The Permanent Revolution
“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
—Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 1848
Though I refer to myself as having been a communist in the past tense, I cannot help but retain an affinity for Marx. The above quote remains one of the most incisive and useful methods for understanding any given cultural moment but especially the one in which we find ourselves now. I have referenced this quote many times as this newsletter’s guiding philosophy, going as far back as the days it was more of a personal account of transition/detransition. Its suggestion that anything and everything—including one’s own flesh, memory, sense of being—can be remolded according to the emergent needs of the political economy was the surgical tool that helped me understand the overall social context in which transition had begun to appear a viable option to myself and others like me. To be sure, personal minutiae are useful in charting out ways for an individual to change course and grow from this irreversible experience, but they are not useful answers for why transition is suddenly socially encouraged or why large new cohorts of people are drawn to it.
Other scholarly attempts at demystifying the social phenomenon were and are still explanatory for some aspects, but are unable to account for the substrate off which our shared super-organism feeds itself. The Blanchardian explanation, that the trans moment is primarily the result of sexual fetishism (the AGP/HSTS dichotomy) fails to account for entirely new populations who only bear passing resemblance to the disorders which were observed when this was a rarer occurrence among idiosyncratic individuals sharing a similar etiology. Some psychological hypotheses on the modern etiology do merit significant consideration as they have emerged out of an observation of the correlations between these new cohorts, prior social contagions, and existing descriptions of maladaptive behavior. However, psychological explanations fail to account for why the field’s own institutional actors have been largely encouraging maladaptive behavior in this case whereas they normally attempt to alleviate it in almost all other cases.
It is for this same reason that the techno-pessimist’s perspective (that this is the result of the internet’s effect on individuals and society) also crumbles. Though this provides a mechanistic explanation of how such contagions can spread (and why society as a collective may be more vulnerable to them now), it still does not explain why so many nonprofits, legislators, psychologists, medical staff, corporations, and public agencies would have vociferously adopted the same party line at the same time, nor does it account for the fact that this rapid adoption took place just before the contagion began in earnest. Transgenderism is just an extremely visible example of the kind of cultural liquefaction the internet is capable of, but it is by no means the only or even the primary blender in use.
Though a single machine spanning, surveilling, and manipulating virtually the entire world, this does not make the internet “evil” per se (if I believed that I wouldn’t be on Substack), but as I’ve repeated in other essays, the internet is both a novel sensory experience and a sacred space unto itself. It is an interdimensional portal which flattens time and space into nothing, with all of the benefits and pitfalls which come included in such a powerful tool. Like with all industrial machinery of its scale, it took decades of research and development, trillions of dollars invested, and a global restructuring of the existing means of production in order for it to revolutionize commerce, finance, and social relations. What the internet allowed for was permanent revolution: All of its spaces can be constantly refitted and reformatted to the immediate needs of its users (even replacing its own users!) provided the physical infrastructure is properly maintained and regularly upgraded. It is the platform for instituting breakneck radical change, one centralized machine connecting every rung of every ladder in every logistical chain containing at least a few dollars’ worth of microprocessors. Though mostly an incremental improvement on analog technologies which did virtually the same things, these new physical connections between all objects and peoples allow for ever more minute alterations to their forms and functions.
The internet, then, is a machine which maintains the status quo in perpetuity by perpetually revolutionizing that very same status quo. It contains the sum total of virtually all capital everywhere in the world, and it is the means by which each and every store of capital is alchemically transfigured into ever greater stores of capital. Marx was awed by this in his Manifesto and in Capital, producing some of the most descriptive formulae for understanding the economic power unleashed by the bourgeois revolutions. The widespread profaning of the world Marx had observed was not a fabrication by a rabid ideologue or deranged propagandist cynically pushing through his own self-serving program, but by nearly everyone alive during his time. The continual unsettling of the settled order was both severe and broad, widely felt by all social classes around the world in differing ways. Marx was but one of many attempting to explain the causes and provide a speculative future for this explosive social period, and despite the repeated failures in manifesting his historical materialist vision, there is still good reason he casts such a large shadow on modern philosophy and sociology.
