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Notes -
I have a question that could turn into a culture war topic but I need some kind of sanity check before I flesh it out further:
Does anyone else feel as though, even as the general populace becomes less and less optimistic, the mainstream narrative has nonetheless converged on a message of unrelenting positivity?
It is hard to describe, but the best examples of what I'm talking about that spring to mind are The Rise of the "Corporate Memphis" art style and the seeming ubiquity of beauty filters as a default feature in smartphones.
Or in the way Youtube video comments have turned from a cesspit of trolls trolling trolls trolling trolls to basically a competition for who can heap the most bombastically hyperbolic praise on the subject video.
The common thread is that these techniques/styles end up minimizing the appearance of 'flaws' and 'ugliness' whilst also idealizing the subjects it examines so as to avoid... I don't know. Offense? Critique? Any possible negative emotional valence? Where before there might be depiction of ugliness as ugliness or actual examination of social and personal flaws in a way that risks causing offense, where before there were art styles that embraced ugliness (while still being aesthetic) and Cartoons like Ren and Stimpy could use unpleasant visuals for comedic effect now it seems like most products are produced with the intent of avoiding any unpleasant sensations on the viewer's part.
And this now seems to apply to every single product of modern culture, aside from some decrepit/degenerate corners of the internet. "Good vibes only" seems to be the accepted norm... with the exception of certain acceptable targets who may be used as punching bags.
I'm not even getting into possible causes, I'm literally just trying to see if this is an actual, noticeable phenomenon.
Have you felt as though mainstream/corporate-produced culture has reached increasing heights of 'toxic positivity' even as your own outlook on the state of the world has degraded?
I'm familiar with the phenomenon you're describing and I think it applies in the realm of UX, brand identities, graphic design etc., but I'm not sure how applicable it is beyond that.
If you compare any random film made in the last five years with a film made in the 90s, one of the first things that'll jump out at you is how washed-out, desaturated and visually dark modern films look compared to films from the 90s. Modern films tend to be filmed digitally rather than on film, which produces more washed-out, low-contrast visuals compared to film. They also tend to use VFX and CG extensively, and one of the most effective means of hiding imperfections in VFX work is just to make the whole image darker. Six years ago, Zack Snyder got a lot of stick for producing a desaturated high-contrast interpretation of the Caped Crusader; now, we're at the point where people are complaining that literal Disney films are too (visually, not tonally) dark. The same trend is obvious in prestige television.
10-15 years ago the big complaint in video games was that everyone was adopting the house style of Call of Duty and Battlefield and making everything brown or grey. The worm has turned and now lots of things are magenta instead, but it still isn't hard to find modern games which are washed-out, desaturated, dark and generally unpleasant to look at.
To my mind, most of the big trends in popular music in the last ten years have prominently featured a conscious embrace of ugliness and poor taste, whether it's the ear-splitting sonic assault of drill music; the self-aware tackiness and excess of hyperpop; the bored, amelodic, disaffected repetition of British and Irish sprechgesang bands; or the deliberate minimalism of modern trap and SoundCloud rap.
I don't see this as a fundamental lack of positivity and retreat to nihilism or misanthropy. At the risk of engaging in some serious "old man yells at clouds" style activities, I can't really emphasize enough how "irony" seems to have become the central social feature of Gen-Z. "Ugliness and poor taste?" No, I have great taste because I'm wearing this ugly outfit and my soundclap rap is mumbled gibberish. Kanye (before he want to planet Kanye) did this explicitly with one of his Yeezy lines that were specifically intended to look like dilapidated homeless people clothes. And have $1500+ prices per article.
But, wait, it gets worse! I'm seeing trends of irony-upon-irony. The embodiment of this is Pete Davidson who has made a career off of 1) Having a firefighter dad who died in 9/11 2) Joking about it 3) Talking about how it still makes him anxious and depressed 4) Making a horrible movie where he mixes both of these concepts 5) Being the heir to the Jimmy Fallon "I'm always breaking" role on SNL and 5) Dating megastars in Hollywood. That guy is incomprehensible to me because he doesn't ever seem to be serious even when he is professing huge sincerity. Again, the maybe-maybe-not self-awareness of that Taco Bell ad he's in where the extra says, at the end, "are you riffing or is this part of the bit?"
