The Not So Emergent Trollgaze

Observation Notes #4

Often I find myself wondering how many of the unwritten rules of the internet are actually written down somewhere, deep in the whitepapers and trade secret documents in Silicon Valley, Think Tanks like the Tavistock Institute, and in the annals of the Congressional Research Service. Most social media apps and such are designed to as addictive as they can be, and as I’ve said with concern on The Reversion Podcast, we will certainly see our kind of Morlocks and Eloi emerge between kids who were raised with the screen and those with a technological meekness in mind.

Yet when it comes to Twitter, YouTube video thumbnails and titles, we are all competing for a piece of your eye and mind in the attention economy. This is nothing new, I angle for it as well. Although I haven’t and certainly hope not debase myself to simply “react” to things like Breadtube does with their not so pithy talking points about consumption, consent, and capitalism. While magazines, journals, and other cultural publications are experiencing material/analog renaissance - with everything to IM-1776 having a printed booklet or various friends publishing good novels we are still very much in the digital ether fighting, for your attention.

As the title suggests there is a name for this, the trollgaze; as coined by Maura Johnston then in the Village Voice as a music critic back in 2011. To put it plainly, I’ll just quote her own words.

2011 has been the year of “trollgaze,” a media-agnostic genre name for those pieces of pop culture as designed for maximum Internet attention as they are pieces of art that can stand (or at least wobble) on their own. The ways to get inducted into the trollgaze pantheon are as plentiful as self-congratulatory Lil B retweets; in music alone, they can involve dropping songs chock-full of easy ways to laugh at them (extra points if you’re being dead serious about doing so), acting like an entitled punkass brat, complaining about people saying that you’re acting like an e.p.b., or somewhat ineptly playing on the already-existent prejudices possessed by critical-mass online audiences, among other things. With so many things these days vying for the masses’ increasingly divided attention, though, it’s becoming tougher and tougher to gauge whether or not a piece of cultural ephemera is actually trying to double as its social-media strategy.

I genuinely wonder what she thinks about the music world (and culture writ large) in 2023. While this is mainly about music, this rings true for quite a bit of our ongoing social media culture, and by extension politics. While her article is specifically about music, its content rings true for quite a bit of our ongoing social media culture, and by extension politics. Ms. Johnston continues;

You can call the genre “trollgaze,” although its appeal transcends any sort of musical style; this is actually why it works as a marketing strategy, because the potential for laughing at/being annoyed by/saying “wtf” at a piece of art trumps its aesthetics.

I’m a fan of the trollgaze as a term, although there is a corollary to it. A digital Narcissus wherein we do it because we want the world to look at us and by extension we want to look at ourselves through the reflection of not just our own eyes but the eyes of others. It poses an interesting question of what came first, but that is for a post at a later date. This is a form of exhibitionism with just as much kink even if it isn’t as publicly carnal. We know it when we see it, whether that be the gluttony and overexaggerated, performative feminine rage of Nikocado Avocado to political/economic content creators making fools of themselves by saying with authority that they had no idea what the Silicon Valley Bank was prior to its collapse.

Of course, Maura pointed this out:

The result, of course, is a somewhat toxic cycle where those people who are willing to wear lampshades on their heads over and over take attention away from artists who are trying to figure out what the hell they’re doing, and who don’t want to play for laughs to the cheap seats in order to establish a foothold. But it’s probably not going to stop—or even decelerate—anytime soon as the hustling for attention on all sides of the Internet spectrum becomes more frenzied, and as editors realize that writing a piece on why a certain highly bloggable artist is terrible—or even overrated—brings in more eyeballs than, say, an enthusiastic post about a good song that just bubbled across a writer’s transom.

This cycle transcends the writers in Reduxx or even writers of Right-Wing Twitter, or even someone like Anthony Fantano, it applies to anyone trying to make a living online. It is the ever-tempting urge to write something for clicks or to treat the online community you've created as a theatric cinematic universe. Online fans have been called everything from trucks, to clankers, to having the “-cel” suffix attached. You can go back further, as some have to the issue of fandoms - Bill Hurrel discusses in Human Events as the infamous “Gleekers” of the television show Glee.

And apparently, this demand for personal vindication from the show’s creators didn’t even stop when the cameras were off!  Twelveclara mentions the rpf, or “real person fandom,” and how they obsessed over whether Dianna Agron (the actress who played Quinn Fabray) might be gay because of a shirt she wore. In other words, it wasn’t enough that the writers conform to the Tumblr users’ wish fulfillment fantasies: they wanted the cast to do so in their personal lives, as well. If there is a textbook case of unhealthy relationship to media, this is it. And no, I am not exaggerating or reading into this. Twelveclara, or Erin, or whatever she calls herself, says as much in the Slate interview:

It was at a time in my life where I had just come out—I’m a lesbian—and Glee started tackling what I had just been through. To see that represented from a character standpoint is something that really impacted me personally. It’s not like Glee was just a show I was watching and enjoying; it was like this was me personally, almost, that I was watching on screen. That was what it was for most of the people who were in it. Because on Glee they really tried to represent everybody or every issue you could tackle, every minority.[…]

I would recommend you read the whole article, or listen to my friend Skeptical Waves’ audio rendition for your listening pleasure if you’re on the go. There are a few major takeaways from the Trollgaze or the Out-of-Glee Theory of Wokeness Evolution, one of which that is fandoms are not necessarily emergent. I don’t mean to alarm you, dear reader, but the works of Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays, and Jacques Ellul were not left on the highest bookshelves of history never to be touched again. They were indeed read many times, and in fact improved upon as technology advanced and the powers of the State grew larger.

For example, Twitter encourages trollgazing all the time, for each niche political assumption group (or fandom) that has a certain set of ideological and aesthetic principles. If that means calling for killing all men or putting a black sun in the background of a Tik Toker calling out the issue of food seasoning, they’ll follow a very similar set of behaviors and patterns even if their vision of victory or lifestyle is radically different from the other. Is this because we all want to be seen, or just that we simply know that if we want to infect others with a little mind virus it needs to be as memetic and obnoxious as possible? As a mutual of mine, Bizlet (@Bizlet7) pointed out, you succeed at Twitter by saying preposterous things with authority and the confidence to defend it and things will go viral. Others however such as the anonymous Battle Beagle, just a friendly soothsayer of destruction of the #DogRight who tends to have an uncanny ability to look at the trends and call it out days, weeks, and months in advance. Whether you’re Hasan Piker or just a friendly beagle telling you to stock up on non-perishable goods, internet clout and attention is built on the desire to be seen and the credibility of your words or persona.

For the last sixty years (at a minimum) we have been witness to a depersonalized body politic, as to avoid the instances of a great man coming again that one could follow, and to view things from a distant abstraction as to think that the worst isn’t happening to us or better yet for those in power to enjoy the celebration parallax. The world around us can’t be all that real, this movement can’t be real, the words on the screen can’t be really what they say they are. They in turn lead to a hypersensitive, overstimulated population looking for meaning which had been uprooted for them in the establishment of a new civic religion - a year zero in which the The Evil One (who is very much real) for a dead and earthly Satan, to which the Western World is haunted by Spectre of an Austrian Painter. In a world devoid of mythos and meaning, it took an overhyped cataclysm to bring people back to faith (See “Weird Catholic Twitter”).