Welcome to the blog. Here are some things you'll need to know.
Allow me to explain. Christopher Lasch was a historian and sociologist. I'd mention his political viewpoint if he had a clear one; the closest I can get is "disappointed leftist," (which, like, same???). He wrote quite a few books, but the work of his that's key to my thought is The Culture of Narcissism. In it, he explains how developments over the 20th Century had led to a country where everyone displayed symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder, and how that's actually pretty terrible. Let's be clear: narcissism isn't just when you're really up your own arse - Lasch and his progenitors (Kohut, even back to Freud) and acolytes (the bloggers) use it to mean a quite complex disorder typified by a lack of internal judgement (i.e. guilt), a simultaneous overdependence on, and retreat from, others, and a lack of standards. Think of the original Greek story. Narcissus's parents get told that he can never know himself, and how do you know yourself other than testing yourself against metrics, working out what you can and cannot do, and connecting with others? A dearth of those three things is what Lasch sees, and I'll explain it more in depth in a later post, but it basically means that everything from work to sport to chirpse is all fucked up.
Lasch was writing in 1982. Over twenty years later, a blog is started by someone called The Last Psychiatrist (hence TLP, or Alone, both in this post and on the entire blog, which goes for all the abbreviations here), and his mission statement is essentially to make the increase in societal narcissism clear to us all. He analyses all kinds of things, especially online articles, to make this point, when he isn't writing about the inefficacy of modern psychiatry - which Lasch also mentioned as creating the culture of narcissism. TLP is eventually doxxed, and retreats from the blog, under the pretense of writing a book about porn and what it means with regard to the society that consumes it (spoiler: it means we're narcissists). I say 'pretense' because no one has heard anything about the book since. He's Lasch's 'son' in terms of ideology; they're working from a similar base, toward a similar end.
Next, we get the two grandchildren: Hotel Concierge and Samzdat. Hotel Concierge (hence HC) is, again, working from a similar base, toward a similar end. Their wheelhouse features more TLP-style content that's suitable for those of use who are Extremely Online (if you've not seen it capitalised like that you aren't), like Cat Person (Shame and Society) or the Bay Area Rationalist outpost and why everyone insists on comparing the modern political situation to Harry fucking Potter all the time (Young Adult Fictions). Samzdat (hence Lou) is slightly different, in that his project isn't exposing narcissism but, instead, exposing nihilism. Again, nihilism isn't just a teenager with a fedora haughtily explaining to you that nothing matters - it means a lack of widely held values in the world. Lou devotes his blog to explaining the philosophy and history behind the loss of said values. He suggests that the only one we really have left, following the death of God that Nietzsche is always banging on about, is politics. Narcissism and TLP still feature heavily though, he shouts out HC from time to time, and the style is still evident, especially in the Fearless Girl post, which borrows liberally from TLP's later, knottier, more (over-)ambitious posts, and is my personal favourite. The line about 'exchanging power for the trappings of power' is a direct pull from TLP, for example.
You can probably tell by the way I write about them, but I'm currently enthralled by their work. I imagine at some point I'll realise it's all wank, or I'll decide that the writers that surrounded Henry Sidgwick at Cambridge are the true key to understanding why everything's fucked, or I'll start doing reading around my actual fucking degree, but for now, these dons are my obsession, and that'll show up a lot in the types of things I write, the way I write them, and the ideas I espouse. This isn't even close to a good explanation of their project, and I'll do better in time, but for now, a better one can be found at this comment on Reddit from Lou.
(And here's the removeddit in case you want to see the deleted comments.)
1. On Multicultural London English
I'm going to use it all the time, and I'm not going to explain what anything means. I'm serious. No more linking to Urban Dictionary. Yes, it's incredibly exclusive and insular. No, I don't care, it's praxis. One's locale is everything. Specificity is everything. It's right there in the Communist Manifesto - "The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature." I know that sounds utopian and good but it's actually terrible, I promise. Accents and sports teams are pretty much all we have left to differentiate ourselves, and I intend to use them both to their full extent. You get me? Safe, lad. That's what the "do sul" in the blog name is by the way; if it stops being clear at any point (within reason) that I'm from South London, something has gone horribly wrong.2. On Sprezzatura
See the first post if you have no idea what I mean, but sprezzatura is key to the "project," I guess. You see, in the footnotes to their tome Shame and Society, blogger Hotel Concierge correctly identifies the fact that "the bildungsromans of Gen Z will be about finding “authenticity” in a social media world." Authenticity is going to be just as key as it has always been for teenagers, but it's going to be harder and harder to find the more commodified things become both on and off the internet - I've already tried to explain what I think has happened to YouTube, and there's plenty more websites where that kind of analysis is doable, but combine that with Marx's spiel above to see that the offline world has become just as difficult to navigate in an original/unique/"authentic" manner. Sprezzatura, being the art of seeming authentic while not really being authentic, suddenly looks a whole lot more important to my generation (what you saying, fellow late Millenials that don't really remember before the Internet but also find things like Fortnite and TikTok incredibly confusing?) and the generation that will follow us (the Zoomers that actually like Fortnite and TikTok). This is why I write about it, and why I think it's important to be able to notice it. The clincher will be when brands cotton onto this, and actually execute properly as well. Then we're completely fucked.3. On The Period Of Time Following The Financial Crisis