In his 1999 work Liquid Modernity, the late Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish/English sociologist and Gramsci enthusiast, described the world after World War II not as the “postmodern” world but as the “liquid” modern world, in contrast with the the “solid” modernity of the prewar years. Though the 19th century was itself a time of endless change, what emerged during this time was created with the earnest belief that it would be a permanent replacement to what had been destroyed. Those alive at the time believed that they were developing the new substrate, the new base of society upon which everything would be built—physically, economically, politically, spiritually, philosophically, etc. Bauman claimed that after World War II, the period often considered “postmodern” by philosophers and social observers of the time is not actually postmodern at all. Rather than it being the case that the ultimate goals of modernity had been achieved and that we are now past them, Bauman believed that postwar societies have abandoned clearly-defined and permanent goals of any sort, embracing perpetual change and uncertainty as their only lasting principles and as goals unto themselves.
It is with this in mind that I will approach today’s pitched cultural battles. However, before we can get to the culture wars, we must start at their logistical base.
The Great “Vibecession”
“Vibecession” is a new term coined in 2022 to describe the disconnect between people’s perception of poor economic performance and the “reality” of economic indicators. This perception emerged from the overall panic and uncertainty of the pandemic, frustrations over inflation, concern over massive amounts of liquidity being created out of thin air, and the general trend of recessions beginning within months or years of the Federal Reserve raising interest rates. Proponents of the “vibecession” concept believe that it was distorted media coverage that led people to believe the economy was on the verge of collapse following the pandemic, pointing as well to data indicating that though people felt the economy was in shambles, they considered their own financial prospects to be in good working order.
Though the economy appears stronger than many feel it to be, this is in aggregate. This recovery was very lopsided, skewed in many different directions, whereas other sectors found themselves either still in recession or entering a new one. Many enterprises folded under the pressure and just as many or more were created in their wake, riding high off the Fed’s stimulus measures. Though tech companies did exceptionally well during the pandemic owing to a greater reliance on their services, these firms then substantially restructured during the “recovery” period, slashing tens of thousands of jobs and benefits on what appears to be a semipermanent basis. Pfizer and Moderna, no longer receiving billions of orders for the COVID vaccine or contact tracing equipment, have likewise suffered. Meanwhile, the dining and hospitality industries have recovered to pre-pandemic levels or better despite rising wages and food prices, a complete reversal of what occurred in the immediate aftermath of the 2020.
This odd fluidity of economic markers can be seen in inflation rate as well. While many discussions around inflation are usually tainted by a misunderstanding that a decline in the inflation rate does not mean a decline in prices, it is also a reality that many families earnestly attempting to budget based on past trends and are finding themselves having to seek alternatives to goods they once considered staple. This is because the inflation rate in aggregate has declined, but the specific products people bought before the pandemic now have wildly different prices post-pandemic. Additionally, since millions lost their jobs, relocated, found new work, gained new housing, financed new vehicles, or retired completely, the average American’s household math has changed dramatically as well, making the post-pandemic recovery feel unstable and possibly illusory. Additionally, different markets faced different inflationary pressures; the South and Midwest faced higher peak inflation compared to the already-pricey California and Northeast, but not for every staple commodity.
This feeling of instability cannot be ignored just because the raw numbers suggest things are going well. “Bidenomics” proponents believe this is largely just due to the doom and gloom of the 24-hour news cycle or electioneering efforts by increasingly polarized partisans, but this cannot account for all of the instability felt. Even though the economy may have recovered in a quantifiable way, qualitatively, it is no longer the same economy. The period between 2020-2021 effectively put the pre-pandemic economy into a blender, had trillions of stimulus spending poured over the top, and what we have now is a slurry which is still reconstituting itself.
