Fakhry Al-Serdawi: Globalization Used To Be Fun

By Fakhry Al-Serdawi: (He’s currently doing classic 1990s Talk to the Hand! to those CPAC bowtie types)

It makes you reflective that Wyatt Verlen concluded that being right-wing is no longer fun, just as Viktor Orban, a symbol of the global right-wing movement, is out of government. Okay, my “right-wing” era, if you want to call it that way, was a bit anti-social from the beginning. The only thing I remember from that time is that I had a two-hour Zoom call with people who talked to me about the publication of anti-woke “journalism” (Dr. Evil Air-Quotes) and about fighting the influence of the Palestinian Middle Class pro-LGBTQ/MeToo left.

We never had another call because life became too busy, and those anti-Woke Palestinians seemed insufferable (probably they felt the same about me). What’s different about those people is that they were not “Islamists”, they were just “middle-class”, probably even atheist; Palestinian anti-wokeness was cultural Peter-Thiel-ism without Peter Thiel, which makes you think that half of the global middle class are South Park Republican wannabes, as a response to the other half being DSA wannabes post-2016, as Alex Hochuli brilliantly exposed during the 2020 anti-racism global movement. Is Americanization that much inevitable?

Another phase I had was reading Red Pill books; say what you want about Rollo Tomassi’s writings. I know that his book series, The Rational Male, is not exactly “social science”, and I know that although he denies any belief in a secret conspiracy by a fem-centric cabal working in the background to undermine men, he yet contradicts himself when he says that we live in a gynocentric social order (fancier words repel the charge of conspiratorial thinking). Yes, I know all of this, yet weirdly enough, Rollo Tomassi’s ideas about how she is not yours and his quote on how “The definition of power is not financial success, status or influence over others [including women], but the degree to which we have control over our own lives”, all this helped me become a better feminist more than any other Biden-era feminist individual or group on the fucking planet.

Later on, I had my Tim Dillon-Red Scare era, which was my most social anti-woke era because I listened to these podcasts while actually driving to places after lockdown was eased. Post-lockdown, even in the Third World, also felt American; driving for a handful of miles after lockdown felt dreamy like a Jack Kerouac novel about a road trip between New York and Los Angeles (nothing screams 1950s Beat Generation like a fuck COVID social life). Here are some snippets from my parents’ white Kia Sportage radio: Tim Dillon has this bit that the 2021 Jerusalem Uprisings took place because every couple was breaking up at the very end of lockdown, including Israelis and Palestinians, while Anna Khachiyan naively thought that Mark Zuckerberg and latte-sipping globalists wanted some bland, boring, woke end to the conflict in a way that undermines Israeli “national” Sovereignty.

You have to be shocked that such naivety persists at Platypus and -partially- at Sublation (Tablet and the Free Press are not naive using this argument, they know what they’re doing), but the real irony here is that the ones who really want a meaningless, empty globalist boring end to the conflict are the anti-globalist Gen-X Left. You can argue about the immorality of the Millennial Left wanting a Stalingrad or a Hanoi model in the Middle East, but is it really moral or more humanitarian to put the Gaza destruction as the only alternative, not to market-economy, but to a deformed version of it? Therefore, paying lip service for Labubu Capitalism? Imagine if you began the Reconstruction Era by telling southerners, including freed slaves, that capitalism in the North was about fidget spinners, Sonic the Hedgehog furry costumes, Whole Foods’ edible flowers, and AI videos of humanoid fruits and vegetables cheating on each other? Would anybody be inspired to reconstruct?

I don’t want to bore you with the Middle East conflict again, I just wanted to say that if the Taco Bell economy in Gaza argument seems as bland as the taste of food at Taco Bell itself (including the subargument that it’s either famine or Taco Bell and if you have any philosophical convictions against Taco Bell at this stage, you are a possibly-pro-Hamas brat yuppie Westerner who does not really care about Gazans), it is because Wyatt is correct, anti-globalists have stopped being fun, in a similar life cycle to globalism itself which used to be fun because it used to be extremely not anti-social.

The Beauty of Parallel Americanization(s)

I was especially lucky to live during the 1990s globalization era, because, for some pro-Israel political reason, McDonald’s refused to license the franchise in the West Bank, sparing us from this corporate Xerox of an American food experience, and clearing the coast for the Kentucky-based franchise, Checkers, which opened its doors in Ramallah in 1997 (with a Dunkin’ Donuts section). Also, across the street, the Dallas-based Pizza Inn also opened in Ramallah in the late 1990s because it was also difficult to get a Pizza Hut license back then.

