Click on the image to see the post itself. Or click here, whatevs.

If you go through some of the responses, they’re extremely polarized. And they’re mostly from dumb 15-year-old kids (who don’t know who Sean Connery is). Some of the more intelligent comments articulate the need for, or rather the necessary destruction of, gender norms, and how they’ve changed over the last 50 years. It’s a good thing that we’ve come down from the false, rigid, and patriarchal figure of Sean Connery to the more sensitive, effeminate, and gentle notion of many boy-bands. There are yet other reblogs viciously commenting on Sean Connery’s checkered past when it comes to beating women:

Oh look at that sassy Barbara Walters glance. Where has that gone? Anyway… I find it very interesting, this whole assertion of “where has masculinity gone?” Largely, I think the image macro is wrong. Nothing has really happened at all on a purely superficial level. Instead of Sean Connery, today we have Don Draper, any one of George Clooney’s characters, Vin Diesel, et cetera. We still have a plethora of “classic Men” embodying a rather patriarchal chivalry. The difference is that the more contemporary male figures are not so much anti-woman, as Connery once was; they are now more and more pro-man in response to feminism. And what’s wrong with that? We have feminist movements, why can’t we have masculine movements? (I have touched upon this before.)

And if you say well men have always had the upper hand, then fuck you, you double-standard asshole. You stand for nothing if you think it’s okay for us to have feminist movements but disallow masculine movements. This is largely rhetorical, however, since many would argue that third-wave feminism has largely overcome this problem, myself being one of them. Equality cannot be found through revenge. Likewise, the world has changed since Sean Connery was our patriarch of choice. None of our current patriarchal figures would agree with him. Not because they think he’s fundamentally flawed, but simply because as a culture we’ve finally begun to move on as a collective.

The ultimate goal of feminism, affirmative action, etc, should not be to raise up their constituents above all others, but to make them equal to all others. Conversely, their aim should never be to lower their opponents, because that makes even less sense. What has happened to men? We have gradually moved closer to the realm of equilibrium with women. Sure, there are still problems, but I have no doubt that we simply have to wait for the old people in charge to die. We lack the self-confidence of our hippie parents to take an active role; we must simply wait until there is no opposition. As miserable as this is, it might be for the best.

But then, additionally, there is the question not of man versus woman but of boy versus man. This is, again, a deeper question than the superficial can provide, because not much really has changed besides our understanding. Further, the question I like to ask is: what changes in a culture when the “male role models”, or let’s just say “role models”, have gone from being very rigid, patriarchal, masculine figures to more effeminate, sensitive, and caring ones. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it, I’m merely curious. Is it an equalizing force? Is it a rational, rather than sensational, force? Are children’s role models becoming more real, rather than stereotypical and fantasty-oriented? Are we moving away from boy-escapism Superman and gesturing towards PBS realism? Is this a good thing?

I would argue… at least begin to argue… that there is an important place for both. It is beneficial for kids to have escapist, world-avoiding perspectives. Superman is a worthy role model simply because he can never exist, and yet a child believes he can and does, and eventually he will realize the values and morals of Superman that transcend the fact that he’s a comic book character. However, it is also important to teach a child that they exist in a real world with real consequences. The younger they learn this, potentially the better, right? I am not so sure. I think a lot of the world’s problems would eventually be resolved faster if we allowed children to be wild, to be unreal, to be other-worldly, rather than constrain what they eat, keep them on leashes, and make them watch Dora the Explorer to learn Spanish. Please, let children be children, and let parenting be more about guiding than ruling.

Few of today’s role models teach self-confidence and self-reliance. Few of them favor “figure it out yourself” over “let’s figure this out together”, to the point that I fear children will become more and more emotionally dependent upon their peers or (worse) their fictional role models. Empathy is an important perspective that is certainly not yet properly represented in our society, and never really has been, but it’s also paramount to remember our inherent independence alongside our inherent sociability. A child must learn how to take care of themselves before they can learn to take care of others.

My favorite reactions to the image:

“they both need beards.”

“I want a boyfriend not a girlfriend.”

“does anyone need any preparation h for their butthurt”

“There’s another one with a picture of Audrey Hepburn and Ke$ha, too.”

“Seriously. If you’re a dude with a straightener in your bathroom, I’m done. ESPECIALLY IF IT’S BETTER THAN MINE.”

I’m happy there were reactions. Tumblr is pretty great.

Coming from a web development background, when I see Facebook, I don’t see people: I see rows in a database. I see people being reduced to fields in a form; status updates, Likes, and other such mechanizations of personality, all of them simply a mass of data. The debate 3-5 years ago (and it goes back much further) was about how we (our individual selves) choose to be represented on the internet. This debate was founded on the idea that the self chooses to represent itself when staring at a computer. This was a reasonable assumption back then, when the majority of computer users were adults who had (somewhat) a capacity to distinguish online from offline. And it was largely true; when you logged in to a chatroom, you were vaguely aware that you could create any identity you wanted to. There was a separation.

For several decades psychologists have known that in many ways, we as people do not really consciously choose how we represent ourselves in real life, even though we’re made to feel that we choose who we are. We really don’t. We’re amalgamations of the people around us, our family, our genetics, and how culture affects us. This is all sub/unconscious, very little control is conscious (though it can be made into a more conscious process with meditation/self-understanding). Who we “are” is highly contextual, abstract, and relative. Who we are shifts constantly over time. Conversely, the more you realize and accept this, the more in control you become (though you can never truly be in control).

The internet is the first medium to truly defy this in its most fundamental form, because computerization of the self requires normalization and, therefore, definition. There are no abstract concepts in a database, facebook’s rows of information are broken down into data types: integers, strings, text blobs, relational foreign IDs leading to other databases, et cetera. There is no room for the amorphous ideas of friendship: there is only a row which links the unique identifier for me to the unique identifier for you. That is friendship to facebook, and it is becoming friendship for all young people.