In my mind, I think pop culture, since about 2015 and the rise of real Gen-Z meme culture, has had a crisis of authenticity. It's now a rare commodity and, therefore, hard to reliable find and produce. The easy way is to double down on irony / sarcasm ... which further pollutes the message and so we get stuck into multi-layered cyclic irony. Trust disintegrates, people aren't sure if their emotions are common and understood or bizarrely unique personal hallucinations.
I think it certainly is in some cases. The dominant lyrical theme of drill music is "I am going to kill my rival drug dealers", while the dominant lyrical theme of cloud rap/emo rap/sadboi rap etc. is "I am abusing drugs because I am so miserable and depressed" (something which is acknowledged to be a stage persona in some instances, namely the late Lil Peep). Maybe these aren't nihilistic or misanthropic stances, but they're anything but "positive".
Hard disagree on Pete Davidson, I watched one of his recent Netflix specials and found him surprisingly candid and unpretentious. Perhaps a thick veneer of irony coated his earlier work but he seems to have grown out of it. Agree that, in the Anglosphere, ironic detachment is the air that we breathe (as a genre, the aforementioned hyperpop could not function without it).
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Posers just stole it from Gen-X. (Simpsons S07E24, May 1996)
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There's an interesting contrast to be made between the Call of Duty era where games went for 'gritty realism' and the, call it the Fortnite era where literally nothing needs to be taken seriously, and real life personalities and pre-existing characters are rendered as a perfected, cartoonish versions of themselves.
I won't even say one is better than the other, but Fortnite definitely represents the sort of unrelenting positivity, the hiding of ugliness, the avoidance of negative emotional valence that I'm talking about.
On the other hand, I'd point at bands like Imagine Dragons and a lot of imitators that produce peppy and/or 'epic' sounding songs with aggressively positive/affirming lyrics that... also don't mean anything. They want to induce some positive emotional valence but without having any real 'message.' Other than a vague "YOU GOT THIS! YOU ARE UNSTOPPABLE, YOU CAN ACHIEVE ANYTHING YOU WANT" sort of statement. And these songs become MASSIVE HITS.
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You mean the same narrative that tells us that
We live in a culture that systemically oppresses everyone who is not a white heterosexual male
Literally any person around us can be a hidden hateful bigot and we must be eternally vigilant to every word and action in case they slip and reveal themselves, and we can not let slide any offensive word, even if they were said by accident and without intent to offend, because it is worse than physical violence
Academic campuses and pretty much all major companies are permeated by rape culture and any woman can be - and often are - sexually assaulted at any moment there
Police are prowling all major cities looking for non-white people to kill for no reason at all
We are destroying our environment and the only way to avoid it is either massive depopulation or massive drop in the quality of life
At least half of the country are insane illiterate bigots who dream about murdering and enslaving anybody who does not look like them, and instituting a fascist dictatorship
We cannot ever show our faces in public ever again for the fear of dying in horrible agony
Convincing people to kill themselves is a viable solution to the problem of rationing medical care (and maybe other resource problems too) - this is only in some countries, but wait a bit
You can't eat a steak without feeling very guilty and you better learn to eat mealworms and crickets instead
Everything that exists around us was stolen from somebody, built by racists or enslaved people and every child that is born is born into the original sin and owes huge sums for that just for the fact of their birth into a wrong race
Internet is brimming with "misinformation" and only strict government-guided censorship can give us hope for the democracy to survive
That doesn't sound like a message of unrelenting positivity to me...
I agree with your post, but I also see where the OP is coming from.
I think it's mostly a process of infantilization. Corporations, states, media etc. behave towards the plebs more and more as if they were children. So yes, that means sometimes they will be extremely positive (you're a good kid!) and other times they will try to scare you (they're coming from you! you need our protection) or reprimand you (how dare you say that foo-ism, you disgusting bar-ist).
So I see OP as referring to the coddling, "nice" face that they adopt for well-behaved kids, which they (Cathedral people, not OP) probably would like to be the only face they have to adopt, because in their ideal world likely every pleb is a good child.
