The Decay of the Divine
On Writing & Modern Media Dispensation
I recently watched Henning Carlsen’s 1966 film noir classic Hunger, based on Knut Hamsun’s Nobel Prize-winning book of the same name. From the opening credits, with their brisk, isolated piano theme, it was clear from the start that this black and white flick wouldn’t be remiss in its duty to convey the tonally dour atmosphere permeating throughout Hamsun’s still-socially relevant late-nineteenth century novella. By the end credits, I was left with no illusions: the film captured Hamsun’s voyeuristically oneiric tale of a solitudinous, vaguely schizotypal writer with a disarming, almost grotesque fidelity.
It’s the essence of existentialism, isn’t it? That even in the most trivial, uneventful existence, there lies enough raw material to craft a story that could, in some small measure at least, be considered timeless. No need for belief-suspending grandeur or sweeping outbreaks of fantastical significance, just the quiet, gnawing pulse of man’s primordial condition, laid bare in its most prosaic and brutal form. In the realm of artistic output, what could be more meaningful than that? A life as a canvas for unmitigated self-awareness, drawn from nothing but the sheer ordinariness of Being. As Nietzsche proffered, "no artist tolerates reality”. Indeed, for in a world now without God, they shape it.
All very well. But isn’t that the cheerful irony? In the act of trying to distance myself from the very absurdities of modern media scroll-baiting — reaching for Nietzsche, Hamsun, and the isolated piano notes of intellectual Scandinavian cinema — I only end up further entangled within the dark and dirty web of it all. Who can escape the pull of the shitposting meme, the digital dystopia of smut-filled ‘freedom of expression’ you’ll find smattered about your X feed, and the useful banality of awesome! as a concise salutation to your editorial seniors, of all entities? Evidently, not I. But maybe that’s just the way it is. We’re all forever sketching within the margins of the existential narrative we can’t quite outpace, despite our doggedly vociferous denouncing of it. Not that I’d be guilty of such a thing, you understand.
Speaking of Hunger, I’ve always felt that the poetic sense of honour in suffering comes only after the fact. No amount of Dostoyevsky, Hamsun, or Nietzsche grants one with unpained stoicism while the toothache rages, for only once you’ve endured the pain do you become your own hero. I posit that, after spending too much time in Telegram’s philosophy-bro cliques, a serious writer will eventually relinquish his more objective influences and give in to a sort of social-media-infused Gonzo journalism, from which the constant glorification and exploitation of suffering, loss, and despair are said to make a man who he is. And that’s all fine and dandy (if not utterly nonsensical), but I shall warn ye, gentlemen: the scars left by invariably saying Yes to a life of pain and self-sacrifice are as psychically indelible as they are hideous. Though we’ll leave the redpill topics for another cold day.
If the modern world insists on substituting this kind of watered-down simulacrum for substance, there remains, of course, a quieter, less commercially viable current: a solitary practice of writing that preserves the primordial heroic power of language, the depth of thought, and the authority of a singular, observant voice. One writes not for the crowd, not for the algorithm, not even for the dubious approbation of one’s peers (a pleasure often over-rated), but for truth. A truth as discerned, however imperfectly, by a mind consciously willing to be disciplined. And in that act one perceives with an almost unpleasant clarity the subtle forces eroding such rigour.
Consider our vernacular: modern English, stripped of structural ambition, scoured of subtlety, stands as a dismal shadow of its former, multi-dimensional incarnation. Latin, with its capacity to compress ritual, philosophy, and lived experience into a single term, German in its archaic rigidity — both retain traces of a thoughtfulness largely absent in contemporary Anglo-Saxon parlance. English, conversely (and perhaps alongside most other Indo-European tongues), has succumbed to a slow corrosion, a forced egalitarianism in which a hierarchical complexity is ubiquitously deemed inconvenient, nuance burdensome, and linguistic precision a kind of unwelcome asceticism – a precision often dismissively deemed ‘performative’ by today's increasingly sterile standards. Two-dimensional, easy-to-read, cheapened: this is the atmosphere in which the serious writer must inhale, exhale, and extract the oxygen of sustained thought. If one’s words seem inaccessible, a brief consultation with a free online dictionary is sufficient; self-education remains a virtue in my book.
“Far from encouraging greater precision, the normative demand for linguistic simplicity in the contemporary publishing industry erodes the very fabric of pinpointed and accurate expression, substituting nuanced interiority with a bland, clinical mediocrity.”
