The Culture of Cope

One major benefit of subcultures is that they open up necessary space when the mainstream becomes too crowded. Now, thanks to the internet, everything is supposedly a subculture—the mainstream has supposedly broken into a thousand fragments. One would assume this creates more room for everyone to spread out, literally and figuratively, but even tha

When too many people try to adopt the contrarian position at once, it’s no longer contrarian. Mavericks become the new consensus-following herd. If everyone tries to outsmart each other by adopting novel or obscure contrarian positions, it leads to player-versus-player environments where the froth and chop of memetic war makes winning even harder.

As W. David Marx argues, the internet has cheapened and commoditized taste so thoroughly that money is the only meaningful differentiator left.

all of today’s so-called subcultures are being routed along the same paths, like a Waze-induced traffic jam clogging the streets of a quiet subdivision

all of today’s so-called subcultures are being routed along the same paths, like a Waze-induced traffic jam clogging the streets of a quiet subdivision

When too many people try to adopt the contrarian position at once, it’s no longer contrarian. Mavericks become the new consensus-following herd. If everyone tries to outsmart each other by adopting novel or obscure contrarian positions, it leads to player-versus-player environments where the froth and chop of memetic war makes winning even harder.

Today’s economic constraints may be enforcing a degree of sobriety, but even before the pandemic, the easy money was clearly concealing a stagnation. This is the thesis of the Umami essay: that material progress had plateaued, leaving us to manipulate symbols and create the mere illusion of value (this is also what David Graeber argues in his “we w

Today’s economic constraints may be enforcing a degree of sobriety, but even before the pandemic, the easy money was clearly concealing a stagnation. This is the thesis of the Umami essay: that material progress had plateaued, leaving us to manipulate symbols and create the mere illusion of value (this is also what David Graeber argues in his “we w

It was usually cooler to seem poor than seem rich, whatever your status actually was. Indie sleaze is back, I’m told, but the PBR-swilling ‘00s hipster—however affluent underneath the blue-collar disguise—would surely recoil from the $20 espresso martinis that their present-day counterparts celebrate.

One major benefit of subcultures is that they open up necessary space when the mainstream becomes too crowded. Now, thanks to the internet, everything is supposedly a subculture—the mainstream has supposedly broken into a thousand fragments. One would assume this creates more room for everyone to spread out, literally and figuratively, but even tha