Queer'd Liberalism : Ch. 5

 V. FORGED ONLINE

Having analyzed the origins of the “Ketamine” style and broader Queer liberalism in great detail. We must now examine the particularly internet-centered character of the “Stephen Universe” style and the conditions of the specific areas of the internet from which it originates.

The liberalization of Queerness came as a direct result of the development of Queer society and the matriculation of publicly Queer people into various classes; however, this does not (at least exclusively) describe the formation of the “Stephen Universe” style. Unlike what may generally be considered liberal or assimilationist, the “Stephen Universe” style does not regard itself as such and still exists with full knowledge of— and a certain degree of resistance to— its marginalization. The “Stephen Universe” style is still “alternative” in the subcultural sense, while still lacking in the proletarian and rightly progressive character of the “Ketamine” style. The “Stephen Universe” style in this sense could be considered a backwards synthesis or an expression of the more general contradiction between proletarian and petit-bourgeois Queerness. 

So, on the matter of the internet— the internet has, through interest-based and engagement-rewarding algorithms, produced a level of alienation and atomization of subcultures and societies hitherto thought impossible. Social media platforms will one show a person what they choose to engage with and as such contains an immense propensity for the creation of “echo chambers” wherein little thought outside the bounds of the subculture may permeate. With each individual siloed into their insular subculture, the alienation first theorized by Marx and Engels— alienation of man from his labor— takes on a new form. Man is alienated from his very sense of self. 

Whereas we have decreed that personhood and identity are complex and— like any material processes— constantly in motion, the atomization of individuality into labeled subcultures leaves one with precisely the “bound knot” of identities that the metaphysicist would declare they were to begin with. Interests, communities, and the general particularities of being are compressed into simple descriptors. This turbo-alienation or “atomization” is what has led to the formation of the “Stephen Universe” style of Queerness. If identity is a bound knot of interests compressed into a subcultural label or “aesthetic,” and if its material basis— in all meaningful sense— is entirely obfuscated, then it becomes inevitable that one would conceptualize their identity from an idealist perspective. After all, in this space existence is defined not by the material processes from which life hath sprung forth, but from one’s own self-identification on a page. A page— it must be noted— that may itself be entirely divorced from any notions of reality. 

The internet, of course, is not an exclusively negative factor; however, the atomization resulting from the current stage of bourgeois social media must be noted for firm analysis. The “Stephen Universe” style’s obsession with media, with optics, with presentation, and with “respectability” is the natural conclusion of a social structure that is based merely in the ideas of existence rather than existence itself. It is an expression of the abstraction of personhood which occurs in the social media space. This is, again, not to say that the internet has not had extraordinary wonders. The ability to nigh-instantaneously communicate with billions across the world is alone enough to say that the internet is a progressive structure. That being said, under a bourgeois-dominant system, a structure that is fundamentally progressive may be distorted and perverted. The goal of the internet is not to connect individuals to each other, nor is its goal to fulfill any other social function. At a fundamental level, it is another vehicle by which a small handful of corporations and billionaires may increase their profits and enrich themselves. 

To summarize, it is the atomization of communities, the flattening of identity, and the abstraction of personality which gives to the “Stephen Universe” style its backward character. If one is only fed their present, comfortable, petit-bourgeois, and consumerist existence— if that is all one knows, then the possibility of material community becomes terrifying. Those of the “Stephen Universe” style are not backwards through moral failing, they are simply the other men in Plato’s cave[12].

[12] We are referencing the allegory of the men in the cave from Plato’s Republic. Having spent all their lives in the cave, the men are terrified of the outside world. When its existence is revealed to them, and they execute the person who first revealed it.