In a surprising move, Donald Trump selected J.D. Vance as his running mate. To the surprise of many, word spread almost instantly among the Democratic elite that Vance was a “crazy guy.” Soon after, the intended smear was extended to Trump himself.
Critics spoke out, the public square erupted with reaction, and the backlash began. Many found it odd that Vance, once vulnerable to hostile categorization through left-wing memes cynically pleading for “average white male confidence,” was now being attacked as an eccentric person, someone who, to put it charitably, displays extremes of eccentricity rarely seen in public just a decade ago.
Ordinary people today are attacked as freaks by the freaks of today…
But there was another kind of backlash in Vance’s defense: He wasn’t just eccentric, but eccentric beyond what his critics had imagined. And that was a good thing. A perfect example of this was a political cartoon in The Atlantic magazine that tried to portray Vance as eccentric, depicting him as a Tolkien wizard puffing on a mystical pipe. Perhaps unexpectedly, the X account suggested that Vance was indeed: strangeAccording to the Etymology Dictionary, the word first appeared in the 1400s and is a symbol of destiny itself.
These leaps may seem “really” weird to many ordinary Americans, something that didn’t feature much in public life before the Internet, but now seems ubiquitous, as ever-more obscure and queer identities double and triple down on the parts that are least accessible to outsiders.
And it’s not hard to see that the forces of this identity logic point in the direction of reification and deification, “from cliché to archetype,” as Marshall McLuhan pointed out decades ago. Across the internet and digitally influenced societies, we see affinity and identity groups elevating their representative figures to what gamers call “god-level” — a symbolic superhuman status intended to capture and express the “timelessness” of the identity in question.
But because I have studied McLuhan’s world for many years, these strange trends were not strange or surprising to me. In the late 2010s, I learned that the rise of digital technology had, in McLuhan’s words, “reclaimed” the “Middle Ages.” The enormous power of digital devices to record and recall was reshaping our internal and external experience in a way that prioritized memory over the highest faculty of modernity: imagination. This disruptive shift was returning us to the collective mental structures last shared in the premodern era.
This change was greatly intensified by the fact that the surpassing of machines in memory powers forced a return to fundamental questions that had previously been stifled only temporarily by the worship of the imagination: who are we really and why? These questions were ultimately theological and demanded theological answers, and the last time society revolved so closely around the question of man and God was the Middle Ages.
And then in the spring of 2021, I logged in post The rise of digital technology has signalled the fall of the weird and the rise of the strange.
Of course, such a big event is not a toggle switch. It is a much messier transition. It is how yesterday’s weirdos (hippies, freaks) become today’s establishment…
How is today’s once strange establishment dealing with the rise of a young population of even stranger spiritual and sexual mutants than the hippies of yore could have ever imagined?
Ordinary people today are attacked as freaks by the freaks of today…
And how this whole mess gives rise to a pantheon of fragmented pseudo-demigods whose vast, cosmic conflicts reveal identity politics as a grand manifestation of the technical and theological character of experience in a strange neo-medieval age.
Who’s in control? your destiny?
