One of the trivia to emerge from the periphery of the celebrity college admissions scandal is the story about polling results indicating that over a third of young people today aspire to be YouTube influencers or similar social media peer marketing bloggers. This story is interesting, in the sense of the venerable ancient Chinese curse about times in which one might live. This entire situation, in fact, is suffused with a delicious terminal postmodernism. In addition to believing that they can and should make a living bullshitting their peers with histrionic bedroom lectures about stuff they’ve bought, these youth are being classified as Generation Z. This means that the very self-serious public demographers who come up with these names will immediately run out of letters with the birth of the next generation and will solemnly act like this purely taxonomical and fully predictable bedshitting is a national crisis. Or maybe they’ll pull something out of their asses instead of putting weird Fukuyama-apocalyptic gloss on their horseshit. Sacramento dealt with this problem by lettering its streets W, X, Broadway, 1st Avenue, 4th Avenue (who dafuq cracka Wayne Hultgren?), etc. In San Francisco, 3rd Street intersects 22nd through 24th Streets, which are also parallel streets on the same grid.
No, I’m not saying that these are good ideas. Who said that ideas have to be good? As the Swiss weirdo who invented that hinged bike said, I’m tired of everything having to make sense. Why does everything have to make sense? Social media influencing doesn’t. That shouldn’t even be a sentence. It should be possible to account for my every jot of shitposting and still not have a chance of coming up with that. This is a crooked culture. To assume, charitably, that the sampling methodologies of the surveys indicating that a third of Gen Z want to be influencers or YouTubers or some shit when they grow up are hopelessly fucked, is not to conclude that this crap is a marginal element of youth culture today. It seems to be pretty mainstream. It’s in the air. I know mainstream boys in that age group who seem more or less culturally mainstream. They’re online watching varieties of this nonsense. So are their parents. These survey results aren’t what happened because Tuber was the closest answer on the questionnaire for a bunch of sixth-graders who totally want to be trained as millwrights.
But why? Kids aren’t raised in a cultural vacuum. Someone is putting ideas into their heads. It could be Rod Dreher. For certain unfortunates currently prominent on television, it was Michael Jackson. For the most part, it’s YouTube. Even this, however, is a copout. With fairly rare and often culturally marginal exceptions, these children are spending thirty or more hours per week most weeks of the year institutionalized in schools. What the fuck are their teachers telling them? Do their guidance or career counselors or coaches have anything more sensible to say? What horror shows are their curricula? Do any of these adult mentorship and authority figures have anything more real-worldly to say to these young people should they momentarily tire of their phones?
YouTube and the fucking Gram are novel. The deeply childish aspiration to eventually find gainful employment doing something that, statistically, no one in the fucking class will ever be trained or hired to do is a persistent, well-established cultural theme in American parenting and early childhood education dating back beyond my own days, circa Loma Prieta, in the Palo Alto elementary school system. Make of that what you fucking will. To paraphrase my fellow Californian Rodney King, why can’t we all just be astronauts and get along? (Aldrin?) There are milieus, some of them extant to this day, that achieved twenty or forty straight years of The Flight School Education of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. This was their curriculum. I understand that in parts of Orange County (Southern ones) this remains the case. *Confused shitting out of a tree voice* We’re making memories! Truly the very model of this age is the young man who was flunking out of reform school and proudly told a visiting guidance counselor of his career goal to be the first man on the sun.
Precious few in positions of adult responsibility have the courage to do the youngsters under their care the personal and public service of forthrightly telling them that they will NOT be landing careers in the allied fields of pro baller, princess, ballerina, or marine biologist. It ain’t happening. These fields and every other allied field in the Department of Chris Van Allsburg Stuff I’m Definitely Doing When I Grow Up, probably including employment as a professional municipal firefighter, will not equal the sheer numbers or the working cultural power of the chronically unemployed. In case you haven’t noticed, America is not particularly into doing anything with or for the unemployed, as we have an economic recovery and a strong job market and also Dagmar Midcap pays me for cock.
