Everyone Online Sounds Like an Absolute Fucking Poseur Lately

it's wild to be opposed to cultural appropriation and also a 37-year-old white person who says stuff like "she serves cunt"

everyone involved with this show should be jailed for their crimes

This piece at the Upheaval is useful. Though I think the turn towards explicit partisan politics at the end goes badly wrong, it’s very perceptive and correct when it comes to its object of interest, “Millennial snot,” an important concept and appropriate term. Though there are many examples offered in the piece, you already know what Millennial snot is. It’s some overeducated shithead with an email job saying “Uh, I’ve unpacked the privilege knapsack in intersectional space, OK sweetie? Get on my level.” “Whoa, did you just say ‘handicapped’? That’s a big yikes, chief.” It’s a form of engagement, quintessentially Millennial, that’s defined by a combination of self-righteous liberal politics, out-of-date internet lingo, terms from university humanities departments that have become mimetic in the past decade, and a performative, shit-eating quality of being perpetually amused with oneself. Anyone who was on Twitter between 2012 and 2022 or so knows Millennial snot. It’s fake courage as meme, a rehearsed facsimile of self-confidence deployed by people who’ll never know the real thing.

Writer Dudley Newright invokes Tom Scocca’s famous “On Smarm” essay, which is a useful reference. Scocca is far too sharp and well-spoken to engage in Millennial snot, but his essay helped contribute to a permission structure for congenitally not-witty people to engage in what they thought was wit. Scocca’s essay counterposed smarm against snark, presumably because Gawker was constantly accused of popularizing the latter; he defended the value of blank meanness and universal sarcasm as the antidote to false, sunny positivity that exists to foreclose on criticism. Scocca’s piece was a sensation among his Twitterati peers, which is unsurprising given that it was ultimately an essay in defense of being deliberately unhappy and they were all unhappy people. The whole debate looks rather funny to me, in hindsight, a battle royale between a couple of meaningless abstractions that provoked a lot of trivial people to man the imaginary battlements. The week that Gawker published Scocca’s essay, they had been running post after post about “Batkid,” a charming little fellow with cancer who was given a Make a Wish-style experience that Nick Denton’s crew lustily wrung some clicks out of - that is, textbook smarm. Commerce!

Anyway, part of the basic confusion of that little cultural moment was to suppose that snark (reflexive, dismissive negativity) and smarm (treacly positivity in which power might hide) were antonyms. But Millennial snot demonstrates that they were always kissing cousins, easily integrated, two complementary spices begging to be added to the same chowder. Millennial snot is smarmy in that it depends on the speaker’s certainty that they are the good, righteous being in every exchange, and it is snarky in that it operates under a logic of being limitlessly disaffected, an asserted perpetual superiority that’s always believed to be apparent to everyone. It’s a simulation of being witty and cutting the way people are in movies, impressed with the self and literally nothing else, like asking ChatGPT to make you into the cool kid at the back of the class that you’ve always longed to be. Millennial snot so easily integrates two supposedly opposed approaches to communicative integrity because it’s the vocabulary of people who have no particular interest in integrity. They simply want to feel powerful, if however briefly, if only in insincere and meaningless online exchanges.

“Imagine not knowing that I’m a tenure-track professor in Problematic Studies. Not a good look. Read some bell hooks and get on my level.”

The purveyors of Millennial snot attempt to fool themselves and the world about their level of self-belief with two primary tools: one, through embracing the preening sanctimony of contemporary left politics, acting as though they simply are the campaigns against racism or injustice or need, themselves, expressed of course in an obfuscatory academic vocabulary; two, through the language of droll disdain that has become the default idiom of the 21st century as insecurity has become the universal marinade of American elite life. It’s the fusion of modern progressivism’s self-celebratory nature, the discourse norms of our most overeducated age cohort, and the reflexive retreat into triviality as a self-defense strategy. It’s an inescapable style of online engagement even though the heyday of this way of talking is now firmly in the past, just like the heyday of the Millennials who popularized it. It’s the idiom of a failed generation, the unconvincing puffery of millions of unhappy front-of-class kids who have spent their adulthoods expecting the pure beauty of their creative souls to someday be rewarded with fame and riches, somehow, just like Orson Welles giving Kermit and the rest of the Muppets the standard rich and famous contract. It floats the ineradicable belief that success is just around the corner, exactly the way it seemed to be when they wore jumpsuits to warehouse parties in 2005.

