Everybody’s generalizing these days

the onslaught of ensh*ttification ensues

@revolvingstyle

When I get online, my feeds are bursting full with sweeping generalizations about every kind of demographic group—races, religions, sexes, nationalities…the whole gamut. It wasn’t such a long time ago that this was something people didn’t do publicly or didn’t take seriously. But now it’s all over the place. It’s even pushed up algorithms deliberately by tech billionaires who think it’s fun. How did we get here, and just where is here, exactly?

During the Cold War, there were at least two modes of being a certain way. Both the United States and the Soviet Union were modern, but each offered its own version of modernity. When we have at least two modes of being one way, we have a plurality of something universal. You’ve seen it written on American money: E pluribus unum—out of many, one.

With the Soviet Union’s collapse, modernity and plurality seemed to come apart. Now modernity appears as globalization, as uniformity. Narratives from the early 20^th century emphasizing the homogenizing effects of technology and bureaucratization came to the center of academic discourse. Modernity as a monolith appeared cold and unfeeling. Far from becoming a universal project with which to identify, it became a project from which all sought distance.

For more than thirty years now, participation in the global economy has homogenized human life. All the countries of the world compete with each other to attract jobs and tax revenue. They fight to generate the highest rate of return on investment for the richest individuals and organizations. Since all the countries are playing the same game, they all discover the same strategies. The longer the game is played, the more play is optimized, and the smaller the differences in style become. They bulldoze the Greek restaurant that’s been there for fifty years. Then the coffee shops come, the boba shops arrive, you get a Whole Foods or a Trader Joe’s or something like that, and all the sudden your town is like all the other towns, with all the same people working all the same tech or food service or retail gigs. New, diverse, exciting—but it’s all just the same crap, every time.

Many ways of living that used to be viable during the Cold War are no longer competitive. High quality public services grounded on high tax rates chase investment away. High wages, supporting families where one parent might choose to stay home with the kids, are no longer realistic. And when world leaders hold multilateral meetings in a bid to write new international rules, they never seem to get anywhere anymore.

It seems, therefore, that our possibilities are gradually being limited, that the future has been cancelled, that the modern world is itself being—to quote Cory Doctorow—enshittified. And yet, there is no particular person or group to blame for all this. It is a consequence of a single kind of competitive logic coming to dominate every area of life.

The response to this has been one of avoidance. Instead of dealing with the fact that the modern world no longer supports a plurality of forms of life, theorists and academics insist that this system protects difference. To substantiate this, they had to shift the focus. Instead of creating and sustaining a plurality of forms of life, liberal democratic capitalism incorporates entrepreneurs who come from different demographic backgrounds and it satisfies consumers with different tastes. Race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexuality—it doesn’t matter, as long as you are entrepreneurial and you consume.

But if everyone is an entrepreneurial consumer, then everyone lives in accordance with broadly the same drives. Everyone must work hard and play hard, all the time. You can have a family, but only if you subordinate it—only if you pay strangers to watch your children while you work and play.

The kind of work we do is changing all the time, and people are expected to be adaptable, to be willing to do many kinds of work. Constructing an identity around the kind of work you do is therefore dangerous—there is always the possibility that you will be technologically outmoded, that your work will be offshored, that the funding you rely on will be cut, that you’ll have to go find something else to do and to be.

It’s easier, therefore, to identify with the ways we play, with the things we buy. But a consumer identity is not something we construct in splendid isolation. It requires a community for us to join. And these communities are constructed by associating races, religions, ethnicities, genders, and sexualities with specific consumptive habits. The group is defined by what it buys and by what it votes for.

And so, generalizing about demographic groups—about what they buy and what they vote for—becomes ubiquitous. Marketing and political researchers immediately break down data by these categories. It is assumed that they relevantly account for purchasing and voting decisions, so that these purchasing and voting decisions can seem to be part of meaningfully different lifestyles. If someone buys different things or votes a different way, or if they are part of a group associated with buying different things or voting a different way, they seem utterly unlike us, even if we share a form of life. We tell ourselves that we have much to fight about, despite sharing in common the burden of having to work hard and play hard.

To view people as individuals who are not reducible to demographic signifiers would be to expose the degree to which they have all become gray cogs in an empty machine. And so, gradually over time, the defenders of globalization came to speak in a manner that constantly reified demographic categories.

Insisting upon discussing what we have in common was framed as erasing difference. And before long, the excuse for the graying of the world was the people who don’t buy what we buy and don’t vote the way we do. Marketing and voting data made it clear which demographic groups we were to blame for this situation. Mocking the demographics associated with buying the wrong things and voting the wrong way spread all over our culture and to every part of the political spectrum.

This spreads to international politics—mocking the countries that elect the wrong people, that have the wrong relationship to the global economy, consuming too much or too little, penetrates discussions of foreign policy. Flags are everywhere online, as the rotting remnants of the concept of the nation become the basis for aestheticized affinity groups. Wars become sporting events, opportunities to root for national teams. Accusations of terrorism, genocide, and abuse become so many ways of berating the referees, of making heroes and villains out of the players.

A short time ago, immigration was framed by liberals as a way of bringing about a demographic destiny, entrenching the Democratic Party’s majority in the United States. Today, it is framed by the right as a way of replacing the population with more pliable demographics groups. The possibility that immigrants might become American, that voting behavior is not reducible to something like being Hispanic or speaking Spanish or being Catholic, escapes all concerned. The same process unfolds around being African, Middle Eastern, or Muslim in Europe. It is insisted that these people come from essentially distinct civilizations. And yet, at the same time, it is quietly admitted that many of them are economic migrants—that they want to participate in American and European economic life.

And yet this life continues to be homogenized and emptied. Change in demography therefore becomes associated with a growing grayness and uniformity. The more diverse in tastes our society becomes, the less meaningful plurality is present in it. The more people become, in all the important ways, the same, the more attention is given over to how we are superficially different. And so, people who are willing to work hard and play hard, who are willing to be gray with us, come to seem as if they were opposed to our way of life. But our way of life is the very thing we have come to despise.

None of it helps. Beneath the garish, splotchy colors we’ve thrown on each other, there lies a suffocating grayness, made all the heavier by the myriad layers of paint used to keep it from view. That grayness weighs on us, and it will not be relieved by constructing imaginary friends and superficial foes.