This began as a private Facebook post for friends and family but, you know what? A lot of folks are telling me (via Twitter, okay) they’re having some trouble hustling through Carles’s latest. And all that really says to me is, I have read WAY too much Hipster Runoff in my time.
"Carles," by the way, is the anonymous, erstwhile proprietor of a blog called Hipster Runoff, which — underneath several layers of "hipster" "scare-quotes" denoting "irony" — was, ironically, a home for spectacularly adroit culture commentary. (I guess I’d point toward Hulk Film Crit, BAKOON, Steve Roggenbuck, and some other alt-lit personalities as Carles’s nearest analogues, although I suspect those writers would hate the comparison.)
What follows below will be kind of an overreduction of some of Carles’s points (here I refer to “Netstream vs Mainstream: How the internet created a new breed of lamestreamers”), but hopefully you will find this little rumination helpful, if that type of thing remotely even floats your boat.
- Carles begins his essay with a Venn diagram and I think he means, with it, to illustrate that culture is no longer really monolithic. This is to say, there really was a time everyone watched Cosby Show; everyone listened (willingly or not) to Cher; everyone watched the same nightly news report. But thanks specifically to the advent of cable television, culture has fractured in turn. (There was a recent furor because some Olds struggled to understand how younger, nonwhite music fans had never heard of the Beatles, if you’ll recall. Well, this is how, and we’re the ones who built it.)
Simply put, no matter whether you espouse right-wing or left-wing ideology, there is a channel specifically for you; you can read Pitchfork for music reviews tailored to your tastes; you can branch away from that onetime “monolithic” culture and hone more “eclectic” tastes (oh my god now I’M doing the quotes thing), and good for you, you fucking hipster.
Lengthy aside: But it isn’t really that hip or “indie” of you at all, is it? Like, there was a time you had to root through the stacks for great music, had to dig through Factsheet Five for cool zines, had to follow a bunch of comics blogs on Livejournal to discover the “next big thing” — whereas, now, a media outlet or, worse, a Netflix or Pandora algorithm is doing all the legwork for you, just as Carles asserts in his op/ed. They’re all serving you media; you aren’t the one finding it. Yeah, sure, you’re a hipster, except you’re not. You’re not authoring your sense of “self” [which is really to say, your “stats card” of “likes” and “dislikes,” and I would say it was Friendster that ushered in that era of consumption-as-identity] as retaliation against the monolith, the Man. Entirely on the contrary, you’re being served your identity — which I think is Carles’s Old Man Hipster point here. Given the Internet and its accessibility, none of us has hipster cred; none of us is an indie, a nerd, a geek. Not anymore.
But what we do have now, given this cultural fracture, is not necessarily a good thing — we’re all branching off into our own respective echo chambers, and the result of that seismic drift is less diversity on network television, no Saturday morning cartoons, and a whole lot of non-information peddled for entertainment’s sake. (Sorry, I’m only partway through Amusing Ourselves to Death.) Basically, instead of changing society, changing a monolithic culture, we’ve preferred to splinter into several separate, discrete factions — discrete channels of culture, if you will — so that a FOX viewer who likes The Wire (I don’t know! whatever!) has trouble even communicating with a CNN viewer who enjoys, uhhhh, interior design shows, so little common ground do they share. The point is, politics and news are just still more shit you’re being sold, and what you purchase as a consumer — what you pay your eyeballs toward, what receives your attention and, therefore, your advertising revenue — doubles as all the markers of your identity. This is the future we deliberately constructed.
So I think that’s why Carles included the Venn diagram, and I think the overlap is supposed to represent the “best” of us, who are literate in both spheres, who function as sort of cultural polyglots.
- I do think, to be successful at anything, you have to appeal to the sensibilities of “both” spheres (these are, according to Carles, “netstreamers” and “mainstreamers”). I don’t know if you remember the backlash when Jonathan Franzen refused to let The Corrections become an Oprah Book Club selection, but some perceived his snub as anti-housewife, intellectual class warfare. Now, that said, I do get the instinct to refuse to let Oprah shill for your book, so I guess I don’t really have an opinion here, except only to say that, yes, it behooves you to be able to be transient, to move fluidly through different spheres.
- Carles himself is pretty great at straddling those spheres, actually, because his work functions on at least two levels. I think a good half of his readers are feeling what he’s putting down; the other half just thinks he’s funny. It’s very early-’00s Vice in that way — that magazine pretty much defined “hipster irony” — where some readers “got” the articles intellectually, others only “got” that it’s so cute and funny to be a social provocateur, and a few stragglers were left going “well, which is the joke?” In short, being able to have your cake and eat it is, really, a goldmine.
- At this rate I’m gonna out-talk Carles, while somehow being even less coherent, so let me speed this up.
- As a freelancer or a person who works in a creative field, you are already a business, already a “brand” (the piece I’m discussing here is only the latest in Carles’s series of manifestos about “scalable” brands, “scalable” social media).
Actually, that isn’t a surprise: You’re already a brand no matter what you do because, with the advent of social media, you’re your own marketing team, you’re choosing what and how to present, and it’s usually an idealized version of yourself. Maybe your brand is “cute family pictures” on Facebook, but if you’re tracking what your friends respond to and kind of playing to that, you’re already doing what, in actuality, any monolithic media corporation does.
