Nathan Schiller

A few years ago, a former mid-level administrator at a prestigious private graduate school told me that one of their job responsibilities was to make the admissions process less corrupt. But they never got much traction. Wealth and influence, i.e., networking and future donations, were a candidate’s most valued qualifications. The dean—who came to higher ed from the tech industry—routinely accepted troublesome students with no academic merit.

This is not a unique story. It’s an open secret that schools can operate this way, or that nefarious actors can game the system. So a breach isn’t really a breach, and one becomes newsworthy only when the crude plumbing’s exposed, when there’s finally public proof that what looks like a meritocracy is actually an underground side-door gangster service.

Facebook is a PR company and Uber is a law firm

I remembered this conversation after reading an article, in Read Margins, musing that Facebook is not a tech company but a communications company, not a telecom one, but a public relations one. The author’s reasoning is that Facebook is in the (unoriginal) business of outsourcing and protecting content creation. The model succeeds not because the company employs the most creators and most efficiently optimizes their unending data for the most advertisers, but because when, inevitably, creators act very badly—spread political disinformation, incite genocide—Facebook spares no expense defending them, and the machine roars on.

As a comparison, the author, a former Uber employee, writes about a joke at Uber, that

if things ever did not work out as a ridesharing app, we could just pivot to becoming a law or a consulting firm since we were so good at introducing ridesharing to many cities and finding creative ways to increase awareness and gain market share.

But, the author notes, it’s not really a joke:

Uber is less of a tech company, but a financial entity composed to find regulatory arbitrage opportunities and suck the profits dry until it can find other sources of revenue.

I find this as helpful a framing as any to complement the idea of American decadence. If Facebook is actually just a PR firm, if Uber is actually just a law firm, then is Amazon actually just a giant unregulated flea market, and not even a convenient one? Is Google really an indispensable search and email service, is it really an innovator in maps, moonshots, and mobility, or does it actually just masquerade as those because the data brokerage and ad auctioneering businesses aren’t as sleek and soothing as material design?

There is a “so what?” element here. Billions of well-meaning people really do stay connected on Facebook, get Uber rides at good prices, buy essential items on Amazon, use Google’s maps for reliable directions. That’s valuable stuff. But valuable enough to pay for itself? To stop the companies from generating the vast majority of revenue from the vacuuming, packaging, and selling of user data to advertisers? From doing nothing to regulate the vile, predatory, criminal behaviors on their algorithmically curated platforms until reporters break the news and Congress starts investigating?

The magical thinking of illusions, U.S.A.-style

The United States is a county where institutions have been unwinding for decades. So a corrupt college admissions process and a sleight-of-hand from benevolent tech monopolists can feel quaint. The impact upon human life is far more crushing when a person faces a healthcare system that doesn’t actually provide health care, or a judicial system that doesn’t actually serve justice, or a public education system that doesn’t actually get funded, or social services that don’t actually get funded, or a federal government that doesn’t actually govern.

But it’s all illustrative of the same conceit: that an important or popular or powerful thing can resemble the thing it’s supposed to be while actually being this other adjacent uglier worse thing, and even if everyone catches on, that’s OK, because it’s all working out. It’s our national subscription to magical thinking: that the illusion, existing in plain sight, can continue indefinitely.

The hollowness of Hollywood

We see this, too, in our art. Hollywood, America’s cultural gift to the world, has been investing in superhero franchises for nearly two decades. These blockbusters are about extraordinary quasi-humans saving humanity. They command the brightest stars and utilize cutting-edge special effects. But they are defined by their hollowness.

There are beautiful, rigorous, gripping films made in the U.S., but they exist on the terms set by the epic monstrosities. One is 2016’s Moonlight, a coming-of-age multi-generational story that begins in Miami at the height of the crack epidemic. The fluidity of the camera, the bright colors and frantic sounds dimmed and muted by tragedy—these are all as exquisitely lined up as the meditations on race, class, family, friendship, work, love, identity, and sexuality are deeply hummed.

Moonlight won Best Picture, but not without scandal. At first, it was announced that La La Land won. So the La La Land people came onstage and gave their acceptance speech. Then there was an on-stage correction: actually, Moonlight won. So the Moonlight people took over.

Commentators pronounced this a “shocking” moment, but it seemed apt that the unconscious forces of the Academy would conjure up a victorious superhero. For La La Land is, indeed, a superhero movie. Not one with mutants in cartoon costumes. One where the most powerful strain of American ideology, uncompromising individualism, rampages through a maudlin, overly simplistic tale about acting, music, and love. It is a film about saving your soul by willing your dreams, yet it is told at a cold, discomforting distance, as if it can’t quite belief itself. I never felt, watching it in the theater, that it really existed. The scenes felt like a prism of rehearsals and takes for a movie parallel to the real one happening just off screen.

As for a film unafraid to tell the truth about American ambition, you have to go back to Mulholland Drive, the surrealist noir that slices the human spirit and litters it with the emptiest optimism. The insanity of the characters’ belief in themselves and in the system of fame and power that they worship cannot be eradicated: it’s all they are, and so psychological style and temporal tricks are all that remains to bring them to life. In this Los Angeles, there is no destiny of independent mutual satisfaction. Just the pitiless self-destruction that follows the realization that nothing is ever as it seems.

Mulholland Drive was released in the United States one year, one month, and two days shy of twenty years ago. In other words, it premiered one month and one day after the September 11th attacks. Let’s hope it didn’t have the final say about its nation.