Preteens and early adolescents, not to the surprise of anyone competent to mentor them, are not drivers of original culture. Their culture is overwhelmingly downstream of the culture they absorb from adults. #TeshTips, while we’re at it: child game and toy reviewers are stage-managed by adults every bit as much as the Jackson Five. JonBenét Ramsey, pray for us. Normally I don’t seek the intercession of anyone who was so troubled and vapid here on earth, but that was irresistible, and it’s staying in, on the night shift (on the night shift). Hmm. Beebo started his on the swing shift (on the swing shift).
That’s the least disturbed character we’ve enjoyed in at least a full paragraph. Okay, Tesh is normal, albeit #BigBandStyle. Too normal. Look at what he fucking does with it. I thought I wanted to be a ramper when I was a little kid. Like most kids, I knew jack shit about any of that. As I noted above, the Palo Alto public school system pre-dot-com wasn’t grounded about ways for its elementary school students to get their heads out of the clouds and think about real-world jobs for life in the real world. These days, I gather it’s oriented more towards stories about how Madysyn has autism and needs extra time on the SAT. That’s cool.
I do remember the one instructional unit I took that in retrospect wasn’t worth a bucket of shit. It was a gardening unit over by the Castelleja School, involving a nice dude in a ponytail shoving a soil sampling probe into the dirt. Even at the time, I had an inchoate understanding that our boy was overqualified. That was the one career-coherent set of lessons I got from the school system where I was told that I’d have to wait until next year to learn about negative numbers.
Whatever that all was worth, I watched a bit much daytime PBS in my deep youth. I was there when, as I understood it at the time, Lamb Chop and Barney replaced Mr. Rogers. I didn’t know where to start to process this or say anything about it, but I could tell that it was a very bad cultural development and figured it boded no good. I was right. Does that sound self-esteeming? It’s fucking true. Neighborhood nostalgia today tends to focus on Fred Rogers’s exceptional emotional intelligence and gift for communicating it, and that certainly was an important part of his calling, but what stuck most with me about his programs were the industrial tours. Like, hey, kids, today we’re going to a pencil factory; check out this pickle cannery; neat hot mill over that bridge. He’d go inside these facilities, talk to some of the people running them, take a look at the equipment, and these field trips were always interesting. The gist was always, wow, this is some pretty cool stuff and the people involved with it must be proud of the good work they do, not lol, look at these fucking deplorables running this shitbox foundry in the ass end of Braddock, what a bunch of losers.
These children’s factory tours amounted to the last stand for looking to tangibly productive work for dignity, pride, and a paycheck. Barney and Lamb Chop were horrific; it’s a miracle that America’s parents didn’t flatly refuse to have that shit on in their houses and insist on babysitting their children with videotaped episodes of Roseanne instead. No, it’s a tragedy. Dora the Explorer is a show about conversational Spanish for use with the nanny. This is extreme cultural degradation. Think about it: the last A-Lister to encourage children to think about factories as something other than loser sheds was a television child psychotherapist with a theology degree. He was great at it, but what the fuck was everyone else doing? Why was Fred Rogers the full roster for that game?
These factory tours were something of a defensive cultural action on behalf of blue-collar America in a time of ever more vicious and destructive attacks from the neoliberal professional/managerial-class coalition. By the tine I started watching any of that, at least consciously, Reagan had busted PATCO years earlier and meatpacking was going shit harder and harder by the year as a line of work.
If our national relationship to work was ever healthy, it hasn’t been in my lifetime. NAFTA was a clusterfuck for the swing states the Democrats are now so bitterly unable to win. The Clintons’ personal idea of “work,” aside from wrecking industrial communities and lighting a time-delayed bomb fuse under the international economy by repealing Glass-Steagall, all for profit, of course, involves insider trading, securities fraud, bribery, tax shelter “charity,” and running real estate scams on gullible proles. Commentary about lotteries and the reasons for playing them revolve around the assumption that anyone with any sense who won the lottery would quit work permanently and without notice.
This goes to show that we’ve got a whole lot of unemployed people in this country and a whole lot of employed very much not speaking with them. Everybody assumes that the Check Republic is happy with its lot because it doesn’t have to work. Speaking from painful personal experience, I cannot wrap my head around this at all. I suspect that many of these people would be bored completely out of their fucking minds without video games, which require focus and engagement of sorts that they might otherwise be called upon to muster at work. I don’t game, and I get antsy just reading or writing.
