[Note: originally posted on Chadnet. This is a repost, which you may have seen in other channels.] I took a break from my next novel to write this, so the editing is slapdash 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
I find it really notable that the entire response from the Spiderverse: ATV fanbase (all teenagers mind you), from all the analysis I've seen online, basically none attempted to back up the only responsible member of the cast: Miguel. He's only imagined as a foil to Miles, but he's really what Miles fears: growing up, facing adulthood.
Miguel is not simply a white man, but literally the antithesis of every other character. He's responsible for the entire organization, responsible for making the tech, does basically all the work, get's nagged & foiled by midwits who don't deserve their jobs, imposing, doesn't take bullshit, & above all else actually has gone through the ringer. He's been tested physically & mentally. Miguel fears growing up & death, but by doing so rejects being someone like Miguel.
This whole movie really shocks me. A white guy being explicitly written to be the genesis of all the actual progress, from the tech to the AI bot to the fighting, & Miles as a black teen isn't the hero: he's still a child yet to grow up being coddled by everyone else, including his so-called allies.
It's a testament to Zero HP's ever-questing mind that a tributary paragraph and footnote in an essay about a children's movie says something so monumental about wokeness that I had to reread it five times: That it only seems to have abated because it has won so conclusively.
It was such a monumental "Do you think that's air you're breathing now?" moment, because everywhere else all you hear is that the era of wokeness is over, that the tide is finally shifting. You read this, and you realize that's because we just haven't noticed, because we're fish, and woke is water now.
It's a point a lesser substacker would have milked for a five part essay, and it's thrown in here as an afterthought, just another eddy in a torrent of ideas coming at you.
Fantastic essay, one of your best. Took me a bit of time to get through it, I'm ashamed to admit, I've been hacking through it before bed all week. Finally wrapped it up tonight. There's just so much going on in here. You could cut this up into 17 separate think pieces.
Re point 5 Id argue fag liberation was technologically assisted it came about more because of modern antivirals than any other factor even legal or moral the same way women's lib came about because of the pill. But this is merely small quibbles about chronology than any real dispute great piece.
Your diagnosis of why the Left succeeds is refreshingly honest.
It does get insufferable, seeing the Right get gunned down on the ideological battlefield over and over again, and their response is to typically engage in exorcisms and ghost dances rather than actually address the reality that their enemy really is wielding better weapons than them.
Something I want to add is that postmodernism I would argue is not entirely new. A lot of its ‘features’ almost feel like a perverted mirror of things you’d see in East philosophy and aesthetics.
Compare for example Japanese minimalism, to modern minimalism. Or the Buddhist notion of sunyata and emptiness.
It makes sense I suppose as a general theme or conflict in Eastern philosophy is the search for an Absolute, in an ever shifting universe bounded by the caprice of human subjectivity.
It does I think explain why wokies fetishize zen religions and Hindu polytheism. Since in many ways the death of God has basically revealed the Void that other cultures have been both grappling and worshipping for millennia.
For all their shortcomings, they definitely understood that there is a right way to put together a human society. The existence of things like Confucianism and the Varna show this.
I doubt that converting the West to trad-Buddhism is going to work. But I can’t help but wonder if you can maybe extract some memetic antibodies from them.
“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”
And this:
"We have contempt for people who fail to embrace their duty to become superior."
Some great ideas in this essay!
As to Spiderman, I enjoyed the movie for aesthetics alone--The rest is just what I expect from this type of film. Always found the Spiderman story the most grating of the franchises anyhow, so a minimally-sacred cow to be led to slaughter.
> 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.
This comment really resonated with me, as I've lately set out to rewatch a bunch of (mostly comedy) shows from the 90s and 2000s.
Even content from as recent as 2010 feels like a foreign country to me. Three things immediately stand out to me:
1) There are the precursors to woke shit, but they're still muted and framed as counter-culture. The _assumption_ that woke _has already won_ is completely absent. Look at eg how 1990s Simpsons treats the character of Lisa, or how Futurama occasionally mocks Leela's feminism. It's there, and there's a wink-nod "look at our point of view" to it, but they're the butt of jokes, and not to be emulated.
2) The content is actually good. A lot of us complain about woke media in 2023 but honestly, if woke media was _actually good_, would most of us complain? I think we would not. When proto-wokeshit is injected to <2010-era content, it's _actually funny and thought-provoking_. Eg. all the pro-gay messaging in Whitest Kids U Know sketches
3) The focus of the content is much more universal. Virtually all media in 2023 exists in this weird nexus of pop culture references, inside jokes, and sly nods to current cultural moments. Media from 15+ years ago is not like this, and instead frequently focuses on human universals. Even when they are intentionally parodying current events (eg South Park), the parodies are internally consistent enough that they're still enjoyable even if you have no knowledge of the underlying content. Meanwhile in comparison, basically every media property from 2017 is, in one way or another, About Trump, and is nigh-unwatchable now that that cultural moment has passed
It really is great reading things written by people who agree with you on almost everything except what they want - like Scipio appreciating Hannibal's brilliant but doomed strategies. Power to power, radicalism as a form of escapism, outrage as a feminine exercise of power, visual ugliness as propaganda, self-acceptance as an unproductive expression of narcissism, egalitarianism as a way to moralize conflict against one's betters, etc.
