“Dang!”: Why even the end of the world is a share pic

Three observations:

1. on your own behalf

There was a time – theoretically the world was just as good and bad then as it is today – when the currency was Instagram’s aesthetic. You could see: sunsets and foam coffee. There was still something shameful about posting selfies. A lot has happened since 2009. The currency of all social media channels is now controversy, which is mostly played out over morality. Because how else are you supposed to make yourself heard when you’re not just communicating with your twenty best friends, but theoretically with two billion users?

“In the constant tension between the individual and the masses, (…) every self that does not want to perish has to burn up enormously,” writes the writer Eva Menasse in her social media criticism “Saying everything and nothing” (KiWi, 2023). She cites the sociologists Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey, who describe in “Affronted Freedom” (Suhrkamp, ​​2022) how social media favors a character type, the “libertarian-authoritarian” type, who is extremely self-conscious in their expertise and interpretive sovereignty overestimated, but saw neither plausible values ​​nor understandable interests in his democratic counterpart. Your own perspective is set as absolute.

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All statements and actions must have been carried out for exactly the reasons that the absolutist ego interprets into them. The opponents now have to be “outcalled” for their transgressions – zeitgeist parlance follows. Even within your own political spectrum, you are irreconcilably hostile because you diagnose racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, queer- or trans-phobic ways of thinking, of which you can only be completely free if you recognize them in others – and about them then vicariously destroyed. Then a morale boost falls from the sky. And 10,000 new followers.

On to the next level where only the app wins. Because the “outcalled” person is of course never really destroyed. On the contrary, it will radicalize its attitude in reflexive defense.

2. now you know what you would have done instead of your grandparents

Thanks to the Internet, everyone is an expert, but at the same time they trust experts less and less. You live in diffuse overwhelm. After all, the world’s news comes directly to your cell phone, your watch. The whole world seems to affect you directly. Morally speaking anyway and in fact you are often alone – with this internet.

One’s own perspective is deformed by the indignation peristalsis of social media, which excretes fears and aggressions onto the streets, which are then taken up again via the media bellows and made even larger, thereby cementing the fronts ever further. Until at some point you can no longer see a topic. Another crisis then seems more urgent and becomes a new supplier of fresh aggression that the commitment kicks off.

3. dang!

Caroline Polachek’s Power Point performance on “Dang” (2023) in the “Live Show with” shows what it feels like to bombard yourself with pointed opinions, fakes, outcalls, news, fears and other people’s professional successes every second Stephen Colbert.” Like a lecturer, she stands in front of a screen, being shot at by flashing lights and spotlights. “Dang!” (something like “damn” in German) comes out of her mouth every time. She clicks through her presentation of share pics: How the world is changing because of people in a before and after comparison, the consumption of fireworks sales in a stunning correlation to global temperature. “Dang!” Everything is a share pic. Also the end of the world.

She sings: “Maybe its forever, maybe its just shampoo”. This is followed by Humpty Dumpty, the fragile egg from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice – Through the Looking Glass” (1871). What did he talk to Alice about again? Oh yes, about semantics. “When I use a word,” said Humpty Dumpty, “it means exactly what I want it to mean and nothing else.” After one minute and 59 seconds, Polacheck’s barrage of images culminates in a sharp, slate-scratching scream.

This column first appeared in Musikexpress issue 1/2024.