Intro
We’re in mid-December and I think this is the first week I actually feel like winter has arrived. Even though I grew up in a city where the summer starts around May and the heat rarely falls below 35 degrees Celsius during the day, I expect winter to arrive on time and actually feel like one. But thanks to climate crisis the seasons are shifting in unexpected ways and that makes me angry in a really unreasonable way.
Also arriving the mid-December means that I’m putting more and more time into planning the new year and think about what I can and want to do. If you think that we can do something together or need my brain and/or services, this is a good time to reach out.
Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing well.
Mission Control
Inbox: 93
RSS Reader: 3160
Upcoming Events/Travel in Next 30 Days: 1
- Received a request for a workshop training on Friday this morning, so I’l be in İstanbul on Thursday and Friday.
- Also visiting a university to give an interview for their media student’s magazine.
- Have two article ideas I want to work on and sell to publications before the year end.
- Starting the usual end-of-year toolbox and information sources maintenance. Which might be a good time to write couple of blog posts for the Generalist’s Toolbox blogchain I started and forgot about it in 2022.
From Last Week
- I was one of the guests on Turkish digital news outlet Medyascope’s “Açık Oturum” show to talk about Australia’s stupid social media ban for kids and teenagers and talked about what it’s a meaningless act and why every attempt to “protect kids” which doesn’t involve them is doomed to fail.
Check my Now page if you want to see what I’m up to in a more detailed way.
Notes on Culture and Elitism
For multiple related and unrelated reasons, I’ve been thinking about the concept of cultural elitism lately. So many half-baked ideas in my head and no idea where I’m going with any of these. Here are some of them.
I grew up in a culture and social atmosphere where anti-intellectualism was and still is the norm. People used the shortened word for intellectual in Turkish (entel) to mock with people, caricatures of the intellectual people regularly used as the butt of the joke in the media, and people used “don’t do jazz” and “don’t do philosophy” as a replacement for “shut up”. Some of those died down and replaced with other things but anti-intellectualist tendencies are still strong.
This is why the global rise of this trend during the last decade or so is something I’m quite familiar with. Combine it with the anti-elitism trick and you can craft the perfect tool to attack anyone who does intellectual work or turn them into a target.
At the very least, an atmosphere like this will start to make you feel bad or guilty for creating or doing anything intellectual or something that might be called elitist. You don’t actually agree with them but you’ll internalize that pressure. Because you’ll think that people labeling you like that will push you to the outside, and you don’t want to be alone. Even though you don’t actually be with those people either.
There are several side effects of the widespread anti-intellectualism and this flavor of anti-elitism. My mind is especially occupied with two of those.
First one is making intellectual work harder to access and find. Because of this pressure, both less people create this kind of work and its distribution also gets harder because less people are openly interested in it. This trend ends up creating cultural deserts where you have to fight your way to any kind of work that’s not popular or mainstream. And if you are not even aware of their existence, you’ll simply assume that what you can access is the limits of culture.
Second one is that this availability problem creates certain groups which some of them are just as dangerous as the anti-elitist groups. One of those are the ones who cosplay as an intellectual, people who wants to look like one and tries to intellectualize everything around them. This one isn’t always a bad thing, it can be a useful gateway drug. But it also creates the kind of people we usually see on places like Tumblr, Twitter or Bluesky who thinks their use of certain words or concepts makes whatever they say more important than it is. But whenever I see one of those, it’s usually a great excuse to post this GIF:
Another group created by this issue is the ones who take elitism to the extreme as a defence mechanism. Limited access to the intellectual work mixed with conservative tendencies makes certain people become over-protective about a frozen image of an intellectual. Sometimes this shows up in more old-school ways and sometimes it shows up as a TikTok video made by someone with an art history degree (you know that because it’s said at the beginning of the video) deciding what is digital art and what is not. Which is quite ironic coming from someone with that degree because all of the art history is filled with people we don’t even know their names but absolutely sure that this new thing was not art.
I see people always confuse availability and being popular. This is one of the main problems with the elitism and intellectualism discourse because when you talk about these things should be accessible, people assume you want those things to be mainstream or popular. But those are not the same things.
I want intellectual works, non-mainstream culture to be available because that’s how I was able to educate myself. I’m not from an elite family or something like that. I grew up poor, my whole education happened in Turkish state schools and yet I was able to go to bookstores to discover new things, find new music in stores and my horizon widened even more with the internet. This is the kind of availability I talk about.
Because I know not every cultural work or genre or idea is for everyone and neither it should be. There is and always will be some of those that aren’t for everyone because not everything has to be created for the majority. Ideas and creativity should not be watered down to please everyone because that’s how you’ll end up with the trending pages of the social media platforms and Spotify Top 100 playlists.
I know some people call it “democratization” or similar things but I feel like what they’re doing is actually preserving the mediocre. We ended up in a situation where anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism is the normal and now people are scared to criticize the popular stuff, create anything that might not be liked by “the people” or unusual or try new tools or ways of doing art. And the people who are called intellectuals are sad social media characters who spend their time fighting over meaningless stuff on the internet and feeding people who are always on the lookout for more material for their fight against intellectualism.
I think only way out is to accept that label and run with it. Be a weird little elitist who creates things and doesn’t care what others say or whether it will go viral or not. If people really wants to understand, they’ll do the work.
Song of the Week
“Don’t listen to what the silvers say
Their world is long gone
A leap or push, a path of love or of blood
Break from the past or a hunt”
Reading Log
I had some other highlights and notes but wanted to stick with the theme of this week and add couple of highlights from W. David Marx.
First one is from his “Culture is an Ecosystem: A Manifesto Towards a New Cultural Criticism”, which I returned for a re-read with these thoughts in my head recently. If you haven’t read it before, you really should.
“More important, poptimism was an obvious ideological extension of “hyper-modern” liberalism, what philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky identifies as the “desire for hyper-recognition which, rejecting every form of the contempt, depreciation or sense of inferiority under which one might suffer, demands the recognition of the other as equal in his or her difference.” To criticize pop culture — with its legions of fans — was to label millions of people inferior. Poptimism, thus, had a political agenda: the positive valuation of pop culture was a strike against elitism and discrimination. In a poptimist paradigm, old-style criticism took on the cast of bigotry.”
Culture is an Ecosystem: A Manifesto Towards a New Cultural Criticism (3)
Second one is from his recent appearance on the Craig Mod’s On Margins podcast, in which he talks about his new book Blank Space. It immediately entered to my to-read list and I’m planning to dive into it as soon as possible.
“I think the key thing is that I’m not saying that democratization is bad. I’m saying that we need to think about what we actually want from democratization. Like, do we want more culture or do we want better culture? And I think we’ve been optimizing for more culture and we haven’t been thinking about whether that culture is actually good or meaningful or valuable.”
W. David Marx — Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century — W. David Marx — On Margins — s02e04
Outro
Okay, this ended up longer than my usual Weekstarters but I’m happy with it. Brain dumping some of those ideas actually felt good and now I’m ready to dive deeper into it.
Guess that’s all from me for now. Take care of yourselves and I’ll see you around.
Leave a Reply