On July 13, 2023. Author: Zero HP Lovecraft.
I took a break from my next novel to write this, so the editing is slapdsash and the tone is conversational and the format is slatestarcodex-style untitled outline because the callback to that style flatters midwits and subconsciously tells you this is a serious thinkpiece despite the fact that it’s a long rambling rant about whatever happened on Twitter as I wrote it. Also and despite all appearances this is a review of the movie Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
There's a strain of thought you can easily locate by googling for phrases lexically adjacent to "tumblr caused wokeness" in which young ladies wax logorrheic about their personal experience of learning social justice rhetoric from tumblr in the early tens. This genre of article is melodramatic, overly personal (like most things women write) and relies entirely on anecdote. Nonetheless, it paints an accurate picture of an important moment in internet culture.
That moment was defined by a tumblr called Your Fave is Problematic. We all remember that word problematic and how it was associated with thick-rimmed eyeglasses, fat girls with neon hair dye, shrill accusations of made up prejudices like ableism and so on. The tumblroid style in media politics is to look at some popular movie or song or tv show and elucidate all the ways that the seemingly unobjectionable aesthetic and narrative choices are secretly laden with implicit fascism, racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, transphobia, ableism, colorism, fat-phobia, ageism, and all of my other favorite things. If a male is white and handsome and compliments a girl on her figure, then that’s problematic because it reinforces the idea that white men are desirable and that it’s good for women to be skinny and that men are allowed to see women as objects and so on ad nauseum. This discourse is so fractally stupid that we won’t comment on it further, lest we get diverted.
The more important thing is to observe how this style of thinking (a generous term for it, I know) spread like a disease and infected basically all millennial women. An instructive example is the account of twelveclara, (Hollywood consultant admits glee started the wokeness epidemic) an hysterical tumblrista who grew up (in the sense of getting older, not in the sense of developing psychological maturity) and became a media consultant. The title of this article is stupid, of course; it's not as if a hollywood consultant is in a position to "admit" anything like this, as if she were some grand conspirator, but it's still an accurate snapshot of a common trajectory for millennial women in the current year, and it shows us the path by which wokeness wormed its way into every level of every media production.
The article and its sources are all too self-important, but they demonstrate how mass culture evolves and propagates. When we talk about overton windows, or what it means to live in a "woke" society, we are talking about both formal and informal mechanisms which mutually reinforce each other. It’s not just your favorite cultural nemesis pushing these things on you from the heights of Hollywood or Wall Street or your local deli or wherever you imagine power resides, it’s the people next to you and around you. It’s every individual in society. Each person in the ideological state is both a jailer and an inmate, regardless of social station. Your coworkers, your family members, the people in your church; they are all culpable in their own way. The people at the lowest tiers of society, the people with the least agency, the least intelligence, are responsible for believing the propaganda, for shouting it back at their leaders with even more zeal than was given to them, for the way they are so quick to correct each other, to cancel each other, to hold each other accountable to the sick and sickening lies they are given.
As much as we might mock the self-aggrandizing confessions of people like twelveclara, it really is true that woke ideology spread largely through online fandoms for media designed for adolescent girls. Social media accelerates the spread of mind viruses the way airplanes accelerate the spread of bio-viruses. Hmm 🤔. But as tempting as it is to blame social media for all of this, it’s also lazy. Everyone hates social media; it’s the second safest punching bag in the world after white women. You make a few spiritless, defiant posts about how Facebook is to blame for our current crop of moral problems— social media, am I right ladies and gentlemen?— and you’re sure to garner a few likes at least.
Maybe it’s no coincidence or that we call the latest iteration of political correctness wokeness because, in a real way, the magic mirrors in each of our pockets are allowing us to see ourselves for the first time, and all the present foolishness is only a fleeting hypnagogic stupor, shortly to be blinked away and drowned in coffee. But no one wants to hear that. It’s far easier, far more attractive, to wallow in cynicism, to sneer at everything, take every opportunity to nay-say, first drawing from left-wing critical theory, then from its counterpart on the right, never in a principled way, using anything at hand to cut everything down. I can find you 100 articles and 1000 tweets lamenting all the ways that social media has supposedly made us dumber, but I think it’s far more likely that social media was the first time we ever truly saw ourselves from the outside in a way that was accessible to the everyman.
When you watch this video, you may notice how uninhibited these young men are. I can’t imagine any zoomers acting this way, because they have grown up in a digital hall of mirrors, constantly inundated with reflections of how they appear to everyone else. I think it’s clear that social media has made us more self-conscious, but I’m not as sold on the idea that’s some novel, unconscionable evil. One of the oldest maxims in philosophy is “know thyself.” What if we are living through a revolution in self-consciousness? What if the last hundred years of philosophical discourse around authenticity, from Rousseau to Hegel to Kierkegaard to Sartre is now finally available to the common man? Technology brings previously abstract, academic questions into the realm of the immanent, after all.
But on both the right and the left today, the response to our new burgeoning self-consciousness has been to oscillate between cloying over-socialized sincerity and ironic, affected insouciance toward whatever object of enjoyment happens to be in our field of view. ‘Woke’ behavior sits at the paradoxical intersection of these two impulses. It disarms the cringey, embarrassing part of sincerity and authenticity with a veneer of self-deprecating absurdism. It condemns nothing but condemnation itself, because being hyper-self-conscious, the one thing it fears is being condemned. For this reason, the only moral stance it can take is that of mawkish inclusivity discourse. This is the exact schtick of the irony leftist bro who occasionally takes a break from telling you he shouts Doritos marketing slogans while jerking off to remind you that they’re really out here killing trans kids and that’s just not cool, man.
But at the risk of engaging in low-grade both-sides-ism, I want to point out that we do nearly the same thing on the right. The content is (sometimes) different, but the form is extremely similar. Instead of self-deprecating absurdism, we use self-aggrandizing absurdism— the gigachads, the calls for TND, there’s even a strain of right-winger who likes to dabble in pedophilia jokes, some of which are funny, and I’m tired of pretending they’re not. Anything that makes women start clutching their pearls is funny, no matter how gruesome or reprehensible — but when you really scratch us, we bleed the same mawkish effluvia: they’re really out here genociding the white race and that’s just not cool man.
Regardless, the point of this essay is not to pretend that I’m somehow above it all, in the infinite realm of the autistic godform, though I am (I’m not, I’m very much not.) The structural similarities between right and left online discourse should be seen not as a way to discredit the right, but rather as an opportunity to colonize the left. As our influence has grown on the Internet, we have felt something akin to an identity crisis; what we built initially, on a platform of intelligent scientific racism, informed by cutting edge readings of genetics, archaeology, and history, is now overrun by a mass of normies who have neither the discipline nor the inclination to develop a nuanced understanding of these topics.
Instead, what we see is a proliferation of shallow copies of the polemical styles of some of the geniuses of 2016. Normies operate almost entirely on vibes. They will clap for scientific racism, for Marxist class analysis, for anything which gives them an edgy, countercultural feeling. It does not matter if the things for which they clap directly contradict each other. What matters is only the feeling of defiance. This is how most people operate in their daily lives; they float downstream, spiritless, pointing in whichever direction the river of time might carry them. One day, they believe in the current thing, and the next day they believe in the new current thing, and they don’t even notice that they ever changed their minds. I think Orwell was wrong when he suggested that this was a consequence of industrial propaganda. I think most people are natural slaves, and what good are principles to a slave? Obedience offers far more utility, and if that obedience should come with a little sneer when he thinks the master’s not looking, so much the better. The sneer is a form of self-pacification.
