Month: November 2024

Wait did Generation X win??

It is required, whenever you post about Gen X, to include an image of OK Soda, even though OK Soda wouldn’t be remembered at all without the art by Dan Clowes and Charles Burns, OK Soda was in fact a branding success, in this essay I will

On the latest episode of the Why Is This Happening podcast, host Chris Hayes chats with McKay Coppins about the incoherence in the Trump Republicans. It’s a great listen in general, but I took particular note of their suggestion of how Reagan’s three-legged stool has been roundly rejected by US voters. It made my ears perk up because it fed into a line of thought I’ve been stuck in for a while about Generation X, my generation, and the failure of everything we tried to do. Maybe it’s come around a bit more than I realised?

Hayes and Coppins suggest that stool is wobbly these days. The Iraq War took out voter support for the foreign intervention leg, and the GFC wrecked voter support for fiscal hawks, and I can’t help but notice that those are two things Gen X resistance had at its heart. So I dare to wonder, maybe, in a roundabout sort of way, without even trying in the end, Gen X politics won after all?

As much as we had politics! Late Gen X like me came up in a strange moment, as Anil Dash noted resonantly the other day. We had the Battle of Seattle, yes, but mostly we just floated around feeling excluded from power and influence, while quietly waiting for bigotry to die out with the old people who held those views (because, of course, bigotry was something old people did, and would go away by itself).

And this is what I’ve been stuck on, for ages now: just how much we failed. Everything I associate with the political concerns of my cohort just had zero impact. No Logo and Manufacturing Consent and indymedia and One No Many Yeses and the biggest global protest in history and none of it did shit. Every bad thing came true anyway.

(And then it got worse from there.)

The analysis in this podcast (and I am of course predisposed to believe it but also I think it’s evident in the public rhetoric of Trumpist politics) suggests that, as much as it’s hard to perceive, the big picture is that those Gen X politics, my politics, have actually become widespread. Sure, it’s because the world got completely broken twice over, and it doesn’t reflect a principled engagement with the values espoused on the Lilith Fair stage, and it has nothing to do with how persuasive those issues of Adbusters were, but I reckon we can safely put all that under the generationally appropriate headline “ironic”. Despite everything we tried to push the world there, it ended up heading so far in the other direction it looped around to the right sort of place anyway.

The sad thing of course is what has happened to the third leg. Social conservatism has grown huge and vigorous in ways unthinkable to younger me, and even with two stool legs gone, the Republicans remain robust enough to win a popular majority of US voters. Fascism is no longer a weird rump belief system akin to Flat Earth (which, not coincidentally, is also back). Cruelty is in.

I think my point, if I have one, is that maybe I don’t need to feel too despairing about the Gen X project, and all the stuff I cared about, and how I listened so carefully to the lyrics of those Rage Against The Machine songs and pretended not to notice that most people weren’t doing the same as they jumped up and down. Because (munters aside) we were right, and we were proven right, and maybe there are now a lot of people out there who basically agree with what we were trying to say.

And maybe that means that the political conversation can, possibly, move forward?

Maybe… there is a good bit of hope to be had?

I can’t believe that fascism and fear-driven hatred are a sustainable basis for a political project. And without the other legs, the US right wing is surely going to break over it. I hope it happens sooner than later, because while it stands it can and will do tremendous harm.

I hope there are good folks ready to take advantage of that moment, when it comes.

Anyway I went back to this the other day, the 2020 re-up of Fight The Power, and though it already seems like it comes from a million years ago, it felt good. Check it.

Obligatory Trump Post

Everyone with a blog is contractually obliged to write a post about the 2024 U.S. election result, here’s mine.

So that’s how it is.

There’s something kind of freeing about it: we’re in the bad timeline. The majority of U.S. citizens who got off their backside to vote wanted Donald Trump in the chair. Despite. (Or, in a non-trivial-but-unclear-%-of-cases, because.)

“He is a danger to democracy and the world” was true and far outweighed every other thing at stake, but it was apparently poor messaging.

“Inflation and immigrants are out of control” was apparently great messaging. It was also not true.

What we can learn from this is: when fascism is on the rise, it’s important not to say anything about it because it’s a turnoff? hmm doesn’t seem right.

***

Social psychology is my area. I have enough expertise in it to know I don’t have any expertise in it. But here’s what I can say with some confidence:

With rare exceptions, human behaviour isn’t reasoned out from information.

But this doesn’t mean the information environment – Fox News as the background noise of an entire swathe of the U.S.A. – isn’t meaningful or influential. We are all surrounded by stories, and they are extremely powerful.

We remember stories that explain the emotions we feel when looking at our local situation.

We like the stories that make us feel good about our emotional reactions. We call these stories “important” and “true”.

We dislike the stories that make us feel bad about our emotional reactions. We call these ones “unimportant” or “lies”.

We like it when our neighbours agree with us about which stories are true and which ones are lies. We can repeat those stories a bunch, getting more assertive every time. It’s a way of validating our emotional reactions, and building an alliance with those who share the same feelings.

Fox News and similar are very good at circulating and repeating stories that validate a certain set of emotional reactions, and ridiculing stories that could undermine those emotions. That’s the whole game.

An entire generation has grown up in the bubble of these social norms. The specific stories have changed – a few years ago, the story about Trans people changed in a major way, for example – but the underlying emotions have not.

The information environment is really a normative environment. It’s an enormous permission machine, saying it’s okay to feel angry and afraid and disgusted, in fact it’s expected. All you need to do is look around you. You’re not alone.

The people who voted for President Trump, even the so-called “low-information voters”, know enough about what he is: the consensus choice for people who feel the same as they do.

And feelings don’t care about your facts.

***

It is possible to shift social norms by transforming the information in an information environment, but it’s much easier to do so by transforming the emotions experienced by ordinary folks. Homosexual law changes didn’t arise from information, but from people meeting gay folks in their own lives and finding they were just ordinary folks. Different emotions at ground level changed the whole thing.

It’s bloody hard for a political campaign to shift either emotions or information. The media can, sometimes. Unfortunately 21st century journalism has decided that’s not its job. Easier to report on the horse race than to try and actively shift the profound misunderstandings held by one voting bloc about fundamentals like crime and the economy.

***

It’s not good, is it. But before all is said and done, I reckon a few more Nazis are gonna get punched in the face.

My game is on Kickstarter right now

It’s called FiveEvil: Fiendish 5E Horror.

It’s a tabletop roleplaying-game, like Dungeons & Dragons, only it is for playing horror.

I like horror, even though I’m a bit of a scaredy cat. Sometimes I have to turn a movie off and finish it the next day while the sun is up.

And I really like horror in games. There’s something about scary times and playing creative games with your buddies that really works for me. I think it’s just a special thing to do. So making this game has been a nightmare come true.

FiveEvil is being released by Handiwork Games. It is on Kickstarter now! It has already funded at basic level and we are trying to keep spreading the word so we can make the book exceptional, with more amazing art by Scott Purdy, and a bonus extra scenario by Gar Hanrahan, and more treats!

Getting the word out has been incredibly hard. Social media has collapsed as a way to share the creative projects we are all working on. Specialist journalism has also mostly collapsed so most of the outlets that might have covered us are missing in action. It’s tough!

If you are reading this – and you know someone who might like FiveEvil – please tell them! It might be the only way they could ever hear about it!

Scary best wishes everyone!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jonhodgsonmaptiles2/fiveevil/description

P.S I’m trapped in a telly send help!!