Our Product is Permission

The new subscriber writing post is coming on Monday morning.

This piece by Phillip Maciak on whether Saturday Night Live is too online these days is innocuous enough, generally not wrong. I find SNL hard to enjoy in general, these days; the series is the site of unpleasant tensions between its various historical and contemporary impulses. While there’s been plenty of great moments over the years, spiritually the show was built on a strained combination of overthought snark and an insufferable dedication to self-mythologizing. (I really never need to hear about how incredibly subversive that original late-1970s case was again, thanks.) Now, it tries to cram that in with contemporary youth culture, which is built on performative vulnerability and an oddly bullying form of sincerity. The result is so tonally jarring that I prefer to avoid watching. Anyway, even if they’ve got a lot of Gen Z writers and performers on staff, the show’s animus is still a Gen X dude in his late 30s writing sketches where Rob Schneider does a funny voice. Anyway! I think the “Is SNL too online?” debate conflates various generational tensions in an unhelpful way. But, yes, as an old person I can say that a lot of the referenced sketches are painful to watch, not because they’re youth culture but because they aren’t - because they’re SNL’s vision of youth culture, and SNL is an old person’s show even when staffed with young people. Plus Bowen Yang is fine but he’s not funny enough to be getting crammed into every fucking sketch, Dana Carvey-style.

What interests me is not really SNL but rather this endless, reflexive, recursive tendency to write pieces that question whether the internet is really bad for us. Maciak isn’t exonerating too-online life, but he is doing what a lot of anxious writers of our generation have done: suggesting that there is ultimately no choice but to be too online. It’s a relentless tic in cultural writing, writers who are unable to deny the negative consequences of such-and-such social change so instead throw up and declare that This Is Just How We Live Now. The internet has an immune system, in this way. Because the digital systems that many of us spend so much time on have clearly deleterious personal and social effects, and because some seemingly cannot bring themselves to put down their devices, we tell stories about how we never really had any choice anyway, and people who claim to be not very online are just deluding themselves.

Of course, Marshall McLuhan dismissed that thinking long ago. Some people live very offline lives, even some young people, and some of those do so without ever really trying. I envy them; I have over time carved out nice big chunks of my weeks where I am offline, but it does take work. Either way, the message that There Is No Alternative is always popular, telling the overeducated and insecure that the life choices they’re already making are the right ones. That is, indeed, more or less the most precious thing my industry sells. Faced with the awful financial conditions for media that have predominated in the 21st century, the industry has collectively decided that we can’t afford to tell people anything other than what they want to hear. And it’s all buttressed by the omnipresent, false belief that now is a particularly hard time to be alive. (Please go through a timeline of the 20th century, note what someone born in 1900 lived through, and tell me if you really think 2024 is all that bad in material terms.)

You’d think that we could, at least, agree that there’s such a thing as too much exposure to screens and the disorienting rush of online life for young children. But you’d be wrong. Here’s Amil Niazi for New York, and here’s Jia Tolentino for The New Yorker. They’re not quite giving everybody permission to let their kids rot in front of a tablet all day, but they are certainly chipping away around the edges at the arguments of those who worry about kids and screen time. They’re not saying, they’re just saying, you know what I mean? Their pieces have very different tones, but they’re both engaged in a kind of artful writing around the issue while constantly repeating that it’s just so so so hard to raise children, which inevitably means that their pieces trouble the supposedly-dominant opinion that our kids look at screens too much. In other words, they soothe the kind of hip parents who read New York and The New Yorker, reassuring them that what they’re already doing regarding screentime is fine, and anyway, it’s so hard that probably everybody else is already doing it. Of course, everybody isn’t doing it; there are many parent of digital-era children who carefully manage and limit how much and what kind of screentime their kids get. I’m friends with several such couples. I’m sure it’s work, but it’s important to them so they invest time and work with dealing with the consequences. They haven’t decided that it’s just too hard.