I’m not a fan.

Today though I’m not really interested in Millennial snot in and of itself, but in a topic that intersects with it: the bizarre, flagrantly hypocritical adoption of ways of talking associated with cultures that are not native to the people doing the adopting. I am obsessed with the way that such a vast portion of those who regularly communicate online do so in styles of language that are utterly artificial, borrowed from “marginalized groups,” when the people doing the borrowing are so often the very people who are endlessly sensitive to cultural borrowing. The commissars who stand against cultural appropriation, in large majorities, are educated white liberals who have never come within a mile of a rough neighborhood, and they’re not gonna stand for cultural appropriation - and that’s tea.

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You can explain a lot about how the modern internet works with a line like this, which is barely barely barely an exaggeration.

“Cultural appropriation is wrong, and that’s on periodt, sis!” - a white lady in early middle age who works in marketing

Online life is always a festival of cliches and tiresome meme speak. Lately, there’s been a varietal that I find particularly phony and annoying. It’s the arrogation of language most directly associated with drag culture specifically and with certain avenues of LGBTQ culture more broadly, as well as some that’s generally coded as coming from Black urban spaces. The most obvious reference would be the classic documentary Paris is Burning, which is funny because it’s 35 years old, with RuPaul’s Drag Race offering a more widespread vector of delivery but with most of it coming, of course, from Instagram and TikTok. Either way, you have no doubt been inundated lately with utterly styleless people talking about how someone “ate,” or how a given celebrity is “mother,” or how they’re “gagged.” This is all in a lineage with terms that became inescapable a decade or so ago, like “tea” and similar. I have no particular opinion on whether any of these terms in and of themselves are annoying or clever or whatever, mostly because language is always contextual and good or bad only in use. Certainly if this language hadn’t escaped its particular contexts, I would have nothing to comment on, and in the internet era all language will escape its context. The trouble is that the kind of person who talks this way tends to have an attitude towards cultural borrowing in general that’s flatly incompatible with their own behavior. It’s the hypocrisy, for me.

As you are aware, I don’t think much of the concept of cultural appropriation. In fact I’ve always seen it as the worst kind of academic-political overreach, the product of people looking for new vectors of offense when the whole huge world of material bigotry and inequality is already orbiting all around us. All culture is appropriated. There is quite literally nothing that exists in culture that is not the product of some amount of borrowing, and influence always extends in both directions. Gospel was a white artform before it was a Black one. Does that somehow undermine the Black contribution to gospel? It’s an absurd, pointless question. Cultural appropriation discourse, ironically, often takes away the right of people from other cultures to define their own relationship to their culture’s goods, such as in the absurd Boston Museum of Fine Arts kimono controversy, which resulted in armies of Japanese people wondering what the hell the protesters were talking about. (The Japanese, for the record, are some of the most unapologetic cultural appropriators on Planet Earth.) Much of what people seek to challenge with cultural appropriation accusations is both harmless and unpreventable, such as when critics rage about white people cooking Korean food at home; no one is harmed by it, you can’t stop it, and if you did, the only people you’d be hurting would be Korean food companies. And the actually shitty behaviors are something else entirely. No, you shouldn’t dress up as a Mexican guy for Halloween with the intent to mock. But that’s a matter of derisive imitation. What does it have to do with a white person playing the sitar?

