XXVI. Essay by…Meltdown_Your_Books
Meltdown_Your_Books works by day as a carpenter in North Suffex. They are a happy grandmother of three and a dedicated gardener for her expansive 4 hectare garden. She has interests in ancient Roman architecture, specifically focused on aqueducts and waste management. She received a bachelors degree from the College of London in mathematics sumo cum laudi. MYB is also an anonymous subject. She is not a faced and orientated actor. It would not matter if her digital presence blinked out and was itself replaced by another clay soldier. Below, an incisive, relatable, and perspicacious meditation on the autophagic oddity of content, its history, and its consumption!
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Terracotta Soldiers: Replaceable Figures in the Non-Historicity of Digital Culture
Before there was @meltdown_your_books there was a loose assemblage of Instagram pages which framed the possibilities of philosophy-based content on the platform. A pigeonhole inside a pigeonhole surely, but there was nonetheless a clear set of these precedent pages, and a meaningful handful of creators who determined the tone and orientation of the “theorygram” space- as we called it back then. These names come to my mind easily as the people who inspired me to forfeit so much of my time to something so abjectly stupid, but the specific character of their roles in that story are not so easy to pass onwards. Most of these precursor pages have grown dark, closed, or reinvented themselves. An astounding loss of records of such a degree that if any history of this highly niche internet space exists - if at all - it is an entirely oral history. It is simply not possible through any archiving or any delicate reconstruction of what remains to conceptualize, or to make a sufficiently primary source-based account of it. History, in this instance, reinvents itself in time as new stories formulate the conditions of the now through the memory of specific actors within it. Its specificity and niche position ensure that it will not last through time, its significance is involuted and implosive, relevant only to itself, far too dense to pull apart, and surely who would care to bother? Within one generation, this history will pass into nothingness, its transience ensured by its own speed and hyper-individual character.
But this niche was no immaculate conception, and its birthplace from 4chan’s /lit/, lefty-pol, philosophy forums, Bernie Sanders meme pages, philosophy twitter, and the million little rat holes its creators pulled themselves through each day is itself a history obliterated by time, one impossible to properly conceptualize by those of us in the second generation. And what of the generation before them? Surely in long dead philosophy forums the works of Nick Land and Deleuze have inspired group-signification and the creation of a unique and specific cultural language which has filtered down irrecoverably into the landscape as we hold it now.
This quality of non-historicity is a form which far predates historicity. It is the culture of oral lineages which defines the pre-civilizational form, and in the contemporary sphere, it still far eclipses the world of historicity which the modern era believes itself to have entered. The infinite qualities of human interactions and works which surround you are, by and large, things which are defined by this non-historicity. Perhaps it is trivial for you to call to mind, or to find through trivial record checking, who created the lightbulb, but can you call to name the person, or company, or even the country which invented the particular kind of glass, metal alloys, and manufacturing techniques which constitute its physical form? Can you call to mind the designers who conceptualized its particular screw shape and size? It has been said that these ideas form a sort of “tradesman history” which is intrinsically less interesting than the “platonic history”, a history which traces the creators of pure ideas and significant historical moments.
The invention of a lightbulb, many will say, far eclipses the history of its specific superseding iterations in terms of importance. But even if we accept such platonic ideas on history’s worth, still the gaps come to eclipse the light. While the history of inventions and scientific creations seems deliberate and settled - though often it is not, lest we forget the exhaustive and unsettled history of the eggs benedict - the cultural landscape remains a fever. The gestures and words, the places and times, each bear a diffuse and unspecific history which we often can only vaguely gesture towards, intimations originating in localities and time periods. The brunt of social existence is one of non-historicity.
The fading evidence of this particular Instagram niche seems, at a cursory glance, wholly unremarkable, one of a million cultural holes that diffuse into a general social knowledge. Many acute internet users even perceive this non-historical quality of the internet’s culture as an archaic and ancient quality. Far from the recorded and deliberate cultural sphere of the 20th century, with its recordable and densely annotated dialogues, the internet regains a sparseness. Spirituality is imbued in the fading bytes and pixels as they circulate and dissipate, mimicking the diffuse qualities of traditions and ceremony. The passage of images takes on the fading social landscape of the lived-in world, and by extension it comes to bear the brunt of a spiritual need. The internet is perceived as escaping modernity’s gravity, bearing elements of a Landian post-humanity or a neo-religious return of the unspoken. These integrated social circuits come to bear the aspect of the thing which cannot be spoken, they escape historicity by escaping the bounds of its possibilities.
The equation of post-modern appearances to ancient and pre-modern ones however is highly misleading, and the equation of post-modernity with a post-human character perhaps doubly so. Where non-historicity in the pre-civilization era extends from a lack of formalized recordkeeping and a deindividualization within collective forms, this post-modern quality extends from just the opposite. The internet is as deliberate a record keeping institution as is conceivably possible, and its collective appearance is not an aspect of hypo-individualization but of hyper-individualization. The specific components of this non-historicity, in a place like Instagram, extends from an extreme version of the qualities which make modernity’s historicity possible. It is a condition stemming not from an inversion or a rejection of modernity’s precepts, but of their own implosive scale.
When records become this exhaustive and this integrated into the individual, they become so detailed, deliberate, controlled, and individuated as to escape the conceivable bounds of what a historical method can bear. The records which detail the niche of a niche so small as “theorygram” would be so great and of such a vast and insurmountable scale as to fill a hundred libraries a hundred times over. And this would contain only the pruned and highly individuated records which still remain.
The internet of my own childhood has passed through such a dense sieve of personal choice and iterative recording processes such that what remains has no more historical quality than the fragmented and incidental history we keep of our pre-modern history. Sporadic saves and deceptively pruned archives account for perhaps a passing glimpse of that internet given at such a specific angle as to be more specious than illuminating, while simultaneously accounting for records far beyond the conceivable scale.
It has been estimated that over 75% of all silent-era films have been lost, an immense loss which still lingers in the collective imagination of film theorists, representing the bulk of the historical and artistic body that accounts for the discovery and refinement of the cinematic language. Comparatively, it is impossible to even imagine predicting what percentage of the internet as accessible on a certain day in 2002 remains, and so instead the loss is immeasurable, unfelt. The cultural linearity that allowed for the development of a cinematic language through deliberate record keeping and historical narrativization collapses in the world of the Hegel-based meme, let alone in the world of a massive cultural behemoth like makeup tutorials. As individual record control and record noting methods have exploded in quality - with the preservation of pages, dates, comments, stories, thumbnails, descriptions, crossposting references, tags, and hashtags - the actual historicity of such information crumbles. On the most widely used and highly annotated platforms of Instagram or Tik-Tok, the extraction of information has never been harder, and tracking down a vaguely remembered meme has never been more difficult.
Unable to mourn this loss, since its unimaginable scale cannot be wrangled with, cultural linearity and historicity collapse inward. Cultural speed accelerates, but with no reference to its own past, it consumes itself and combines across space and time without regard. Y2K comes to eat any historical "reality” of the digital 2000s and become a non-history of its own. A consuming and active non-history which makes no meaningful portrait of the 2000s as it “was”, instead actively modeling this historical object into the needs and speeds of its own active processes. Historicity no longer becomes an immutable quality, but a gelatinous and pliable one. The boundary between the model and its subject evaporates and the history, its use value, and its historicity become one.