Few have articulated this erosion more incisively than the reliably mercurial Will Self, whose critique of social media’s corrosive influence on literary three-dimensionality is as piercing as it is prescient. In typical cerebral-sardonic fashion, the long-serving New European columnist had opined on what he deems the death of the “serious” novel in a pleasingly meandering 2014 piece for The Guardian, preceding the cautionary prophecy he delivered a few years later at Brunel University, where he warned of the impending demise of the literary codex itself at the hands of technology’s unrelenting, transformative juggernauting – concluding that the excessive supply and demand of digital spaces will obliterate humanity’s aeon-old necessity for linguistics-based communication. But it’s his unrestrained disdain for the ceaseless tide of vacuous chatter on platforms like Instagram and Twitter that warrants closer attention here, regarding which he acerbically declares, “I’ve no intention of writing fictions in the form of tweets or text messages—nor do I see my future in computer-games design.” Nicely put. You could also trek to notice that Self’s X account is notably devoid of such glib dispensaries, therefore the man cannot be lampooned for hypocrisy any time soon.
Of course, the ‘death’ of ‘X-this’ or ‘Y-that’ is hardly a novel sentiment, and while some trendy young things may dismiss Self’s views as the grumblings of an aging curmudgeon, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that our daily exposure to the exponentially growing deluge of lukewarm wisdom and Readers Digest philosophising does little to nourish the intellectual appetites of anyone with any serious aspiration of contributing at least a fraction of perennial depth to the selective-historical confines of the literary establishment, of any screed.
In another Guardian piece, Self deftly touches on Baudrillardian theory in professing that “digitisation has become so comprehensive and penetrating it is now able to express the fundamental categories within which we perceive reality itself”, summing social media’s matrixial lair with an easy philosophic flair. As the author of the extraordinarily imaginative The Quantity Theory of Insanity reflects, “In the early 1980s, the literary novel was perceived to be the prince of art forms, the cultural capstone and the apogee of creative endeavour.” This rock-star status he ascribes to the novelist during the Thatcherian decade of economic decadence now seems almost risible relative to 2026’s social media junk culture, where the ‘lit’ in ‘literary’ has arguably made way for the ‘lit’erally sensationalist.
But let's get more exact here: this lamentation shan’t remain confined to the literary novel alone. For the broader cultural landscape has, in fact, surrendered the artistic vigour of literary expression in true white-flag fashion; and yes, very much within the mundane precincts of daily non-fiction; and no, not solely confined to the domain of social media. Given the now-widespread ubiquity of the written word in the early 21st century, shouldn’t we be living in a more journalistically literate society, I hear you ask? So what, then, is the root of this literary decline?
Allow me to answer thus: How often have we zestful pen-pushers been accused of writing too ‘wordy’, too dense; overly muscular, too ‘verbose’? Or perhaps yet more insulting— ‘ornate,’ ‘flowery’? How many times has a nameless editor eventually come back only to drolly reply with, “Tone it down, dude, we’re not interested in a reinterpretation of the King James Bible”?
Absolutely granted, not one literary organisation is obliged to publish your work, and that’s whether you view yourself as Luther-reincarnate or not. However, this type of constructive criticism often demands that we neuter and consequentially enfeeble our words rather than clarify them. Words are words, folks. We use them for a very specific purpose: to make our thoughts, feelings, reflections, and actions of intent more clear, more direct, not less. If executed effectively, words do not serve to cloud and obfuscate, but to affirm and educate. Spoken or written, without the advent and cleverly neogilistic application of syntax, we’d still be tussling and fighting and indiscriminately killing one another merely to get our point across, Hobbesian proper.
Far from encouraging greater precision, then, the normative demand for linguistic simplicity in the contemporary publishing industry erodes the very fabric of pinpointed and accurate expression, substituting nuanced interiority with a bland, clinical mediocrity. Lexical complexity is neither strictly performative nor mere ornamentation when it maps genuine conceptual terrain. The current push for “accessibility” often means flattening distinctions that matter, thus trading Victorian muscularity for McLanguage designed for frictionless consumption. This modern digi-geist of widespread accessibility and mass appeal has produced a landscape in which a carelessness in relation to the dispensation of content (produced and manufactured with an alarming speed and efficiency, no less) devours and discards the structural sanctity of the codex in a relentless rhythm that borders on the frenetic. Instead of cultivating original, reasoned thought with a meticulous appreciation for the strength and beauty inherent to the lexical structure of language, most feed-friendly social media influencers (and yes, a glut of editorials too) merely serve up a paltry, echo-chambered diet of quasi-literate flaccidity and subsequently disseminate via the gaudy vestige of quantity-based optimisation alone. In this way, the ubiquity of digital culture has indeed democratised discourse but also diluted it tenfold, rewarding engagement over insight, and volume over internal veracity. Thus, the intellectual bar is now set not by the weight of one’s ideas and their virility of execution but by the algorithmic perpetuity of visibility, very often employed to emote a convulsive ‘shock’ value in order to climb the curve of exposure. This is not a sign of progressive evolution but a widespread relinquishing of declarative self-assertion; a cognizance of inner strength, a surrender of the heroic that once lent our letters backbone and fire.
