Michelle Orange

“The new American dream is to build a really bitching personal brand, and the result of all that tap dancing on all those individual platforms is a pervasive kind of narrative decadence. We race to consume and regurgitate the hour’s large and small events for each other like patricians in a postmodern vomitorium -- to know them first, translate them into bitter capsule form fastest, and be shocked or stirred or perceived as in any way less than totally savvy about these things the least. Even within our self-contained realities we become dulled to what’s real and what’s not, and further desensitized to what lies behind our fellow performers’ virtual scrims. From the vantage point of the individual platform, even the narrative of tragic greatness seems less a product of secular anxiety -- a sort of surrogate Christian allegory -- than one more of the stories we devour out of self-interest. We take heart instead of horror in the idea that anyone can be famous, but we are performers with no actual interest in dying for each other. It seems related that actual death is by far the most awkward thing for the Internet to handle. Because it’s so real” (71-72).… (meer)