Again, the problem here is that social constructs are inherently collective nebulous relatively socially-constructed abstractions with no rigid definitions. Computers cannot accept this. The same way the invention of writing itself turned thought into a form, which could then be analyzed, torn apart, rebuilt, and contextualized further, the social network has turned social interaction into something that can be normalized, data-mined, interpreted (by automation), and aggregated. Social media itself is the destruction of collective social abstractions. When once things were defined by all of us, they are now defined by corporations.

An easy example I’ve written about before is the very idea of friendship being mechanized and normalized. Of course, to us individually, “friend” still means more and different things than how facebook defines it, (my insistence on its destruction is a bit hyperbolic, but still true,) but the fact that it needed to be normalized and was defined attacks its social significance. By defining it, facebook robbed it of all power in our abstract social-reality by transforming it into something definably real. Before the internet, you could not define your friends. You could have a list, sure, but there were allowable grey areas on what that list meant to me or you because “friend” itself was a purposefully undefined social construct. There was no authority saying it was this or that.

Now, of course, all this is or should be rather irrelevant to an adult, because they understand the difference and the nuance. But this is not apparent to American children, who are now growing up inside the internet. To them, there is no difference. This has a number of severe social and cultural detriments, which might be why a lot of kids are killing themselves based mostly on shit that happens on the internet. (Conversely, the campaign that uses social media to fight against this kind of online bullying is the one that is most explicit in acknowledging that all of the problems associated with “internet seriousness” are ones we collectively create. “It gets better” because we grow up, hopefully.) I know a lot of people who take my status updates more seriously than my speech. Why?

What happens when I write a status update or a tweet? First, we are stripping it, as writing does, of all real-life social context and nuance. It is undeniable (and has been for a long time) that writing something down is distinctly different than saying it, and communication is much more than just words. This is not in debate. For reasonable adults, we can tell the difference and make a reasonable distinction, and may not jump to social conclusions based solely on a status update. (Just as we should not jump to social conclusions based solely on a blog post, though we can get a bit closer thanks to its length.)

But a child, growing up with facebook as a primary means of communication, does not understand this. They grow up reading text as the primary form of social communication. (This has been true not just because of facebook, but of all textually-dominant form of communication, like IMing and texting. Though Facebook represents its epitome.) What’s more is that meaning and nuance are only added back into text by means of long-form writing, as in more than the 140 characters allowed on twitter. There are things that can definitely be said concisely within 140 characters, but there is no real substantial discussion to be had because nothing can be sufficiently communicated. (Poetry, of course, defies this, but using that as a defense of twitter would be saying that everybody growing up on facebook/twitter is inherently a poet.)

The youth of today are being normalized like rows in a database. Individuality and personality are being stripped wholesale in favor of uniformity and conformity. Technology is very quickly trying to claim ownership, commodify, and define all terms of abstract social interaction. It started with friendship, it’s now moving forward with location-based social situations, and it’ll march further into the mosaic of all of our personal trends. Right now trends are one of the easiest things for corporations to follow because they’re normalized and recorded in a crowdsourced fashion: we have millions upon millions of users readily giving reviews, rating things, buying things, sharing things, all for free. (And yet access to that database is not free, rather it’s sold to marketing agencies.) We are coming soon to the point at which a person’s personality itself can be trended: we can track someone’s personal development as an individual. Albeit for now, the vast majority of tweeting is done by a minority of twitter users, this trend may change. And I don’t know of any numbers around how many people who use facebook versus those who regularly submit content, but I’m sure it’s higher than the tweets-per-user ratio. It’s already been diagnosed by psychologists that people on facebook are inherently more depressed because they believe everyone else is out having a fantastic time (because that’s all facebook shows you in your news feed, because nobody wants to be on facebook saying they’re lonely or bored). So there must be enough content being posted by enough people to cause such a shift.

This is all thanks to sharing. This is all thanks to Like-ing. This is all thanks to being able to log in to whatever via Facebook Connect. This is the gradual and systematic technological breakdown of individualism and social uniqueness. The internet is shifting the social, democratic, intellectual, and abstract forms of our society and culture into the realm of the defined, inflexible, totalitarian, and cataloged relational database.

The truth is, everything in our life is socially constructed. The rules we follow, the friends we make, the pressures they create, the expectations, the status updates, the whatever, are all things we simply agree to engage and concern ourselves with. Every day when we wake up we are all willfully signing unspoken social contracts for codes of conduct, behavior, speech, and so forth, and we expect everyone else to abide by them to make our society function smoothly. However, on the internet we’re signing actual terms of service and privacy statements every time we use these sites, we have to actually write down the rules of life and privacy in doing so. The breathing room of unwritten social mores is eliminated. For example: “privacy” in real life, specifically in America’s justice system, is determined by what is known as “reasonable expectations of privacy”, a term that has been around for a hundred years. It, like many laws and social agreements, is purposefully nebulous because it is a collective social construct — it is one that is allowed to change, reform, be debated, and not be written down. That way it can shift and shape for different situations. The bottom line is, there can be no computer program made to automate the justice system, and for good reason. You’d think there could be no computer program to automate our social system, but that’s exactly what we’re doing.

We are, with the continued meshing of real and computerized life, destroying the meaning (in that they have no real meaning) of all of such constructs by having to rigidly define them. We are melting away the identity-persona of an entire generation in doing so. I know this because of how many kids take the internet so fucking seriously that they take offense to someone’s status update, or they read someone’s tweets and fall in love with the person. What’s most sad is, five years ago, we’d say that you can’t truly love someone based solely on their internet-self, but very soon that internet-self might actually be pretty close to their real self. Internet dating is seemingly more and more promising to more and more young people. By taking the internet so seriously, you are actively modifying what is socially acceptable and understood. More than that, the more people who engage in this, the more totalitarian the internet truly becomes. Those who disregard it are forced to fight against it, because not having a facebook page is a grave social stigma.

