Maybe it was due to Halloween. A few Saturdays ago, on my way back from Lowe's, I drove through one of those "No Kings" protests. The people had a fair amount of the usual political protest stuff: overly-detailed signs, pins identifying all manner of political opinions, and megaphones. This particular assemblage had something less frequently seen at these sorts of things: inflatable costumes. And not the big rats you see at a typical labor union protest. These were the exact things some kids in the neighborhood used for trick-or-treating: dinosaurs, aliens, and the like. Judging from the media coverage, a hallmark of the protests across the nation was their silliness. I didn't think much of it until I read an overly earnest explanation, written with the specific flavor of confidence only possible with LLMs, of how silliness is exactly the thing this moment requires of protest politics. And then the Times jumped into the discourse with the kind of fawning, Style-section portrait that'll launch any arts-oriented 20-something into a life of minor celebrity: a protest-cum-performance street art fomented in the counter-cultural, politically-heterodox trenches of NYC's $75k-per-year New School. The first few lines of the piece tell you everything you need to know about the Gray Lady's viewpoint of these sorts of goings-on:
On a recent Saturday, a group of about 100 people in conical gnome hats made of brightly colored manila envelopes gathered near the start of the High Line in the Meatpacking District in Manhattan and began to march south.
The occasion was the second annual “Scathing Hatred of Information Technology and the Passionate Hemorrhaging of Our Neo-liberal Experience” conference, organized by Lamp Club, an organization for people with Luddite tendencies, or at least aspirations.
The upper class yet downtrodden youngs parade around the streets wearing their gnome hats, per-formatively smashing iPhones in front the Apple store, and hosting a hobo dinner party on a patio in front of an expensive steakhouse's window, anti-tech and anti-capitalist, all the while filming themselves with iPhones for the socials and getting great PR from the establishment's paper of record. It's a great piece; read the whole thing.
Cranky centrists and crankier conservatives, in whose camps I sometimes find myself, snort at this kind of performance art as political protest. We make snide comments about using social media to broadcast yourself decrying social media. The critiques write themselves. We've never believed the "end is near" sign nor the earnestness of the political partisan yelling that "this time is different." The self-serious nature of most political types is a decent indicator that we shouldn't take them at all seriously. Remember when Ted Cruz shut down the government in an attempt to convince Pres. Obama to end Obamacare? Its seriousness was an odd, indirect indication of its fundamental unseriousness. But while that sort of seriousness is in the end silly, taking the diametrically opposite approach, holding a 'he's a dictator' sign while wearing an inflatable dino costume, doesn't seem to be much different. In both cases, the silliness multiplies by zero.
Reading
They've Come to Free the 'iPad Babies'
A student at the New School started a group to change her and her peers' relationship to technology.