On Esoterislop
A few words on the Friends tab’s more rogue offerings, beyond (in terms of intelligibility and pre-requisite knowledge) mere corecore and behind (by a margin perhaps too charitably wedged apart by irony and the credence placed therein) synthwave Greco_Roman_Bust.pngs edits set to Eurodance (I often feel like an unpaid Meta content moderator in my trying to avoid getting black sun-banged): that of esoterislop and its enjoyers.
My following applauds, “found footage of griffins” and “me at the Shambhala store”, and that “the scallion is the best-known symbol of beauty and love”. What is this? To fall back on the “you know it when you see it” test (Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964) at 197 (Stewart, J., concurring)) for nebulous sorts of digital content feels like a cop-out, and very in line with my being a law student with anal-retentive fatigue. I endeavour (kinda) in this article to define it positively, but begin with its foil: “people you went to high school with [who] be liking ads on Instagram”. Bless their hearts. Rainbow gradient Create Mode pontifications that seem to have infected everybody’s feed—and ostensibly their hearts and minds, what with how often they pop up—are also an incredibly available counterpoint of frankness, but they stir something dark and hateful inside of me and I do best to move onto disclosures of partiality that attach to my criticism: anything sacred geometry, Trinitarian heresies, or saturation diving will get my like.
It’s not quite brainrot. Still weird, and unintelligible, but not totally so. We have to entertain the plausibility of our friends’ acquaintance with all things ‘antediluvian’ and proceed accordingly (imperatively? Tempered somewhat, surely, by the prospect of your normie cousin encountering Kabbalistic imaginings of hopscotch). It doesn’t have to do with religion or the occult, but there’s definitely an uptick in that. Mesmerising concentric and overlapping circles, flitting newspaper headlines, Kundalini-esque animations propelling, as does a red string, the montage toward some kind of final pin (more often than not, the real 9-11 perpetrator), but other times anticlimactically petering out to the end of a Yeat track (not to all; it still “actually feels ahead of its time in [sic] investing”; “this is peak they not trained enough yet”; “Biblically Accurate Data” and “elite Baal knowledge”. Christ. Okay, “me when I larp esotericism”).
One does well to note that people were probably eating humans on Little St James. This understandably enlivens the conspiratorial in us. But now that those savvy enough to pick the allure of esoterislop have jumped on the AI wagon for their diagrammatical machinations, it’s hackneyed. I am not too proud to fail to recognise my biblicalcircuitboardslop sensibilities (sucker for dichotomies here. Oooh, crucifix meets the motherboard. Deep.), but the Tree of Life overlaid by Brian Griffin seems to be simultaneously doing far too much and far too little in the syncretism department. With the osmosis of previously-cloistered language, references, and symbols into mainstream vernacular, the dialogic of Reels transforms plainly weird content into a new kind of social media capital predicated on a chronology of comprehension.
Perhaps it’s really the innocuous expressions of esoterislop that reveal its underbelly. Edtwt lurks at the periphery of, at least for those with finely-tuned sensibilities, early-internet-style scentboards evocative of coquettish laundry lines and weird quasi-academic schematics with polka dots and creaming soda floats labelled “Beliefs”, “Values”, and “Attitudes”, for reasons I can’t quite explain. You, uh, know it when you see it? It’s not lost on me that the above is few shades of separation visually, and aesthetically in the vein of neat, palatable, harmonic femininity, from that explicitly sanctioned in the girlblogger’s feed: birds-eye shots of sambas resting on the curb, iced drink adjacent; crumpled white tees and coffee rings; broderie anglaise against tan skin; lace ribbons. But that it purports to contain something meaningful, albeit (and in fact because it is) obscure, interests me as a demonstration of gendered esoteric communities: ‘coqslop’ as post-Hood Irony. Two sides of the same esoterisloppish coin. For example, I felt unnerved not only by the realisation of the pick-me potentiality in my liking of a ‘X day in Cranston, Rhode Island’ Reel, but what this reflexivity revealed about the pedantism with which I navigate the digital realm as a sensitive young woman.
And esoterislop can apply to the mundane and inadvertent, too, I think. A crude panorama of a street or pasture with a couple words thrown in from the personal account of some variously Midwestern or Eastern European boomer. Sometimes schizophrenic, sometimes not. Generally, esoterislop eludes ‘exploitability’ harboured in most memes (by their nature). It is discrete; inimitable; transient. That’s not to say that it’s not conducive to really fun (and somehow substantially more intelligible) post-internet art (@subproject69.tv and @onetwothreefourfries are among my favourites), whereby the concerted and intentional meta-process of collating weird content alleviates the scorn I feel (if you haven’t gathered) toward what I imagine is merely cursory effort, if not just pretence, at making and/or understanding esoterislop (signifiable by an ambiguously-ironic like, passable in any event as a slip of the thumb). Am I just hating, plain and simple, or can I claim that the montage of a greyscale shot of a palm full of nuts and a low-opacity ‘Day in the Life of a Plus-Size Parkhopper’, set to ambient music, contains infinitely more meaning?
In the age of “mythical Reel pulls” and “Gem alerts”, the capital accessible within a sub-4k like count is a given to anyone clued in enough to at least to pretend to appreciate this content. If it’s just weird beyond belief, what, beyond our own chuffedness at beating the Innovation-Adoption curve, compels us to it? I can extract some pride from having been at Ortho-bro cutting-board reels set to Byzantine chants before “X and a godly woman” entered IRL vernacular. Now, it’s a gamble to like a deep-fried Clavicular edit. Cause that’s tired.
Of course, as an unspoken rule, a like is rarely regarded as sincere on Reels, much to the chagrin of those who like to cash in on their newfound (circa two years ago) sincere faculties to wax earnest about their special interests on main but who would be the first New Sincerity Struggle Session subjects—wow, projecting?. Insofar as digital content needs now to speak for itself in the midst of the waning permissibility of earnest exploration—in captions, or elsewhere, what with the attention economy and the state of sincerity in tatters—it’s interesting to conceptualise it as needing, first and foremost, to speak for itself to you, to then speak to others indelibly marked by your understanding; sandwiched between Sydney Eats and 7 News Stories and screenshots of tweets set to Joji. And if it’s the nothingburger underscoring this article that we happen to be drawn to niche and subversive communities in a digital topology swamped by prescriptive and formulaic content, so be it. Wow, that was easy. In 2018 I downloaded Instagram to share photographs with my friends and family.