Anytime anything in our society is normalized on a massive scale, life gets more boring. I drove across the country and found that McDonalds tastes the same everywhere. Cities kinda look the same wherever you go. (Uniqueness, geographically and culturally, becomes only accessible to those who spend a long time in a certain place. Lurk moar.) How can people not see why art has been stagnant for the past 40 years? The diversity of experience in our lives has been steadily diminishing over that time span; there is little to challenge us and make us strive for more. If the internet conquers our whole lives, where there is no diversity, where everything is systematic and mechanized, then what drones will we become? I have always found it rather amusing that we left the individualistic user-defined-style of MySpace pages for the rigidly-standardized Facebook profile page. We gave up control very explicitly.

In the face of all of this, it would be unsurprising to me if our children’s children want nothing to do with technology. Perhaps this is simply the cyclical nature of things. It is unfortunate that the world we leave for them will probably be worse than the world that is currently being left for us now. But perhaps I’m taking the internet too seriously.

This is an article about the difference between these “jobs”, or “positions”, or “mindsets” in regards to making things on The Internet. I think they exist within separate spheres but encompassing the same general principle of the importance/balance of creativity vs knowledge. The jobs exist in different realms, with each side weighted differently; it’s the age-old left brain vs right brain, and how different responsibilities require different mixes of the two. The juggling/emphasis of each is what makes the job unique. It’s tough to go from being one to being another; people tend to be born predisposed to one of them. Kind of like being introverted or extroverted. These are constructs, yes, and they can be changed, but they’re often deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking. I’ll cover Designers, Developers, Engineers, and Architects. (And one more at the end.)

A Designer

First of all, there’s this bullshit position called “UX Designer” (UX stands for User Experience) which is somehow different than just a designer. To me, this is extremely erroneous division, only contributing to further unnecessary stratification in the field of design. Being a designer, your first job is to build an experience. That is design. If you make some design that isn’t made with experience in mind, you’re not really a designer, you’re just an illustrator or a craftsman. However, I can easily see why people would want to make this distinction, since most designers get so egotistical that they no longer think in terms of users using their designs. Hence the need for designers specifically trained to think differently, most often adding to the bureaucracy of the process. This is upsetting. Even though I’ve known a lot of talented UX people, I wish the position didn’t exist, and would rather they just called themselves designers.

Not to narrow the field just for simplicity – I just think more in terms of context. You could easily say a great designer doesn’t need to think in terms of user experience, and that’s true. There are plenty of beautiful chairs in the world that are very aesthetically pleasing and some would say well-designed. A lot of those chairs, no matter how cool, might also be terrible to sit in for long periods of time (see: Ikea chairs). Therefore I wouldn’t feel that it’s right for anyone to conclude they are actually well-designed.

A designer is someone whose creativity is their weapon. A designer pulls from the air, their work is ideas. Their creativity is crafted into the form of actual things – though they are usually not the ones who make that form happen. But they have the best ideas, they’re supposed to be the ones who have the ideas that make the most sense. Which is why having a separate UX Designer is nonsense to me. The designer should have the social skills and the design research to know whether something will work. While ideas (seemingly) come from the air, no one designs in a vacuum. Users are made to be deceived; the best designs are ones that seem obvious but at the same time magical and original, the trick is that they just are obvious and you’ve probably seen it before. The designer’s job is to bring beauty out of seemingly nothingness which a user would be able to understand.

Designers often become either too aware or too unaware of what they are designing and who they are designing for. They can be lost in research, trying to craft the perfect design for an intended audience, or they can be so blinded by that research or their own intuition (wherever ideas come from) that they miss any audience. Great designers, working together, almost always rely on a singular common focus; the best contemporary example of this is Apple’s approach to design. Simple, elegant, ethereal. They tap into the stupidly-simple yet profoundly difficult notion of the cool. They use phrases like “it just works” and “it feels right in your hands”. A designer may spend decades finding the balance between the sophistication of their approach and the simplicity required for highly usable and memorable experiential design. Again, a great designer makes the obvious so intensely intuitive that the experience feels like magic.

A Developer

But how does that design go from a sketch to an implementation? If pure creativity is the lifeblood of designers, it is merely the tool of the developer, albeit an important tool. A lot of people mix up and confuse the roles “developer” with “engineer”, but there’s a big difference. Developers rely more often on creativity as their primary tool, while engineers rely heavily on knowledge. To highlight the word explicity: developers develop stuff. Like old-school film photographers, the good ones walk through a longer process. A photographer has to have a good eye to make a great photo, but also frequently has to have the technical skill to make that film expose and print properly to make the photo something you can hold in your hand (as opposed to something that just exists in the photographer’s memory).

Developers require the ability to wield and channel creativity in their execution more than they can have the luxury of getting lost in that creativity as designers do, usually because they’re in a strange position. Over the last 10 years or so, a developer is the person you’d talk to when you have a great idea for an app or a website but no idea how to make it. A developer is the most common bridge between the average person and the technical world of computers. The developer’s job is to be a magician; to bring forth from an idea the actual implementation. Often an amateurish one-stop shop instead of a formalized team of designers and engineers; developers are often self-taught and informal.

