And with royalties.

This is cute. Former Gawker editor and recovering neurasthenic Emily Gould evidently took some literary theory courses, and she'd like you to see how smart she is in addition to feeling sorry for her: she's written an essay about how we should all stop blogging because the internet is, like, totally fascist. Since it seems to have been easy enough for her to do, I guess I can overlook the untidy detail that she, um, published it on the internet. Also? Being told to stop blogging by Emily Gould is like Robert Downey Jr. sitting you down for an intervention. Though the man has done some great work lately! Maybe Emily should take some notes? I am absolutely not calling anyone retarded.

Anyway, if you don't know her story, the deal is that she shared lots of personal details about her life and relationships in her own blog and in her Gawker posts, in true Stuff White People Like style, documenting the ensuing difficult breakup and writing a mea culpa for the Times. Now that some time has passed, she'd like to apply Walter Benjamin to the situation, using her own experience as a microcosm of the larger digital alienation at work in our culture. And actually, awesome for Emily Gould! She's come a long way since being visibly reduced to a stammering college freshman on CNN by Jimmy Kimmel.

It would just be so much easier to take her seriously if she weren't misinterpreting Benjamin! Not in the it's-a-complicated-essay-and-she-missed-a-debatable-nuance way. In the reading-it-exactly-fucking-wrong way. According to her, Benjamin finds reproducibility of artistic images problematic because it "clears the way for fascism." Actually, the entire point of the essay is that reproducibility of the image detracts from its elements of aura, ritual, and mystery. We no longer feel awed or overwhelmed by the image, which Benjamin feels can help us resist fascist governments. Nor does Benjamin employ the term "simulacra," as in Emily's amusingly alliterative "simulacra of social connection, facsimiles of friendship." I think she's thinking of Baudrillard, which is an honest mistake since they are both taught in crit theory courses and do both begin with 'b'.

Okay, okay. The people who produce our current consumable culture are smart and educated and they're going to show it (today I was delighted/horrified to learn that "Gossip Girl" namedrops Thomas Pynchon in an episode from last season). And as the writers of Stuff White People Like will tell you, there's a well-documented history of privileged white girls using fascist movements as metaphors for their own personal tragedies. Ach, du, Emily, it's just that Benjamin really is relevant to your situation, in a far different way than you realize! The aestheticization of the everyday inevitably leads to an aestheticization of politics, which means, for Benjamin, that we begin to find war beautiful. It becomes our art, in a sense, and you're one of the biggest profiteers in the game. Not everybody can shame the world for its online soullessness while making a killing from it in print. At least we are assured that she does it honestly and wryly.