Category: Pop Culture

This Time, Irony Might Really Be Dead

After terrorist attacks on New York and Washington shocked people around the world on September 11, 2001, it seemed to many Americans that everything had changed. The government promised a rapid response to counter the unexpected national security threats, and the public rallied behind the president. Some members of the nation’s intelligentsia also viewed the traumatic attack as a cultural turning point. Roger Rosenblatt of Time and Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair suggested that U.S. culture had reached the “end of irony.” These critics (among others) thought 9/11 would cause Americans to return to the serious-mindedness of prior eras, putting an end to the political and cultural frivolousness of the prosperous 1990s. 

Their diagnosis soon appeared premature.   Their pronouncement was mocked by defenders of the ironic sensibility in the months after the shock of the terrorist attacks wore off. Developments during the years that followed 9/11 proved the skeptics right. Like partisan politics, culture wars, and pop culture frivolity, the ironic posture of cultural mavens was stalled briefly by 9/11, but returned stronger then ever in the years that followed. Irony reached a new apex in the form of “hipster culture” during Barack Obama’s first term. Hipsters would wear T-shirts ironically of “uncool” bands and products that they disliked. They used this sartorial gesture to signal their wit and hipness to those sophisticated enough to “get the joke.” The ability to mockingly appropriate the lowbrow became a highbrow status marker.

However, with the economic recession and the revival of economic and racial tensions during the Obama years, irony became less compatible with the cultural zeitgeist. Google Trends indicates that the search term “hipster” peaked in the early 2010s and has been in a steady decline ever since (and by 2015, some outlets writing about the hipster movement were declaring it dead) which likely indicates a decline in irony’s centrality to our cultural conversation. During the 2010s, grassroots anger on the Right led to the Tea Party movement and popular conspiracy theories about President Obama’s true allegiances. The Left responded not just with “Daily Show” style satire and mockery, but with also with serious-minded (if not entirely successful in the short-term) activist movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. 

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Why We Shouldn’t Turn Our Politics Into a Costume Drama

Far too often, modern American politics has come to resemble a form of “cosplay,” in which activists of various stripes cast themselves in the role of virtuous freedom-fighters standing up against an all-powerful, malevolent enemy force. This tendency has exacerbated as our pop culture has shifted toward comic book films and science-fiction movies as our key narratives, while politics have simultaneously moved online into radicalizing ideological echo-chambers. As a result, many Americans perceive political narratives along the lines of Manichean or apocalyptic fantasy tales, and cast themselves as heroic combatants in this storyline of existential struggle. One thought-provoking essay recently argued that in comic book films, “Fear is omnipresent, public institutions are not to be trusted, and the best we can hope for is benevolent vigilantes to take everything out of our hands.” The popularity of these movies likely reflect the growing civic distrust in the United States, and may shed light on a disturbing impulse within the American electorate to favor figures willing to defy institutional and legal norms.

Many Americans now are chafing at the limits of what can be quickly accomplished under an increasingly gridlocked U.S. political system. In their frustration, they are also losing sight of the humanity of their opponents. This is not an entirely new phenomenon. In the 1990s, militia members portrayed themselves as modern-day minutemen, casting Clinton Administration federal agencies such as the ATF as tyrannical. This red-state narrative conveniently & hypocritically disappeared when a right-wing president, George W. Bush, again took office. Recently, American political cosplay has revived, expanded, and taken on a more continental flavor, with Antifa wielding the black and red flags of leftist Spanish civil warriors, and with Alt-Right supporters cosplaying as Nazis, Confederates, and other extreme-right factions.

When groups are engaged in politics as cosplay, the use of uniforms clearly mark insiders from outsiders, forming a ritualistic display of group unity, rather than a coalition of like-minded people willing to have a conversation with outsiders. Contrast the civil rights marches and antiwar demonstrations of the 1960s and 1970s, or even the more ideologically sketchy Million Man March and Glen Beck’s “Restoring Honor rally,” whose participants generally did not wear uniforms, with the global rallies and marches of Klansmen and neo-fascist blackshirts and Marxist guerillas, whose participants did. In the aforementioned costumeless marches, at least someone could slip into the crowd unidentified, and one could not tell at a glance whether that person was a curious observer or an enthusiastic participant. The adoption of a uniform makes the group’s demonstration more implicitly militaristic, and makes it seem more plausible that violence may occur between group members and hostile non-members.

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I Did Absolutely Nothing But Write About “Office Space,” and It Was Everything I Thought It Could Be

The 1999 film “Office Space” remains a cult classic. It’s one of my personal favorite comedies of all time, and it’s one of the most iconic movies about the experience of working in the tech industry. However, much of the angst that it so hilariously documents is a feature of much of white-collar work in general rather than software companies in specific.

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