Let’s play a game. We’re going to try and describe our current era the way that historians will describe it looking back in twenty years. I’m going to treat this blog post as a time capsule, a prediction - wake me up in 2043 and maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised by my perspicacity, or it’ll just be another arrogant attempt at grand prediction.
The philosopher of history G. F. Hegel once said of understanding history that “the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk” - meaning, you can only understand the moment you’re in once it has passed. Clarity comes only with the passing of time, because we are so immersed in our current epoch that its contours are invisible to us. David Foster Wallace’s speech about fish and water comes to mind.
To Hegel and the doubters I say simply, watch me. I want this blog post to be a collector’s item in twenty years.
If we call 1900-1945 the Modern Era, and 1945-2000 the Postmodern Era, then 2000-present is…the Metamodern Era? Angry spellchecker not withstanding, this is apparently the term that social critics have coined for this new era of civilization, ushered in by the collapse of the Cold War, the sweeping implications of the Internet, and the waves cast into history by the War on Terror and our slow and shocking awakening into the reality of climate change.
Unlike most of my posts which are meticulously researched, I have deliberately not looked into what other people consider the metamodern to be to remain intellectually pure. Sometimes in philosophy you have to avoid the temptation to check the back of the book. Because in reality, there is no back of the book.
What you’re getting here is straight from my brain, no filter applied.
Ten Features of Metamodernity
1 - Bullshitification
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt introduced a famous distinction between lying and bullshiting in his straightforwardly-titled essay “On Bullshit.” Lying is deliberate, conscious, meant to effect a specific false narrative - the liar knows the real truth, chooses to conceal it, and promulgates the false narrative closest to their needs. “I wasn’t sleeping with my secretary, I was doing overtime at the office,” is a lie. Specific, targeted, the opposite of the truth, designed to be taken seriously.
The bullshitter on the other hand operates with a reckless disregard for the truth, and either implicitly or explicitly rejects the very concept of the truth as a valid category. They don’t pause to consider what reality truly is, or what words really mean, and their aim is not to convince the audience of anything specific, but merely to achieve an impression or emotional impact. It is not about creating a Sherlock Holmes like web of intricate deception - it is more like speaking without thinking or morals involved.
The liar above is specifically trying to convince his wife that from between the house of 5 and 10pm he was at his office, pruning spreadsheets and cramming for that big presentation. The lie is meant to be as close to something true as possible, and to create a specific vision in the mind of the victim.
On the other hand, saying on your resume that you “Strategized across cross-functional teams in order to deliver real-time assets to a diverse customer base” rather than “Made coffee for five years as a barista” is bullshit. It is not a clear picture, it is not meant to withstand serious scrutiny or examination - it is not even strictly true or false. The point of it just to throw words off like chaff, the almost hypnotic rhythm of “action verbs” and “key-performance indicators” that people load their flimsy CVs with in order to gain access to the password-protected world of corporate life.
It is not that bullshit is a new phenomenon, or uniquely metamodern. It is the scale and all-pervading nature of bullshit in metamodernity that makes it a marker of the age. As Frankfurt writes at the beginning of his book, the surprising thing about bullshit is how much of it there is.
I wrote in a previous post that the drift of Gen Z slang towards a lexicon of truth and bullshit is a reflection of a widespread, generational feeling of being lied to and bullshitted. I’m upgrading this thesis now to say that bullshitification, or the ‘turning-into-bullshit’ of cultural, economic, and political channels previously perceived to be sincere, is one of the leading features of the metamodern. The degradation of the institutional authority of news corporations “the Fake News Media!” is a major feature of metamodernity, both within and without the Trumpiverse of blanketing contempt for journalism. This is not to say that these channels were more honest in the past - in many cases they were worse - but what is new is how certain we are that they are in fact bullshiting us all the time.
It is all too easy now to type in [News Source] + “caught lying” and get hundreds of results, regardless of the source. The New York Times, Fox News, the White House, the Pentagon, CNN, The Washington Post, the American Medical Association, you name it. At no point does it seem that any of the many many instances of lying and bullshiting have come home to roost, and the reason is that we now regard all institutional authorities now as bullshitified. Everyone lies, and no one is ever punished.
If you point out to a Fox News viewer the incredible deceit witnessed in the Tucker Carlson / election fraud episode, they will point out to the CNN enjoyer the never-ending series of lies about Hilary Clinton, US military abuses, and the genocide in Gaza. The point is not that my side is better, the point is that the rules of the game have changed, and we’re all equally filthy.
If everything is bullshit, nothing is bullshit.
The irrelevance of these facts of duplicity is best illustrated by the fact that the Washington Post collated all of Donald Trump's lies over four years in office. The final count? 30,573 confirmable deceptions while occupying the Oval. By my calculations that is just shy of one lie per hour for four years straight.
The number of voters swayed by this horrifying revelation? None, to my knowledge.
This cynicism, this inability to take anything seriously, to allow anything presented however sincerely and verifiably to land, is the most obvious symptom of social bullshitification. Even as we divide into more steeply entrenched partisan groups, the strategy on both edges converges to the same basic point:
“Just look at the other guy. Everybody’s doing it.”
