YOLO: You’re doing it wrong.

The Internet is awesome.

Although this seems like an obvious statement, it’s not something to just gloss over.

It’s important to sit back every once and a while and look at how great we have it. Breaking news is available instantaneously. Porn is easier to find than ecstasy at a Skrillex concert, much to Rick Santorum’s dismay. Distances have become irrelevant, as you can see and hear a friend quicker than you can say “Skype.”

While all this is at our disposal, the generations before us not only had to sit in the dark waiting for day-old news but also had to use their imagination during their “alone time” and haggle with the operator just to talk to their "homie" across the country, if they even owned a phone.

Sadly, the Internet isn’t all sunshine and puppy tails. It’s also given a home to played out and misused abbreviations, the latest offender being “YOLO.”

If you’re not familiar, Drake popularized the abbreviation, which stands for “you only live once,” in his song, “The Motto.” Thanks to Drizzy, trend-chasing young adults are posting it at the end of their tweets or Facebook statuses that are either a. entirely ordinary or b. completely brainless.

“Just napped for two hours. YOLO.”

“I blacked out and woke up in jail. YOLO”

Here’s how I read those:

“You only live once, so I’m going to sleep it away.”

“You only live once, so I’ll make mistakes that might haunt me for the rest of my life.”

The point of “YOLO” isn’t to do a bunch of hood rat stuff and say, “fuck it.”

YOLO shouldn’t be a justification for ignorant behavior, but it’s used for that very reason. A bunch of pothead kids getting high and ditching class is already a problem in itself, so let’s give them a catchphrase to go along with it. That’s a great idea.

If we only live once, the importance of our decisions is heightened, not devalued. I don’t mean to sound like Buzz Killington, because there is definitely a time and place to go out, have fun and act wild. In fact, I quite enjoy those instances. I also realize, however, there are many more pertinent things happening in this world.

Look at the man who coined “YOLO.” He’s recording platinum albums, selling out concerts worldwide, winning awards, meeting his icons, appearing on magazine covers and voicing a character in “Ice Age 4.” To put it bluntly, he’s doing a hell of a lot more than most of us. So when he raps, “You only live once: that’s the motto n****, YOLO,” he can’t possibly be encouraging us to act like asses. He’s telling us to make something of ourselves.

The point of “YOLO” should be to go out and do something meaningful. That doesn’t mean everyone should hold themselves up in the library or go volunteer at the homeless shelter because, let’s face it, that would get boring. It just means that people should prioritize doing something with a lasting value. Go try a new hobby. Go to a foreign country. Go do anything with a longer shelf life than “I just beer-bonged three Four Lokos.”

“Taking surfing lessons. YOLO.”

“Roadtrip around Europe. YOLO.”

Those are appropriate things to do with only one life at your disposal. Even if most of us won’t become one of the biggest names in music, we can still do great things. We don’t have to be average.

The Baby Boomers and early Generation X didn’t grow up with the Internet, they invented it. Let’s not slap them in the face by using their gift to boast about our complacency.

Stop #stopkony.

Are you ready to party like it's 1999? Is it time for another wave of humanitarian militarism? All of the ingredients, it would seem, are present. We have an intensely mediatized campaign in which no one learns anything about the ostensible subject. The video from Invisible Children by the despicably narcissistic Jason Russell is supposedly about a conflict in Uganda, but it tells us not a thing about Uganda's politics, its rulers, the military who are hunting down the remnants of the Lords Resistance Army, Museveni or his US-backed invasion of the Congo (death toll from that war is close to 5m), or the Lord's Resistance Army. We have a US intervention. The hundred or so US advisors assisting the Ugandan army are supposedly there in part due to pressure from Russell and his organisation. We have an evil-doer about whom no one knows anything, aside from the fact that he's a Hitler or, worse, a Bin Laden. This approach, in which we learn only that Kony is a bad man, is justified with the repellently manipulative technique of having the film-maker's son stand in for the audience - Daddy 'explains' to his son that Kony steals away children and makes them shoot people, and the little treasure gurns "that's sad". We have the helpless victims, who articulate only their suffering, reduced to bare-forked creatures of the imperialist imagination, and firmly locked in the missionary position. We have the absurdity of hundreds of thousands of well-meaning but slightly silly people who have allowed themselves to be manipulated and bullied into supporting the combined forces of US imperialism and the Ugandan military in the name of human rights. We have, in all, a white man's burden for the Facebook generation. 


I will not rehearse my own arguments. Those who haven't yet read Liberal Defence now have the opportunity to go and consult the record from five hundred years of liberal imperialism. Nor will I take it on myself to explain the history and social complexities of Uganda's insurgency. It would be superfluous in the context, since people are not even being mobilised on the basis of misinformation - this is ideologically very weak - but rather are being invited to share a sentiment which taps their natural solipsism (as well as, at a vulgar level, their desire to help people, to be altruistic). All that is necessary is to alert people to the fact that they are being manipulated by slime balls into supporting scumbags. And that information is slowly getting through. The criticisms are beginning to gradually penetrate the wall of great white hype. People are beginning to notice that Invisible Children supports war criminals and rapists, which is a rather squalid little blow to the afflatus generated by the Live 8-Geldof-Bono-style promo video. I have no doubt that this campaign will prove to be as futile and anti-climactic in its results as many previous unwanted efforts to Save Africa - one recalls the idiotic Save Darfur campaign. (About Sudan, though - ahem!). 


