Post-Peak Kanyeverse or Bianca Censori's anti-interview in Welcome Magazine
There was a lull in the Kanyeverse this year. Last fall, there was the theatrical debut of the documentary In Whose Name?, then in the spring the release of his new album, Bully and the accompanying stadium tour. Like so many cultural events, it was a flash in the pan; things people spoke about for a week or two then went silent on.
It's hard to keep burning bright. And burn bright Kanye did with his stream of 2010s hits, marriage to Kim Kardashian, and successful brand, Yeezy.
But then, of course, came the manic dumpster fire: the Twitter rants, the presidential run, the divorce, the implosion of Yeezy, the Alex Jones appearance, and on and on. Britney peaked the moment before she shaved her head. Kanye did so when he tweeted he was "going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE."
Still, there were embers throughout his apologies for antisemitism and their reversals. (Remember his post-apology-tour song "Heil Hitler"?) But when crazy becomes the steady state people stop thinking about it as crazy anymore. The taboo around playing a Kanye track withered. All my friends went to his show at SoFi stadium. Kanye no longer burns bright like the sun, but he still has gravitational pull.
With the arrest and deportation of his one-time chief of staff Milo Yiannopoulos and the announcement of new tour dates, he's flickering. Though the most interesting work from the Kanyeverse didn't come from him, but his current wife Bianca Censori, who responded to an interview request from Welcome Magazine with one of the best essays I've encountered in a while.
Censori doesn't want to be interviewed: "Words, especially written words, are sanitized in real time - snatched out of the air and nailed down." She sees the performance of the self as a creative act and is wary of capturing the ambiguity of life in something so fixed as words. According to Censori, "Plasticity refuses permanence. It refuses the fantasy that a person can be cleanly defined, captured, stabilised, or fully known."
Though, of course, that's precisely what she does in her response, even as she resists.
What does the uncanny mean to me?
It is the moment something is destroyed and reborn into something new and familiar, but at the same time peculiar. My husband and I were reading about bipolar episodes when I came across something an anonymous reddit poster wrote that stayed with me.
They said bipolar disorder makes you realize your sense of self isn't tied to your actions, beliefs, or ethics, like everyone thinks it is. Because all of those can dissolve and reconfigure, depending on your state of mind. The only thing that remains consistent, the only thing that might be true, is your ability to reflect on them.
Kanye was the king of what I once described as the "HYPEBEAST | WOKE" era from 2016 to 2020. He was instrumental to the rise of streetwear and even if he himself was conspicuously anti-woke, his denouncements only prove how influential wokeness was in that era.
I now have friends born after "Through the Wire" was released in 2003. In the glimmer of their eyes, I see the merciless nostalgia cycle churning on. Perhaps when 2010s nostalgia fully hits, we'll see him rise once again.
Pre-Peak Return of Rock or Echo Park Rising
When I first declared a return of rock, inspired by conversations with my friend and collaborator Sophie Secaf, it was more of a provocation than a diagnosis; something that seemed inevitable, even if the only signal I was working off of was The Strokes 2020 New Year's concert at Barclays Center.
I remember a friend asking how exactly that would happen. Do kids even play guitars? I forwarded him some TikTok accounts of Zoomers shredding in finished basements. That was six years ago. The teens are twentysomethings.
Last weekend, at Echo Park Rising, I may have even seen some of them. The neighborhood block party in its first full-scale edition in years was overrun this year and featured (according to organizers) hundreds of bands playing in bars and restaurants and on street corners, dissonant sets overlapping up and down Sunset, crowds of young Angelenos in dirty tees and ripped stockings sipping tall boys and eating street tacos between sets.
More than the success of Geese or the Hedi boy renaissance, this made me feel like the return of rock was underway. There were no industry plants. There was no hype. There was instead a lot of good music and more than anything, there was an audience for it.
