Hashtag Apocalypse

or, "But I Said So"

In 2014, the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram kidnapped hundreds of schoolgirls, prompting global celebrities and elected officials to pose for social media selfies with the Duckface of Concern™ and signs bearing the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls.

Spoiler alert: they didn’t. Even though famous people said so on Twitter!

A global human centipede of elite status, the private-jet-to-the-climate-change-conference gaggle composed of the people on television who are entertainers and the people on television who are politicians and the people on television who are "journalists,” spends a great deal of energy declaring things in slogans and platitudes and hashtagged decrees. It is, essentially, their business: they display symbols, for which they collect a paycheck. Today they display some symbols; yesterday they displayed some symbols; tomorrow they’ll display some symbols. (I am one of these people. Sorry.)

Meanwhile, most of the symbol traders have what we’ll generously call a limited conception of what people who aren’t symbol traders do for a living. Take Michael Bloomberg, who famously said that he could teach anyone to be a farmer, ‘cause all you do is dig a hole and then put a seed in it and then pour some water on it and then boom, there’s your crops, while on the other hand, trading symbols and abstractions in the digital space takes “gray matter.” (It’s true, by the way — it’s crazy easy. Look at the simple-minded shit that farmers study to learn to do their jobs.)

So we have a global class of people who think that the trade in symbols is life itself in its highest form; what you represent in words and pictures is reality, sophisticated and extraordinary in its seriousness. I hashtagged it; therefore, it is — not like digging some dumb hole and dumping seeds in it like some moron.

These are the people who have casually declared, as personal diktat arising to and thenceforth descending from the sacred lips of He Whose Patience is Growing Thin, that everybody must get a COVID vaccine or lose their jobs. They have declared the symbol, so it is to be.

In practice, it appears that the exchange is beginning to look like this:

Human Centipede of Elite Status: You must get a COVID vaccine or stop working.

A Remarkable Number of People: Okay, we’ll stop working.

Human Centipede of Elite Status: Uh….

The people who think that farmers toss a seed in a hole, then go and watch television, and then some wheat grows itself and crawls onto the store shelves, have told everyone what to do, and they now assume that the symbol they have declared will become manifest.

A great deal of online debate — and, if your experience is like mine, lately, a great deal of discussion among friends and family — is about the question of intent when a Joe Biden or a Dan Andrews declares that he’s sending you to the cornfield if you don’t do what he says: Do these idiots not know what they’re doing, or are they actually trying to produce a crisis on purpose? Is this wave of destruction part of a plan?

There’s evidence of a plan — you’ll own nothing, and you’ll like it! — and I don’t discount it. But it seems to me that the much bigger reality is that we have a set of allied status groups at the notional top of the political and societal hierarchy that simply have no connection of any kind with anything real. They’re performing and invoking, a set of behaviors that have served them well in the act of credentialist climbing, but they have increasingly little idea how much they don’t know.

It’ll be quite interesting to watch pilots and truck drivers and other people who do things in the physical world try to teach them the coming lesson about the limits of declamation.