In most recessions, economic pain is distributed fairly evenly across sectors, and if it isn’t, it’s usually because there is a replacement taking place. The Rust Belt declined precipitously throughout multiple decades of relative economic success of all other sectors; without a replacement source for the commodities once produced by those regional manufacturers, there would be no economic successes to speak of, but Asia filled in the gap and enabled massive profit generation for American firms through lax regulation, large shipping volumes, and cheap labor. The capital generated by the globalization of manufacturing subsidized the creation of the contemporary digital economy, an invention which likewise decimated untold numbers of brick-and-mortar stores. Smaller downtown economies which had already been decimated by the flight of their core industries and the arrival of big box stores were now in further decline due to Amazon and digital at-home entertainment. The only towns that saw any kind of rebound were those that had large institutional anchors which could exist symbiotically with these new digitally-based logistics chains: Universities, government services, FIRE firms, tech firms, etc. Even in these towns, the legal and fiscal environment had to be reconstituted out of whole cloth. This is not unlike the situation we find ourselves in the 2020s, the major difference being that our present qualitative economic uncertainty does not appear in quantative metrics.
All of the “solid” forms of infrastructure exist to facilitate the transfiguration of low-value goods into higher-value goods into trash. If they don’t get trashed in the end, there is no longer any profit to glean from them. Therefore, the best infrastructure in such a system is the kind of infrastructure that can also be trashed at a moment’s notice. This is the entire philosophy behind Uber; replace cabs not by buying their own national fleet of cabs to compete with local companies, but by paying people to use their own cars as cabs and delivery vehicles, never fully absorbing the costs associated with vehicle maintenance. Despite being what is essentially a consumer-facing logistics company, the actual business only exists on people’s privately owned smartphones. It has no need for any physical infrastructure of its own except for offices and server space, and requires vast amounts of subsidization elsewhere (roads, vehicles, internet, smart devices, GPS, etc.). Likewise, because Uber’s software facilitates payments between riders and drivers, it gets to set dynamic (and at times, extortionate) prices for both.
And speaking of smartphones, these are fantastically disposable and yet indispensable at the same time. They hardly last a few years before their hardware fails, demanding an upgrade to a newer, more powerful, and more expensive model which is just as fragile and degrades just as quickly. It’s almost a cliche to speak of their planned obsolescence at this point, but it is the case. The vast majority of truly indispensable features on a smartphone were already there nearly a decade ago. And yet, despite this, each iteration’s new features (however small or seemingly innocuous) grants internet-based economies ever more flexibility, ever more adaptibility, ever more potential in disrupting what exists. I cannot start a social trend quickly by sending someone a letter, if at all in today’s context. Ten years ago, it would take a serious and sustained effort to go viral and to receive any kind of monetary benefit for having done so. But today, if I were to plug away making absentminded TikToks for a few months, the likelihood that something I post will reach a critical mass that justifies opening a dropshipping merch store within the app is quite high. It’s not an easy thing to sustain long-term necessarily, but it’s never been easier to get off the ground.
Mr. Beast is an excellent example of this. His entire business model relies on the purchase and immediate liquidation of consumable goods as part of projects carefully tailored to generate as much YouTube watch-time and interactions as possible, through which he is then able to generate profit, which he then reinvests into other ventures such as his Feastables candy line. Unlike a traditional entertainment enterprise, the Mr. Beast channels are designed to be unmemorable but addictive. The only goal, per the creator’s words himself, is to maximize YouTube views. His goal was to game the YouTube algorithm, not to become an entertainer. While the ultimate goal of any network program would be to turn a profit and to have critical acclaim, there is usually somewhat of an artistic sensibility in or affinity for even the most sterile of shows and films. This is not the case for the Mr. Beast network. While looking at the project for what it is is impressive from a technical point of view, in the end, what is truly there? None of it will last. Each and every one of those videos will rapidly decline in viewership as the YouTube algorithm shifts. In the past, content creators on the YouTube platform have repeatedly attempted to lobby YouTube into releasing the details of their algorithm or providing some kind of base pay for creators who are “unfairly” hit by changes in the content recommendation system. Jimmy and his people are part of a new generation of YouTuber who actively embrace that fluidity and are happy to stay on top of it, never really seeing an end goal, never really producing a solid piece of material that will stand the test of time, always reconfiguring themselves to match the next nearly-imperceptible bias of a faceless machine.
