CAN HYPER-SINCERITY SAVE US?
RECENTLY, INTERNET CREATIVES ARE TRANSFORMING THEIR VULNERABILITIES INTO STRENGTH, BREAKING DOWN ALL BARRIERS OF HUMAN RESPECT. IS THE FEAR OF RIDICULE EXPERIENCING ITS FINAL HOURS?
LINK: https://josephmatheny.com/2023/11/25/can-hyper-sincerity-save-us/
Photo caption: BEWARE OF THE DOJA CAT_ After insulting her fans or incurring the wrath of Anna Wintour at the MET Gala for having a cigarette – Anna hates it – Doja Cat is nevertheless a hit with her latest album, Scarlet. Pissing off everyone would be a profitable strategy, because Scarlet has more than 70 million monthly listeners on Spotify. A record.
Insulting your fans multiple times, losing a million subscribers, then occupying the top 3 of the Billboard charts with a new album that persists and makes a mark, it’s possible. “Yeah, bitch, I said what I said,” raps mega pop star Doja Cat, in her latest track “Paint the Town Red” – currently #2 Billboard. It all started last July, when she asked her fans to stop calling each other “kittenz”, someone asked her what to replace kitten with on her Insta profile. Doja Cat responds: “Just delete the entire account and rethink everything. It’s never too late.” She then calls her hardcore fans “creepy”, and urges them to “get a job”. Hard.
She loses a million followers, but has no regrets, quite the contrary. “Seeing all these people stop following me, I feel like I’ve conquered a big beast that’s been holding me back for so long. I feel like I can reconnect with people who really matter to me, and who love me for who I am today, instead of who I was yesterday. I feel free,” she explained. To symbolize this rebirth, she shaves her head and applies her own advice by cleaning up her Insta, to make way for a Doja Cat who will never censor herself again.
“I USE MY EMBARRASSMENT AS A WEAPON, TO MAKE PEOPLE BE MORE COMFORTABLE. » – SABRINA “TUBE GIRL”
At the same time, Sabrina Bahsoon (aka tube girl), became a global star overnight with Tiktok videos where she dances without restraint in London underground trains, hair blowing in the wind – with embarrassed travelers in the background. Sabrina is not afraid of ridicule, she uses it as a strength. “I use my embarrassment as a weapon, to inspire people to be more comfortable wearing what they want. »
Thanks to the millions of views generated by her extraordinary uninhibitedness, she is already occupying the front rows of fashion weeks, collaborating with Boss and Valentino, and above all inspiring millions of people to free themselves from the gaze of others, to find comfort. in an exaggerated version of oneself – but sincere. Some people talk about “exposure therapy”. With this movement which transforms our faults into strength, this sort of digital hyper-authenticity, we can ask ourselves: does the Internet make us more sincere?
METOO DES WEIRDOS
On the networks, we have recently seen the emergence of a wave of freedom of speech around the psychological particularities of each person, with the hashtag #MentalHealth, a kind of MeToo for weirdos. And the form is not necessarily funny, because it all passes through the filter of post-irony. An ultra-sincere humor that exaggerates reality, to reach an intermediate space between irony and acceptance. By exaggerating our situation, which we will deride, we can better control it.
Post-irony is a bit like the character laughing and crying at the same time. On the French Insta account Shlagmin, we find an image of a fully saturated Bugs Bunny, with biftons, a cigar and big gibberish, and accompanied by the text: “I’m retarded”. Yes! We are all together.
And as always with Internet trends, we find this latent ultra-sincerity in the creations of avant-garde fashionistas. The young Californian brand Praying, for example, sells “Sick of myself” caps, and at OGBFF we offer “I do whatever I want” or “cancelled adjacent” tops – worn by Doja Cat –, and sold on a site that looks like Web 1.0 blog. Being canceled would almost have become cool. Angela Ruis and Lauren Schiller, best friends and co-founders of OGBFF, say they are “very inspired by friendship. Close friends have the opportunity to cultivate a sense of humor where one can cry with laughter over something that is not at all funny outside the context of the friendship. Today we are able to achieve this on a much larger scale. »
This impression of a giant cyber-pajama party on Tiktok also exists because the Internet has the capacity to bring together communities of people who understand each other, and are therefore more sincere and free with each other. All facets of human existence can thus find an audience and be accepted. These niche communities are then all safe places where spaces of ultra-sincerity can develop.