The populist delusion, which affects both sides of the political aisle, is that if we can just spread knowledge, just spread awareness, then somehow we can get everyone to wake up and there will be some new and better and more prosperous way of life on the other side of the awakening. The funniest thing about this story is that although it’s false as it pertains to any burgeoning political awareness, it’s almost true—if you squint— as a way of describing what smartphones and social media have done to our collective self-awareness. There has been a great awakening of a sort, an awakening to the way that we look to other people, and to the way we are judged by other people.
How many times have you heard someone ask you: what have you done for the cause? what have you done to advance our political agenda? The content of "our" political agenda is perhaps better left uninterrogated in these cases. Presumably, it has something to do with saving the white race, you know, the 1.1 billion of us who are on the verge of imminent extinction if we don’t do something today about one long nose boi. Well, I’ve only seen three strategies ever proposed, and here they are:
One: the Turner Diaries. Anyone proposing this to you on the Internet is a federal agent, and they get paid for every young man they can trick into showing up at a federal building with a bomb. Don’t be stupid.
Two: run for the hills and try to outbreed them. Who’s them? None other than the 6 billion brown people who your AWFL overlords desire to bring into your borders. These people worship the dirt, and they stink. Their answer is to abandon all higher education, all institutions, everything the white man has ever built, and go live in a ghetto and LARP as a sub-Saharan African. But even if you could convince a majority of whites in the US today to adopt the wigger farmer trailer park lifestyle, it would take sub-Saharan African levels of fecundity to even have a prayer. This type of thinking is woefully ignorant of human biodiversity, and it fails to understand what made the white man special in the first place.
Three: the most nebulous proposal on the list is to somehow gain the ear of "the elites" and persuade them of the correctness of our platform of soft eugenics, ugly laws, mass deportations, and kinetic management of refugees (to name a few) and then hope that they open their limitless wallets and magically implement these things. Among the problems with this strategy are: the elites who are even potentially convertible by us are the ones with the shallowest pockets, and most of their wealth and power are contingent on their continued alignment with the zeitgeist, and the people who need to win them over are mostly young and antisocial and have no idea how to manage a fortune or a mass of people and they can’t or won’t stop retweeting lolicon.
So given that field of compelling possibilities, friend, what have you done to advance the cause? (And let’s notice here also that all three of those possibilities are carefully constructed in such a way as to be impossible to actually execute, and this isn’t a bug, this is a feature, because it allows you to go on living your life resigned to the impossibility of impossible things, soothing yourself that your personal problems like not having a wife or a husband or whatever are caused by giant intractable societal problems. They do this on the left, too, by the way, they just blame capitalism or patriarchy instead of the wokeness or the jews.)
Deep breath. I promise this is an essay about Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. But first indulge me as I advance a fourth possibility, which is that despite its limitations, the Breitbart doctrine (politics is downstream of culture) really is the only avenue that normal people have open to them to effect political change at scale. This idea briefly received attention in 2016, when media eyes were on Steve Bannon, and for a moment it really did feel like there was something new and fresh, culturally, that was blossoming right in front of us. Alt-right (a phrase that has been poisoned now) books and podcasts and art were blooming, for just a moment. Everyone was in it together, wignats and neonazis and good old boys of every persuasion were coming out of the woodwork. Normal people were sporting Richard Spencer haircuts.
The brief false dawn of the big-tent right could be anything to anyone — many leftists, sensing a real opportunity to the stick it to the man, voiced their support for Trump. After all, national socialism, despite being nationalism, was also socialism. They could work out the details later. Alas, it was not to be. Trump fired Bannon (merited) and the leftists who had flocked to Trump downloaded the latest software patch from The Jews. Orange man was bad, and the Trumpian moment of culture creation faded away.
Instead of Gobineau and Sailer, the mass imagination turned to Evola and QAnon (These are not the same and need not even trade with each other. Nevertheless, they are the same type of thing.) This was, in every way, a retreat. It backed away from something practical and dangerous, and fell into something comforting and passive. Scientific racism is a language and a way of thinking that speaks power to power. In a society of hundreds of millions of people, of metrics and globalism and professional-managerial-class-ism, data is a threat. Evolian blubbering about “materialism” and “demons” and the “reign of quantity” is not. Statistics and mathematical models contain imperatives to the scientific bureaucracy. Perennialism and alchemy and astrology are the right-wing equivalent of dilating your neovagina; a pointless, private tribulation which does nothing to change your essential condition.
The scientific bureaucracy has many shortcomings. It is wrong about many things. But until and unless you can succeed in tearing it all down, we only win by playing its epistemological games, by knowing things in ways that the bureaucracy can consume, by means of data, math, and empiricism. This is not even a tall order! Objectively, we are correct about race, about sex, about gender, and many other things. We have good science. They have lousy science and control of a giant propaganda machine.
Everything is downstream of everything. Culture and law and politics and religion all feed into each other like an ouroborotic human centipede. All the various pieces of the world that we try to taxonomize feed backwards and upwards and every which way into each other.
Culture is downstream from politics. Obergefell, Griggs/Duke Power, Hart Cellar, and Civil Rights 1964, are all examples of woke laws. Before Obergefell, a range of opinions were possible regarding gay marriage; after, there was only one. Probably you had at least one friend who was totally ambivalent to gay marriage on June 25th, 2015, and totally convinced he had always been a vehement supporter of it on June 27th.
Politics is downstream from culture. Supreme court judges are people who watch TV and read Twitter posts just like the rest of us, and they absolutely respond to vibes. Culture spreads upwards and laterally and peer-to-peer. No one is forcing baristas to put BLM flags in their windows; it’s not like it will stop a rioter from throwing a brick. No one is ordering stay-at-home moms to trans their sons. Similarly, no one is ordering product managers and marketing ICs to rainbow up their branding. It’s all coordinated semi-spontaneously through flocking behavior.
The crucial insight, the Vaclav-Havellian insight, is that (again) in the ideological state, every person is both the inmate and the jailer. There is exactly one part of this shit-ingestion cycle where any and every random person has a pivotal role to play, and the power of that role has been amplified tremendously by social media. There’s a sense in which ‘woke’ is nothing new; political correctness has been around since the 1950s, as Peter Thiel reminds us, but back then people understood it to literally mean that your opinions were in line with the communist party. It still means that, of course, but something changed about it in the early 2010s that caused it to metastasize into wokeness as we understand it.
The difference is that social media, by bringing new self-consciousness and new philosophical awareness to the masses, allowed a generation of people to develop a new folk culture, or a folk religion (but really, a folk identity) using whatever bits and pieces of authority and wisdom they were able to grasp from the cultural aether around them. I claim that a similar thing happened in the early Trump years as a reaction to wokeness, a counter-folk-culture arose, cobbling together pieces of neonazism, of Rush-Limbaugh-ism, of Jonathan Bowdenism, of Mencius-Moldbug-ism, of Steve Sailerism, and half a dozen other isms besides. The resulting egregrore is just barely superior to the leftoid thing it opposes.
And despite the meta-cultural similarities between wokeness and deplorablism (look, we don’t have a great name for it yet) there are incommensurable structural differences. People who engage in both-sides-ism like to downplay the fact that state power, legal power, and military power all exist solely to support wokeness. The counterfactual world, where "the fascists" are in power does not have transexuals in the military, it doesn’t have pride month or Juneteenth, there is no such thing as a gender "reassignment" clinic, and the penalty for drag queen story hour is lynching. We are so far from that world, it hurts. One of the first things the nazis did when they came to power was raid the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft and burn all their cursed books. If "the nazis" or "the fascists" were in power in America, there would be exactly zero living transexuals on American soil. That’s how you know.
