It makes sense to me now, in a way it never did before—the idea of performers failing to adapt to a new medium, as they used to say of the stars of the silent movies.
I think I must always previously have parsed this as a sort of euphemism—a polite, proto-PR way of saying that they’d just become unpopular somehow, or that perhaps they’d started hitting the sauce (or the chemicals) too hard. But having lived through a fairly dizzying succession of new media over the last two decades, I now get it quite literally.
I cam up as a blogger when that was the cool new thing, and I was pretty OK at it; a long way from anything you’d ever describe as stardom, certainly, but enough to get me out of totally unemployable obscurity. When the socnets came, I got on board early with Twitter (when you still updated by SMS!) and was, again, modestly adept at it. But then came the Instagrams and the YouTubes and the Vines and the Snapchats and the TikToks, and suddenly the blogosphere—a label whose retrospective cringe factor tells you everything you need to know—looked like New York in the 1970s, a run-down zone of spiralling decline where landlords were starting to burn down their property just to claim the insurance, and Twitter had become a cruel and grabby nightclub of a place, and all the routes out—the new modes of visibility—were asking things of me that I either could not or would not give.
It’s not that I think myself incapable, to be clear—although I think it safe to say that I have a face made for radio, and a voice for magazines. Rather, it was an instinctive recognition that whatever I gave would never be enough. It’s that giving—that giving over, that surrender to the system—that I refused, and still refuse today, because it will ramp forever.
It has to ramp; that’s the deal. We talk about “the algorithm” stealing our attention, but that’s not strictly true, and it absolves us of our complicity in the process. In fact, we steal one another’s attention; the algorithm merely ranks and rewards us for the attention-stealing strategies we develop in response to these crude yet devastatingly effective gamified incentives. And this was as true in the time of Technorati (remember that?) and RSS as it is in the time of TikTok. Perhaps generative models will eventually relieve us of the effort to entertain and distract one another, and we’ll be able to just settle back and let the socials pour slop straight into our brainstems… but somehow I doubt it. Without original material on which to train, the slurry will soon become predictable and tasteless, stripped of the novelty which is the refined sugar underpinning every recipe.
And it’s so easy to be pulled along, because the attention captured is its own reward, even as the unheimlich feedback loop of the Spectacle makes monsters of us all, in proportion to our submission and success: the media cyborg, a formerly elite role made ubiquitous, inescapable.
So I wonder, when it comes to the silent stars, whether on some level they felt the same thing, only without having the concepts with which to express it: a whole new level of submission, of intrusion; a style of exposure that they simply couldn’t countenance, a level of public life beyond the one they’d slowly come to terms with. Did the prospect of having their voices recorded and broadcast fill them with the same sense of horror and trespass that I get from the thought of mugging into a phone camera and a ring-lamp? Could they see in their peripheral vision a new, hungry generation rushing in to take the upgraded bargain on offer from the fame machine? Did they recognise, on one level or another, that their environment had out-evolved them?
That’s my current theory about the emotional turmoil of the world at present: as unevenly distributed as it surely is, the dominant experience is that of the rules and requirements shifting so fast that they’ve already changed by the time you’ve made your adaptations. The goal posts aren’t so much moving as they are disappearing over the line of the horizon, and the terrain is ever more desiccated, scattered with skeletons and disquieting ruins, your hard breath parched and scraping in your throat as you, along with countless others, run in desperate pursuit.
The strangest thing, as I’ve remarked elsewhere, is that those running the hardest and using their elbows most aggressively are the wealthiest. The old proletarian dream of wealth, namely that of an exit from the requirement to work, has somehow become anathema. More is by definition never enough, because prices keep increasing, and the systems of investment and asset stripping mean that even the cost of just getting by is a moving target. The idea of capitalism as a treadmill is far, far older than I am, but that metaphor is starting to look extremely concrete and literal at this point; likewise, it’s long been said that capital is inescapable and totalising, but one realises in hindsight that even twenty years ago there were still meanders and ox-bow lakes where, if you were lucky, you could stay out of the strongest currents, avoid shooting the rapids unless you decided you wanted to.
And, who knows—maybe twenty years from now, people will look back on the Twenties as a period of naivety, ease and innocence. (Maybe, in other words, what I’m feeling is just the existential terror of middle-agedness?)
But somehow, I don’t think so. There are no exponentials outside of pure mathematics, only power-law S-curves, and the device whose capacity is in question is that of the human body. Ironically, the collective human body is perhaps healthier than it’s ever been—but in others it’s sick, sick, sick.
And this is not disease, in the sense of some external vector of infection or injury. Humans are arguably distinguished from other species by the extent to which we have transcended the temporal limits of natural selection through our capacity to adapt our environment to our needs, rather than the reverse. But evolution is the very longest of games, and this is a strategy of short-term advantage. In our lives, as in our economics, we externalise the consequences, externalise the waste products… but the sources are running dry, and all the sinks are full, and everyone knows it.
Our attention, our very sanity, is the last fungible resource remaining to us, and we’re burning through it in a way that makes our dalliance with hydrocarbons look like a practice run. You can slow down, perhaps, but you can never stop running—because even if you’re not trampled, you’ll be left in the dust which is the true final product of economic efficiency.
This, I suppose, is something like the pessimism of the intellect that Gramsci wrote about, which is meant to be countered by the optimism of the will: you identify and acknowledge the problems, and then you act to address them. We can blame the influence of Lao Tzu, via Ursula Le Guin, for my growing sense that Gramsci’s formulation, however well intended, is part of the problem—or has perhaps simply been recuperated by the system its was intended to oppose; it is couched in the same zero-sum logic, an essentially game-theoretical way of seeing the world.
Readers of my own generation may recall a line from a movie, which—rather ironically, particularly in hindsight—is given to an artificial intelligence: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
The silent stars still had the choice, even though it likely didn’t feel like that at the time; the cyborg condition is, at its root, that of habituation. We still have the choice, as well—but in a world where performative effort is the only metric that counts, it is surprisingly hard to wei wu wei: to do not-doing.
How does one try not to try? This is my mantra, as I jog across the desert of the real.
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