CONTENT: This post discusses serious themes. It’s about political anxiety, especially over the climate. If you trust my taste, please check out [5] before any of this. And don’t stop scrolling. It’s a much better way to spend your time.
[1] (a big spoiler for Bo Burnham’s INSIDE) and [6] express that anxiety through recent news. [2] to [4] reframe that anxiety on a human level. [5] is bravely optimistic and [7] is existentially sad. I like scrolling through [2] while listening to [1].
I think their power comes from exploring their themes with empathy, but they might not be the right media at the right time for you and that’s okay too. Take care of yourself, whether that includes interacting with these or not.
That Funny Feeling, Bo Burnham (TW: mass shootings, derealization)
everytract, Neil Freeman
radio.garden, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
QUEERING THE MAP, Queering The Map
(★) 17776, Jon Bois (TW: photosensitivity)
Love It If We Made It, The 1975 (TW: photosensitivity, the post-trump years: police brutality, xenophobia, sexual assault, and more)
WORLD OF TOMORROW, Don Hertzfeldt (TW: photosensitivity)
NOTE: I can’t pin exactly when life became overwhelming, when I plugged into an endless stream of information that was at once necessary, fascinating, and demoralizing. I’m not sure where the line is between my personal exhaustion and my society’s exhaustion, and I understand the urge to disconnect entirely.
This is by no means original. This is life on the internet. This is being queer and Asian and sick and young and in debt in 2023. This is a life where most of my exposure to other people like me is bookended by them fending off bigots, bots, and sitting senators. This is the deadly ennui that radicalizes angry young men1 and hollows out their kinder friends, the apathy that makes everything but bloodsport trivial. The sky is orange, the president was orange (although the Canadian electoral map may never be again) and it’s all critical to understand if we stand a chance of changing anything before the waves knock over Lady Liberty. This is all too big for a blog this small.
The last two shinies were each about an exciting form of media and what they could evoke. This one’s about how different forms of media can evoke one antidote2 to the anxiety above. They make me feel small and I’m writing to figure out why that worked.
Each of the seven entries plays with a sense of scale.
The constant flow of information has no scale, nothing to hold onto but replies to replies to replies, made to kill any sense of time passing so we stay plugged in a little longer. There's just enough to concern, just enough to comfort seconds after. [1] and [6] capture that funny feeling.
[1] That Funny Feeling, Bo Burnham
The live-action Lion King, the Pepsi Halftime Show
Twenty-thousand years of this, seven more to go
Carpool Karaoke, Steve Aoki, Logan Paul
A gift shop at the gun range, a mass shooting at the mall
[6] Love It If We Made It, The 1975
We're f★cking in a car, shooting heroin
Saying controversial things just for the hell of it
Selling melanin and then suffocate the black men
Start with misdemeanors, soon we'll make a business out of themAnd poison me, daddy, I've got the Jones right through my bones
Write it on a piece of stone, a beach of drowning three-year olds
There’s unspeakable horror and absurd distractions from it. Burnham's main distraction is numb consumerism3. The 1975's is reckless participation. The former is apathetic, the latter flush with guilt. I love that their delivery matches this- Burnham sings softly as Healy screams. The "business" is economic destruction, human degradation, and filming the result for entertainment4, all in a monthly cable bundle. And it's enthralling.
Love It If We Made It also brings up the absurdity of fame, of standing atop a burning mosh pit. The music video is stubbornly aesthetic5. It starts with a plastic bag in the ocean and flashes through news we’ve long forgotten by 2023, all filtered through the glitchy effects that we use to make smartphone videos feel retro, imperfect, and authentic. I’m not sure if the chorus says things would be different if we had a say in any of it, or that we’d just enjoy being on top. Like Healy is.
The next three zoom out.
everytract is a Twitter bot that posts satellite photos of American census tracts. radio.garden is a website for listening to radios anywhere in the world. QUEERING THE MAP is a map of countless visitor-submitted queer experiences, real and fictional.