Going to these 1950s-style diners was an authentic, epic family event. There was a certain special day where people went to these spaces and places; now fast food is too fast, so fast, that it actually became grocery 2.0 with some chairs and tables (sometimes not at all). From an economic standpoint, the fact that these medium-sized businesses attempted to reach remote parts of the world proves that there have not only been one, but parallel processes of Americanization based upon asymmetrical and sometimes personal intra-middle-class relations, hugely different from the death of the middle-class dystopia we live in today, where several corporations rule over the planet.

Music -sometimes bad music- was fast to globalize (The Backstreet Boys’ Everybody, Crystal Waters’ Gypsy Woman, The Cardigans’ Lovefool), but cinema was the slowest to globalize in my part of the world (The Matrix was released in 1999, and we had to wait until 2002 to see it on TV). This is why the videocassette was the way to go, especially with the Egyptian Arabic-dubbed Disney Renaissance movies. But never mind the lack of cinema buffs in the 1990s, TV was hugely influential with California mom-energy in The Bold and The Beautiful, and Pacific Northwest dad-energy in Highlander: The Series and the coming-of-age stories for young-adults in Buffy The Vampire Slayer (Buffy and Angel romance is good Globalization, Bella and Edward is bad Globalization, you see my point?).

But the biggest difference between now and then was the tech industry with the Dotcom and the Multimedia Revolutions. The healthiest characteristic of this era is the little to no enmeshment of those two revolutions; there was a genuine offline and personal enjoyment of the information age. Back then, you would buy a game because the CD art was cool; that’s it, no trailers, no online discussions, no hype, no toxic fan base. Years later, you would discover that the game you bought, Half Life, turned out to be PC Gamer Magazine’s Best Game Ever Made.

That offline enjoyment of tech was paradoxically more social than the current online environment would ever be. The internet cafe, the PC salesman, and the CD salesman, unlike many “start-ups” and ZOOM rooms today, were real spaces to spend time. These were also middle-class environments similar to North American game developer studios in the innocent era of early tech (see documentaries about how crazy it was at the Seattle-based Valve Studios) before you started reading news today that some Arab oil Monarchy have just bought your favorite 1990s game publisher.

There was a whole day spent by you and your cousins in the internet cafe, there was Local Area Network-gaming, four controller plugs on a Nintendo 64 console, and Mario and Luigi were brothers for a reason, because you played with your brother. Even if a technology was designed for the individual consumer, for the singleplayer, we had to rhetorically reverse-engineer it to become social; the PlayStation One, the Gameboy, the Sega Genesis, you took turns playing and when it was not your turn, you watched your best friend’s gameplay while being physically in your best friend’s living room, that was not an era where you pathetically convinced yourself that Destiny and Hasan Piker were your “true friends”.

Being online was also great; you had one or two pen pals, and there was a certain time and place to chat with them through Yahoo or MSN chat. You had to respect that, and most importantly, you actually got to turn off the internet when the chat was over! These days, your WhatsApp has forgotten to be just a fucking “chat” app and started thinking of itself as just another world news app, bombarding you with hot takes on how America is winning or losing, or how Iran is losing or winning.

The Global Non-Society

The explosion of the Dotcom bubble, 9/11, 500 million members on Facebook, Steve Jobs’ iPhone announcement, Chris Crocker, 2008 financial meltdown, The Arab Spring to Arab Winter, ISIS, Netflix’s House of Cards and Stranger Things, Gamer Gate, Brexit, Trump, MeToo, Elon Musk CyberTruck announcement, Zuckerburg’s announcement that you will work and half a social life on the Metaverse, Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, and Sam Altman just being fucking Sam Altman. Pick the original date that suits you best as to when globalization started to suck for you. In general, globalization stopped being fun when it started forcing you to choose between your society and you, when the Global Village’s price became the death of the here and now village it took to raise a child, when Francis Fukuyama decided to cancel you and your childhood friends as a “tyranny of the cousins”, although you were loyal believers in his End of History back in the 1990s.

This is why many people are postliberals; no one wants to defend individuality in the era of corporate-forced consumer individuality. People either join the DSA or right-wing populists because they want to get rid of the anti-social condition thrust upon them, created by the loss of the social capital of extended families and neighborhood friends, and yes, they are sick of the subliminal messaging of Disparate Housewives, which tells you that you are on your own, there is no society because everybody in Wisteria Lane keep cheating on each other and killing each other.

Queers were tragically the first people to have to answer the question of choosing between society and oneself. But this is why LGBTQ activism is so sadly in the long-term a Catch-22 situation; why would you fight for being accepted by a family of origin that does not even exist anymore? Do you want the equal treatment of a futureless straight cisperson who visits his hometown once every five years, to practically find it a museum exhibiting the carcass of his past happier life?

Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus smartly explores the irony of a queer-friendly end of the (social) world. Episode 9 of the first season, titled (La Chica o El Mundo) masterfully connects this apocalypse to the themes of globalization; It is at a ski resort during a lush vacation abroad (the biggest and the most annoying symbol of globalization) that Carol discovers that she did not really get the girl, but rather lost the world, and no amount of queer-friendly tourism abroad can change that everybody in the world accepted her when everybody in the world was already dead. The show accurately captures what you, I, and everybody at least once felt in the last 10 years: being in an important airport or at a fancy hotel lobby at some important cosmopolitan capital, but at the same time, having this eerie feeling of impending doom.

You can consider people who go on a white-guy-friendly trip to Southeast Asia as colonizers, and you can accuse people who go on an arab-dude-friendly trip to that region of being sexist or escaping sexual repression. But the truth of the matter is, everybody has thought about escaping there at least once in their lives, because it’s always 1990s globalization in Southeast Asia. Even the fantasies of social justice liberals about that region are no less pathological, nor more noble. Crazy Rich Asians is a film filled with the false promises of globalization towards Persons of Color with high university degrees; not only will you find a job as a female NYU professor in New York, but your foreign boyfriend also happens to be from a wealthy Singaporean dynasty. No wonder the jobless, highly educated voted for Zohran Mamdani; they were disenchanted by the Crazy Rich Asians false worldview, so they opted in New York for Crazy Welfare Abundance Asians. (I am a West-Asian Catherine Liu kinda guy, cancel me if you can).

Globalization stopped being fun when a paradoxical thing happened; there became too much intrusive cultural globalization in private life through Orwellian tech, where you can’t even negotiate what you consume, while there were too few fairly geographically distributed long-term economic opportunities that globalization offered (Wyatt Verlen said that the End of History should’ve created a lot of jobs, including non-bullshit important ones). Cultural Globalization kept taking over your life, while economic Globalization kept slipping out of your hands, and that discussion about immigration became like the discussion about abortion; immigration is morally valid when you have the choice to find a good life where you are right now, you don’t have to abort your life anywhere on the planet and move to a “remaining globalization center” because Libs defend that.

Alienated Abroad and at Home

In 2013, I went to Spain for a paid scholarship after the globalization party was already done in the West. Don’t get me wrong, I love the small city of Bilbao, but you can see the futurelessness in the people’s eyes after the Euro financial crisis, and they can see it in yours (especially with the Syrian civil war), from an angry citizen screaming at a Médecins Sans Frontières executive that the organization is countless times more efficient than the Spanish government, to a group of radical feminists dancing Macarena as a protest method, to a an english speaking middle-aged Basque woman waiting by the Urumea River for Will Smith to arrive to the San Sebastian Film Festival, who sadly acted as if she was waiting for this her whole life, to a Street performer at some Zara street fashion event signing, while being obviously stressfully unhappy, the Pharrell Williams song Because I Am Happy; the official anthem for the denial of the death of globalization.

I came back to Ramallah in 2015. Checkers was already closed in the West Bank; several years before the restaurant’s closure, it stopped offering its signature seasoned fries (that was the coal mine cannery of that establishment). In that era of late globalization right until 2023, I heavily disliked the late-globalized New Palestinian Man, from influencers, selfie-stickoids, and make-up artists, to guys who bought a lot of PUBG energy drinks so they can go home and play the battle royale shooter, to middle-class boys and gals who went to an entertainment attraction of a themed escape room. An escape room? In the occupied Palestinian Territory? I knew gentrification was a sick anti-working-class joke, but that was new. Also, we finally had a fully functioning Cinema that made us in 2019 feel represented by Aladdin’s live action remake and made us feel deep, like chainsmoking kind of deep, by Joaquin Phoenix’s The Joker.

Fast forward several years; we had Woke and anti-Woke, and we had the ultimate globalized anti-globalization tool: THE POLITICAL BLOG. Arturo Desimone asked me why I stopped writing short stories after the beginning of the Gaza War; we both agreed that Joseph Biden killed poetry, and hence I became overwhelmed by the art of POLITICAL BLOGGING, the “superweapon” that allowed me to take part in the online populist revolution.

I resent myself. I know that I should be grateful that globalization is the reason why I am here talking to you (in English), but yet, globalization is the reason why I am here, talking to you (I should be somewhere else, maybe at a still existing Ramallah Checkers branch, having a milkshake or a chili-dog with ten other cousins and friends talking about that LAN party we just had all day).

I resent myself, and so does my wife. You know what she nicknamed me the other day? Mr. Substack (I don’t know how she knows little about American sarcasm yet can sound like George Carlin). Nonetheless, someone must keep doing it until the end, someone has to keep writing THE POLITICAL BLOG; the last globalized collective dopamine-hit-inducing activity that is becoming less effective day by day, losing its mojo by the passing of time, I can feel it writing these very words…