The Enantiodromia Edition

Elliot Aronow (EA) runs minor genius studio, a selective editorial and cultural counsel practice for people and projects trying to avoid the terrible fate of becoming generically appealing. He is also the editor and host of minor genius, an independent imprint exploring the tensions and pleasures of taste, mystique, scenes, and life after the feed.

Elz here. Sometime in early 1991, my mom and dad went to Atlanta to see our cousins Michelle and Shalom. I had to go with them because I was ten.

I don’t remember much about the trip, other than that our hotel was close to a place I should have had no business knowing about, a strip club called Tattletail’s.

Like many kids my age, I knew it from the Motley Crüe song “Girls, Girls, Girls.”

Second chorus, fourth line:

Rocking in Atlanta / at Tattletails!

Hearing The Crüe sing about drinking and fighting and “chicks” was so normalized in the culture at the time that you’d be crazy to think the Harley was ever going to run out of gas.

You don’t need me to tell you what happened next.

Why is this interesting?

Within 24 months, I was poring over Kurt Cobain’s now-iconic liner notes from the Incesticide cassette I bought at Sam Goody with my Bar Mitzvah money.

“If you hate women, gay people, or people of color, don’t come to our shows.”

Now I can’t pretend I didn’t just learn about the term last week but, to me, this was a prime example of what Carl Jung called enantiodromia.

Systems pushed too far in one direction eventually summon their opposite.

Once I started looking at internet culture through that lens, I couldn’t unsee what was coming.

We’ve probably hit the limit of the last 15 years of internet culture: performative, parasocial, distribution-brained personal brands.

Maximum self-exposure. Maximum audience maintenance.

Smooth, repeatable, low risk.

I’ll remove the moralism here and say that it’s not my place to say if this feed-based era was good or bad.

But in hindsight, I’m glad I “sat it out,” because its opposite is going to be geared towards the sort of folks I love hanging out with — people who create and seek out high-context environments, are willing to protect mystique, and repeatedly choose density over consensus. (Shout out to WITI friend Matt Klein of ZINE.)

The younger kids are already hip to the performative authenticity game. And once literacy increases, enchantment decreases.

The next cultural shift won’t come from people optimizing the feed. It’ll come from people who feel impossible to credibly copy.

Here we are now. Please don’t feed us. (EA)