Techno-Fatalism or David Wallace-Wells on the techlash
Techno-Optimism or Ruby Justice Thélot on the techlash
Wallace-Wells evaluates the following causes of the backlash:
If you call it simple environmentalism, you have to reckon with the fact that coal plants are less unpopular. If you call it NIMBYism, you need to reckon with the fact that just three years ago, Americans said they supported the construction of solar farms in their communities by three to one and nearly the same for wind farms. If you call it anti-corporate backlash, you need to reckon with the fact that support for nearby Amazon distribution centers was higher and that generic factories, semiconductor plants and even nuclear power plants all polled better than data centers, too.
If you call it a turn against Silicon Valley or delayed payback for a decade or two of its broken promises, you have to account for the fact that Americans not only obsessively use tech products but also tend to view many of the big tech companies favorably. If you call it know-nothing tech derangement, you have to make sense of the relative popularity of computer chip fabrication plants. If you call it the paranoid style of American politics in the social media era, you have to explain how it could be that more than three-quarters of Americans got Covid shots in 2021 and how data center opposition is much larger than movements against earnest causes like fracking and fringier ones like opposition to 5G. If you call it the thinly felt politics of TikTok vibes and predict they'll probably evaporate, you may be somewhat right. You still have to explain why no other recent cause has generated as tall a mountain of negative vibes.
I think he glosses over the possibility that the data center backlash was caused by a general "turn against Silicon Valley." For one, it's been well established that many tech products are addictive. Are we surprised addicts "obsessively" use products they are addicted to? Two, do Americans really view big tech companies favorably? I think that's contested, as shown by Ruby Justice Thélot's recent article for a16z and the 404 Media reply from Emanuel Maiberg.
Thélot uses American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) scores to argue a similar point to Wallace-Wells. Instagram—like the major airlines and Budweiser beer—scores high on consumer satisfaction. That's true. But when 404 Media's Maiberg digs into what this means, the picture becomes much more ambivalent:
Here are the type things customers are asked to evaluate with a score of 0-100 in the survey this rising satisfaction score for social media: "Quality of mobile app, reliability of mobile app (minimal down time, crashes, lags), loading speed and reliability, ease of navigation, ease of using the site on different devices, speed and reliability of video clips, variety of services and information, freshness of content, relevance of content, ability to use site without disruption, personal relevance of ads seen."
Customers scored all these aspects of social media highly (between 68 and 84), and I agree with their evaluation. Instagram loads really fast. I can scroll videos on TikTok very quickly. I watched one YouTube Short about Warhammer 40,000 lore, and then was served more than a dozen other YouTube Shorts about Warhammer 40,000 lore that were both fresh and relevant. I do not contest any of this and I don't think that is why both my friends in the DSA and my Trump supporting family members agree that Instagram is bad.
If we wanted to find out why Americans have negative feelings about social media or why we think these platforms are enshittifying, we might ask questions like: Does using Instagram make you feel good? Do you think children younger than 13 should have unlimited access to TikTok? Has Facebook been a net positive for your family?
Let's look at some other data. A recent survey from The Searchlight institute found that voters "overwhelmingly believe social media has a negative impact on society." Last year, an Emerson College poll found that Americans have low confidence in information they get from social media and that social media platforms are most responsible for the creation of "fake news." In 2021, the Cato Institute found that 75 percent of Americans don't trust social media to make fair content moderation decisions. In August, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that three in five Americans support stronger oversight of social media companies. 35 percent said social media stressed them out. 52 percent said they spend too much time on social media. A Pew poll in July found that 6 in 10 Americans supported a social media ban for kids under 16.
404 Media is an explicitly tech-critical publication, just like a16z's Substack is an explicitly pro-tech publication. But taking bias into account, I still think 404 Media won this round.
More reading from last week:
Enhanced Olympics or "Gear and Doping in Las Vegas" by Daniel Waite Penny
AI Civilizations or Dwarkesh Patel on the Hugging Face incident
