#76: Cemetry Gates
A few weeks ago I glanced at my Facebook feed (I still do that sometimes) and noticed that a high school friend had posted, "Mr Gorbachev, tear up this club." Having wasted a full decade on Twitter, I immediately recognized this joke as a viral @extranapkins tweet from 2012 (3,000 retweets in 2012 is worth at least 50k in 2019 dollars). Now, I am 99% sure that my high school friend hadn't seen that original tweet and therefore wasn't copying it for personal gain. His wording was even slightly different. I started thinking about this meme's six-year journey from a dark corner of young Twitter to the florescent lighting of high-school-friend Facebook. Searching for the same joke on Twitter today reveals that many others have tweeted it since, mostly without crediting @extranapkins (and exactly one person tweeted it before he did). The joke is fairly obvious and concise but 2012 seems to mark the moment when the idea became broadly "available" to the world.
There are two different explanations for this phenomenon that I'll argue are different ways of looking at the same thing: One is that a single Twitter user released this sentiment into the collective unconscious, or activated an existing sentiment, and that by going viral that sentiment has become thoroughly and invisibly embedded in the fabric of culture to such a degree that it now consistently reappears throughout the world. The other explanation is that creative originality, the kind we still police with terms like "plagiarism," is even more of a myth than we realize, and we hadn't faced that because we never had the tools to observe how much we repeat one another. Among the many well-known pitfalls of having all our data live forever on the internet, one is that we finally have a near-perfect record of everyday communication, and we probably haven't yet acknowledged how transformative that is. Fifty years ago, we could demand that published authors and students produce original work because we had mechanisms to measure and enforce that originality. Now, those same mechanisms extend to anyone sharing anything publicly online.
So, the collective unconscious may just be a 20th-century term for what is now becoming blindingly obvious: a metaphor for the consistent cultural blueprint shared by all of our brains, the similarity of which will henceforth be demonstrated again and again by software and the searchable, immortal data trails we all leave behind. Beyond memes and viral tweets, other nascent features of digital existence force us to reckon with this in uncomfortable ways: Autocomplete and Gmail's smart replies, horrifyingly, confront us with how predictable so much of our communication is, and also retroactively expose how predictable it always was during the long analog epoch when we could pretend otherwise. Rob Horning, reflecting on these emergent norms, writes that smart replies "automate our participation in the collective at the level of shared phrases, common ways of expressing ourselves and depicting our reality." Rather than demanding originality from ourselves and our peers, software might instead free us from the burden of coming up with something new, and thus put us back in touch with the premodern joys of simply repeating one another.
Reads:
A manifesto from David Banks about how urban planning needs to become less technocratic and "re-center the human in the city" (this kicks off a column he'll write for Real Life).
A fun discussion of restaurant website aesthetics and how web design conventions have evolved (accompanied by an excellent gallery of examples).
Alex Pareene on how America's unprecedented consumer wealth masks deepening inequality as measured by the criteria that actually matter.