An infection of the common web: an obituary for the culture war as we knew it

Trump Part Deux, Part Deux

It’s all over now, baby blue.

The Obama years gave rise to a cultural reflexive (borne out of people habitually defending the imperialist president against racist dogwhistles both real and made up) that grew and grew before erupting aroung the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Fueled by anger at the reactionary Trump campaign and later administration, as well as the proliferation of little-understood critical theory concepts diluted into buzzwords on social media sites (beginning with Tumblr and then expanding out to other platforms), this cultural reaction began with “good intentions” but led to an era of paranoia, overreaction, and censoriousness that very quickly became exhausting. This was far from new, though the adherents of so-called online “social justice” may have believed otherwise—similar reactions to Reaganism coalesced in the 80s and 90s into “political correctness,” which itself was shrugged into the void with the rise of “third way” politics embraced by liberals in the 90s.

Like political correctness before it, there began to grow a quiet despondency even outside the reactions of the right which began to nibble at its foundations as an exaserbated whisper network grew of people confiding in one another that they didn’t see the big deal about this or that TV show’s depiction of this or that social phenomenon. The Democrats—late as they are to every party—tried to muscle in hard on this tendency only to have their obvious disigenuousness simply irritate people further, fueling skepticism and resentment of “social justice” rhetoric, and by the time Israel was trying to weaponize the same rhetoric to justify the most horrific public spectacle of mass slaughter in the 21st century, the bottom gave out under the weight of the contradictions entirely.

Losing the 2024 election—a prediction I made in a scheduled post on this very blog, and to which this post serves as a sort of sequel—forced the Democrats into a full-blown panic and, not wanting to be caught holding the “woke” bag, dumped it all out on the floor in an instant. Most of what I predicted immediately came to pass—the party began to blame its own coalition and began throwing them all out of the window, they turned on trans people overnight, and AOC took the pronouns out of her bio. Quickly afterward, Meta relaxed its hatespeech rules, and companies everywhere began dumping DEI now that they intuited that it was no longer a profitable posture (not that DEI was ever all that good to begin with, as I already explored in my aforementioned previous Trump piece).

I log off from time to time—just to do field research, don’t worry, I’m always online in my heart—and spend a not insignificant amount of time talking to broad sectors of the “normal” public about their views, and my anecdotal findings have largely aligned with some polls and reporting on the subject, which is that the public is turning away from views that may broadly be considered “social justice” oriented. With reactionary trends on the rise—I just read recently about how in my home province homophobia is completely exploding in schools—it’s hard not to blame the “snowflake left” for having played so easily into the hands of right-wing grifters. And I’d say that blame would be placed correctly.

One great problem with the internet social justice crusade was its own cannibalism, a feature commented on early enough by Mark Fisher in his famous “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” which now reads like a dark prophecy come true, as well as its inability to distinguish scale while failing to center material concerns—making everything into a “production,” treating petty personal concerns with the same gravity as major systemic issues, turning suffering into an endless “oppression olympics” rather than focusing on the shared conditions of that suffering, and so on. What was also at issue was an intellectually-lazy and pretentious obsession with the aforementioned “buzzwords” which became vague shorthand for a variety of issues which could be hand-waived away without providing clarity in good faith, or just plainly stupid 1:1 substitutions that make their utterer sound like a self-important dickweed, such as saying “Black bodies” when you mean “Black people” but are afraid of coming off as pedestrian and think the added jargon lends weight to your argument rather than simply making you seem like an unserious person. All of this turned into terrible PR, especially with its overexposure online, and we can’t pretend the negative examples were cherry-picked, because we all know that this kind of shit came to dominate the discourse for years, and few people spoke out about it out of fear of reprisals. The self-conscious neurosis was all-encompassing—the poet Robert Graves once described war as “an infection of the common sky,” an oppressive and all-consuming chaos without a point. This was an infection of the common web, a malignant nimbostratus in the eye of the cyber-gyre, a grim and confusing spectacle, and the more it leaked into the media the more confused it became.

