Trying to create a good society with nothing but critique is like trying to create a prosperous economy with nothing but flipping houses.
Critique really is like financial trading. All you do is evaluate stuff other people make, and you try to get the prize for being the best evaluator. And you tell yourself that what you're doing is valuable because it pushes other people to make better stuff.
When a few people do financial trading, or critique stuff, it's good and valuable. But as evaluating becomes all any of us do, it means fewer and fewer people are actually building the stuff to be evaluated.
Eventually a financial system centered on trading becomes a kind of pyramid scheme where we all just trade assets back and forth whole real investment dries up. A similar thing happens with critique. A society of critics chases its tail until it disappears up its own ass.
Social media makes it super easy to critique stuff, and it gives us instant social rewards for doing so. Dunks and denunciations get massive attention and acclaim. But as social media becomes more central to our culture and interaction, it means we all become constant critics.
We're an over-critiqued society, just like we were an over-financialized society before 2008. We need to shrink the critique industry down to an efficient size.
Not that I know how. Hell, all I can do is critique stuff!
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Not that I know how. Hell, all I can do is critique stuff!
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