In blogger Samzdat's original introduction to his blog, one of his Four Questions was 'The 1960s.' "That's not a question!" I know, he explains that in literally the first section of the essay, please actually click on the links or there's no point in me doing them. Anyway, because I don't read history, and I was born twenty-one years ago, my Incredibly Important Period of History is the period of time following the Financial Crisis. I need to think of a catchy name for it, late Noughties is horrible and doesn't include up to 2012 like I want, and TPOTFTFC does not bang at all. The point is, this period marked a massive cultural shift, at least to my mind. I'm not really gonna talk about the economic side of things at all, this blog is for avoiding my degree, not doing extra work around it, but the social and cultural end will be hammered home again and again. Again, I've touched on this in the first post (wow, almost like I planned this shit out (I didn't)), but the Internet changed radically with the advent of social media, smartphone usage, and corporations finally getting a hold on how it works. Of course, the landscape radically changed politically as well, and I presume I'll end up talking about that in some post or another. This period was formative in how I view the world, and I think the seeds sowed then have been harvested in the second half of the New Tens (ugh) in some interesting ways.4. On Christopher Lasch and his Spiritual Children
"Why do you keep linking to these same three blogs? There's Angry-About-Narcissism Guy, Angry-About-The-Internet Guy, and Angry-About-Pretty-Much-Everything Guy?"Allow me to explain. Christopher Lasch was a historian and sociologist. I'd mention his political viewpoint if he had a clear one; the closest I can get is "disappointed leftist," (which, like, same???). He wrote quite a few books, but the work of his that's key to my thought is The Culture of Narcissism. In it, he explains how developments over the 20th Century had led to a country where everyone displayed symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder, and how that's actually pretty terrible. Let's be clear: narcissism isn't just when you're really up your own arse - Lasch and his progenitors (Kohut, even back to Freud) and acolytes (the bloggers) use it to mean a quite complex disorder typified by a lack of internal judgement (i.e. guilt), a simultaneous overdependence on, and retreat from, others, and a lack of standards. Think of the original Greek story. Narcissus's parents get told that he can never know himself, and how do you know yourself other than testing yourself against metrics, working out what you can and cannot do, and connecting with others? A dearth of those three things is what Lasch sees, and I'll explain it more in depth in a later post, but it basically means that everything from work to sport to chirpse is all fucked up.
Lasch was writing in 1982. Over twenty years later, a blog is started by someone called The Last Psychiatrist (hence TLP, or Alone, both in this post and on the entire blog, which goes for all the abbreviations here), and his mission statement is essentially to make the increase in societal narcissism clear to us all. He analyses all kinds of things, especially online articles, to make this point, when he isn't writing about the inefficacy of modern psychiatry - which Lasch also mentioned as creating the culture of narcissism. TLP is eventually doxxed, and retreats from the blog, under the pretense of writing a book about porn and what it means with regard to the society that consumes it (spoiler: it means we're narcissists). I say 'pretense' because no one has heard anything about the book since. He's Lasch's 'son' in terms of ideology; they're working from a similar base, toward a similar end.
Next, we get the two grandchildren: Hotel Concierge and Samzdat. Hotel Concierge (hence HC) is, again, working from a similar base, toward a similar end. Their wheelhouse features more TLP-style content that's suitable for those of use who are Extremely Online (if you've not seen it capitalised like that you aren't), like Cat Person (Shame and Society) or the Bay Area Rationalist outpost and why everyone insists on comparing the modern political situation to Harry fucking Potter all the time (Young Adult Fictions). Samzdat (hence Lou) is slightly different, in that his project isn't exposing narcissism but, instead, exposing nihilism. Again, nihilism isn't just a teenager with a fedora haughtily explaining to you that nothing matters - it means a lack of widely held values in the world. Lou devotes his blog to explaining the philosophy and history behind the loss of said values. He suggests that the only one we really have left, following the death of God that Nietzsche is always banging on about, is politics. Narcissism and TLP still feature heavily though, he shouts out HC from time to time, and the style is still evident, especially in the Fearless Girl post, which borrows liberally from TLP's later, knottier, more (over-)ambitious posts, and is my personal favourite. The line about 'exchanging power for the trappings of power' is a direct pull from TLP, for example.
You can probably tell by the way I write about them, but I'm currently enthralled by their work. I imagine at some point I'll realise it's all wank, or I'll decide that the writers that surrounded Henry Sidgwick at Cambridge are the true key to understanding why everything's fucked, or I'll start doing reading around my actual fucking degree, but for now, these dons are my obsession, and that'll show up a lot in the types of things I write, the way I write them, and the ideas I espouse. This isn't even close to a good explanation of their project, and I'll do better in time, but for now, a better one can be found at this comment on Reddit from Lou.
(And here's the removeddit in case you want to see the deleted comments.)
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