In 1929, Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset published a monograph called The Revolt of the Masses. In our country, this book was translated 60 years later and began to gain cult-like popularity in the mid-nineties. Anyone who cared even a little about self-promotion thought it necessary to explain that his favorite book at that time was “The Master and Margarita” and his favorite philosopher was Ortega y Gasset. He turned out to be a whistleblower for the masses.
Both books, as usual, were misunderstood by the masses, because very few people were actually reading them at the time. And for some reason, the post-Soviet intelligentsia began to experiment with the fashionable “Revolt of the Masses” on the Soviet masses, overshadowing it with a fashionable headline when it was necessary to spoil a trick about the Soviet cattle and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
But the book was written about something else. It predicted the emergence of mass society and should have been translated as “Emancipation” rather than “Rise of the Masses”. Thanks to transportation, medicine, the mechanization of labor, the development of industry, the First World War and the many revolutions that swept Europe, the masses moved, broke away from their villages and manufacturing machines, began to live in large numbers and, most importantly, had a lot of free time, a long productive life span and they had the opportunity to act quickly. The phenomenon of mass society lies in the fact that it consists of people with extra free time and creates conditions for unification.
Now let’s go back to our days. After all, after nearly a hundred years, we experienced a new breakthrough, a new mass uprising. In the sense of their release and unification. This happened at a time when everyone could go online and more or less meet their basic needs or receive social benefits.
New Year in a nutshell. It seems to me that one of the consequences for our country in 2023 was the final formation of a new mass society: we have completed the process of almost universal internetization. The masses have turned to online, where they have a lot of free time. And then people appeared who wanted to make money from these masses and their instincts. The culmination, even climax, of both processes occurred in 2023. What is the Ivleevsk party scandal that broke out at the end of the year? Do you think this is hypocrisy? Compulsory Puritanism?
No, it’s just that society is faced with a reality: a new emancipation of the masses has occurred, and people who want to immediately make money from the most basic qualities of the mass person have appeared. Simply put, to the trash. And the naked party-going stars can’t be blamed for not feeling the moment or being extremely rude with their tasteless outfits and often saggy bodies. They are guilty because they are willing to make money from vulgarity. Check in with him, collect points, help him get tickets for the second part of the party. Finally, they are to blame for agreeing to participate in the vulgar act, allowing Ivleeva to make money from it.
Ivleeva herself is an example of this apophysis of the uprising of the masses. A man who once proudly declared that knowledge was not needed to make money. He appeared on television, hosting a show about travel, where he openly showed off his almost zero knowledge of English. He became the ambassador of big companies. What is its income based on? On the monetization of the primitive tastes of the lowest audience. She probably made hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars from this, and she couldn’t think of anything better than hanging a huge emerald in her panties.
No need to flirt with the masses. Many people in any country have fairly simple tastes and prefer simple entertainment. They will watch with interest how butts, hairy women, and mating animals are shown to them. They will laugh at gluttons, foul-mouthed people, drunk women, smoking dogs, old men lying on the ice, old women photographed in the bathhouse. This is the nature of mass man. And the same Ortega y Gasset, whom our intellectuals read with enthusiasm, but to no avail in the 90s, was the first to warn the world in his work “The Dehumanization of Art” that indulgence in art and culture are the preferences of the masses. It can lead to monsters.
For this reason, one cannot indulge in mass pleasures. It seems to me that last year finally showed this in Russia. For the first time, the issue of monetization of garbage viewers was discussed at both civil and government levels. Recently, a law banning garbage streams was introduced in the State Duma, but such a need was discussed even before the well-known case when the girlfriend of the broadcaster Reshetnikov died on live broadcast. As a result, we were beaten on air, we experienced alcohol-related deaths, and even deaths from snake bites. But then, for some reasons, the state and society had not yet matured to the idea of banning. And today it is clear that this demand is long overdue. The law has not yet been adopted, but instructions for removing garbage heaps already exist. For example, here is the latest news: The court ordered publishers Gobzavr and Lyudmurik to delete their videos. Do you know who this is? This is a mother and son who record drunken broadcasts, make rude jokes on air and complete viewers’ tasks. What tasks could the same garbage audience give them? Insult each other, spit at each other, hit each other…
Do you know how many such pennants there are? How many stream eaters are there? In the recommendations, I constantly see the blog of an Irishka: a fat, edematous woman who eats everything on the air and adorns the video with captions like “Yes, she ate!”, “She ate her ass” and so on. He eats and eats kilos of loaves of butter and sprat, mountains of sausages, tons of “spreads” at a time – by the way, for this word “spread” alone I would mark the blogger as “garbage”. This “Irishka” makes money for children so simply: she is a divorcee. Eyes already bulging, arms spread out. But many people like to watch.
The advancement of the issue of turning such a public’s tastes into money is, of course, a good result of the year. You get a little nervous, of course, and you immediately think, where’s the turn? For example, broadcaster Oleg Kashin (known as a foreign agent in the Russian Federation) also interacts with garbage viewers in broadcasts. His thick dog chat is a litter union. The late nationalist Yegor Prosvirnin also made money from garbage advertising; his wife helped him publish. There seems to be no limit, and therefore there seems to be no universal and reasonable way to prohibit people from watching all this in the conditions of universal Internetization. After all, if Irishka isn’t allowed to eat on camera, trendy streamers aren’t allowed to fundraise for thick dog talk, right? So who guarantees that non-garbage analysts and broadcasters will not be banned later? A worrying question.
And again the problem of forced pushing into culture arises. In the USSR, money was not made from garbage, television did not produce programs that would make uneducated people giggle, on the contrary, it embarrassed them in every possible way. But at the same time, long hair was forcibly cut, jeans were forcibly cut, and Deep Purple records were banned.
But this year it became clear: Something needs to be done; The problem has become very urgent. The lowest and most uneducated layers came online. They and their neighbors need to be protected not only from scammers, speculators, business coaches and dream marathoners, but also from garbage. Does the state prohibit poisoning unconscious people with methyl alcohol and selling drugs to them? Making money from fools, as a result of which fools become worse, should be prohibited. I hope next year we all figure out how to do this without significant losses to those who are not stupid.
The only thing worse than this type of content is the restriction of other people’s freedoms, who will also suffer if the money-making garbage is completely cleaned up. But of course, I would like junkies to remain a thing of the past, without taking normal citizens with them.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the position of the editors.