Yet, the cultural significance of this could be far greater than the immediate range of its intended ambitions. I don't just mean this in the sense that this raises highly suggestive questions about the conditioning, the socialization, the immersion in mass/social media that makes people susceptible to this sort of offensive. (And in propaganda terms, it is a straightforward psychological assault which, like the latest US assault rifle being deployed in Afghanistan, combines sophistication at a technological level with crudity in its and somatic effects.) Rather, the formulation repeatedly used in the promo video - "this is an experiment" - raises the possibility that the techniques here deployed will, insofar as they are successful, find their way into the repertoire of the Pengagon's propaganda department. This is hardly the first campaign of its kind to use a combination of rock video imagery and soundscape with pseudo-populist interpellation (rock the power structure, make the dudes in Washington listen, stop at nothing). The imagery from the poster campaign is lifted straight from Obama 2008. Nor is it the first to strip-mine the iconography of social struggle (it's what Gandhi/MLK would have done). And it hardly breaks new ground with the social media fetishism. However, we are obviously at a pivotal stage in the development of new medias and their effective annexation by capitalist states in alliance with silicon monopoly capital. The re-deployment of MTV/Hollywood audiovisual tropes in combination with the depoliticised atrocity reportage style of the 1990s is merely a happenstance formula, one of the many ways in which a subject like this might be handled to the same overall end. What is important is the techniques allowing the manoeuvring of a notoriously ambiguous, 'lukewarm' medium like the Internet into a more coercively 'hot' form. According to McLuhan, media exist on a hot-cold continuum depending on the degree of participation from the audience that they required or permitted in determining meaning. Movies were the paradigmatic instance of a 'hot' media, gratifying consumers with intense, attention-absorbing sensation. The relation of dominance and subordination between producer and audience is increased in direct proportion with the 'hotness' of the medium. It was never quite clear how ostensibly participatory, user-generated media would fit into this, much less the new forms of communications technologies such as he Blackberry messaging systems which gave police and politicians headaches during last Summer's riots. There has, of course, been a tremendous investment by firms and states in theorising their impact. I don't know, but I imagine that quite a few PhDs have been made from this sort of research. And I would suggest that some of the fruits of all these studies in domination have been very effectively brought together in a way that blends ersatz participatory, grassroots politics with straightforward psychological compulsion. They have learned how to use these tools well enough to give the Ugandan army the face of Mother Theresa, and that, one suspects, is what makes this a really seminal moment.

Love, Hate.

If you love someone, you run the risk of not loving them one day. You run the risk of seeing them in a grocery store years later and hiding behind the display of bananas so you won’t have to say anything to them and pretend that the love never happened. It’s funny, isn’t it? When you run into someone like your childhood best friend (the one you haven’t seen in years, the one who became a Christian and has a Coach bag), you say hello. You hug, quickly find out what they’re doing with their life, if they’re happy, and then you move on. Sure, it’s awkward, and there might be a temporary ache in your chest afterwards (time can be unkind) but you acknowledge them, you pay tribute with a smile, a hug, a “How are you doing?”

With the people you once loved, the people that once had an all-access pass to the most intimate details of your life, you sometimes can’t pay tribute. You can’t ask them about their work, their travels, or god forbid, their family. Your mind can’t process it. They can only exist in black and white; they can either be everything or nothing. You say hello to the person you played with when you were five, and ignore the person whose cum you swallowed, who once cried to you in a cab because everything was going wrong and oh my god, you wanted to help them, wanted to save them.

Who do we hold on to and who do we force ourselves to forget? The hardest thing about love often seems to be the extremes. How quickly it can go from “hold me through the night” to “get fuck off of me.” One day you’re in a hotel gift shop with the person you love and you look over at them and start to see different things, things you wish you were never able to see. This is the beginning of the end, the beginning of “get the fuck off of me.” You know in that moment that you’ll be ignoring them five years from now in a grocery store.

You always have the ability to hate someone you love. Hate is passion just like love is passion. You must know this when you sign the love contract. “I hereby acknowledge that loving you carries the potential for disaster. I hereby acknowledge the possibility of hating your fucking guts!!!” Will this stop anyone from loving? More importantly, should it? No.

In a way, hate can be the best compliment next to love. Because the second you’re able to come up to your ex in that grocery store or on the street, you’ve healed and moved on.  The love exists now in a healthy compartment in your brain or not at all. This is all very well and good, but it also means that it’s truly done. Technically, this is what’s supposed to happen. This is the path you’re supposed to be on. But losing the passion can sometimes be the hardest thing to give up. Holding on to feelings, whether it’s love or hate, reminds you that you’re still alive and that the relationship happened. Or something.