Introduction

This graduate course explores what a modern day gonzo journalist might cover instead of the Mint 400 and the Kentucky Derby. Research topics include Silicon Valley and new semiconductor foundries being manufactured near Las Vegas. This question was first posed as a thought probe in October and November 2022. The examination of the term “fear and loathing .”

  • Why there?
  • Why here?
  • Did Nancy Reagan ever blush ?
  • What about this? Nirvana lyrics revisited- Exploring the Mandela effect in auditory interpretations of ambiguous phonetics
  • What about that? Computers embedded in culture, direct to consumer (D2C) and the shift in Silicon Valley from hardware in the late 1990s to software.
Part 1 - Industrialized Printing Press, Xerox PARC, and World Wide Web

Pop culture is inseparable from technology. Comparisons in commercial advertisements made 30 years after the Intel Pentium era. A study of of Outcault’s 1895 The Yellow Kid comic strip, the color offset press , transistor radios and PARC’s Cookie Monster as prototypical tech demos. Recent examples of technology demos, such as OpenAI’s text to video-generation software, Sora, are analyzed with its implications for the film, media, and advertising industries. Increased obsolescence via convergence or deprecation of ever-evolving entertainment industry technology, from sound accompaniment after the first “talkies,” to technicolor, to special effects by Industrial Light and Magic, are compared to recent advances in AI. The economic downturn in such industries such as journalism, advertising, and customer service is examined while also highlighting a renewed focus on the value of art arbitrage in traditional arts, such as literature and theatre. A recent tweet described an increasing need to discern “taste” due to the volume of AI-generated content. Whether the “art” or “taste” arbiters will be managed by humans or AI is both a social and system-wide architectural problem, as neural network algorithms are being implemented at the lowest levels of chip design, from microcode, to high-level search engine optimization (SEO) and is an emerging nexus of influence.

Part 2 - Stranger in a strange homeland and the role of individuality in a “Non-Player Character” Era

Fictional portrayals of technological and cultural obsolescence, or intentional anachronisms, are common in films such as Enchanted (2007) and An American Pickle (2020). As early as the 1960, Hunter S. Thompson was known to make fun of counter-culture (even whilst indulging himself at Big Sur), of disco in the 1970s, and Bill Clinton’s saxophone in the 1990s (but also gifting him a reed. ) While not technologically old-fashioned, there are two things that I believe about him to be true, after studying HST on and off for nearly 20 years. The first, “Thompson admitted during a 1978 BBC interview that he sometimes felt pressured to live up to the fictional self that he had created, adding, “I’m never sure which one people expect me to be.” and the second:

“His seemingly perverse insistence on face-to-face confrontation occasionally exposes cant and hypocrisy. In 1964 he offers his services to President Johnson as governor of Samoa (‘My position at this time is in flux enough to allow my serious consideration of such a move’), then withdraws the offer in protest at the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Scolding LBJ (‘start acting like a thinking human instead of a senile political beast’), Thompson, at this point an obscure hack, places himself on the next metaphorical barstool to the President, insisting on his right to address the Administration as an equal. Lack of emotional engagement seems, throughout The Proud Highway, to be the crime which Thompson abhors. Again and again he insists that things happen because people, particular individual people, make them happen. And if you don’t like what people do, you should confront them. Applied to the smoke and mirrors world of US politics, it taps into old-fashioned American ideas about individual liberty and plain talking.”

Emerging social movements, however are less equipped to deal with individuality in isolation when compared, strawman-like, to NPCs, or “non-Player (or non-Playable) Character” stereotypes. However, the opposite is also true: organized social justice often uses a flat form of Menippean derision (as opposed to dry wit) to mock old-fashioned ideas, pigeonholing even rugged individualism as housecat libertarianism. The difference HST had between a modern political activist, is that HST would write personalized letters, whereas today an activist, including of my own generation, might digitally sign a carbon-copied petition on Change.org, or use an exact meme template for parroting statistically representative beliefs rather than a long tail of truly diverse and constitutionally protected opinions. NPC pejoratives also appear to stem from, paradoxically, from increased tolerance to extreme beliefs, such as solipsism, which libertarianism is incompatible with in groups larger than one.

Part 3 - A Contrast of two Southern “Gentlemen,” Literary Attack Dogs of opposing parties?

John Kennedy Toole’s post-humous A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), represents a prescient attitude of a large share of American personalities, albeit quite contrary to traditional attitudes of his time (some suggest he was truly medieval). It would be difficult, if not inaccurate, to categorize Toole as belonging to either party today, however, and like HST, would appear to be much more conservative than today’s modern Democratic party, if not because of a product of his time. It should also be said that Toole was very likely writing a satire of Southern values, much in the way Johnathan Swift and Aldous Huxley wrote of their contemporaries’ changing or speculative social mores in A Tale of a Tub and Brave New World, respectively. A 2016 episode of Bill Maher, described an interesting phrasing of presidential candidates: “our scumbag.” If anything, HST, while not a successful politician (losing an Aspen mayoral race), in many ways was the Democrat’s own scumbag. Toole, while seeing nothing of the success as HST, represents somewhat of a quaint royalist fantasy, that only became activated and three dimensional in the past 10 years. Other irreverent members of the self-identified American aristocracy include the cartoonist Charles Addams and writer/socialite Alice Roosevelt Longsworth, who, while both highly partisan, honed their craft and interests in slightly less political ways.

Lecture videos
  1. Wayne’s World
  2. Nirvana’s Most Successful Song- “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (1991)
  3. Lyrical Ambiguity as Art “Weird Al” Yankovic - “Smells Like Nirvana” (1992)
Lecture notes

Can Americans identify Arizona on a map? Nevada? New Mexico?

Did Kurt Cobain really say “Mosquito”? or “How does he know?” And did he say, “Albino”? or “How would I know?” and “How would you know?”

Readings