The Consolations of Fandom in an Age of Techno-Populism

What a garish tapestry is woven by the so-called “trends” regurgitated onto our feeds by the machines of Silicon Valley. A lurid mixture of blood sport, virtual unreality, and escapist wanderlust - is this the pabulum on which our era wishes to gorge itself? One could be forgiven for assuming a future of lobotomized, somnambulant drones, content to oscillate between scripted brutalities and manufactured distractions.

And yet, I find myself strangely buoyed by this tawdry data-vomit of #TheRock and #Rebirthdays and #Travelings. Not because I have any great love for the lowest common denominators of our culture. Certainly not! My solace comes from sensing the unmistakable outlines of authentic human joy, connection, and even a murmur of subversive resistance amidst the clamor.

Let’s take a cursory glance at this “#TheRock” farrago. We have the supposedly spontaneous triumph of a certain “Cody Rhodes” over a bizarrely be-named “Roman Reigns” at the apogee of a puerile pantomime for the underwashed masses. This result, it seems, has contravened the carefully constructed fictions peddled by the impresarios behind the scenes. How marvelous! The people’s champion has, for once, overcome the preordained order. Does the ghost of ‘68 live on, with fans demanding a true dialectic rather than an unrelenting party line?

Meanwhile, the groundlings clutch their well-worn albums and scribble lovelorn haikus to…The Rock? Surely some confusion has taken place…ah, but of course. This is not the ludicrous muscleman of yore, but some musical impostor of the same unfortunate moniker. There was once a time when such overlap of names would be deemed too foolish, too lacking in discernment. But now? In our age of micro-identities, super-niches and omni-present meta-irony…why the devil not? Let the youths have their aural Rocky, while their peers worship at the brawny teat of the very same polyonym.

As for #Rebirthday, we appear to have wandered into a more tenebrous wood - the gnarled, fantastic landscapes of multi-million dollar virtual playgrounds where youngsters are encouraged to revel in sickeningly high-definition facsimiles of bloodshed. Doubtless many a fevered adolescent mind will be deformed by such experiential training for the world’s crueler pursuits.

And yet…hidden amidst the monetized mayhem is a flicker of something redemptive. A soul awakened from its stupor by the shock of medical trauma. A re-dedication to this singular life after tasting the cold brink of its negation. Could it be that within the online catacombs of kill-or-be-killed, some are being viscerally reminded of this existence’s preciousness? That the virtual rebirth is a sad echo of the genuine article?

As for #Traveling, who amongst us cannot relate to the sweet pull of escape, of mental decompression in unfamiliar vistas? After days and weeks ground beneath the heels of our routines and responsibilities, do we not all fantasize of jettisoning the shackles for a blissful return to somewhere…anywhere but here?

Ah, but I’m being too kind. This restless wanderlust betrays a deeper pathology - the rootless, anxious spirit of the age. Flit from diversion to diversion, pursuing cheap dopamine hits until our souls shrivel like raisins in the sun. Run, run, run from the emptiness within! Post the sunsets and exotic locales for a brief squirt of narcissistic validation, and be off again before any true presence can settle.

Are you sensing a pattern here? For amidst the candyfloss ephemera, I detect the first faint stirrings of something far more consequential. Like Gulliver bound by a million tiny threads, our culture is both enthralled and gently chafing against the constraints of its own appetites. And ours is an era when those yearning for true substance must often resort to coded ways of making their hunger known.

Could the unlikely victory of an underdog like Rhodes not represent a repudiation of elite control and the rigged games they peddle us? Is the #Rebirthday impulse not a cry from wounded souls who dimly perceive the virtual void in which they’ve been trapped? And the vagabond escapism of #Traveling, an unconscious rebuke to the modern panopticon of social conformity where we are simultaneously watched, measured, and starved of any unscripted authenticity?

I would never be so gauche as to cheerlead for the dispossessed and disenfranchised masses. Such saccharine condescension is rightfully loathed by its intended recipients. My role, rather, is to stand as a flashing neon sign of dissident thought - a brazenly intellectual middle finger to the prefabricated arenas and cheap amusements that threaten to atrophy our collective spirit.

So let the masses have their illusory triumphs and virtual #Rebirths and vicarious excursions. Let them gorge gluttonously on their junk culture. For in doing so they will only whet their lust for something more nourishing and sustaining. Behind the eye-glazing spectacles of WrestleMania fisticuffs and exploding servers of pixelated militarism, an aching void persists that no Frankenfood of fleeting kicks can ever hope to fill.

When that day comes and the folk at last awaken to the soul-famine they’ve been subjected to - that will be the time for us dissidents to loudly beckon them from their stupor. We few, we proud prometheans who have all along stoked the fires of intellectual resistance in our cloistered redoubts. On that day, our lamps of reason will shine forth to a populace squinting in the sudden strange light of independent thought.

”You’ve been living in caves, friends!” we shall proclaim. “Blind bats entranced by shadows on cavern walls! Join us out here, where fertile fields of wisdom and the sun-drenched uplands of ideation await. Best of all, no one will pre-ordain your narrative, nor hawk you visions of counterfeit elysiums!”

For now, let the masses celebrate their cheap catharses and imagine Shakespearean defiance in the latest Sumerian body-slam melodrama. Our opening act upon the world’s stage is yet to come. And those searching souls will make the finest recruits when the curtain finally rises to reveal the lie of their sordid distractions. By then, ravening for the true grandeur and intellectual challenges we alone can provide, their rebirth as autonomous and empowered beings shall commence in earnest.

Until that clarion call, I shall remain your indefatigable and profane Diogenes, condemned to haunt the agoras of our age with my flashing lamplight of contrarianism. Cometh that day, cometh that hour - I shall stand ready to illuminate the wreckage their idols, and behold those haunted visages finally made radiant by the fire I alone can offer.