The two parts of these jobs need to be meshed almost 50/50 in developers. They should rely on creativity as much as knowledge. Developers are creative problem-solvers, ruled not by calculus but instead by common sense. The creative part of the job is figuring out how to transform that idea into something real. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for a wealth of knowledge, rather it requires an understanding of shortcuts. These shortcuts have become easier thanks to the internet and the creation of simpler, more straightforward programming languages. But it means frequently using the quick-and-dirty way instead of the most studied, efficient way, which is their primary drawback. Prototyping – quickly making real, functional, and minimally designed things out of ideas – is the major craft of a developer. Getting the ball rolling; generating a fast reliable result.

Developers usually don’t mesh well with designers or engineers. Designers think their designs have little room for compromise and engineers always think there’s a better way to write code. That’s hyperbole; but I have always found developers (myself included) to exist in a weird uneasy middle-ground between the two. Sometimes an advantage, but dangerously nebulous. A developer may not have the very best most refined solution, and they might not have the most air-tight design, but they get shit done. And that’s the difference: developers aren’t bureaucrats. A good developer should be a beacon of progress for the sake of progress itself.

An Engineer

As I said, engineers know the best way. Engineers rely on knowledge. You can ask an engineer to sit down and figure out a problem in its entirety and have the path from problem to solution. And they’ll have it for you, probably using the most efficient methods, in the best-fit programming language, which they’ve most likely studied extensively. (Hopefully not Java.) Their strength is in that totality of ability. An engineer is the one who figures out how to safely build a bridge from one side of the river to the other, and the strength of their calculations is paramount. Real engineers carry this with them whether they’re building a skyscraper or programming a banking interface; their vocabulary revolves around the stakes and not their creative whims.

You can’t ask them to make the solution quickly, or ask them to put a red ribbon on it. Engineers largely can’t give an application a feeling or emotion or a reason to use it beyond its function. There’s creativity in their job, but it’s subservient to their knowledge as a means to solve a problem. Knowing how to do things isn’t as good as knowing how to do things right. And to real engineers, there is definitely a right way. There’s always a perfect, elegant solution because there has to be. Computers are made by man within logical limits; there’s always a results-driven procedure that shows the best use of its zeroes and ones.

Engineers can be powerhouses, but they can also be monsters. They can define and enhance productivity as often as they can destroy it. A great engineer can halt production on something because they’re afraid of some small potential security flaw, or simply because they doubt the integrity of their own work. This is compounded when several engineers work in concert, and reinforce each other’s doubts by re-writing each other’s code or simply writing code in different styles. Anyone else helping with the project will be met with obstacles because of this. This attitude toward absolute perfect execution isn’t found as much with designers; they compete over ideas more than procedure, and ideas are far more maleable than the rigid definitions laid out by code.

An Architect

Above these roles, having an architect can be essential. In a team of engineers, designers, and possibly developers, there needs to be someone to wrangle them. There needs to be a unified vision, and it needs to come from someone who knows pieces of each process. The architect is someone who can bring that vision, usually because they’ve been in one of the three roles and then transcended it. Notice I do not use the word “manager” or “supervisor”, who are typically useless. An architect is someone who knows and has experience with some or all of the processes involved. A “project manager” most often just wants to get things done as fast as possible without knowledge of what that speed potentially sacrifices, usually involving politics into their executive decisions. Managers and supervisors generate bureaucracy.

The architect is hopefully the end result of anybody in one of the previous three jobs. All of the three jobs should realize that there are larger concerns than their own independent vision can show them. More than that, though, the previous three jobs may easily become obsolete with the person’s own complacency. Engineers can quickly become useless if they refuse to learn a new, more robust and widely-supported language. A designer may not read into the changing of the times, and may make something that worked ten years ago but won’t appeal to anyone now. In this case, a broader, more comprehensive and platform- and language-independent mindset is required to survive. As I said in the introduction, the three roles described above are just different uses of the same tools; each has the chance to become something that encompasses pieces of all of them.

Regardless, the overall problem with all of these positions is that they are rarely good enough as one person working alone. Making things well requires a collective, with a very simple and easily-defined core idea. There are, of course, various other entities (like support personelle, and nitty-gritty stuff like system administrators) who contribute, but not really to the experience of creation. It’s those (typically small) well-formed and informed teams that build massively elegant projects that stand the test of time or, better yet, evolve as time requires them to.

An Expert

Briefly, I’ll mention here that there are no such things as Social Media Experts involved in the creative process. They’re a waste of time and money. They don’t exist alongside the people who actually make things happen. They might get a few other social media experts on Twitter to follow a product, but really that means nothing. Thankfully for them there currently is no way to truly measure their results, other than through means created by other social media experts. So it’s a bubble that will soon burst, hopefully. Marketing a good product shouldn’t be a difficult chore requiring social media experts. You shouldn’t pay anyone to sit on Twitter.

That’s not to discount the use of social media, merely I am discounting the reliance upon it, and the sudden belief that has grown surrounding the necessity of its usage and the throwing of money at it. Social media works well largely because it is untamable, and a product’s existence within or without it seldom determines whether that product is good, or works well, or is well-designed. Great projects largely find their own audiences if the stars are right, and you don’t need a social media expert to get a great product to its audience; thanks to the internet, that work is already done by merely existing. There’s no such thing as intentionally making a viral video.

The author immediately refers to the internet (the 1995 internet, mind you) as “trendy and oversold”. It still fucking is. Trendy? See: Twitter. Oversold? See: Google. A lot of what he says the futurists predicted have not happened presently, and what small steps we made (like internet video conferencing and Second Life) are relegated only to either academics (whose careers rely on them) or the most cutting-edge corporations (who don’t mind dumping money on trendy things to appeal to their employees).

Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

He’s right. They do lack common sense. I would argue that nothing so far has replaced the newspaper; rather, the internet has allowed the explosive devolution of news from centralized to niche-oriented, and it’s not a good thing. With customized personalized news comes a narrowing of individual knowledge and interest, instead of a more broad and enlightening understanding of our world. The electronic classroom has become extremely popular in affuent communities and colleges, but it has only made children and parents dumber and more complacent. (See my review of The Dumbest Generation, I don’t want to retype that rant again here.) And so far, the computer network has only allowed government to be even more shady, and surpringly has allowed corporations to become more shady than even the government. Nobody is worrying about what the NSA is tracking, we’re too worried about what Google is tracking.

The internet at the time of the article’s writing was very primitive, and contemporary users would probably find it unusable. He complains about the messy nature of it, but with such few people and websites, it wasn’t really that bad compared to today. The internet was a small, withdrawn place. You had to make an effort to be a part of it, and people rarely took that for granted. Today, the internet is truly an incomprehensible ubiquitous wasteland of nonsense. There are way too many people on the internet. Some responded that Google Search has allowed the internet to become easy to understand and “de-cluttered” it, but really this doesn’t solve the problem of having the mess to begin with. If you don’t want to learn how to tie your shoes, you can get shoes with velcro, but it doesn’t fix the problem of not knowing how to tie your shoes. We still have the problem of not having an organized internet, but I can concede that it’s not really a big problem since we’ve found ways around it.

The computer screen still cannot replace the book. They’re trying, but it’s a rocky start, and it’s hard to sell to most people. The one major thing the author was wrong about was online sales, but he was right about one piece of it: there are no salespeople on the internet. Rather, so many people flooded the internet and so many businesses started selling things on it that it did not need salespeople, only storefronts. What solved the problem of online business was a huge influx of stupid people willing to put their credit cards at risk and pump the internet economy with the funds to make it more secure. The chicken came before the egg, and we all paid for it.

Unedited and unfiltered data, while messy and awful, is what makes the internet great. He’s totally right that it’s a step in the wrong direction overall, but it’s a necessary phenomenon and perhaps will be an important lesson to humanity if any further significant intellectual development occurs. As more shit piles up, perhaps one day as a collective we’ll realize how much shit there actually is, and think of ways to fix that. Right now we have this problem with energy: too much carbon dioxide, and the only way we really finally noticed it collectively was when it piled up too much and threatened our survival on this goddamn planet. (The problem is not the planet’s, mind you, the problem is ours.) The same will happen with information. We’ll be generating so much garbage information, someday we’ll have to account for it.

We’ve infested the internet with too much humanity. There was too short of a time between there not being enough and then too much habituation. I remember maybe a two-year window (2003-2005) when the internet was a decently-sized, managable place. After that, we were suddenly enabled (by sites like MySpace and YouTube) to feel self-important enough to fill the internet with garbage, and it’s only getting worse.

A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

This was true in 1995, and it’s still true today. The internet sucks, but it’s here to stay.

Ugh. I’ve listened to this song a couple times since it came out and I’ve largely avoided it because it makes me very depressed. I didn’t really know why, I just felt a pain in my gut when I heard those lyrics and that pseudo-R&B beat and poor old Alicia Keys’ voice. Unfortunately, I’ll analyze this a bit.

First of all, let’s talk about Jay-Z. Yeah he was kinda cool way back when and I’m very happy he made a song that rails against the proliferation of autotune in contemporary “hip-hop”. (Man, that awful clarinet just kills me every time.) However, he’s gone down the same dark path that Kanye West so valiantly rushes headlong: that of trite and vulgar lyrical masturbation. For the few of us young people who do listen to the vocals beyond just the chorus, I cannot imagine any words more grating to listen to than those of an artist espousing their own spectacle. It’s one thing when they’re rapping about how many people they’ve killed. It’s another when they’re just talking about how cool they are and how they’ve “revolutionized music” and “rewritten history without a pen”. Why do people keep buying these albums?

Other than the needless almost Twitter-style self-promotion, the song barely touches upon what it’s supposed to be about: New York City. You know, the place with the big lights that will “inspire you”. (I thought for awhile that she was saying “expire you” and that made me okay with the song.) So not only is this song contain the abysmal tonality of Jay-Z jerking himself off, but it has the overused and outdated motif of choking an entire city’s chicken. At one point in the song (and in a few other songs) Jay-Z compares himself to Frank Sinatra, calling himself “the new Sinatra”. Well, no. Sorry. You can’t do that. Just fucking can’t. There really has been no need for another “New York City is awesome” song since Sinatra’s own “New York, New York”.

Let’s compare the two songs, just because I’m a dick. First of all, Sinatra’s song is not masturbatory at all. In fact, it’s from the perspective of someone outside of the city looking in: being beguiled by its seemingly endless excitement. Really, his song is simply a dream, a wish, an assumption: “if I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere”. Jay-Z’s song, on the other hand, is about having already “made it”. It’s about Jay-Z high-fiving Knicks players and shit. Hanging out with famous people and seeing beautiful women all around. Probably having sex with them. It’s self-congratulatory, he compares himself to DeNiro, making the Yankees popular, and “rest in peace Bob Marley”? What the fuck? I bet you’ve never even heard a Bob Marley song. Hell, Miley Cyrus hasn’t heard a Jay-Z song. (Good for her.)

And fuck songs that are about how awesome cities are. Fuck right the fuck off. Unless you’re going to make it a fun, stupid, silly, danceable song, just don’t fucking make it at all. Your city is not that awesome. NYC especially. Sure, it has a shitload of people and it generates a lot of culture, but it’s just too fucking big. But these songs are basically saying that the city is full of pretentious assholes. Really, NYC doesn’t need that. You’re already enough of a target, dude, you don’t need to encourage people to hate you.