And it's not only about art styles, it's also about the language used and the patronizing, condescending or "overly cute" tone. For example, see the peppering of emojis in every online communication by many companies, states etc. Does anyone really need a finger pointing down to understand that "this image" refers, in fact, to the image shown below a post? To see the country flag after the name of the country? To see a snowflake after reading the word "winter"? (oh, babby understandy now, you mean time when it snowwy, thankies mommy!!) Etc.
An interesting exercise is to compare current textbooks to old textbooks. It's very salient in programming books. Most old programming books address the reader as if he were an intelligent, mature, adult person, even if they use jokes and puns sometimes; they show respect for the reader. Many current programming books try extremely hard to be "cute" and address the reader as a dumb, fragile baby. For example, compare Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs to Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!. SICP is not dry at all, in fact it's quite friendly and full of jokes and puns. But it clearly respects the reader and expects him to be mature and intelligent. The second one is written as a children's book, but meant for adults. This may be an extreme example, but the trend is definitely there.
The thing is, it seems that many people like to be addressed as children. Maybe because it "absolves" you from responsibility, thinking and anything else but "wanting" and "not wanting", being happy, sad or angry? I don't know.
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That's what certain parts of the media are portraying, but notice the point that each of these is usually couched against some 'valid' target of ire, so there's always an outgroup to blame for the problem.
And the positivity tends to come from the general corporate/commercial messaging around a topic which simply frames any and every possible situation in the lightest way possible.
Let me zero in on a couple:
This is often couched as "guess what! You can make an easy impact against climate change JUST by eating bugs!" as a positive, progressive viewpoint.
There's a recent development of, again, framing this whole things as a positive in the marketing!!! This is what I mean! Rather than viewing the end of a human life as a generally tragic, possibly grim affair that should be viewed as a negative (discounting the afterlife). look at that fucking commercial portraying it as a beautiful event!
When did we hit the point where euthanasia was couched as a 'beautiful' thing rather than the ugly (sometimes) necessity that we try to avoid?
And likewise, can you find any corporation outside of the news media that allows any level of honesty, critique, or possible offense of any particular group in their corporate messaging?
If the group offended is not "woke people", then yes, easily. E.g. I have seen corporation sponsor "family friendly drag queen shows" (and publicly brag about it) - I'm pretty sure it is offensive to many people. It's just not the people that the Right Thinking People would care about offending.
But you don't see them sponsoring a Family Friendly Drag Queen show and depicting opponents to such a show as bigots.
Basically, they refuse to acknowledge that there's any negative side to it, and don't aim criticisms at any group. It's not their intent to offend, and part of that is to make it as annoyingly positive as possible.
Oh yes they do. Maybe not with drag queen shows (I can't say as I haven't witnessed specific communications to that effect) but certainly with other things. Example: https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2021/03/31/georgia-election-law-delta-ceo-calls-new-voting-rules-unacceptable/4823216001/
I think it's pretty offensive for anyone who supported the law (2/3 of voters by some polls) but somehow Delta - and many other companies - do not care. They think they are too big to fail anyway, so offending somebody who does not hold the power (and these aren't consumers anymore in the American system, not for a long time - it's those who control government budgets and subsidies) is completely fine.
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Seems to me that OP was talking about art, or at least about art suitable for mass consumption, not public discourse.
Can art stay "unrelentingly positive" if all other culture is steeped in negativity? We're not living in an environment where the art can (or wants to) stay away from politics and cultural context.
Yes! There are multiple different things. these are not particularly negative. They suck, despite being "positive".
This is not art, this is grift.
It's a grift of unrelenting positivity. here, here's some unpolitical, "positive" art. stable diffusion 1 is a much better artist than this quirky person
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What is scarce today is proportionate authenticity in positivity and negativity.
A question I like to ask with my bi-coastal over-educated early 30s cohort is "Yes, of course Orange Man was very very bad, but how did you life get appreciably worse between 2016 and 2020, barring anything related to COVID?" As almost all of my cohort got into manager+ levels of mostly tech corporate work, completed a masters, and/or got married ... they can't really come up with anything concrete beyond "well ... my anxiety...blah blah blah." But that's just the point - negativity (in media sources or elsewhere) doesn't seem, to me, to be about real proportionate evaluation, but a kind of circular mood-affiliation. Even the less emotionally charged WSJ frequently has articles along the lines of "workers are worried the economy is real bad and whatnot." The body of the article amounts to "a bunch of online surveys indicate people are worried ... in general ... here's a few interviews with people who are worried ... in general."
