Conversation

Just realized something. The essence of metamodernism is when the creative act is not what the creator does, but the spectacle of “the creator doing the creative act.” It’s easy to confuse with narcissism or anything self-conscious performance art, but is a very different thing.
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There’s something child-like about it, in the sense that the child is necessary context to find a refrigerator crayon drawing cute, except it need not be childish. A lot of identity performance/representation is “bad” art if you look at what’s being produced, but good meta art
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I think you have to be Instagram/tiktok age to do it well. I’m too much a product of TV to do it well. Twitter is good for gen x because it’s a hybrid between postmodern and metamodern. It’s a Prius medium. Us X’ers can play Spectator++ while young ‘uns can play Representer- -
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People who are a product of books and music can’t be metamodern at all. When they play on hybrid or metamodern media at all, they just look campy. In Sontag’s sense of failed seriousness.
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Very grateful TV rescued me from books before I got on twitter. I’d have already descended into full lolcow-hood by now if it weren’t for TV conditioning slowing me down
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Contrast “Breaking character” and “breaking 4th wall” and you’ll get why I am arguing character mask is the zeroth wall. Why you break it, you allow your performance to get entangled with your non-performance life.
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When “breaking character” is the character 🤔
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Metamodernism often features a performer whose core theme is some extreme, lurid fear. Coupled with a Heisen-sincerity (you can’t tell whether the performance is ironic, and often they can’t either) and a demanding accessibility moat, it’s a way to manipulate high-IQ midwits
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It’s weaponized nerdsniping at scale. Step 1: Identify a deep, irrational fear to tap Step 2: Build an obscurantist bullshit theology around it Step 3: Craft a special language to gate access Step 4: Present the fear as an ongoing performance …
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Step 5: Reward those who work to acquire literacy in it by validating their conclusions forcefully and creating a cult of weird certainty around it Step 6: Claim oracular legitimacy in the entire territory appropriated by the performance (“this is the only source of truth”)
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This is… not a good thing. I’m realizing now that I’ve mapped the pattern that metamodern performances are all over the place. They’re much more sophisticated than mere conspiracy theories because they don’t require a supposed hidden secret world to work with
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Hmm. Maybe that’s the definition of metamodern fiction proper — fiction that manages to cage metamodern performances in a form they can be contemplated without inducing the derangement syndromes the wild versions tend to.
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If you get a sense of a “actor-director’s commentary” on dvd extras where the role is “messiah,” but it’s nominally part of wild reality rather than framed by a theatrical boundary…you’re watching an advanced kind of metamodern performance A kind of stereo vision effect
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Yet again I’ve managed to tweet my way from light-hearted fun analysis of tv stuff to depressing conclusions about humanity. You all suck.
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