The way prole-trap drivetime radio programs talk about days of the week–DAYS OF THE FUCKING WEEK–corroborates the aspirational aspects of gambling culture to indicate that Americans cannot stand their jobs and fantasize about the impossible prospect of quitting them never to return. To misappropriate some multimedia late-midcentury popular culture, Work: Take It Or Shove It. The unspoken premise here is one of pervasive coercion. It would apparently be a very alien headspace to this crowd to think of work as something worthwhile for its own merits, a meaningful contribution to the operation of society. More than a few of these same people would find it odd to describe their home gardening or cooking as work. Gee, is there something wrong with me for getting paid to pick figs?
All too much of this is abiding cultural baggage from the Puritan scolds, joint stock company scoundrels, and slavedriving psychopaths who colonized Anglo North America. We’re still bearing these burdens 400 years later. We’re still fitfully trying to exorcise these demons. Conversely, there’s no end to the heinousness that some fuckhead will try to excuse on account of its contribution to the work ethic. I know a number of book bougies who got really taken with Strangers in Their Own Land, Arlie Russell Hochschild’s ethnographic Cletus Safari of some bigoted Cajun asshats with chemical factory jobs. I don’t mind that there’s an ethnography of these particular shitheads, but I’m uncomfortable with how conveniently this ethnography fits the ugly white working class connotations of Hillary’s famous basket of deplorables and ignores factory-scarce gentry scumbags like Roy Moore and the Third Successive Mr. Jefferson Beauregard Secessions as vectors of Southern racism. The tote bag library is suspiciously free of material on the racially integrated steelworkers’ unions of Jim Crow upcountry Alabama, for example. There is such material, but it’s no surprise that affluent Yankees prefer to read about some resentful Chemical Alley shithead’s complaint that the problem with some other guy aspiring to live on a government check, “just like my mamma,” is that he’s white.
I haven’t read any of Russell Hochschild’s work, even though my dad has recommended it, but I’ve heard enough about it to rue that Sherman isn’t around to call some of these characters stranger and introduce them to the chemistry of residential fire. Some of these creeps actually complain that the damn niggras don’t wait in line for their prosperity like upstanding white Americans. What is this? The fucking DMV? Are we applying for prosperity pink slips now? In California there’s the option to make an appointment online in advance instead of coming in to take a number and wait. I’m never organized enough to do this, but it’s available. The California DMV sucks ass.
I guess it’s gratifying for BoBo Yankee supremacists to blame this sort of thinking exclusively on brainwashed dipshit losers who all die of occupationally induced cancers by the age of 35 and not on the clubbable Southern ownership class or its provincial Northern counterparts, any of whom might show up at college, or at work as the bourgeoisie conceives of it. The chemical Cajuns who got dredged up in Louisiana for this Yankee bait literary exposition sound truly reprehensible, and I’m inclined to tell them in the names of God and the Union to shut the fuck up, but it is not all on them. Yacht dealers get to be the white working class for purposes of journalism in the time of Trump, and nobody at the Gray Lady tries to guess who the black steel mill employees in Pittsburgh would sooner support for the presidency, or whether maybe they’re more like a working class than a country cracker who dresses just as plainly but owns a grain elevator. Dying as young as just about every other man in town due to too much time standing over a benzene vent isn’t how Roy Moore came to own a stable of horses, or court young ladies on the courthouse square while their mothers were inside on court business and he was the district attorney.
Here’s another way to look at it: the floor shift manager at Red Lobster may be just as nasty a tinpot Torquemada as the franchisee, and the junior keyholder may be angling to ape her, but the franchisee is the likeliest of them to turn out to vote. This is also, of course, another great example of work as many Americans come to know it sucking all kinds of ass. It’s the sphere in which so many get abused by superiors who shouldn’t have personnel authority on behalf of businesses that probably shouldn’t exist. Scummy characters like Paul Ryan peddling wizardry-grade fantasies about the dignity of work aren’t targeting labor here with their nonsense; they’re targeting management and capital. That said, I suppose, contra St. Francis of Assisi, that there’s more dignity in sexually harassing employees than in being sexually harassed.
