The Resentment Machine

By Freddie deBoer
http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-resentment-machine/
The immiseration of the digital creative class
The popular adoption of the internet has brought with it great changes. One of t
he peculiar aspects of this particular revolution is that it has been historiciz
ed in real timereported accurately, greatly exaggerated, or outright invented, of
ten by those who have embraced the technology most fully. As impressive as the v
arious changes wrought by the exponential growth of internet users were, they ne
ver seemed quite impressive enough for those who trumpeted them.
In a strange type of autoethnography, those most taken with the internet of the
late 1990s and early 2000s spent a considerable amount of their time online talk
ing about what it meant that they were online. In straightforwardly self-aggrand
izing narratives, the most dedicated and involved internet users began crafting
a pocket mythology of the new reality. Rather than regarding themselves as tech
consumers, the most dedicated internet users spoke instead of revolution. Vast,
life-altering consequences were predicted for these rising technologies. In much
the same way as those speaking about the importance of New York City are often
actually speaking about the importance of themselves, so those who crafted the o
ral history of the internet were often really talking about their own revolution
ary potential. Not that this was without benefits; self-obsession became a vehic
le for an intricate literature on emergent online technology.
Yet for all the endless consideration of the rise of the digitally connected hum
an species, one of the most important aspects of internet culture has gone large
ly unnoticed. The internet has provided tremendous functionality, for facilitati
ng commerce, communication, research, entertainment, and more. Yet for a compara
tively small but influential group of its most dedicated users, its most importa
nt feature, the killer app, is its power as an all-purpose sorting mechanism, on
e that separates the worthy from the unworthyand in doing so, gives some meager s
emblance of purpose to generations whose lives are largely defined by purposeles
sness. For the postcollegiate, culturally savvy tastemakers who exert such dispr
oportionate influence over online experience, the internet is above and beyond a
ll else a resentment machine.
The modern American meritocracy, the education/employment vehicle, prepares thousa
nds of upwardly mobile young strivers for everything but the life they will actu
ally encounter. The endlessly grinding wheel of American success indoctrinates you
ng people with a competitive vision that most of them never escape. The numbing
and frenetic socioacademic sorting mechanism compels most of the best and the br
ightest adolescents in our middle and upper class to compete for various laurels
from puberty to adulthood. School elections, high school and college athletics,
honors societies, finals clubs, dining clubs, the subtler (but no less real) so
cial competitionsall make competition the natural habitus of American youth. Ever
y aspect of young adult life is transformed into a status game, as academics, at
hletics, music and the arts, travel, hobbies, and philanthropy are all reduced t
o fodder for college applications.
This instrumentalizing of all of the best things in life teaches teenagers the u
nmistakable lesson that nothing is to be enjoyed, nothing experienced purely, bu
t rather that each and every part of human life is ultimately subservient to wha
t is less human. Competition exists as a vehicle to provide the goods, material
or immaterial, that make life enjoyable. The context of endless competition make
s that means into an end itself. The eventual eats the immediate. No achievement
, no effort, no relationship can exist as an end in itself. Each must be ground
into chum to attract those who confer status and successelite colleges and their

representatives, employers.
As has been documented endlessly, this process starts earlier and earlier in lif
e, with elite preschools now requiring that students pass tests and get referenc
es, before they can read or write. Many have lamented the rise of competition an
d gatekeeping in young children. Little attention has been paid to what comes af
ter the competitions end.
It is, of course, possible to keep running on the wheel indefinitely. There are
those professions (think: finance) that extend the status contests of childhood
and adolescence into the gray years, and to one degree or another, most people p
lay some version of this game for most of their lives. But for a large chunk of
the striving class, this kind of naked careerism and straightforward neediness w
ont do. Though they have been raised to compete and endlessly conditioned to meas
ure themselves against their peers, they have done so in an environment that den
ies this reality while it creates it. Many were raised by self-consciously creat
ive parents who wished for children who were similarly creative, in ethos if not
in practice. These parents operated in a context that told them to nurture uniq
ue and beautiful butterflies while simultaneously reminding them, in that incess
ant subconscious way that is the secret strength of capitalism, that their job a
s parents is to raise their children to win. The conversion of the hippies into
the yuppies has been documented endlessly by pop sociologists like David Brooks.
What made this transformation palatable to many of those being transformed was
the way in which materialist striving was wedded to the hippies interest in cultu
re, art, and a vague nonconformist attitude.
It is no surprise that the urge to rear winners trumps the urge to raise artists
. But the nagging drive to preach the value of culture does not go unnoticed. Th
e urge to create, to live with an aesthetic sense, is admirable, and if inculcat
ed genuinelywhich is to say, in defiant opposition to the competitive urge rather
than as an uneasy partner to itthis romantic artistic vision of life remains the
best hope for humanity against the deadening drift of late capitalism. Only to
create for the sake of creation, to build something truly your own for no purpos
e and in reference to the work of no other personperhaps theres a chance for grace
there.
But in context of the alternative, a cheery and false vision of the artistic lif
e, self-conscious creativity becomes sublimated into the competitive project and
becomes twisted. Those raised with such contradictory impulses are left unable
to contemplate the stocks-and-suspenders lifestyle that is the purest manifestat
ion of the competitive instinct, but they are equally unable to cast off the soc
ial-climbing aspirations that this lifestyle represents. Their parentage and the
ir culture teach them to at once hunger for the material goods that are the spoi
ls of a small set of professions, but at the same time they distrust the culture
of those self-same professions. They are trapped between their rejection of th
e means and an unchosen but deep hunger for the ends.

