Heirs to the Wreckage

I struggle to strike a balance between my intellectual and personal sides when it comes to this blog. What is the actual point of it? I constantly find myself wondering whether it’s therapy for my over-ruminating self, or a chance to practice my craft. But then again, why else would I seek to refine my craft if not for the precise purpose of expressing myself? 

I intend to focus this piece on multiculturalism but ironically, my life has lately felt anything but that. A new job promises direction and an answer to that uncertainty in your life, but inevitably delivers mundanity. Unlike school, where there’s defined goals and a timeline that you can wrap your head around, a job is indeterminate longevity. Tepid purgatory. Life broken and reduced to salaries, career trajectory, stability where time flits by incognito. How macabre is it to be 22 and already planning a retirement fund, as if our economy still guarantees a timely retirement. 

There’s a sense of possibility that’s dimmer, divorced from you by the banality of routine. It’s not gone exactly, I’ll admit I’m still far too young to whinge about lost potential and forsaken dreams. But there’s an intractable sense of something lost, of an irrevocable change from when your life used to be pioneering and novelty. That, and life’s possibilities seem all too narrow when solely defined by the calculus of wealth. It is a practical choice I have made for myself by choosing to work for the foreseeable future, and even though I do not intend to adhere to practicality for the rest of my life (I’ve met far too many adherents who have and find themselves boxed in), I still must accept its limitations while reaping its benefits.

It’s no accident that Spider-Man: Brand New Day is doing so well in theaters. For those of us who were in High School at the same time as Tom Holland’s Peter Parker, this movie seems expressly made for us as Peter wrestles with the isolating and confusing quietus of lost childhood. The appeal of Spider-Man has always been his connection to the reader, how his struggles seem so oddly human as he struggles with grief, balancing responsibilities, financial struggles. It’s only fitting that in his state of mourning we should feel present alongside him. I mourn when life did not seem so firmly set and anything felt achievable. I mourn the people I loved who were a part of that possibility, people whom I couldn’t follow through this particular life transition. 

At the end of the day, we can quantify most of the social and cultural processes that reproduce capitalism, but it is most intimately envisioned as an ontology. It’s life oriented around work, value-systems quantified by productivity, progress and strength defined by individualistic accumulation. We feel the cultural, affective, and material touch of capitalism every day we breathe our polluted city air– even if we lack the language to express it. The entire reason I push myself to read (even as social media whittles away at my attention span) is because the phenomenology of capitalism can’t be thought-through from within. Purely from within the lived experience, it’s nearly impossible to objectively deconstruct capitalism. We’re too tired, or kept in too precarious a state to devote the proper time and attention to the question. This is of course operates in tune with a distinct logic, to ensnare subjects in a never-ending state of perpetual work, which in turn serves the never-ending impetus of economic growth and guards against any interruption to it. Most people lack the time for politics, and this in turn feeds the demand for sensationalist and opportunist media that seeks to enrage and divide and tell us who the heroes and villains are. 

In many senses, they already won. By the 20th century capitalism had completed its onto-epistemological conquest of the world, rebranded its racial divisions along lines of neostructured economy, turned developing countries from sovereign states into minor corporations. One scrolls through LinkedIn and you see people from all over the world, with many different ethnicities and places of origin on display. Some celebrate this, claiming we have progressed away from tribalism and racial divides and are peacefully united by the apolitical realm of market exchange. 

That may very well be true to some extent; but I do not see unity, I see rebranding. I see workplaces reinventing themselves in the modern era as diverse and inclusive, yet all ethnic identity permitted is scrubbed of all its character. The only ethnic identity the workplace allows is that which it can freely redefine in its own terms. And all that is to say that the racial tensions have never really gone away, the modern workplace culture very much still leans Western and Anglicized. I find it rather disturbing to see so many people around the world resorting to the same mutilated corpo-speech, the same torrent of keywords that are deliberately algorithmic, the same tired performance of the same interchangeable professional persona. I’ve met people worldwide who valorize the shit out of corporate culture where bootlicker becomes an understatement. They not only aspire to be as polished and professional as the John LinkedIns of the world; but also as implicitly racist, as dismissive of non-instrumental value, as downright cruel to the powerless. If that is not conquest, or some dismal whitewashing of cultural sovereignty, what is? If ethnic identity is only tolerated within the confines of a monocultural LinkedIn, can it truly be said to be inclusive?

Multiculturalism and the 20th century have existed in opposition for some time. It’s come to an ugly head with culture wars, new progressive American voices such as Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani, and the almost comical right-wing backlash for every movie that trundles through the cinema: The Odyssey incorporating a cast of diverse characters in a mythology claimed by White America, the hysteria over Elliot Page, the misogyny towards Supergirl. The world seems more and more reactionary as multiculturalism naturally cements its place in human history. 

It is clear that aside from conservatives continuing to cling to outdated power, we have made steps in redefining the world and its conception of race. For my part, I have been pleased to see (as crazy as it sounds) a degree of progressive potential in the wilds of social media, despite its usual extremism. The widespread memes and online followings of Mbappe, Wembanyama, Lamine Yamal, etc.; showcase a younger digital audience that wholeheartedly accepts a multicultural interpretation of countries historically thought caucasian. Barring one particular Paraguayan senator, the world culturally reads Mbappe as a Frenchman– perhaps The Frenchman when he’s the focal point of pop culture. And if anything, the memes not only demonstrate this acceptance, but reinforce it to future generations, building out this new modern mythos. 

And this begs the question, if there really is any truth to the notion that a culture can only be preserved through exclusion of others. This is not uncommon amongst minority groups, or cultural groups in general worldwide, where there is a culture to be preserved. But does this not lend credence to the idea that conservatives orbit in their talking points: that hereditary culture cannot coexist with diversity? I would content that for any group that has been disenfranchised (or continues to be in the modern era), perhaps this sort of practice is justified. Perhaps it actually makes the most sense when trying to promote solidarity among people of color, where majority groups see their culture resounding throughout the wider world. It is far more destructive for Conservative America to apply this argument to the phenotypical and cultural image of an entire country. 

What we see in conservatives is not the organic result of cultural evolution, but a symptom of our media being controlled by elites who work to sow discord. It’s a violent strand of Republicanism that we see, fueled by rhetoric and screens and content manufactured by Musk, Murdoch, and company. If the world has naturally grown more multicultural, there is no culture it displaces save unjustly hegemonic ones.

I grew up in the US, and even if I’ve sometimes felt the need to aggressively conform to an All-American persona, I never really have. I have no ancestral claim to this place as a first-generation American, but that doesn’t stop me from simply living and being shaped by the environment around me. I am shaped by my multicultural family, New York, people around me, and yes– American culture. For me to separate those facets of my life into different categories, as if they do not form one neat narrative, would be ridiculous. It’s not as if it’s that extreme a code switch to speak with my mom versus my friends; it’s a different language, a different persona perhaps, but still the same person underneath with the same inherent beliefs. The distinctly American bits of culture central to my personality revolve around movies, Star Wars, superheroes, US History, civics, music, internet culture, and books. There’s very little in the way of a connection to the church, guns, or baseball, but those are merely conservative marketing ploys when framed as the “core of the U.S”. My point here is that, at least in my experience, multiculturalism has never once displaced or eroded at anything– it all coexists. There is no core culture that need be performed save the one Fox News constructs. Culture occurs and manifests in the lives of contemporary people, it evolves in real-time. If there is a concept that resists the natural evolution of culture and intermingling of the world, perhaps it should be allowed to adapt, rather than be twisted by a score of AI robber barons.