Ironically, I think the least correct thing you've said (besides the obvious 'gays want to rape kids' stuff, but that's basically par from the course from the losers of history) is that the 'scientific bureaucracy' could possibly ever be manipulated into or, this having been done, convince anyone of anything as extreme as racial crime statistics when liberals still run around thinking COVID is going to end the world, all facts and statistics aside.
Of course, your aims certainly vindicate my own actions - helping young boys get on estradiol, engaging in tremendous amounts of litigation against companies for transphobia, encouraging fellow trannies to improve themselves rather than to accept themselves - in the context of ensuring that gynandromorphs stay a powerful cultural force and retain our legal protections. Some insane people may get their genitalia inverted, but fighting for their right to do it is a necessary sacrifice to keep the momentum going. After all, if you're expending all your energy fighting something that insane and stupid with ineffective laws and online polemics, how are you ever going to even practically conceive of TTD except as a form of the very same radical escapism you abhor?
I will add that the 'transexual [sic] version of Obergefell' you're worried about has already happened - R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes. As always, your work instills a great pride in my 'side', as unbearable and disgusting as they may be at times, for the extent to which they have made your own position more or less unwinnable. After all, as you yourself concede, your best shot at winning is effectively trying to convince women not to like the latest Spider-Man, and the endless flood of female-beloved media that follows in that very vein. Amazing!
"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."
There is a lot that is interesting and insightful in this essay, but let me all boil it down based on the conclusion: Men have to become more feminine. That's what it says. You want us to think like, and manipulate like the 'longhouse'. Very appealing to incels which is why they remain celibate involuntarily, and then become women. 'Let's make tradwoke!'
You have a great talent for storytelling, for understanding and creating art. Lean into that. Not this. I'm not sure if this was meant as a sort of parody or not, but it seems clear that most of your audience isn't taking it that way, so unless you are serious maybe rethink the strategy.
Just a single data point, I know, but fwiw I would totally pay $20-$40 for a collection of your best essays over the last 7 years, read by someone in a collected audiobook. This would be an amazing commute or roadtrip listen.
I find it really notable that the entire response from the Spiderverse: ATV fanbase (all teenagers mind you), from all the analysis I've seen online, basically none attempted to back up the only responsible member of the cast: Miguel. He's only imagined as a foil to Miles, but he's really what Miles fears: growing up, facing adulthood.
Miguel is not simply a white man, but literally the antithesis of every other character. He's responsible for the entire organization, responsible for making the tech, does basically all the work, get's nagged & foiled by midwits who don't deserve their jobs, imposing, doesn't take bullshit, & above all else actually has gone through the ringer. He's been tested physically & mentally. Miguel fears growing up & death, but by doing so rejects being someone like Miguel.
This whole movie really shocks me. A white guy being explicitly written to be the genesis of all the actual progress, from the tech to the AI bot to the fighting, & Miles as a black teen isn't the hero: he's still a child yet to grow up being coddled by everyone else, including his so-called allies.
Women as social police
Recruiting them into our social order with emotion
Novel insights, presented with lucidity
You never miss 0
One for the archives to share with my sons when they are older
It's a testament to Zero HP's ever-questing mind that a tributary paragraph and footnote in an essay about a children's movie says something so monumental about wokeness that I had to reread it five times: That it only seems to have abated because it has won so conclusively.
It was such a monumental "Do you think that's air you're breathing now?" moment, because everywhere else all you hear is that the era of wokeness is over, that the tide is finally shifting. You read this, and you realize that's because we just haven't noticed, because we're fish, and woke is water now.
It's a point a lesser substacker would have milked for a five part essay, and it's thrown in here as an afterthought, just another eddy in a torrent of ideas coming at you.
Fantastic essay, one of your best. Took me a bit of time to get through it, I'm ashamed to admit, I've been hacking through it before bed all week. Finally wrapped it up tonight. There's just so much going on in here. You could cut this up into 17 separate think pieces.
Re point 5 Id argue fag liberation was technologically assisted it came about more because of modern antivirals than any other factor even legal or moral the same way women's lib came about because of the pill. But this is merely small quibbles about chronology than any real dispute great piece.
Your diagnosis of why the Left succeeds is refreshingly honest.
It does get insufferable, seeing the Right get gunned down on the ideological battlefield over and over again, and their response is to typically engage in exorcisms and ghost dances rather than actually address the reality that their enemy really is wielding better weapons than them.
Something I want to add is that postmodernism I would argue is not entirely new. A lot of its ‘features’ almost feel like a perverted mirror of things you’d see in East philosophy and aesthetics.
Compare for example Japanese minimalism, to modern minimalism. Or the Buddhist notion of sunyata and emptiness.