The Parenting Wars
What was once considered the solid base unit of modern industrial civilization—the nuclear family—today is no longer as common, and is just one of a variety of “viable” familial structures. Dual income parenting is by far the most common, but we also have coparenting between divorced adults, multiple children from multiple fathers or mothers, “polycules,” etc. Even within otherwise traditional nuclear families, the role of the child has changed, with them being offered very little autonomy in how to spend their time, overbearing amounts of supervision, and substantial screen time. Yet simultaneously parents are reticent to discipline their children when they make serious missteps, or to allow their children to face the consequences of their own actions. It is a total inversion of what childhood used to be, where children used to roam the streets and the parks freely, get themselves into trouble, and have to put on a clean-cut and respectful face at home. Instead, children have little to no freedom to go where they like but their most disrespectful and antisocial tendencies are coddled. Punishment is a taboo word, even in cases where the most antisocial of children pose actionable threats to their classmates in schools. If a school were to sequester a particularly dangerous child and attempt to correct them, it can no longer be taken for granted that a parent will understand why a child is being disciplined in such a way.
This inversion began well before Covid, with authors Greg Lukianoff and Johnathan Haidt first popularizing the concept with their essay in The Atlantic titled “The Coddling of the American Mind,” in 2015 (then published as a standalone book in 2018). In it they describe teenagers who folded under the most basic of pressures, were unable to control their emotions to a developmentally appropriate degree, and who simply refused to hear out perspectives they did not already agree with. This problem has only grown worse in America and has spread to much of the rest of the world as well. An additional factor which emerged in full force after the pandemic is the complete absence of any kind of intellectual curiosity. Zero ambition, zero goals, zero prospects; the number one career picked by teenagers today is content creator even though exceedingly few of them exhibit any kind of joy for the processes involved in making it as a content creator.
The base economic changes wrought by the 2008 recession and now the 2020 pandemic have occurred too quickly for the advice of older generations to neatly apply to life in the 2020s. Even my own Gen X parents, in trying to aid me in job searches, have suggested I show up in person with a hard-copy resume to offer prospective employers. In some lines of work, this may still apply, but in my highly credentialized white-collar career, applying online is the only way to get one’s foot in the door. Having charisma, confidence, and a firm handshake is still a must, but that’s for when you actually land an interview, it doesn’t do anyone any favors to show up soliciting a job offer from someone who wasn’t expecting you.
The internet is to blame here, as is much of the strife with regard to parenting in general. The internet completely dissolved the outer walls of the home while erecting new ones within it. It’s not uncommon for families to sequester themselves in their own rooms, mindlessly scrolling on their phones, watching personalized Netflix recommendations, or playing video games alone, avoiding each other entirely yet at the same time feeling stifled by their having to share space with their own families. All inside the home have the propensity to feel adrift, unmoored, misunderstood, and unloved by the people they are supposed to be sharing bonds with, instead seeking ephemeral bonds with strangers online who are a more perfect reflection of what they would like to see in themselves. Mom is on Facebook commenting on poorly-generated AI images put out by bots, Dad is on Twitter arguing about the redpill in a thread rife with P U S S Y I N B I O replies, their preteen son has been on Twitch watching Kai Cenat eat a Hot Cheeto mukbang for the last six hours, and their toddler daughter goes into withdrawal without access to Cocomelon. None of these people can relate to each other’s internal lives at this point, and moreover, the adults in the home—the ones tasked with the responsibility of actually forming and maintaining these bonds—are unwilling to even attempt it. Before, breaking apart a family involved one or both parents not being physically present; now the exact same scenario occurs within the confines of our homes.
