Polite Society

I recently remedied an absence in my reading repertoire. There’s a terrifyingly large number of books out there, so even though there are stories and writers you know you should have engaged with, it’s nearly impossible to keep up.

So when I last journeyed to the library, and saw upon a shelf a copy of Jane Austen’s PERSUASION, I thought, I’ve never actually read an entire Jane Austen novel. Excerpts, sure. Adaptations? They’re inescapable. But I’ve never read one, cover to cover.

And so I did. It took a little while. When reading early 19th century literature, you have to adjust your brain a little bit. The patterns of thought and writing aren’t ours, with compound sentences that spin endlessly outwards like fractals generated from a Mandelbrot set. PERSUASION was Austen’s very last novel, written in her late thirties and published at the very end of 1817, six months after Austin’s death. I’d say “untimely death,” but before antibiotics and vaccines, dying before forty wasn’t even faintly unusual.

It’s a romance, unsurprisingly, one between the thoughtful but suppressed Anne Elliot and the dashing but frustrated Captain Wentworth, who she’d loved passionately but whose offer of marriage she’d spurned years before after being persuaded by her family that it wasn’t a socially advantageous match.

Two hundred years ago, things were really, really different if you were of the genteel class in Britain, because all that mattered was society. Meaning, ninety-seven percent of the life of the Elliot family seemed to be going to visit people, and having people visit them.  

I found myself thinking, Dear Lord, do none of these people have jobs? Which, being aristocratic, they mostly didn’t.

Polite society meant everything was about carefully managed appearances and relationships, about everyone knowing who you were and…equally importantly…who was connected to you. 

If someone had more social influence, you’d do anything you could to establish a connection with them. In practice, it meant that you were constantly spending every last second of your life worrying about how you were perceived. Even though every moment was compulsively socializing, you were also strangely, paradoxically alone. Your real thoughts, your deepest feelings and fears? None of that could be expressed. All of it was posturing and falseness and striving for advantage.

So, you know, nothing at all like the way we “socialize” now in the social media era. 

 As false as it was, at least in British polite society you actually got to spend time with people, face to face. The smothering heights of Austen/Bronte-era society ain’t got nuthin’ on our commodified, algorithmic, Skinner-box social hellscape, which is antithetical to genuine intimacy, meaning relationships where you can be completely, deeply, utterly yourself.

If the net result of a new social paradigm is relentless interaction coupled with deep and paralyzing levels of human loneliness, you know something is very, very wrong. 

Without real intimacy, all we will ever feel is utterly alone.

The Parasociopath

Last night, the wife and I went to see a comedian.  It was her birthday present to me, one both thoughtful and welcome.  The comedian: Josh Johnson.  I'd "discovered" Johnson whilst scrolling endlessly through short form videos in 2024, most likely on Instagram, and his slow-paced, slightly awkward, and utterly genial delivery was charming and unique.  I'd shared him with her, and she found him as delightful as I did.

It made for a pleasant night out, as the opening act was solid, and Johnson was exactly what I recalled him being.  Only, you know, physically present.

As always, it was peculiar seeing a human being one knows only as an image on a screen actually standing on stage, close enough that I could have thrown him a football.  If you know the limitations of my throwing arm, you know that meant we were quite nearby.  

His first few bits were interesting, in a meta sort of way.  Funny, naturally, and a pleasure to listen to, but also peculiarly recursive.  He lamented how pathologically online he was, and how anxious all of that made him.  He then proceeded to engage in a long retelling of an amusing video that's making the rounds.  Which is exactly how I encountered him, and how I shared him with the person who bought me the tickets to come to see him.

So here's this actual human being, live and in the flesh, doing precisely what so many of us often do with one another when we gather these days.  "Hey, Person We Actually Know," we say.  "Would you like to look at this amusing thing that I just saw on my screen?"  And so we share it, just as we've likely already shared it in whatever corporate media ecosystem we first encountered it, and we laugh together at some absurdity.

What aren't we sharing?  Our actual life.  That video is not a thing that happened to us.  Nor is it something we're encountering organically.  It's something that is being fed to us by semi-sentient systems designed to show us exactly what we want.  It's not actually part of our life.

And here, I find that I'm increasingly at a remove from the flow of culture.  The flow of culture is parasocial, and I am no longer significantly part of those systems.

Parasociality is the term used to describe our sense of relationship to a human being who we know only through media.  We "know" the famous and the celebrated and the influential, and we project our desires for real human relationship onto them.  I, for example, "know" Josh Johnson.  He shares himself, or appears to, in his comedy routines.  He projects a late night small room raconteur vibe, and it feels intimate.  But it is not.  Intimacy does not occur in a two thousand seat arena, or on Insta.  He has no idea who I am, or who 99.975% of his audience is.

Now that I am no longer on social media, and have used a nifty Chrome extension to shut down all of the compulsion-engines of the still-useful Youtube, I realized that this is having a substantial impact on my ability to engage in this type of relationship.  I am at a remove from the influences of influencers.  More of my time is my own, because I have chosen not to connect.  I have willfully withdrawn from parasociety.  