ANYWAY, another song I’d like to compare it to, on a more broad measure, is NWA’s “Express Yourself”. Listen to this goddamn amazing song:

You better listen to that, it’s fucking awesome. Back when hip-hop was actually hip-hop and it had defenders and leaders and reality. In “Express Yourself” we have a collaboration of artists speaking their minds, and the prevailing notion is simple and effective: express yourself! Frankly, it’s an odd song coming from the same guys who made Fuck tha Police, but that’s another reason why it’s amazing: the need for artistic expression transcends violence to form a song that is not only articulate but danceable. Can any mainstream rapper make the same claim? I know, I know, this is like comparing a Rembrandt with some shitty unknown contemporary artist, but that’s the point. Kanye and Jay-Z are shitty.

Okay, okay, and finally Alicia Keys. Was she tricked into doing this? Was she paid a lot? She’s a classy lady, she can do better than this. Her whole contribution is a roll of piano notes and the banal chorus. I mean, she can play classical and gospel piano, she has a potentially iconic female R&B voice. Part of the reason why the song is depressing is because she’s so out of place in it. Her voice has quality and it soars, but the message doesn’t deliver, it only deflates. Maybe I’m wrong about her and my expectations are too high. It’s as if Luke Wilson started doing AT&T commercials, or like if J.J. Abrams rebooted Star Trek. These are all terrible ideas that shouldn’t happen. As an audience, we should recognize their folly and firmly reject them.

I thought Jay-Z wasn’t making any more studio albums. That’d be nice.

I don’t think I need to say anything more. I think the “breakdown” at 2:50 especially exemplifies what’s wrong here.

Special thanks to Zach Maxell for bringing this to my attention. I was going to write a long-winded rant about this, akin to the crabcore article, but I don’t want to waste any more words on this right now.

If you’re still reading this, then I guess I’ll explain why you should stop right now and go buy that book. Firstly, I’m going to say that it was an extremely validating book, because it eloquently examines, with scientific backing, the same material that I myself focus on in my nonfiction writing (see: this blog).  Basically, this blog is a lot like the book, but with almost nothing listed to back it up besides my own ego, and is much less hateful than my rants. However, about halfway through (starting with a chapter called “Online Learning and Non-Learning”) Mark suddenly gets a lot more biting with his remarks, much more flippant with his tone. I like that a lot. It excited me. Before this, you spend over a hundred pages going over statistics on literacy and intelligence aptitude testing scores and how they have changed over the last half-century.  While this is interesting, and it certainly lays a foundation of scientific and statistical inquiry, it gets kind of dry. But dear reader, persevere through it, because once you get to the asshole side of Mark, there’s no end to the roller-coaster of awesome.

The latter half of the book is full of amazing quotes and themes, of which I’m not going to cover all here, but I’ll go over my favorites. (Oh god there’s so much text below this, I’m sure all of you people under 30 are going to have heart problems, but please try and wade through it. This information is vital.)

The basis and main thrust of the book is the thesis that “being online” has caused kids to lose all intellectual stimulation. While everyone believes that time on-screen gives children an opportunity to learn more than they ever could, the facts state that the opposite is happening. It’s the first in a series of paradoxes Mark guides us through, and it seems the most obvious from statistical data. My generation hates books now more than ever, and are never really pressured by adults or peers into developing advanced literacy. Especially since American government institutions have shifted heavy emphasis on only caring about basic literacy (see: No Child Left Behind). You might think that by being in college you’re experiencing difficult literature, but the fact is that the levels of reading comprehension and the required reading habits that professors ask of students has dropped significantly over the last 30 years. From recently being in college, I can fully vouch for this. I was never required to read anything difficult in college, nor do I know anyone whose curriculum required any of the old masters of poetry or prose. (Mostly because multiculturalists rally against the “old white men”, which is also bullshit, because the two can co-exist just fine.)

Young people exist now in their own self-made universes more than ever before. It used to be that school was the place a child socialized the most, and going home meant doing your homework and doing things with your parents, and maybe talking on the phone with your friends. Now, kids run home because it means they get to go online and talk to their friends all night long, and even in school all kids do is text each other. This closes them off from learning, exploring, and having to be forced into doing something other than socializing or thinking about socializing. And everyone, from scholars to parents to anybody worth listening to, believe that the internet is awesome and it cannot be a bad thing and encourage their kids to get on the computer. Not to mention the computer or the TV will take care of a kid while the parent does something else on their own, too.

The study of history in any form, really any attention to the past at all, has been left behind in favor of the youth-knows-all self-expression method of learning. One of my favorite quotes in the book: “It is the nature of adolescents to believe that authentic reality begins with themselves, and that was long preceded them is irrelevant” (p. 168). It is very true that this is our attitude, and it is a very bad thing that our teachers and parents believe that this state of being is fine to just keep living in well into our late teens and twenties and onward. We do not learn from the past because we never pay attention to it because it is never exposed to us because we don’t want to see it. We are never forced to see it. No one sits us down and makes us watch PBS when there’s MTV we’d rather be watching. Our parents don’t want to take us to museums anymore because we think it’s boring.

Our generation is a self-centered repeating mashup of peer-created nonsense with no basis in reality, no real ground on which to stand, nothing to cite as an influence besides the same nonsense that was used to create it. All of us float in this goddamn cloud of self-importance, as if the only true way to know things is to discover them through ourselves. I can confidently say that there is no average American 18-year-old who knows enough to learn anything substantial from themselves, and yet they are told and they believe that they’re ready to and should take on the universe. It’s bullshit. No we shouldn’t. Reading the statistics, I wish I could go back ten years and tell my 12-year-old self to read more. (Admittedly, I read a goddamn lot in my teens, but I wish I had read even more and challenged myself further.)  The only real way to learn is from the experience of those older than us and/or different from us, and it only makes sense that we as children should at least bounce everyday ideas off of our parents, let alone the many thousands of years of human existence that has been recorded in books (and now online). But everyone would have our generation believe that the past is trivial, and we know no better because we are still children, and will be stuck in childhood thanks to that idiom.