A perfect encapsulation of said confused neurosis in that era is what transpired when they rebooted Clone High. Clearly concerned that the show would be accused of brownface due to the fact that the actor who had once played Cleopatra was white, the character was recast, in spite of the fact that the Ancient Egyptians have no equivalent modern descendants as there is no group on earth who can lay claim to any religion, culture, or language¹ which can significantly be said to descend from those of the Ancient Egyptians in the last nearly two thousand years, and with the current inhabitants of Egypt being largely Arabic in origin—to say nothing of the fact that Cleopatra’s lineage was from Ancient Macedonia in modern Europe.² To ameliorate this non-issue, the producers cast Mitra Jouhari, who is Iranian, which you may be aware is nowhere near Egypt, and she is of likely Persian ancestry, meaning she is not even Arabic like the modern-day inhabitants of Egypt. What did any of this mean? What was the point? No one seemed to acknowledge this decision at all. It came and went as just another confused attempt to resolve an issue no one raised.

Another: the production surrounding Disney’s live-action remake of Snow White, which has had a production history that is nothing short of carnivalesque. Preemptively concerned about reaction to the film on the basis of its title and the name of its central character, they cast Snow White as a non-white woman. Then, clearly relatedly, some pre-production photos got leaked and revealed a cast that looked like this:

Which seems weird? For a medieval European village? What kind of economy in their village led to it being so ethnically heterogenous? Still, they could not avoid the hot water, as Peter Dinklage got mad about the potential of a remake at all because he thought that the premise was offensive to people with dwarfism, and then some other actors with dwarfism chimed in to say they would be offended to have non-dwarfs play the dwarfs—and yet no attention seemed to be paid at all to the fact that the “dwarfs” in Snow White are not people with fucking dwarfism, they are mythological creatures and the term “dwarfism,” not coined until the 19th century, is a reference to them because they happen to be short, not the other way around. “Dwarfism” could have easily wound up being called “Gnomism” instead, or perhaps even “Hobbitism” had it been coined even later.

Eventually lead actress Rachel Zegler made some errant comments about the gendered politics of the film, probably just pointless red carpet interview filler, which went like this:

We have a different approach to what I’m sure a lot of people will assume is a love story just because we cast a guy in the movie, Andrew Burnap, great dude. It’s one of those things that I think everyone’s going to have their assumptions about what it’s going to be, but it’s really not about the love story at all, which is really, really wonderful.

Predictably this made all the usual suspects mad and the other usual suspects defend it, but… it is a stupid comment. Yes, traditionally women in stories have played a disproportionate amount of passive roles, but what is inherently wrong with an occasional “passive” chatacter, or even a love story? The alleged issue with representation in media posed by its adherants—the more coherent ones anyway—is not in quality but in quantity, that it isn’t a problem if a film “doesn’t pass the Bechdel test,” the problem is more the quantity of films in that category, and even then, these simple categories are far from clear. Princess Leia played a rather passive role in the original Star Wars, though was also depicted as strong-willed, wise-cracking, and brave enough to withstand torture—“passivity” is complicated.³ But even outside that context, is this debate about women’s representation even really topical anymore?

Here’s a tough pill to swallow for some: the proportionality of women’s representation in mainstream media is no longer a recognizable problem in the west. Four of the top ten films of 2024 on Metacritic were films where women had top billing, and when we consider that two of the ten were documentaries, that puts the representative share at an even half. Of the Academy Award nominees for best picture earlier that year, five of the ten had a woman with top billing. Three of the top ten box office films of the year were almost entirely centered around female characters (including Inside Out with the number one position) and the other seven were all sequels, four of which were in series nearly twenty-years old at minimum (that minimum being set by Kung Fu Panda 4) and so can probably be considered more emblematic of older trends. Okay, so we’ve arguably achieved gender parity in mainstream media—now what has that actually done for women in the real world? The gendered pay gap in Canada is fucking enormous, clocking in at a 17.1% difference between the median earnings of women and men last year, the seventh worst in the world. In the United States, the country that produces most of these films, that gap is over 19% and it has barely changed in twenty years. How many overbearing films do we have to put up with where some two-dimensional girlboss girlbosses away all of her problems before this “inspiration” trickles down to helping the overwhelming amount of women employed in sweatshops globally? We can now say without a doubt what was obvious to some of us from the get-go: this representation isn’t fucking worth shit. It is meaningless, pandering garbage, and what’s more it makes for shitty movies.

