Let Fetch Happen
It's going to happen
“Stop trying to make fetch happen. It’s not going to happen”
In my first post, I took inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges, the legendary Argentine poet and writer. Today I’m going to take a different tack.
“Stop trying to make fetch happen” is a popular meme because it gets at an important trait of human psychology—we often become so enamored by our own tastes and opinions that we expect others to appreciate the things we like much more than they actually do. The technical term for this is the “False Consensus Effect”, but we hardly need jargon to recognize a phenomenon that has become so transparently common in the social media age.
Spend time on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter and you will quickly see that even your closest friends grossly overestimate how interested you are in the minutiae of their lives. You browse, you skim, you linger for a few seconds on something eye-catching… but mostly you just scroll right past. Even if you “like” a post, that doesn’t mean you fully read it or took time to think about it in any meaningful way. You might simply be helping a friend to “feel” engaged with and understood—or hoping they return the favor in the future.
All of this is a precursor to my attempt to explain the flip-side of Regina George’s insight. Just as we commonly over-promote things which naturally appeal to us (“trying to make fetch happen”), we are also prone to resist fundamental changes in our environment that don’t appeal to us. If “fetch” is rapidly overtaking the word “cool” and becoming common usage, you might not be able to just dismiss it. Your best response might be to let fetch happen.
Stepping outside the context of Mean Girls, where “fetch” is the epitome of a lame idea struggling to catch on, imagine that “fetch” is a powerful idea with real inertia behind it. If “fetch” is the microchip or instant messaging you probably won’t get very far by simply resisting it. You have to adapt.
This simple theory of fetch raises the difficult question of whether you can ever definitively know that a trend is going to take off. For now, let me simply state a few information trends I am confident we should recognize and adapt to:
Books are becoming less important
People have trust issues
I'm liking this so you feel engaged with and understood, and so that you like my stuff later ;)
I'm sad, tho also not sure, about books becoming less important. They certainly are to some extent, except for escapism for reading nerds. Yet my computer game-playing sons are also reading books in PDF form. And much of what intellectuals talk about is based on books, along with their own authority to talk about it. "White Fragility", became fetched (?) because while it had been a phrase, it became an intellectual meme target from the book.
(But I came here, again, to praise you for you FITs note, which I'll now comment on...)