Re-Playing Dumb

Or, More Stupid Thoughts: A postscript to Playing Dumb

It’s seems remiss to have talked so much about the popularity of stupidity without mentioning The Internet^TM.

The Internet has frequently, and tediously, been the source of endless optimism about the democratic future of stupidity humanity. And this is in itself stupid. Not because the argument’s necessarily wrong, but because optimism is necessarily stupid.

Optimism: the human habit of blandly expecting that the best outcome will, in some vague, unspecified way, eventually come about. It might be mildly endearing if you, too, are an optimist. However, it’s also utterly infuriating if you are in any way rational.

Let’s ignore the fact that, at whatever level you choose to look, history is an endless list of things always inevitably not turning out for the best; an indisputable litany of repudiation, if you like, which is a fairly solid basis for any argument. None of that matters, because optimism’s not a rational approach. Like faith, the most watertight logic in the world can’t penetrate the smug, freshly-scented fug of fuzzy stupidity that optimists blanket themselves in – they cherish that stupidity as a bulwark of hope amid a terrible world. A world, in fact, where they’re constantly proved wrong, yet only use that proof to pretend that their wrongness actually makes them right.

Reasons to be cheerful #1: Crawley, 1/10/07. Image credit Motoda Hisaharu from www.oneinchpunch.net

In any case, the internet has been a refuge for the endless shallow hopes of blinkered optimistic idiots, when they're not just worshipping self-inflicted stupidity as their key article of faith and as a refuge from the truth.  However, all this optimism has poured forth at the exact same time as The Internet has been hilariously cited by the rest of humanity as The Death of All Hope, and a reason we’re damned as a species. I forget the reasons why, exactly, but it was probably for pretty much the exact same ones the optimists celebrated, only including titty porn as well.

Clearly, these contradictory (yet outstandingly rational) viewpoints can’t both be true at the same time, can they? Well, no, that is indeed the case here. In fact, they’re both completely wrong.

I’ve always been amused by the idea that so many idiots subscribe to: that the internet is in some way helping to lower both attention spans and IQs through a kind of contagious online transmission of vapidity. The argument neglects the somewhat essential observation that stupid people who hate the internet manage to become almost tectonically dumb without themselves being exposed to it – so serenely dumb, in fact, that they don’t even know that they’re being stupid every pitiful grating time they open their hollow, mewling, yawningly moronic wordholes. It’s the internet that makes you stupid, is it? Right.

Until the definition of ‘scientific proof’ is broadened to include ‘unfounded and paranoid moaning perpetrated by Daily Mail-reading life-sumps’ there’s absolutely no evidence for anything of the sort, of course. But the human race is not one to let lack of evidence get in the way of anecdotal bleating.

The internet itself is stupid, of course, not just as a mirror of its masters, but also by design. As an example, the internet caused me to laugh as a result of discovering that some poor stranger had died the other day. How? Well, I once watched a video of the wonderfully dreadful acid techno tune Narcotic Influence by 90’s The-Next-Prodigy-Honest outfit Empirion on YouTube. I’m not proud of this, but in my defence I was drunk, in the company of like-minded fools, and nostalgic for times I’m not strictly capable of remembering with any degree of clarity.

For the sake of all the people who don’t remember this ‘classic’, which is probably everyone except myself and members of Empirion, it was a thumping tune with the sample ‘giving them drugs, taking their lives away’ looping over the 808s and the bleeping. It made faced people smile in 1993 and that is not necessarily A Bad Thing.

YouTube, like Amazon, or its parent company Google, now recommends things on the basis that if you like, say, racism, you might also have a passing interest in joining the Republican Party. And as far as it goes, it’s an occasionally not completely useless idea. As far as it goes, of course, because pigeonholing people into a group solely to sell them targeted guff, and thereby maximise profit, is always going to miss a few subtle flaws.

In any case, it therefore turned out that YouTube was proud to recommend a link for me. And tell me definitively that the reason for the recommendation was because I had watched Narcotic Influence. And what was the link? OU Student Dies After Tylenol Overdose, a two minute news report with a fairly self-explanatory title. And at seeing that a bad dance tune was the supposed rationale for this, I laughed out loud. And then was ashamed. And then wished I had some Tylenol.

The internet is stupid, therefore, because it’s as stupid as the expectations of its users. It doesn’t make people stupid, though: we started out that way and are pretty unimaginative when it comes to some forms of change, regardless of the medium.

Reasons to be cheerful #2: Leeds City Centre. [Credit: Ghosts of Shopping Past by Brian Ulrich at http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/galleries/ghosts_of_shopping_past/ ]

What the internet does do, however, is raise the profile, and the volume, and the shit-slinging range of idiots and idiocy en masse. It’s not that people are more stupid so much as stupidity is more immediately visible and more noticeably prevalent. And that’s why I initially said there’s never been a better time to be stupid. As never before, an outburst of idiocy can be validated internationally by a consortium of geographically diverse numbskulls and lead to a warm feeling of idiot belonging – much in the same way that bacterial decomposition raises the temperature of dung.

The fact that such warmth may eventually help to melt the icecaps and lead to a worldwide flood that drowns all ‘intelligent’ life forms is not a coincidence. Nor a pity.

The democratic side of all this The Internet (as long as you’re well enough off to get online) is that ‘ordinary people’ do have a higher profile, a higher impact, and a bigger platform from which to speak than they have for years – in fact possibly ever. How many years? Well, arguably, the last time ‘ordinary people’ banded together in such numbers around a common goal was the unionisation movement in the 1920s. Not the 60s – the middle classes aren’t ordinary people, they’re the privileged masses who have the luxury of choice in their dropping out or ganging up. So that’s why it’s the 1920s labour movement that is probably the best analogue.

A Zombie board game. This is not intended as a metaphor. It's just rubbish.

And that movement of ordinary people not only brought down the government of the day, but arguably performed the first act in one of the most successful ever campaigns to further the idea of social justice. That kind of movement ultimately built free education and healthcare, as well as social security and support for every person in Britain; the equivalent American effect was, predictably, racketeering. But in any case, having this kind of profile and ability to get together does represent a potent, almost limitless possibility for change.

It’s a mark of the times, then, that with our massive banding of everyday people, what we’ve achieved is the unrivalled and unparalleled act of subverting the Christmas number one. And not through any dangerous commie means, either. We did it through the method of encouraging dumb consumers to in fact consume more. And we appear almost biblically proud of ourselves for this beautiful act. I know it wasn’t entirely unironic, but it seemed to be celebrated with an astounding lack of irony.

And that’s why there’s never been a better time to be stupid. Which in turn is why the only decent protest group you can join is one that demands intelligence in the face of an uncaring, unthinking world. Even just driving a few morons to apoplectic heart attacks when reading badly written videogames reviews may raise the collective IQ of the human race, and help make the world A Better Place.

So join me: let’s have a New Trivial Revolution we can all take part in. Irritate fools in the name of justice. Change the world one tiny, simple extra syllable at a time. Videogames are Art, or something; in fact I forget what it was we were uniting around. Erm. Revolution in the fucking head, man. Yeah.

Comments

[matt h]

ok i'll read this one if you promise to make your links open in a new tab, you hairy arsehat

[Aidan]

Thanks to you, I am now going to go and switch one of my turntables on and play Narcotic Influence at 7.40 in the morning. When the neighbours complain, I shall point them in your direction.

I saw Empirion live at the last ever Megadog in Leeds. I can remember literally nothing about it, as I was somewhat altered.

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