Upspeak Culture, the "Lost Generation," and the Decade-Plus of the Dull Mumbling Shambles

I listen to NPR in the car to keep up with the pathetic consensus of the institutionalized dullards who run newsrooms and government agencies, but yesterday I had a narrative accident that triggered a sadness I hadn’t quite noticed in myself. Maybe irritation is a better word than sadness, or maybe something in between the two, but it’s something I’ve been carrying around. My bet is that you’ve been carrying the same not-quite-conscious sense of loss.

The trigger was this discussion:

Nick Harkaway — the pseudonym of the son of the pseudonymous John le Carré — grew up with a con artist for a grandfather and a spy for a father, in an atmosphere of calculated lying and false identity. He enjoyed it. So did his dad, who was recruited into the grift by his own father. Harkaway learned dishonesty, but he learned dishonesty as an act of storytelling, as an art. The interviewer plays a clip of an old interview with le Carré, the interviewer asking in pity-voice if he also felt like one of his conman-father’s victims as dad used him in the scams. “No, I joined,” le Carré said, describing it as an interesting education in human nature. You learn quite a bit about people by tricking them into giving you what you want.

Having come up through a trained involvement in clever fakery and manipulation, Harkaway describes himself as British. He tells a story that you should go listen to, describing the time a teacher told the boys in his class that they were going to have a long discussion about the influence of a writer they had never heard of. He let his students be nervous, for a moment, before he explained: You don’t know this writer’s work because he does not exist, but you’re now going to talk about him with great confidence and authority, and I’m going to show you how. He was teaching poise, sureness under stress, the art of high-status bullshit. Harkaway says he could always tell that he and Boris Johnson had a similar educational background, because he recognized the rhetorical behaviors. You learn quite a bit about people by tricking them into giving you what you want, if you can see that circle closing.

Harkaway’s spoken thoughts have a shape. He’s a storyteller. He surprises you, reveals things you can’t anticipate, leads you toward [X] but then says [Y]. You perk up, come closer, pay attention without deciding to. He’s the grandson of a conman and the son of a spy, a novelist born to a novelist, an artist-trickster who went to school for it. He is, wait for this word, interesting.

If you listen to the interview, take care to also notice the NPR interviewer. You can hear the man wearing a sweater and nursing his tea. Harkaway keeps handing him Easter eggs that he can’t bring himself to find. It’s like watching a Bob Hope-Bing Crosby road movie that doesn’t come off: the wind-up never triggers the gag. Here’s 70% of a fascinating story, Harkaway says, all but audibly leaning forward, and then all the interviewer has to say is something like, “and why did he do that?” so the interviewee can drop the Big Finish. But he can’t bring himself to do it, because he isn’t quite listening. He’s sitting in front of a way that people used to speak, but he doesn’t speak it. His questions, read from a page, are the um I was wondering question, over and over again: Um I was wondering um how did that make you feel?

Notice how many interviewers currently use some version of um I was wondering.

“We’re sort of talking around this American Eagle ad right now, and maybe we should just talk about it.”

“I think I know how you’re going to answer this, but I’m going to ask anyway…”

“…and I wondered what that was like.”

No one in media knows how to speak. Whole categories of narrative professionals have no ability spin a narrative. The instinctive way they open the story about the time Bob stole the widget right in front of Fred is that they say to Fred, and do hear the implied upspeak and vocal fry in your head, “Um, I was wondering if I could ask you about the um time Bob um stole a widget?” People who make a living in the public eye, holding conversations for an audience, don’t hold your attention. There’s an entire storytelling genre about the absence of storytelling, entertainment about the loss of entertainment.

Nothing much has been interesting for at least a decade. The culture is unattractive people who say um a lot. High-status people, officials in top jobs, are people who recite dull-minded pablum without deviation (screenshot, abandon all hope and click this link to play the video if you really feel the need):

Dull Monday, dull Tuesday, dull Wednesday, dull Thursday, dull Friday, dull Saturday, dull Sunday. Really dull Sunday.

Writing about that instantly famous recent essay at Compact, the one about the purge of white males from the culture industries (which serves as a companion piece to the other famous recent essay at Compact), John Carter notices what the commissariat has done to us:

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.

We live in this “cultural dark age” so entirely that it becomes the joke about the two fish¹. The clearest way to notice the enshittification of everything is to get little flashes of what life was like without it, as I did this week. For half an hour I lived in 1990, and there were interesting new releases at the bookstore.

The great crime at the end of the DEI rainbow is how unrelentingly boring and predictable it all is: how little it can tell a story, how much ugliness it puts inside the frame and hangs on the wall of the gallery. Among its other crimes, the institutional kakistocracy has quite clearly built a moat for itself through the principle of negative selection. We’ve built an entire cultural edifice out of the decision to elevate dullards. For a while, yesterday, I perceived that great and deliberate infliction of dullness as a personal injury. It has a Soviet character to it, this long enforcement of mindslop consensus, grinding pleasure out of the days by pushing slogan-mumblers onto the stage. It can’t possibly go on.

1. First fish: “Water’s cold today.” Second fish: “What’s water?”