Girl congrats for inventing being normal—@mgzxr, 21 June 2021
Totalized data-knowledge amounts to absolute ignorance: the absolute zero of Spirit.—Byung-Chul Han
femcels unite—TikTok comment, June 2021
THE ABSOLUTE STATE OF THE NORMATIVE VIBE
To momentarily burst the bubble of online presence, it is enough to recall what the German-Swiss thinker Byung-Chul Han says in his book Psychopolitics, that under internet conditions ‘the subjugated subject is not aware of its own subjugation’. Since even the creator of the most efflorescent online content is, according to Han, a literal slave to so-called ‘Big Data’, what ‘content’-value really means in the present lingers as a radically open question.
Han develops the idea of a ‘digital panopticon’ in which today ‘everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise’. In other words, the functioning of what some still call ‘neo-liberal enslavement’ is now entrusted not to states or corporations, but to us. In this way, digital capitalism’s own needs are constantly mistaken for our own. In fact, a paradox arises in which the more irresistible and interesting content becomes, the less we are able to disentangle ourselves from whether the content is for us or for a machinal impulse that has no care of us but constantly lets and makes us think otherwise.
This vanishing point—between at least two sets of needs at the heart of ‘content’ as such—can of course be fertile, even psychedelic and beautiful. From the point of view of netnography, the ‘internet’ as singularity-organism tends to proceed by ‘shifts’. For example, the GameStop saga was followed by the NFT explosion of early summer 2021, by DAO wave, by the great ‘VIBE SHIFT’ of June 2021, and so on. Many such ‘vibe shifts’ will continue to take place, precisely because of the letting go of subjective control at the point of a beautiful or terrifying proliferation (content-effulgence).
In each phase, it remains hard to tell whether the shift is more productive than it is part of an ongoing ubiquitous relapse (ubilapse) that defines the highly problematic aspects of what Guillaume Pitron calls the digital transition.
THE HISTORY OF THE INTERNET, OR, HOW WE ALL DIED ONLINE
Part of the reason the internet is almost impossible to leave is that the addictogenic screens on which it relies are also erotogenic screens. Again, a confusion (of needs) takes place that is at once productive and fatal. Han eventually says in Psychopolitics that ‘the auto-exploiting subject will carry around its own labour camp’. This allusion to the ‘camp’ may seem excessive. But to be online now is to take part in a staying-online that can be so extreme and all-consuming—economically, psychically, logistically, emotionally, medically, sexually, and so on—that it coincides almost exactly with accelerating movements of biomorphic co-extinction.
We would rather go extinct than go offline, in unconscious effect. Or rather, since going offline is all but impossible for most—or beyond their subjective will—the question is already decided (we will not go offline, but we will go extinct). Instead of dividing the recent history of the internet into episodic shifts, we might simply say that this is the period in which we all went extinct online.
DATAISM AND EROTOGENESIS
But how is this extinctogenesis specifically sexual? Certainly, HD p*rn content now approaches an impossibility axis. That is, some p*rnographesis, to some consumers, is figured as impossibly good. So good that it easily replaces the need and, eventually, existence of actual sexual expression and intimacy, if not the conceptual drive. (Sexual genealogy already formalizes itself as a series of handover cues for the moment artificial intelligence harvests what it desires from what sex would have meant.)
Han gives to the eroto- and addictogenesis of the screen a special sense and a number of names. To be ‘very online’, he says, is to be digi-sexual. The Quantifiable nature of our content becomes something like a sexual and data-fused p*rnographesis:
On the whole, dataism is displaying libidinous—indeed, p*rnographic—traits. Dataists mate with their data. In the meanwhile, there is even talk of ‘datasexuals’. They are ‘relentlessly digital’ and consider data ‘sexy’. The digitus is starting to play the part of the phallus.