According to Mark, it is the fault of adults that this happened, because they let it happen over the course of the last 50 years. Since the 60s, America has become more and more centered on youth, so much so that now I would wager that we have completely eclipsed all dominant adult-oriented culture. (Except for maybe The Economist and Fox News.) In the 60s, academics and culture-generators alike began believing that youth was inherently correct in its rebellion of “the system” merely because they were rebelling with such fervor. Nevermind the fact that kids could not really articulate their revolution, or that they overwhelmingly grasped onto whoever was the most radical at the given moment without pause, and had absolutely no organization but yet were one gargantuan mass. (Conversely, this is why I think the internet will kill us all; it is a completely disorganized gargantuan mass that, when finally riled, will overtake the world with nonsense that shrouds even today’s pop culture mythos.) No one bothered to stop and seriously question what was going on in the 60s, and because of that we let the whole thing slide until the kids were in charge 20-30 years later, and they had no idea what to do.

The teachers now move away from being authority figures and instead try to buddy-buddy with their students, meaning their words fall flat on our ears, because not only are they trying to be our friend but they’re boring, too. So to combat even this, professors dumb everything down to group assignments, so that perhaps one out of five kids will carry the assignment for the other four in the group. They wonder why nobody goes to talk to them during their office hours: the smart kids who were forced to do all the work hate them instead of seeking them out, and the kids who didn’t do the work are only encouraged to do less. The leading case of why people I know ever went to see their professors was to try to get extensions on their assignments, and most adults let it happen because “college life is so demanding”. No, it’s not. What hit me hardest after I graduated was the realization of how hard I had to work to make the college experience challenging for myself. (Obviously my ego is huge, you must believe this by now.)

So we now have this swirling nexus of technology and throwaway culture and a supported idea that learning is unnecessary, all of which has led to soul-conquering immediacy and almost total youthful self-centeredness. The worst part, I think and Mark points out, is the lack of skeptics and critics, the absence of a group trying to examine what’s actually going on. There are a few, but they are relegated to the sidelines, rather than being considered watchful protectors of reason. (I don’t think it was stated in the book, but I like to think that the rise of the young in the late 20th and the 21st century so far is a lot like the rise of medieval religion.) A lot of people who are entrenched in this culture believe that the views of Mark’s (and mine) are reactionary and offensive to the future growth of our society. However, Mark doesn’t really care, the science is on his side. But then again, that’s not going to convince anyone since science isn’t really that important or relevant to our interests (except that whole global warming thing which is more of a collective nightmare than a rigorous scientific inquiry).

In the final chapter of the book, Mark explicates the personality and flavor of the culture warrior, one who was mentored and self-guided to acquire knowledge and understanding of the past and how it applies to the present. The culture warrior is passionate, reads a lot, accepts being taught while always questioning the teacher, and has a paramount interest in skirmishing with anyone (specifically peers) who may hold an opposing intellectual viewpoint. Mark’s main concern in relation to the Dumbest Generation is that all of the greatest of these warriors were formed early in life thanks to the rigors (whether self-made or mentored) and raw social importance of education. As he has outlined (and I have as well, haha), my generation severely lacks even the possibility of generating true culture warriors. The youth-world of today is not one of argument and diverse ideas, but rather a homogeneous popular/hypertopical brain-soup of repetition and self-interest. This is not to say that those culture warriors of the past were awesome nice people, in fact they were complete assholes, perfectly willing to berate each other for hours on end. The difference between these culture warriors and the self-professed asshole intellectuals of today is that there used to be a ever-flowing dialogue enriched with specific citation and raw information from all sides of the argument, things we have in easy abundance today but never utilize. Again, another paradox that baffles. We’re full of them.

Another one of my favorite quotes I’ll leave here, because even my massive ego can’t just blurt it out from my mouth, but I’ll let Mark say it: “if you ignore the traditions that ground and ennoble our society, you are an incomplete person and a negligent citizen.” He said it, not me. (But I wish it was me.) And don’t take that to mean that everyone needs to be a culture warrior or hyper-intellectual, it just means that everyone needs knowledge and needs to want knowledge for the betterment of the self and the society at large. Democracy depends upon an informed citizenry, which we (under 30) are entirely not. Even if you voted for Obama.

Anyway, that was long-winded but I wanted to rant about this, since the book is rather all-encompassing of this blog’s goals. It’s a good book. It’s required goddamn reading as far as I’m concerned, and I stake my massive ego on that. It has a lot of points that may not be the most even-tempered, but that’s important, too. Old people need to get mad at us and tell us kids we’re wrong. That’s what is happening when kids graduate from college and enter the workplace, as Mark explains. We grow up in our bullshit and when we finally make it to reality, we are completely unprepared for it, thanks to our self-importance and our dwindling abilities to read and write effectively. It’s an ideological crisis as well as a practical one. I, for one, have compiled a huge reading list that I will be working on for the next couple months. (More reviews to come.) And I like talking to people who are a lot older than me. And I like talking about this stuff, if there’s ever anyone to talk back. Anyone want to start debating theology on Facebook with me?

But I’m singling out “Party & Bullshit (In the USA)” for a reason. The reason is simple and fairly obvious, but I want to explain it for those who don’t pick up on it immediately. This song is taking something that’s doing it wrong and making it right. I like to complain about what’s wrong, but some things deserve a break to be commended. Especially if it’s transformative. So what’s wrong? Miley Fucking Cyrus, that’s what. Honestly, I had never listened (or known that I was listening) to a Miley Cyrus song before this one, mostly because I figured she’d sound just like those other girls. I was wrong. She’s worse.

