Content Aggregators and The Golden Age of Porn
The Reification of Reality
1969. A month prior to the legalization of porn, Andy Warhol's "Blue Movie" (or "Fuck") is released in the United States, marking the beginning of the Golden Age of Porn. A few years later, "Deep Throat" appears in theatres, achieving major box-office success and desensitizing the world to stag movies.
2021. What started as a genuine artistic expression, part of the sexual liberation movement, today is saturating the internet. Pornography is now a potential problem for thousands of young men. It's a troublesome industry that became too big for its own good.
I find many similarities between porn and online marketing. They use the same recipe but different ingredients. They strip away the essence of the artform and resort to vulgar displays of the most insulting and exploitative aspects of humanity. Porn doesn't always refer to explicit movies, mind you. You can use the term to describe any expression that's procuring the consumer - and the producer - for the purpose of money, validation or self-interest.
If you follow me on Twitter, you might've seen this tweet:
This is someone who's exploiting in-group dynamics and lingo to farm an audience. It's simple. Use the right words that will trigger a response in the limbic system, short-circuiting the frontal cortex. Similar to pornography, it causes a sensorial response but the information isn't registered necessarily.
For example, the concept of "cold showers" is meaningless in this context. It's codified signaling that communicates the poster recognizes and adheres to the rules of the virtual tribe. It might as well be a mating call or monkey noises. The terrifying part is that this pornographic expression takes a parasitic form, possessing the user.
Prolonged exposure to this kind of predatory, stimulating material, whether visual or textual, results in a trance state addicts call "gooning". People have described porn addiction as a separate entity, similar to a Tulpa operating as a second self competing for control. To what extent a simple tweet can cause this reaction, I can't tell.
But I do know that the daily dripping of dopaminergic content can hijack the identity of the consumer via memetic osmosis. This is the reason most people feel the need to take a break from Twitter. And when they do, they feel physically better.
Glorified Secretaries
The key component that differentiates genuine expression from pornography is the intention and the origins of thought.
What passes on as an original - even synthetic - idea is in fact a result of content aggregation. People are scouring forums, blog posts, and Wikipedia articles to find interesting trivia and information they can integrate into their propaganda. If you’re looking to make money or seeking validation, novel concepts and terminology are a goldmine. They allow to reframe old paradigms in new ways and hit the “refresh” button of the potential buyer’s mind.
Like a glorified secretary, they copy-paste tidbits of information from everywhere. They rehash and paraphrase, adapting them to their own style and branding. But make no mistake, none of these people ever had an original thought that was a product of honest research and pondering. And if you're a little bit cognizant of the linguistical mechanics, you can tell when they're just dispensing prechewed material.
This is a chthonic, subversive Promethean Ritual. Knowledge without sacrifice, knowledge for the sake of profit, whether it's monetary or psychological. The debt accrued is massive and it slowly corrupts the identity.
Terraforming the Online Language to Create Subcultures
There's only one Online Language, which usually follows the grammar and spelling rules of English but can freely alter the structure and subtext to imbue different meanings.
This language has been used as a tool to draw cultural borders. The free flow of ideas is bottlenecked inside the piece of internet land you're occupying. When utilized in good faith, you can attract individuals who share your cognitive inclinations. But given the opportunity, this can be used as a lever to prime an audience - whether you're selling intellectual ramblings or a course - thus many online personalities terraform language to mystify their ideas and blunder the communication on purpose, seeking to create a landlocked subculture - which is closer to a cult than not.
The choice of words and phraseological contour always confesses the internet ethnicity, with the political spectrum slicing the pie in big pieces.
The balkanization of the internet culture is reflected on the tiles of the mosaic Online Language has become.
A Problem of Linguistics
Finally, we arrive at the most important section of the piece.
Information self-organizes socially. The object is reified as cultural norms (the subject), according to the rules I've outlined in the previous sections and the objective problems that arise become problems of linguistics. All you have to do to solve them is perform algebraic manoeuvres using words.
The data is then separated from the subject, creating the "avatar of the subject" which only contains the symbolic rendering of information. Through these stages, information becomes a sensorial experience, a pill you can consume, a pornographic movie you can watch, without having to register the meaning of information.
A perfect example is the word "soy". Soy is culturally relevant within the right-wing community. It translates to effeminate behaviour or weakness. Soy has now become the avatar of the subject. It's separated from the food soy, the qualities of the object, so people within this subculture don't always register the connection. The inferences they make spring from the subject, the experience, and not the object.
In case I wasn't clear enough, porn creates a similar dynamic between object and subject, rendering the subject (the reified object) "passive and determined"; the virtual substitute alienates the consumer from the physical experience.
The same way pornographic expression alienates the person from his identity.
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