***

Momentum can be a cruel thing. High school culminates in college acceptance. Thi
s temporary victory can often be hollow, but the fast pace of life quickly leave
s no time to reckon with that emptiness. As dehumanizing and vulgar as the highschool glass-bead game is, it certainly provides adolescents with a kind of orde
r. That the system is inherently biased and riotously unfair is ultimately besid
es the point. In the many explicit ways in which high-school students are ranked
emerges a broad consensus: There is an order to life, that order indicates valu

e, and there are winners and losers.

Competition is propulsive and thus results in inertia. College students enjoy a
variety of tools to continue to manage the competitive urge. Some find in the ex
clusive activities, clubs, and societies of elite colleges an acceptable continu
ation of high-school competition. Others never abandon their zeal for academic e
xcellence and the laurels of high grades and instructor approval. Some pursue me
dical school, law school, an MBA, or (for the truly damned) a PhD. But most dull
the urge by persisting in a four-or-five-year fugue of alcohol, friendship, and
rarefied living.
The end of college brings an end to that order, and for many, this is bewilderin
g. Educated but broadly ignorant of suffering, scattershot in their passions, po
ssessed of verbal dexterity but bereft of the experience that might give their w
ords meaning, culturally sensitive 20-somethings wander into a world that is sup
posed to be made for them, and find it inhospitable. Without the rigid ordering
that grades, class rank, leadership, and office provide, the incessant and unnam
ed urge to compete cannot be easily addressed. Their vague cultural liberalisma d
edication to tolerance and egalitarianism in generally vague and deracinated ter
msmakes the careers that promise similar sorting unpalatable. The economic resent
ment and petty greed that they have had bred into them by the sputtering machine
of American capitalism makes lower-class life unthinkable.
Driven by the primacy of the competitive urge and convinced that they need far m
ore material goods than they do to live a comfortable life, they seek well-payin
g jobs. Most of them will find some gainful employment without great difficulty.
Perhaps this is changing: As the tires on the Trans Am that is America go bald,
their horror at a poor job market reveals their entitlement more than anything.
But the numbers indicate that most still find their way into jobs that become c
areers. Many will have periods of arty unemployed urbanism, but after awhile the
gremlin begins whispering, You are a loser, and suddenly, theyre placing that call
to Joel from Sociology 205 whos got that connection at that office. Often, these
office jobs will enjoy the cover of orbiting in some vaguely creative endeavor
like advertising. One way or the other, these jobs become careers in the loaded
sense. In these careers, they find themselves in precisely the position that the
y long insisted they would never contemplate.

***

The competitive urge still pulses. It has to; the culture in which students have
been raised has denied them any other framework with which to draw meaning. The
world has assimilated the rejection of religion, tradition, and other determina
nts of virtue that attended the 1960s and wedded it to a vicious contempt for th
e political commitments that replaced them in that context. Culture preempts the
kind of conscious understanding that attends to conviction, that all traditiona
l designations of meaning are uncool.
If straightforward discussion of virtue and righteousness is socially unpalatabl
e, straightforward political engagement appears worse still. Pushed by an advert
ising industry that embraces tropes of meaning just long enough to render them m
eaningless (Budweiser Clydesdales saluting fallen towers) and buffeted by arbite
rs of hipness that declare any unapologetic embrace of political ideology horrib
ly clich, a fussy specificity envelops every definition of the self. Conventional
accounts of the kids these days tend to revert to tired tropes about disaffecti
on and irony. The reality is sadder: They are not passionless, but many have inv
ested their passion in a shared cultural knowledge that denies the value of any

other endeavor worthy of personal investment.

