The point is not that self-awareness has no value, because of course it does. The point is that ironic detachment from one’s own views and even one’s own life has, through the joint workings of postmodern theory and pop culture, become a miserable cliché: an idea once but no longer liberating. We are now awash in what Bogost – by analogy with paranoia – calls ‘ironoia’, defined as follows: ‘If paranoia is the mistrust of people, ironoia is the mistrust of things … Zooming out a level with irony is far easier than reconciling the conflict between sincerity and disdain, so as to reconnect with
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Irony and consumer saturation.
