Where did all the hipsters go? You may have noticed, as author JD Cowan did, that the hipsters who once infested the cultural landscape seem to have vanished overnight.
So did writer Sam Kriss, who has an interesting theory as to where all the mustache wax-sporting, Pabst Blue Ribbon-drinking oddballs went.
Now, innocent people sometimes wonder where all the hipsters went. They were everywhere, once, and now they’re gone: what happened? Who killed them? What happened is this: hipsterism as the dominant mode of mass culture could only exist under very specific informational conditions. Before the turn of the twenty-first century, most of the things that people said and did simply happened, and then fell away into the past—although it’s true that in certain repressive states there were bureaucracies dedicated to capturing the world as data. Enormous piles of paper documents and magnetic tape. From the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the Holy See received frequent detailed reports on exactly what was happening across its domain; before that, monasteries would keep pedantic records of every Mass and every meal; before that, all human activity, every twitch of every fibre, was recorded in the extratemporal and omniscient databases of God. But from the 1990s on, and increasing every year, people started to individually record every detail of their lives in a single vast and open archive, and this was new.
Around the turn of the century, the world contained around 50 exabytes of data: from the first Mesopotamian documents pressed into clay tablets, through five thousand years of books and pamphlets and diaries, to Shrek. Today, there’s around 65 zettabytes. A zettabyte is a thousand exabytes; an exabyte is a billion gigabytes. (Every word ever spoken by anyone who ever lived would come up to about 5 exabytes: a rounding error. One molecule of DNA contains about a gigabyte and a half: the instructions for building you take up about as much data as Shrek in 1080p.) Almost all the information ever produced by our species has been produced in the last few years. The last man to have read every single piece of publicly available data was the fifteenth-century polymath and mystic Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. (People sometimes make the same claim for Samuel Taylor Coleridge; they are wrong.) He knew the entire corpus of Greek and Latin texts, and also Hebrew and Arabic; he studied Kabbalah with the Italian rabbi Yohanan Alemanno; he could recite the poetry of every European vernacular. A contemporary Pico, meanwhile, would have to read not just every crap novel ever published, but every article in every newspaper, every Facebook post, every page on every corporate website, every tweet, every status report from every wifi-enabled lightbulb. The task is impossible. And so, for a while, we had the hipster.
Related: Subcultural Experiences
The hipster was an information-sorting algorithm: its job was to always have good taste. The hipster listened to bands you’d never heard of. The hipster drank beers brewed by Paraguayan Jesuits in the 1750s. The hipster thought Tarkovsky was for posers, and the only truly great late-Soviet filmmaker was Ali Khamraev. The hipster bought all his toilet paper from a small-batch paper factory in Abkhazia that included small fragments of tree bark in the pulp. The hipster swam deep into the vastness of human data, and always surfaced with pearls. Through its powers of snobbery and disdain, the hipster could effortlessly filter out what was good.
That was the theory, at least. In fact, the hipsters were generally very bad at their job. Most of the stuff they liked was awful. They flourished in a brief gap: after we started producing impossible volumes of information, but before we had the technological means of efficiently processing it. In the 2000s, the best tool available was keyword search, the utility of which drops in line with the size of the data set. We still needed people to like things manually. But in the 2010s, we developed algorithmic processes capable of efficiently discerning patterns in the ungodly excess of human cultural production and sorting it appropriately. The hipsters were no longer required. So we shot them all and burned their bodies on a hill. Today, the hipster era survives only as an aesthetic: flash photography, guitar music, tits out. The particular form of snobbery and disdain that powered it is entirely extinct. In the post-hipster era, you listened to what Spotify told you to listen to. If you read a book, it was because the precise pattern of blobby pastel-coloured shapes on its cover contained coded instructions to TikTok’s algorithm that sent it zooming to the top of your feed. Your tastes and preferences were decided for you by vast crystalline machines coiling and uncoiling in the livid molten core of the earth. But these algorithms tend to work in a very particular way. At best, they present you with a caricature of yourself that you then have to conform to. At worst, their processes of cumulative reinforcement serve you up the exact same bilge as everyone else, but shrouded in the aura of individuality. It was at the dawn of the algorithm era that all my Dalston friends started playing Taylor Swift at their parties. A few years ago, I was dragged to some fashion-world event in the Bowery in New York: the room was full of cool young people there to be seen, and they were listening to a playlist of Top-40 pop music curated for them by a proprietary mathematical equation. As someone who had grown up in the hipster age, all these people seemed incredibly lame. The world had been given over to the nerds.
The coming of the nerds destroyed hipsters?
Big if true.
Related: Revenge of the Nerds
Yet all is not well in Nerdville.
But now, the nerds are dying too.
Related: Nerd Culture Is Dead
For the last decade, mass culture has been nerd culture, and a nerd is someone who likes things that aren’t good. This is not to say that everyone who likes things that aren’t good is a nerd. Fast food is bad food: cheap, tasteless, unhealthy, and unsatisfying. But if you grew up eating frozen burgers as an occasional treat, and you still find it nice to sometimes stumble drunk into a McDonald’s late at night and wolf down a Big Mac—because it reminds you of something, because it’s the sign for a certain vanished pleasure—then you are not necessarily a nerd. But imagine a person who collects the boxes from every McDonald’s order he’s ever made, who’s yapping with excitement about the new McDonald’s partially hydrogenated soybean-canola oil blend, who can’t wait for them to release the McBento in Japan so he can watch video reviews all day, and who acts incredibly smug every time McDonald’s posts its quarterly earnings and they’re growing faster than Burger King’s. You know exactly what this person looks like. A total failure of an adult human being. Fat clammy hands; eyes popping in innocent wonder at every new disc of machine-extruded beef derivatives. An unbearable, ungodly enthusiasm. Does he actually like eating the stuff? Maybe not. It hadly matters. His enjoyment is perverse, abstracted far beyond any ordinary pleasure. It signifies nothing. This person is a nerd.
