A couple of days ago the muscles of my back seized up almost completely, which meant that I was nearly immobilised for a day or so and have spent the time since in a diazepam- and painkiller-induced haze. The plus side is that finally I had the time and was in the correct frame of mind to sit and finish watching series one of Heroes, my failure to do so thus far having almost caused me to be disqualified from most of my friendships. The unfortunate side is that I haven’t really been keeping up with technology and media news or working on developing a cycle of blogs, and so rather than post another piece discussing issues which have frankly already been talked to death, I thought I’d cull a few choice sites from what I’ve been looking at recently, with a few comments when relevant. Fun though it would be to write a rambling, indulgent post and put it down to the drugs, I’m going to try to keep those down to one a month.
The spectacle of the male ape copulating with the female cyborg is always good for a laugh. It would be possible, I think, to overstate the importance of Zizek’s thought to the ways by which academia has tried to predict the effect of the internet on communication. Possible, but difficult.
the new shelton wet/dry is a gloriously syncretic collection of interesting things, accompanied by beautifully irrelevant lomo-style photographs, home movie stills and off-duty mannequins. I use syncretic the way Diderot tried to claim for it in the Encyclopédie, a meaning closer to éclectique than to the Biblical sense of blasphemous synthesis.
The four million
The four million
An old article here critiques Malcolm Gladwell’s notion of ’supermavens’, hyperinfluential individuals who are able to build or reanimate brands simply by adopting them: Gladwell’s example is Hush Puppies, a dead brand which a select group of Manhattanites brought back from the dead in the mid-nineties.
‘I have heard among this clan
You are called the forgotten man’
‘Is that what they’re saying? Well did you evah.
What a swell party this is…
‘Have you heard- it’s in the stars-
Next July we collide with Mars…’
A man called Ward Mcallister was the self appointed arbiter and the puppy doyenne of NY society, the ‘knickerbockracy’, from about 1860 to 1890. He coined the concept of ‘the four hundred’, the number of New Yorkers and satellites who really mattered, supposedly the number who could fit into Mrs. William Backhouse Astor’s ballroom. (Not THE Mrs. Astor, though McAllister knew her too, calling her his ‘Mystic Rose’. Becket tells us “no gardener has died comma within roseceous memory”, but in this case Ward, who thought himself the society cultivator, was outlived by his roses. I shit you not in the slightest about ‘Mrs. William Backhouse’. Former marm made good? Must remember to investigate.)
Ward died “dining alone” at the Union club: there is room on Wikipedia for irony, and obvious relish. His list, which he is supposed to have actually written out, was top-heavy with his allies and the neuveau riche; he was disgraced when a tell-all book pissed off actual magnates with little interest in gasping and fluttering encouragingly at the Really Too Much. Ward’s relentless pursuit was to surround himself with the ‘Tong’, which he translated as ‘cream’, raising people up to nearly his own seat, which he probably imagined to be absolutely solid, sandbagged in with his outrageous selfconsciousness and his power as a maven, a connector.
(Tong are in fact chinese gangs, also called Triads: at roughly the same time Ward held his carnival court the Tong Wars shredded certain quiet neighbourhoods of Chicago, LA and particularly San Francisco. Machete street battles decided the control of sex and opium in whole cities. Anecdotes of the blood culture are fascinatingly gruesome: the film ‘Kung Fu Hustle’ isn’t far off. I remember I got heavily into it while researching a presentation on ‘crime’ for the Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s English Club a few years ago. In the end I cut it all, and went for Italian-American stereotypes instead, easily translatable.)
The point is that networks of influence are very real, and the people have a kind of power who -by tacit mutual agreement- occupy what the media determine to be the top spots. These people may even move in worlds among those who have real power. But they, no more than marketers or the media, should not labour under the illusion that they themselves create: these people are not important, and are becoming less so. They are not the ‘cream’, the most visible, by any particular merit; they are gangs like any other, but ones which have maintained a monopoly over people’s attention. And that is breaking down.
doubleclique
doubleclique
Consumers are faced with a democratisation of interest, and content providers are starting to realise that the people who make the best tastemakers are not always those who can be predicted and deployed, but those who love what they make and want others to do so to. These people can make trend not imitation but participation. And in theory, that should make them easier, not harder, to coolhunt. But not with current techniques.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t still and won’t be many, many people who follow trends because of the appeal of community: top-flight trend idols are the barometer for what everyone will be talking about in the mall or Monday round the cooler. Equally, those who get into and stay in niche trends may do so for the community, for its sense of insularity, of having discovered something others can’t, whether it’s Heroes or The Wire.
But exact uniformity is a niche, perhaps the most fetishistic of all. Digital participation, in the form of forums, of online video fashion consultations, is going to seep its way into all trends. And online, exact duplication is instantly, globally obvious. Certain types of trend leader are still going to have disproportionate amounts of power, so long as there are still common standards for success. But trend idols already acknowledge that a trend is a genre within which fans operate and personalise; this is why rappers start clothes labels as well as music. The music has become a soundtrack to the environment they create: in many ways the least commercialised component. In the era of Primark’s economic eruption, personalisation may well become the new sign of wealth, like plumpness in the middle ages and slimness five years ago and environmentalism today. Harajuku is the centre of world fashion but that’s because it’s ’style’ is a community of competing eclecticism. Meantime, TV content providers are acknowledging the value of cultishness, encouraging fans to go deep, to find a balance between a sense of community and coterie, and finally to personalise.
Don’t get me wrong, there will always be cliques. Perhaps I think this way because of a bias towards geekdom. But though I’m losing faith in the term ‘geek’, obsessive interest in your chosen subject will always be cool as far as I’m concerned. And the net has made certain that choice will survive the age of abundance, even if abundance does not. Maybe one day soon we won’t have to talk about ‘coolhunters’ or ‘mavens’ or maintain the illusion that those people have to be the ‘coolest’ of all. Maybe we’ll be able to talk about coolgeeks.
“How dare you. ‘One in a million’ means there’s eight of me in New York City”. Downs trousers, exits left.