The Gender Wars
With such miserable conditions having taken root, it’s no wonder that the gender wars are and have been in full swing for the better part of a decade (nearly two). The feminist revolts of the 2010s have begun to give way to a “masculine” reaction which is just as hysterical and corrosive to healthy relationships as the former. Both are fueled on resentment of the other, both form their model of the other sex based on the worst behavior of the worst role models each sex has to offer, even when such role models contradict each other. The “traditionalist” men are soliciting the OnlyFans whores they lambast in public while the radical feminists are soliciting chauvinists who don’t balk in the face of their shit-tests. Though this dynamic does not extend to the vast majority of people, it does permeate the cultural landscape and thus still has somewhat of an effect on even the most average of people. Assuming someone is able to escape being exposed to this self-reinforcing hotbed of resentment, they will inevitably come into contact with someone who has, and at that point it’s off to the races.
Having a poor family life isn’t even required for absorbing this mindset; merely being online for too long as a teenager can cause these warpings in self-perception, self-reflection, and bond formation. It’s rather difficult to blame ordinary parents for not having known what smartphones would do to their kids when they had never seen a generation raised on them, but now that the oldest Gen Zs are approaching their 30s, we are seeing what effects this rapidly changing social environment has had on them. The online sphere’s dependence on dynamism constant reinvention are at odds with 20th century values which were themselves new and dynamic when they arose. The only surviving elements of human culture will not be those that attempt to form an anchored reality but those which eschew anchoring altogether.
The Race Wars
Though the gender wars are far more corrosive owing to the fact that they fundamentally restructure our most intimate of relations and prevent the arrival of the next generation, the racial discourse is similarly destructive. The Western Hemisphere has always had a different relationship to race than the Old World, and as such, our nationalisms are less predicated on ethnicity than on civic identities.
Though there was always an ethnic component to early American nationalism, it was still flimsier than most. This being due to the diversity and the hybridity of the peoples that were already living in America, divorced from their colonial motherlands and now developing their own culture in common, but also due to the sheer size of the territory. Regardless of whether everyone in North America shared the same cultural heritage, that culture would eventually splinter and drift over time owing to the variety of climates, resources, and geographical barriers that existed on this vast continent. Therefore American identity did inevitably become more conceptual in nature since it was a new thing to begin with, not even three centuries old at the very beginning of the Republic.
Dynamism and change are baked into the American identity. Urbanization and the closing of the frontier marked possible departures from this, but after so many centuries of conquest, self-sufficiency, and reinvention, this shared cultural memory is nearly impossible to erase. Even with those potential departures in mind, the immigration booms of the 20th century were fueled by economic opportunists eager to try their luck in “the land of opportunity.” The social, political, and legal conditions of the United States throughout that period continued to favor dynamic individuals willing to risk everything they’ve ever known in order to make it work in the New World. This did lead to a dilution of the original American stock, those who created the country out of whole cloth, but this is still a hallmark of America today.
Given that this has always been a racially diverse place with a wide variety of overlapping ethnic hierarchies in play, racial conflict is nothing new. One of the major legacies of 20th century America after World War II is, of course, the Civil Rights movement, the destruction of legal American racial segregation, and the elimination of racial quotas for immigration. That was assumed to have been the end of it, but of course, different people groups subjected to different pressures over time inevitably show their differences. Separate but equal may have been inherently unequal, but at the same time, together and nominally equal does not produce equality in practice. Thus, even though all explicit racial and sexual barriers had been eliminated, barriers intrinsic to large racial and sexual groupings still exist and still produce resentment across the spectrum.
