“Dinergoth” as punching bag
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Kyle Chayka, who is now coincidentally father of the first baby to be born with perfect taste, unleashed a quick but classically Kylean note on the tech bro obsession with taste itself. It’s interesting how slippery that word has become in techy parlance; I like how we’re called to consider the former harbinger of consumer discernment — the indie hipster — who at least viewed the project of personal taste as a journey, not a destination (staying ahead on the new Fleet Foxes or whatever is only satisfying until the next album drops). Meanwhile, the tech sector’s obsession with taste is so much more nakedly about the destination: the point of amassing cachet is, much like any asset or underutilized web domain, to flip it into something you can get investor backing for. The subtext being: that little gemstone of humanity inside all of us is only as useful as an efficient converter of aesthetic revelation into liquid shareholder value? How bizarre. The rest of us are using it to like, feel interesting sensations and maybe find each other. But okay!
Did you read that “American Diner Gothic” piece in The New Atlantis that everyone’s been buzzing over? Congrats are at least definitely in order to the writer for coining such a sticky new term for what I do think is a real phenom this late in the game of competitive vibe taxonomizing, but I otherwise found the piece quite disdainful of its subject. (And if you are going to be hating on a Type of Person, you simply can’t start with a Tinder match as an entry point — especially when your writer bio lists you as the CEO of an AI dating assistant app!)
The idea that the internet has disseminated alt aesthetics and the online sub-cultures of fandom, anime, cosplay, etc. across middle America and in lower classes as part of a great convergence, rather than a cultural flattening (which has been the predominant narrative otherwise) is interesting, sure. It’s sort of like looking at the mirror image of all the stories we’ve been reading about cuts to local arts, media, etc. in conjunction to general economic downturn; where else do we expect people to turn to except the internet and its sanctuary, sometimes sugary niches? I didn’t even terribly mind the lines, “Pull back far enough and America becomes a single screen, ten thousand towns as pixels running the same program. Between them only bandwidth and weather.” But critics of the piece are rightfully decrying the piece’s lack of curiosity about the lives (or even politics) of these diner goths; I was surprised to not see even a gesture toward the inherent radicalness of presenting openly queer or “alt” in these supposed bastions of “middle America,” which has become synonymous with conservatism. Maybe the story is that these smaller cities and towns aren’t as conservatively coded as we in the “superstar cities” think; that’s an interesting story.
Otherwise, what this screed reminded me of immediately was the sobering “User Interview #3,” a viral video (ad?) posted by Avi Schiffmann (the Friend.com guy) that followed a woman with dyed hair, piercings, and tattoos around her day-to-day somewhere in the south. (“You were my first anchor back to reality,” we see her tell “Vector,” her AI necklace, shortly before she has a seizure and wakes up in the hospital, where she picks up the conversation where she left off.)
I’ve thought about this particular video in the series a lot; Schiffmann presented it on X last month (where has since racked up more than 11 million views) without comment, making it hard to nail exactly where on the guileless-to-perverse spectrum it should land; the video is obviously not flattering if you’re under the impression that artificial connection is even a tiny bit problematic. My theory is that Schiffmann and his company made a bold gambit in daring viewers to conflate their scorn for the product with scorn for the people who use it, especially when this user has a legible, distinctive look. The other two videos in the series, after all, feature a bald white man and a young white man, and they’ve barely broken 200K views.
On a lighter note, it was pretty delightful to come across this Cut piece — Search and Rescue and Me: “I trained to track down missing people in the wilderness. I ended up finding myself” — at the same time as this NYT Magazine “letter of recommendation,” titled How Escape Rooms Helped Me Escape My Life. What shall we call this genre of essay — deux ex metaphor?
Should You Read It: That longass Sam Kriss piece in Harper’s on Roy Lee and San Francisco tech scene’s obsession with being “agentic”? Yes!
There are very few people who can deploy diamond-cut prose like this, and the introduction to the Scott Alexander short story was particularly delightful (reading a nice reference to literature, halfway through this piece about letting machines tell you what to do, felt like opening the window on an increasingly suffocating room). You should absolutely hold out at least until you get to the quote “so it is a sperm race—it’s just up-skinned,” but if get all the way through, you do also get to learn who Donald Boat is, in case you’ve gotten away with not knowing. And that at Cluely, one can expense one’s dating life?
Well this shaped up to be a very “men in tech” edition, so seems right to cap it off with Benjamin Mullin’s check-in on Jonah Peretti on the future of BuzzFeed, my internet alma mater and probably also yours. Things have been dire for a while for the company once valued at $1.7B in the 2010s (What have we learned in this decade? That you should probably always sell to Disney), and I’m still rooting on the lovely friends who work there, but you can honestly get the full gist of the situation based on this quote from Peretti, with his age inserted meaningfully in between.
Naaaasty work!
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