Does everyone need to parent that way or have those values? No, of course not. But just about every time I got out to eat these days I’ll see a family at a restaurant with a disturbingly young kid clutching a tablet and staring at it, glassy-eyed, the entire time. The parents will attempt to feed them and they won’t even look up. You can watch them, failing to develop essential social and communication skills as their family talks and engages and they fall deeper into the black mirror. And, you know, I think that’s bad, and I don’t care if people think I’m self-righteous, and I don’t think parenting without a tablet should be assumed to be that hard considering parents got it done for 300,000 years. But if you look at someone like Jonathan Haidt - whose ideas are absolutely a fair target for critique and contextualization and pushback - you’ll find this whole satellite industry of writers who insist that none of the things he’s worried about are real problems. And that’s the excuse industry, that’s the permission industry at work. Find a need and fill it, right? Well, a lot of readers of shortform argumentative nonfiction have a need to be told that it’s fine for them to toss a phone at their kid so they can have three hours to binge Queer Eye with a bottle of wine.

The media has less influence on the culture than I sometimes think. But whether all of this excuse-making is influencing cultural behaviors or merely providing ex post facto justifications for behavioral changes that have already happened, we’re living in an American social culture that has embraced the overarching, all-devouring excuse - life is too hard. Life is too hard to do what’s right instead of what’s easy. Life is too hard to put others before self. Life is too hard to do anything other than pursue maximal physical and mental comfort at all times. Real friendships are hard, TikTok is easy, so let’s stare at our phones instead of going out with friends. Good therapy is hard, bad therapy is easy, so let’s therapist shop until we find one who demands literally nothing of us. Showing basic and minimal respect for people in service industries is (for some ungodly reason) hard, using digital intermediaries to avoid them is easy, so tell them to leave the food outside rather than making eye contact and saying “hello” to your minimum-wage servant. Reading a complex novel with intricate symbolism and deep allusions is hard, reading nothing but YA shit is easy, so please pass another copy of A Thing of Thing & Thing: Part IX of the Flarff Odyssey. So many behaviors that are not commendable but are sometimes understandable have been excused so many times that, rather than being something we do rarely and with a little embarrassment, they’ve become things we do proudly and all the time. See, for example, the Reddit forums that are dedicated to adult men who proudly eat nothing but chicken nuggets and Kraft macaroni and cheese. It’s a whole thing.

Here are some things that have been lost to a permission-granting culture.

The prohibition against selling out. There was this idea of “selling out” in the 1990s, that if you were in an artistic or creative field you could make commerce-maximizing choices that would damage the integrity of your work. Music was the paradigmatic example; there are ways to make music that are more superficially pleasing but which might undercut deeper and more complex types of musical value. Both are good and valuable at various times, but when friction and difficulty was deliberately removed in the pursuit of selling more records, this was understood to be an ethical failure. To deliberately sanitize your work in this way by trying to appeal to the widest possible audience was selling out, putting money and fame above art. There was also a broader and vaguer sense of selling out in life in general, making decisions based on money and popularity rather than on one’s own intrinsic value set.

Among a certain cohort in the late 20th century, a refusal to sell out was a way of life. There was, of course, a great deal of hypocrisy and moral confusion inherent to all of this, and it often amounted to a set of moral standards nobody could reach, endorsed as a kind of fashion. But there were obvious benefits to a shared cultural understanding that there are artistic and personal values which are threatened by the quest for fame and money, and which are more important than fame and money, and which must be defended with communal values - that we can choose to act in a way that is more consonant with our ethics, at personal cost, if we care to and if we build a social cultural that embraces such a choice.

In the 2000s there were so goddamn many “uh, selling out isn’t actually a thing” essays. SO many. Reams of them. Every writer you know was busily digging the grave for the concept of selling out, and pretending to be the first to ever take that stance when they did so. The 1990s cultural investment in a divide between art and commerce gave way to the shameless artistic populism of the 2000s, where the implicit values were as garish and unapologetic as the hair and shirts on members of boy bands. If you watch a movie like Reality Bites, you could be forgiven for thinking that the anti-selling out philosophy had a good deal of social power. (Winona chooses Ethan Hawke!) But of course “selling out” was always going to be hard to defend, given that it was an indisputably self-righteous and anti-consumerist abstraction in a gleefully capitalist world. In post-9/11 America, with irony supposedly dead and subprime mortgages heating up the economy, that kind of arch and uncompromising value structure wasn’t very attractive. Besides: Gen X had aged into its softening spouse-and-kids years. Looking back on those anti-anti-selling-out essays today reminds me of the poptimism discourse, in that they were waging a war they had already won in a rout while insisting they were the underdog. Just like indie music being thrown unwillingly into a spiritual battle with pop, “don’t sell out” never stood a chance.

