# Questions for Damon Young

2024-04-03

Min: How do you build an archive with contemporary media? How do you relate to the algorithmic curation of content? ("Ironies," pp)

Cailin: You mention paranoia in "Ironies" and "Shortbus"; how do you think about Sedgwick's reparative reading? 

Alex: In "Ironies," about sincerity & Chris Crocker; this doesn't quite account for the "new sincerity" turn in web culture. Is this a generational thing? Gen X, vs. Millennial, vs. Gen Z? Are web aesthetics local to particular audiences?

Scott: How do you periodize Web 2.0? How is it different from TikTok, Instagram, Discord?

Veronica: p. 15 of PDF: "Crocker seems no more convincing..." Is there really no difference bt. Crocker & PewDiePie? Irony is protective, vs. the vulnerability of earnestness. Aren't people incentivized to claim irony rather than sincerity?

Cailin: Perversion isn't perversion anymore. But the stalker storyline is the one that actually feels gross? (Voyeurism of the camera vs. voyeurism of Caleb.) (Watchful eye of Lady Liberty looks like War on Terror-style surveillance and not the assurance of the liberal order's claim to assure the equal pleasure--"pursuit of happiness"--of all. Maybe?)

Veronica: On _Shortbus_: what does queerness mean to you? It seems no longer to index people or identities. p. 204: "If simulation was a structural condition..." Is "perverted, fetishistic" activity/desire necessarily queer (as in the case of _Psycho_)? Or: what does "beyond identity" mean in this context? Now? The muddying of queerness & perversion, subsumption of queerness into perversion: this is used so that more people could take on queerness as a lived formation?

Min: "Ironies," 6: "lulz," or the corruption of "lol". How do you think about the change in online interaction with alt-right celebrities? How do we trace a path from Milo to Elon. (Are they on the same path, or is something else going on here?)

Scott: How would you narrate the last 5 years of internet culture?

Orrin: If we were to link Milo to the piece; Milo is the new creative director for Yeezy; Kim K's photography book. p. 18: "The self of the selfie..." Can you talk more about ambient sexualization and the movement of a gaze in in internet culture? And how film theory helps you discern the technological and aesthetic procedures that bring this new kind of gaze into being?