(2021-06-10) Notes On Dean Kissick's One Path For The Internet

notes on Dean Kissick’s "One Path for the Internet". again. I made the mistake of subscribing to Sean monahan’s substack to see what the boomer trend forecasters were saying (rip khole, you were relevant like multiple extinctions ago) and not only had to see it, but had to hate-read a mind-numbingly horrible take about it. Incredibly fucking stupid, masochistic thing to do on my end, but anyway – Monahan writes: “This post won’t be an explanation of the meme. If you want to know what it means Google the words, look up the accounts, consume the associated content. Instead, I want to point out that the general anxiety the meme has engendered is evidence of a vibe shift”

But the first thing that needs to be addressed is an explanation of the meme, especially that this image doesn’t function as a venn diagram – in actuality, it’s just a mass of cultural signifiers. A generous interpretation would be to rearrange them into three floating spheres that are somewhat better aligned.

Group 1 (“Music/Fashion/Theory” Signifiers): bladee, aphex twin, SOPHIE, Margiela, Raf, Adam Curtis, Deleuze, Early Nick Land, Hyperpop, Techno

Group 2 (“Public Intellectual Vacuum + Surrounding Culture” Signifiers): red scare, new models, mark fisher, CCRU, dean kissick, honor levy, kyle brown, drunken canal, taolincellectuals, tom tuna, master of cum, based/cringe side of internet

Group 3 (“Girl on Internet(??)” Signifiers: chloe sevigny, quirked up shawty, wretched worm, miu miu, amy Winehouse, whisper text app, markfisherquotes, 2012 tumblr

Even doing this, it’s clear that even these subgroups don’t really make any sense. What does make sense is that the meme came from Instagram, whose algorithm is awful

The bigger thing happening here is that the boomer trendforecasters are stuck in Web 2.0 – Monahan opens up suggesting you can just “Google the words”

These are things you can’t google because our platforms, especially Twitter, are transient by design and without proper archiving, canonizing, recontextualizing, (See: the mausoleum at Halicarnassus), someone from the outside will never Get It.

Dean Kissick called the above image the “One Path for the Internet”, a phrase (like much of his writing) I’m sure he didn’t put much thought into before taking the image from a lowest iq josh citarella adjacent meme page, but which certainly places a loaded emphasis on the importance of it, which Monahan extrapolates into a marker delineating a “vibe shift” / cultural moment, because of the “anxiety” the image caused. This is where he totally misses the mark because the anxiety doesn’t come from the meme itself but from the sheer inability for people to sufficiently navigate the internet & its fragmented, but still somewhat overlapping, subcultures.

Check the date stamps on the tweets. Dean Kissick, K-HOLE, and everyone other washed millennial who reads them thinking they know what they’re talking about – they’ve all already missed the vibe shift. They didn’t see the angelicisim01 tweets that are now deleted. They don’t know what to make of the clone accounts. They don’t understand that the -cellectuals account isn’t a fan account, it’s post-angelic matter. They don’t know how to read the internet. And they don’t know what’s next.