It makes sense I suppose as a general theme or conflict in Eastern philosophy is the search for an Absolute, in an ever shifting universe bounded by the caprice of human subjectivity.
It does I think explain why wokies fetishize zen religions and Hindu polytheism. Since in many ways the death of God has basically revealed the Void that other cultures have been both grappling and worshipping for millennia.
For all their shortcomings, they definitely understood that there is a right way to put together a human society. The existence of things like Confucianism and the Varna show this.
I doubt that converting the West to trad-Buddhism is going to work. But I can’t help but wonder if you can maybe extract some memetic antibodies from them.
Loved this:
“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”
And this:
"We have contempt for people who fail to embrace their duty to become superior."
Some great ideas in this essay!
As to Spiderman, I enjoyed the movie for aesthetics alone--The rest is just what I expect from this type of film. Always found the Spiderman story the most grating of the franchises anyhow, so a minimally-sacred cow to be led to slaughter.
Brilliant and outstanding! You elucidate the conceptual roadmap to a solution, as well as the praxis for getting there. Bravo!
> 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.
This comment really resonated with me, as I've lately set out to rewatch a bunch of (mostly comedy) shows from the 90s and 2000s.
Even content from as recent as 2010 feels like a foreign country to me. Three things immediately stand out to me:
1) There are the precursors to woke shit, but they're still muted and framed as counter-culture. The _assumption_ that woke _has already won_ is completely absent. Look at eg how 1990s Simpsons treats the character of Lisa, or how Futurama occasionally mocks Leela's feminism. It's there, and there's a wink-nod "look at our point of view" to it, but they're the butt of jokes, and not to be emulated.
2) The content is actually good. A lot of us complain about woke media in 2023 but honestly, if woke media was _actually good_, would most of us complain? I think we would not. When proto-wokeshit is injected to <2010-era content, it's _actually funny and thought-provoking_. Eg. all the pro-gay messaging in Whitest Kids U Know sketches
3) The focus of the content is much more universal. Virtually all media in 2023 exists in this weird nexus of pop culture references, inside jokes, and sly nods to current cultural moments. Media from 15+ years ago is not like this, and instead frequently focuses on human universals. Even when they are intentionally parodying current events (eg South Park), the parodies are internally consistent enough that they're still enjoyable even if you have no knowledge of the underlying content. Meanwhile in comparison, basically every media property from 2017 is, in one way or another, About Trump, and is nigh-unwatchable now that that cultural moment has passed
Can we please get the article on slavery? 🇳🇴
I think we have our playbook, gentlemen.
I couldn’t imagine that film being so bad💀
It really is great reading things written by people who agree with you on almost everything except what they want - like Scipio appreciating Hannibal's brilliant but doomed strategies. Power to power, radicalism as a form of escapism, outrage as a feminine exercise of power, visual ugliness as propaganda, self-acceptance as an unproductive expression of narcissism, egalitarianism as a way to moralize conflict against one's betters, etc.
Ironically, I think the least correct thing you've said (besides the obvious 'gays want to rape kids' stuff, but that's basically par from the course from the losers of history) is that the 'scientific bureaucracy' could possibly ever be manipulated into or, this having been done, convince anyone of anything as extreme as racial crime statistics when liberals still run around thinking COVID is going to end the world, all facts and statistics aside.
Of course, your aims certainly vindicate my own actions - helping young boys get on estradiol, engaging in tremendous amounts of litigation against companies for transphobia, encouraging fellow trannies to improve themselves rather than to accept themselves - in the context of ensuring that gynandromorphs stay a powerful cultural force and retain our legal protections. Some insane people may get their genitalia inverted, but fighting for their right to do it is a necessary sacrifice to keep the momentum going. After all, if you're expending all your energy fighting something that insane and stupid with ineffective laws and online polemics, how are you ever going to even practically conceive of TTD except as a form of the very same radical escapism you abhor?
I will add that the 'transexual [sic] version of Obergefell' you're worried about has already happened - R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes. As always, your work instills a great pride in my 'side', as unbearable and disgusting as they may be at times, for the extent to which they have made your own position more or less unwinnable. After all, as you yourself concede, your best shot at winning is effectively trying to convince women not to like the latest Spider-Man, and the endless flood of female-beloved media that follows in that very vein. Amazing!
"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."
Beautiful, because it’s absolutely true.
There is a lot that is interesting and insightful in this essay, but let me all boil it down based on the conclusion: Men have to become more feminine. That's what it says. You want us to think like, and manipulate like the 'longhouse'. Very appealing to incels which is why they remain celibate involuntarily, and then become women. 'Let's make tradwoke!'
You have a great talent for storytelling, for understanding and creating art. Lean into that. Not this. I'm not sure if this was meant as a sort of parody or not, but it seems clear that most of your audience isn't taking it that way, so unless you are serious maybe rethink the strategy.
Just a single data point, I know, but fwiw I would totally pay $20-$40 for a collection of your best essays over the last 7 years, read by someone in a collected audiobook. This would be an amazing commute or roadtrip listen.