reflections on culture

culture (noun)

  1. the customs and social forms which characterise a society or social group at a particular historical moment
  2. the act of acquiring elevated taste and discernment in intellectual or moral matters, particularly in the fine arts
  3. a living group of microorganisms (such as bacteria or fungi) cultivated in an artificial environment

We live in an age of remarkable cultural proliferation. Never before in history has the median citizen of a wealthy nation had access to such a panoply of cultural products. The sheer density of the media landscape defies both enumeration (from TV to listicles to audiobooks) and description (with genre-busting online content resisting categorisation alongside traditional forms of education and entertainment).

This media proliferation is, in a very real sense, the result of globalisation - a contested term, certainly, but an undeniably apt one in a unipolar world (for now, still) dominated by the vast cultural machine of the United States (which is, in turn, underpinned by the US's vast material wealth, and rooted in petrochemical extraction).

And yet the mass production of culture has also produced the counter-tendency of fragmentation and atomisation. With the advent of the internet, in particular, subcultures have never been more accessible. Are you interested in images of birds with crudely photoshopped or doodled human arms? Maybe you're one of the absolute degenerates who think computers are kind of neat and would like to touch them more? Or perhaps you deeply identify as a Bat-Eared Fox? Whatever your niche, the marvels of the internet mean that there is a community out there for you, just a few clicks of a button away.

This is, perhaps, one of the original internet utopias - a place for the loners and weirdos who, by accident of birth or economic circumstance, don't have access to a community of fellow travellers within a feasible commute.

The dystopian obverse of this utopian dream has been clear for some time now. The culture of online fascism (sometimes called the alt-right) is one obvious and particularly abhorrent manifestation. I wouldn't be the first to observe that the canker of fascism often festers around splinters of truth which the social mainstream can't or won't address. Naomi Klein calls this tendency the Mirror World - a place where left-wing grievances are transformed into funhouse mirror versions of themselves. The government is oppressing you - by kidnapping your children and drinking their blood. The climate is being altered - by jewish space lasers. Wages are historically low - because the liberal elites are ethnically cleansing honest white workers and replacing them with the unwashed migrant tide.

And so, in another paradoxical turn, ascendant fascist forces are turning to address the very social fragmentation from which they formed.

The revolutionary right understands that loneliness and despair are rampant - but easier to blame this on nazi-punching online leftists than to tackle the real social decay that is happening all around us. As "global north" governments, particularly in the Anglosphere, continue to gut our social fabric and feed it into insatiable maw of capitalist accumulation, the right have an easy but wrong answer to the deep alienation we all feel - punish the Other. Destroy or assimilate countercultural movements by force. The liberal consensus is dying - long live the fascistic plutarchy.

The outlook for those of us on the left is bleak. As cruel and nihilistic as fascism is, it undoubtedly does deliver on one thing - the sadistic thrill of lashing out against your enemies, the psychological security of belonging to the in-group, and meaning, as twisted and sadistic as that meaning may be. The US is a case in point, of course, but these issues are equally relevant, and perhaps even more urgent, in the UK. We are living under a historically unpopular labour government, a government bereft of ideas and seemingly resigned to waltzing despondently into the shadow of naked US-style plutocratic fascism. Our institutions will not save us, and we can expect that in the face of increasing climate breakdown and supply shocks, the fascist foothold on UK politics will only continue to grow.

But of course, we can't work from the right's playbook. For obvious reasons, a left-wing movement cannot rely on the police state to crush its cultural enemies, the way the insurgent US right is currently playing it out. Pressing questions for us, then, are how to undermine online fascist recruitment, and how to build inclusive and united social movements outside of the decaying structures of social-democratic-capitalism. Managing this, while navigating our fragmented cultural landscapes, will be no easy task.