Nov 22, 2019
First things first, I don’t really follow American politics as anything more than to the degree that it impacts the outside word. So, superficially, for the spectacle only. Your entire lives and all your struggles are mere entertainment. I am not an American citizen, and not particularly familiar with the internal workings of the political process, having only had a cursory course in high school covering the basics of the American system. So compared to the average American citizen, I suppose I am an expert.
Q: What Is The Secret Behind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Success?
A: She is Slightly Brown and slightly sexually attractive.
Now lets be all clear and scientific about it and define our terms.
She’s not a bombshell by any means, but she’s a lot younger than most (all) politicians, and that’s bankable PR if you’re female. I’m a sexist for talking about her sexual attractiveness as the very first thing, don’t I know she’s a powerful Leader Girl Boss? Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean. “slightly” sexually attractive. And hey fuck you buddy.
If she did not wield political power, you wouldn’t look at her twice. How’s that for gender equality.
Of course, I have no idea how much political power she actually wields, I just see her on the internet. But she has a lot of cultural pull. People act as if she did, and that’s good enough for me.
Her claim to fame and rise from obscurity, in internet terms at least, was the video of her dancing around on a roof, being EVEN YOUNGER than she is now, and was at the time. A “silly little college thing” her defenders would call it. Yeah I bet she was. That’s how women who crave power always try to look.
“Slightly Brown” is the real keyword though.
Did you know that 100% of Americans still to this day believe President Obama was Muslim and related to known terrorist Osama Bin Laden? It’s true. Did you know that all over Europe, Muslims and “cultural christian” atheists are currently fighting in the streets every single day in every single city, killing each other by the millions? Did you know Mexican drug criminals are invading north America?
Now what do all these various and strange situations have in common? That’s right.
They are all great shared cultural anxieties, that strangely somehow sound more true when you purposefully exaggerate them for comedic effect, than when you try to articulate them as truthfully and precisely as possible.
Now, what do we do about our shared anxieties then? It’s not nice to feel anxious. I’m even willing to pay the price of you having your anxieties relieved (although you don’t deserve it you freak), for having my own relieved. I’m desperate.
Everywhere you look, when you avert your eyes from the unbearable prime cultural conflicts of the times (Silly Little Things), and try to take a load off, you do one of two things. One is, you look at secondary cultural conflicts of the times and think “hey all those guys are slightly brown. What’s up with that”, and then you feel bad for being a racist. Or you watch porn, and then you feel bad for not having a girlfriend. The genius of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is that her public persona is the synthesis of all three.
Whether by luck or design — I’m favourable to both explanations. I think it’s more that she was always doing the same silly little thing all her life, and global/American culture simply deteriorated to the point where her following her natural incentives fit right into a gaping hole where culture was breaking apart in the middle.
I think she saw an opportunity, and intuited something that has yet to be fully theorised by anyone. The people who will win this generation of technology/the internet/culture are exactly like this; those who intuit that the current iteration of information technology is based on pornography, and act on it, before everyone else catches on. It’ll only work for as long as they don’t.
Pornography has driven the major decisions in technology for decades. VHS won over betamax, DVD won over blueray. The reason everyone thought “the future is streaming” was pornhub. The reason everyone thought “the future of writing and journalism is the internet, print is dead”, is porn adds on torrent hosting websites.
The last one’s the one that’s important here. Social media 2.0 has made journalists of us all, whether we like it or not. The people who spent years and money educating themselves as “journalists” don’t, because they feel like they’ve been had, and are caught in a huge complex of trying to justify wasting their time and money.
But seeing as we are all journalists, it’s important to acknowledge our technological surroundings, and if we want to be any kind of decent journalists and have any kind of success, we have to consider our competition.
Q: Why did the entire field of real journalism die in less than ten years from the release of the iPhone?
A: Now instead of reading self important drivel written by some asshole, you always have the option of watching a Silly Little Thing, right at your fingertips.