What I love about this mashup is the contrast, and it’s that satire which makes the music work so well. The song opens with big’s amazingly harsh, thick rap, which I love for its rough honesty. But there’s a nice, light dance beat (like most bootie songs). Talking about smoking blunts at 13 and getting shot at. Then from nowhere, some autotuned 12-year-old’s grating high-pitched voice slices the song up with some bullshit about a Jay-Z song? Putting your hands up? Butterflies? Moving your hips? Aren’t you illegal in most countries, little girl? Party in the USA? This is fucking bullshit, I can’t think of worse lyrics. (And I lived through Staind, Nickleback, and Evanescence.)

And then more of big’s fucking killer lyrics. You read this shit? Compared to modern music, this is Hemingway. NWA might as well be Longfellow, Thoreau, and Emerson. I’m not the biggest fan of rap in the world, but I have a lot of respect for a guy who can stick to a rhyming scheme like it’s nothing. (Yes, biggie rhymes “out” with itself, but Dylan Thomas did that too sometimes.) I have a great deal more respect for motherfuckers like Snoop and Ice-T who rhyme about killing people than anybody who writes a pop love ballad. Poetic conventions in such violent situations? Brilliant. Scare kids into thinking poetry is cool, it works.

The killer, and my favorite part of the song, is big’s swaying jive in the background of Miley’s chorus. Turn it up and listen to it. Party… and bullshit. Party… and bullshit. Fuck Miley Cyrus and her fucking voice. She is what’s wrong. But biggie, even though he’s fucking dead, is making it right.

Edit: This got fucking reblogged by fucking bootie. I’m so hard right now.

Yeah so this is old, but it’s still funny and it’s still wrong. Crabcore. If you don’t have an IV pumping internet into your veins at all times like I do, you might not have heard of this. You are fortunate. Let me bring you down to my level, briefly.

“Crabcore” is a subsubsubgenre of hardcore (is that even a genre? Ugh, another post for another day) which involves adolescent males with very black hair and a complete lack of style pumping on easy chords and strumming like a crab. Exhibit A:

Winners, amirite? I was going to post the original video this all spawned from, but it’s too gruesome. You want it anyway? I hope so. Exhibit B:

So what’s wrong? Well, if you didn’t actually watch it, scroll back up an inch and skip to 2:40 in. Yeah, that’s what dreams are made of, baby. You see, I wouldn’t have a problem with this if it wasn’t serious. Hell, I’m kind of jealous of these kids because I would have loved to make this video and post it somewhere as an awesome joke. A truly epic joke. A hilarious, timeless joke. I would have stuck it between Immigrant Song and Gimme Shelter on my playlist.

The problem here is that it’s serious business. I really hate sounding like an old man sometimes, but kids these days don’t know anything about music, and this is proof.

I regret posting this. I feel kind of dirty. But Frankie wanted me to.

What I almost hate more than this is that there are not one but two bands named “attack attack.” One has a singular exclamation point (Attack Attack!) and one has two (Attack! Attack!). I’m thinking of starting a grindcore/ska band called Tora! Tora! Tora! If you want in, please leave a comment, preferably with a video of yourself playing (or trying to play) an instrument. Ukuleles are a major bonus.

So wait a minute, wait a minute, let’s break this down a little bit into smaller parts. I’m going to analyze this band and this song, specifically. (Because if I listen to any more of the band I’ll probably die from what Camus refers to as philosophical suicide.) First of all, it is literally the same two or three chords the whole song. And there’s like, three goddamn people on guitar. Honestly I can’t tell who’s on guitar because THEY ALL LOOK ALIKE. I think one of them is asian. The only thing I know for sure is that they’re all ass ugly.

Okay okay, there’s also a guy on keyboards. What is he doing the whole time? Wait wait, hold on, PIANO MUSIC out of nowhere? And there’s like… eight breakdowns in this song. This song is literally confusing misdirection, screaming, and breakdowns. And then electropop. And that asshole drummer who looks like he’s having a seizure. BANG THAT CYMBAL DUDE. THE SAME ONE OVER AND OVER. He has two snares and a kick drum and probably five fucking pedals to hit that kick because he’s having a seizure and needs to be sure just to hit it at some point.

And THE SCREAMING. WHY. I’m going to take issue with the whole -core suffix genre system and immediately question all screaming.  I remember when screaming got big in the late 90s/early 00s. Nobody really liked it, but american kids felt like being violent for some reason. (Columbine? 9/11? Who knows.) I even remember being at a hardcore show, watching a bunch of lowlife teenagers form a gross wannabe moshpit, picking each other up and kicking everyone. When does that get fun? Anyway, the screaming. Yeah, you have no vocal talent, we get it, now please get off the stage. I will readily admit that there are a few good examples of hardcore that work very well because they use screaming/singing as an interesting oppositional method which organizes a dialect about the particular music’s subject matter. (See: Every Time I Die’s Hot Damn! album; shut up, the lead singer studied Shakespeare and it shows.) But by my trollworthy estimation, at least 98% of screaming in music is bullshit cover for an asshole who can’t sing. Chicks dig this? These guys get laid? Can’t play guitar and can’t even sing?

While watching this video, I immediately saved it and cut it up into about six loops, most of which are the same as the dancemoves video. Whenever I get tired and I wonder what life is all about, I play them all at once across several monitors. I let the noise of it wash over me like a cold shower, reminding me that there is no point to anything anymore.

My main problem is that kids see this and grow their hair out long and dye it black and get shitty tattoos all over their body and then they hit 26 and wonder what the fuck they’ve been doing now that they realize they just spent 13 years working at Wal-Mart to fund their cross-country Attack Attack! tailgating. That’s all I’m saying.