androidsixteen
@androidsixteen.eth
We are at absurdity ATHs as a society Best move in these circumstances imo is to short absurdity / irony and long earnestness Worst case outcome — your life is authentic and sincere
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Absurdity perhaps Irony no That’s a very different thing and at an all time low
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androidsixteen
@androidsixteen.eth
How is irony at ATLs? The tone of the internet is sarcastic
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Sarcasm is not irony
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androidsixteen
@androidsixteen.eth
Ok but why is irony at ATLs?
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
People have been hating on it and counterprogramming it for 30 years and it has mostly worked. Started around time of David Foster Wallace essay E Unibas Pluram. Irony peaked in the late 80s/early 90s. Sincerity of various flavors, mostly right-coded has been steadily on the rise since then. Now it’s a core element of politicized aesthetics like trad, metamodernism, NRx etc, as well as some left leaning ones. People started blaming irony for the meaning crisis around the time of the GFC. The brief hipster era then (Portlandia, drinking PBR ironically) was the last gasp of irony as a broad cultural attitude. Now at most, it’s a mannered style in specific scenes, like kayfabe in wrestling. It is important to distinguish irony from cynicism, sarcasm etc. Unlike those, irony is a philosophical posture beyond just a rhetorical tactic. That philosophy (postmodernism) has been relentlessly under siege for decades now. Even internally. The Marxist takeover of pomo is essentially about taking out the irony.
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androidsixteen
@androidsixteen.eth
Thanks for the explanation — gonna digest I suppose my OP wasn’t nuanced enough, but the feeling was that the culture generally feels insincere X is a bastion of trolling (and absurd political theatrics), Bsky is a bastion of snark, sarcasm and outrage (which I may have conflated with irony) Yearning for a culture that means what it says (absent the ideological baggage and absurdity of trying to bring back antiquated life a la trad)
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
What you’re feeling is a majority mainstream sentiment now :) I don’t know how old you are but if you were old enough during the late 80s/90s you’d have experienced actual irony ATH But just killing irony doesn’t actually create a viable sincerity. That’s its own cultural construction project that I’d argued has entirely failed to get off the ground despite decades of people trying. It always degenerates into humorless self-importance and gets captured by meaning-supply grifters who eventually rug the wannabe sincere types. As a product of the 80s, I’ll stick with irony myself.
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