Shiny Objects

The story of this week, for those of you who were camping somewhere with no cell or wifi signal, was whether some non-negligible number of Americans believe that the actress Sydney Sweeney is a secret Nazi because of a pun in an ad campaign she was featured in, which starred, like most of her roles, her big naturals.

The story felt like a spacetime wormhole to five years ago, when people actually cared about things like this. But actually it was something much simpler, scientifically speaking: it was fake. There were probably 200 people in America who cared about the imaginary political implications of American Eagle’s snickering ad copy, and they were all internet fiends whose political consciousnesses were forged by the Covid-19 pandemic, which is to say they were brain damaged. Everything else was hype: the right-wing “backlash” to the non-existent liberal outrage, the media feeding frenzy over said fake outrage, the Vice President of the United States ridiculing the fabricated inanity of his political enemies, the President doing the same.

Back in 2020, these kinds of crazy episodes emanated from something that was actually happening in the culture: people were sincerely outraged by the most frivolous offenses, institutions with real power threw themselves behind the online mobs, meaningful consequences were suffered by people both famous and ordinary. This, by contrast, was a deepfake. We’re years past the mass psychosis formation of Peak Woke; none of the cultural conditions are in place for anything like this to actually occur again.

But 2020 was a great year for both the media and conservatives. Every day, journalists could wake up, see what’s trending on Twitter, and grind out some irresistible clickbait slop before their kids had even logged into their Zoom classrooms. Then every Republican in the country could jump into the fray, churn out some hackneyed viral snark about the blue-haired libtards and watch their follower counts grow, while their left-leaning friends and neighbors ran for their foxholes, hoping to make it to the end of the workday without being asked for their opinion on the latest cultural landmine.

There are a lot of people who would love to have that season of easy layups back again. So they’re memeing it into existence. All that’s required is a very bad take and a few anonymous, low-follower social media accounts that may or may not be right-wing shitposter sock puppets to voice it. That’s what happened with Sydney Sweeney and her denim-clad, Aryan Sisterhood mammary glands.

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