PicoBlog

In part one, I thought of a working definition for “choosing memes” as a genre:

But what is genre anyways? Is the idea even useful? Does it do any analytic work other than offering you the pleasure of placing things carefully down and watching them rest placidly in the boxes you have made?

I’m thinking about Franco Moretti’s take on detective fiction as a genre in his essay The Slaughterhouse of Literature (2000). I think his approach of “distant reading” might work for memes. “Distant reading,” in that essay, meant looking at hundreds of detective stories from the late 1800s when the genre emerged in English-language magazines. Instead of analyzing one text at a time (“close reading”), Moretti analyzed them as a group. He determined a set of patterns in the stuff the stories had in them. Not every thing was in every story — genre is never hard and fast — but things recurred often enough that a shape emerged. Since memes are small and we usually encounter them in groups rather than as single objects, this “distant reading” approach makes sense.

Moretti starts reading detective fiction because he’s interested in the evolution of “clues” as a literary device. In the beginning of the genre (like, 1860s) he says detective fiction stories in the big sample he’s taken tended not to have clues that were decodable by a reader — these were stories about crimes, not puzzles that engaged an audience in an interactive way. But as the genre became more popular, more stories started using clues, became puzzle-like. The big example of this is Sherlock Holmes.

Paraphrasing Moretti, the genre’s interest in clues, evidence, and puzzles mirrors an increasing focus on rationality in the social and intellectual life of the time. In the late 1800s, people in the English-speaking world are fixated on science and evolution. They’re building tons of machines and bureaucracies that run on evidence-based and supposedly rational thinking. The detective story, and the development of the “clue” as a literary device, mirrors that fixation and way of thinking.

That’s a graceful (if suspiciously over-tidy and cute) take — of course, what the hell do I know about detective fiction? But in general, I think this is the utility of genre as an analytical idea: telling stories in a given way, or doing anything in a given way, happens for specific historical reasons. You can think back from the genre to the reason why people made the genre.

But after that I stop agreeing with Moretti. He goes on to describe the genre change process as evolutionary — he even cites Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and coiner of the term meme (gasp!) — and on principle I am against Dawkins and against people equating cultural changes with natural evolution. Applying evolution to culture leads to bad things, like social darwinism, eugenics, or the infamous SBF quip where he said “most books could’ve been a six-paragraph blog post.”

I’ll take the part of Moretti I like — the bird’s eye view of a genre and the matching of a formal element to a systemic historical change — and apply it to memes. Here’s the take:

“Choosing memes” can be distantly read as memes about algorithms.

That’s because the algorithms are always asking us to choose. We live in a world where our intellectual and social lives run on an “agree/disagree” binary (like the binary code that runs the computers themselves). Just like how in the late 1800s “evidence-based thinking” was the emerging new method of navigating through information, “choice” is our new method. It doesn’t mean it’s the only method, or the dominant one of course —

We all know there are shades of gray, but the social media platforms are not built to capture them. You can’t kind of like a post, you either like it or you don’t. You can’t have mixed feelings about Taylor Swift, you must either be a hater or be a Swiftie. There is no niche, no platform, and no position which doesn’t ask you to choose. Any engagement with information, in this era, means making morally-inflected choices.

Online, choosing is a form of inquiry, a way of organizing information before it is even understood. The distinction which matters most to my generation for understanding the world, I believe, is less between correct and wrong than between right and wrong.

This isn’t necessarily a “post-truth” worldview — twelve is still larger than two, trickledown economics still doesn’t work — it’s just that we don’t step away from the world in order to understand it. There is no objectively-observing rational subject position that we can each kind of fall back into and soberly judge things from. The “judge in your head,” or imagined “adult in the room” just isn’t credible anymore, so we’re left with something else: intuition, vibes, making choices instead of rationally weighing the clues like the detective. The murder is a moral matter again, not a puzzle to be solved.

In Arts de faire: L’invention du quotidien (1980) Michel de Certeau writes about going to the top of the World Trade Center sometime in the 1970s. He’s standing there looking out over New York, and he sees the whole city. Since he’s a Catholic theologian (and also a radical French thinker of the ‘68 generation) he simultaneously has both the panopticon (Foucault-style) and Renaissance notions about the eye of God in mind.

He makes this argument that the liberal order rests on pretending any of this is rational. Liberalism is founded on the belief in some high tower from which science, finance or government peer out over the world and comprehensively understand what’s happening. For liberalism to continue operating, enough people have to believe this bird’s-eye-view of the city is more relevant than their ground-level view of the city. Enough citizens must subordinate their own experience and intuition to the vision of the world reported from the tower — what is “correct” has to matter more than what feels “right” for liberalism to work. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I could talk about de Certeau for days, but here’s what initially made me think of him: he’s obsessed with walking in the street. He’s all about this difference between the bird’s-eye-view from the tower (what he calls strategy) and the ground-level view of the walker in the city (what he calls tactics). Distracted Boyfriend depicts people walking in the city, which always makes me think of de Certeau — that’s kind of a coincidence, I suppose, but in a larger sense I wonder about his conceptualization of the city and whether it applies to social media platforms.

The strategy part would be the algorithms, while the tactics part would be user behavior. To tie this back to choice (which I’ve strayed quite far from) I think we can’t act strategically online the way we do in real life. We can’t think like an algorithm in the way we can think like a scientist or a judge. There is no tower at the center of the internet, and we feel that — the map is not really drawn, and so our tactics are running the show. This isn’t to say we are liberated online or the algorithms aren’t powerful, just that every view is a view from the ground. The choices we make while navigating it are our primary means of understanding it — we’re turning around corners with our feet instead of sitting up in the tower tracing the avenues with our eyes, we learn by doing, not by observing.

That’s what the “choosing meme” genre is about, in my opinion.

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