I’ve been working recently on a long essay about, basically, why all the things I like in the world seem to be losing out and the winner always and everywhere is a very narrow mentality, which endlessly optimizes and commodifies, even when there’s no particular market, and which always roots for whatever happens to be winning at the moment.
What’s particular frustrating here is that the two sensibilities actually have a great deal in common. Both believe in the primacy of the individual, and in ethical relations rooted in rational reciprocity, both are fundamentally respectful towards individuals’ choices. But there really is an immense gulf between what we can call ‘cosmopolitanism,’ with its emphasis on high culture and elevation, and then mass media and mass consumption.
The usual story here is about class — ‘high culture,’ almost by definition belongs to elites, while mass culture belongs to everybody else — and the sequence is that elites, basically, tried to blend in. A landed inter-generational aristocracy disappeared from the world, and elites — the story is probably best told by David Brooks in Bobos in Paradise — stopped defining themselves by their elevated taste and instead liked the things that everybody else liked but consumed greater quantities of it, or at least better brand names.
But I’ve come to think that there may be more to the story than that. There was a point when the middle class, in any case, was more culturally aspirational. The heyday of this probably was Mortimer Adler’s great books program and the ubiquity of Encyclopedias Britannica and Great Books boxsets in middle class homes. It’s still discernible in, say, old Woody Allen movies where a major part of Allen’s neuroses is that he’s not measuring up to what he takes to be a European cosmopolitan ideal.
The divide between the urbane and mainstream persisted into the 2000s above all in the figure of the hipster who was almost by definition a city creature. The notion of the hipster was that they would do things in their city enclaves that were so impossibly cool that they would soon reach the rest of the population, whether the population had any idea where it was coming from or not. That could extend to cool music, to the right kind of sneakers to wear, to buying locally-grown food, whatever. As Miranda Priestley informs her assistant in The Devil Wears Prada, “it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.”
That seemed to just be the way of things — how fashion worked — but then, as Sam Kriss aptly documents it, “it’s been about a decade since we killed all the hipsters.” What he means is two events occurring together — the rise of algorithmic recommendations and then the pandemic — which made people realize that they didn’t have to depend on the city for very much at all. The machines generated their own algorithmic recommendations and everybody seemed to like that just fine without cultural curators. And then the egalitarian structure of social media allowed virality to emerge from basically anywhere and spread without much regard for any existent socioeconomic factors. In his cultural history of the 21st century, W. David Marx traces out a whole series of gee-whiz cultural chains moving in unfamiliar patterns. Did you know, for instance, that “the grind” comes from a motivational video by the Texas Christian baseball team? or that gangnam style caught on when the Korean rapper Psy performed his horse-riding move for the fan cam at Dodgers Stadium? It no longer seems such a gravitational law that culture emerges from city slickers and goes outward from there.
I have this suspicion that the pandemic was a collective trauma that we still haven’t processed, and a great deal of the trauma was this — that at a stroke the city became outmoded and it became clear that the real movement of wealth and culture was through the web.
Since then, the city has recovered but mostly just as a status symbol. When New York Magazine runs pieces like “It Must Be Nice to Be a West Village Girl,” it may be true but the whiff of desperation is palpable — what New York is really doing is arguing that the old patterns still hold and that whatever lifestyle the village girls have isn’t just draining a trust fund somewhere but will matter ultimately for the country as a whole.
If I’m right about this, we really have passed into a fundamentally different social dynamic. The cultural claims of the city — its theater, its music venues, its fashion, its literary centers — really may not matter for the distribution of cultural content as a whole. At the moment this still hinges on professional tastemakers and they still to some extent treat the city as an incubator of talent, but if that shifts — and we seem really to be right on the line — then the cultural map shifts entirely.
For several thousand years, culture has worked in one way — radiating outwards from the city. This has if anything been exacerbated by industrial production and by the conception of the modern city as a cosmopolitan metropolis setting the tastes for the market as a whole. But if that just isn’t the underlying social dynamic anymore, then culture changes as well. It’s, at least for the time being, not the best news that culture is set by the here-comes-everybody dynamic of social media vitality and heavily manipulated by the tech companies and their algorithms, but it’s what we have. If the city isn’t magically restored to its pride of place, culturally not just economically, then those who are interested in high culture and cosmopolitanism really will have to adapt to the web. It may be a long time before the whole cosmopolitan apparatus — plays, presses, scenes — reaches the web, but for those who care about this we have to do the best with what we have.
I’m curious if this is a USA-centric hot take, because at least in Europe, where I’ve lived the past seventeen years, very few folks within the metropolitan circles I frequent are preoccupied with what’s happening culturally in American cities. Hipsters are taking over in Europe, too, but it’s a much slower burn, in large part because there are many cultural aspects of European cities that don’t require much if any money to enjoy them.
Interesting. Substack is the one place I've found the most people with interesting things to say, read, and talk about--the closest thing to what I've imagined those cafés in artist enclaves might have been like terms of a wide array of artists and thinkers. Maybe a bit more siloed here in terms of a cross pollination of genres, but we're not bumping into one another physically here either. And then there's an awful lot more material here too. But, again, a lot of art has come out of a time and place of disorder. Thanks for this. Much to think about.