The person who makes the movie or the hit song may seem to be producing top-down culture, but in order for media to become culture, it has to be able to marshal an audience into reacting and participating in it. It has to spread outward once it descends. As culture has moved online, the distance between content producers and content consumers has shrunk to zero. Everyone has a direct line to every media maker, and the audience culture instantly fulminates back up to the creator. At the same time, audiences have fragmented and algorithms and on-demand delivery have created idiosyncratic personalized media feeds for everyone. The artist is always listening, and because of this, the shared experience of art and culture has realigned itself around one particular form of audience participation: critique.
Unironic enjoyment of mass culture feels inherently degrading. The way it is made all but guarantees a certain soullessness; a sleek, polished artifact with no friction, no seams, no rough edges anywhere. Its artistic “statements” are carefully filtered through focus groups and “sensitivity experts” who specialize in avoiding cultural tripwires so as to minimize the number of people who could possibly be offended. Critique — the thing I am doing now — gives us a way to participate in media spectacles, a way to talk about all this, without having to face the embarrassment of letting anyone think we enjoyed it.
Wokeism is a toolkit for critiquing narrative. It’s a simple toolkit which anyone can pick up easily. It contains only a few tools, but once you equip them, you can produce an analysis of any piece of media which appears to be revealing hidden corruption, hidden evil lurking behind the mundane and everyday contours of the surface. There are several reasons why you might want to that; when you produce a wokeist critical analysis of a piece of media, it puts you in a position of power relative to your audience. You are showing them your sophistication, your ability to see what is hidden, and you are teaching them something, which puts you in the position of the teacher, a person with authority.
This is a neat trick. Whoever has the most incisive complaint, the most compelling revelation of the hidden “fascism”, “ ableism”, “racism” etc wins the popularity contest of the week. This creates an incentive gradient that leads straight into woke hell, and the whole time people are telling themselves how moral this all is, how righteous, how enlightened. A group mind develops, where anyone who refuses to accept the endless theological affirmations about how many gender identities can dance on the head of a girlcock is guilty of violence, complicit in the “literal” murder of all these marginalized ephemera.
When an erstwhile wokeist sees the toolkit being used, sees the attention and accolades and authority flowing to the person using it, she immediately goes and uses the toolkit herself in front of some new hapless cohort of unwoke masses, and then they go and do likewise, and so on. In this way, a new cultural form arises and transmits these stifling, diseased behaviors at the speed of the internet.
Most people aren’t really sentient enough to adhere to an ideology in a principled way. Water takes the shape of the vessel that contains it, and the average person is quite a poor vessel for philosophy. Thus, their ideology, whether it's Christianity, boomer liberalism, or millennial wokeism, tends to be quite leaky. The best way to think about ideological action is to realize that it’s not ideas that spread by imitation, it’s behaviors. When we look at the behavior of woke people, we try to form an abstraction of what beliefs are driving those people, and we call that abstraction “wokeism.” This creates the illusion that behavior proceeds from ideology, when the reverse is more often the case: people don’t become ideological by learning a bunch of abstract principles and then trying to deduce what actions they indicate.
People become ideological by simpler and more selfish means; every social interaction is a game with winners and losers.1 When we observe another monkey winning a monkey game, we copy the behavior of the winning monkey, (often subconsciously) on the heuristic that the winning behavior will also allow us to win social interactions. "Winning" is usually intangible. The most common prize is that people give you compliments or attention.2 Radical political stances rarely win popularity contests IRL, because there’s never a critical mass of people willing to clap for them. Online, it’s possible for people with nonstandard views to congregate unrestrained by geography, which makes it possible for them to win social interactions by saying "radical" things, which makes it possible for the behavior (expressing radical view X) to spread. To see a perfect example of this, look at how a Taiwanese Netflix show triggered an echo of the #metoo movement. The show models a behavior, every woman who sees it realizes she will get attention if she copies it, and away you go into woke hell.3
The tragicomic irony of this is that the range of behaviors you can model online are mostly restricted to talking and masturbating, and as a result, radical utterances have no correlation to radical actions. “kill all white men” says the blacktivist/feminist. “Die cis scum” says the tranarchist. “Total Nigger Death” says the BAPist. And each of them blinks thereby. How many times have you watched a “viral food trend” video and actually bothered to copy it? The answer is occasionally you execute on a low/effort one, and it never turns out to be worth it. “Radical” online calls for genocide are exactly the same as elaborate Michelin food hacks at home except you don’t even have a helpful instruction video.
The thing that is sort of unique about wokeness is that a moderate form of it managed to cross the online-IRL membrane. Most of the discussions we see about online radicalism are rooted in anxiety in—and uncertainty over—how porous that membrane really is. I think an honest accounting has to conclude: not very. The amount of radical talk in the world doesn’t remotely add up to the amount of radical action. The number of far right terrorists divided by the number of far right posters is 0. The occasional mentally ill person who the feds entrap into committing a shooting, complete with a manifesto written in Langley, has as much relation to online "extremism" as the unwashed hobo on the corner shouting about how he is owed millions of dollars and everyone is going to be sorry.
The real question is how something as extreme as wokeness was able to break out into the world. I don’t think that’s clear at all, though if you read your Caldwell, you will understand how the law, specifically the civil rights act4, laid the foundation for it. In any case, the last time the American right had the backing of the state (on paper) was December 31st, 1863, so our path to actualizing our so-called beliefs must be different.
We may be used to thinking of wokeness as an ideology or a religion (same thing), and there is a level where that's true, but this statement is also a trap, for two reasons: the first is that ideological thought does not cause ideological action, but the other way around. A person becomes committed to an ideology as a post hoc rationalization for actions already taken. Moreover, many people—even bureaucrats and leaders—may be compelled to take ideological actions against their beliefs, because each person in the ideological state is both the inmate and the jailer.
The second reason that calling wokeness religion is a trap is because it suggests a narrative where wokeness can be "solved" if we can "liberate" people from their ideology. The unspoken assumption there is that when the “bad” ideology is excised then either no ideology or some unspecified “good“ ideology will automatically rush in to fill the gaps. But you can’t really have no ideology. What would this entail? Some form or of radical nonbelief, some form of principled nihilism? This is an absurdity.
(Of course we have all seen leftists say things like, “just be a decent human being. Just be a good person.” While it’s true that there is a limited notion of goodness that exists apart from any ideology, they reflexively conflate the former with their received understanding from the latter. That’s a topic for another time.)
To possess an ideological frame is to possess a metaphysical frame, and everyone, even the most principled nihilist, has one. I think this word metaphysics risks sounding pretentious. What are metaphysics? And what does it mean to talk about them? When we think about the world and the way it works, we can choose to think at various levels of abstraction; we might think in terms of atoms, or chemicals, or electricity— in other words, we might think in terms of a physical frame. We might think of physical processes — but we might also think in more human terms, we might think in terms of economics, or in terms of morality, or in terms of karma. When we think at these higher levels of abstractions, we are seeking metaphysical explanations for what are ultimately physical events. Whether these levels of abstraction are epiphenomena of the material, or whether they are distinct ontological magisteria is not at all relevant to the discussion.
So, for example, if you believe your sins will come back to haunt you, that you will end up paying in some oblique way for your moral shortcomings, that’s a type of metaphysical belief. If you explain the rise and fall of empires with some Spenglerian theory of civilizational cycles, that’s a metaphysical belief. There is no clear boundary between metaphysics in this sense and morality.
Leftism operates within a metaphysical frame of what I call emancipationism. Every narrative it uses to justify or motivate its actions takes the following form: there is an oppressive social structure placed over you which is preventing you from becoming your authentic self. It is so entrenched and implicit that most people can't even see that they are participating in it and controlled by it. In order to become your authentic self, you must first become aware of it, then make others aware of it, and then dismantle it. Emancipationism is not limited to wokeness, and on its own, it's not an ideology. It's a storytelling primitive which can be used to build an ideology, sort of like playing with Legos. It's a brick, and if we use that brick to build our house, then we won’t be escaping from leftism at all, we will only be rebuilding it. When we talk about wokeness as an ideology, we need to be careful that we are not just constructing one more emancipationist narrative which is structurally similar to the woke narrative itself.
