internet cesspools. Some of the most prolific kinds of accelerationism on the internet have nothing to do with any of the other ideological flavours mentioned in this chapter, although they're often pinned to one of them in the wake of violence. I just think this would have been an interesting thread to tie in with the others in this book, since what could be a more appropriate capstone for individualistic, capitalism-ravaged religion than a totally atomized, nihilistic and yet accelerationist belief in nothing?
This chapter HEAVILY cited "It Came from Something Awful," and "Kill All Normies," and yet I feel like both those books did It better. This was a constant issue in the book for me, and the bibliography is mostly full of journalist articles and original sources rather than research papers or books, which I felt was disappointing. It would have also been interesting had this book been written in the age of tiktok Satanic Panic/Qanon/JFK conspiracist/True Crime (although this article, which made me feel crazy, does: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22832827/manifesting-tiktok-astroworld-conspiracy-qanon-religion). What I felt was really missing was a sense of WHY we are here specifically -- beyond the identification of these forces of individualized religion in our world, although their history was discussed, why are we seeing this prevalence now? Is it truly just the result of slow-moving temporal trends, or the result of the crises of our era? This is how it ties into MY recent reading-books thesis -- I wanted MORE. Maybe this is in fact my own fucked up secular modernity religion search, a book that explains the problems of the world just as I want it to, and throws everything I've every thought about into clear and interconnected relief. Maybe this is a sign -- from the universe even! -- that in 2022 I should tally my losses, chill out, find a peaceful and ensconcing mass movement, and try yoga.
PS thoughts and prayers to Marin Honda ... some in FS may have forgotten Shoma's leaked incel moment but NOT ME!
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