Make me a channel of your piss, or, failing that, of her ass. As I’ve mentioned previously in these pages, I’d be a Horace Mann myself if I caught the junior end of a Denny Dundiddly deal at Manor Hall. Spell it however you like. Katie Couric publicly made the her ass joke, about it being two words when she got started in the business, and I don’t see why it didn’t remain two for Matt Lauer. Fine people I’m aping. Boy howdy is there some disconcerting shit lurking in the celebrity culture we’re exhorted to worship. About Harvey Weinstein, for example: the kindest thing I can think to say of him is that maybe he and Jennifer Lawrence deserved each other.
I know, I know: I’m turning into a real profile in thot. What I have to wonder, though, is how much worse the rest are when I keep getting such weirdly untoward vibes off so many of the supposedly wholesome ones. Can you imagine encouraging a teenaged daughter or niece to watch Olivia Jade? Fuckin’ A. Teenagers will get into the garbage as much as any raccoon, but to give that one’s blessing as an elder in a young woman’s life? For one thing, these are not for the most part financially independent young people watching that crap and making purchasing decisions based on it. The Giannulli family, already wealthy, is dumping unfunded credit liabilities on a nation of MILF’s by working a peer-to-peer direct channel to their thot daughters. I guess that’s objectively no worse than advertising in general, but it sure feels gross, and by God that chick is a fucking bimbo. Can boys be bimbos, too? You betcha. Some of the most truly cursed content I’ve seen in months mentioned an influencer who goes by Markian and publishes vlogs on topics including what it’s like to date a Latina. This has to do with a bunch of shit you need to go out and buy.
I wish I were making that up. That is, I wish I lived in a world in which that were too fucking bizarre to make up. Dreher is so, so, so right about the Benedict Option. He’s kind of a pompous dork, but he’s a genius and a moral giant compared to any of these stupid shysters. Colonize the brats’ minds with edifying alternatives and they still may be taken in by this scum fraction, but it’s worth a try. Even the metamaterial on these marketing tricks is disgusting. I’ve never seriously dated, but I read about Markian vlogging about what it’s like to date a Latina and feel like it just has to be fatally retarded, and that I grew just a little bit stupider by learning about any of it.
If this is in fact what a plurality of the ostensible workforce in training aspires to do for a living, uh, can one literally fucking even? I mostly can’t. This is a Twilight Zone of contagious idiocy. If I try to approach it directly I will be dumbfounded and my mind will fail. There is something deeply wrong with any society that doesn’t incent these dumbasses to get jobs in retail or fast food. We’d be better off if Latter-Day OJ were encouraged to use her trust fund to go sit around and do drugs all day. The problem is, she’d post on YouTube about that. She’s already a drunk, a compellingly inferred cokehead by background and lifestyle, and basically a wastrel.
Why has anyone heard of her, again? Why can anyone name her or any other showboating hustler with a YouTube review channel? These are parasites. We’d immediately recognize them as parasites, and grotesquely vain ones at that, if we had any cultural ability to discern contributions to society from drains on it. Society needs the couple hundred hours of farm work I’ve lately been doing per year more than it needs however much it keeps getting of whatever the hell it is that these Tuber shitheads do for the monetization deals. It’s scary how few people get me when I try to explain any of this to them.
Lordy do I hope the poll results about aspiring influencers are erroneous. Maybe the kids will naturally withdraw their heads from their own asses in due course of time as they discover how the world works and find productive roles through which to help it keep working. Popular culture will be of no help here; it’s arrayed directly against them, and against anyone else who tries to think coherently about any of this shit.