Contemporary strivers lack the tools with which people in the past have differen
tiated themselves from their peers: They live in a post-virtue, post-religion, p
ost-aristocracy age. They lack the skills or inspiration to create something of
genuine worth. They have been conditioned to find all but the most conventional
and compromised politics worthy of contempt. They are denied even the cold comfo
rt of identification with career, as they cope with the deadening tedium and mea
ninglessness of work by calling attention to it over and over again, as if ackno
wledging it somehow elevates them above it.
Into this vacuum comes a relief that is profoundly rational in contextthe self as
consumer and critic. Given the emptiness of the material conditions of their li
ves, the formerly manic competitors must come to invest the cultural goods they
consume with great meaning. Meaning must be made somewhere; no one will countena
nce standing for nothing. So the poor proxy of media and cultural consumption co
mes to define the individual. In many ways, cultural products such as movies, mu
sic, clothes, and media are the perfect vehicle for the endless division of peop
le into strata of knowingness, savvy, and cultural value.
These cultural products have no quantifiable value, yet their relative value is
fiercely debated as if some such quantifiable understanding could be reached. Th
ey are easily mined for ancillary content, the TV recaps and record reviews and
endless fulminating in comments and forums that spread like weeds. (Does anyone
who watches Mad Men not blog about it?) They are bound up with celebrity, both r
eal and petty. They can inspire and so trick us into believing that our reaction
s are similarly worthy of inspiration. And they are complex and varied enough th
at there is always more to know and more rarefied territory to reach, the better
to climb the ladder one rung higher than the person the next desk over.

***

There is a problem, though. The value-through-what-is-consumed is entirely illus

ory. There is no there there. This is what you can really learn about a person b
y understanding his or her cultural consumption, the movies, music, fashion, med
ia, and assorted other socially inflected ephemera: nothing. Absolutely nothing.
The internet writ large is desperately invested in the idea that liking, say, T
he Wire, says something of depth and importance about the liker, and certainly t
hat the preference for this show to CSI tells everything.
Likewise, the internet exists to perpetuate the idea that there is some meaningf
ul difference between fans of this band or that, of Android or Apple, or that th
ere is a Slate lifestyle and a This Recording lifestyle and one for Gawker or Th
e Hairpin or wherever. Not a word of it is true. There are no Apple people. Buyi
ng an iPad does nothing to delineate you from anyone else. Nothing separates a B
udweiser man from a microbrew guy. That our society insists that there are diffe
rences here is only our longest con.
This endless posturing, pregnant with anxiety and roiling with class resentment,
ultimately pleases no one. Yet this emptiness doesnt compel people to turn away
from the sorting mechanism. Instead, it draws them further and further in. Faced
with the failure of their cultural affinities to define an authentic and fulfil
ling self, postcollegiate middle-class upwardly-oriented-if-not-upwardly-mobile
Americans double down on the importance of these affinities and confront the con

tinued failure with a formless resentment. The bitterness that surrounds these d
istinctions is a product of their inability to actually make us distinct.
The savviest of the media and culture websites tap into this resentment as direc
tly as they dare. They write endlessly about what is overrated. They assign spec
ific and damning personality traits to the fan bases of unworthy cultural object
s. They invite comments that tediously parse microscopic distinctions in cultura
l consumption. They engage in criticism as a kind of preemptive strike against t
hose who actually create. They glamorize pettiness in aesthetic taste. The few a
rtistic works they lionize are praised to the point of absurdity, as various aco
lytes try to outdo each other in hyperbole. They relentlessly push the central n
arrative that their readers crave, that consumption is achievement and that crea
tors are to be distrusted and put in their place. They deny the frequently sad but
inescapable reality that consumption is not creation and that only the genuinel
y creative act can reveal the self.
This, then, is the role of the resentment machine: to amplify meaningless differ
ences and assign to them vast importance for the quality of individuals. For tho
se who are writing the most prominent parts of the internetthe bloggers, the tren
dsetters, the ber-Tweeters, the tastemakers, the linkers, the creators of memes a
nd online normsonline life is taking the place of the creation of the self, and d
oing so poorly.
This all sounds quite critical, Im sure, but ultimately, this is a critique I inc
lude myself in. For this to approach real criticism I would have to offer an alt
ernative to those trapped in the idea of the consumer as self. I havent got one.
Our system has relentlessly denied the role of any human practice that cannot be
monetized. The capitalist apparatus has worked tirelessly to commercialize ever
ything, to reduce every aspect of human life to currency exchange. In such a con
text, there is little hope for the survival of the fully realized self.