Authenticity. Closely related to but distinct from selling out was the quest for authenticity - to live a life where the outside matches the inside, to embrace one’s own internal values and ethics in one’s outward behavior, to not try to appear to be anything other than what we truly were. The idea was that we have a true self, or at least true impulses, and we live better and more ethical lives when we allow them to dictate our acts and (especially) our self-expression. When I was in high school in the late 1990s, there was no insult more cutting than “poseur.” But then online life happened, and we were stuck in these various networks and mediums that were fully the product of choices we made, where how we appeared to others was in every sense orchestrated to some degree. Instagram is the notorious example; few of us actually live lives that are composed of nothing but tasteful minimalism, inspiring visuals, and enviable brunch spreads, but that’s how everybody started to present themselves. The idea of authenticity in such a context is rather ridiculous, and so most people let go of it, and now a younger generation has arrived that has no idea what the term could mean.

Resistance to celebrity obsession. Again, degree matters. There was plenty of celebrity obsession in the late 20th century; you can certainly find critiques of it here in the 21st. And I’m going by vibes the same as anyone else. But I find it indisputable that in many ways our culture has essentially surrendered to the unhealthy elevation of celebrity to the pinnacle of all human desire. It used to be considered kind of trashy and embarrassing to read US Weekly, but celebrity obsession got laundered in under extremely dubious third wave feminism logic, and here we are in a cultural place where questioning a fixation on celebrity logic will get you called an elitist and a misogynist. The easy way, the way of comfort and self-soothing, was once again laundered into public morals.

The New Yorker has a good piece out about fans growing obsessive about the personal imperfections and dalliances of celebrities we most certainly don’t know. It succumbs to the usual There Is No Alternative perspective, suggesting that we all must accept parasocial attachments to stars. But it’s useful for demonstrating how the concept of public ethics (that is, what we expect from those around us) has been abstracted away from our various actual IRL social contexts - from our real two-way relationships with other people, in offline space - and onto these mythic figures who we have no influence over and whose personal relationships have no bearing on our lives. And, the more that this sense of moral conduct being a concern only for the famous predominates, the more the new orthodoxy sets in: the only way to matter in any human context is to be famous. The only way to exist is to be famous. All of 21st century life is one big play for the approval of others, and success is only achieved when it is codified in celebrity. Personal networks and personal relationships, the actual human work of how we treat others and our intense commitments to them, are irrelevant.

Valorization of ordinary lives and work. Relatedly, consider crypto bros or hustle bros or WallStreetBets types. This whole genre of young man, who emerged largely from the Rogan-sphere but whose presence has grown and grown, may partially be defined by stuff like resistance to vaccines or a rejection of woke niceties or the pursuit of abstracted masculinity. But the most operative way their values play out in real life lies in the absolute rejection of the legitimacy of going to college, getting a good job, working hard, and slowly building wealth for retirement. Of living a normal 9 to 5 life. That notion has become poisonous to generations of men; it’s synonymous with being a chump, with falling for the ruse, for surrendering to the machine. They’re forever buying a meme stock or launching a cryptocurrency or trying to sell you some weird online course because they cannot fathom getting moderately wealthy, slowly. Only getting rich quick will do. Like the obsession with celebrity, it points to a collapse in any shared communal sense of what a valuable and worthwhile but not rich and famous life would look like.

Many people have lamented that kids these days say they want to be famous YouTubers instead of astronauts. Setting aside any other implicit values here, that points to a generation of young people who simply cannot see any purpose to living other than to seek attention, who think that there is no point to doing anything that is not observed and admired, who believe that we might not even exist when other people’s eyes aren’t on us. This is, among other things, a math problem: everybody can’t be rich and everybody can’t be famous. The numbers don’t work out, I’m afraid. Most people are going to have ordinary lives no mater how much they might want something different. And if ordinary lives are disdained, we’ll have masses of deeply dissatisfied adults.