And any social network that hosts your profile — they really do have ownership of your posts and pictures, by the way, and in essence those networks function as your mediators, your editors and publishers, and that’s why they get to censor your status updates — is using you as an unpaid content-generator. As Carles says, it’s all symbiotic: Those networks make incredible amounts of money, yes, but without you, they’d shrivel and die. You are the one of value — not Facebook, not Twitter.
- By the way: Not paying your content generators is one of the best moneymaking schemes around.
- The other best moneymaking scheme I can think of — and on some level it’s disingenuous as all get-out — is to make a magazine, website, or brand seem authentic, seem sincere and “indie” and grassroots, when it secretly has all kinds of sponsorship. (I touched on this briefly over here. It’s the media version of political faux-activist “astroturfing,” basically. We can learn a lot about marketing our own selves from any collective that “astroturfs” — collectives that, in turn, learned it from, ha ha, viral marketing. It’s an ouroboros.)
- I’ve said it before, though, and it’s well worth repeating: People are shrewd and cynical, they expect to be taken for a ride and are duly suspicious of that, and anything less than utmost transparency will, in time, simply not work. Yeah, I do realize just how funny it is that I’ve typed this — you know, given…ethics…in… — but I’ve always cited my moral belief in utmost transparency as, if at the very least, the best business practice of all, and so in retrospect everything is very funny, yes, thank you.
- (Some time ago, I transitioned to “confessional essays” in public, in part as a reaction to readers suddenly seeming very interested in, and entitled to, my private life, which at that time contained two gravely sick parents. I decided that complete transparency was preferable to obfuscation, and for me, transparency was absolutely a sort of defense mechanism. How can you badger a person with questions when there are literally no more questions to ask? So… I guess I learned a lot last year, ho ho.)
Back to Carles.
- Carles’s work is emblematic of the “New Sincerity” movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Sincerity), although it isn’t quite clear whether his work is intended as satirical.
- I used to often say that “irony” was distinct and separate from “hipster irony.” If irony is saying one thing and meaning another, “hipster irony” adds one more layer: It’s saying one thing as if you mean another, when at heart you really meant the first thing after all.
Similarly, if “kitsch” (in which New Sincerity has some roots) is professing to like something because it’s ugly, “hipster kitsch” would be professing to like something “because it’s ugly” when, in actuality, you find that thing very beautiful. In that regard, I might “hipster-ironically” adore Sheryl Crow — because I sincerely think her songs are catchy, that she has tremendous vocal range, and that she’s a wildly talented singer-songwriter who effortlessly produces perfect pop.
If I had a slightly different temperament I’d call her music “a guilty pleasure”; I’d use a semantic loophole to sound disaffected, to not have to perform my fandom for Sheryl Crow for others. In that regard, “hipster irony” — the act of saying exactly what you mean as if you don’t really mean it — is intended as an added layer of obfuscation, keeping your private thoughts private by putting them out in plain view, while smirking.
- The New Sincerity movement gets confused a lot with “twee,” but it isn’t always twee, or maudlin.
With that said, a lot of creative nonfiction writing — here I’m actually thinking of the “confessional essay” niche, which has always existed as a sort of variation on “magazine-style writing” but which Dave Eggers, himself a onetime editor of magazines, perhaps finally made marketable with A Heartbreaking Work — really does qualify, satisfying the aesthetic’s few criteria. That’s because, on some level, the confessional essay, the memoir, is going to be manufactured in some way. Maybe it will aspire for the heights of “truth,” sure, but it’ll still fail simply because the narrative is, yes, constructed — and that is inescapable.
At the very beginning of Alone With All That Could Happen, writing professor David Jauss outright laments that there is little truth to be found in memoir — only people putting forth their idealized selves (which, I’d warn, you know, some of us DO enjoy self-flagellation, DO enjoy punishing ourselves by experimenting with making ourselves look just as awful as possible, but in that case the “lie” skews in the opposite direction, this time toward humiliation instead) — and, Jauss puts forth, this is why everyone ought to abandon nonfiction writing in lieu of fiction. Because there CAN be no truth in nonfiction, he says; fiction, meanwhile, gives us opportunities to couch the truth.
- This last point used to drive me into existential peril pretty much daily, and I think the same crisis is happening to Carles. That is to say, I suspect not even Carles is sure whether Carles is being sincere. I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. If I’m right, though, I sympathize.
- At the time that I first watched the movie Synecdoche, New York — which discusses, very well, “memoir” and memoir’s sad descent into fiction, delusion, and simulacra — I remember typing out my thoughts on it, and I distinctly remember using the phrase “concentric rings of bullshit” to describe the main character’s horrible gradual distancing from his “authentic self,” which is to say, his real emotional core.
Admittedly I’ve only seen the movie once, and that’s because I can’t stand to watch it twice through. (All Charlie Kaufman’s movies give me serious agita.) But on all that, I think you can eventually become so performative — whether that performance is one of “sincerity” or the alternative performance of never saying what you mean at all — that you yourself can become incredibly confused by those obfuscating layers.
- Carles, meanwhile, is trying to sell off the Hipster Runoff domain, and I think he’s in the process of attempting to explain the artistic vision he’d like for the website’s new owner to maintain in his absence.
But I do think he’s also presenting, on another level, a warning — you can’t maintain that stylistic choice for too long before it starts to require any existential relief — and, without cognizance and vigilance, you’re going to lose a certain sense of personal identity when you create a “brand” for yourself. It’s an eventuality.