The recent explosion of race riots, “racial justice” NGOs, and published racial grievance manifestoes began in earnest following the Great Recession. Each local initiative is shaped by the pecularities of local pressures, but across the country they have all shared similar themes since roughly 2010, taking pages out of the Black Lives Matter playbook, itself also influenced by the activist culture fostered by youthful disaffected academics on Tumblr. The reaction to this, which has only been taking off in broader culture since the pandemic, utilizes the same playbook, the same intentionally offensive shit-slinging, the same black-and-white view of race relations (no pun intended), and crucially, the same lack of an ultimate goal.
Though there is a deep-seated racial animosity animating the most ardent Leftists and Right-wingers, and though they may posture in the direction of “decolonization” (i.e., white genocide) or reminisce about the Final Solution they almost certainly would have been caught up in had they been alive for it, the reality is that neither of these core activists really has the stomach to do what they say they would do. The sentiment may feel real to them in certain moments, and it may be what animates them to act, but there is no faith in the Solid Modernity that would come after the ethnic cleansings. A true believer in such an extreme action would be intent on creating a stable world order that comes out of it and would see it so clearly that nothing would stop them from enacting it; instead half the people calling for the replacement of whites by migrants are white and half of the Twitter Nazis are mixed-race.
This coupled with the visible prevalence of raceplay fetishes not dissimilar to the domination fantasies of the feminists and redpillers suggests as well that they are more motivated by change itself than by anything else. It would be a mistake to claim that their respective extremist stances are merely performative in nature; though their explicit claims may at times conflict with their actions, their actions are just as public and explicit as the claims being made. They are one holistic product, even if they are contradictory. Indeed, even the opposing sides are themselves part of one holistic product, as they merely serve to liquefy the other into an adulterated version which preserves all of its pent-up energies while dispersing the direction in which that energy flows.
Conclusion
This constant cultural tension, these always escalating and never completed cultural wars, they must exist to continue a culture valorizing the liquefaction of culture. The issues are impermanent, they are passing, but the conflict must extend on into forever. Anything which can act as a store of capital must be perpetually broken as though it were a piggy bank being shattered, with instantaneous mass communication acting as the hammer. Unlocking the earnings potential of every possible person, animal, or item on earth involves reconfiguring all relations between these things, and whatever cannot be achieved from the top down must be achievable from the bottom up.
We have shown ourselves to be amazingly adaptable to the changes wrought by the industrial revolution, but as a species we are coming up on some hard limits. Cratering fertility rates suggest that perhaps those alive today are not suited for these changes, or that such rapid social change is maladaptive to human reproduction altogether. In any case, the modern condition is one of plenty and safety, and yet also one of persistent insecurity—the opposite of what the “solid” modernists expected of such a world. They had hoped for a system capable of absorbing all of the changes which had been wrought by the Industrial Revolution, reconciling all of its dynamic and transformative qualities into one stable structure, and in the end, the most stable form of all was the one which deliberately rids itself of structure wherever and whenever it can, only so that it can be renewed over and over again.
Excellent as always, strigoi. Thank you for always writing so incisively.
I am trying to get a sense of how my grandparents got swept up in the social flurry (contagion?) around Marxism & those sorts of new ideas that must have been popular & enticing to youth in the late 19th century in Eastern Europe (specifically, Poland and also Russia.) My grandparents renounced old ideas such as religion and fully embraced these new ideas, bringing them here as young people & believing in these new ideas for the remainder of their lives. None of this was discussed in my family--I was raised Marxist by people who were raised Marxist, but it was all a foregone conclusion & never discussed. I'm trying to put it all in context. I see how Marxism continues to appeal to naive idealists who aren't being taught the evidence of history (I was not taught it at UC Berkeley, I received an ahistorical Marxist education.) It isn't until recently that I became aware of how I was raised in a low-control cult. Understanding how this captured generations of youth may help us to stop that ongoing capture.