COZY WEB & INTERMITE
“I now work with smaller groups, rather than wanting to speak to the whole world. We have better exchanges, more sincere, clearer, more precise, in a group of no more than a hundred people. The mass media only thinks about one thing, how to make a generic blend to reach millions of people, instead of something really powerful for a hundred people, which will inspire others,” explains Joseph Matheny, pioneering American artist of internet culture, creator of the first alternate reality game. Since his semi-fictional project overtook him to become a conspiracy theory, he only works in small groups.
This desire for sincerity on the Internet even has a name: the cozy web. A welcoming Internet, on a smaller scale, less ephemeral, allowing more concentration and complexity. If the leading French cyberpsychologist Serge Tisseron created the term extimacy to designate external intimacy, shared by as many people as possible on networks, we could here speak of intermity, to evoke intimacy shared in a restricted group and interconnected.
And if today the latest fashionable aesthetics (like the “frutiger aero”, the successor to Y2K) are inspired by old versions of Windows, cozy comes in all forms. We find it in cozy yoga, or in the success of cozy games like Animal Crossing, or even in fashion – always –, where cozy is the evolution of the cocoon, with comfortable clothes, but designed for the outdoors . It’s about being in public as you are alone at home. But in hyper-sincerity, everything is not just beige and comfort, quite the contrary. Tiktok also being a network designed to connect strangers, the exchanges inexorably encourage a certain disinhibition… Sometimes to the point of excess.
GOT THE MESSAGE ?_
The era of ultra-sincerity marks the great return of clothes with a message – and of shaved heads in their post-cringe version. Here a mini-skirt from the OGBFF brand presents us with a Y2K and post-ironic equivalent of Magritte’s “ceci n’est pas une pipe”, the first meme-lord.
CRINGE, BUT FREE
When this hyper-sincerity is pushed to the max, it then takes the form of cringe – this feeling of embarrassment that travelers feel when they meet the gaze of the tube girl dancing alone in the metro. A little awkward, but very liberating – at least if you believe the popular meme that says, “I am cringe, but I am free”.
In an age of the attention economy and the tyranny of emotions, cringe is an ultra-powerful weapon to attract attention. But it also corresponds to an aesthetic of the bizarre, which is emulated. On Doja Cat’s Insta, we find montages of her with Gollum’s head, photos of cereals with mayo, or weird insects. We find this bizarre side among the alien designers at Matières Fécales, or at Collina Strada with its parades of creatures from a bad remake of the Grinch.
Some are speaking outright of a new post-cringe era, “a cultural movement that frees us from the chains of cringe (…) It is only a matter of time before what was acceptable before becomes cringe, and what is was cringe becoming acceptable (…) don’t avoid cringe, be based,” explains jREG, author of a post-cringe manifesto. The term “based” was adopted by the Internet underground to designate this bizarre, but very original, way of being, and is now used even on Hollywood film sets – as by the filmmaker Harmony Korine, for discuss his latest experimental film Aggro Dr1ft.
Coming from a 2010s rap sound from outsider Lil B, the term says a lot about the current state of mind. “When I was young, based was a negative term for drunks that people used to make fun of me. (…) I turned this negative into a positive. I embraced that, like: yeah, I’m based. I made it mine. I integrated it. Based is positive. » he explained. Today, connected youth are integrating cringe and making it their own.
You just have to look at the latest shoot led by Harmony Korine for Marc Jacobs’ new “zine” to see that cringe and vulnerability are very much in the wind. Korine shoots Young Lean – the most depressive rapper in the game – who poses in a neck brace and crutches. There is also a photo of a man in a shopping cart, with a mask, a blonde wig, a teddy bear, and balloons. Very creepy, very cringe, very cool.
Accepting the vulnerable weirdo deep inside us would therefore be the height of cool right now for all those hipsters who came to algos. Because there is no ultra-sincerity without the dark side of the force. For British artist Luke Turner, pioneer of this new sincerity, “our way of perceiving the full spectrum of our existence and the human condition has evolved greatly, because the idea of normality no longer exists. Extra-normativity is a relic of the past. » But then, where will this lead us? For Joseph Matheny, “this culture of memes and sincerity is what precedes religion, because it precedes words in a sense.” Tomorrow, Generation Alpha could therefore pray to Pepe The Frog or Sponge Bob, and embrace a new Trinity: sincerity, empathy, optimism.
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#hypersincerity #save