The Year that We Forgot

My Thoughts on the Past Year.

I was recently on Mr. J. Burden’s channel for an interview of sorts, where we attempted to cover the news stories of 2023. We didn’t get through many of the stories as we had gone on several tangents, and Mr. Burden had no problem with me going on off. When we’re on a 24/7 news cycle (in the most literal sense, if you’re Twitter) remembering what happened back in January felt like trying to remember some joke told at a family reunion years ago. Do you remember the SVB fallout? Or perhaps where Chinese Spy Balloon flew over? In our defense, the stream topic and questions were particularly impromptu, but was difficult at first to put a timeline to this year’s news cycle as many of the larger stories that I could recall actually happened in November and December of 2022 rather than 2023.

You can watch it here, if you’d like.

I’ve written before that I’ve taken to uninstalling Twitter from my phone during the weekends, only accessing it if I’m working behind my desktop. I’m certainly punished for it algorithmically but I think it is good for the mind to decompress a bit from the birdapp birdbrain. Although “logging off” creates that kind of “Content Creator FOMO” that comes with not being in on the The Discourse or not getting your take in that might just be the tweet that goes viral.

My friend essayist

Morgoth

wrote about this prior to his return to Twitter earlier this year:

Beyond Twitter Dome

He wrote the following:

It is becoming increasingly the case that to consume Dissident Right content is simply to consume the latest spats and internecine squabbling that happens on Twitter. What’s more, an entire lexicon is emerging which, if you’re not on Twitter, may as well be Chinese.

I’m very much on the same wavelength, and any longtime listener of The Digital Archipelago will notice every episode has dozens of people in the comments section complaining about lingo and terminology that my co-host uses (I’m guilty of it too, to a lesser extent) without explaining or fleshing out what that particular term means.

You either know or you don’t.

The same goes with how we consume media or keep up with current events, it affects the way we process information, and who we can tentatively call out to as friend or foe. It can be very easy to forget the news stories you covered months ago because you’re already onto the “next current thing” or that you’re “waiting for the next current thing to happen.”

How the Right Wing Twitter News Cycle Goes

Some things of course haven’t gone away entirely, whether that be the War in Ukraine, the ongoing conflict in Palestine, the 2024 Election, hey does anyone remember what happened to Lampedusa? Sure some of these items get thrown onto the pile of evidence to prove a point of the over arching metanarrative of how bad things are in Western Nations politically, although it feels easy to forget that just this year we had:

• Sam Bankman-Fried and the Collapse of FTX

• The collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank

• The Chinese Spy Balloon Story

• Failed and Mixed Results on Offensives and Counter Offensives

• The Rise and Fall and Rise of Trump Alternatives in the 2024 Race

• Rampant Open Borders in America

• The Tories unable to return to Pre-Brexit Levels of Immigration

• Mar-A-Lago Raided

• Trump Mugshot

• “Barbenheimer”

• East Palestine Rail Disaster

• Introduction of the “Competency Crisis” Term

• Multiple battles over The Speaker of the House

• Inflation

• And much, much more.

Perhaps it is because the year is over, and that we are ourselves know what’s ahead is most assuredly going to be worse or at the very least more interesting in terms of getting essays, videos, and livestream content out easier and faster, we’ve become a train on rails with no brakes. Constantly commenting, with very few people having the humility to say “I don’t know” or “let’s not get too hasty” with respect to the headlines.

After all, next year is a major election year, more to talk about, more to discuss and more work to be done. I’ve commented before that one of the things that I’ve taken great stock of is the change in content of one my favorite essayists and commentators,

Dave Greene

whose content and essays are still some of the best in the scene but has put more effort into real life meetups, (basketweaving) hosting mini conferences and events, and things that are in general away from exclusively digital spaces. Our technology should be tools first, not methods or means of escaping the dull and harsh political reality that we live in. Sure we can be based online, but are we doing anything remotely based in our real lives?

To me it certainly feels like 2023 passed us by rather quickly, but I have the nagging sensation that this year passed by that way because I am “cultural commentator” or “columnist and youtuber” and I am constantly in a digital ecosystem in which time is processed far faster than it is on the outside. I’ve often said that on the Internet 6 years of in-real-life history and time is actually about 6000 years of history. If you were around 6 to 8 years ago when the Online Right was just getting its footing, whether with the old Alt-Right 1.0 or coming through to the right via Sargon and others, you’ll be called an “old head” or something similar. This short essay would be tens of thousands of words if we tried to detail or even just list out what happened in terms of political history, not to mention the ever-evolving landscape of the Online Right. Trying to go back to a time where your favorite thought leader was singing Depeche Mode will make you look like a 101 year old Rose Dawson to a lot of people today.

A lot of things happened in 2023, but as it comes to an end one may find themselves blurring their timelines together to wonder just what on earth actually happened. The mediums in which we engage the with the world politically has radically altered the way we judge the character and track records of “thought leaders” and personalities, whose best and worst ideas are only reified because we make memes out of them. From Curtis Yarvin’s “Dark Elves” (that was in 2022 btw) to Covfefe Anon’s “The Woke Are More Correct Than the Mainstream,” their worst and best tend to stick with you, and their larger corpuses are just swallowed up into the right wing digital noosphere. Many times we will see someone say something without realizing where or who said that to begin with. In an age of competing narratives, theories, and ideas all fighting for your attention span, the one with the most power is he who can get a thought into your head without you remembering where you got it from.

This also allows for individuals whose track records may not be the best — from encouraging protests to poorly-aged takes on Covid-19 — to be easily hidden from the social consciousness of someone’s new and growing audience. In a game of ideological and political clout, you wouldn’t want anyone to know that your batting average is closer to .112 than your self-reported .566. This is why it is still so important to read and to have a sense of history beyond just the last thirty years. Sure, the ’90s were better than today’s standards, but the ’90s also had problems that were from decades prior (such as immigration) that have been kicked farther down the road to our present age. The same goes for what has happened in 2023, whether that be the rising clout and political power of those from the Indian subcontinent in 2023, or the flagrant use of legal and political power to arrest and silence conservative opposition in the United States and in other Western nations.

Overall, the Internet, Social Media, and Personalities with Vast Parasocial Command of Audiences have shortened the memories and attention spans of our modern body politic. Who cares what you said five years ago, and whether it was true? As I said on J. Burden’s show, we can just tell people to go back to what we said if they want our takes, but were our takes on that issue six months ago still prescient? Do they hold up or were they just incomplete thoughts on a livestream or a tweet? Are you Dunking on the Libs today? Despite the fast-paced and frenetic environment of our social media, political history didn’t begin in 1991 with the introduction of the World Wide Web, or in 1981 with Usenet. As the political environment changes, and as politicians adapt to the changing mediums of social media, understand that while our perception of history or lore has been radically altered for the short term.

Red Letter Media, a mix of gen x or older millennial men criticizing or talking about movies, made fun of the current slop of Marvel and Star Wars films with the damning phrase, “Just consume product, and get excited for next product.” For many on the online right, and I’m afraid this includes myself to some extent, means “Just comment on current thing and get excited for next current thing.” We cannot allow our memories or attention spans to be short-circuited by the mediums in which we engage in politics or culture. It’s partially why I’m thankful for Substack, to keep us going to seriously think our words and opinions even if it just commentary on the news.

2023 for many will be a year where someone will go “oh yeah that happened” but so much did happen, much of it that has altered the course of our lives, but for many it will just be another year that was between elections or worse “the good times.”