Somehow, in one of those accidents that befall those who spend too much time on the Internet without much intent, I came across a TikTok a fellow writer had pointed out. In it, a young American woman with one of those slightly dead-sounding LA voices goes on about “manifestation.” You roll your eyes, but some of these videos have millions of views and likes.
For the uninitiated, “manifestation” is the idea that you literally will good things into being. You decide you want “financial abundance” or a holiday in the South of France and you “manifest” it from the universe. It’s like prayer, I guess, except unapologetically selfish.
Elsewhere, the BBC informs me Megan Boni, a random TikToker, has gone viral for a 20-second song she made up and sung in a stupid voice for a joke about wanting a boyfriend in finance with a trust fund, a song that has been remixed by David Guetta and resulted in an actual record company offering her — a woman who has no musical ability or has ever written a proper song — an actual serious record deal. She turned the deal down, saying, “I was like: ‘what makes you think I can write a song? What makes you think I could write an album?’” but nonetheless says she will “ride the wave of the song,” appearing in Vegas with Guetta and hoping to appear on Saturday Night Live.
If this isn’t enough, front page on the BBC news page today is a “review” of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in Edinburgh. “Review” being in apostrophes because the BBC seems to have some contractual obligation to promote Taylor Swift with daily articles brimmed with insipid praise. Review might imply considering, say, how the city turfed out the homeless in order to make way for the avalanche of Swift tourists, or the utter vacuity of her song lyrics. But no, all they care about is that one of the songs is “believed to be about actor Jake Gyllenhaal.” The whole thing reads like a post on a Taylor Swift fan forum rather than supposedly “impartial” national news outlet whose basis is meant to include the avoidance of “undue prominence.”
This is the same BBC who recently ran an article promoting the singer Kim Petras, whose EP “Slut Pop Miami” they call “an outrageous, sex-positive, club-ready tribute to the joys of carnal pleasure.” Petra’s songs include “Get fucked,” “Cockblocker,” and “Butt Slutt,” the later including the lyrics “Do it, do it, lube it, lube it / Gotta put your back into it / Smack it, smack it, ass-attack it / Push your balls up on my racket.” Do we point out that this ludicrously gratuitous and listlessly shallow view of sex is the result of a generation numbed by pornography and TikTok? No. It’s “upbeat and escapist,” reflective of “sexual liberation.” You can’t make it up.
All of this feels like a weird joke, a parody culture. Except it isn’t. The BBC, a half-respectable news outlet, wrote all of these articles with dead seriousness. That TikToker talks about “manifesting” without a single snigger, without an ounce of self observation that what she is describing is utterly shallow, desperately selfish, and more than that just unimaginably dumb. People are being bombed and she’s telling millions of followers that if they just “manifest” from the universe they’ll get whatever they want.
Of course, perhaps this is just a warped perspective of culture the Internet provides. Perhaps I just looked on the BBC on the wrong day. Or perhaps not. We know this generation is literally getting dumber(1), test scores globally are going down, and we know 11- to 14-year-olds spend an average of 9 hours a day looking at screens (2). The massive rise in mental health issues in the young since 2012 also reflects the fact that this effect is not just shallowness of culture but that it is ultimately bad to those who grow up in this bizarre online world. From rising anxiety, depression, and eating disorders, we must at least acknowledge that whatever we are doing, the young are not being helped by it.
Because we do not say or notice enough how bizarre this is. Ejecting the homeless from a city so we can blindly praise someone who talks like they’re a fourteen year old in a high school corridor and writes songs about nothing but countless vacuous relationships with ex-boyfriends is not to be celebrated, praising an artist whose lyrics are “Butt slut / Butt slut / Doggy, doggy, rough, rough” should be met with despair, record companies being so profit-oriented and completely empty of concern for music or culture that they would offer a TikToker who has never written a song a music deal just because she went viral should utterly utterly appall us.
But it doesn’t, why not? Somehow we seem to have lost the ability to apply the perspective we naturally possess in the real world to the online world we are all spending inordinate amounts of time on. Somehow we have lost the ability to recognise that culture forms our world, that it is a meaningscape in which we exist, and that it has actual consequences. The rise in youth mental health problems should tell us this, yet the BBC can run all these articles alongside “mental health awareness” articles without the slightest acknowledgement of their po-faced, idiotic participation in the causes of said mental health problems.
But perhaps I’m shouting into a vacuum, or an angry man yelling at a cloud. Or perhaps not. I don’t think at this point there is anything that will stop us driving the wagon of culture off the cliff we have turned it towards, but at least our attentions are sufficiently absorbed that we won’t have to notice. Rather like pointing out the ludicrousness of Trump will never get through to a Trump supporter, the same blindness afflicts those who think this culture is saving us rather than ruining us. But what can you do? Now I’m going to go and manifest a cup of tea, then go outside to the actual world.
Written By: Matthew.
This article was originally published on Medium.