CULTURE CREEP: Notes on the Pop Apocalypse, by Alice Bolin
The modern age is overwhelming. There are so many things to look at, so many apps to track our calorie intake, our periods, what our friends and emotional-support celebrities are doing. There’s so much suffering, so much trauma and so many men laundering myths of greatness in an effort to control our daily lives. How does an individual make sense of it all? According to Alice Bolin’s new book of essays, “Culture Creep: Notes on the Pop Apocalypse,” the answer is cult thinking.
“All the decisions are exhausting,” Bolin writes. “Some part of us longs to cede control and have someone else tell us what to do.” And so we have, by and large, given in to lives “shaped by groupthink and indoctrination.” In the process, we — every one of us, according to Bolin — have played right into the hands of a capitalist system looking to keep us complicit and wring our bank accounts dry.
Bolin’s first book of essays, “Dead Girls,” explored the American obsession with victimized women. Now, Bolin turns her eye to the average American’s social manipulation by industries that created everything from the “startling regression” among women in the 1950s back into the confines of the home, to Gamergate and the rise of Donald Trump. In a world where our every data point is collected by tech giants, “even our rage against the machine becomes just another way to feed the machine.”
Bolin outlines the book’s three main subjects as “cults, corporate thought control and the end of the world as we know it,” and she covers these in seven roving essays all tied up in the Catch-22 of trying to exist as an individual in a hyperconnected age. Often these wanderings make it difficult for the reader to identify a central gathering point for Bolin’s musings, though she manages to hit at some sharp truths. “Foundering” excoriates the “American mania for founder myths,” of which Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk are only the most modern iterations. “The narrative impulse comes from our own epic origin story,” she writes of the founding fathers, “whose inspiring opening salvo, a poetic ode to all men being created equal, was maybe more marketing than actual game plan.”
But the author’s most meaningful observations concern the “post-feminist apocalypse” American women now find ourselves trapped in, and how cults like Nxivm and apps like MyFitnessPal succeed by selling women on the flaws of their own bodies and emotions. “In a post-feminist paradigm, a thin body is the outward expression of self-control, a woman rising above human urges and taming her unruly body, showing she is capable of the self-denial that capitalist success requires,” Bolin writes in the essay “Lean In/Bend Over.” “But if this is the motive, then could it really be said that the ‘self’ is exercising control?”
Where these essays deal in more global subjects, holding the reader at arm’s length, the essay “Real Time” invites us in as she indulges in some of the more frivolous joys of the computer age — and it’s more compelling, and persuasive, as a result. Her writing shines as she describes her six-week obsession with Animal Crossing, a video game designed to “unfold at the pace of life, with an emphasis not on reaching targets or winning levels but on small daily delights and discoveries.” She finds herself preferring to spend hours at a time in this animated world “where I will eventually get what I want than go back to my real life where reward is less assured.”
Bolin is troubled by the culture of dissociation that the current capitalist system asks us to buy into. “I’m not the first one to note that the tech we have is excellent at providing distractions for burned-out workers but hopeless at addressing those workers’ actual problems,” she writes in an essay about streaming and “the eternal rewatch” of soothing television. “Culture Creep” may struggle to pin down a single thesis — but that’s not to say Bolin doesn’t have a point. The problem might be that she has too many.
CULTURE CREEP: Notes on the Pop Apocalypse | By Alice Bolin | Mariner | 264 pp. | $27.99
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