I just had yet another mailing list email referring to its subscribers as a “community.” Of all of the abuses of language, this one possibly bothers me the most. Like… how is it that I have no practical way of talking to or even meeting anyone else in “the community?” It’s downright shameful (and misleading) how so many people use such deceptive marketing techniques.
I think about this a lot: specifically, is what appears to be society-wide cynicism a direct result of the economy collapsing circa 2008? When I was a kid, I thought the world …no… the US, in any case, was a fairly friendly place. Nowadays, it seems like scams built on scams, and it seems like more people elect to participate each day.
My own sense is that societal stability derives specifically from a common baseline of honesty everywhere. Increasingly, it looks like the baseline is no longer shared.
And I will add to this. In order to even _have_ a shared baseline, you need to share a language and/or references. For instance, you can share common distinct references with ersatz sign language, but your ability to discuss ideas is severely degraded.
In addition to the sales email that triggered me, I was thinking about this in the context of a reddit thread I saw. The thread said that life, now, is essentially akin to the one envisioned in “cyberpunk” novels of yesterday. This got me to thinking about how the reddit post only uses the words to articulate that because the person posting is able to make the shared reference. The very term “cyberpunk” was (I think) coined by William Gibson, who is still alive. Moreover, the future he envisioned was in the context of Reagan/Thatcher and broad public collapse under the auspices of “the free market.” The term describes something highly contextual rather than something inherent.
When I put these two concepts together, I see something frightening: our ability to communicate entails sharing a language — and that doesn’t simply mean “English.” Rather, we need shared cultural references to merely communicate effectively. Nowadays, I hear a barrage of references to people whose names are unfamiliar. I was thinking this is a sign that I’m getting old, but I think it’s more insidious than merely age. The www has become the dominant method of disseminating/sharing culture, yet the dark side of that is that shared references will no longer be shared. Like, who’s the most famous pop star now? I have no idea. During the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, it seemed like the mega-famous pop star (Michael Jackson, Madonna, Britney Spears) was ascendant. However, as time advances, I start to get the impression the pop stars are on borrowed time (not Michael Jackson tho).
And so how do I connect these ideas? Are they even related?
And, like, the meaning of words is important to me. Without that, we really have nothing. Everything is defined relative to something else. I am all for disassembling many aspects of society, as they are profoundly unfair and sometimes even hostile. However, once words broadly no longer mean what they purport to mean, we have serious problems.