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The irony shield, which isn’t so much a defence mechanism as a full blown epistemological stance, doesn’t deflect criticism so much as consume it. Every challenge gets absorbed into the performance. Every earnest objection is reframed as content, delivered with a knowing smirk. You try to critique it, and suddenly you’re “feeding the discourse,” which is the only metric that counts. Try to opt out, and you’re “pressed,” which is even better. It’s not Teflon, it’s Velcro pretending to be Teflon.
Nothing sticks because nothing’s permitted to matter.
Sincerity becomes cringe, anger turns into reach, detachment registers as complicity, all of it folded neatly back into the loop. And it’s all undercut with that trademark self aware aloofness that pretends to take the piss out of itself, but never really does. Because irony, in this context, doesn’t dismantle, it conceals. It hides the absence of anything real beneath the joke.
Because vulnerability, true, trembling openness, is the one frequency the irony shield cannot metabolize. To let it in would be to lower the visor, to be seen. And perhaps to realize that the whole time, there wasn’t a clever persona inside. Just a frightened child who never learned to risk being real.
So the great joke continues, infinite, self consuming, safe.
And in that safety, something sacred is lost.
The question is, are you laughing, or are you just afraid to stop?
Because stopping would mean lowering the shield, and ultimately, revealing there was never a real person inside it to begin with.