Part of the reason emancipationist narratives are compelling is that they contain some truth. There are, indeed, implicit structures of social control. In sociology, those structures are called institutions — and this word has a domain-specific meaning in sociology, it doesn't mean an organization of people such as, in the USA, the National Institute of Health. In sociology, an institution is a pattern of behavior which did not originate with any of its participants. That is all. If a group of people create a pattern of behavior — a harvest festival, for example — and then all the originators of the festival behavior pattern die, but their descendants continue the ritual, then the harvest festival is now an institution.
There will always be institutions in any group of people that lasts for more than one generation. We copy useful behavior patterns that we observe in others, and as those patterns are handed down, they become "traditions." Often, the initial reasons for the pattern are forgotten, and in some cases, they may not have been clear in the first place. A behavior that "works" — a behavior that results in its performers continuing to exist — is a behavior that may propagate, even if none of the performers understand why.
The emancipationist narrative is a narrative of pure destruction (which is not the problem with it, per se, though I have never met an emancipationist who understood this.) It begins with something true: the existence of an institution (in the sociological sense) which has rules. It leverages natural instincts that we feel to acquire and exercise social power, and it targets an institution with the intent to violate its rules. Emancipationism never contemplates what will happen after the institution is dismantled5, and it is constitutionally incapable of understanding the problem the institution solves, or why it arose in the first place.
Tumblr didn't invent the constellation of civilizational anti-patterns that we have come to call "wokeness" or "critical theory" or etc. It's a mistake to get overly hung up on its genealogies, in any case. There are many lines of thought from Critical Theory, from the Frankfurt School, from thinkers like Marcuse and Foucault, sure, but there's also a lot of baked right into the founding documents of the USA, and there's also a critical mass of ethnic diversity — I don't even mean brown people, I mean jews and italians and irish and so on — and it all coalesces into a big disordered ball of ethnic resentment, and it finds this academic language to express something that's ultimately a human universal.
Underneath the surface of wokeness is a fundamental impulse that finds expression in ideology, but if you take away all the jargon of intersectionality and diversity and equity and -isms and -phobias and -archies, what you remains is something everyone feels in some capacity: these animal impulses to envy, to covet, to hate the Other, and so on. Wokeness dresses radical intolerance for the Other in a skinsuit of radical tolerance, but it's nothing of the sort, as any normiecon can see. But it's precisely because these impulses are universal that we need to have institutions for social control, rules about what you can and can't do, and authority to impose order and rein in those impulses.
Leftoids, which is to say Marxists, which is to say women (and their revolting, malformed male allies) generally conceive of matrices of social control in terms of “oppression“, or they think it comes from people who hold positions of social authority or wealth. In the left-wing model, those people are hoarding all of the money and power for themselves, and we will all live happily ever after when they are destroyed. This destruction is called "emancipation" or “liberation."
Both the right and the left recognize a socially instantiated, external problem, which the individual in society must overcome in order to flourish. For the left, it is the oppression enacted by authority and power which prevents the individual from becoming her authentic self. The authentic self is an idealized interior manifestation of the leftist understanding of what constitutes the good. It is endlessly open, accepting, tolerant, and empathetic. The leftist authentic self is so maximally feminine that the mere concept of "woman" must be expanded to cover a range of "gender identities" such as non-binary, genderqueer, demisexual, and so on.6 She stands up against authority and oppression. And she celebrates her uniqueness, but that uniqueness is only ever delineated in shallow, superficial forms, such as traditional clothing, food, art, and music. Any symbolic content in any of these things which could conflict with the above must be deracinated, de-emphasized, and explained away.
The woke toolkit for critical media analysis contains a part implicit, part explicit understanding of the relation between top-down authoritarian oppression and the liberation of the authentic self. But why is this important, if action precedes ideology? It’s because, just as with culture and politics and religion, there exists a feedback loop between actions and beliefs. The metaphysical frames implicit in our narratives condition our responses to ideological actions, which then condition further ideological actions. The model is something like:
Action => Abstraction => Ideology => Action
Over time, actions become institutionalized, and ideology becomes integrated into society. When a loop is self-stimulating or self-catalyzing, we call that auto-catalysis. Under the right conditions, an auto-catalytic loop can become self-perpetuating and self-replicating. Within the ecological niche of tumblr, woke media criticism was an autocatalyzing loop which permanently changed the way its participants thought about and interacted with narratives. What we see today is a metabolite of that process, even though the loop has burned through all of its fuel. (Tumblr is gone, and the social media attention economy now operates with distinctly different dynamics to that of tumblr 2007-2015).
There are those who think wokeness is on the downswing, but this is sadly mistaken. Just as in physics, you can’t actually feel velocity, you can only feel acceleration. Wokeness felt like “a thing” in the 2010s because it was accelerating. Now, in the 20s, it has hit cruising velocity, and everything is woke.7 Watching movies and TV from the aughts feels like you’ve traveled to a different country, because the things we could joke about and discuss were substantially different to what is permitted today. You have lived through a relatively bloodless cultural revolution, and one of the main things a cultural revolution does is burn all the books of the previous paradigm. Even when it doesn’t burn them, it renders them illegible to most people by rearranging the semiotics needed to interpret them.
One easy litmus test for whether a person is sentient is if they are able to remember the time before the cultural revolution and think in terms of its discursive primitives. I have found that most people I talk to in The Current Year believe that they have always vehemently supported gay and trans rights, and that they completely dissociate when you remind them that words like “gay” and “queer” used to be common, unremarkable pejoratives. Non-sentient people have no ideological content, and if a day ever comes when we are the ones making the propaganda, they will swear up and down that they have always been racist.
But as much as we might like to go backwards, it really is true that you can’t turn back the clock. Each turn of society encapsulates and supercedes that which preceded it. Marxists call this the dialectic and they believe that history is an autonomous entity in the process of working itself towards a utopian state of perfected Marxism. They are wrong, of course; there is no necessary final state to human society (other than the heat death of the universe), and all of this ends only when there are no more humans left. This type of "arc of history" thinking is among the many metaphysical conceits which must be replaced in a right-wing regime. The truth is: we don’t want to go backwards in any case. We want to go forwards and upwards. All of the beliefs and discourses to which we might return are all of the same ones that allowed wokeness to take over. What we want is a new cultural paradigm which rejects not only wokeness but its metaphysical roots. We want to to reject it so radically that it’s no longer possible for the average person to conceive of it or express it within their metaphysical model.
The New Left took over partly by reterritorializing traditional American liberalism and Christian existentialism, replacing the negative concept of sin with alienation and the positive goal of salvation with that of authenticity. These sorts of psychological mechanisms cannot be done away with; they can only ever be replaced. The goal of right-wing critical analysis should be to reterritorialize these concepts rather than replacing them. We have to emit discourses which can bind to to the soteriology receptors without activating emancipationist sentiments.
The right-wing outlook has a radically different picture of the idealized self. In fact, we do not have a single ideal, we have two; one for men and one for women. And we recognize that what makes an individual unique may be incompatible with what makes others unique. We recognize that conflict may inhere in uniqueness as it relates to others. We do not see that conflict as something which needs to be expunged, but as something that ought to be celebrated, and we celebrate it by engaging in it, by fighting. And we don’t hold out that everyone is going to make it. But we don’t have a name for this right-wing idealized self. We don’t believe in authenticity, because we think that if the inner reality of the self is weak, or flawed, or deficient, then we also have an obligation as a self to destroy it and re-make it into something better.
