Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the ‘manifesto’ of the week. These are suggestive essays meant to think very broadly about the world and the direction that ‘society’ is headed in — this one even more broad than most of them.
Best,
Sam
ON FOLLOWING
What is the most precious word in the culture right now? More than ‘like.” Certainly more than ‘love.’ It’s ‘follower.’
It’s such a funny and unexpected word ‘follower’ — I remember being really startled when it started appearing on people’s Twitter and Instagram feeds. First of all, there was the high school association of it — in high school, the worst insult was to be a ‘follower,’ which stung so much because, fundamentally, everybody was a follower. And then, more surprisingly, there was the religious connotation, like these snarky, random ‘feeds’ were in fact private churches and each of these news kibitzers and lingerie models were, in fact, Pied Pipers leading their band off in some bizarro direction.
And, to a great extent, that’s exactly what’s happened — and ‘Pied Piper,’ the name of the start-up in Silicon Valley is a perfect stand-in for the whole era. These hapless-seeming posters turn out, on the whole, to be shrewd entrepreneurs — the models selling products, everything in their photos pretty much comp’d, the kibitzers leading the way to the paid content if not the seminars.
In terms of group dynamics, the word ‘follower,’ word of the zeitgeist, stands beautifully suspended over both of its meanings. Its high school meaning implies loyalty to a public, to a center — everybody is on the platform after all, which means that everybody implicitly is hovering around the popular table, hoping to be noticed themselves, duly remaining part of the herd until they are. And the peculiar gravitational field of social media, the way that public space is spliced up into disparate and ostensibly personalized chunks, creates a pull away from the herd, with the baddies, the smooth-talkers and operator types, trying to lure as many followers as possible into their monetized spaces.
There’s another meaning inherent in the word ‘follower’ which is present as well but is, at this stage, embarrassed to be spoken aloud. That’s the sense of ‘adherent’ and ‘worshiper.’ And on the fringes of the zeitgeist of the basics and the followers — the world of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram — is a sort of rival zeitgeist, the revitalized New Age with the ‘psychedelic renaissance’ and the ‘spiritual lifestyle’ and an actually radically different way of perceiving the world that co-exists uneasily with the capitalist over-culture. And ‘following,’ in that community, gets closest to its truest sense — there are the ideas of submission, of discipleship, of surrender, and all as a path to working through various blocks, to emerging stronger and more self-reliant on the far side.
In terms of group dynamics, that sense of the word hovers over Twitter and over the basic discourse. There’s the implicit possibility that the act of following will lead not just to greater conformity or to a transaction but that the online followee will do something so interesting, so dramatic as to inspire devotion. And that religious sensibility — which is already spelled out in the spiritual community — is now part of the gravitational field of the avowedly secular. What’s implied in all the scrolling is the idea that sooner or later you may come across the thing itself — sort of in the way that the endless scrolling on dating apps is supposed to lead, in theory, to the one.
My prediction is that that’s the direction we’re heading in, something more or less akin to the religious ferment that occurred in the later Roman and Han Empires. That’s not necessarily a straight-line towards a single religion. It’s more, at least for some period of time, a proliferation of local cults — a feeling of the center fracturing and people developing their sense of meaning from participation in small and intense groups. The word ‘follower,’ idly cooked up by the techies, turns out to be more suggestive than was intended. It’s not just conformity or fandom, it’s also discipleship and seeking, an idea that it’s part of the make-up of a human being to choose their religion, to figure out what’s really important to them, however idiosyncratic it may be, and to orient their values in that direction.
Title on my last sstack was intended to be " sstack is not a caring and loving nurturer unless:in t event that very many if us are ensconced atthesametime in scattered coffee shops..." Self same feeling here firstly that as you usually*you are being generously open to the potential for collections of people to underline each others health. You for instance have made me feel heard in a year i was underground. Secondly i hear people continuously saying Stop you are hurting" and failing to appreciate your ideas abt the merely intensityof Americanism high school ...For me far and away artists have guided me to the changes that are helpful to my health. 70000 therapists are available to tell people gentleness and we just go out and punish each other. Hay thanks Farmer keep plowing your ideas into t stories. They are very good and the way you do it we can process those. I think:unlike in public forums where the 20th cent'y idealogies seem to default and short circuit people's listening ability.
When I read about group behavior and thinking, I always think of Groucho Marx's one liner: "I don't want to belong to any club that would have me a member."