I'm walking straight between the paths, with fabulous nails and a fucked up lipstick.
Unironic Jokerfication sounds depressing as fuck. Like, you accept that the world is a terrible place, but then lean into that and just laugh at all the terrible things? You can be nihilistic while still being positive. Nothing matters, so what have you got to lose by trying to build a happier world for others?
You can be nihilistic while still being positive.
I know this comes naturally to zoomers but this is a foreign concept to a lot of millennials, who wasted their teens and twenties actually being Emotionally Invested in doomed causes like actually preventing climate change and ecological collapse, as if it weren't too late by the time most of them were in primary school. We spent our youths living in denial that our entire adult lives would be spent bearing witness to apocalyptic event after apocalyptic event ad nauseam and going nuts seeing people (especially older people conditioned to believe they could get nuked at any moment) still pretend like this shit is somehow Okay and Normal and that long-term planning is somehow possible under these unstable conditions, that dystopian fiction stories were horrifying thought experiments rather than sober, grounded warnings of what was almost certainly inevitable with the collapse of the Soviet Union completely locking us into a path to Hellworld.
How the fuck does an observant millennial respond to these conditions other than through some combination of revolutionary radicalization and/or at least partial, mild Jokerfication, if they don't go blackpilled or get tricked into fascism? Is it any wonder we had so many school shooters in the US in the 2000s and 2010s? For some of us, embracing revolutionary ideas wasn't initially a hopeful or optimistic act, but a spiteful, desperate, vengeful one. The liberals promised us a future, that Progress (not just economic, but social) was all but inevitable, and we know what could have been if they weren't lying-ass two-faced shitstains. Instead we live in a Verhoeven-esque (if not Kafka-esque) cyberpunk novel with most of the hopeful "punk" elements stripped away, where the Bad Guys Always Win (even when they "lose") and with the hamfisted satirical elements cranked up to 11 with zero subtlety.
Funnily enough, I got jokerfied early on, 9/11 conspiracy radicalized me at an early age and introduced me to anti-imperialism and radical politics.
I feel like i skipped the step of "be a liberal who is invested in hopeful progress", then in 2015/2016 as an adult I was roped back into it with bernie. So I probably had the opposite trajectory to the typical one you outline well here.
I seem to be getting some positive feedback for this post so I want to emphasize that going full doomer isn't a good idea. The role of Marxists, the builders of revolutionary workers' parties, is to give people a genuine source of hope. This is incredibly difficult to do without first disabusing cynical and demoralized people of a tendency to equivocating any and all forms of hope with false hope.
Those who believe that a better world was possible and have given up must be convinced that it still is possible if they're to become useful to liberation movements rather than defaulting to reactionary thought or resorting to useless small-scale terror after taking the black pill and collapsing under the added weight of the last straw. Capitalist realism is the first barrier that has to be broken, a barrier only penetrable through consistent, disciplined organization. Think about the working- and lower-middle-class libs who wanted M4A but voted for Biden...in the primary. Consider the grim pessimism that must have compelled the Bernie voters who refused to let go and move on to independent socialism to vote for Biden in the general, knowing fully that they were still voting against their class interests.
Imagine if the Greens or PSL had had their shit together ten years ago, how dramatically different the conversation might have been. Imagine if the DSA weren't led by Dem-entryists, and had focused more on non-electoral work and developing their membership instead of using the Bernie hype to accumulate thousands of inactive paper members. Imagine if SAlt had stood against the stream and refused to endorse Bernie or tail behind DSA. The road to cynicism and despair that still haunts us is paved not only with broken promises by liberals, but failures and shortcomings on the part of what should be the organized left. I still hold a grudge against the surviving boomer left for selling out completely to the Democrats and NGOs, especially the ex-revolutionaries who absolutely should have fucking known better. Especially the sheepdog sellouts like Bernie, who peddled false hope in reformism and collaborated with the enemy instead of pointing the way forward when his bid inevitably failed.
I’m doomed. I’m going to die, be forgotten as years go on, and slowly everything about me will be as lost to the void as I am. The crushing weight of existence within this exact time and place is immeasurable by the fact it took all of history and the universe interacting with each other to lead to this specific moment.
Ah, well, jokerfication can be non-spectative as well. it's just that it is assumed that it is a spectator sport, because that's the hegemonic cultural form.
The one from the original Batman cartoon and the one from the spin off
Do you know why? I always read that title meme as explicitly making a mockery of the idea of a gender binary, so I'm curious about other perspectives on it
That was always my reading of it too, especially since the format highlights false dichotomies. I've seen it used in problematic ways, but CHUDs have a magic ability of missing the point. I'm going to try and avoid it now knowing that people view differently though.
I believe it's just the phrase itself being used that's triggering
Since so many fucking chuds spend time and effort putting it out there non-ironically
"Like, what if we could, I don't know, like try to like, you know, kill the Batman?"