Access to the internet, and putting all of journalism’s eggs in that basket, has had the unintended side-effect of putting it in direct market competition with Hardcore Pornography. Because on the marketplace of Ideas, the currency is attention. And no matter how wise and smart you are, you will always be distracted by a set of tits. Even women (link to one of a million propaganda studies that says women like tits and we scanned their brains and their brains got wet from looking at tits).
Nietzsche talked about this. And this is what I mean when I say, the people who intuit this is the people who will win, because as soon as anyone puts it into words, they will already be way to far ahead for anyone to catch up. AOC is one such people.
Who are those sorts of people then? Psychopaths, sociopaths, particularly cunning or particularly stupid narcissists. The Zoe Quinns, Richard Spencers of the world. All narcissists use the internet for practise. The ones who get caught up in the dopamine feedback loop become “lolcows”, internet phenomena of ridicule. The one’s who don’t and intuit this, becomes leaders of movements. The competent succeed.
A particularly incompetent person was in “the news” lately. A certain Mia Khalifa, of pornography fame, revealed in a popular interview (conversation) that she had only ever made 500 bucks from her pornographic career. It seems preposterous as she had starred in a very popular piece of pornography, in which two Mexican women dressed in veils pretend to be Muslim women, and are seduced by a White Man™.
The connection should be obvious. The answer to the question of AOC’s popularity is the same as to why that particular piece of pornography became popular:
She is Slightly Brown and Slightly Sexually Attractive.
No one had ever nailed “slightly brown” before — it’s an unstable substance. There’s brown, there’s black, there’s a billion degrees of brown — but they are all too particular. You can point at it as clearly distinguish it as this or that precise degree. It’s too real. What we needed was the thing, abstracted. Not Brown, not light brown, not dark brown, but slightly brown. Unspecified, abstract and importantly, fake. Fake brown might be a better term, but I like the other one better. Obama nailed it too, but was less sexy, because he didn’t have big tits.
The picture works, because it is fake. In being transparently fake, it allows the projection of every and any kind of Brown. No matter which kind of brown people you’re worried about, Mia Khalifa’s got it all.
Did you know Obama was born in Kenya and is secretly Muslim? He’s not “real” brown. He’s brown, but it’s fake, you see.
Because we are Scared of Brown people — even brown people are. A memeplex has been artificially created by the sort of people who hate binaries, in which the people of the earth are divided in two distinct categories, “white people” and “slightly brown”. The idea is too stupid to not be understood, this and this is how it spreads. You cannot avoid understanding it. It is however also preposterous and annoying, and a cause of great stress in the individual who has to navigate a world where Everyone Else believes such a thing.
And how do we deal with sauces of anxiety and stress in our daily lives? Do we consider them carefully with rationality and defeat them with facts and logic, overcoming them and move on to greater things? Or do we fetishize our anxieties, force the ethereal and abstract into a physical form, where we can play-act out overcoming them, over and over again?
Do children of divorced parents become “polyamorous” and seek out group sex and orgies to overcompensate for their loss of belief in true human connection because their parents failed them by failing each other, and we all structure our view of the world by how our parents behaved towards each other?
Are “Strong Independent Women” without fail all deeply into BDSM, and particularly, being “dominated”? Do Red Pill Salesmen becomes born again Christians?
Is one of the most popular character archetypes of our time the Sexual Bigot Who Hates The Gays, who is really Secretly Gay? For what reason is this archetype so popular?
AOC’s popularity derives from the fact that she looks like a terrorist you could fuck. I don’t mean to say that she actually looks like that. I mean only to say that You think so. It doesn’t matter that she’s not the “right” kind of Slightly Brown, what matters is she’s attractive, slightly brownish and in culture. On screen. Metaphors don’t care about accuracy.
She’s popular because she embodies a way for people to face their fears in a psycho-sexual symbolic structure, without having it come too close — both for her detractors and her fans. She is a Fetish for multiculturalism, and she’s a well enough constructed one to work for both. And the difference between AOC and Mia Khalifa is that AOC is simply smart enough to exploit it. And just like the porn star, she’s not really actually “attractive” or “brown”. She’s just at the right time at the right place.