The Metamodern Miasma

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Politics is downstream of culture

The late Andrew Breitbart is not someone I like thinking about all that much, but he’s as singularly responsible for where we find ourselves today as any one person can be. In addition to helping start The Huffington Post, the Drudge Report, and his namesake Breitbart News, during the Obama years he popularized the idea that “politics is downstream of culture,” which became the rallying cry of the emerging right-wing media apparatus that has now metastasized into MAGA and the global right populist movement.

Personally, I would argue that the right didn’t so much as start with culture as they just made everything political, but I can’t deny that their systematic investment in media paid off electorally. Of course, they got lucky in that the Obama years coincided with a total upheaval in the global information environment that dramatically lowered the cost of both creation and distribution of media, creating fertile ground for experimentation in entire new modes of communication.

While the left invested primarily in messaging tailored to the new modes that emerged from this period, the right invested in the modes themselves — both in the literal distribution channels, as in Elon Musk buying Twitter, but more importantly in the modes of expression that animate them, as in, well, shit-posting and trolling and memeing. This is where Breitbart’s observation comes most into focus. Politics isn’t downstream of the content of culture, it’s downstream of the practice of culture.

The Metamodern Miasma

If you’re one of the 9 people who have read my blog, you’ll know that I love abusing theory. My latest kick is metamodernism, which I think best explains today’s dominant modes of cultural expression. Metamodernism describes an emerging reality forming as a consequence of society’s increasing oscillation between modernism’s romanticism and sincerity and postmodernism’s hyperreality and irony. As theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker described it in their Notes on metamodernism, it “can be conceived of as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism.”

Put another way, perhaps we can solve the world’s problems, even if they kill us. Maybe we don’t need to shoot a promising idea down just because it hasn’t grappled with the full weight of history. And maybe we don’t need to reject a tactic that works just because it’s incremental or defensive.

Notably, the “meta” comes not from being self-referential, but from “metaxy,” the Greek word for oscillation, though needing to explain that makes it painfully self-referential. Get it? The concept also fits well with a lot of my other favorite theories, like Solarpunk’s recognition of stagnant culture, hyperobjects being simultaneously all-encompassing and unknowable, and our tendency to hypernormalize digital spaces. What it provides alongside those ideas is the notion that you could potentially develop something stable on top of the substrate we have to work with.

The most odious example of the metamodern sensibility playing out in culture right now is the interminable, and terrifying, debate about whether you should take Donald Trump seriously or literally — though never, of course, both at once. But there are many more innocuous, even optimistic, examples, particularly in the resilient hopefulness and real progress of the climate movement despite the increasingly dire outlook.

The good news, then, is that metamodernity is a creation of neither the right nor left and prefers neither. The bad news is that I don’t think most people on the left understand the degree to which traditional leftist culture is a mismatch for the metamodern miasma.

I stole “miasma” from Neal Stephenson’s Fall; or, Doge In Hell, because it is just the perfect word to describe what our information environment has become: a reeking emanation of floating shit-particles. And yet, in true metamodern fashion, we’re all totally addicted to it. I mean, most of us spend hours a day quite literally randomly oscillating back and forth between the most sincere and wholesome videos of dogs and cats and snarky memes (with ads for vitamins in the middle).

I think what the left needs to realize is that this is the environment through which most people, including ourselves, understand everything now. Again, it’s not just that we’re consuming information in little bits via social media (in fact, there’s probably less of that and more private messaging, newsletters, and podcasts these days), it’s that the oscillation between sincerity and sarcasm within and between each of those bits is the atomic unit of our entire information universe — including, maybe especially, the one we form our self-identity in. (Side note: we’ve done it, folks, we’ve invented media string theory.)

And so when we see an abstracted clip of Trump somehow managing to complete a thought and promising to fix a problem by doing the one thing guaranteed to make it worse, what we see resonates on the same frequency as other memes: ironically hopeful, a little deranged, funny in a sad way. Trust me, most people know the specific solutions he offers are bullshit at best. What they’re latching on to is the fact that at least he’s promising to fix something. Now contrast that with a clip of Kamala touting incremental reforms that will make a real difference but won’t actually solve anything and, well, you get it. There’s just no amount of “influencing” that can make that work.

Again, it’s critically important to understand that the problem isn’t the messaging. The problem is that the cultural practice of the left, writ large, is either modern (“resist!!!!!!!!”) or postmodern (“sure, but what’s your theory of change?”), and neither work, like, at all, in the miasma. To move forward from here, we need to give the keys (no, not the 13 keys) to the whole apparatus to the people who are inventing the leftist cultural and infrastructural modes that can work in a metamodern media landscape.

The good news is they’re out there on the fringes, doing weird stuff. Now are we finally ready to let them in, invest in them, and start building the cultures that can get us out of this nightmare?