Recent events have caused a particular uproar in the realm of cultural politics. Kanye West continues an ongoing pivot towards the furthest edge of cancelability while retaining relevance. Shiloh Hendrix has become the oppositional avatar to Karmelo Anthony in the great game of financializing identity tribalism. Young people across western civilization are engaging in a form of ideological tinkering which was once desperately curtained off by the narrative impulses of centralized media.
Every hallowed topic or inviolable taboo which was once tiptoed around in the minefield of discourse is now being buried under the landslide of unstoppable virality. As tantalizing as it is to simply pick a side and treat these developments as a cathartic unburdening from the shackles of shibboleths, what's happening is far more complex and inscrutable.
What you are witnessing is not some simple advancement of echelons along a war map, but rather the complete disintegration of the map itself.
Our two-dimensional worldview is collapsing. In entropic chrysalis, society at large is returning to the nuanced chaos of reality. This state of perception was once a common naturalistic understanding of the world as a mysterious complexity in which its events and participants are scattered as widely across as they are deeply within. The natural state of tribalism is returning, as instinctive reflex often does when faced with unpredictable change.
The internet in its infancy was merely a tool for facilitating the exchange of information. Its evolved state is the Network, facilitating the mass economy of experience across an ever expanding series of nodes. For the past two centuries, humanity was cradled in the comforting delusion of narratives. Every developing major event was forced to participate as a building block in some grand structure, a collective total narrative pushing towards an ideal unified system of politics, philosophy, and ethics.
Past events were retroactively framed as stepping stones towards this state of vague enlightened liberalism. Wars shifted beyond the simple winners and losers of national self interest, they became materialistic mythological lessons denoting right and wrong. Tragedies, massacres, and disasters could never again be attributed to chaotic misfortune or simple human nature. Instead, every important event swept through fuzzy television screens had to be some kind of call to action.
The mundane was equally harvested into narrative structures. A criminal committing violence is no longer an individual accountable to his own actions, he is now a symptom of wider societal flaws to which the government is held responsible for fixing. Natural disasters can no longer simply be a result of mere climatic cycles or ecological patterns, they must always be the consequence of civilization which everyone must equally be held responsible for. Personal achievement is no longer the result of individual merit or circumstance, but rather a manifestation of invisible privileges that must be acknowledged, dismantled, or redistributed for the collective good.
Understanding the world through this lens is only possible when the delivery mechanisms for information are centralized through a limited number of institutional sources. Every expansion of media technology chipped away at this bottleneck, exposing people to an increasingly overwhelming flow of information. There is a biological limit to how much people know about the world before the collective universal structure of understanding they shelter under caves in completely.
When the structure collapses, the nearest debris is cobbled together into ramshackle enclaves. When the empire falls, castled fiefdoms pop up across the landscape. We have already crossed beyond the point of no return. There will never be a settling into "normality" within your lifetime. The world you may have known in childhood, the world of your parents and your grandparents is dead. What has transpired now is the beginning of the end for the final pillars of enshrined beliefs, the final stand of establishment-backed boundaries: Identity politics.
You may have noticed this year's outcomes of the pendulum shifting violently against the last ten years of Obamacore ideological tolerance. Online posters remarked with incredulity at coworkers calling things "gay" again while Elon Musk openly calls people "retards" in Twitter replies and advocates for removing the taboo on the word itself. The Trump administration purges DEI policies, roles, and even aesthetic decor from various branches of bureaucracy while groups of Europeans chant songs about expelling migrants from their country.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out the natural hierarchy of verboten transgressions and the predicted trajectory of Overton window shifting that will result. While media figures and politicians openly denounce transgender discourse and companies quietly shelve pride flags from product packaging, you aren't going to be seeing commercials or branded accounts toying around middle schooler Call of Duty slurs any time soon. Yet there are still two big N-words which all but the most fringe dissident outliers still shy away from: Nazi and N****r.
Treading either of these two topics represents a death sentence for anyone who works in an occupation even slightly public facing, let alone dependent on attention share for their income. Any mention of Hitler, Nazis, or the Holocaust beyond sterile historic reference or abject denouncement casts someone into a forbidden chamber of problematic shaming. Saying the N-word out loud, especially the hard-R variant is basically a magic spell for summoning excommunication, joblessness, violent retribution, and sometimes even legal consequences.
To date, no modern celebrity has ever managed to cross the hardest barrier of these prohibitions in a public deliberate manner without having their careers destroyed. Now, it seems, Kanye West has decided to do both at the same time.
Kanye West has been steadily leaking songs off of his new album, Cuck, which features cover art of KKK members. Purporting that his new album would have an "Antisemitic sound," Ye has leaked several songs which have generated massive amounts of controversy. The album contains subject matter ranging from Epstein's island, his wife leaving him for his Twitter post, drawing swastikas, reading Mein Kampf, chanting Heil Hitler, abusing nitrous oxide and Percocets, confessing to fellating his male cousin multiple times, and saying n****r with a hard-R several times (something which almost every major rap song has distinctly avoided doing).
The album represents a multifaceted attack on nearly every possible forbidden topic which remains untread in daily cultural context, to such an extent that it seems to be a deliberate endeavor in transgression itself. Some may claim that this is merely an attempt at artistic provocation, but Kanye's vitriol undeniably connotates this as a candid conveyance of deeply held beliefs and serious opinions. This is reinforced by an ongoing escalation of Kanye's controversial statements along this category, beginning in 2022 and resurging in the past year.