Now, flip the coin the other way. Anybody here who routinely uses Slack or and other chat app in a corporate job will be familiar with the "EVERYDAY AMAZING" hyper-praise that a lot of front line managers HEAP on their employees for ... doing the basics. "Timmy and Janey ABSOLUTELY CRUSHED THEIR STANDUP THIS MORNING!!!!!" Followed with dozens of emoji responses. First, I think this is maybe the number one issue with career development today - front line managers are turning into weird cheerleaders until annual performance reviews where they absolutely gut these same folks. Consistent and honest feedback is really hard to come by and it's nearly impossible to calibrate the relative strength of feedback when you're getting the above (OMG YOU SHOWED UP TO WORK) on the one hand, and a muted "Hey, I think you could've delivered that report better..." on the other. Wait a minute, did I fuck up or not? If I did, how do I improve? What's the most important part of my job?
I know I mixed some topics up above here, but I don't think they're that unrelated. I think about this a lot as somehow who's moved into the Senior Manager / Director phase of the career and, looking down, see a lot of individual contributors who truly don't trust the feedback from the system. As a citizen who reads the news, I see something similar happening with your average man-on-the-street who's looking around and seeing "THE END IS NEAR" on a daily basis, but who goes home, orders from Uber Eats and isn't worried a stranger is poisoning his food.
Oof, yeah the "authenticity" question has been banging around in my head too, and I'd write an essay on it if I can confirm someone smarter hasn't written it already and I get the time to do it.
This rings true: people want to hear positive affirmations if they come from a place of honesty, and maybe don't like it when it's a condescending sort of affirmation or obviously isn't sincere.
And when it comes to positive affirmations from large corporations, you can largely conclude that they're not sincere because it's all designed around getting you to spend money and they have no particular connection with you as an individual to 'authenticate' the affirmation.
Agreed, although I do not have a large corporate job.
Also agreed, and funny enough oftentimes it seems like the performance reviews will gut someone for NOT buying into the positivity culture and being an overall 'downer' at work even if that's simply the result of trying to be honest.
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The comedian Dara O'Briain expressed this as "Crime is down, but the FEAR of crime is up!"
Good Christ do I hate logging into LinkedIn for any reason.
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I think you are correct to a large extent, but as someone who still subscribes to print media, much that focuses on politics, the economy and current events is very negative in tone. This is natural as these publications place focus on trying to warn readers about negative developments and things that need to be changed and improved. It is funny that when comparing the op-ed sections of the NYT to WSJ, the Spectator World to the Atlantic, or the New Criterion to Jacobin, the other side — whatever it is — is usually winning, as “things are going well for us” is less persuasive as a call to action.
Yes, I am not reading newspapers or watching cable news or indeed any mainstream news sources that don't bubble up through twitter, so I am definitely not exposed to the mainstream news messaging as much. Although it doesn't surprise me if they're still in 'fear and outrage mode.'
I think part of what I noticed, however, was how the messaging on inflation, supply chain issues, and energy prices seemed to focus on downplaying the severity of the situation and implying that it will be all fixed in short order. Part of that was due to the election year, to be sure.
Add on all the ridiculous puff pieces about Sam Bankman-Fried that ignore the thousands upon thousands that lost tons of money due to his actions.
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I have noticed that a significant part of Reddit now seems to be "support talk". Instead of jokes and trolling, it's all people saying "terrible thing X happened to me" and all the responses are some variation of "oh my god I'm so sorry for you here's some hugs"
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Interestingly enough I ran across discussion about this phenomenon just the other day. I sometimes watch a youtuber called Todd in the Shadows who talks about pop music (usually through a negative lens because most of anything is bad, but he appreciates good pop music). Every year he releases his "top 10 worst songs of the year" and he began this year's video with a diversion about how critic culture has morphed into fan culture. The discussion on reddit (on a similarly very "poptimist" subreddit) agreed how the culture of positivity is utterly cloying and suffocating. Specifically the genre of "self-empowerment/positivity" is called out as fake and saccharine.