C. S. Lewis, I think it was, one of the Old Religious Limeys, in any event, but not blustery enough for Chesterton, said that if the people are forbidden to revere kings they will come to revere others instead, perhaps athletes or even famous prostitutes. It must have been too wise for the fucking English to recognize that the famous are mostly degenerates and remain accordingly wary of them, and just as well that we gave the Redcoats the boot. Privately admiring a prostitute who isn’t famous seems much more reasonable. What’s wrong with the Giannulli girl or any of the Kardashians isn’t prostitution, which I haven’t heard of any of them plying normally as a trade. Lohan supposedly puts out for high rollers when she’s hard up for coke money or whatever, and Latter-Day OJ acts like she’d put out for that prick Caruso on his yacht as a hazy quid pro quo, but most of these chicks find frank sex work far too pedestrian. What’s obviously wrong with them is their extreme performative narcissism. It’s something that royals often master themselves. It isn’t even that they’re lazy loudmouthed drunks; that could account for any number of bums wandering around the average Greyhound depot, without Instagram accounts. Having fawning newspaper articles and social media accounts dedicated to the every idiotic antic of these tools is what weaponizes them against the rest of us.
These are atrocious role models. Any sensible parent, guardian, or mentor would intervene to zealously discourage a young person under her care from aping these freaks. Like, okay, son, maybe they’re entertaining in the same way that some floridly psychotic guy at the bus stop is entertaining when he’s talking about the space warp between Inglewood Boulevard and LAX, but you are NOT going to be making a living doing what any of these social media celebrities are doing. True story: my wannabe baller cousin is now a part-time preacher and full-time home alarm installer. In case you’re thinking, lol, Shorty wasn’t cut out for hoops, he’s six-foot-six.
Mind you, if everyone stopped fantasizing about bullshit that is not going to happen, no one would fucking apply to Harvard. This seems about as likely as the Immanent Eschaton of Revelation. We’re all just temporarily embarrassed astronauts, aren’t we? And we can’t have our children aspiring to something that they might achieve and that would also provide a net contribution to society. That wouldn’t do.
If the problem is that the kids don’t know their asses from a hole in the ground when it comes to what it takes to do some job, maybe it’s because they’re children and we’re batshit insane to put so much pressure on them. Maybe we’d be better off gently encouraging them to develop interests that might eventually be marketable, or might not, and are not just investment banking. Will they find their way? Hell if I know. The American job market post 2008 is certainly not set up to help any normal person find a feasible, productive, let alone meaningful role as a gainfully employed worker. Say, maybe this should be addressed as a structural problem, not as another thing to blame on harried children who are gonna start cutting themselves by the time they’re sixteen.
Given some of the alternatives we’ve been exploring, it should come as a relief if a young woman in your life expresses her aspiration to be a prostitute when she grows up. What does a child know about what it takes to be a hooker? Shit, what does anyone who isn’t a nurse know about what it takes to be a nurse? I know a number of nurses and took cadaver anatomy, but all I can figure is that it means half an hour of ass wiping and a full shift of listening to hospital coughs, plus paperwork and other insurance-wrangling straight out of hell. I do know what it takes to be a sexy male nurse: Indiana residency, a moustache, and a mullet.
A third of high school girls wanting to become whores would be an improvement over a third of anyone wanting to kinda sorta dress up like a whore on YouTube. I’m not trying to go full Frankie Avalon here or anything, but I notice how some of these chicks dress, and I have to say, your body is not a cargo cult. How many fat slobs do you see sitting around in Ben Roethlisberger jerseys? Not Body by Pastrami; that’d mean changing his outfit. It’s the same deal, though, aside from sex work having a turnkey market and low barriers to entry and pro ball being something that you, young thing, don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of playing.
Look, I try to warn the kids away from the really bad ideas. What the fuck else have I been doing for the past 4,000-odd words? Besides, it’s not like working girls (or boys!) are always trying to get everyone in town all up in their business. Giggity, so to speak.
I just spent most of four hours laboring over this screed with no expectation of payment, now or ever. It’s past two in the morning and I’m finding “all up in their business” risqué. Meanwhile, Markian or some equivalent asshole just made thousands of dollars for blurting out two minutes of brain-dead gobbledygook about his Latin girlfriend. I need to get the fuck to bed, but if we want a normal economy, we need normal incentives, ones that ideally result in our forgetting entirely about this cohort of marketing dipshits. Influence me that, bitch.
Murica Derp 