Case in point, I recall watching an interview with the legendary English author J.G. Ballard, recorded in 1986, in which he described the media landscape we now inhabit as “This enormous impracticable novel within which we’re living,” thus sustaining itself solely on sensation. “We’re now in the position of drowning animals,” he went on to say, “drugged by some powerful narcotic agent who needs electric shocks to remain awake.” Made decades before the advent of social media, it goes without saying that Ballard's words are remarkably prescient.
The obscure Nietzschean polemicist Bill Hopkins diagnosed the condition with equal precision in stating that “a literature which faithfully reflects a mindless society is [itself] a mindless literature.” Perhaps the most understated figure of the brief but fiery Angry Young Men zeitgeist, Hopkins had correctly determined that if literature “is to be anything larger, it must systematically contradict the great bulk of prevalent ideas, offer saner alternatives, and take on a more speculative character than it has today.” One could argue, then, that the literary culture of 2026 mirrors this ‘mindless’ media pantheon with an unquestioning obedience — which is to say an ecosystem where intellectual rigour is often sacrificed at the altar of virality, where spectacle and simulacra drown out the substantive, and where the esteemed act of well-reasoned thought is reduced to an exercise in deliberately abrasive and consequentially invasive Tikker-Tokker branding or some other ephemeral discharge of the digital age.
Oh, you’ve heard all this before? You might scoff and eyeroll at such linguistic snobbery, but really—it's hardly the stuff from which thought leaders are made. Conjunct with the BBC of yesteryear, most well-informed British Millennials may recall when our very own broadsheet newspapers were deemed the most authoritative and reliable source of domestic and pan-continental information, and nowhere in The Times or The Independent were there bot-generated op-eds posing as pulse-checked punditry, nor clickbait headlines wired to inflame rather than inform (for that mantle was reserved for The News of the World and other such commodifiable nipple-oriented slop). And no, nor were mainstream print moguls inclined to publish laconic, apostrophe-less one-liners in their designated mail sections in the late 90s and early 2000s, given most of these Dear Editor letters were written by retired headmasters and regional Lib Dem candidates and bespectacled late fifty-somethings called Reginald and Edwina. Even the sardonic irreverence found within the anarchic, neo-reactionary crit-theory zines a la Bowden’s Revolutionary Conservative Caucus and Vartikian’s much less restrained Bastard invoked dismissive jeers from Sir Reginald the Third and his ilk. Yet these fringe, unabashedly anti-establishment mini mags were far superior in topical and literary quality in comparison to today’s myriad, surplus equivalents of social media quick-fix sensations in the most previously pondered Ballardian manner. Thus, if for nothing else, I see the value in the premium—and dare I say, professional—influence legacy media had commanded from its ancillaries by virtue of its objective literary superiority alone.
This isn’t merely a reactionary critique, you understand, it's a realistic observation of how far we've come, or rather, how swiftly Western discourse has transitioned through phases in such a relatively short period of time. Indeed, the first quarter of the 21st century has signalled a most galling plummet.
“The modern tendency to dismiss intellectualism as performative is, paradoxically, a performative display of self-serving authenticity.”
Incidentally, the first time I saw my own name in professional media print, I was twelve, an age at which I would've insisted I was de facto linguistically superior to all the other Scouse grugs in my classroom. It was in The Evertonian, a locally distributed newspaper dedicated to chronicling the in-house gossip and on-pitch triumphs of my boyhood football club (now, alas, relegated to the glossy pages of a generic sports magazine). I wrote a piece on behalf of a friend. Or rather, I pretended it was on his behalf, though I suspect my words were less an act of friendship than an exercise in pre-digital self-aggrandisement, thinly veiled in the pretensions of precocity. But it worked. The article saw the light of day, and I, like any good enfant one to watch, was validated by my own juvenile cleverness. Though I never did manage to get published in the club’s unofficial but highly lauded fringe subsidy, the infinitely readable, terrace-pulsing fanzine When Skies Are Grey, long since defunct. Terrible shame. Nevertheless, this nascent foray into print was, of course, merely a prelude to my youthful attempt at music journalism.