We have contempt for people who fail to embrace their duty to become superior. We believe men have a duty to develop and exercise their will, and the people who failed to do this are personally and individually accountable for their failures, no matter their circumstances. One does not always overcome his limitations, nevertheless, limitations are no excuse.
And to be fair, there are philosophies of authenticity—particularly that of Heidegger—which teach this, or very nearly this. There may be a reason Heidegger is so closely associated with the most notable right-wing government in living memory. But most people aren’t going to read Heidegger, and they aren’t going to read you or me, either. Most people go their whole life without ever truly reading a book. When it’s deployed in a mass context, the naive meaning of a word is the only meaning of that word. The esoteric meaning of a word—the one deployed by initiates into the ideology—is only ever an afterthought, a little mental whirligig whose evolved purpose is to keep the mind of the initiate in a paradoxical state of restful activity, to prevent them from wandering outside the ideological boundaries.
So it has to be another word, because when the uninitiated person hears “authenticity,” what she hears is “I have an innate, relatively immutable inner nature, and what I really need to do is discover it and adhere to it.” The word authenticity calls to mind something static. And ironically, once someone becomes convinced they have a static, true inner nature, they become very malleable, because now they’re on a journey to discover a part of themselves for which they have no proprioception, and they are very open to suggestion as to what it is they supposedly feel.
In the right-wing version of authenticity, the external, socially instantiated problem that we need to overcome is something more akin to a sickness. It's something that comes from the bottom, up. It’s something that spreads peer-to-peer. In other words, it is culture, not authority. This is the real meaning of the Bronze Age Pervert’s idea of the longhouse. It designates a horizontally-enforced stifling of the spirit. The problem is located in every petty little person who surrounds us, in the people closest to us: in our friends, or our coworkers, or most often, in their wives. We don’t defeat them by toppling a tyrant, but by subjugating a herd.
What would it really mean to win the culture war? I think it would mean that the average normie, the average NPC, reflexively and thoughtlessly recites right-wing ideas are in the same automatic, catastrophic register that they recite left-wing ideas today. Anyone who tries to express a left-wing opinion in based world is treated as a dangerous psychopath, and probably they are forbidden from earning a living wage. That would be a precise mirror of the world in which we live today. How could we possibly achieve such a world?
It took the left about 70 years to build woke world, if we start our reckoning from the Nuremberg trials. There are all sorts of reasons why one might not esteem Nazis and I’m not going to claim they were some pinnacle of civilization, though they had a few things going for them. What’s indisputable, I think, is that after their defeat, it became illegal, as a matter of international law, to exist as a right-wing regime. Having established that legal precedent (in Thiel terms, we call that going from zero to one) it was more a matter of consolidation to also ban right-wingedness at the level of interpersonal normativity.
What we desire is a total inversion of this scenario, and to make matters more difficult, our victory in the arena of normativity will have to be won prior to any kind of legal victory. If this is possible at all, it’s going to mean creating a version of our right-wing beliefs which are simple enough for anyone to repeat, and then it’s going to mean composing a social script which allows people to win popularity contests in everyday life by saying things which are predicated on those beliefs. Only insane zealots are willing to suffer guaranteed damage to their reputation in order to “courageously“ speak truth to power. Even then, that’s not really what they’re doing; rather, when someone courageously speaks truth to power, there is always an audience they have in mind who they calculate will esteem them more. The math of signaling and reputation balancing always works out in your head, even if it doesn’t work out in real life.
In based world, if you say that blacks commit murders at roughly eight times the rate of whites because of the legacy of slavery, epigenetic trauma, or a lack of "good schools," then a bunch of hysterical women write letters to your employer calling you a literal wokie (same emotional valence as "literal nazi") and threaten to stop buying your products as long as you continue to employ such a person. That's the longhouse, and I don’t actually think it’s possible to burn it down. I think there’s a natural hierarchy in the world, where a tiny minority of men sit at the apex, and beneath them is all women, and beneath them are the rest of the men. I think every society in history has been structured this way, and I think the best thing we can do is to try to build a longhouse where women build men up instead of tearing them down. I think that was how the Christian iteration of the longhouse mostly worked, and when trad larpers and christian larpers make these whiny pleas for public morality, they are acting out a cargo cult where they believe that if they can just be good enough boys, if they can just show that they are willing to cooperate with women, then women will cooperate reciprocally. That's never going to work, because once you are in a defect-defect equilibrium, cooperating just makes you a sucker.
There is nothing on this earth that women enjoy more than covertly gossiping and sabotaging other peoples’ reputations. For this reason, and following in the steps of wokeness itself, I propose that we could perhaps win a cultural victory by equipping women with a rhetorical toolkit for deconstructing pop-culture inside of a Nietzschean-vitalist-technofascist frame. I know this is a ridiculous proposal, but that’s my vision: the great mass of vexing AWFL harridans nagging and hectoring and browbeating the men in their lives into being racist (justifiably) homophobic fascist bodybuilders. We do this, not by asking them to be courageous, but rather by asking them to be selfish, and by giving them a little bit of leverage to pursue their individual will to power in a way that will be helpful for building society, rather than for dismantling it. Women are the main foot soldiers (heh) for policing social norms, all those rules which are not quite enshrined into law, but which are nevertheless the rules. In a healthy society, this is good because the informal rules are good. In the past, most men could reasonably expect to marry a slender, virginal woman, because women were empowered to deride and defame each other for obesity and promiscuity. In modern society, they are empowered to shame each other for virginity and self-control.
Emancipationism is the impulse to overwrite human nature and ignore biology, and this is why it makes us miserable. Homo- and transexuality, feminism and antiracism are all products of this impulse. Right-wing thought must seek to flow with nature rather than rail against it. When it pushes us, we must learn to divert its momentum into something uplifting. When all women are arrayed against all men, they not only make men miserable, they make themselves miserable, too, but it occurs with a bit of lag time and so they are never quite able to figure it out.
So finally, in light of all that, I am going to provide you with a fascist critical reading of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and I’m going to show you how the same logic can be used to tear apart almost any woke narrative. I took a lot of flak on Twitter from parochial mouth-breathing mongrels for saying that the visual aesthetic of the movie was distinctly anti-white. Of course, being 75 IQ communists with zero media literacy, they were only able to interpret this statement as meaning that the movie featured a cast of black characters. But having black characters, even exclusively black characters, is not in itself a racially antagonistic aesthetic. Certainly, a show with an exclusively white cast is not automatically or intrinsically anti-black, though many libs have claimed this is the case. For example, we might point to such television productions as The Cosby Show or Fresh Prince of Bel Air, both of which feature black casts, but neither of which contain anti-white racial animus. Even something like Boondocks or The Chapelle Show, both of which routinely made whites and white culture the butt of their jokes, were not metaphysically hostile to white society.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is an attack on whiteness and white culture both in its visual and narrative aesthetics, and as with any leftist cultural action, its proponents will predictably begin by claiming it is not an attack, followed by immediately affirming that it is an attack and that’s good. Let’s begin with the visual. The most obvious aspect of the movie’s visual aesthetic is it’s stylistic maximalism, which consists of many deliberately clashing rendering modalities, juxtaposing clean quasi-photorealistic 3D graphics with comic book cel-shading, chiaroscuro, and grungy line art. The dissonance of these styles comports with the worldbuilding of the story, which is set in a Spider-Man-centric multiverse, and this high budget visual mashup is the only redeeming feature of the entire film. And if we look past the surface of the visual design, we notice that the "beauty" of the production is covering for—or distracting us from—the deliberate ugliness of the characters and the world design. The movie encodes antiwhite racial animus not in its choice of main characters but in its choice of background characters; the film is big on "representation" but in a setting that goes out of its way to "include" people of every ethnicity, there is a conspicuous absence of whites anywhere in the background of the movie. (As ever, the fewer whites you have, the more diverse you are.) The implicit message is that one—exactly one—race is not welcome in the rainbow multiethnic utopia. There are two (really, 1.5) white characters in the main cast, and we will get to them, but in the background there are approximately none, and this is quite intentional: "imagine a world without white people," say the film’s creators, "wouldn’t that be ideal?"