I'm not really hooked into social media so I don't really have much else to add. I do know that RottenTomatoes and other kind of review sites have become utterly worthless as metrics of quality because big companies have realized how important internet cachet has become as an advertising mechanism, and the inevitable tyranny of Goodhart's Law follows. You do have to wonder how much of this endless positivity you talk about is organic. I don't think it's necessarily that all the comments are AI-generated or bots or whatever, but there's obviously corporate fingers tipping the scale. A simple example is youtube removing the dislike button so that the hoi polloi can't show their disdain.
A tangent:
Find a cinephile or three to follow on Letterboxd who’s taste you respect. You don’t even have to sign up for an account or visit the website as Letterboxd provides an RSS feed for each user account.
Is it possible to rate stuff and then get matched with someone like-minded?
That I don’t know. I’ve got three acquaintances I follow on there via their RSS feeds who are all cinephiles. I’ve not signed up for an account, myself, per my personal no social media policy.
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I was going to mention the same video as a welcome change from the Pollyanna-isms.
I'm only a casual Youtube user but it's clear that they set up an aggressive automod for comments a few years ago and I assume people have begun conforming to the unwritten rules in order to have their comments posted instead of being shadow-banned. I suppose it was necessary and probably a net improvement, it gets a bit uncanny though when I watch the videos from SoftWhiteUnderbelly interviewing the by turns desperate and criminal denizens of LA's Skid Row and then read the comments and see they're full of glib praise and hollow platitudes for pimps, addicts and proud gang bangers (in both senses of the term).
I run a youtube channel just for fun with small viewership (~ 1k subscribers). I can tell you that even I (with no youtube partnership or monetization) have a whole bunch of automod options to filter out negative/aggressive comments. I imagine a lot of channels have this on by default, and have even more powerful options at their disposal
Wouldn't surprise me because I can remember when Youtube comments were, as mentioned, a cesspit.
But Youtube has just gone so far in the other directly, including removing the dislike count to prevent negative views/opinions becoming visible that people have adapted by becoming so aggressively positive that you'd think it was sarcasm.
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I remember watching years ago on a guy who reviewed each episode of My Little Pony complaining that his videos that were positive always got a way better reception than his videos that were negative, regardless of the actual quality of the episode. He was pretty deeply upset it seemed that he couldn't honestly review shows, which his channel was supposed to be about, without crippling his channel.
At the same time "hate channels", whose purpose is to shit on stuff seem to do very well.
Yeah, I think in this case the novelty of a grown man liking MLP may have something to do with things.
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I had some thoughts about how both the major films being produced, themselves, seem to play into this and as indicated the average mainstream critic seems to think their job is to validate whatever product is currently supposed to become the latest hit and look for any reason people should enjoy it rather than making an honest assessment of quality.
Critics finding as many reasons as they can to 'like' a work and downplaying obvious flaws seems like a far cry from the days of Siskel and Ebert.
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George Carlin was talking about this decades ago - Euphimisms
IMO, the content distribution has stayed the same, but content discovery has changed a lot. There is more of every thing. More flawed/yucky/ugly stuff and more sanitized garbage. It's just that when the recommendations systems don't know what you like, the sanitized garbage is pushed in your face more often than it used to be. The flipside is once you get into the ugly-offensive-flawed content, the recommendation systems will overwhelm you with that too.
It is about how content discovery changed. You can now eat straight sugar from the sachet, or straight black coffee. Our experiences aren't attenuated by having to all see the same 5 channels on network TV.
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I think there are definitely still shows out there like Big Mouth which use ugliness for comedy. And you of course still see the news reporting on wars and terrorism. There are definitely some areas that are now optimizing for minimizing offense like social media algorithms, but I don't know if I'd say if society as a whole is significantly moving in a direction like this.
I'd have to think pretty hard if this is the kind of 'ugliness' I'm talking about, but then I'm reminded of the whole subplot where one of the characters got his pillow pregnant and it had a little pillow baby and yeah, that's definitely a counterexample.
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