In light of this, online ‘p*rn’ is not a problem located on this or that p*rn site but in the entirety of the online experience. The internet itself as digitus central is a kind of panoptical phallus. To be successful, to hate-read, to go Lindy, to lurk, to post in the other’s face, these are all forms of dataist self-capture and (often ecstatic and hyper-sexy) self-own. From the inside they can feel abstractly ‘sexy’ and, since from the inside there is almost nothing but inside, hyper-sexiness extends all the way beyond actual sex, hence the appearance of ‘femcel’ content for example or a certain strain of Dark Catholic Crypto ‘only God is good enough for me’ e-girlism.
FRUSTRATION ONTOLOGY
This dataism and meta-sexiness can also come into being as frustration. The vestiges of sexual frustration can be carried over into a new world of chaste general content sexuality. Namely, one thing that piques (or pricks?) the ‘very online’ dataist is not so much subtlety as subtle gradations of non-meaning (dryness). The closer to non-meaning something is, the more frustratingly subject to repetition and virality. The ultimate meaning-tease in this respect is perhaps the Lindy phenomenon.
Let us try not to repeat all the verbiage about what Lindy is and is not. Such definitional attempts are in any case often reduced to just that, listing things as ‘Lindy’ and ‘not Lindy’. Or to spending a whole podcast exhausting available meanings of ‘Lindy’ without daring to say that precisely what Lindy seems to mean is the digitus of frustration and non-meaning itself.
The definitional flailing that marks every attempt to define Lindy is simply a function of the digitus creating niche areas of dataist pleasure, or rather dataist masochism and self-signalling. The recent episode of Red Scare on Lindy was occasioned, as if automatically and meaninglessly, not so much by LindyMan as by the Paul Skallas/Lindy profile in the New York Times. These formal means are how the frustration signal is passed on.
The pleasure quotient for Anna and Dasha’s own discussion was itself frustration, cued up for them in advance by what Lindy is. Every time the discussion veered towards the banks of absolute non-meaning (is this even a Thing? perhaps not fully getting Lindy is actually . . . Lindy), the nonspeaking host steered us back to the middle path of normative and accepted non-meaning (but Lindy is a thing, thank you for inventing the normal!).
More precisely, Lindy is the game wherein one subscribes to the game of talking about Lindy in which the game is that and nothing else. To be Lindy is to Lindy-signal and to talk through the various meanings of Lindy, to threaten to dismiss them and it, but then to settle for the fact that ‘Lindy’ is Lindy and ‘Lindy’ is a word, and ‘normal’ is now IT. Lindy, for example, is the superficial phenomenon of just how predictable discussions of the fact that the NYT Lindy article was itself Lindy automatically became.
K-HOLE REPLICA WRITING MEETS FAKE LINDY
In a Substack post called ‘Bet on Writing’ (also written after the NYT article), Sean Monahan makes the argument that ‘writing’ is making a comeback. He focuses on Substack Wave—as seemed to begin to be a Thing when Glenn Greenwald moved to the site during the Hunter Biden laptop censorship saga just before the 2020 election—and takes as his central example of this wave Paul Skallas and his Substack, saying:
While much of the attention around Substack has been focused on controversial, but highly visible (and high earning) journalists who jumped ship from mainstream media companies—Paul Skallas is probably a more interesting case. He built his brand on the newsletter platform. He is the breakout Substack star.
Monahan elsewhere makes the claim that the future of music is ‘rock’. This point about Skallas being the prime example of the new Substack wave of writing has a similar feel to it, in terms of a high degree of superarguability. No doubt, according to Lindy metrics—formal permanence is breakout—Skallas is something like ‘the breakout Substack star’. Also, it seems true that writing itself is often understood as perdurance. The digital image perhaps does not have, in very basic terms, anything like the same ability to survive a material apocalypse as does primitive inscription (script, writing, signs, notches).
However, it also seems clear that Monahan is not predicting or even analysing a ‘trend’ here, but is rather inside one. As noted, Lindy is nothing but the immanence of the mirage-effect of Lindy-signalling itself. One either indulges the rollcall of definitional frustration as enjoyable masochism (Lindy is this, is that, but is it even a Thing? I guess it must be) or one tags oneself as part of the effect by 100% approvingly alluding to Lindy and Skallas.