Congenital dumbass Simu Liu, who’s still playing the game as if it’s 2018, recently got big mad about the terrible cultural appropriation of the ancient traditional dish known as bubble tea. And by ancient, I mean invented in 1985 or so, in Taiwan, which is a unique cultural space that largely stems from Han Chinese culture but also has various Japanese and indigenous flavors, as well as a great deal of western influences. One such western influence is the use of milk and sugar in tea, which many in East Asia long saw as unnatural but which is obviously important when making bubble tea. Another important ingredient in bubble tea is tapioca, which comes from the South American tropics. (No word on whether the indigenous people who first utilized it there are the victims of cultural appropriation every time a Taipei bubble tea shop makes a sale.) Why, it’s almost as if the best things in life are a fusion of various cultural influences and contributions, and that it would be absolute idiocy if we decided to put up walls around cultural objects in some pointless effort to police ownership! But sure, Simu, it’s offensive. Go make a good movie.

So, you know, I’m not one to try to regulate how someone else speaks. Nowhere is the ubiquity, the inevitability, of cultural borrowing more apparent than with language. Indeed, we often bother language without ever consciously intending to. If you want, you can get mad when language from the Black underclass bubbles up into mass culture, but you’re going to get mad at almost everything people say if you do, and again, for what, for who? Who benefits?

However. There are two important subsidiary issues here. The first is hypocrisy. It’s pretty goddamn wild to be the kind of person who complains about cultural appropriation and also be the kind of person who says “deadass” constantly despite being old and not Black, with “old” here being older than 20. Right? Yes, plenty of cultural appropriation discourse comes from people of color writ large, but because of the demographics of both American society and online debate, most people who inveigh against it are adult white liberals. And yet adult white liberals are also the group most likely to engage in the kind of casual appropriation of slang terms that emerge from racial minorities, LGBTQ niches, or the overlap of the two! This is why the Millennial snot piece inspired me to write about this, because it’s so bizarre to live in an era filled with people who have a deeply committed moralistic rejection of the concept of cultural borrowing when so many of those people think nothing of borrowing themselves. You are permitted to use whatever language you care to, so long as you’re willing to shoulder the consequences if you use language in a way that provokes others. But if you tell people that they can’t get box braids on their vacation in Jamaica, when some low-income Jamaican 17-year-old is enthusiastically trying to get wealthy Americans to do exactly that, you can’t turn around and talk about how you saw the Eras Tour and Taylor just ate the whole time, she was so Julia. You can’t! A particular manner of speaking is no less demonstrably a product of a “marginalized culture” than a particular style of hair braiding, or type of cuisine, or type of dress. It’s utter hypocrisy.

The reality is that these people see no contradiction between being deeply opposed to cultural borrowing and engaging in such borrowing themselves with utter shamelessness because they all think of themselves as down. White liberals, as a class, are people who think that they’re the exception to all of their rules. They think broadly associating themselves with a given cause, performatively and explicitly, means that they can always escape from the critiques of that cause. They throw around a lot of academic antiracist terms they learned on Twitter which were themselves cribbed from Tumblr, and thus imagine that they are somehow exempt from that tradition’s various critiques of “whiteness.” They think they’re allies to LGBTQ people because they call Melania Trump a fishy queen and say they’re gay for Billie Eilish. They talk in terms of universal indictment of men, in fact openly mock the “not all men” stock phrase, but everything about their comportment as self-styled male allies demonstrates that they think they personally put the “not” in “not all men.” They believe they get to type “ion” instead of “I don’t” into an Instagram caption, despite growing up lily white in Chevy Chase, Maryland, because every single day of their lives they wander around thinking that they are the exception to every rule. And frankly, I find it all pretty gross!

The second issue is, if anything, worse: these people are being untrue to themselves. They’re affected, they’re performative, fake. There’s a crucial difference between saying that something should be impermissible and saying that it’s phony. Everybody can use whatever language they’d like, and with a few exceptions, I’m never going to find the particular idiom or means of expression offensive, only sometimes the expression itself. But that doesn’t mean that every use of language is of equal value; in particular, some uses of language are defined by inauthenticity, amount to a pantomime of someone else’s organic expression. There are people who can pull off saying that someone else ate, and people who can’t. I don’t personally think that status depends on identity markers in a simplistic way, but it’s complicated and anyhow I’m not at all equipped to sort the various factors out myself. I can however tell you when somebody’s being a phony. You see so much of this shit, online, someone who has clearly discovered some term that’s foreign to them and their life, sees that it attracts a certain kind of social approval, and pulls it out like a child deploying a rare Pokemon card on the blacktop. That’s why people whose personal style is closer to the House of Blues than the House of LaBeija call a celebrity “mother,” because they want to be seen calling someone mother and in that way create distance from their own reality.

