Hitchens In YouSpace

The gimmick in 2006 was the yourselfness of culture these days, with Time magazine slapping a cheap mirror on the issue traditionally devoted to the person of the year. Now Slate magazine's always indispensible Christopher Hitchens has declared the You Decade to be as tedious and empty as the Me version of same. He rants amusingly away:

I have just been sent a link to an Internet site that shows me delivering a speech some years ago. This is my quite unsolicited introduction to the now-inescapable phenomenon of YouTube. It comes with another link, enabling me to see other movies of myself all over the place. What's "You" about this? It's a MeTube, for me. And I can only suppose that, for my friends and foes alike, it's a HimTube.

It reminds me of the exasperation I used to feel, years ago, when one could be accused of regarding others as "sex objects." Well, one can only really be a proper "subject" to oneself. A sentence that begins with I will be highly solipsistic if it ends only with me, and if the subject is sexual, then the object of the sentence will be an object. Would people rather be called "sex subjects"? (A good question for another time, perhaps.) Or "sex predicates"? Let us not go there.

Perhaps global-scale problems and mass-society populism somehow necessitate this unctuous appeal to the utter specialness of the supposed individual.

Here we have self-centeredness writ large, extended with the reach of technology. Grandma has a MySpace page, grandpa has a blog, and uncle Joe has opted for the hot pink RAZR (with the customized ringtones). The difference between the You and Me generations is mostly about your preferences within the range of pre-fab commercial choices - the same old application with a newly customized "skin". As Hitchens observes, most of this is only the latest variation of overly-ingatiating consumerism.

Who are You, anyway, and why should we care? (Said the blogger with a twitch of irony.)