SMOOTH CRIMINALITY
There are several predictable things one might say about Lindy in terms of ‘critique’. Let’s skip most of them here, since ‘critique’ in its traditional form would then triangulate in a tiresome mise en abyme with the Lindy effect itself. Rather, we can simply note that this Lindy effect, which is not really locatable on the Skallas Substack but in the frustrated definitional attempts as if magnetizing it, relies in an absolute way on the subjugated ‘very online’ subject who is, by definition, impossibly aware of their own subjugation.
In simple terms, the Lindy effect in its Skallas rendition is a very online effect. Skallas himself has built up a following and a notoriety through continuing to post and (by formal definition) little else beyond that. The baseline definition of ‘Lindy’ would therefore be perdurance (insistence, staying-power) without thought as to what that now means. To keep posting, keep posting. To get more ‘likes’, stay online. To deepen your online praxis, simply remove all negativity (the ublilapse is often marked by a certain smoothness).
The directive to be online therefore absolutely coincides with what Han says about the digital panopticon and content labour camps. ‘Lindy’ would not just be one example among others of this, but the name given to the absolute subjugation of the subject hidden in the simple unconscious directive, ‘do not go offline’, and its absolute forgetting. To refer to or to champion or to join in with ‘Lindy’ is thus to be absolutely coinciautocidal with the most innocent-looking (and lethal) universal form of increasing auto-exploitation imaginable.
‘LINDY DOES NOT EXIST’
If the very inward form of digital capitalism is designed to keep us online, then ‘Lindy’ is the empty value-form of what it means to be held to that task. Lindy is not classical in its interests at all (I can find my own list of Mozart symphonies, thank you) but entirely modern, even if appearances indicate otherwise.
When Monahan writes about ‘Lindy’ he is diagnostically universal insofar as there is an ublilapsing completely into this vertiginous and contagious self-exploitation. No real trend forecasting may take place under present conditions, since the forecast is itself Lindified at every level into captivity. Success itself and even aesthetic perfection formally make an X with ubilapsing of every variety.
For instance, Monahan’s post is about the return of writing, and yet the form of his account of ‘Lindy’ merely replicates the most banal of Lindyesque propositions, such as ‘books are lindy’:
Books are lindy. They predate the printing press in the form of scrolls or manuscripts and despite their downward trajectory in prestige remain one of the most portable and sustainable forms of content storage. I don’t think we’ll ever enter an age where there are no books, even if their share of the attention pie suffers a relative decline.
So far, so ‘Alexa what are books according to Paul Skallas’. Insofar as the propositional content here is safely embalmed in its own normative reliability, nothing will break the online spell. What could be more ‘lindy’ than saying ‘books are lindy’? If one bothers to read the post carefully, one can see the collapse of Monahan’s prose into the frustration-ontology that ‘Lindy’ as a meta-effect exploits and manipulates without any formalizable knowledge of doing so being available. To be Lindy is to be Lindy is to be Lindy, and to be Lindy is to remain online and to keep on posting, and this is all the users will have had to say.
NON-PERDURANCE
There is one moment where Monohan might have said something much less—for want by now of a much better word—‘Lindy’. And it’s this one:
If climate change or WWIII collapses global, industrial civilization, it’s unlikely there will be anyone around ensuring protective coats of paint are routinely applied.
That ‘Lindy’ as permanence-effect comes to be ‘breakout’—with total predictability—in an age of acute and increasing impermanence is not something Monahan’s 8Ball is in the business of dwelling on. Impermanence is, more than anything else, what kills the vibe. Or, at least, seems to according to online metrics, and that’s the thing. Fragility is, as a real matter of fact, far more trending right now (offline and online) than anything else. It’s just that online vibe-smoothness dictates it must be left out. Why would you buy anything that tells you on the label it’s obsolescent in advance?
This is why 8Ball automatically touches on impermanence (the ‘protective coats of paint’ euphemism) only to leave it behind, since the focus here is the opposite (Lindy). But the overall impression remains the same. At the exact moment impermanence is, if you like, our only real and very increasing content, ‘Lindy’ just happens to be what names the breakout of writing’s return. Nothing can better define ubilapse than this permanent degree of confusion.