It all comes down to the same two culprits, which are not at all restricted only to Millennials but which are particularly acute for my generational cohort: fear of aging and the elevation of insecurity to a virtue. As for the former, well, nobody likes getting old, and we’re getting old. The oldest Millennials, like me, are approaching their mid-40s; the youngest are just a year or so shy of their 30s. I don’t think 30 is old, in fact I think being in your 30s is great, but then nobody cares what I think is old. They care what the ambient culture thinks is old, and somehow as human beings live longer and longer our definition of being in the prime of life seems to trend younger and younger. In any event, my generation is reacting to the inevitable death of our youth very poorly, and many have attempted to stave off that feeling through ostentatiously embracing the cultural markers of youth, no matter how incongruous and sad it seems.

As for the second, well, it’s the enforcement of insecurity, the way cultural elites have created an expectation that all decent people should perform a total lack of self-confidence and perpetual anxiety for others, so that no one feels judged for their own lack of self-esteem. I’ve written before about the odd way that, when I was in grad school, the concept of imposter syndrome went from “a common unfortunate condition that you shouldn’t beat yourself up for feeling” to “an affirmatively good thing to experience that should serve as a marker of in-group status.” I think people have embraced similar logic on a broader scale by appropriating the cultural engagement of traditionally disempowered groups. “When I say that Kamala was absolutely serving on Jimmy Kimmel last night, I’m speaking from a position of marginalization, which means that every self-impressed thing I say is an act of defiance against the Man.” The borrow someone else’s words because they do not have any faith in the value of their own and then insist that said borrowing is, in some strangled way, a politically radical act.

It’s related, oddly, to my constant, fruitless complaints about modern mental health culture. As we’ve seen in that domain, there appears to be no way to end the stigma regarding something without ending up actively celebrating that something. See the online ADHD community, which is the most nakedly self-celebratory space I’ve ever witnessed, and I’ve been to a CrossFit studio. I certainly don’t think that you should face stigma for having a minor-but-vexing neurodevelopmental disorder like ADHD; I also don’t think you should build an entire culture around the idea that people who have it are, like, the new bohemians or whatever, the people who really feel things and are so much more intuitive and emotional and creative than everybody else or whatever, and that’s exactly what the ADHD people have built. (I assure you, I am not exaggerating.) It’s entirely unclear to me if humanity permits a space between “actively stigmatizing” and “openly self-aggrandizing.” What’s wild is the way that the insecurity underwrites the self-aggrandizement, how the specter of societal judgment that people in these various communities supposedly labor under becomes the machinery through which they arrive at arrogance. They are authentically sensitive and vulnerable and at the same time they have a wildly inflated sense of their own self. In the 21st century, all things are possible.

Here’s my novel, revolutionary takeaway: you should be yourself. If you exist in a cultural and discursive space where saying that mother ate last night is natural, and saying it is authentic to who you are and to the moment, well, you already know you don’t need my permission or anyone else’s. And if you’re someone living and speaking in a context where all language is ultimately appropriated from somewhere else - that is to say, if you’re a human being - then you simply will borrow terms and manners of speaking from others. I would merely ask, first, that if you’re the kind of person who still gets very upset about white people making stir fry, you should reinvent all of your moral priorities. Second, that you ask yourself if you actually think you can pull off the linguistic look you’re wearing, or if you’re simply trying it on for effect, willing to step out in something ill-fitting to prove a point to yourself about yourself. I think maybe you should just try speaking the way you organically speak, even if that reveals you to be just exactly the lame aging white people you are. It’s not so bad.

Because sooner or later, you do have to act your age, and sooner or later, you should try actually being yourself.