The mission to review Radiohead’s then media-bewildered Kid A for Q magazine (a rather lofty goal for any young teen) was, in hindsight, perhaps ill-fated from the outset. My sardonic rants against the growing tide of radio-friendly café-pop and nu-metal, which I naturally believed myself above, stood in stark contrast to my unwavering allegiance to the Oxford quintet’s cerebral fusion of new wave Krautrock and post-disillusioned Britpop (which, at the time, was deemed a daring presence atop the mainstream charts). I can still recall a line from a column in Q that same year — the journalist’s name, regrettably, escapes me — describing the band as ‘thinking man’s rock,’ a label I had eagerly adopted as a reflection of my own musical preference. And perhaps I was in that juvenile milieu, but it serves as a reminder that an above-average verbal IQ can act as a shield in equal measure to the sword. There was an underlying alchemical zest in the process: a piece read, considered, perhaps even enlivened by someone with the authority to decide its worth.
What had begun as an exercise in literary self-validation was, upon reflection, a lesson in the weight of discernment. The act of writing to cultivate nuance and precision of thought at such a young and impressionable age was no longer just a means of asserting my precocity of opinions. Most relevant, however, was the feeling that my words became something greater simply by passing through the hands of a professional editor.
What we can conclude is this: serious prose now exists in a kind of self-imposed exile, dwelling in margins the algorithm will neither reward nor even acknowledge. The twelve-year-old who once experienced that alchemical charge of editorial transformation—words made weightier through institutional scrutiny—now finds himself serving as his own refining agent, negotiating between impulse and precision without the mediating friction of gatekeepers who have long since abandoned their posts. Perhaps this is the only tenable position available to those who refuse the neutering demanded by quick-fix platform economics: to write as though the literary vanguard still commands relevance, whilst simultaneously acknowledging it survives only in outposts the broader culture has left for dead. My own icelationworks.com, in this sense, operates as both a type of monastery and laboratory; a space within which such muscular expression the digital deluge has rendered obsolete and ‘difficult’ are preserved, while their stubborn renewal is tested.
There’s no romance in this marginality, however, and certainly no vindication in knowing one’s prose will be overlooked by the very mechanisms designed to distribute it. But the alternative — capitulation to the degradation of media dispensation, or worse, silence — remains existentially intolerable. One's uncompromised truth is not discovered in a lost society's normative interference, nor in the clamour of competing voices, but in fidelity to the foundations upon which one builds one’s thought, one’s craft, and one’s art. For what else can the serious writer do but continue mapping conceptual terrain with whatever linguistic tools prove adequate to the task, irrespective of whether his peers are listening? Thus, the modern tendency to dismiss intellectualism as performative is, paradoxically, a performative display of self-serving authenticity. After all, as Carlyle understood, we live by believing in something, not by endlessly debating the conditions of its impossibility.
The divine lexicon of the English language may well have decayed, but the act of articulating that decay with precision and conviction is itself a form of refusal. Refusal, however marginal, however ignored, remains a mode of belief; the one who says “it’s not that deep” is already speaking from beneath the surface.
As we were: watch Hunger. It will clear your head.
Referenes:
Ballard, J. G. (1986). Future now [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RELjQkAI1RA
Carlsen, H. (Director). (1966). Hunger [Film]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RShayOfGTJ8
Carlyle, T. (Ed.). (1995). Selected Writings of Thomas Carlyle (D. C. Traill, Ed.; Penguin Classics). Penguin.
Hamsun, K. (1920/2001). Hunger (R. M. Bly, Trans.). Vintage International. (Original work published 1890).
Hopkins, B. (1957). Ways Without a Precedent. In Declaration. MacGibbon & Kee. United Kingdom.
Nietzsche, F. (1901/1958). The Will to Power (W. Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, Eds. & Trans.). Random House. (Original manuscript published 1901).
Self, W. (2014, May 2). The novel is dead (this time it’s for real). The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/will-self-novel-dead-literary-fiction
Self, W. (n.d.). Isolation, solitude & long-form fiction [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2Mo5hLWcsg