Are We Having Fun Yet?

One of this Substack’s main preoccupations is with what you could call the material basis for culture: the political and economic systems that shape how American media get produced and consumed. I mainly write about this stuff because I find it fascinating. But I also do it because the materialist perspective is weirdly absent from a lot of the cultural criticism that gets published these days. Case in point, Megan Garber’s recent Atlantic essay on how “[w]e our lives, willingly or not, within the metaverse.”

By “the metaverse,” Garber means the elaborate latticework of entertainment media options that seems to have extended into every corner of contemporary life. She writes:

There hase been a lot written over the past ten or twenty years about the chilling tendency of social media and viral content to colonize all aspects of human sociality and attention. Go further back then that and you have David Foster Wallace writing about “the Entertainment” in Infinite Jest, or Neil Postman bemoaning the cultural hegemony of television in Amusing Ourselves to Death. I’m very sympathetic to writing in this genre, and I think Garber’s exploitation of the metaverse angle is a smart move. But I also think she’s missing most of the story about how we got here.

It’s hard to imagine that Garber’s metaverse could have muscled its way to the center of contemporary life if everything was perfectly hunky dory prior to its creation. Instead, it must have expanded its influence by satisfying some need. Consider the following example from Garber’s essay:

One way to interpret this anecdote is to say that mass entertainment like Abbott Elementary is so compelling, so addictive, that it has pulled viewers away from the world of political action and into the world of parasocial fantasy. That seems to be the explanation Garber favors, and there is some truth to it. But there are also push factors at play. Who are the Abbott Elementary viewers supposed to be, in Brunson’s words, “demanding more” from? The show and its creator are more accessible, more present in their daily lives, than the structures that used to mobilize and direct political energy. Entertainment and social media have come to absorb a lot of that energy because it has nowhere else to go.

To speak a little more concretely, the metaverse takeover that Garber describes became possible because of a decades-long decline in the institutions that used to structure American social, economic, and political life: mass parties, religious congregations, labor unions, social clubs, and so on. Theda Skocpol’s Diminished Democracy, a book I’ve cited before, describes some of the the causes and consequences of that decline. In Skocpol’s account, the membership-based organizations that used to mediate between the citizenry and the state have been replaced by professionally managed nonprofits. But those nonprofits primarily engage with the state; most citizens have little relationship with them. Enter social media and mass-market entertainment.

Where nonprofits fill the state-facing side of the vacuum left behind by civil society’s collapse, the metaverse fills the citizenry-facing side. The membership-based voluntaristic organizations of prior generations provided a sort of “thick,” albeit geographically circumscribed, social existence; Garber’s metaverse offers a shallow, distended substitute. Similarly, where voluntaristic organizations provided channels for concrete political action, the metaverse offers something diffuse and random. You may not be able to substantially alter your material circumstances, but it’s possible you could somehow shape the entertainment that gets served to you and millions of other people.

I suspect that goes part of the way toward explaining how I became a journalist. Growing up in the post-civil society, post-historical world of the Bush and Clinton years, media was just about the sole channel through which I could engage with politics. I must have internalized the lesson that media was politics, and vice versa: that commanding the attention of a large audience was the same thing as wielding political power.

Now I know a little better. Part of what drew me to the YIMBY movement was that it looks a bit like good old-fashioned civil society, refashioned to take advantage of new organizing tools and speak to very modern political concerns. Obviously social media and and communications are a big part of what we do, but they’re a means to an end; the goal is to change cities for the better, not promulgate a particular vision of those cities on Hulu. And while a lot of the movement’s work happens on line, quite a bit of it does not. People are meeting in person, going to planning commission meetings, devoting their attention to unsexy but important local government processes, and generally eschewing what the political scientist Eitan Hersh calls political hobbyism. Social currents like the YIMBY movement offer an escape of sorts from the everything-is-pure-entertainment trap.

Then again, it’s not a total escape. Here I am, for example, posting on my non-professional Substack account over the weekend. Even among people with pretensions to self-awareness about these things, the metaverse mind virus can be terminal.