cultural consent and experiential inversion

why the rebels of gen X find the "artists" of gen Y so intolerable

this little missive has been working its way around twitter. it seems an apt exemplar of a sort of modern millennial mindset common in the allegiance as externalized identity classes, a theme doubtless familiar to longstanding readers of discerning cattitudes.

it manages the impressive feat of being entirely and utterly self-congratulatory about the gaping chasm of one’s own superficiality while simultaneously demanding a cookie for it.

it’s riddled with what daniel thinks are poignant takes.

and with pretense to cool used to badly mask associative appeals to one’s own authority. (and you all know that appeal to one’s own authority is my absolute favorite logical fallcy. it’s so charmingly vain and so singularly vapid and self-refuting.)

daniel is a “london artist” and demands that you know and acknowlege and kowtow to this. he’s also a 40 year old millennial trying to make it sound like he was “there” with the movers and shakers back in the day and not a modern day remora clinging to the ruins of that which those before him once erected.

you can see his stuff here.

personally, i think it looks like someone took a generative AI and said “produce a bunch of overtly derivative, cluttered, overcolorful slop that seems like the 80’s vomited fifteen fringe album covers into a sad circus while having a bad trip on some overclocked 2CB,” but tastes vary, go see for yourself.

but what really struck me was not his “art” or lack thereof, it was this pretense to “not understand” which has become such a polestar for the involuntarily inclusive echo chamber DBA “modern liberalism,” the very thing that has made it so dull and devoid of innovation and aspiration.

they take terribly simple things and pretend not to understand them thereby rendering discourse impossible.

i’m honestly starting to suspect that a great many of them truly do not understand these things having, for so long, inhabited only the echo chambers of cancel culture that disqualify dissent and prop up the illusion that “no reasonable, moral, or right-thinking person could hold any view but ours,” while calling such self absorption and coercion “diversity and inclusion.”

well, there comes a point where a pussycat is pushed beyond endurance and as one of the poor unfortunates beset by that most grievous of mental illnesses, a true and deep-seated belief that if one can marshal facts and logic in such a way as to tell the truth so that it can be understood, that it will be believed, i guess i ultimately and inevitably must bend to my irrational pathologies.

and so, in full recognition of the near certainty of the abjectly quixotic futility of persisting in such profound hallucinations:

dear daniel:

if you’d like to understand why the generations above you have so little respect (and increasingly so little tolerance) for your cohort, it’s simple:

everything we made was optional and opt in.

interesting people did interesting things and if you liked them, you got on board. and that was cool. and if you didn’t, you didn’t. and that was cool too.

but you and yours took the awesome stuff we built for you and you politicized it all.

you turned it from the ask of “accept me?” upon which our culture was based to an institutionalized demand of “accept me!” backed by the force and institutions of the state and of mass media and indoctrinated into curriculums and cancel culture.

you have not pushed boundaries, you have captured institutions.

and that’s not art.

it’s soviet.

what’s the difference between commerce and theft?

consent.

what’s the difference between a cozy little sleeping nook and a prison?

being allowed to leave if and when you want to.

you have never understood this and took coercive cultural domination and importance to be some sort of divine birthright.

in the place of rebels, you became commissars.

and that’s a very different situation.

prince was just prince. some “adults” got the vapors, but that’s the point of pushing boundaries. no one in our generation cared. no one cared because prince was legit and prince did not care if you cared or demand that you agree.

you want to make this about rejecting an identity like his, but this is not and never was what this was about. people were fine with the purple patterned androgynous rock hobbit. dude was a legend. auto workers in flint michagan listed to hair bands dressed to win ru paul’s drag race. again, no one cared.

and never once was the phrase “and if you do not accept my gender identity as a spider from mars (pronouns charlotte/web) then you are a bad person” uttered, framed, or even considered.

they were rebels and rebels were cool. you’re not a rebel. you’re the establishment. always have been. you offer nothing new and demand the stature of one who does. you take no risk and demand vast rewards.

it’s as saccharine as it is self-indulgent.

you’re a bunch of children dressed up in 70’s and 80’s halloween costumes and squalling for the respect earned by those who fashioned them but unaware of the strength it took to do so.

it’s an easy mistake for you to make because doing this no longer takes such strength. it’s mainstream, low risk behavior, cosseted and unprovocative.

it’s safe to the point of being boring and pushy to the point of being intrusive, even dictatorial.

because of this no one respects what you do.

but you expect prizes.

and so you demand the reverence you cannot elicit.

this issue and gen X’s distaste for what you and those you courted became was never about identity or phobia. it was about choice. it was about liberty and free expression including the right not to care or to disapprove.

that which may not be criticized is not rebellion.

it’s orwellian.

and, in no small irony, back in 1984, we did not do this.

these actions took place in the great wilds of culture.

you live in a petting zoo where bossypants sheep play make beleive that it’s the savannah and that they are lions.

you are not the heir to these traditions, you are their antithesis.

and my little china cat says, “oh baby, just you shut your mouth.”

bowie just did things and offered them up for people to like or ignore or criticize as they saw fit.

your generation passed laws that if we didn’t like and support you it was a hate crime.

you were neither inclusive nor interesting.

you did not make offers, you made demands.

you became performative crybully assault artists wielding absurdist identity like a mace against anyone you did not like or sought to dominate.

you made it into a post-modern kafka trap and force-fed it to a nation who was not allowed to say “no.”

you hated the cool kids so much that you made the worlds they built into joyless bataan death marches of avolitional aggrievement worship by incredibly marginal people.

take me to the coffee shop. we can dance lile kitty pop…

you mistook the surface and seeming of a thing for the substance of it and a self-serving cargo cult of theater kid histrionics for identity and worse, for meaning.

and you dragged the rest of us into it against our will and tried to demand a respect and acceptance you were unable to earn.

it’s been one big “everyone gets a trophy day” cum pity party, invitation by gunpoint, thrown by a group of hyper-demanding, entitled brats providing nothing new and demanding everything as though you had.

that’s not rebellion.

that’s oppression.

and perhaps worse, it’s just boring.

and the fact that you “do not understand” how we “ended up here” or see why the distinction of choice vs force matters is exactly why everyone is so terribly sick of you and does not want you around.

i grew up in the very cultures you describe.

and you wrecked them because you were too lame to handle freedom.