Simultaneously, a mom named Shiloh Hendrix was filmed by a Somalian man in Minnesota who accused her of calling a child on the playground the N-word for allegedly rifling through her purse. The man filming her, Sharmake Omar, followed her and demanded explanations, to which Hendrix doubled down and yelled the slur at him, at his urging, while he threatened to make her go viral. He claimed she was violating hate speech laws, which don't exist in the US.
Following the video's explosion of views online, a crowdfunder supporting her was started on GiveSendGo, initially capped at $50,000. Donations surged and the cap was raised multiple times, eventually towards a one million dollar ceiling. At the time of writing, her current donation amount is at over $750k. Donations would be paired with usernames and comments ranging from the fervently supportive to the scandalously edgy, with a variety of racism themed usernames. At one point, an "N-ladder" was built in the comment section, a well known meme where different users spell out the N-word letter by letter in a reply chain. Each letter was priced at $2,000 with incremental dollar increase to spell out the word successfully.
Shiloh Hendrix has been elevated into a folk hero, a symbol of defiance against cancel culture. This spree of donations and the subsequent corollaries of controversy are seen as a response to the similar weaponized financialization of identity politics that has been commonly applied to various notorious figures, most recently Karmelo Anthony. On GiveSendGo, Anthony has received over $500,000 in support of his legal defense for stabbing Austin Metcalf to death at a high school track meet.
GiveSendGo removed the comments from Hendrix's donation page and made statements denouncing the platform being used for threats and hate speech, despite having left open the comments on Anthony's own donation page which contained many similar threats and racially derogatory comments dehumanizing whites. Backlash from online dissidents eventually pressured GiveSendGo to remove the comments from Anthony's page as well.
These incidents have spurned a great deal of discussion on the tribalistic nature of race discourse. Even before the Shiloh Hendrix incident took place, many felt that the black community's unflinching support of Karmelo Anthony was a glimpse at the callous intolerance ascribed to a large portion of black Americans in which they are indifferent to context and simply show support along racial lines as a pure default reflex.
Examples of such discourse can be found in several widely covered sociopolitical events of racial tension, such as people arguing whether Derek Chauvin actually murdered George Floyd or the polemic response to the exoneration of O.J. Simpson. This may be the first time a white subject of mass media coverage has been supported out of racial indignation within the past four decades of identity politics, with some labeling Shiloh Hendrix as the "white O.J. Simpson."
The relative tameness of saying a slur in comparison to murder is itself a core element of the controversy. Despite all logic suggesting that racist words are not a transgression worse than murder, many genuinely believe the opposite. The N-word is a symbolic totem for the narrative of racial prejudice at large. If extrapolated thoughtfully, the act of expressing racist thought is seen as a precursor to escalation towards acts of displacement, violence, and genocide. The rhetorically advanced adherents of cancel culture argue, either explicitly or subconsciously, that there can be no worse sin than racism due to the impact of its consequences.
However, many do not ascribe sophisticated reasoning when engaging in cancel culture. Most often, cancel culture is simply a weapon of convenience, a mechanism built by think tanks and establishment figures for propelling intentional cultural movements. Many people are dimly aware of this and simply wield their cell phone cameras like weapons for destroying an opponent in social or financial arenas sheerly out of self interest. Many more don't even have the capacity for understanding why racism is supposed to be the ultimate sin. They simply engage according to a Pavlovian reaction, having been trained to respond accordingly as the result of a cross-generational Monkey Ladder Experiment.
The consequences of abjectly forbidden topics are embedded so deeply in society that even this article cannot expressly state the N-word in neutral reference without being obliged to paint it with the safety label of "N-word" itself. These dilutions are a result of attempting to curtail reality through obfuscation, a band-aid solution meant to cover the symptoms of underlying social tension.
The word "retard" for instance was once a dilution word, an academic terminology which became adopted into common lexicon to replace more offensive terms for the mentally challenged, such as "slow." Yet, human nature encroaches further and "retard" is now replaced by "mentally challenged," itself soon facing usurpation in favor of "Neurodivergent."
Shiloh Hendrix and Karmelo Anthony being the Rock 'Em Sock 'Em robots of idpol outrage is not some grand conclusion to a cultural symbolic race war. Kanye West spurring on crowds of people to chant Heil Hitler to melodic rap instrumentals is not the horrifying precursor to a boogeyman Fourth Reich nor is it some cinematic toppling of cancel culture. These are only examples of a new normality being established, a state of being which exceeds simplistic tribalization.
This is a new existence, one where shock value has worn out its welcome so thoroughly that if 9/11 happened today, young Americans would be making TikTok memes and publicly joking about it immediately. The monolithic touchstones of cultural discourse have been Balkanized into fragments. Despair is encountered as frequently as euphoria, each incident of notoriety being a unit of fuel that upholds everyone's individual bubble of hyperreality.
The extinction of universally accepted human viewpoints may seem confusing or traumatic to those who knew of a time before the Pandora's box of the internet cracked open. This evolution is occurring because the majority of society's participants are now online and truly exposed to Network culture. Those who still somehow avoided this exposure are still beholden to a society that shifts in response to online existence.
Your lifetime is the golden hour where the sun is dipped halfway into the horizon. This liminal state will persist only until nobody remains on earth who remembers a time before smartphones. Whether this is an ominous sunset before a dark age or a promising sunrise for a golden era remains to be seen.
I'd like to think we get to choose which direction it goes.
Michael Dragovic is Chief of Staff at Remilia Corporation and goes by Scorched Earth Policy on Twitter (@scearpo). When he's not working, you can find him hovering above the Pacific Ocean as a 750-mile wide metal cube rotating and oscillating at Mach 5.