But Spider-Man: Across the etc. goes even further: beyond its specifically racial hostility, it contains other forms of intersectional hatred, encoded purely in its art direction, without even looking at the actual narrative. The character design, color palette, and even the lighting are intended to convey the primacy of queerness, disabledness, ugliness, and any-race-but-whiteness. It used to be that art and film tried to portray beauty, in part by deploying beautiful people, but all the characters in Spider-Man: Across etc. are deliberately malformed. They look like the faces of antifa. The only characters in the entire movie who are classically proportioned are the arch villain and the mtf transsexual love interest. Everyone else is awkwardly tall and lanky or fat or skinny-fat or otherwise a caricature. And as with the conspicuous absence of whites in the background, it’s not the use of caricature per se that encodes implicit disdain for the well-turned out and the beautiful. It’s the conspicuous absence of caricature when the movie gets down to the business of delivering its moral payload. In this world where everyone is misshapen, who is classically handsome? Only the archvillain.
We might pause to consider another recent movie which used similar aesthetics, which was also set in “the multiverse” and which had an identical metaphysical premise: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.
When you watch a big-budget movie, everything—every tiny detail—is deliberate. There is a visual ideology which is conveyed by the totality of what is in the film. The lighting, the make up, the mise en scene, the composition of every frame; all of it is carefully curated in order to support the film maker’s world-view and vision. Take a look at these stills from DJ Snake’s Turn Down For What and compare them to Everything, Everywhere and compare them to Spider-Man. You can see how the set pieces are carefully chosen to give an impression of filth and squalor. They choose to cast unattractive people, or if they cast someone good-looking, they choose to make them look ugly. Stark, yellow, lighting gives an impression of jaundice. Clothing is distressed; hair is disheveled; but neither in a fashionable way. I have never seen it written this way, but I suspect that the "aesthetic theory" behind these choices is that they are supposed to encode some kind of "gritty realism," depicting the world "as it is" "warts and all" and that moreover this is supposed to be subversive of capitalism, which the communist understands as working upon people to implant desires within them that they do not natively possess. Supposedly this means desires for frivolous things like Coca Cola, but the way it cashes out it becomes clear that the real resentment is over things like soap and flush toilets. The left longs eternally for the muck and the mud.
(Even a small detail such as a filthy microwave interior are selected to convey the Spiderman’s ideological payload)
Understood in this way, the relative brownness of the cast is yet another aspect of mud-grasping, of the desire to fall down. Whiteness in leftist discourse is associated with cleanliness, punctuality, with science and mathematics. When you look at the movies that brown people make in their own countries, there is no sense of this; they take pride in their own people and they portray them as smart and brave and beautiful. They see themselves as the protagonists in their own history. These same people come to America and raise brown children who grow up to see themselves instead as antagonists8 to American history. Asians like Daniel Kwan (codirector of Turn Down and Everything, Everywhere) are capable of performing whiteness or brownness as it suits them; here he performs brownness as an auteur, in order to create media which is directly antagonistic to whiteness. It’s a kind of revenge gambit, an attempt to invoke the same racial alienation in whites that he feels as an Asian American.9
Like Spider-Man, Everything, Everywhere was produced by an auteur duo consisting of a (((white))) man and a 2nd-gen light-skinned minority who performs antagonistic brownness. Both film-making duos chose, as their settings, to depict American cities which are mostly devoid of white people. Both movies construct their world in a way that treats brownness as normative. Indulge me as I "imagine if the roles were reversed" — a movie set in Taiwan which shows the city entirely populated by whites would be saying something quite alien—and dare we say, colonialist—to its audience.
I know that my detractors will accuse me of reading far more into this than is present, but we can all recognize this accusation as an instance of celebration parallax, wherein an observation of leftist behavior is scurrilous and false if made disapprovingly, and glorious and inevitable if it is being celebrated. If you were to take my same analysis above and reword it to be triumphalist (9 Times that Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Deconstructed the Aesthetics of White Supremacy and Hetero-Fascism And We Are So Here For It!) then the same people telling me to chill out man, it’s just a kid’s movie, would instead praise the ingenuity of the filmmakers for the way they are subverting the patriarchy.
And on that note, we will briefly examine the different men in the film and how they are used to comment on the topic of masculinity. This is important because the varieties of male behavior in a story reveal the author’s beliefs about what roles a male can choose to play as the author of his life. Although there are many male characters in the movie, most of them are not actual men. Miles’ and Gwen’s dads are inert props to their respective children’s queer journey of coming out as Spiderman. The Spot is presented as an important character, but the movie treats him as part of the environment. In psychoanalytic terms, none of these males has a phallus, which is the capacity to act.
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller present us with two examples of genuine men; male characters who are self-actualized and who exert agency. The hero of the movie, Miles Morales, is not a self-actualized man, he is a boy in the process of becoming a man, and his character arc is complete when he rejects Toxic Masculinity in favor of Nu-Masculinity.
Choice 1 - Miguel. The movie’s portrayal of Miguel is not subtle. He is a "vampire." He is the only male character in the movie who has a classic silhouette. He believes the universe operates according to principles which sometimes demand sacrifice. He is willing to do what is necessary to live according to his understanding of moral law. Miguel represents fascism, toxic masculinity, and heterosexuality. In a movie that is entirely queer-coded, he is the only character who doesn’t act feminine. Any other villains in the movie are incidental, because the central drama of the film revolves around Miles’ relation to Miguel. Miguel is the only character who doesn’t automatically affirm Miles’ intrinsic worth. He is the only character who values people based on their accomplishments rather than their “humanity.” There is nothing particularly villainous about Miguel except that he tells Miles, "no." But that and some chiaroscuro lighting and some dark, foreboding synths and strings tell you everything you need to know about how bad Miguel is. Every time he is on screen, the director uses cinematic techniques to tell you he's bad.
Choice 2 - Peter Parker. Is Peter Parker actually white? The creators of the movie say he is crypto-Jewish, but in the context of the story that is hardly relevant. Peter in this movie is doing everything a good white man is supposed to do. He is standing down and stepping aside to make room for women of color. He is passing the torch on to the next (brown) generation. He is a stay at home dad who wears a pink fuzzy robe and always has his child in tow, as if he were her mother. This is presented as the proper way for a man to self-actualize; not by relinquishing agency, but by deliberately stepping into female roles and acting as a supporting character to browns and women of color. He is “non-toxic” masculinity. Notice how his his build is less intimidating than Miguel’s. He is a little shorter, he is soy-facing, he wants a hug. He is the precise opposite of Miguel, a sensitive, soft, anti-male.
There’s some kind of inverse correlation between how big the author claims his world is and how big his imagination is. The contention of every "multiverse" story is that it encompasses not just the the entire universe, but all possible universes. As the stage of the story expands, the concerns of the plot contract: the only story which is possible in all possible worlds is that some bad actor is trying to destroy all possible worlds and that a collection of variations on the protagonist must band together to defeat the bad actor, who might also be a variation on the protagonist. No other narrative composition is parsimonious or concinnitous within the setting of "the multiverse." If the story is anything else, then the multiverse isn’t the setting; at most it’s a set piece.
