I called the return of 'weird' 3 years ago. Here’s how I knew.

Surprising few, Donald Trump chose JD Vance as his running mate; surprising many, almost instantaneously, word went out across the Democrats’ elite that the hit on Vance would be that he was “weird.” Soon thereafter, the intended smear was spread to Trump himself.

The commentariat weighed in, the public square pulsed with reactions, and the blowback began. Many found it weird that Vance, who’d previously been more susceptible to hostile classification by the lefty meme ironically begging for “the confidence of an average white man,” was now being attacked as an oddball — often by people who, to put it charitably, presented with an eccentricity so extreme that just 10 years ago, it was all but absent from public life.

How the normies of today can be attacked as weird by today’s freakazoids ...

But there was another kind of pushback in defense of Vance: Not only was he weird, his weirdness went far beyond his critics’ imagination — and that was a good thing. Perfect case in point — the Atlantic’s attempt to portray Vance as weird depicted him in a political cartoon as a wizard out of Tolkien toking richly on a most mystical pipe. Seemingly unpredictably, accounts on X started half-joking that Vance was, indeed, wyrd, a figure of destiny straight out of the 1400s, when, as the etymology dictionaries will tell you, that word first appeared.

This kind of leap may strike many normal Americans as the “real” weird, one that didn’t really influence public life before the internet and now seems to be everywhere, as ever more obscure and bizarre identities double and triple down on what’s least accessible about them to outsiders.

And it’s not that hard to see how the force of this identitarian logic points, as Marshall McLuhan observed decades ago, in the reifying and deifying direction “from cliche to archetype.” All over the internet and our digitally influenced society, we now see affinity and identity groups elevating representative people to what the gamers call “god-tier” — a symbolically superhuman status meant to capture and express the “eternal” about the identity in question.

But thanks to my years of obscure McLuhanverse studies, nothing about these uncanny trends was weird or surprising to me. I learned in the late 2010s that the rise of digital technology “retrieved,” in McLuhanite speak, “the medieval.” The immense power of digital machines to record and recollect was refounding our interior and exterior experience in a way that privileged memory over the master faculty of modernity, imagination. That topsy-turvy transformation returned us to a collective cast of mind last shared in premodern times.

It was a change massively intensified by the fact that our machines’ dominance over us in recollective power returned us to fundamental questions that our prior worship of imagination only temporarily muted — questions like who we as humans really are and why. These questions, ultimately theological, demanded theological answers ... and the last time society so tightly revolved around the question of the human and the divine was the Middle Ages.

And so it could come to pass that I logged on in spring of 2021 to post that the rise of digital tech heralded weird's fall and wyrd’s rise:

Of course, big happenings like these are not toggle switches. It’s a much messier transition. That’s how it can be that yesterday’s weirdos (hippies, freaks) are now today’s establishment ...

How today’s ex-weird establishment can be struggling with the rise of a still-weirder youth cadre of psychosexual mutants beyond the old hippies’ imagination ...

How the normies of today can be attacked as weird by today’s freakazoids ...

And how the whole mess can produce such a fractured pantheon of pseudo-demigod figures whose titanic, cosmic conflict reveals identity politics to be a grand manifestation of the technological and theological character of experience in our strangely neo-medieval age.

Who’s in control of your fate?