May 19, 2021 - 11:25am
Is the interplay of power and surrender a pervy thing, a political thing — or something else altogether? I wrote recently about the way the popularity of ‘BDSM’ reflects a longing for hierarchy in a culture officially committed to egalitarianism. Now, though, a new app seeks to detach the seductive business of either taking or surrendering power from the clammy hands of the whips-and-chains community, and put it to newly-sanitised work-making money instead.
NewNew is an iPhone and Android app that allows you to pay to control others peoples’ lives. Users create polls on anything they like, and followers pay a small sum to vote. In many respects, NewNew echoes what BDSM practitioners call ‘power exchange’ — that is, a voluntary agreement in which one party relinquishes part of their autonomy to another’s control, in the interests of mutual pleasure.
NewNew’s Terms of Service are unambiguous in forbidding creators on the website to post content or polls that are sexual or pornographic, but it’s hard to miss the seductive voyeurism in the app’s offer to ‘Control what real people do’ and ‘Watch them do it’. The app itself scrolls through intro videos posted by young, attractive ‘creators’ who gush about being ‘so excited’ to ‘let you control my life’. And the flirtatious demeanour of many ‘creators’ in their intro videos makes the seductive sub-text (pun intended) abundantly clear.
Arguably though it’s less that NewNew is something pervy in disguise, as that playing with power and hierarchy has escaped the bounds of fetish subculture. And this proliferation of opportunities to play power games is driven in no small part by the way meaningful political agency is increasingly draining from our lives.
In his profile of ‘yacht influencer’ Alex Jimenez Oliver Bateman quotes Jimenez, on what owning a superyacht really means. In Jimenez’ view “it’s a signal that ‘you’re beyond buying and selling. You have more money than there is money to have. You’ve transcended.”
That world is pulling rapidly away from the one most of us live in. Joel Kotkin recently outlined in painstaking detail the consolidation of a new super-oligarchy that’s increasingly unmoored from 20th-century democratic constraints and working fast to consolidate its worldview and class interests. In this world, the people with agency are not voters, or even national politicians, but those who have — in Jimenez’ terms — ‘transcended’.
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SubscribePeople are so weird.
I’ll pay everyone’s small fee for that money-obsessed narcissistic Bateman, because he wwnts money for nothing and at least walking the plank will only bruise his ego not his tackle after something painful. He’s naive. There’s BDSM like 50 shades of sh!te and then there’s BDSM involving horrors such as doing things with produce that cometh out of the body, bloodletting or even cannibalism … have you heard the one about the 2 german gay blokes, except it happened, one wanted to be eaten, the other said “ok, tiger” and obliged. At the murder trial his defence was that the eaten party consented. Like the author says, what can possibly go wrong.
That app should be avoided. (I know about this because I’m gay and you’re bombarded with sex info, images, pride marches or on Eurotrash type programmes. I bake bread instead).
It’s never ceases to amaze me how dumb some people can be. Paying to vote on whether some low level celeb should wear green or blue etc,etc, etc. Just how dumb do you have to be to fall for the rubbish about controlling some aspect of someone’s life when in fact all you are doing is giving away hard earned money to someone who is happy to rip you off
A very interesting take on what may be the real attraction, and motivation, behind this rather strange new app.
This is one of the things I like about Unherd. Journalists like Mary Harrington find these weird cultural manifestations and place them in a broader more meaningful context, or at least try to.
The most useful thing for me in this article is the link to Joel Kotkin’s article published by the Claremont Institute. There’s a whole world of ‘institutes’ and ‘think tanks’ out there making their collective living from studying the emergent weirdness in our society. At least our current moment of cultural crisis is putting bread on someone’s table.
**a voluntary agreement in which one party relinquishes part of their autonomy to another’s control, in the interests of mutual pleasure.**
When are you *not* ‘relinquishing autonomy’ to others in some degree? Only the autonomic system is truly autonomous in the sense of not being conditioned by others.
Even one’s innnermost thoughts and desires are ‘borrowed’. Wittgenstein’s point about the impossibility of a ‘private language’ was a philosophical argument against what Rene Girard has called the ‘romantic lie’ of individualism.
Girard’s ‘metaphysical desire’ – ‘all desire is for being’ – is the premiss of all consumer marketing, which relies on ‘models’ of desirable qualities we feel deficient in ourselves: looks/status/belonging. We desire *being* like the model, not the object/’product’ as such.
The ‘triangular’ shape of desire, that it’s always mediated applies in every realm. Desire needs to be distinguished from appetite. My need for a drink if thirsty requires no mediation. Even so, I might choose a San Pellegrino for social cachet, or not drink straight from the tap if others are present.
The concept of autonomy only makes sense against its absence, i.e. total conforrmity. But nothing is more conformist than individualism. Punk rockers were as ‘individual’ as the hippies they reacted against.
When I was a boy tattoos were the preserve of criminals and sailors. Now even semi-respectable women have tattoos to show how ‘unique’ they are.
Of course their decision to be scarified is ‘autonomous’ in the sense of voluntary. But the notion that women suddenly decided autonomously to be tattooed, or teenagers to wear safety pins through their noses perfectly illustrate the truth of Girard’s maxim that ‘Individualism is a formidable lie’.
“I wrote recently about the way the popularity of ‘BDSM’ reflects a longing for hierarchy in a culture officially committed to egalitarianism.”
Er… no – that is not what it is about at all.