Demons Despise the Sound of Shaking Paper

Let’s call this the end of an accidental enshittification trilogy, with Part One here and Part Two here. My last on this topic was sad and pessimistic, and I kind of am too but I really don’t mean to be. I think there’s far more cause for hope than not, on a medium to long timeline, and almost an inevitability to the end of the current model of dull, empty, miserable cultural and political institutions. Again, I’m starting from John Carter’s recent essay on the “dispossessed generation,” which I hope you’ve read or will, especially this part:

The flower of Western youth withers on the vine while the fruits of Western civilization rot unharvested on the branch, food for locusts and crows, as termites chew through the heartwood of the dying tree.

The enshittification of everything cannot be emphasized enough. It is the single most damning, delegitimizing aspect of the DEI kakistocracy. The people controlling the institutions are pretenders raised above their stations, working far beyond their natural abilities. They are midwits proclaiming themselves geniuses, mediocrities putting on the affectation of excellence, peasants LARPing as nobility. They are liars in every way, not only in that they lie about COVID or crime statistics or the effects of immigration or the motivations behind their foreign policy or the rate of inflation or whatever else, although of course they lie about that all the time; their most fundamental lie is that they present themselves as something they are not, as being worthy of the offices they hold. That they are unworthy is demonstrated by the consequences of their rule, which have been disastrous. They have brought about a cultural dark age.

I think, and let’s hope this is sort of true, that the end of the cultural dark age is implied by the existence of the cultural dark age. It ends because everyone sees it. It ends because everything sucks, and why would everyone go on tolerating a world in which everything sucks?

This is what I’ve been groping toward when I borrow the increasingly familiar term “parallel institutions.” Nearly everything that we now talk about as the mainstream organs of the legacy media, the sensemaking flagship publications, were started as alternatives. The New York Times was founded as the New-York Daily Times in 1851 as a businessman’s newspaper, a sober and factual alternative to the city’s sensation-driven penny press. It was supposed to be the thing that sensible people read, full of plain reporting for the sturdy souls who wanted facts instead of titillation. Sample from the published founding declaration, and see how much this sounds like the current New York Times:

Similarly, the New Yorker was founded to provide an alternative to lowest-common-denominator popular journalism. Harold Ross promised wit, discernment, and cosmopolitanism, “not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.” It was supposed to be literate. Now it’s the magazine that tells you how Sydney Sweeney got them titties, y’all, but titties is for them white people, ‘cause black men is into ass. If you think I’m kidding, it’s in the third paragraph of the linked essay. Next paragraph: “To be clear, many of us—the Negroes, the queers, the hairy feminists, et cetera, et cetera—do not react out of a feeling of personal injury, as if the blondeness-as-beauty standard has terrorized us. Whom does that standard terrorize more than white cis women, honestly?”

If Harold Ross could rise from the grave, we would have heard from him by now.

A bunch of things that people started doing a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago because media sucked became the media that sucks. The cycle will repeat. People will build new things to replace the terrible old things, and then the new alternatives will grow into the mainstream. People who create Substack pages will go on to run, I don’t know, CBS News, something like that.

Garbage gets thrown out. When the respectable mainstream people, the officeholders and important editors, become obviously worthless and empty, their gormlessness is noticed. And then:

It’s “the emperor’s new clothes,” a million times. It’s coming. It’s pretty much here.

A strange and quite pleasant Cat Power song says that “demons despise the sound of shaking paper,” with Dave Grohl keeping up those steady drums in the background:

If you hunt around on the Internet, you’ll find people saying that aha, demons flee the sound of the pages of your Bible turning, shaking paper, so she means that faith saves you. But Cat Power is not noticeably a gospel singer, ladies and gentlemen, and the more common guess is that she’s talking about redemption through learning and expression, through the act of refusing to be silent or passive: reading and writing. I’ve been playing this song a lot, to the point that my family would probably like you to know that it’s okay to stop playing it for a while.

In a cultural dark age, speak. Write, make things, look for other people who are making things and speaking with clarity. Look at this fascinating formulation from Australia (screenshot, click this link to play the video):

If we let people speak freely, he’s saying, we can’t build the kind of society we intend to create and sustain. And he’s right. They can’t. Clear speech and free thought are the acid that dissolves the dismal technocratic kakistocracy of DEI-grifter clowns. There’s no new technique of resistance to learn. The vocabulary is already known. Do you think you’re going to lose a culture war against Patty Murray and NPR?