The Threat Of Pop
Here is an image, often stolen, without credit, or knowledge of what is happening on the day. An “expert” will then write his/her assumptions to a reader base who also assumes that journalism was involved in the process. No one will be the wiser — except those who actually know — and the world will gobble up just another pop-feature article to sell supplements.
“You know of, but you know nothing about”
This quote stays scribbled on our whiteboard. It was written in haste while stewing our contempt for a popular “fitness” related periodical—misinforming the world of what we do—while simultaneously selling what we have done; without our input or permission, naturally. Despite our grudge, it makes one wonder how prolific this tendency of lazy journalism is. Because surely we aren’t the only ones that notice the recycling of hyperbole and the the media’s habit of confusing “having heard of” with having done.
Pop, is what I call it. Pop-science, pop-news, and pop-fucking-music. It’s the digitalization, mass production, and annihilation of reality. It is life lived on “auto-tune,” but sold as otherwise. Almost every major industry is affected by it because people love to believe they understand without taking the time to ensure that they do. Confirmation of knowledge is usually based off of what is POPular. But it is hard to fathom just how unimportant consensus is to expertise, in fact, expertise is often developed by questioning consensus—at the very least it is refined by it. This is something we know a little about, a house built on spite. Our practice has evolved out of asking questions, verifying what works and tossing everything else. I would maintain that we are only able to exist because people question what we do, and we have to prove what we do repeatedly. The media’s representation of this is usually arguing with us about what we do because it needs to “make sense to the general public.” This always catches me off-guard. To knowingly misinform the public because to tell the truth would require more work on the part of the reader, and would distract them form the pretty advertisements.
Take any subject that you have special knowledge in—an activity or hobby—place that activity in a major motion picture, and writhe in agony as writers and directors misconstrue what any novice could point out about the film’s tendency to forgo truth in favor of narrative (this includes movies that meta-conceptualize movie making). Now overlay this quality to news, social media, and you begin to see how confusion is the most common outcome from “learning” through these channels. The world is not a montage. You can’t sum up a 6-month training experience in 500-words and not lose teachable details to compression, as they say: “the territory is not the map.” Admittedly, half of what I think I know of the world is based on some sort of pop-information that I gathered and stored as a truth because I didn’t take the time to confirm it. And since “knowing of” something feels eerily similar to “knowing about” something—especially if one is ignorant—few of us will ever confront the very real difference until we have to.
Pick up a barbell, a wrench, or gun and notice almost immediately that the actual use of any tool is much more technical than what we would ever fathom by just looking from afar. I’m feeling this now as I clumsily strike a dead string in Em (E-minor, probably the simplest chord) on the guitar. Despite years of learning and practicing everyday, seamlessness and expertise are still on the other side of something that I am not close enough to even see. I have loved and listened to music my entire life. I know what good guitar playing sounds like. I have watched people play in-person—some of the best in the world—and I can even play the air guitar with the best of them, but when I actually try to play, I realize that my “knowledge of” is simply familiarity with. My ability is next to nonexistent. The absence of skill is the only thing I truly know about, and yet I have such a familiarity with the language that I can write or talk about music and the general public would think of me as a “musician,” because I know just enough to trick someone less experienced than me. This admission is what is missing in mainstream media, but it will never correct itself. It can’t, the purpose of media is not to get information out, but to get buyers in. Sales have stifled incentives. Confidence sells, and questioning kills. So we are sold information, not for comprehension but as a form of closing.
POPular culture is full of arrogance, a conceit regarding “knowledge” and a perversion of truth. But truth does not need fade-ins, emotionally tense music, and resolution of sound to work, it needs to work. If a fitness program “worked”, we would sell it. Should I say that again? What we do works because WE work, and we work off the premise that we will do what is necessary at the time that it is needed. You can’t sell “learn for a decade, and then feel for what to do.” You need a spreadsheet, a calculator for percentages, and an app that has graphs and notifications. POP-culture has shouted about “300-abs,” steroids, and CGI but even with these claims of “truth” and allegations of celebrity privilege, they can’t reproduce. Don’t you think with the availability of all of the aforementioned, that most of the modern world would be “ripped in 6-weeks?” Well. If none of that stuff worked, and I am shopping for answers, that periodical might be the secret, and maybe the pre-workout mix they are selling isn’t a bad idea either. What POP-culture hates more than anything is the inability to copy and paste, the absence of scalability, and the inability to point or reduce the answer down to a trademarked or patented “secret.”
If you want to know something, or develop a skill or ability, go do it. Get out of the “I read it on the internet” mask of expertise. It is an endless scroll of conjecture and assumption, most often from people who sit all day and stare at a screen. Want to know how to build a “superhero physique?” Go fucking build one.