This is why nerds are always so belligerently defensive about the dreck they choose to consume. They are mortally offended by the suggestion that Marvel might be somehow less good than Chris Marker, or that K-pop might be worse than Rimsky-Korasov. A kind of inverted snobbery; a snobbery against value as such. It’s not enough that the things they like are, by definition, globally hegemonic, blotting out any other form of mainstream cultural production—if there is even one person who still tries to consider things by some measure of quality, it’s like a needle sticking sharp in their side, a constant tiny unbearable pain. Any kind of judgement feels like a personal attack against the individual nerd, which it is. It feels like a form of discriminaion, a coded bullying, which it is. It’s the imposition of an entirely foreign system of distinctions: like trying to give a mark out of ten to the sun. Why are you judging? Why are you hating? Why do you keep saying these things are bad? Nerd culture is never bad, because it’s not attempting to be good. Its only function is to exist.
Related: Nerdocracy
This is the secret manifesto of the nerd. The greatest lie the nerds ever told us was that being a nerd had something to do with being unpopular, being uncool, being outside the cultural mainstream, being unusual, being creative, being funny, being different in any way. Andy Warhol was cool, this slight shy serious closeted bespectacled nerd who lived with his mother; possibly the coolest person to have ever lived. He was popular; nerds have always gravitated to the popular; nerds have always delighted in the flat infinity of the Same. He liked things. Being a nerd has always meant being a machine for liking things. The nerds were the messianic faithful, awaiting the incoming of the algorithm. Waiting to fuse themselves with machines. To live in a world where you could like something simply by pressing a button. Waiting for the utopia where let people enjoy things is the whole of the law.
Marvel is failing because they thought that most people were nerds: that mass audiences would actually want to delve deep into their joyless multiverse and slog through all its lore. Nerds like that sort of activity; nerds don’t need to actually like the things they like. But not everyone has the good fortune to be a machine: most people are not nerds. Most people will passively accept culture produced under the regime of alibidinal information-sorting algorithms, if it’s the only thing available—but only up to a point. After that point, they will simply check out, which is exactly what they’re now doing. It’s not just Marvel: nerd culture is collapsing everywhere. Sequels and franchises no longer drag as many people into the cinemas. The ecstatic boyband fans have gone quiet: increasingly, new music in general is being oucompeted by Spotify’s century-long back catalogue. Over the last year, sales of books in print went up by 4.2%—except for young adult novels, which have declined. As I’ve argued previously, algorithms in general are starting to collapse. The nerd world is dying. And since the nerds gravitate towards homogeneity and popularity, their extinction will be total. Soon, very soon, every single one of them will be dead.
Related: The Internet of Shit
Did nerds destroy hipsters? Maybe not directly. But the end of the conditions that allowed one scene to thrive paved the way for the rise of the other. And that paradigm, in turn, is hurtling toward its end.
This is what I’ve been saying for a while now.
Nerd culture is only possible in a monoculture enforced by entertainment cartels with near-total gatekeeping power.
An identity based on being seen to consume the latest big thing disintegrates when there is no next big thing everybody consumes.
You see it everywhere from Hollywood to the record industry to gaming. Corporate acts with astrotured careers are ostensibly raking in historic revenue. Yet no one can sing two verses of the latest chart-topper, and working actors who once made a comfortable living are having to moonlight as Uber drivers.
It’s an overused meme in counterculture circles to say that people are waking up to something. I think they’re waking up from something.
And that thing is the 20th century.
The socioeconomic conditions most of you reading this think of as “normal” were in fact an unequaled anomaly in terms of world history. Those anomalous conditions resulted from America coming out on top in two successive World Wars, and they depend on the US havint enough military and economic muscle to enforce American hegemony on the rest of the world.
Just as American megacorps are losing their grip on the market, everywhere you look, US foreign policy and the dollar are hemorrhaging credibility.
There were no nerds in the 1920s and 30s. Nobody had enough idle time to obsessively collect comic books or all the memorabilia associated with a given movie serial. People read comics and went to movies to unwind from the back-breaking labor they had to perform to survive.
All the indicators suggest we’re heading for a cultural contraction of a kind not seen since the 1930s.
If that’s what it takes to cleanse American culture of the scourge of nerdery, so be it.
That’s not to say everyone is screwed. Names and fortunes were made in every era of recorded history; even the 1930s.
And artists these days have one massive advantage over our predecessors a century ago: advanced digital tools that can turn one man into his own publishing house/indie film company/graphic design studio.
For an idea of what’s coming, imagine 1930s movies without the studio system and publishing without the big NY houses.
Of course, without corpo cartels footing the bill, the new artists will need a new patron class to fund the entertainment they want made.
A neopatroange system, if you will.
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