Whereas most stories are concerned with the behavioral dynamics of multiple chardiferacters forced to negotiate some kind of intersubjective terrain between them, multiverse stories are about a single character forced to negotiate some intra-subjective terrain as an ordeal of pure interiority. If the strictly internal conflict cannot be resolved, then the outcome is the end of every possible person in every possible universe. Far from having the expansiveness to which it pretends, this type of thinking is that of a toddler. A child cannot distinguish between his own personal concerns and those of the rest of the world. If a three year old doesn’t get his toy, it really does feel like the end of all possible universes, from his perspective. "End of the world" stories are childish and they appeal to children, because metaphysically, they fail to distinguish between the universe of an individual and the universe itself. Both for authors and audiences, "end of the world" stories are a symptom of solipsism and parochiality; the smaller your personal world is, the easier it is to bring the whole thing down. Multiverse stories are an even more extreme case of this: it’s not catastrophic enough to end the world: the stakes of your personal family drama are not merely existential with regard to the whole planet, or the whole galaxy, or any finite apportioning of space and time, no. If you can’t apologize to your mother, all of existence and the field of everything which was ever possible and everything which ever could have been will be erased.
Most people are familiar with the idea of the monomyth, but of course if you zoom out far enough, every story feels the same. Guy wants thing. Other guy stops him from getting thing. First guy figures out how to get thing. Other guy sad. Other guy, for the purposes of this summary, can be a literal person, an institution, a historical circumstance, and so on. If first guy gets what he wants, that’s called a comedy, and if he doesn’t, that’s called a tragedy. Horror, which is what I like to write, is a subgenre of tragedy.
Stories aren’t very interesting when we look at them from this far away. This model can describe The Lord of the Rings and The Cat in the Hat, but it can’t tell the difference between them. It’s true, but not useful. What makes a story remarkable (or not) is determined at a much higher level of detail: what are the desires of the characters which are fulfilled or unfulfilled? Are those desires righteous? Does the cost of satisfying them serve to undercut their righteousness or their desirability? These are grown up sorts of questions, and Spider-Man: Across etc. is billed as a movie for children, but it seems to me that the primary consumers of children’s media these days are ostensibly adults. Moreover, older children’s stories used to contain questions like this, but newer ones seem to be much flatter.
The classic monomyth has room in it for courage and heroism. The hero is supposed to pass through some kind of dark underworld develop himself, and then use his new competence to overcome his adversary. And of course, through the magic of wordcelery, we can produce any reading of any text that we desire, but I’ve noticed a pattern in the movies that get made since the cultural revolution of 2015, which I call the Queer Monomyth. The standard monomythical story contains such famous narrative beats as the call to action, the refusal of the call, and the katabasis. The queer monomyth has its own beats, which I have taken the liberty of naming:
The bigoted rejection — in the first act of the story, the hero is revealed to be queer. Queerness, in this context, need not be homosexuality. It could be any kind of aberrant or eccentric quality, but it must be a deviation from the norm. Regardless of the literal nature of the difference, it is always a metaphor for homosexuality. The bigoted rejection occurs when the hero is outed or partially outed to their parental figure, and the parent does not make the state-mandated noises of joyful acceptance and approval.
The temper tantrum — in the second act of the story, the emotions of the hero are metaphorized into a story about the end of the world. The consequences of the parents’ rejection are projected onto a conceit which is larger than life. The self esteem of the hero prevents him from overcoming the difficulties presented by this conceit.
The acceptance — in the final act of the story, the parent observes that their rejection of the child in act one is causing harm to the child, and probably threatening to unravel the entire universe. The parent has a moment of tearful awakening and is finally able to except the child’s literal or metaphorical queerness. The universe is saved!
In one sense, there is some thing almost charming about the innocence of the worldview expressed in the queer monomyth. We see that the purveyors of the story are lost, vulnerable children longing for daddy’s approval. But there’s nothing innocent about queer liberation in practice; it doesn’t matter what purported psychological damage lies at the heart of every single homosexual’s super villain comic book origin story, the manifestation of it in the adult world is to create a culture which maximizes the opportunities for adults to take sexual advantage of children. The same people who claim that being a children’s movie disqualifies a film from serious literary analysis also believe it is morally imperative to expose children to queer understandings of gender in cartoons. Curious.
The queer monomyth is at once pathetic and poisonous. It’s pathetic because its ambitions are revoltingly small and shallow, and it’s poisonous and because the moral logic of stories is always prescriptive. Stories define what is normal, and they make a statement about the way the world ought to work. To those who identify with the hero in the story, the message is, "you are perfect just as you are, and your deviancies are the source of your moral worth." To those who identify with the parents, the message is, "the best way to love your child is to defer to them. The most important thing you can do as a parent is celebrate their homosexuality."
Spider-Man: Across etc. hits all the beats of the queer monomyth, and in fact the dramatic sequence of bigoted rejection, temper tantrum, acceptance plays out several times across several characters. In the climax of the story, Miles Morales defeats his nemesis effortlessly. The only point of friction in the colossally boring fight scene is the cliché where he realizes that he was good enough all along, and he doesn’t have to grow or change in any way. I think that’s a self evidently vile message to teach to anyone, child or adult, but it’s all too typical of queer narcissism. In this movie, being Spider-Man (having super powers) is an allegory for being gay or trans. The children in the movie struggle with the emotional labor of "coming out" to their parents as Spider-Man. This doesn’t make any sense, because unlike being queer, being Spider-Man is not a source of moral opprobrium, but it only serves to highlight the allegorical nature of the conundrum.
There was a discussion on Twitter over whether the main love interest in the story, Gwen Stacy was supposed to be implicitly trans. The evidence for this is her haircut, and the fact that she is always portrayed with a pink and blue color scheme that is evocative of the trans flag. For some reason, the slightly less gay half of the franchise’s fan base felt it was an important culture war battlefront to gainsay this possibility, but the fact is that it doesn’t matter in the slightest which of the thousand and one queer identities the characters profess when the movie is queer from its female-presenting balls to its bones.
There are many more narrative threads one could pick apart in this movie. We might comment on the race-mixed relationship between Miles and Gwen, on the way she is flagrantly disloyal to him and yet he instantly forgets and overlooks this. There are anti-white and anti-male sentiments buried in this plotline. We could look at the ways that some of the supporting characters such as Jess Drew (a black pregnant spider woman in a wheelchair) and Hobie Brown (a British antifa ‘punk’ Spiderman) are chosen to reify antiracist and antifacist conceits of the left. We could examine the way the film briefly dabbles in anti-anglo resentment through the character of Pavitr Prabhakar. But these are best left as an exercise for the reader.
The purpose of this essay is not to exhaustively quantify all of the ideological conceits of the Spider-Man:Spider-Verse franchise. The purpose is to demonstrate a method for criticizing left-wing pop culture. Whatever it might mean to "win" the culture war, an important piece of it is to embed this type of critical understanding into the mind of the average normie, the way wokism has already done. And despite the intellectual pretensions of most leftist posters, the truth is they barely have any engagement or understanding of high-brow topics and literature. They are immersed in lowbrow, mass-produced, industrial pop culture. That’s the actual battlefront. That’s the level of thinking they occupy. And if that puts them beneath us, then what that means is we have to fix them by meeting them where they are. They are sick, and we are healthy.
Maybe the terms I have used here are not the winning terms. Emancipationism. The Queer Monomyth. The concepts are important, not the jargon. Never use jargon to the uninitiated, all you do is make yourself look dumb. Using obscure jargon is sending a signal to the in-group. Explaining the concepts without jargon is how you send a signal to the outgroup. Be self-conscious when you criticize these concepts. No pop cultural artifact is too small or too insignificant. Criticize everything. Show how left-wing ideological conceits are embedded in every level of popular media.
