Sam Han | Eportfolio

Patton Oswalt, the voice of the main character of Ratatouille(which I hear, by the way, is an excellent film), is one America’s most literary comics. Yes, there is this other guy but after one bizarre-o appearance at the 92Y this year, well, it seems that people have realized that his time as the intellectual doyen of comedy is slowly coming to an end. But to call Oswalt the new Martin would be unfair to both. Martin basically cut his teeth as a voice in the literary upper echelon of the US through the New Yorker, perhaps still the major gatekeeper of what is in among the cultural elite. Oswalt, on the other hand, has really relied on the web and Wired. Both are fantastic writers, but have really addressed different “publics,” Martin’s being the NPR-crowd (broadly) and Oswalt’s being the TRON-crowd (broadly). 

In the most recent issue of Wired, Oswalt penned a much-lauded essay on the past, present and future of “geek culture.” I have to say it was a great read—well-written, made a point and often funny. But at the end of it all, I was left with a bit of puzzled feeling. Let me explain. 

The general thrust of Oswalt’s argument is that geek culture, once the exclusive property of actual geeks, has massified, become pop, and irrevocably Web-ified, making it no longer actually geek but just simply one among many cultural pools from which people can take a sip. Here’s Oswalt’s the state of the geek: 

The topsoil has been scraped away, forever, in 2010. In fact, it’s been dug up, thrown into the air, and allowed to rain down and coat everyone in a thin gray-brown mist called the Internet. Everyone considers themselves otaku about something—whether it’s the mythology of Lost or the minor intrigues of Top Chef. American Idol inspires—if not in depth, at least in length and passion—the same number of conversations as does The Wire. There are no more hidden thought-palaces—they’re easily accessed websites, or Facebook pages with thousands of fans. And I’m not going to bore you with the step-by-step specifics of how it happened. In the timeline of the upheaval, part of the graph should be interrupted by the words the Internet. And now here we are.

The problem with the Internet, however, is that it lets anyone become otaku about anything instantly. In the ’80s, you couldn’t get up to speed on an entire genre in a weekend. You had to wait, month to month, for the issues of Watchmen to come out. We couldn’t BitTorrent the latest John Woo film or digitally download an entire decade’s worth of grunge or hip hop. Hell, there were a few weeks during the spring of 1991 when we couldn’t tell whether Nirvana or Tad would be the next band to break big. Imagine the terror!

Long gone is the ”chilly thrill in moving with the herd while quietly being tuned in to something dark, complicated, and unknown just beneath the topsoil of popularity.” 

I get it. Oswalt’s lament is something that die-hard fans of various subcultures feel when what they once viewed was theirs is shared by the masses, usually boiled down to LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) backwash that no longer resembles what they first fell in love with and obsessed over for so long. It’s not hard to imagine why Oswalt, and conceivably others, would feel such a way. I used to feel that way about hip hop. Once considered to be a cultural danger on par with drugs (remember Tipper Gore and C. Dolores Tucker?), hip hop has emerged as part and parcel of the cultural logic of capitalism, or at least one can argue. But more specifically, the fear for Oswalt is that the increase in availability of geek culture will lead to not only its dilution but a kind of laziness. See, part of Oswalt’s definition of geek is a penchant for working hard. There’s a strong thread of austerity that undergirds much of his descriptions of his early years as a geek. Thus, the actual fear for him is ease not massification. He calls this condition ETEWAF: Everything That Ever Was—Available Forever.

Here’s the danger: That creates weak otakus. Etewaf doesn’t produce a new generation of artists—just an army of sated consumers. Why create anything new when there’s a mountain of freshly excavated pop culture to recut, repurpose, and manipulate on your iMovie? The Shining can be remade into a comedy trailer. Both movie versions of the Joker can be sent to battle each another. The Dude is in The Matrix.

So what does Oswalt suggest we do about the status quo, with geek culture being spread so thin that it no longer holds meaning? 

Rather surprisingly, he takes a page from a rather orthodox Marxism. Like those adhere to the linear theory of history that Marx provided, Oswalt suggests that in order to get to a degree zero of geek culture, where everything is as it was, we must accelerate the very thing that he admonishes and trying to take down. In the case of Marxism, it was to help along the process of capitalist “primitive accumulation.” For some Marxists, in order to get to the state of communism, where one could be a poet at night and a fisherman during the day, there needed to at least be the social conditions under which the transitional period of socialism could emerge. But this can only occur if capitalism, viewed by Marx, as a stage of the development of history towards communism, and its universe of economic and social relations takes hold. 

