This account from Abraham Josephine Riesman’s Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America crystallises an idea slowly occurring to me while watching the Netflix Vince McMahon documentary and the brilliant Behind The Bastards series on this:
From loc 113:
These days, if you’re a wrestling fan, you understand that wrestling is fiction. You know that the wrestler who is crowned champion got that title not because he “won” it in an unscripted competition, but because he has the talent as a performer to carry the role. But then again, he might also be there solely because of political maneuvering behind the scenes. That ambiguity is where the fun begins. Maybe you heard that another guy should have been champ, but was snubbed because of a personality conflict with the boss. But then you also heard that the so-called personality conflict is just what they want you to think is the truth, to build drama for the show. But wait, maybe it is real—they could be passing it off as a work, but maybe, actually, those guys really do hate each other… This new status quo is what we might call neokayfabe. It says that pro wrestling, with all its spectacle, is a lie—but that the lie encodes a deeper truth, discernible to those few who know how to look beyond what’s in front of them. To those fans adept in reading the signs, another narrative emerges, and another beyond that. Suddenly, the pleasure of watching a match has less to do with who wins than with the excitement of decoding it.
This was the point where baking became a mainstream practice: “the process of decoding and analyzing Q drops and Trump’s social media posts to find obscure meanings and connections between various events and topics”. It turns the compulsive search for signs into a leisure pursuit, a networked enjoyment stemming from what would otherwise be a painful environment in which, as Beradi puts it, we are “overloaded with messages that we must decode, our existence can turn difficult and painful and can grow so chaotic that our mind feels on the brink of explosion”. It’s fun to bake and social platforms make it rewarding to bake in public and engaging ways, creating a feedback loop which in my more dystopian moments I feel is slowly consuming us all:
From Bourdieu’s Pascalian Meditations pg 226:
Below a certain level, on the other hand, aspirations burgeon, detached from reality and sometimes a little crazy, as if, when nothing was possible, everything became possible, as if all discourses about the future – prophecies, divinations, predications, millenarian announcements – had no other purpose than to fill what is no doubt one of the most painful of wants: the lack of a future.
Mark Carrigan 