It's Not a Religion, It’s a Role Play

thought digest, 6.11.2024

Jun 11, 2024

∙ Paid

Everything is text now, not just media properties like Star Trek or Harry Potter, but the whole world.

I'm more fully emerging from my postpartum cocoon and experiencing quite a bit of confirmation bias! The ideas we’ve discussed on this blog for the last four years or so are popping off everywhere I look.

For example…

Culture isn’t stuck. We just refuse to recognize our new media forms.
Pronatalism (once referred to as “reactionary childbearing” on this blog) had its moment. And, somehow, that moment has already passed…
It’s now common knowledge that Latinx came from the Blogosphere, two-spirit came to a conference attendee in a dream, and demisexual either originated on a 2004 role-playing forum (or from Tumblr and someone made up its genealogy). The Internet is a game of telephone.
So much of the Discourse—now changing shape, people are sick of Takes or at least those Takes—is infotainment. You’re selling a product, not living the life of the mind.
In a world where everyone’s an influencer, many of the most successful influencers are, by necessity, thieves. This is a curation culture. A remix culture. And we should recognize that as a talent in and of itself. My position on Lindyman as a master remixer and curator? Still vindicated. I mean, fuck, I referenced him in the first bullet of this blog. He gave an existing phenomenon a catchy name, and the catchier name is what stuck. Kind of like “vibe shift.” People had been talking about it, but nobody gave it a name.

Also, I think Substack succeeded in becoming the Twitter replacement. This might not be obvious now, but I suspect it has already happened. It used to be that you could get a good read on what was next in culture by paying close attention to Twitter, but the power has shifted to Substack.

Conversations are happening here. A different type of interaction is happening on Twitter. Because of that shift, you can “spend” your Substack clout in a way I suspect you can no longer “spend” your Twitter clout.

This Isn’t a New Religion, It’s a Role Play (2021)

I pulled the (very abridged) interview below from the too-vast Default Friend vault. It’s an old Tumblr interview from 2021, so I did one of the later ones.

I talked to 30-year-old Courtney about the influence of social media platforms like Tumblr on shaping political and social beliefs, fandom, and the emo subculture that contributed to "The Great Awokening,” and the evolution of identity labels.

We also talked about the potential backlash against the medicalization of identity, with both Courtney and I expressing concerns about the collateral damage and the future trajectory of these social phenomena.

Comment below if you want to hear the full two-hour-long audio conversation.

Tumblr’s Role in Shaping Courtney’s Beliefs and Emo as “The Great Awokening”

Courtney: I was encouraged onto Tumblr by my mother, who was using it—just for art stuff. But I was quickly introduced to fandom, not art. By the way, I read your article in The Spectator about fan fiction. I think it's--I think it's going to come up a lot when people look back at the gender stuff. Anyway, this was 11 years ago. Fandom was a big part of it in the early days. It's less so now largely because I am old and wizened and I can't find any media to enjoy that same way…

But gender stuff was everywhere. I just had the most awful creeping feeling that something had gone wrong, like that something had gone badly wrong. Gender is the start of it, and it's the thing most clearly that I can link to Tumblr. Like intersectionality, it felt like it explained everything.

People talk about “The Great Awokening,” and they tend to date it to like 2015, 2016. But I was learning about this stuff years before that.

Katherine: Here's my crazy person theory. The Great Awokening happened post-MySpace when emo exploded. That was the Great Awokening.

Courtney: So, I actually had a terrible experience being online when I was about 11 or 12 because Order of the Phoenix hadn't come out yet. I discovered fan fiction and didn't understand the rating system. I came across the most disturbing stuff, and it basically terrified me off the internet until I was 18. My only interaction with the internet between ages 12 and 18, 19 was through New Age sites, like numerology sites and those that told you what gemstones meant. I didn't do the social stuff apart from a tiny bit of MySpace. So tell me about what I missed in that lead-up gap to 2010.

Katherine: I think the explosion of fandom culture was significant. But the missing piece is that a lot of the gender fluidity stuff started with a weird intersection of depression and bisexuality, identities people could step in and out of on LiveJournal and MySpace, and it was really fostered by the emo subculture, which is sort of a fandom. I don't think the internet or fandom invented any of this stuff; it's been percolating for a long time. Emo was like the bus that everyone could get on and start experimenting with these ideas, and the next iteration of that was what we saw on Tumblr. But it didn't start on Tumblr.

The Evolution of Identity Labels

Courtney: Are you gay if you're non-binary? How does that work? Do words mean anything?

Katherine: Can you be gay if you're non-binary is an interesting question, and I think yes because the way people think of identity now is more about affinity than experience. I think the explanation is that when we were younger, saying you're gay or trans was about labeling a feeling, experience, or behavior. Now, it's more like saying you're a Hufflepuff—an aesthetic or set of keywords. Your lived experience might differ from your affinity label.

Tumblr as a Role Play

Courtney: When I stopped buying into all the gender stuff... For me, it's like when you outgrow playing with toys—you can't enter that imaginative space anymore. Something similar happened with gender issues. I can't join in that imaginative space anymore, even though many trans people still prefer certain pronouns.

Katherine: That's interesting. What if there's something to learn from what happens when little girls stop playing with Barbies? You see it with people who lose faith in religion—there's a mental shift when they stop believing, like ex-Mormons who realize the history is proven false, not just theological.

I hate the wokeness is religion line, by the way—it just feels like it's not really a religion, right? But we're in a society that has basically stopped everyone's emotional maturity at 16. Maybe it used to be that a lot of this stuff—the Internet, I mean—was like a parallel reality.

Now, with arrested emotional development, role plays aren't trivial. There's something especially significant because so much is online.

Courtney: Do you think this applies even to older people participating in this? Many older than millennials are involved. I don't know if they had immersive games when they were younger or if it's just tempting or opportunistic now.

Katherine: I do. It's a myth that only young people are very online—everyone is, even older generations. The only thing that stops the very elderly from using the internet like a 25-year-old is physical limitations. When the very elderly are in good health and independent, they use the internet just like young people. Maybe not on TikTok as much, but many are there—they're just invisible to us.

default.blog