Timescale Is Everything

Speed or the expectation thereof breaks people's brains

From the prompt “female viral pop sensation performing during an address to Congress” in anime style

I was listening to the latest Time to Say Goodbye podcast with Jay Caspian Kang and Tyler Austin Harper, which was mostly about new tech developments and the pernicious influence thereof. Toward the end there was an extended riff lamenting the “viral” nature of pop culture:

All culture is viral. right?

Like that's all it is, right?

Why did Tracy Chapman sing at the Grammys?

Because Luke Combs went viral on TikTok singing a song from 25 years ago, right?

Why is why is why is “Fast Car” like back in the news? Because Luke Combs went viral and then Tracy Chapman went viral on the Grammys, right?

And what is the Grammys?

The Grammys is a way in which people can create a bunch of social media clips, right?

And one of them hopefully goes viral, right?

(Taken from the transcript on their site)

And, you know, I don’t exactly disagree with this. Current pop culture is absolutely built around things that go “viral” in one of a couple of ways, TikTok being the hottest new example.

But at the same time, this isn’t a recent development. Culture has always been viral. Or it might even make more sense to say that “viral” is what popular culture always has been.

This is one of the key points I end up taking away from Rob Harvilla’s book and podcast about 90’s music (that I wrote about recently): when you dig into the backstory of a bunch of these songs, they’re just… viral. Some journeyman musicians toil away for years making records that nobody hears, and then some DJ at a big station plays one of their songs on a whim, and BOOM. Rocket to stardom.

You can go back after the fact and retcon a bunch of reasons to explain why this or that song has the qualities to resonant with a mass audience, or why a particular moment was ripe for a particular craze to take hold. But at the end of the day, it’s all just viral— some songs catch on with the right people, who pass them to other people, who pass them to even more people, and twenty-five years later every wedding DJ is still playing the fucking Macarena.

To the extent that there’s any actual change here, it’s really just a change in time scale— things blow up faster and die down quicker because Internet technology makes it easier for that to happen. There’s also a little bit of a visibility aspect— modern viral trends take off in public view, on YouTube or TikTok, so we don’t need an intrepid journalist to track down the strip-club DJ in Miami who was the first to pick up some local band. But I think it’s mostly time scale— viral crazes that used to build over months now flare up and are replaced within weeks. That’s disorienting to people who were plugged in during the previous system.

(I pretty much decoupled from Top 40 music culture circa 1993, except when something got sufficiently huge to be inescapable. There are a bunch of songs in Harvilla’s book that other people my age regard as core 90’s culture that I’m only dimly aware of. As a result, my experience of the last 30-ish years has been of things suddenly just being… everywhere, because I wasn’t paying attention to the slower build-up. So the modern situation doesn’t feel like such a huge shift to me.)

I end up feeling like there’s a kind of time scale mismatch here that explains a lot of opinions about modern culture: things aren’t qualitatively different, they’re just faster. That change in time scale feels disorienting to some commentators, which leads them to mistake it for a qualitative change. But really, culture is functioning in pretty much the same manner it has ever since one proto-human turned to another in an African cave and said “I mean, it’s a good effort at painting. But if we’re being honest, the bison are a bit shit, aren’t they?” Just… faster.

This question of time scales is one of those “Gets you coming and going” problems, though, because I think there’s a similar issue on the other end, with a mismatch between the pace of political conversation and political action. Modern social media allows the forming of an extremely rapid consensus— or at least the illusion of a general consensus when in fact it’s just among atypical subset of weirdos on social media— about what would constitute Correct Policy, but the mechanisms for implementing it remain much slower.

This leads to a lot of angst and yelling about “Why hasn’t the Correct Policy been implemented yet?!?!” The answer is that it hasn’t happened yet because in the real world, things take time. This is most obvious in the context of actual legislating, back when that was a thing that Congress was capable of: the general outlines of what can be passed into law are often very clear to the small group of obsessives who pay attention to such things very early in the process, but then it takes weeks or even months to actually write and pass the bills. The end result is more or less what you could’ve predicted at the very start— sometimes a little worse, sometimes a little better— but it takes time to get there.

A not-insignificant segment of the social-media commentariat finds this sort of thing incredibly frustrating, though, and that drives a lot of rage, and declarations that they’ve been Sold Out because Correct Policy hasn’t happened overnight. Sometimes this leads to the abandonment of processes, or at least declarations of the need to abandon processes, that are, in fact, working fine, albeit slowly. It’s not a problem with the process, it’s a mismatch in the time scale: the time needed to form an illusory consensus among social-media commentators is vastly shorter than the time needed to reach an actual consensus among legislators, which can be shorter than the time needed to form a public consensus that includes the median voter (who famously isn’t paying any attention). If you expect and demand everything to happen at the time scale of social media, though, or even cable news, you’re going to drive yourself insane.

I think a lot of what we attribute to Internet technology isn’t anything inherent in the idea of connecting people together via electronic media, but is down to the unrealistic expectations that people create for the world when they have access to rapid communications. Policy debates that used to unfold over weeks now sort themselves out in hours, but action still takes weeks to months, and people who are Too Online end up filling that time with impotent fury that things aren’t happening on their preferred time scale.

I’m making some effort to keep my phrasing here neutral, but I’m probably still tipping my hand and making it clear that I don’t have a high opinion of a lot of this behavior. I just wish I had some clear idea of what to do about it, other than urging people to just generally Be More Chill. Which, of course, never works.

---

So, yeah, I’m an old man yelling at clouds. If you want more of this for some reason, here’s a button:

And if you want to yell back, the comments will be open, but I do have a day job so I can’t promise to respond on an Internet-friendly time scale: