The Unbearable Weight of Post-Modern Symbolism: The Case of Background Music

on the symbols that hold me hostage

Posted Jul 21, 03:12 pm in culture, experiences, marketing, postmodernism


Sometimes the post-modern world is a weird place to be. The things we do are so pregnant with symbolism that it’s hard to do anything that doesn’t appear to say more about you than you’d mean for it to. My girlfriend Huan-Hua’s birthday was a couple months ago and we held a very enjoyable party at our house, where about 20 people showed up. What typically happens in situations like this is that I’m expected to be in charge of the music. I can’t stand being in charge of the music.

There’s too much scrutiny and expectation associated with that job, too much anxiety associated with failing to match the playlist with the crowd’s prevailing sense of aesthetics, or matching the music to the crowd’s mood. Some people love doing this because they can showcase their impeccable tastes and impress people with their musical knowledge. I envy these people for the unabashed way in which they are able to share their tastes without a neurotic fear of judgment. However, I am unfortunately not in this camp.

Ideally, what I’d like is to just put something on and walk away without having to worry about it. In a world of musical diversity and genre-fication, I feel that the act of putting on a track by [artist X] will have a symbolic social value that is necessarily greater than the value that I personally ascribe to the act of putting on [artist X]. For example, if I am playing DJ at a party, and I happen to put on something by, say, New Order (not a bad selection for a party, in my opinion) I see this act as primarily fulfilling a functional purpose— filling the air with something that is tonally aligned with a festive event. It will serve as suitable background music, and won’t get attract too much attention to itself. But in this post-modern era, a New Order song is not just music. It is part of a genre. That genre is attached to many symbolic meanings. Those symbolic meanings are then attached to the DJ. The DJ then is responsible for the “statement” that these meanings make.

On more than one occasion, I put on an album by John Zorn, who is one of my favorite jazz musicians. His band Masada makes music that is alternately pleasant Middle-Eastern/Klezmer-inflected jazz music and less frequently, crazy, off-the-wall free jazz that perhaps encapsulates the most ridiculous negative stereotypes of what jazz music is (e.g. “It’s just a bunch of people playing random noises without a beat! I could do that!”). When it’s the former, it’s very good, energetic, organic, and sophisticated party music. When it’s the latter, it’s chaotic, unnerving, and immensely distracting. I try to delete songs with avante-garde instrumental wailing from my playlists. Of course, one night I failed, and I felt rather sheepish amidst a crowd of befuddled 20- and 30-somethings being sonically battered by cacophonous screeches of atonal, arrhythmic saxophone. This, for having made a bizarre public statement that I had actually studiously avoided making.

My friend Tim suggests that the best way to avoid this problem is to divest control: put on a radio station. But even then the selection of the station itself is an editorial process that could reflect back on you. Short of dumping the DJ job on someone else, it seems there are few escapes— though I can think of at least two ways out of it; 1) at the start of the party, choose a radio station through a transparently randomized process, or 2) profess total ignorance about anything related to music.

The first of these options, you have to admit, is pretty ridiculous. The statement that would result from you making a spectacle of randomly selecting a radio station is very likely more damaging to your image than you putting on a station representing any particular genre (though putting on a smooth jazz station— aka “quiet storm”— would be one genre that could potentially be even worse).

Professing total ignorance is a route that I’ve seen a lot of people do in the past. It’s a good escape hatch to use when necessary. The typical sophisticate has a strange tendency to want to be knowledgeable about everything. Or at least appear like they are, even if they’re not. It seems important to maintain one’s currency in certain matters (popular television programming, movies, music, politics, alcohol, current events, etc.); It keeps you in the conversation and demonstrates that your tastes mirror those of others— very important for maintaining social standing. However, sometimes the trump card is admitting ignorance.

Admitting ignorance basically does one of two things: either it suggests that the ignorant person is above the fray, or it suggests that they are an outsider who can be schooled. The first of these two leaves someone open for assault on their tastes since it implies that categorical dismissal of a topic (e.g. music) is the result of a selection of something else that’s superior (e.g. film). However, the second leaves one unassailable on grounds of taste. After all, how can you criticize someone’s consumption habits if they come clean upfront that they really don’t know what they’re talking about? Not even the most callous of record store employees would criticize on those grounds.

Playing ignorant is a great strategy to use if it’s true. But on the other hand, pleading ignorance can also be a dishonest way of preemptively truncating any line of questioning that might legitimately address issues of taste. That is, someone who actually knows something about music might, when questioned, demur on grounds that actually, er, they don’t know anything, huh huh. It’s almost a sort of nuclear war of cultural capital where you talk a good game until you see the stockpile of weapons the other guy has, and then you back down and pretend that you weren’t really planning to fight for real. It’s actually this strategy that I’ve seen a lot of. No matter how hollow it might ring to me, somehow I always find it kind of a charming tack.

One way that marketers have cracked the puzzle is not by defying the tenets of post-modernism through a refusal to play the game, but by actively embracing it. Take diversity to an extreme level. Jack radio has done pretty much this. Stations with this format don’t commit to a genre at all. They just play, in their words, “what we want,” which apparently means that they don’t pay particular attention to genre, they don’t pay attention to era. Everything is just thrown together into a blender and spat out over the radio. Jack radio has been gaining popularity since it started a few years back, and for good reason: kids of this generation are not as committed to genre as they once were. A couple decades ago, metal kids listened to metal, punk kids listened to punk, and rap kids listened to rap. I can remember a few years ago when the definitive “indie” music review site Pitchfork reviewed an Eminem album; it was the first non-indie album the site ever reviewed. The backlash was fierce. Its readers were incredibly upset that this site, which was ostensibly a champion of indie music was now reviewing a mainstream rap album. Accusations of selling-out were bandied around and emailed to the site with alarming frequency. It’s hard to imagine this happening now; indie rock kids now brag about listening to both indie music and top 40 radio. Many simply don’t make a hard distinction about the two. Music is music.

A Jack station might be a convenient ‘out’ for the situation I was describing. It both offloads the DJ’ing onto someone else (the station), and it’s hard to criticize on genre grounds. It would have been a good solution. But here’s the one I went with: I didn’t play music.

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Just Follow the Script!

why we do what we don’t want to because we’re supposed to

Posted Aug 5, 04:04 pm in culture, hyperreality, postmodernism, semiotics


I’ve taken a recent interest in how we’re driven by life scripts to behave in certain ways that we normally wouldn’t, simply because we’re “supposed to.” Take for example this story that my friend Liz was telling me (some details have been changed because to protect identities and also because I was kind of sloshed when she told me):

Liz had some friends who were getting married. As is the ritual in the United States, the groom attended a bachelor party held in his honor. Often these take place in seedy topless joints or private rooms where a stripper titillates the bachelor and his friends. The part that was odd is that none of the participants of this bachelor party had ever been to a strip joint, and none was particularly comfortable with the idea of doing this. But they did it anyway because that’s what you’re supposed to do. It was a bachelor party, after all.

Perhaps here, this bachelor party script, even taken as a semi-comical trope that has been the subject of many bad (but highly profitable) “buddy” movies, is rather revealing about our latent attitudes as a society. Viewed on an symbolic level, this would suggest that Americans— particularly men— perceive marriage vows (perhaps humorously, perhaps not) as a set of shackles and chains that essentially prevent them from engaging in philandering, sex romps, and various other fun sexual indiscretions. This is while simultaneously enjoining and celebrating the view of marriage as a sacrosanct state that we should all cherish and take enormous comfort in.

But I found the behavior of these bachelor party participants exceedingly curious. Why would a large leaderless group of individuals engage in behavior that none of them really wanted to (apparently not even the groom, who the party was being held for)? Why would they not just design an event that would be more meaningful and entertaining to them on the level they thought more appropriate given their values and states of mind?

Perhaps it is because this situational life script (more charitably described as a “custom”) told them that if they didn’t do this strip joint thing, they weren’t having a “real” bachelor party. This script promised an authentic bachelor party experience (the kind seen in the movies!)— an experience that apparently none of them particularly wanted or felt comfortable with, but also didn’t want to feel like they were robbed of later, perhaps because saying they’d been to one could offer some social currency or sensation of a life well-lived in the future.

I’ve noticed these recurring scripts as well:

Scripts seem to be part of the social contract we sign when we join this earth, or more accurately, join certain groups. We are supposed to act a certain way and do certain things that conform to certain expectations at certain times. Even if you don’t want to do it, even if no one wants to do it. Don’t rock the boat. Just follow the script.

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The Symbolic Value of a Beer

how much meaning is embedded in a single beverage?

Posted Jul 31, 11:03 am in branding, culture, marketing, politics, postmodernism


The so-called “Beer Summit” occurred today. The premise of this meeting between Barack Obama, Henry Louis Gates, and James Crowley— a Cambridge police officer— was the culmination of a lot of recent speculation about latent racist attitudes, profiling, and the state of race relations in America. The event hinged on an incident in which Gates was trying to get back into his house after apparently being locked out, and being challenged by a white police officer for appearing to be breaking-and-entering. Allegations about police making assumptions about black men committing crimes were made and it soon turned into the subject of a national debate.

But Obama, ever the diplomat, invited the parties over to the White House garden for some beers (one each) and a bit of mano-a-mano discussion. A lot could be said about the political nature of this event, but what I’m interested in is what apparently the media made a big fuss about: the beer that each individual was going to choose to drink at this event.

It’s fascinating that a single beer could be so embedded with symbolic meaning. This is the nature of the post-modern world, in which many brands are reservoirs of symbolism and fit so prominently into the public’s schemas about social groups. As I mentioned in a previous post, David Foster Wallace once commented that he’d read books in which a character’s personality could be succinctly conveyed simply by naming the brand of T-shirt the character wore. That’s how much meaning we associate with certain brands. Thus, it was a matter of apparent great symbolic import what beer these gentlemen were having on this momentous occasion.

Gates, a Harvard professor, chose a Samuel Adams Light, while Crowley chose a Blue Moon (with an orange slice). Obama, ever the epicurean (what with his much-ridiculed taste for arugula), chose Bud Light. This invites the question of why, if you were the ostensible leader of the free world, you would ever choose a Bud Light. Maybe I’m more of a beer snob than I realize, but of all the world’s beers I could choose, Bud Light would be somewhat at the bottom of my list. Perhaps I am being a bit presumptuous here, but it seems highly unlikely that a man of Obama’s stature and taste would voluntarily choose a Bud Light if given unrestricted choice.

But of course, we have to think about the symbolic value of his choice. Bud Light is the best-selling beer in America, and has been since 2001; apparently it accounts for a massive 22% of case sales in the United States! It carries with it so many symbolic, populist overtones. It’s what any blue collar American would drink. Not like that elitist, hoity-toity microbrew stuff, and especially not one of those foreign beers that wasn’t brewed on our shores.

According to a Republican strategist quoted in an article from Bloomberg, Obama is “trying to send a message that he’s an average American… [He could] complicate that by making an exotic choice, or an import, or too expensive.” Indeed, imagine what the news sources would say if he drank, say, a Heineken, a Sapporo, or a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. He was already skewered by Fox News’ Sean Hannity for asking for Grey Poupon at a diner several months ago.

There is a rather unexpected complication to Obama’s choice, however. Budweiser was sold to the Belgian company InBev back in July 2008, making Bud Light not quite an American beer. Sure it’s brewed here and it’s a traditionally American brand, but it’s no longer owned by an American company, so perhaps it can’t be viewed as wholly American as say, Coors.* Nevertheless, I think most Americans probably still view Budweiser as a culturally American beer and don’t really know much or care much about the location of the headquarters of the huge international beverage conglomerate that owns it.

Bud Light, viewed strictly on symbolic terms and with the intent of being an uncontroversial choice for a nation who, during the 2004 presidential election was inexplicably obsessed with choosing the candidate who one would most like to have a beer with, was a good selection. It’s a best-seller, has no particular subculture attached to it, and is sold pretty much everywhere. It’s hard to beat that. As Al Ries, an Atlanta-based marketer told Bloomberg, “Leading brands tend to be a very safe choice for a politician because, in a sense, they’re saying to the public, ‘You picked it, not me. I’m just reflecting your choice.’”

Interestingly, little commentary has been made on Crowley’s choice. The police officer was easily the most blue-collar fellow at the table, and chose what is probably the most “elitist” beer (if such a concept can be meaningfully applied) in terms of popular conception. Most people likely have not even heard of Blue Moon as it is the type of beer that is typically served in “uppity” and yuppy-type hangouts, not roadside dive bars. In reality, however, Blue Moon is rather surreptitiously brewed by Coors, though they do not advertise this and do not have the Coors name listed anywhere on any Blue Moon products. The company (rightly) assumes that the Coors name will reduce the brand equity of this macrobrew masquerading as a microbrew.

Gates’ choice was a sensible one; he lives in Cambridge, just outside of Boston, and he chose a beer that is brewed in Boston, perhaps a symbolic nod to his affection for the area despite his recent conflicts.

All in all, somewhat interesting choices made by all three gentlemen. I would, however, have loved to hear what kind of public commentary would have been made had Obama chosen the ultimate in a confounding beer with multiplex meanings: Pabst Blue Ribbon. Is he kowtowing to rednecks? Bikers? Hipsters? Cheapskates? In a perfect world, he would have chosen it, and it would have been a wonderful and puzzling mystery to unravel.

* You could tell that around the time of the sale of Anheuser-Busch to InBev that the company got kind of nervous about how its customers might perceive this traitorous act of selling out a quintessentially American brand to Europeans; they responded by creating and heavily advertising something called Budweiser American Ale, repeating the world “American” many times in the ads to reinforce the idea that this was a American drink.

Further reading:
1. The Bloomberg Article
2. “How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding” by Douglas Holt

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The Youthful Search for Authenticity

in which we borrow images to ‘forge’ ourselves

Posted Jul 16, 11:57 am in consumerism, culture, experiences, human nature, postmodernism, semiotics, unfinished thoughts


People of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they’re all so envious of it.” – Chuck Klosterman, “Killing Yourself to Live”

The above passage is from a chapter of a book called “Killing Yourself to Live” in which music writer Chuck Klosterman discusses the Great White nightclub fire in Rhode Island a couple years ago, in which 100 people died due to a pyrotechnic mishap. Being that this was in a small, lower-middle-class town, the crowd was made up of blue-collar types who were actually (perhaps unbelievably) fans of the band. Klosterman was contrasting this audience profile with those of the many big city shows he’d been to where washed-up bands like Great White would play long after their primes to crowds half full of hipsters who were just there “ironically” so they could mock the music and scoff at those who were genuinely into it. Klosterman suggests that these hipsters scoff at these true-blue fans because they want to express being above liking things, because they can’t stand to be genuine.

The sentiment expressed in the quote is an interesting one, but I’d make a slight, but significant alteration; the word “despise” should really be “crave.” This, of course, renders the phrase a considerably more obvious one. Yet, for the most part, Klosterman’s observations resonate with me; I’ve noticed that people of our generation often have weirdly amorphous personalities and images, shifting wildly based on social circumstances and how those circumstances can be manipulated for social capital. Our generation seems fixated on self-awareness as its own virtue, and is highly obsessed with carefully controlling and crafting our images in the eyes of others through symbols whose meanings likely did not carry so much symbolic weight in identity construction just a few generations ago (clothes, vehicles, online personalities, musical taste, etc.).

Anyway, as I see it through Klosterman’s lens, the reason the indie kids of this generation can’t stand to be genuine is because they grew up entitled, in sheltered environments in which they never had to endure hardships. Their entire personas were cobbled together by borrowing images they liked, never borne organically from their own experiences. These images they adopt are never their own; they are fashion objects, constantly subject to the winds of change and shifting public opinion.

Because of the postmodern focus on image and its central import in identity, choosing images and consumer goods to be associated with are critically important decisions; no one wants to be associated with images that may turn out unfashionable or appear to suggest that a person is, in fact, a loser. Therefore, it’s easier to just reject them all (at least publicly), or to simply adopt them “ironically.” But clearly, we can’t be free of symbols entirely. The ubiquity of symbolism in nearly all consumer goods is an unavoidable byproduct of a post-modern era; everything we see forces us to think about “what kind of person would own that” and form schemas about these individuals.

Therefore, such individuals bitterly resent those whose life experiences are more “authentic” (read: difficult and uncomfortable) than their own, because such trying experiences are never unfashionable, and those who have endured them are never subjected to the plaguing self-aware scrutiny that everyone else has to deal with. Living through hardship engenders respect, never mockery. Thus, these entitled kids want nothing more than to have had some hardships— “grit” as Klosterman puts it— to confer them authenticity. There is nothing authentic, as these people see it, in their comfortable upbringings. Their lack of unmolded identity is a source of inner conflict because it forces them to constantly question their symbolic choices.

The ubiquity of multiplicities of divergent images, tropes, and cultures has given us license to treat our personalities like clothing that can be switched at will. On one hand, this allows a sense of psychological freedom to be whatever we want to be; but on the other hand, I think many people born into this postmodern world feel like they don’t have a “baseline” self that is grounded in anything that wasn’t calculatingly copied from something else they perceived as authentic or identity-conferring in a categorical sense (e.g. “punk”, “skater”, etc.).

There are some people who lead the way in cultural transformation, but they account only for a small fraction of individuals. Most of the rest are what academic and sociologist Doug Holt describes as “feeders”— basically, people who crave brushes with authenticity, and who just copy what the innovators are doing, often without the understanding of where those ideas came from. Since they can’t lay claim to the authenticity, having been deprived of the experiences that created them, they settle for the next best thing: adopting the symbols of it. And since the symbols are the easiest way for outsiders to categorize people (e.g. torn jeans and a mohawk means ‘punk’), that works out just fine for feeders.

This generation’s youth craves authenticity, but rarely one that they can have (that is, one they are genuinely entitled to through experience); it’s always someone else’s authenticity that they wish they could have.

But perhaps it’s not limited to youth; we engage in such activities largely as a means of arriving at a manufactured authenticity that constitutes our ‘image’ at any given point in time; the bevy of images we’ve been presented with for all our lives through media have, ironically, taught us not to want the real authentic with respect to ourselves, but instead to want something we can’t have, but which we can fake well enough to convince others. Our true self, it seems, can be manufactured through symbols.

Comment [10]




Deconstructing the Hipster and Youth Culture Movements

just another youth movement or a revolutionary departure?

Posted May 4, 11:12 am in consumerism, culture, postmodernism


The following is a response to this article from Adbusters, which seeks to dissect the curious and ubiquitous hipster subculture. On the whole, it is a highly dismissive article that sees few redeeming qualities in this way of life. The author views the hipster as the culmination of a Western fixation with conspicuous consumption and self-absorption. In other words, it does not paint a pretty picture of hipsters. What follows is a two-part commentary about the article, which consists of my response to the article, followed by a response by an insightful friend who wants to be called “Derry.”

Response by Rahul
This article is as hilarious and ugly as the scene itself. While I find many of its observations incisive and funny, it’s hard to argue that the hipster scene is derivative and unoriginal as the author claims. In fact, he has given dozens of details about behaviors and artistic movements within hipsterdom that are essentially original— like fixations on fixed-gear bikes, odd mixes of disparate music, and obsessive photo-taking on old-school cameras. The author’s argument seems to suggest that these are not valid expressions in themselves, but instead are gross, consumerized actions in which identity is created through purchasing power. I find this a somewhat curious and circular argument to make, as the way he is identifying people within the movement is by looking at the products they carry with them (fixed-gear bikes, non-prescription glasses, keffiyahs); By his definition, someone who has certain possessions, looks a certain way, or attends certain parties is a hipster, so naturally the conclusion he’s going to come to is that hipsters base their identities on consumption patterns.

Still, it is probably true that through such unifying signals that scenes coalesce in the first place (of clothing, you could say that beats had those black shirts, grunge guys had flannel shirts, country guys have cowboy hats, hippies had tie-dye, etc.). Yet, the author seems to argue that hipsterdom is an outlier from other youth scenes throughout history. I would challenge the author to find a youth scene anywhere in history that cannot be criticized on the same terms that he criticizes hipsters on. I think it would be hard, because, like the author, we identify those scenes largely by their visual aesthetic, not by a collective ethos— if that term can even be reliably applied when discussing a scene. Sure, we have some vague ideas about what certain movements stood for, but ultimately, we call someone a hippie because they smoked dope and wore tie-dye, not because they were against the Vietnam war. Some guy who was against the war doesn’t automatically gain admission into the hippie movement on account of his political views; first and forement, he has to look the part. Even aside from that, is it even possible to ascribe a unified ethos to a movement (e.g. did all hippies embrace ‘free love’ or did some of them just want easy sex?; were they all against Vietnam, or were many of them indifferent to it?).

Admittedly, I do not particularly relish the hipster movement by any means, but that may be simply out of envy for those in it. Hipsters are young, having fun, they seem to have tons of friends, they’re fashionable, and are privy to a vibrant arts scene. Of course, there’s something that rubs me the wrong way about hipsters (vacuity and self-obsession come to mind)— but once I start thinking about it, it’s hard for me to put my finger on exactly why any of this might be problematic. Lots of people are vacuous and self-obsessed, and I don’t invest particular time in condemning them; such people seem to make up the bulk of Western society, and likely the world. Hipsters are having fun while they’re young, and they’re not really hurting anyone, so why should I care what they do? Rampant consumers they may be, but a scene that is divorced from commerce would actually be the exception, not the rule; groups forms largely due to similarity in consumption patterns (shared aesthetics in music, books, TV, clothes styles, etc.— indeed, defining lifestyles as being similar largely hinges on consumer consumption habits).

Besides, it’s hard to tell from this vantage point what cultural contributions hipsters might have in the long run. There’s too much data (fashion, music, etc.) for bystander to effectively parse at this stage; we need time to separate the wheat from the chaff. Maybe in 10-15 years it would be clear what hipsterdom has given modern society, but before that time comes, it seems like a pre-emptive dismissal to write off the whole movement as worthless and self-indulgent. Such criticisms have been leveled against every youth movement during its time.

Response by Derry
While I agree that most, if not all, youth subcultures could be justly criticized on the same terms as the author uses to criticize Hipsterdom, I believe that Hipsterdom is, in a sense, an “outlier” of youth subcultures. Past subcultures, such as the hippie, punk, and grunge cultures, seem to have been at least the partial result of philosophies of anti-establishment that stemmed from objectionable views of mainstream society. Hippies were identified, in part, by their shared opposition to the war in Vietnam. Sure, many “hippies” were simply along for the ride, looking for an easy way to get laid, but the initial catalyst of Hippiedom was, I believe, a result of genuine repulsion in regard to the Vietnam war and the American public’s widespread paranoia and fear regarding Communism. Without that societal catalyst, I don’t think hippies would have found the reason to band together. Grungers rebelled against the vapid materialism of the 80’s, creating and listening to music that was an abrasive rebuke of the antiseptic synth-pop of Phil Collins and of the extravagant lifestyles of coke-sniffing yuppies.

What is the unifying cause of Hipsterdom? Does it even have a cause? Unlike past subcultures, I don’t think its cause is rooted in anti-establishment philosophy or an opposition to mainstream society. Instead, I think (as does the author) that hipsters are simply a bunch of privileged white kids trying (in vain) to appear genuine; to escape the shame and guilt of leaving a consequence-free life, free of responsibility and without any true cause to support. Hipsters are even ashamed of their own hipsterhood, as most will deny that they are, in fact, hipsters and will get angry at the insinuation. I doubt the same was true of hippies, grungers, punks, or even Goths, who wore their labels proudly. Why the difference? I think hipsters, unlike past subcultures, don’t really have a reason to exist, a unifying struggle against mainstream society that defines them. They are the post-modern youth subculture; a subculture whose defining cause is their lack of cause and apathetic dismissal of anything that gains mass appeal (i.e. their dislike of good music because it becomes popular). I suppose this still counts as a “cause,” but I am arguing that this cause is dramatically different that the anti-establishment and reactionary causes that propelled past subcultures into existence.

Regarding the clothes and products that these subcultures display; every tribe needs a way to communicate, and the way members of a tribe dress and behave allow them to find each other. This is true for any tribe, not just youth subcultures, from religions (yamikas and crosses) to sports fans (jerseys). The fact that these tribes have identifiable clothing does not, by itself, make them shallow. Hipsters, on the other hand, do not seem to have a unifying cause and, as a consequence, I think their clothing and attachments to particular products appears to be shallow, representing nothing beyond itself. Hippies wore tie-die shirts, which identified them as hippies, but this identification meant something. It meant that they were affiliated with a group that espoused anti-war, free-love views. There were some hippies, as you point out, that just wore the tie-die shirts but didn’t share hippie ideals, but that doesn’t change the fact that there was a unifying set of views and causes that defined Hippiedom. When you see a hipster with non-prescription glasses and a torn vintage tee, you don’t think of the cause that the subculture represents, because there is no meaningful cause. WYSIWYG. There’s really nothing to it, at least nothing that I can put my finger on.

I suppose nothing is wrong with being a hipster. As you said, who am I to give a [expletive deleted] about what people do and how they dress? If they are having fun and feel a sense of community, good for them. But I think that hipsters do represent an outlier of youth culture for the reasons described above.

Brief Response by Rahul
One thought: you mention the inability or unwillingness of hipsters to self-identify. I believe the reason for this has everything to with the underlying ethos of the hipster movement: unyielding individuality and non-conformity. The entire movement celebrates idiosyncrasy, eclecticism, and a lack of adherence to what is perceived as societal norms. This is somewhat ironic in my view, since clearly there is some, perhaps large, level of uniformity in the symbols depicted within this group. Nevertheless, admitting to being a hipster is tacit acceptance of conformity to a group, which is anathema to the most important facets of hipster ideology, the uniqueness of the individual. In other words, acceptance of the “hipster” title paradoxically violates the very premise of the group’s collective ethos, and preservation of self-identity will disbar anyone from doing it. Weirdly, this means that hipsters as a group do not exist to hipsters, but only to outsiders!

Do you have any thoughts on the hipster movement? Post in the comments!

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The Business of the Hyperreal

the ubiquity of imaginary places

Posted Apr 13, 06:18 pm in branding, epistemology, experiences, hyperreality, postmodernism


At one of the big casinos in Las Vegas, you’ll find an elaborate scene that perfectly captures the beauty of Venice. There, you can sit aboard a slow-moving gondola with your sweetheart, while a mustachioed Italian man quietly ferries you from dock to dock. All the while, the gentle aroma of Ciabatta bread wafts through the air, and the warm sound of a concertina drifts through the background. The entire experience is one that perfectly reconstructs the feel of Venice.

The only thing is, if you went to the actual Venice, you would never have an experience like this. You can ride a boat in the real Venice, but it won’t be romantically quiet, there won’t be the smell of Ciabatta bread, and Rossini won’t be playing. Instead, it would smell like bilge, the ferryman will be hurrying to get you to your destination because he can make more money if he gets more passengers, and the only sound you’ll hear is the sound of water splashing all over your clothes.

Yet, despite this apparent artifice, you can identify this scene as Venice. It’s impossible to mistake it for anything else. This scene in Las Vegas recreates the idyllic, popular conception of Venice, the Venice that resides in our minds. This Venice is a place that does not exist in real life. It is a composite of pieces of our collective consciousness. It’s all the things we’d expect to see, hear, smell, and sense in Venice, but which don’t really coalesce in this way when you’re actually there.

This concept is known as hyperreality. It’s such a strange concept, but it’s one we’re all intimately familiar with in some way, because hyperreality has been sold to us in so many ways, and on a daily basis. Disney World has been described as the ultimate expression of hyperreality— and it’s one of the first vacation spots that many children around the world go to, and it creates many people’s impressions of other countries. Some of our most enduring perceptions about what romantic relationships are ‘supposed’ to be like and the way we’re ‘supposed’ to act in them stem from the way we’ve seen them in movies. The way we think women are supposed to look (including such things as ideal weight and flawless complexions) are rooted in heavily-touched up photos that have little to do with reality, but everything to do with a reconstructed, idealized reality.

The reason I bring all this up is that the other night, I went to a bar that I had never been to before. The moment I walked in, I felt like I had been transported somewhere else. The decor was somewhat anachronous; there were antique-looking green Victorian style chairs arranged around dark, ovular wooden tables, the walls were filled with bottles of obscure beers and liquors I’d never heard of before, the wood-framed bar looked like it was from another era entirely. The ambiance generally reminded me of what I imagined a somewhat upper-crust English pub would be like in the 1950s, where corpulent, monacled gentlemen might tease their handlebar mustaches and puff away at their tobacco pipes while perusing the Sunday Times.

We see places that try to re-create themes from popular consciousness somewhat frequently. Think of T.G.I. Friday’s, a corporate restaurant chain whose walls are covered from top to bottom in weird, rustic nostalgia that manages to both capture the oddest fringes of Americana while presenting it all as a completely normal and commonplace series of images (when was the last time you ate dinner next to a 20ft long wooden swordfish wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball hat— besides the last time you were at T.G.I. Friday’s, that is?). Oddly, this forced aesthetic of post hoc historification and semiotic mythmaking is comforting for many people. But that’s a particularly extreme example; I’ve been to plenty of Mexican restaurants that try to simulate the experience of being in small-town Mexico with the aid of huge murals; townscapes replete with children playing in the street, lifesized buildings painted on the restaurant walls, and pastel-colored senoritas standing on flowered balconies and under large arched doorways.

But something unsettled me about this bar I was at. There was a shaggy green carpet underfoot (which incidentally is not the type of flooring you typically want in a crowded bar), and the place had the musty smell of genuine antiquity. This place, it seemed, really had been around since at least the 1950s (a notion confirmed by the menu).

And then it struck me what had been bothering me. The sum total of my lifetime experience with these sorts of themed pubs had been with re-creations and remodeled versions— never with the real thing. And now, here I was at the real thing! My impression— and expectations— of what a place like this was supposed to be like was based entirely on hyperreal simulacra of it, pieced together from such places as spy movies, books, television shows, and other themed establishments. When you see the “real” version of a hyperreal place, I tend to think that you’re not really prepared for it because it has a way of defying your rather unrealistic expectations of it— which creates the very bizarre problem of something authentic ostensibly lacking authenticity.

If your image of something is based on an idealization of it, how can the real thing ever hold up? An idealization usually means that the gaps are all filled, the blemishes smoothed away, and the diffuse themes that define a place or idea are effectively condensed into a consistent, concrete, and easily digestible series of images; such simulacra allow you to imbibe prevailing themes very quickly, where by contrast the “real thing” typically takes some time for your mind to synthesize into a overarching gestalt.

The implications of this are curious. What does this mean in a world filled with images— manipulated, editorialized, and spread across the globe through various digital channels? These images will form our impressions of the world around us, whereas in the past, our own experiences were what defined our understandings of the world. Will everything we ever see in real life from here on out be a replication of something we’ve seen in a movie first? Which is the real when the fake is our first experience, and hence the first real to us? And what does all this mean to our interpretations and expectations of reality and our interactions with the world and our peers?

And now that I step back a bit and reflect on my experience at the bar, I have to face an unusual epistemological question: how do I know that this place I was at was a “real” bar that was essentially unchanged from the 1950s?

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A Thought Before the 2008 Presidential Election

Posted Nov 3, 08:41 am in human nature, politics, postmodernism


What is the link between the following ideas?

Give up? All these things have no basis in fact. Yet, they are all beliefs that people rabidly cling to no matter what evidence comes up to contradict them.

Like the people who believe these things, some moral and political crusaders spend so much of their lives trying to reinforce and justify their pre-existing opinions that they can’t evaluate new information without experiencing profound cognitive dissonance; they then cling to their pre-existing opinions even tighter to ensure the security of their own identities. These people are called extremists, fundamentalists, jihadists, terrorists, racists, bigots, ideologues, and morons.

To these people, the world is not a complex place; it is a place of black and white, good and evil, right and wrong, “it is” or “it isn’t.” The real world is not this; it is a place of often unsettling gray and ambiguity. And to grapple with it in a meaningful way requires serious independent thought, self-reflection, and a willingness to admit that your thoughts might be inaccurate and plain wrong at times. Reality can conflict even with one’s most basic, gut-level knowledge of “truth.” This is deeply troubling to most people. But we all need to take steps to confront the fact that truth has a way of changing depending on what we know. Perhaps if we take the time to learn more, we can change. Alas, most people do not have the capacity to search for truth or the desire to change; they want to hold on to their old, limited conceptions of the world. And to force them on others.

I heard a reporter talking to a college-age boy about his choice for president. “McCain,” the boy remarked. “He doesn’t want to take from the rich to give to the poor.” This comment was made with the underlying assumption that doing this was wrong. He then went on to admit that he came from an affluent background and that played into his decision. It was a moment that caught me a little off guard, because the unstated subtext of his comment (that perhaps he himself was not even aware of) was that if he were someone else— perhaps a poor person— he might have made a different choice.

But then, if our conception of righteousness is so fluid, and subject to change based on our own current situation and how our opinions might personally benefit us, how then can our thoughts and opinions on issues have any value other than the demonstration of opportunistic self-interest? Should our opinions not reflect attitudes that we would hold regardless of their personal impact on us, or what our situation is?

Perhaps it would be useful to consider the words of Mahatma Gandhi, whose life continues to be an inspiration to me:

“In my life, my commitment is to truth, not consistency.”

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Social Networking and Self-Regulation

the potentially crippling problems inherent in the self-policing realms of Digg and Reddit

Posted Sep 28, 07:15 am in economics, experiences, human nature, improvements, marketing, politics, postmodernism, social networking, unanswered questions


Social networking websites are the big thing right now, not just for armchair sociologists and online businesses, but also for academics. They serve as sort of a vacuum where you can observe interactive behavior from afar in a venue that didn’t even exist just a few years ago.

Two of the sites that get a lot of the attention are Reddit and Digg. These sites are not like Facebook or MySpace, in that they are not pages in which you create profiles for the purpose of having your peers come check you out and find out what music you like. They are essentially link portals that allow users to submit content (links) and allow users to comment on those submissions. They also give users the ability to “upmod” or “downmod” submissions to indicate, respectively, approval or disapproval of said submissions, comments, and links. It’s supposed to be an egalitarian means of aggregating a collective response of the userbase to a submission, and to show others how worthwhile a contribution might be, and to establish a feedback mechanism to the poster.

Keeping count of ups and downs encourages good comments and submissions, and can be seen as a preventative tool to keep out trolls, spammers, and people who say don’t make worthwhile contributions to the public discourse. And like the Roman gladiator battles of old, the idea is that a preponderance of upmods will spare the life of a well-written or interesting contribution, while downmods will effectively slay it, striking it from the viewing grounds.

In theory, it’s a very good thing. Over humanity’s existence, and particularly over the past 15 years, there has been a glut of information flooding into the public sphere at a rate that seems to only accelerate. It become increasingly necessary to more effectively filter what reaches our eyes in order to make our limited time more meaningful. In other words, there’s a lot of junk out there, and you don’t want to waste your time reading it; you want to get to the good stuff immediately (this attitude probably is problematic in its own way, but that’s a different story entirely). These social networking sites help you put mass consciousness to use in achieving that agenda.

For a while this was being considered as the way that private citizens were finally going to wrangle the big bad world wide web and all its anarchic tendencies; finally the masses would be able to collectively wrestle power away from the disproportionately powerful spammers and media corporations, and regain control of the discursive sphere that the internet was always meant to be.

Alas, the debilitating cracks have already formed in the foundations of this well-meaning institution.

Digg was working fine up to a certain point, where articles were being upmodded based on merit and interest, but this utopic system was eventually usurped by an organized network of users operating on a platform of quid pro quo, in which users would agree to upmod another’s comments and submissions in exchange for similar treatment to their own comments and submissions. These rogue networks expanded, using Digg’s proprietary “friend” system, in which a user can befriend other users and monitor each others’ activities with ease. Pretty soon, the entire front page of the site, which was once supposed to house an aggregated list of topics that the entire userbase considered important, was commandeered by people subverting the system through mutual backscratching, thereby annihilating the democratic ideals of the site.

To this day, despite 150,000,000 page views a month and thousands of content submissions per day, the same 20 people’s submissions make it to the front page every day. This, of course, basically makes Digg the equivalent of a mainstream media outlet that uses editorial discretion to filter content, except in this case, it is not exercising supposed meritocratic discretion (“what are the important issues of the day?”) so much as they basically just have a staff of 20 contributors who are going to automatically have their voices heard, while everyone else is basically forced into a consumption role.

So much for that.

It was then that we looked to Reddit to become the site that would cradle our highest democratic ideals. Many Digg users jumped ship to come to Reddit after being disgusted with the downward slide in content quality at Digg. But soon enough, Reddit too was destroyed— but not by the same system as Digg. It was leveled by a much more subtle and insidious form of cancer.

Reddit had always prided itself on being a more thoughtful and educated mass of users than Digg, always mocking Digg for its tendency towards childish humor and ad-hominem verbal sparring. Reddit, on the other hand, was a site that was sophisticated, and more prone to having mature dialogues about subjects that were served more by complex dialectics than verbal drive-bys. But ultimately, this user self-perception and self-selection, combined with the “modding” rights of all users created an ideological vacuum that threatened the very foundation of the site through its own exclusionary behavior.

To understand how this happened, it is relevant for us to first understand what happened in a more concrete sense.

At the moment I am typing this, the front page of Reddit is littered with anti-John McCain/Sarah Palin articles that seem to recite various sensational or seemingly biased positions against them. This is not in itself a problem, but as a supposedly non-partisan site, it has repeatedly been shown that anti-Obama submissions get downmodded into oblivion. Reddit is now essentially a clearinghouse for liberal rhetoric, where every single anti-Republican and anti-progressive screed on the world wide web can be found, being upmodded by users who are probably only reading descriptions of articles rather than full articles, and who are voting based on ideology rather than quality.

Spend a few minutes on the site, and you’ll see liberal comments regularly upmodded (or at least not downmodded), and you’ll see conservative comments downmodded like there’s no tomorrow— with no apparent value put on the complexity or discursive quality of the comment.

Remember, upmodding and downmodding are supposed to be reflections of user opinion on submissions. The issue here is that there are many reasons why users might not like an article, and without consistency in voting patterns, it descends into a meaningless mush of upmod/downmod numbers.

Therein lies the problem with this form of social networking. Upmods and downmods do not carry with them a single unique and transparent value. A downmod does not necessarily mean “I thought this comment was bad on the merits of its thesis”; it could mean “I disagree with you ideologically.” It could even mean “I don’t like this user,” or “I don’t like this user’s username.” All this tends to render whatever submissions are highly upmodded or highly downmodded to be of somewhat ambiguous import— which of course means that anything you are seeing (or not seeing) because of others’ value judgments is based on somewhat arbitrary rationale… which should, in turn, make you wonder why this is such a great medium for brokering dialogue. After all, what if you want to read well-written opinions of people whose ideas differ from the site’s mainstream?

An idealized situation would have separate measures for the any number of factors that might elicit someone’s approval or disapproval: well argued/poorly argued; convincing/not convincing; ideologically agree/disagree; spam/not spam; worthwhile contribution/not worthwhile contribution; stupid username/not stupid username, etc. With such a system, one could theoretically exhibit approval for a contribution on multiple levels but simultaneously disagree on other levels (and let others know it). In this manner, we could read an article that was well argued, but not convincing, that was largely ideologically disagreed with. But we can’t do that now. And that’s too bad, because it forces regular users into intellectual stagnancy. As sociologist Mark Granovetter suggests, it’s actually the people who aren’t in our immediate intellectual circle who are the ones who can teach us things. We already “know” what our ideological peers think.

Of course, this opens up a whole new can of worms because it relies on the ability of users to police themselves in what category of approval or disapproval they choose to give to submissions. Vindictive liberal users might angrily describe an eloquent and well-argued conservative post as “not worthwhile” simply because of their own parochial point of view. This is problematic, and unlikely to be resolved in any meaningful way.

Another reason why this is potentially troubling is because of intersubjective value judgments. What’s worthwhile for you does not match the threshold of what is worthwhile for me. Aggregated over a massive userbase, we’ll end up seeing a sort of middling effect that promotes submissions that basically hug the bottom rung of the ladder of quality. That is, we’ll end up elevating the sorts of things that the most people happen to agree are good. If you listen mainstream radio, read mainstream magazines, and watch mainstream television, you can see why this may not be such a great thing.

Will this ever see resolution? Will humanity’s mainstream be forever condemned to mediocrity in everything it engages in? Will our music, television, movies, literature, politicians, and now content portals all be mediocre? God, I hope not.

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You are what you say you are? Maybe not.

Posted Sep 9, 12:52 pm in human nature, links, marketing, postmodernism


I found a thought-provoking post over at Violent Acres about the duplicity of so-called ‘personal branding’ and how many people feel comfortable with the idea of defining their character through their own words and ideas rather than through their behavior. The author writes about a hilarious and highly troubling incident with a woman who, deciding she’s a good person, overlooks the absolute heinousness of an action she is planning to undertake as a pet owner. Worth thinking about in relation to your own life.

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The Pleasant Green Illusion of Trader Joe's

Why one of America’s fastest growing stores is not quite what it appears

Posted Sep 2, 10:44 am in branding, business, business models, consumerism, marketing, postmodernism, semiotics


I recently moved to Madison, WI, and found that my new apartment is just blocks away from the perennial grocery store of choice of the archetypal liberal, Trader Joe’s. Don’t get me wrong, I love Trader Joe’s. They have a somewhat interesting— if a bit odd— selection of food, low prices on alternative-lifestyle staples like Morningstar Farms Vegetarian Meats, Hummus, and Dr. Bronner’s Soap, and the staff usually seem engaged and friendly in a way that you rarely see in the bigger chains.

Yet despite these virtues, there’s always been something that I’ve found very curious and fascinating about the store given its primary clientele: they package the hell out of everything. I’m talking about putting often unnecessary plastic bags around nearly all their produce (which is, incidentally, prepackaged and shipped from afar), hard plastic shells around fruits and tomatoes, and things like individually wrapped biscottis inside paper bags of biscotti.

The produce sections of standard grocery stores like Kroger and Safeway aren’t much better, but you can tell that there’s a lot less waste going on, on the whole. You can buy fruits and vegetables without using a plastic bag at all, but if you choose to use one, very thin plastic bags on a roll are offered. You can stuff your plastic bag with as much salad mix as you want. The bags at Trader Joe’s are much thicker, presumably so that they can ship without incurring damage to the contents of the bag, but they are sealed so that if you want 10oz of salad mix, you’ll be forced to buy two packages of the stuff.

Now, the interesting thing that I’ve noticed is that if you talk to people about Trader Joe’s, you will see that many if not most of its clientele view the store as being ‘environmentally sound’, espousing the values prioritized by the politically and environmentally progressive consumer, words like: organic, sustainable, socially-conscious, green, fair-trade, healthy, whole-grain, eco-friendly, and so on.

Strangely, as the store is able to capitalize on those concepts, there is little in the direct customer experience that should really suggest any of those things any more than any other grocery store. Not all of Trader Joe’s produce is organic or whole-grain, not all of their coffee is fair-trade, and not all of their eggs and meat are cage-free or free-range. Few customers know anything about what Trader Joe’s has to say about labor rights, politics, or environmental issues, but if you asked, I would bet they’d place them in the top 20% of American companies in all these categories. And yeah, they sell canvas bags, but they still bag your groceries by default in paper bags.

Both Kroger and Safeway both have sections dedicated to organic and whole-grain foods. Both also sell fair-trade coffee and free-range eggs and meat.

So what exactly is going on here? Why does Trader Joe’s get a free pass on environmental concerns and get to capitalize on all the standard jargon of the socially-minded left while the other guys are left to be viewed as the mainstream guys who don’t really give a shit about anything but profits?

Part of it, I think, is that Trader Joe’s is a much smaller store than Kroger and Safeway. It’s a mere fraction of the size by volume, but they carry a similar variety of foods but certainly not the diversity of brands. And for that matter, many of the brands they do carry are not to be found in other grocery stores. They don’t, for example, carry Kraft Macaroni and Cheese or Tropicana Orange Juice. Sometimes such products are on their own private label brand (whose name changes depending on what product it is; their Mexican products are stamped with “Trader Jose” and Italian products have the ridiculous name “Trader Giotto’s” on them). They also carry an unusually large percentage of imported or apparently exotic goods. These don’t by themselves convey the aforementioned concepts, but these features do set them apart in the minds of the consumers, which is important.

Another part of it, while subtle, is the décor. Contrast the feeling you get while walking in the close, friendly quarters of the Trader Joe’s store with one you get when walking the cold, labyrinthine halls of Kroger. Contrast the warm wood paneling and comparatively low ceilings of Trader Joe’s with the stony white floors and high ceilings of Safeway. Notice the prevalence of baskets in the Trader Joe’s store, and the gargantuan supermarket carts elsewhere.

Also, and this is important, notice the clientele. There is a very obvious difference in who the typical shopper in each of these stores is. It’s impossible to tell without some form of surveying, but I would be extremely surprised if the average Trader Joe’s shopper wasn’t more educated, of a higher socio-economic status, with a higher disposable income, and a more liberal bent. But is it the store’s ostensibly progressive values that attracts this clientele, or does the store get its progressive image from the people who shop there? Certainly, there’s a feedback loop happening here, but it’s also true that there wouldn’t be such an attraction to these sorts of people without some compelling cause.

One possible cause could be that progressives are attracted to each other and teem into places where there are people like themselves, even in the absence of any gastronomical pretense. Possible, but I don’t find it very likely to be the root cause in the case of Trader Joe’s; after all, why would this trend begin in the first place? A more convincing reason for the progressive psychographic’s descent onto this store is its decidedly eclectic selection of food, where exotic foods like shitake mushrooms and shelled edamame are placed fashionably next to staples like baby carrots, and exotic Hollandic stroopwaffels oh-so-nonchalantly next to chocolate chip cookies. This post-modern melting pot of food is likely the central point of resonance at Trader Joe’s. After all, if we are to cull the messages from all the progressive radio stations, left-wing talking points, bumper stickers, and Bay Area street fairs, it is this very quality of “diversity” that presents itself as some kind guiding principle of progressive thought and which shapes the idealistic visions of progressive society. It is in this world that “diversity” in itself is considered a virtue, even in the absence of any dialectic.

Of course, diversity of foodstuffs is one thing, but where does the image of social consciousness come from? The household cleaners aisle, which is right next to where you’d buy “natural” toothpaste (do Poloxamer 335 and Propylene Glycol really count as natural?), doesn’t feature the usual allotment of chemicals like Ajax and Windex, but instead has products like all-purpose ‘natural’ orange cleaner made from degreasing compounds apparently found in citrus fruits, and mouthwashes with tell-tale signs of products that are trying to market themselves as ‘natural,’ muted brownish packages.

And speaking of muted packaging, it just might be that as a whole, Trader Joe’s packaging is of a more muted health-food store color than their mainstream rivals. With the notable exception of the produce section where colors like brown and white are not typically indicators of quality, the remainder of the store makes use of these earth tones in a manner not consistent of mainstream stores, where bright colors and fluorescence are used in packaging the same way that circus carnies shout and prod passers-by with their staccato brayings.

Trader Joe’s expertly weaves a tapestry that references all the signals that progressives look for and can relate to in their political identity, but much of the “follow-through” is only implied. But the store has called out so many of these reference points, that it creates the illusion that it’s all there—an illusion that many of the store’s patrons seem to appreciate as much as if it really were.

UPDATE (11/12/08):
I had an interesting encounter the other day as I was shopping in Trader Joe’s. In the seafood section, my girlfriend and I noticed that they were selling orange roughy. This particular fish is one that is listed as endangered, as it takes nearly 30 years for it to reach maturity— far longer than most commercial fish— and it has a long lifespan as well, often living up to 150 years. With the U.S. fishing industry hauling in about 19 million tons of the fish a year, and many of those fish being more than a hundred years old, it is not an exaggeration to say that this fish may be extinct within our lifetime.

Regardless, we were perturbed by the presence of this fish at this ostensibly progressive grocery store, and decided to talk to the management about why they are selling this endangered fish— at $6.99 a pound, no less. The manager was quite up front about it. “We don’t consider ourselves a ‘green’ company,” he said, obviously a little tired of once again having to answer to the legions of progressives that shop at Trader Joe’s, and explain why they stock items perceived as being unsustainable or hostile to liberal consumption ideologies. He continued: “We let our customers vote with their dollars about what we put on our shelves, and though I understand your concerns, we sell a LOT of orange roughy.” He tilted his head towards the sky when he said ‘lot.’

So there’s the confirmation. The idea that Trader Joe’s is a somehow progressive or green company is a total myth created by the brand’s phenomenal marketing— which is largely based on word-of-mouth.

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