I am, if you will, a parasociopath.  Meaning, those flows of social exchange no longer run through me, not in the way they have been designed to flow.  I no longer encounter an endless stream of amusements.  I no longer receive most of my social information through algorithmic filters.

And unlike sociopathy, which is a particularly damaging pathology, parasociopathy seems necessary for our sanity, less a disease and more a healthy immune response.  It's a bit like feeling overwhelming vertigo when standing next to a potentially lethal chasm, or having a fear of poisonous snakes.  There's a necessity to it, the aversion of an organic system to something that does it harm.

Occupy Targeting

Stay on target.   Stay on target.

With a tiny bit of free time on my hands this last week, and my flighty muse temporarily disinterested in the book I'm chugging away on, I found myself doing a little bit of research.

With the days growing short and the winter coming on, the Occupy Movement here in DC is going to be facing a conundrum of sorts.  The long history of sustained camping-demonstrations here in the Nation's Capital combined with a moderate-to-progressive local ethos may not yield the sort of forcible removals we've been seeing in city after city this last week, but one never knows.  It didn't stop the aggressive action to clear out Zuccotti Park last night in New York, at the heart of where the Occupy movement began.  There, the response of the Movement was mostly what it needed to be.  Just clear out.  Just pick up peaceably, smile at the nice officers and tell them you love them, move, and then settle back in the next morning, like the murmuration you are.

Still, time is short.  The Death Star is clearing Yavin.  It is important to stay on target.

The larger challenge will come, in DC at least, in reinforcing identity and in spreading popular support for the movement among Americans generally.   To do this, I would ask that Occupy K St and Occupy DC consider direct action that reflects the actuality on the ground.   Having gotten the satire out of my system on that subject, here's a simple proposal for consideration by the General Assemblies in question:

As the political system is not, not yet, the focus of Occupy, focus on the ground you inhabit.  Call out those places of power that are not accountable.  What troubles most Americans is the control over our political system by powerful, entrenched, and moneyed interests.  The One Percent, as they say.  These are the lobbyists, the potent influence-shops that employ our politicians and politicos after they've left office.   This is where corporate money buys the direction of our culture, and where the good of the country is taken out of the hands of voters and citizens.   This is the heart of injustice.  The political leaders from either of the two parties we're permitted to choose from do not speak against these places, and they will not.  Not ever.  It's where their campaign staffers go to work, and where they themselves hope to pad the nest for their retirements.

Resisting those places would have purchase, deep purchase.   If America hears you are doing this, Honeychild, ninety-nine percent of them will wave their hands in the air and say AMEN.  Even the Tea Party will acknowledge the excellence of your kung fu.

Here in the District of Columbia, there are plenty of office-fronts where a few hundred souls with signs making noise could light up, in a prophetic way, those places of unaccountable power.  These are not places known to most citizens, but as I'm a DC townie who likes to do research, I know 'em.   The next time you're considering a nonviolent Guy Fawkes-masked march or an impromptu resistance dance party, consider these as destinations:

The Podesta Group.   Akin Gump.   Patton Boggs.   I have selected these three against two primary criteria:  1) they need to be in easy walking distance of your encampments, and 2) they need to perfectly represent the essential power you oppose.

Let me light 'em up a little for ya.

The Podesta Group is a good place to start.  They're at 1001 G Street, NW, Suite 900.   They are, according to opensecrets, the number three lobbying shop in DC this year, pulling in over twenty million dollars from their clients in 2011 alone.  And oh, what lovely clients they have.  They've pushed the interests of BP, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Bank of America, and various Big Pharma corporations, and that's just this year.

If you're having a Pavlovian response to Podesta, well, that's because it is just so very tasty.

Akin Gump is a DC powerhouse, and has been for decades.  I used to work in the same building they inhabit, at 1333 New Hampshire Avenue, NW.  I watched former lawmakers and power-players go in and out, in and out.  The guy who advised Clinton to hush up the Lewinsky thing?  He worked there.    They represent, among many others, Chinese interests, Big Oil, Boeing, and casinos.  It's a short walk, right next to Dupont Circle, and if you want to stop in for a beer at the Front Page afterwards, it's right there.  They're number two on the list of 2011 lobbying firms, at twenty-five million in receipts in 2011.

Finally, there's Patton Boggs, the big boy on the block.   They're looking at nearly thirty million in client money for 2011.  Their huge client list includes various large big Pharma players and Walmart.  They are also in the notable employ of several big-ticket investment and financial interests, who are their largest dollar amount clients.

Meaning, my friends, that they work for Wall Street.  This is where the power of Wall Street reaches into the halls of governance, kids.  This is where the social connections of power are leveraged, bought, traded, and sold.    This is why you're here, and it's only a 25 minute walk from McPherson Square, at 2550 M Street, NW.

So I will leave this in your hands, to do with what you will.  Be peaceful.  Be loud.  Be gracious.  Be bold.