Memetic Culture and the Destruction of Nuance

On the Transformation of Information into Entertainment

Welcome to Art and Survival, a weekly-ish newsletter documenting one theatre-loving boy’s attempt to build a secure life filled with creative acts. You can find out more in the introductory post here.

This week: a go at peeling apart a braid of politics and culture.

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WHAT🙀🤯🤯🙀?! DADDY TRUMP JUST TOOK A HUGE 💧🍆💦💧LOAD💧🍆💧 TO THE EAR!!! CUM-VICTED 💦 FELON 🚨DONALD TRUMP 🍊🍑HAS HAD AN ASS🍑 ASS🍑 INATION ATTEMPT 🤔 IN BUTT-LER 🍑 PENISYLVANIA!

[From one of my friends, at 8:32pm on July 13th, after the assassination attempt on the 2024 Republican candidate for president.]

“Excuse me,” asks the shy high schooler sitting in the college lecture hall, “but what is nuance?”

It’s debate camp. The student has listened at length to the lab leader repeating the word over and over again during her lecture about rebuttals (rebuttals, the shorter speech at the end of a long-form, formal debate). When the student asks his questions, the lab leader smirks. The student is embarassed – he probably should have known the meaning of the word – but when the explanation comes, he’s glad he asked.

“Nuance is,” begins the lab leader, “like the different layers and textures of a topic, or an argument about that topic. The first reflexive reaction to argument is generally emotional, but as debaters, it’s our job to peel apart the nuance of the argument and the topic, to help the room understand the moving parts, and what’s at play.”

In debate, digging for nuance means moving from an emotional reaction to an argument to a pursuit of the argument’s context, relevance, and veracity. Moving away from personal identification with a position creates an opportunity to understand the whole.

As I argued a couple weeks ago, speed is queen, now, and understanding nuance takes time, so nuance is on the decline.

What’s replacing nuance – as is evidenced by the chain text message quoted at the top of this piece – is the memeification of information. There are pros and cons to this: on one hand, information travels incredibly quickly. Memes make it easy to digest a bite of information in one fell sensory swoop. The chain text above gives you the who (“Daddy Trump”), what (Got Shot), where (Butler, PA), and when (Just Now) – and it only takes a few lines. When the Democratic candidate for president announced that he was dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, and endorsed Kamala Harris as the new Democratic candidate, the internet exploded with memes; people proclaimed themselves coconut-pilled, and clips of Harris’s speeches were suddenly supercut and set to music:

[click to watch on twitter]

The new quanta of information is the meme. Culture has always been mimetic – art and its representations were famously critiqued by Plato – but as information becomes compressed and moves faster, its messengers become smaller and faster. Letters become email become memes. Now, what abound are bite-sized packets of information that are assimilated almost instantaneously.

When I got that text about the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, I barely read it. I saw the key information, recognized the form, and immediately passed the meme on to a few friends. Then things started to feel really weird. A kind of intense act of political violence just happened, and this is the reaction? Our reaction?

Our reaction transformed key information into a dopamine hit of entertainment. If it’s not entertaining, information won’t travel fast enough to breach the annals of culture. Consider for example the chain text message above, or the brattification of Kamala Harris, or the infographicization of essential information about the ongoing apocalypses.

If we always need to be entertained by a thing, then we discount what’s boring. We skim the pages of an essential book. We let our eyes glaze over when someone is speaking to us, and telling us something important. It’s too easy to be entertained; so, the opportunity cost of doing something boring (but fulfilling in the long-term) is high.

While memes move quickly, and are fun, they often smooth out the texture of fact and description into one solid, strange, digestible-in-the-moment tone. There’s not enough space for the qualities of all the instruments and the crackling of the vinyl.

This loss of complexity is the destruction of nuance. A strong emotional hook plus an unverified fact are often parroted, rather than picked apart. Maybe nuance has always been rubble – since before the internet, debaters have used straw men and non-sequiturs to win consequential arguments. But there have been times, too – like the time when people tried to rethink the rules of governance – when deep thought and layered argument was commonplace.

