Identity politics as the new astrology
Identitarianism has become the new astrology. On its own it’s completely understandable - in a homogenized consumer society where the physical landscape is the same assortment of parking lots and consumer retail everywhere, no place in the United States seems to have much of its own individual identity (or culture) anymore. Youth growing up in this kind of bleak landscape are understandably grasping for some sort of self-validation or self-identity that will form the foundation of their understanding of the world around them. Born out of a reasonable attempt to come to terms with a long history of human injustice, genocide, oppression, & European colonialism, and given the current cultural landscape & the recent Advent of social media, identity politics has now morphed into a take on human beings and human societies that misses reality entirely, yet plays into our worst, age-old tribalistic urges to divide into opposing social groups. Mix this with the reality of an eroding middle-class, go-nowhere suburbs and go-nowhere jobs, and…
Philosophically, this is an existentialist nightmare - like something out of the most dystopian version of an Albert Camus novel.
Social media has made an already bleak and depressing cultural situation all the more deranged, offering young people endless opportunities to compare themselves to one another through the distorted and completely inaccurate lens of handheld pocket computers, each equipped with a camera that can record video. Young people growing up in this landscape are facing an uphill battle in terms of their psychological development. The utterly deranged venue of social media accounts and one’s self-image as filtered through the number of acquired likes has become the mirror for this generation, yet the image it reflects back to the viewer is highly inaccurate, formed by a collective aggregation of the viewers that have interacted with it. This puts a whole new spin on the human group dynamics and social behavior, and more importantly - the development of the self.
It could almost be argued that it would be extremely hard for true self-awareness and genuine self-development to be able to occur in this kind of atmosphere, at least while psychologically plugged into social meia. Rather than developing organically on its own, with the constant infusion of social media into daily life the sense of one’s self now develops with near-constant self-consciousness due to the ability to sculpt one’s image in the eye of the ever-watching audience. I feel like some of the dadaists - and later the situationists - saw this coming.
