laundromat television special
The job of the laundromat television is to put everything on the level of weather. The cops, the arrests, the pro-Palestine protests, the President, the mayor, the microplastics. It’s all just a nuisance or a reason to go outside. It’s all just words and numbers reeled off in the incredulous tone of a gameshow. New York City is constantly invoked as an explanation for all kinds of things, by the news anchors and vox pops alike. I mean, what can you say, this is New York City, folks. Tautology is how we describe things that we do not wish to know or speak about further, and yet the talk continues. It is what it is what it is. The television loads words like shapeless stones into the hull of the present. It stabilizes but eventually it sinks.
Not so long ago, this local daytime news genre was easy to dismiss as distinctly lowbrow and ridiculous, like those always-on airport TVs with made-up channels. But watching it in the angled mirror above the washing machines at the beginning of the year, I just thought it felt representative. A botoxed, garrulous news anchor yelling at a wall of churning dryers about sunny days and brave cops doesn’t seem paradigmatically different from all the infotainment on my phone, which exists primarily to process crisis into reassurance. The status-quo scolding of a newspaper’s op-ed section, the TikTokified advertorial that passes for journalism, the cultural criticism whose trend-spotting is just a shill for consumerism, even the passive voice and journalese in war coverage that makes everything seem tragic but nobody’s fault.
Recently, I watched a video on Instagram from the New York Times about the newest Royal Caribbean cruise ship, shot in the FaceTime style that the Times has cannily adopted for all its reporting. The travel reporter marvels at the size of the ship, its floating waterpark, its countless nightlife offerings, its eight different “neighborhoods.” Of its environmental cost, she says this: “The cruise industry has come under a lot of criticism for its negative impact on the environment. But with this ship, especially because of the scale, Royal Caribbean has really tried to introduce a lot of new technology and features to help it reach its sustainability goals for the future.”
They’ve tried? Did anything work? One of the following shots in the video is of hundreds of plastic balloons falling from the ceiling. Taking a cruise generates about twice as much CO2 as flying, and people often fly to take a cruise. Isn’t that something a reporter should tell us? Would it kill us not to bathe in absolution?
Maybe it would kill us. In America it’s practically a sin to despair for the future. You’re supposed to idle in this wide, eternal present, awaiting revelation. You’re supposed to keep up with the world, not to change it, but to maintain a world-historical gratitude or a saintly sort of guilt, which usually just amount to arrogance and unconcern. And if you are to despair, you’re supposed to do it about “algorithmic culture” and “late capitalism,” which are not descriptions but aesthetic clichés, overfixations on form that think the most shocking thing about a livestreamed school shooting is the fact that it’s livestreamed.
Nobody wants to be depressed. I don’t either, if you can believe it. But somewhere the President sounds like he’s hallucinating on live TV. Somewhere else the ex-President is raving like Hitler, his skin burnt-orange and sagging, like cowhide. I won’t even bother writing about the warming, the extinctions, the disasters. The ethnic cleansing, the election year. Doomerism is a tedious dead-end, just as reductive as optimism, but loudly insisting on normality is way more insane, and will only become less convincing. Maybe the fact that the laundromat television feels more and more like the rest of my feed is simply because turning catastrophe into commonplace is becoming harder for everyone to do.
Worse than despair for the future is not taking the future into account at all, pushing the past farther backwards and the future farther forward so that we can languish in an inconclusive present. Take environmental collapse, which is spoken about as something that will happen later, even though we’ve already crossed the 1.5ºC warming threshold for a single year. Or take the American imperial project, where we dodge responsibility until there’s just rubble left for someone else to sift through and the perpetrators have all died in their sleep.
It’s what everyone blames the baby boomers for, but it’s endemic. The American present is a cruise vacation from history, dumbstruck with indifference, where the future is just a glimpse of shoreline from high atop the waterslide. Even when it really starts to fall apart, the decks will be as crowded as ever. There will be people there to say What can you say, folks? as they wait for all to be revealed, which of course it already had been. It’s something to look forward to, yells the laundromat TV.
ben tapeworm