The destruction pf nuance and the transformation of information into entertainment is a leading cause of the pervasive feeling of fragmentation that dominates today and contributes to trite public discourse. A sound bite doesn’t need to be verified in order to be amplified. When Donald Trump and Joe Biden had their fateful debate, Donald Trump said, “during my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever,” but:

During his presidency, Trump rolled back some provisions of the Clean Water Act, eased regulations on coal, oil and gas companies and pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord. When wildfires struck California in 2020, Trump dismissed the scientific consensus that climate change had played a role. Trump also dismissed scientists’ warnings about climate change and routinely proposed deep cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency. Those reductions were blocked by Democratic and Republican lawmakers.

[Fact check from AP News.]

But it didn’t really matter, during the debate, whose words were true. Trump was a much more compelling speaker that night, and grabbed attention in a way Biden did not.

What’s at stake here is our ability as citizens living in a representative political system to engage with our representatives not in terms of their personality, or the persona they project, but in terms of the policies that they enact.

This operates in all directions. Biden spoke with little veracity during the debate when he said, “I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any — this decade — any troops dying anywhere in the world like he did.” According to the AP article above, at least 16 service members have been killed since Biden took office.

Both the Democratic party and the Republican party spend more time virtue signaling than they do discussing actual substantive issues affecting Americans’ everyday lives. If there were a pluralist system in place in the US, maybe more airtime would be given to each party’s vision for the country. As it stands, if an American citizen wants to vote and wants their vote to count, they’re forced to identify with a large party even when they only align with a small part of that party’s mission.

However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

[George Washington, in his Farewell Address. 1796.]

In 2024, most voters were being forced to identify with a candidate they didn’t like because they mostly supported a certain party. The arrival of a new candidate on the scene shook the up the internet because there were people waiting with bated breath for any new candidate to appear who might be a redeemable choice, and actually capable of fulfilling the office and doing the job.

I say all this knowing that I am an artist, not a political scientist. I am an observer of culture, not a pollster. But culture – especially in an election year – is inherently political; and, because art arises within a political context, art itself is inherently political. The politics surrounding the artist allow for the relaxed naturalism of the paintings, or demand the harsh lines and speed of her futuristic sculptures.

Artists can take risks in places where the government supports the arts. That’s probably why the oldest theatre troupe in the world is the French state theatre Comédie-Française. Artists operating under the United States’ economy have to create work that is consumable, which might explain the dominance the commerical musical. The musical beats other kinds of theatre when it comes to attracting an audience, and it’s not even close, as I noted when an Olympic commentator called the US mens’ gymnastics team “young, scrappy and hungry,” referencing lyrics by Lin Manuel-Miranda (Hamilton is a great example of obviously political art, btw).

As artists, surviving artists, we do not just fall out of coconut trees. We fall out of – and into – a specific social and economic context, and it is within that context that we produce our work. So it’s our responsibility to take part in political discourse, and to use our precious breath to shape that discourse with every word we utter and through every image we propagate. If our words – and our memes – promote peace, understanding, and clarity, then we’re probably doing something good, however minor, for the society we’re part of.

So many memes these days are bereft of information – the corecore aesthetic might be viewed as dada in 21st century clothing (though corecore has more emotional meaning than dada). Dada, as an art movement, purposefully defied semiotics and denied meaning. Dada was the precursor movement to Futurism, which itself reflected a vision for the speedy, streamlined, constructed vision for the world – and that vision ended in the second World War.

Humanity is a species as natural a part of the ecosystem of the planet as a single thrush is to a forest. When our activity becomes insular – completely fragmented from that which it was created within – and transforms into entertaining, mostly disembodied abstraction, we lose something – that embodied part of being alive in the world.

If we fell out of a coconut tree, it serves us well to remember where that tree is planted: within which forest, on what island, in what archipelago, in which ocean, all on this very little rock floating through a great void.