Modern Hopelessness - User Comment Rodeo

I read an article awhile ago while I was looking around for interesting anti-consumerist agitprop. Mostly I was just trying to feel better, but of course there are a million problems and only a few dozens of mostly ideological solutions so I wound up feeling completely fucked. But you gotta believe in something! That or you begin to volunteer and first try to solve your stubborn local problems, remembering the enemy for later. While, you know, scraping a living together and trying not to end up on the streets, without a roof over your head or a pot to piss in. Odds are if you're young, you're over-educated and underemployed, and everyone is shitting on you because you want a good life, not even The Good Life as sold to you by the multinational greed-ignorance system. Or you're an entitled youth with an iPhone and you used to really like Dubstep but now it's more EDM and mostly it's weed, beers, and bros.

I sort of like Adbusters. All of their articles are alarmist, which gets a bit old, and which excuses severe lapses in discipline and research. Best part is, the alarmist tone is often warranted. Anybody not actively living in deluded ignorance can see that there are a lot of things wrong with the world and that, as a species, we might be fucking ourselves over. In fact, we probably are, and the problems stack up while the disbelievers go around like business as usual. Racism, sexism, ageism, exceptionalism, cronyism, patriarchy, oligarchy, police states, xenophobia, terrorism, war mongering, corporatism, you name it – there are issues for everyone. Pick your side and hold a fractious conflict against your opponents while the world withers. Throw stones, hurl insults, utter blanket statements about shit you don't really know much about. That's the game right now and we're doing a great job wasting the years playing it. There's this huge amount of angst everywhere, seemingly residing in less than 5% of the population. So it goes without saying that Adbusters is not popular and possibly stigmatized by whatever evil ghosts rule the world.

There was one online article that was kind of interesting. It was written in the same mildly alarmist hyperbolic style and touched on reality in a way that complements the dread of modern society that some people feel. Ironically, to be on point, the article has to focus on the hollow spectacle of western culture – which means it discusses a lot of supercilious bullshit amongst the mentions of economic woes, class warfare, and impending monolithic doom. Pretty much worth the fifteen minutes it takes to read and dismissive of 'feel good' movements in the west. The comment section drew me further into the puzzle... I didn't have time to read it all, but it didn't take long to find some real beauties lurking among the rank weeds.


 So without further ado, and hoping you have read the article, I present Exhibit A: the Michael Jackson (may he rest in well-deserved peace) Apologist:

Misspellings aside, and bad grammar, and faulty logic, and completely missing the point of the article (which did not state that M.J. was the creator of issues, and obviously posited him as both a major figure in the spectacle and its victim) this is a great moment in defensive posturing. This European poster is a maniac who doesn't understand what's going on. What this post demonstrates is how fractious and serious we get about celebrities, people who live overblown wasteful lives, and whose every act is supposed to be drenched in meaning. Micheal Jackson helped a few single cases of problems and spent most of his money on absolutely crazy shit. Neverland Ranch is a pathological cue, not the haunt of some great misunderstood man. Respect and everything, but he was part of the distraction at his best: massively wealthy, far from the common man, and heavily invested in the status quo and the system. Compared to, for a loaded example, Dead Kennedys, Micheal Jackson was inactive and useless and all of his oddities and peculiarities just add up to make him a strange eccentric victim.

Exhibit B is my choice for champion user comment. It's critical, but not critical enough to be dismissive. It's incisive, but just prejudiced enough to falter. It's well-written, but there are enough flaws to keep anybody guessing. It's a basic antithesis of the Michael Jackson Apologist from earlier

It's well thought-out and elaborated and it's just about as helpful as the article it castigates. The problems aren't vague but the number of them makes them, well, numinous and vague. Adbusters in general is spot-on about declamations of society and its many illnesses, but offers few things other than 'being informed and angry'. It doesn't help that the Champion User Comment Poster offers vague and impressive-sounding cant in mild opposition to other vague and impressive-sounding cant.

And so the echo chamber of dissatisfaction continues to ring with the anxious voices of the enlightened. The system rolls on. Most people continue to give no fucks about anything. The rest are trapped in an existential crisis of faith with no real exits. The problems go on multiplying, the solutions are relegated to single issues, and the combativeness about everything also continues. In some places there are lots of angry protests and hopelessness and the TV drones on about whatever while the internet fills up with idiots hopped-up on conflicting ideologies. The wisest among us can only watch in dismay and mouth the fateful words 'fuck this world and every human in it'.