Varied and challenging artistic tastes. Adults used to feel social pressure to not just consume arts and media for children; the vision of a 35-year-old with Star Wars bedsheets was once widely understood to be a sad one. Comic books were for kids - you could certainly read some, especially if you called them graphic novels, but you needed to contextualize your tastes and make sure they were included among other reading habits, adult ones. Grownups were, in general, expected to be at least minimally interested in grownup art. But the internet brought adult “fandom” fans together into communities of the like-minded, and the generic dynamic of online communities applied: the way to become popular within such forums is to say what everybody wants to hear, and what everybody really wants to be told in a Star Wars forum is that it’s OK to watch nothing but Star Wars. The more extreme people got with their rejection of any social pressure to consume adult art, the more extreme the next wave had to get to beat them. (Again, generic online forum dynamics.) Unsurprisingly, those communities inevitably became factories for rejecting the notion of engaging in more difficult, more mature fare. And in keeping with developing trends, they gave their project a quasi-political edge, insisting that they were in fact a downtrodden minority group, reviled by bigots, for liking the biggest and most profitable franchises in the history of media. No matter how big comic book movies and fantasy shows became, their fans never stopped claiming to be marginalized.

You can of course extend this to music and the iron grip that poptimism now has over music commentary; again, the most dominant commercial force has been cast as a beleaguered underdog, and that metaphorical narrative of exploitation and bigotry is used to crush anybody who suggests that maybe adults should listen to more than just the most disposable pop songs and try a little music that’s more challenging or dissonant, in addition to pop, not instead of. Go on BlueSky and say “I think it’s good if pop fans challenge their tastes a little and see if there’s stuff the like in more challenging genres,” see that goes in contemporary elite culture. It turns out that, when you change social norms to give people permission to never stretch themselves in terms of consumption (of music, of movies, of food), very many will just default to consuming the easiest, safest, and most comfortable product out there. You could argue that this means that pure cultural populism is inevitable because that’s what people really like, so let’s shut down all the black box theaters and arthouse cinemas and alternative music venues. Or you could argue that, since it’s good for people to expand their cultural palates and be exposed to new and challenging things that they might not ordinarily try, it’s essential that we have a shared social expectation among adults that our tastes should evolve and grow over time. Can’t see that one ever coming back, though. People want to live their whole lives in emotional sweatpants.

Not dressing like shit. Perhaps the paradigmatic example of what I’m talking about. People used to believe that you needed to dress to a certain standard in certain public situations because how we dress how seriously we take ourselves and others. You wore a suit to the office because there was a set of social rules that were mutually understood, and they included the rule that most grownup workplaces were spaces that required a certain shared formality. But wearing a suit, while not actually uncomfortable (IMO), appears uncomfortable to a lot of guys, and more to the point makes them feel like they’re capitulating to authority. And enough of that kind of guy got together in Silicon Valley that they mutually agreed to dress like shit all the time, wearing hoodies and ripped jeans to board meetings or whatever, and after the course of years that once minority behavior became a majority value. So now you can go to a fancyish restaurant and see a middle aged person with a respectable career sitting at a table wearing a snuggie. Once it becomes permissible for a few, it becomes permissible for everybody, and everybody gravitates towards doing the lazier, easier thing.

You can and will debate any of this. Surely my comments section will light up with people asking why exactly a 30 year old shouldn’t eat and wear and watch and do the exact same things they did as a 10 year old, if they want to. But things have definitely changed, and I find it hard to deny that as a culture we’ve entered a phase of slouching, exhausted permissiveness. The internet enabled all of this; at the heart of my complaint lies, more than anything, the dissolution a broad-if-abstract larger public culture that mandated certain rules (don’t wear pajamas in public, don’t watch nothing but Bluey as a 34 year old) in favor of rules driven by small groups of motivated people who all want to live without being judged, for whatever they do, ever. The pandemic stoked this change, creating an broad public perception that life had never been harder (which wasn’t true) and so we should always put comfort first, to stop trying. Instagram spread the message that good advice in wellness and self-help and personal development always amounts to “put yourself first.” All the arrows pointed in the same direction. And so we’re in a world where saying you don’t like Sabrina Carpenter is a hate crime and anyone who knows how to tie a tie is a representative of The Man. It’s a rejection of traditional values not in the pursuit of personal and sexual freedom or in an effort to increase social mobility or equality, but rather to serve our most juvenile and selfish instincts.

Everybody has their own values. Lots of people disagree with mine and will correspondingly reject my vision of what a healthier, more respectful culture looks like, a culture of personal integrity. But even if you do, perhaps you share my belief that the point of cultural commentary is to articulate some sense of how we could all do a little bit better than we’re doing now - and that we can’t get there by telling people to go easy on themselves, about everything, all the time.