Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More

I saw this title recommended on a piece I was reading about Hypernormalization and the US. This work also lent to the Adam Curtis documentary also called Hypernormalization, published 2016 (haven't watched it, seems far more out there than this scholarly work).

The crux of the idea is this: That people are aware that the society/rules/regulations that dictate their life aren't working but have to endure them away because to do away with that scaffolding would be unfathomable. Alternatives that buck the mold are rejected because they subvert tradition. Tradition loses all meaning because it is an echo of an echo of an echo. If you wrap this sociological blanket around life at the end of the Soviet Union, it's not a stretch at all.

Yurchak gets heavy into semiotics with regard to communist meetings and how the language couldn't change, was edited in a group setting, the personal voice was lost. And so everything grew to have two layers of meaning, the sort of described spirit of the word meaning, and then the signifier of what it had come to represent by the late 1970s-1980s. I honestly hadn't thought much about semiotics since college. These chapters in particular remind me so much of ad word copyrighting. Plugging in different phrases where the only goal is page rank and the intelligible content is an afterthought.

This book is not written for a casual reader and it is not particularly digestible. It's dense and the aha moments are difficult to come by. I wish I could say I enjoyed it more, it was a challenge to read and I read a lot of non-fiction. I wish a more accessible book would be written on this topic because it's something I'm fascinated by as an American in this crumbling moment.