Since most people lack the inner spark needed to think for themselves, they only know how to complain using left-wing concepts. They blame "capitalism" and "the patriarchy" for their personal discontent. Well, both of those things are dead. We don’t live under capitalism or patriarchy, and yet our problems persist. It’s time to give the normie a vocabulary wherein egalitarianism and longhousery are the "systemic" paradigms that are causing problems. It’s beyond the scope of this essay to produce an apologetic against egalitarianism, but it’s scarcely necessary in any case. No one was ever reasoned into egalitarianism. People choose egalitarianism as a default option, because monkeys make pleasing monkey noises when they talk about it, and because they perceive themselves as inferior. Desiring equality is what you do when you think you are lesser. It’s a way of striking back at your betters under the guise of morality. Often you don’t realize you are doing this, because your own motivations are not necessarily transparent to you.
Women, in particular, (as we have already noted) use a strategy of intra-sexual competition wherein they attempt to disguise hierarchy, to produce a social mirage, that everyone is on equal footing, and then covertly snipe at each other in order to be the first among equals. This is the skeleton key to understanding all female behavior. They want the illusion of equality, and then they want to sabotage their rivals within an egalitarian pretense. This is what the longhouse means. It doesn’t mean anyone trying to control your behavior for any reason. Telling someone, “no,” to their face isn’t the longhouse. Participating in a gossip network in an attempt to defame a category of actions that you know your rival partakes in, that’s the longhouse.
Again, it’s out of scope to expand on this, but I assume I’m writing to the initiated. Our critical analysis does not take off by being rational, (although it is rational) it takes off by speaking to people in their hindbrains, to the part of the self that is pre-rational, and post-rational, by attaching an emotional valence of goodness to what we will build up and of badness to what we will tear down. That’s the only way to convince anyone of anything, and that goes double for women. A good society is one in which male social norms prevail over women, and a bad society is one in which female social norms prevail over men. We live in a bad society and we wish to get back some measure of a good one. And the only way we’re going to do that is by mastering the feminine modality of social control.
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1 Some people will say I am autistic or mercenary or cynical for saying this, but I say they are wilfully (and adaptively) blind to this. Every author knows the way you write compelling dialog is by realizing that when two characters are talking, they each have an objective, which they are trying to accomplish by means of talking. Women have evolved to win social games by obscuring hierarchy and then performing covert aggression with plausible deniability. Men, on the other hand, have evolved to idealize women. This makes both sexes congenitally incapable of acknowledging the real, game-theoretic transactions which occur in social interactions. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352250X19300910)
2 I am avoiding the evo-psych term “status” because midwits have ruined it with poor understanding, as midwits always do. The best way to think of “status” in an evo-psych sense is the same way you think of likes on Facebook or Twitter. It’s an ephemeral unit of attention and approval. Fleeting, seductive, one bit of information.
3 In court, the standard for evaluating whether a person has been subjected to sexual harassment is called the “reasonable woman standard” — the #metoo movement is essentially a confession that this reference class doesn’t exist.
4 Repealing the civil rights act is currently the most important strategic goal for the American right, no matter what silly online games you play, or what e-celeb you think is so important to “the movement.” I’ll take a tradcath, a perennialist, a Nietzschean, a homesteader, whatever kind of masculinity larper guru, I don’t care—if you want to liquidate the civil rights act and curtail immigration, that’s good enough for me. Even a transsexual who is on board with that might not be the worst thing, but once we get there I am going to personally send him a rope and a book of 101 reasons why life ain’t worth living.
5 It’s also worth noting from a strictly historical perspective, that no emancipation event has ever made the emancipated population better off, with the exception of emancipation from tyrannical left-wing governments. Of course, this gets a bit tricky because everyone will want to gerrymander and equivocate and negotiate as to what, precisely constitutes emancipation in an historical sense. I’ll give you a few examples:
After women’s "liberation" to do men’s work and perform male roles in society, their self reported happiness has cratered, and they have mostly turned to antidepressants and hysterical politics. By every measurable metric of psychological wellbeing (not financial) western women have become progressively more unhappy as they’ve gained more rights. US white women, who have had the most rights and privileges for the longest, are the most miserable and medicated demographic. (The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness (There's no paradox at all, it only appears paradoxical to emancipationist religious zealots, which is most of the western world at this point.))
After black slaves were freed in the antebellum south, most of them were incapable of providing for themselves. Prior to their emancipation, they had the highest employment rate, and the lowest incarceration rate (lol) of any time in American history. This is not a joke, by the way, but to write a good and thorough apologetic for why black slavery was good for the majority of blacks is outside the scope of this work.
It’s harder to pin down exact date of homosexual liberation; it was formalized in 2015 but it was in full swing by the mid nineties and it instantly precipitated the AIDs epidemic, a disease caused by and spread by homosexual behavior. It literally decimated the gay population and the only reason it appears to be under control now is that medical insurance companies now enact a form of socialism on straights, forcing everyone who pays for healthcare in America to subsidize their lifestyle with expensive antiviral drugs. (The actual cost of PrEP is ~$21,000/year, but it is given to homosexuals for free.) The costs are laundered through “private” healthcare insurance your employer is obligated, by law, to pay for by skimming off the top of your wages. Money which you earn is taken into a public purse and used to pay to keep homos from dying of AIDS. The emancipation of gays is possible only through the enslavement of straights. Every time a fag swallows 20 loads at a piss party, know that you subsidized that.
6 All of these so-called gender-identities are words for “woman.” Gender-nonconformism is an overwhelmingly female trait, something women do because they believe it is bad to be merely a woman-qua-woman. Feminism tells them that women are inferior unless they shed their femininity and become as men. All female social roles and jobs are degraded and denigrated in society. Giving birth, motherhood, and domestic chores are all seen by feminism as degrading, and the message given to little girls is “you should be anything but a woman.” At the same time, women are given many special privileges in society over men. Women are simultaneously told to be proud of being women and that the culmination of feminine pride is to renounce femininity. Gender Ideology is the female response to this: women search for ways to be women without being women.
7 There has not been a “vibe shift.” The only vibe shift is that the covid lockdowns are over, and that the woke have won. It might help to actually spell out what woke means in material terms. It isn’t just an hysterical discursive affect. It’s a redrawing of the lines of what is considered sane and normal. It means that basically all republicans are happy to defend terfs and LGB without the T against those horrible wokists; it means that you’re allowed to grumble about the ongoing ordeal of civility but you aren’t even capable of badthink about the previous one. Notice how words like terf and lgb without the t narrow the domain of discourse: pick a side, normie, are you with the feminists or the transexual feminists? Are you on the side of the homos or the other homos? The Stonetoss comic is evergreen: neo-leninists are the real transphobes. In ten years when the dust has settled around whatever the transexual version of Obergefell turns out to be (one shudders to speculate) the vibe-shifted techbros will dutifully claim that the female penis havers are all well and good but they draw the line at corpse-fucking.
8 The standard Not All Brown People disclaimer applies here. This is the thing boomers (of all ages) don’t understand: while it’s true that American civic ideology deliberately trains 2nd gen browns to become antagonists, a large plurality of them are eager to accept that training because there is a real and perhaps inescapable racial alienation that one feels as an ethnic minority. On the other hand, most non-white American citizens don’t understand that American culture is alienating to all Americans of all races, even and maybe even especially to the proverbial straight white males who are, by definition, excluded from all of the rhetoric of inclusivity.
9 Footnote: I really need to take an extra moment here to demean, belittle, and diminish Asian-American alienation. It’s entirely self-inflicted, a cottage industry of anecdotes about how the other kids used to mock you for having a smelly lunch. Play the world’s smallest violin for the Asian American girls, whose kvetching about racism amounts sums up to "god don’t you hate it when white guys think you’re hot? I wish everyone would stop sexualizing my hot, wet pussy."
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