In a number of recent blogs we have used Cory Doctorow’s concept of ‘enshittification’ to capture some of our concerns with the ways that social, cultural, economic and political processes – energised by the so-called enshittification or platform decay identified by Doctorow – are increasingly characterised by various forms of racism, misogyny, proto-fascist, ‘strong man’ politics, and denials of the climate crisis and mass extinctions associated with crises in the dominant model of neoliberal global capitalism.
The most recent of these blogs – Enshittification and the World Wide Dead – showcased the innovative work of James Jackson who used this concept – accompanied by a creative ‘hand-made’ video – to highlight the effect that the decay of digital life has had on contemporary young people. For James, the question that frames his work is: how are young people’s identities shaped, distorted, and impacted by a decaying, fragmented and increasingly monetised digital space?
In a series of blogs over the coming weeks James Goring and I want to pick up on aspects of this ongoing work to explore the ways in which the concept of ‘enshittification’ foregrounds concerns with the increasingly powerful influence of platform economies in shaping young men and women’s engagement with each other, with the OTHER, with education, with the world in all its diversity and difference, opportunities and possibilities, inequalities and inequities.
And to think more critically, broadly and deeply, about how this concept can be leveraged in various ways, including in spaces such as this, to add to existing community, political and scholarly work on such things as the ‘manosphere’, ‘toxic masculinity’, young people’s identities, the crises of capitalism, and the politics of identity.
‘Adolescence’ and Making Sense of the Manosphere
In one of the recent posts we indicated that we would return to a more detailed examination of the ways in which the highly successful Netflix series ‘Adolescence’ might be ‘read’ as a text that opens points of entry for many of these issues. As we indicated at that time, a review of ‘Adolescence’ in The Guardian suggested that the series:
lays bare how an outwardly normal but inwardly self-loathing and susceptible youngster can be radicalised without anyone noticing. His parents recall Jamie coming home from school, heading straight upstairs, slamming his bedroom door and spending hours at his computer. They thought he was safe. They thought they were doing the right thing. It’s a scenario which will ring bells with many parents. Some will be alarm bells.
There is often a glaring gap between parents’ blissfully ignorant image of their children’s lives and the truth of what they get up to online. We think they’re playing Roblox but they’re actually on Reddit. We think they’re doing homework or innocently texting mates. They are watching pornography or, as DS Frank pithily puts it, “that Andrew Tate shite”.
This 2018 podcast from New York Public Radio station WNYC – Making Sense of the Manosphere – was produced in the aftermath of Alek Minassian’s van attack in Toronto, Canada, which killed ten people and injuring sixteen. In it, various commentators seek to make sense of the catch-all phrase ‘manosphere’:
The manosphere includes a wide range of responses, from fathers’ rights groups, to tips on pick-up artistry, to the so-called Proud Boys, a far-right fraternity that restricts masturbation to once a month, to Men Going their Own Way, or MGTOWs, whose website abounds with contempt for women and the civil society that’s empowered them.
We will explore these and other elements of the enshittification of platform capitalism as we develop our reading of ‘Adolescence’.
‘Adolescence’ tells the story of 14 year old Jamie Miller – and his mum and dad, his sister, friends, school community, police and psychologist – from the morning after he stabbed to death his 13 year old classmate, Katie. Created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, and directed by Philip Barantini, the series – identified by many as ‘the closest thing to TV perfection in decades’ – is a deeply harrowing experience which brings into question so much about where we are at at this moment in history, politics, society, schooling, technology. And which we feel compelled to reflect on, and to unpack some of the elements that resonate for us as academics, teachers, parents, and students.
But what can a ‘fictional’ account of a young man’s radicalisation in the ‘manosphere’ tell us and others about the concerns we have here. After all, as a work of ‘fiction’ it is, by definition, not ‘real’.
‘The Blue River of Truth’
Over a decade ago Peter K published an article in the Journal of Youth Studies that was titled: ‘Breath’ and the truths of youth at-risk: allegory and the social scientific imagination.
PK’s intention there was to suggest that Tim Winton’s 2008 novel Breath could be read as an allegorical tale about the terror of being ordinary: and of the teenage years as being a time in a life in which the fear of being ordinary compels Winton’s key characters – Pikelet and his mate Loonie – to seek out, sometimes stumble upon that which promises to make theirs a life less ordinary.
In Winton’s novel, risk is something that breathes energy and purpose into Pikelet and Loonie’s lives in a remote coastal town in South West, Western Australia. Lives that are dominated by the institutionalised ordinariness of family, of being a certain type of man, of school, and of work. At one point, in reflecting on his first encounter with surfing, Pikelet recalls:
I couldn’t have put words to it as a boy, but later I understood what seized my imagination that day. How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared…In Sawyer…men did solid, practical things, mostly with their hands…there wasn’t much room for beauty in the lives of our men. (p. 23)
As a reviewer of Breath observed at that time:
Who would have thought that a novel about an extreme sport, surfing the wild swells and sets off the south-western coast of Australia, would be about nothing less than the infirm glory of the human condition and the damage left in the wake of tasting the limits set for our human frame? Tim Winton’s Breath is as much a novel about surfing as The Old Man And The Sea is about fishing and Moby Dick about whale-hunting. (Mukherjee 2008)
PK suggested that, as an allegorical tale told from the vantage point of hindsight, Breath unsettles what it is that the social sciences can tell us about youth (as becoming) and risk (as mitigated by prudential foresight).
In that context we were suggesting that there are multiple, diverse ways in which we, as humans, can tell and read stories that might not be ‘real’, but which can be powerfully ‘true’. We closed our discussion of the ways in which Breath could be read with what English critic James Wood (2008, pp. 178-179) suggests that we might find if we go looking for meaning and knowledge in practices other than the ones we are often encouraged, even compelled, to use in the practice of twenty-first century social science.
Wood argues that:
‘the question of fiction’s referentiality – does fiction make true statements about the world? – is the wrong one, because fiction does not ask us to believe things (in a philosophical sense) but to imagine them (in an artistic sense)’.
Here, imagining:
‘the heat of the sun on your back is about as different an activity as can be from believing that tomorrow it will be sunny. One experience is all but sensual, the other wholly abstract’.
This sense of imagination provides a means to move beyond the problematic arena of reality, to a sometimes more problematic notion of truth. If, as Wood (2008, p. 180), suggests we:
‘throw the term ‘‘realism’’ overboard, we can account for the ways in which, say, Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Hamsun’s Hunger and Beckett’s Endgame are not representations of likely or typical human activity, but are nevertheless harrowingly truthful texts’.
In truth, if not in reality, we can imagine:
‘what it would feel like to be outcast from one’s family, like an insect (Kafka), or a young madman (Hamsun), or an aged parent kept in a bin and fed pap (Beckett)’.
And so as we encounter a variety of texts – such as Breath or ‘Adolescence’ – we can stumble upon what Wood (2008, p. 184) calls the ‘blue river of truth’: the space in which we might engage
‘scenes and moments and perfectly placed words in fiction and poetry, in film and drama, which strike us with their truth, which move and sustain us, which shake habits’ house to its foundations’.
In the next blog in this series we develop our critical account of the story and how others have read it.
References
Mukherjee, N., 2008. The only way is down after ultimate high. Tim Winton book review. [online]. Scotland on Sunday. Available from: http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/book reviews/The-only-way-is-down.4116836.jp [Accessed 8 July 2008].
Winton, T., 2008. Breath. London: Picador.
Wood, J., 2008. How fiction works. London: Jonathon Cape.