Disney makes a plethora of shitty movies—it’s their bread and butter—and their attempts to rage bait conservatives have become more and more obvious year by year, such as their hilariously-transparent move in the Star Wars space-fighter they produced, Star Wars: Squadrons, wherein you can play every combination of race and gender with the conspicious exception, specifically, of a white man. The plan with these cultural products, clearly, is to get people mad and thereby drum up free publicity through the ensuing discussion in a world where a lack of common media overlap and preponderance of adblock means a blockbuster film can come and go without some people even knowing it existed. The only reason these live-action remakes exist in the first place is so that Disney can practice a form of adaptive copyright hawking, and it’s hard to consider their appeals to “inclusivity” in a film like Snow White as being in good faith while also starring Gal Gadot, an Isaeli freak whose political views make the “evil queen” she is playing seem quaint by comparison.

This is why I have refused to identify as a “feminist” for almost a decade now. The label is too broad and overly-confused, and generally stands in for bourgeois concerns (the “glass ceiling” for women in the managerial class conflated with the abject suffering of disproportionately-exploited women in the working class). All these other nebulous labels—“anticolonial,” “antiracist,” “queer ally”—are likewise meaningless to me, and I have less than no interest in the “plight” of “marginalized” members of the bourgeoisie when compared to so-called “normative” members of the working class. I am a Marxist-Leninist, a label which suggests a specific mode of political economy, and one which already (theoretically and ideally) calls for universal suffrage of all peoples and it is a label which is more difficult to co-opt, while still allowing me to take aim at systems of exploitation on the grounds of race, gender, sexuality, and so on without contradiction. You should likewise favour more explicitly-defined labels and evade drawing associations between yourself and the infantile (and dominant) online segments of these movements. My beliefs and values—as espoused here—do not require these associated labels, they speak for themselves. The financiers of Hollywood films would never finance something they felt would risk upsetting the status quo in such a way as to challenge their interests—are they “feminists” or not? It’s an irrelevant question. Many of them do, I believe, possess these kinds of “liberal” sentiments about parity and inclusivity, but it amounts to nill and will only be expressed when it suits them. With rising cultural reactions, Hollywood will eventually fall in line and follow suit, their films will quietly abandon any pretense of “inclusivity” that is seen to stiffle shareholder growth. The rage bait is no longer working, the audience is getting bored, the sounds of the guns are growing dim along the frontlines of the culture war, the world is changing. When the Snow White remake comes out later this year it’s going to feel like an artifact from another fucking dimension.

As Trump begins his second term today, the door to the world of that old culture war is slamming shut behind us. We are entering a dark antechamber between two social epochs. What remains on the other side and how we who want change will get there will rely on the subtleties of action conducted while sitting in this waiting room. The “left” can either continue to exist around a cult of shame and guilt and continue to alienate the general public—in which case it will be left weighted down in the antechamber forever—or it can allow itself to become more robust, to affirm rather than shame, to embrace solidarity and not intersectional pettiness.

1. The use of coptic by the Coptic Orthodox Church is the most we get out of that last one.

2. There was that one stupid Netflix show that made her Black, with the director coming out to argue not that this was merely a colour-blind casting decision (which would at least be defensible) but argued that this was literally historically-accurate, with the decision being vociferously defended by culture warriors in spite of the fact that that it plainly runs counter to mainstream scholarship, and that this decision was probably rooted in the claims of reactionary Hoteps.

3. For what it’s worth, Leia’s role in the successive two films was a lot more involved and had her character making a lot more impactful decisions.