Hyper-masculinity and the newer media

We are told all too often that the newer media provide a wonderfully unmediated access to all. ‘Peace on Facebook’ claims that the social-media site can ‘decrease world conflict’ through inter-cultural communication, and Twitter modestly announces itself as ‘a triumph of humanity’ (A Cyber-House, 2010, p. 61). No more gatekeeping by producers, politicians, or editors.

Cell phones and the like are said to obliterate geography, sovereignty, and hierarchy, replacing them with truth and beauty. This deregulated, individuated, technologized world makes consumers into producers, frees the disabled from confinement, encourages new subjectivities, rewards intellect and competitiveness, links people across cultures, and allows billions of flowers to bloom in a post-political cornucopia. People fish, film, fornicate, and finance from morning to midnight, from Marx to Godard (minus the struggle). Consumption is privileged, and labor and the environment are forgotten. How very jolly.

Equally romantically, but with a franker commitment to capital accumulation, bourgeois economists argue that cell phones have streamlined hitherto inefficient markets in remote areas of the Global South, enriching people in zones where banking services and commercial information are scarce due to distance and terrain. Exaggerated claims for the magic of mobile telephony in places that lack electricity, plumbing, fresh water, hospital care, and the like include ‘the complete elimination of waste’ and massive reductions of poverty and corruption through the empowerment of individuals (Jensen, 2007).

This is one more cliché dalliance with new technology’s supposedly innate capacity to endow users with transcendence, but no less powerful for its banality because of the interests it serves and the cult of newness it subscribes to (Ogan et al., 2009).

Time magazine exemplified the utopic silliness of these tendencies in its choice of ‘You’ as 2006 ‘Person of the Year’, declaring that ‘You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world’ (Grossman, 2006). The discourse incarnates reader, audience, consumer, and player autonomy – the neoliberal intellectual’s wet dream of music, movies, television, and everything else converging under the sign of omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent fans. The dream invests, with unparalleled gusto, in Schumpeterian entrepreneurs, evolutionary economics, and creative industries. Its true believers have never seen an ‘app’ they didn’t like, or a socialist idea they did. Faith in devolved media-making amounts to a secular religion, offering transcendence in the here and now via a ‘literature of the eighth day, the day after Genesis’ (Carey, 2005). Machinery, not political-economic activity, is the guiding light.

But when people awaken, a multitude of scandals follows these wondrous dreams: Cambridge Analytica, Eastern European influences on democratic elections, misogynistic and racist trolling, the sale of information to advertisers – the full panoply of corporate malfeasance and idiocy.

And the free-speech, total access ethos of many social-media platforms (unless sex is involved) has seen the valorization and vocalization of violent masculinity, in cahoots with the usual obsessions of the older media.

Consider the textualization of Jhon Jairo Velásquez, a key assassin for Colombia’s Medellín cocaine cartel in the 1980s. He was personally responsible for killing hundreds of people, and managed the assassination of thousands more.

Jairo Velásquez became known as ‘Popeye’ due to a supposed resemblance to the cartoon character, a typical sicario appropriation of popular culture to leaven and lighten their image (Uribe, 2018). Since his release from prison in 2014, Popeye’s YouTube channel has exploded in popularity, with well over a million subscribers at the time of writing.¹

He remade himself under the soubriquet ‘Popeye Rependido’ [Repentant Popeye] and claimed redemption through apology, even as he studded his videos with bullet holes and gunfire, proudly admitted to mass murders, and interpellated his light-skinned, ultra-right followers as political confrères (Anderson, 2018; Mele & Garcia, 2016).

Meanwhile, Netflix merrily parlayed a Colombian adaptation of his memoir, Sobreviviendo a Escobar [Surviving Escobar] (2017) and a reactionary Spanish province hired Popeye to promote its setting and cuisine.² Rolling Stone and The New Yorker profiled him (Glade, 2017; Popeye, 2018). Russia Today released a bizarre documentary, Escobar’s Hitman (2017) that trailed Popeye around Medellín as he encountered victims and their families and was hailed on the streets by the popular classes.³

Throughout, the carefully-curated image is of a paradoxically dependent man’s man, indebted to hegemonic masculinity, craving the approval of his chosen chief, and eschewing introspective males and scheming women (Bialowas Pobutsky, 2013).

In 2018, he was back in the joint, accused of extortion, intimidation, and leading a group of bagmen for the mob. The following year, he was charged with human-rights violations for his part in the 1986 murder of the prominent newspaper editor, Guillermo Cano Isaza (Higuera, 2019).

But Popeye’s brazenly murderous narcissism still appeals to young men, publishers, and social-media platforms in its quasi-humorous deadly outrage at the world – and right-wing bling. He is not to be romanticized—he is a mass murderer to be imprisoned, minus internet uploading. Unless you’re YouTube (property of Google), and their band of true believers.

Notes

1 September 2019. The address is https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm4BXaCpgI7exZ_Nu3dkXcQ.

2 https://www.netflix.com/title/80141259; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB3qQJKLlVw.

3 https://rtd.rt.com/films/escobars-hitman/.