My experiences with them always started with crushing, overwhelming context. Nothing showed how little I knew about geography like learning how far I had to zoom out before spotting anything I recognized, and then how far off I was when trying to zoom in again to where I wanted to go. Almost everything has a name, a road going out and a town on the other end. Surrounding every major city I knew were more modest suburbs, service towns, and farms. I’ve been on planes and long road trips before, but entertainment and air conditioning made the sheer amount of space between destinations a comfy wait. I forgot, as spoiled city boys do, that people live almost everywhere.
radio.garden provides a weird feeling of listening to what those people are driving, working, studying, and relaxing to. Ads in foreign languages, calm ballads in time zones where it’s night. everytract gives this feeling through rows of houses and parking lots instead of flailing navigation. The low engagement on each gimmick post makes it feel lonelier, less like you’re teleporting to these places with radio.garden and more like you’re orbiting above them. They all highlight how humans take up space.
That hits harder in QUEERING THE MAP. For queer people, mere proof that we exist everywhere in the world means something6. We’re not Western mutations of some natural order, the unfortunate gunk generated by decadent urban cores7. We're also not just the White gay man, our community's dominant representative in American media. Just as feminism in different countries changes in response to different kinds of patriarchy, queerness changes in response to gendered systems everywhere.
The map's individual stories are a constant reminder that our glimpse is incomplete. It avoids essentializing exotic queers, the way we might through academia or entertainment. It gives physical locations new meaning. That road’s not just a political border between two counties, it’s where someone learned they were trans. That city’s not just the victim of an infamous earthquake, it’s where someone met their ex-husband. The project challenges efforts to erase and legislate queerness out of human history.
>v002
>v004
NOTE: This entry’s been sprawling out since Christmas, so the conclusion and reflections on 17776 and WORLD OF TOMORROW are coming next month! Doing a half-resolution here feels.. wrong. Thanks for reading, and hopefully, see you then!
About Face is a comic-essay about death, militarism, and masculinity in American culture. Writing in the post-2000’s, those all impact my experience of political anxiety.
How to Radicalize a Normie is a video-essay about the modern alt-right and its own kind of identity politics. It’s part of Ian Danskin’s Alt-Right Playbook series, which I highly recommend for understanding the current state of American politics.
My anxiety-to-calm-to-hope approach is stolen from other nervous writers I love. The influence is so direct here that I have to cite and recommend:
INSIDE by Bo Burnham, maybe my favorite work on political anxiety, the internet, and posting through the End.
Cities Without People by Jacob Geller, where I found 17776
The Best Simpsons Intro Is About Losing Everything You Love by Jacob Geller, where I found WORLD OF TOMORROW.
The Sycamore Tree by John Green, my favorite nervous white man.
The Lincoln Highway by Noah Caldwell-Gervais, which inspired the section on everytract and travel, and my love for overusing run-on sentences.
It reminds me of this image! Google tells me it’s probably from Ice-T’s Shut Up, Be Happy— “The comfort you demanded is now mandatory!”
If you haven’t seen it yet, the Jake Gyllenhaal movie Nightcrawler is perfectly about this— a young grifter enters the world of filming crimes for local news.
From a Reddit repost of a screenshot of Twitter:
I write a lot about hope and existentialism but goodness does this test my convictions.
From THE SUGAR APPLES (ii):
“There is a long history of people like us. It is a history of the kindest friendships, love poems scrawled on café napkins, green carnations pressed between notebook pages, photographs lovingly adored in trenches across the Seine, oil-soaked warriors rendered on terracotta, French diplomats at the Peking opera, self-insert fanfictions and image boards with song lyrics over pictures of the villains we claimed. You owe nothing to this history, especially not to the well-preserved canon told by white men. Save that love. Save that sorrow and awe for ★ in your own time. There were alien forms of being ★ before us, and I’m sure that people will find new ways of being ★ once we’re gone.”
This is coming from a decadent urbanite!