The ocean is a giant healing crystal
Well, I would like to think so, but um yeah, no. I came across this in the caption of an LA-based painter’s instagram who has a sizable following and what could be called an expertly crafted presence for the platform. To generate traffic, the artist performs charmingly amateurish and admittedly hypnotic dance routines that have gone viral, affording her a larger audience, one would imagine, than her paintings could naturally garner since they’re equally amateurish and of no real consequence. Being the curmudgeon/social agnostic/maverick that I am, naturally I bristled at the proposition that the “ocean is a giant healing crystal” mainly bc we as the human race are destroying the oceans (the ocean isn’t healing itself or us; I mean, I need a good beach wknd to recharge my batteries but that’s beside the point ), and secondly, the strategy seems to represent a type of communication specific to sm. Instagram and presumably other sm platforms create dynamics that wildly prioritize such language-it’s almost phatic in its bearing, meaning that it’s an untruth but not necessarily a toxic one that makes extremely damaging claims. It's largely benign and offers a feel good moment that holds hands with the brief meaninglessness of identity tourism. But, it also functions like modern religion or politics in significant ways. It breeds constituency-the primary objective of such persuasive language and some of the other engagement optimization strategies (follow/unfollow, having bots do the work, blatant look-at-me strategies) is to foster a transactive subject on the other end. It isn’t to stimulate “dialogue” or “discourse” which is the traditional call to arms or purported virtue for high art specifically. As the term sounds, a transactive subject is one who is transacted, processed, and unlitaterally effected into behaving in a certain way-to be made to believe that a meaningful exchange has occurred or that a beneficially mediated alliance has been cemented. In contradistinction to a traditional counter-culture’s cliquishness of tone or its decivilizing effects (punk music, trash aesthetics, run of the mill recreational drug use), the new generations version of detachment, which is actually a backward form of attachment, is directly attributable to the confluence of informed boredom of consumers (mixed at time’s with guilt) and silicon valley’s now widely circulated corporate strategies and language that have themselves been phaticized . The irony here is that even considering the bad faith (resulting from global pandemic, civic unrest) that the general population, and especially liberal artist types, have with the real transactive leadership, i.e., politics, media, market elite-what Eric Weinstein calls the sense-making apparatus, personal interactivity amongst a youngish population engaged with something like instagram seems to have profoundly dovetailed with the very same behaviors coming from the top, at least of late. Everything has been normalized with top-down culture in fundamental ways, not in tangential ways. Perhaps older generations’ attempts to carve out a deterritorialized space for themselves functioned in a similarly mimetic way, but consequences look very different nowadays. And at the end of the day, it all seems to circle back around to commerce, homo economicus, and the complex calculus that is surviving in a contemporary society, which may not be worth enjoying if we keep acting like the leaders that we malign.