7 April 2010: "Hipster Puppies blog gets book deal, authored by Bitter Music Critic"

This post is about gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. In an unusually biting entry, Carles poses the quintessential question of our era: "Would u rather look at a cute hipster puppy, or read an out-of-touch bloggers’ 50000 word manifesto on Animal Collective?" Of course this is a false choice, a classic example of an either/or formulation masking what is in fact a tautology. Carles seeks to demonstrate that looking at a "hipster puppy" and reading a critical assessment of Animal Collective are in essence the same act. That is to say the visual and textual modes of apprehension have collapsed into one another under the pressure of concentrated, technologically abetted narcissism. Carles asks: "Do people care more about cute memes than tons of words?" The implied answer is that they "care more" about neither, because they care only about themselves and instrumentalizing memes to improve their own cachet. As Carles demonstrates, the reprocessing of culture into self-aggrandizing tidbits to be disseminated online leads inevitably to such unanswerable philosophical inquiries as this one: "Do u h8 him for expecting to get paid 4 writing about music? Do u h8 him for getting paid for blogging pix of puppies?" The question could easily be inverted and "h8" rendered as love; the specific emotional response is irrelevant to the subjectivization of the public re-presentation of cultural phenomena. The self no longer participates in an organic community of characterized by a common tradition. Instead the alienated self attempts to introject itself into an anomic social formation.

So we must bear witness to the evisceration of the figure of the artist (Carles figures this with the piquant image of a man with "his head up his own ass"). Carles suggests that "viral meme blogs" have become "more lucrative than trying to become an authentic writer" -- which of course evokes the question of what sort of authenticity as writer is possible after the alleged "death of the author" and the nullification of the "author function" have been widely proclaimed. The author function itself has become the virus, the content implied by any viral meme. The meme, regardless of its surface content, primarily signifies its transmitter and that transmitter's status as one who has been infected.

The irony here is that the particular transmitter in question that Carles critiques in this essay has himself criticized the state of social affairs "where every one has an opinion, and no single music critic is valued more." But this complaint is in vain, as his own praxis has contributed to the condition in which every critical voice is uniquely sanctified and ignored as the virus of authorship prompts the replication of superficial and degenerating content toxic to the social body. Gemeinschaft becomes geschellshaft in accordance with the laws of epidemiology. We are left to wonder: Is there any hope for inoculation?