No, I’m not suggesting that Oswalt is in anyway Stalin-like but I do wish to draw some parallels in the kind of rigid framework under which he is writing. I understand, he’s trying to be funny and not every word in his essay is meant to be taken literally. But, there is undoubtedly some sense that the Web, for better or for worse, has ruined geek culture. For various Marxists, this has been a point of confusion and has resulted in a rather bizarre way of dealing with non-proletariat populations. How does on develop a revolutionary class consciousness when the group one is trying to galvanize is not even in the stage before the stage before that stage that would lead to communist paradise? Well, you either killed them all or removed them to the Gulag. Either get on the Juggernaut, or we’ll throw you off. While there is no geek ETEWAF Gulag in Siberia, Oswalt does suggest that we must aid the process of ETEWAF to the point where there is, as he describes it an “ETEWAF singularity.”   

So the topsoil we’re coated in needs to wash away for a while. I want my daughter to have a 1987 the way I did and experience the otaku thrill. While everyone else is grooving on the latest Jay-Z, 5 Gallons of Diesel, I’d like her to share a secret look with a friend, both of them hip to the fact that, from Germany, there’s a bootleg MP3 of a group called Dr. Cali-gory, pioneers of superviolent line-dancing music. And I want her to enjoy that secret look for a little while before Dr. Cali-gory’s songs get used in commercials for cruise lines.

Oswalt is effectively contributing to a cultural elitism that has long been the favored strategy of post-WWII social and cultural critics, particularly the group of intellectuals called “the Frankfurt School” and those influenced by them, of which the most important figure today would be Fredric Jameson. (See this article in particular where he comes off as especially culturally elitist.)

In the case of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the most representative figures of the Frankfurt school, it was revolutionary, anti-capitalist consciousness that they argued was being repressed by homogeneity of mass culture, which they, tellingly, refer to as “the culture industry.” For them, the massification of culture through technological means meant that the artistic sphere, for instance, which used to be the breeding ground of anti-status quo ideas and sentiment, has become the very opposite, the bearer of hegemonic ideology. In their classic The Dialectic of Enlightenment, they write: 

Works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish. Love is downgraded to romance. And, after the descent, much is permitted; even license as a marketable speciality has its quota bearing the trade description “daring.” The mass production of the sexual automatically achieves its repression. Because of his ubiquity, the film star with whom one is meant to fall in love is from the outset a copy of himself. Every tenor voice comes to sound like a Caruso record, and the “natural” faces of Texas girls are like the successful models by whom Hollywood has typecast them. The mechanical reproduction of beauty, which reactionary cultural fanaticism wholeheartedly serves in its methodical idolisation of individuality, leaves no room for that unconscious idolatry which was once essential to beauty.

…

The assembly-line character of the culture industry, the synthetic, planned method of turning out its products (factory-like not only in the studio but, more or less, in the compilation of cheap biographies, pseudo-documentary novels, and hit songs) is very suited to advertising: the important individual points, by becoming detachable, interchangeable, and even technically alienated from any connected meaning, lend themselves to ends external to the work. The effect, the trick, the isolated repeatable device, have always been used to exhibit goods for advertising purposes, and today every monster close-up of a star is an advertisement for her name, and every hit song a plug for its tune. Advertising and the culture industry merge technically as well as economically. In both cases the same thing can be seen in innumerable places, and the mechanical repetition of the same culture product has come to be the same as that of the propaganda slogan. In both cases the insistent demand for effectiveness makes technology into psycho-technology, into a procedure for manipulating men. In both cases the standards are the striking yet familiar, the easy yet catchy, the skilful yet simple; the object is to overpower the customer, who is conceived as absent-minded or resistant.

Why is austerity and difficulty so important for this perspective? What about the process of spending long hours to discover something special only to keep it to yourself is so appealing? While I understand where both A+H and Oswalt are coming from, I have a few questions in response to this figure of the “austere geek”: How many of today’s geeks grew up as Oswalt did, with a family with means so much so that as children they could spend hours upon hours digging through geek-cultural esoterica? Is not Oswalt’s lament basically one that assumes a middle-classness of yesteryear that no longer exists for the majority of America’s potential geeks? To call for a return to the hard-work era of geek culture, is not Oswalt simply providing a cover, a rather well-argued one at that, that is founded upon a sacrosanct status quo ante that, well, is simply a justification of elitism under the guise of “revolutionary” politics? What is more “capitalist” than an ethic of hard work? 

If it is this “geek culture” for which Oswalt is nostalgic, I say good riddance. It’s been a long time coming.