Steve Bannon, while heading strategy for Trump’s 2016 campaign, described his overall media strategy as “flooding the zone with shit” - intentionally confusing and misleading the press and the opposing campaign so that fact, fiction, hearsay, and conspiracy mixed freely and ultimately couldn’t be told apart, one from the other.
This turned out to be remarkably successful. I believe that moment will be read by sensitive future historians as the beginning of an infinite downward spiral in the quality and authority of information. Seven years later, we are deeper than ever in the ‘zone’ of fundamental doubt that Bannon inaugurated.
Now, everything has the taste of shit about it.
2 - Technological Eclipse
In previous eras, technological progress was sometimes disruptive, but often incremental. In metamodernity, technological progress experiences hyperbolic growth at a rate that outstrips the ability of even the specialists to track and comprehend. Here are just a few headlines from my feed this morning:
IBM releases first-ever 1000-qubit quantum chip
Reviving Minds: Implant restores cognitive functions after brain injury
Collisions change how fast ions surf on plasma waves in fusion experiments and beyond
Department of Education study reveals the professions most likely to be replaced by AI and chatbots
Deep sea sensor reveals that corals produce reactive oxygen species
Simultaneous production of a top quark and a photon observed for the first time
Researchers design limestone putty nanogenerator to harvest energy from everyday motion to power small devices
This New AI Tool is the DREAM for Fiction Authors
Reimagining the Cosmos: New theory unites Einstein’s gravity with quantum mechanics
All in a day’s work, literally.
Metamodern technological growth is not unlike the quantum revolution in physics in the 1920s - the basis of science went from the equations of Galileo and Newton, which the educated layman could intuit and understand, to the mystifying indeterminacy of particle physics, replete with wavefunctions, Hamiltonians, virtual photons, higher dimensions, antimatter, and other imponderables.
Future science it seems, need not explain itself to normal people - ever since the atomic bomb physicists have occupied a role not unlike the temple priest: they don the robes, enter the secret chamber of mass-energy equivalence, perform the requisite sacrifices to the gods of vector calculus, and emerge to tell the crowd gathered at the steps that by combining a heavy mineral ore used previously in orange pottery glaze with the gas from the Hindenburg Blimp they have produced a bomb with so much power it can alter the tilt of the earth. All we normal people can do, is tilt our heads with a feeling of vague but broad fear and confusion.
Technology is now evolving and taking on a life of its own in a manner that has no historical precedent. Our interest in technology during its earlier years was simply to grease or accelerate human activities that take too much time, energy, or money. It was a facilitator of those things we were already doing. We just wanted bigger, faster, cheaper, further, funner.
What technology is doing in metamodernity is replacing wholesale functions which we never imagined we would utilize technology for, displacing human beings in the process. AI can keep you from getting lonely, write 90% of your memoir, do your job for you, give you psychotherapy, compete against you in games at any level of difficulty, entertain you with apropos Netflix recommendations, plot a sophisticated ground invasion of the Chinese mainland, and design your stock portfolio for bear market conditions.
It knows what kind of wines you’re going to like, which lane your car should be in, and how to best phrase a non-confrontational text to a roommate who is late on rent. As has been observed on TikTok, the algorithm often knows more about your sexuality, gender, and mental health problems than you do, and has revealed to more than a few teenagers that they are actually gay, bisexual, transgender, autistic, ADHD, and so on - a process that normally occurs in a dialectic between a young adult and their community is now occurring via a social media algorithm that feigns human connection by delivering content made by humans.
AI talks for us, works for us, shops for us, heals us, enriches us, and ultimately manages us. Surveys of workers attitudes reveal that 2 out of 3 people think AI could do their job instead of them. The specter of human obsolescence is hard to escape.
I refer to this wholesale displacement of human beings (and forced reimagining of what even makes a human being unique or valuable in the first place) as technological eclipse. Feeding off of behavior data in order to develop the statistical models which drive its performance, technology has shifted from something that we use to something that uses us.
We hope that the greatest challenges (climate change, global governance, automation, and even loneliness) can be met by AI and new technologies as we despair more and more of hortatory politics, incremental remedies, or individual evolution. This places AI and technology in general into the role usually occupied by God, the State, or one’s political ideology as the chief mechanism of social restitution and concrete salvation. It is the new thing that you pray to. AI will fix poverty, AI will fix medical research, AI will be a therapist for the millions without healthcare, and so on.
This replacement of the top nexus of authority usually occupied by God with AI (what Lacan calls the ‘master-signifier’) is why I find the metaphor of ‘eclipse’ fitting.
I’m going to continue this series - these are the first 2 of 10 “clusters” or traits of the metamodern. I’ll try to put these out regularly, so you can have the full mosaic by Christmas.
Great post, looking forward to the rest of the series. It seems to me a unifying theme is the (meta)modern tendency towards the degradation of authenticity. The source and presence of authenticity in our lives previously stemmed from personal interaction with priests, government officials, community members, and our peers. In metamodern society, these have been wholesale replaced and degraded by technological and social forces that operate on scales inconceivable to atomized humanity. Great insight.