This is an essay I wrote in 2022, inspired by Kyle Chaka’s 2016 viral essay, “Welcome to Airspace”. After seeing an excerpt from Kyle’s new book on the front of /c/Technology, I thought y’all might be interested in reading this piece of mine, which is less about the design of physical spaces, and more about The Algorithm’s™ influence on creative practice in general.
This is a conversation I can have a million times, so I hope you enjoy.
Something I think about a lot is how the “hipster” movement in the early 2000s was extremely _anti-_consumer culture. They were building easy to repair “fixie” bikes instead of driving cars, they were brewing their own beer and buying/mending clothes they bought second hand. They were moving to abandoned factory loft apartments in similarly abandoned urban areas.
Then, the artists living in lofts, making zines and and knitting sweaters got priced out. And now in pop culture the term “hipster” has largely replaced “yuppie” to mean an elitist, snobby, and extremely pro consumer culture sort of person, which is basically the opposite of what the young people in the early 2000s were doing. I’m not a conspiracy theorist but I have to imagine that the big corps saw the movement as a threat, and did an classic rebrand on them, like car companies did with the minivan to sell more SUVs.
hipsters still exist, although i don’t think the name applies so much anymore.
For sure, they also don’t congregate in Williamsburg much anymore.
it’s not so much that we got priced out. many of us grew up and had kids (not me, ew), and the rest of us don’t want to be around those assholes anymore, lmao. coke-fueled drinking binges and after-hours parties don’t mix well with the kid life. so we all went to ft. greene, bed-stuy, and bushwick.
Example: Tim Pool got his start as a livestreamer at the Occupy Wall Street protests. In 2018, he would say he was never politically aligned with OWS. Yes, that giant piece of shit Tim Pool was instrumental in livestreamed coverage of OWS.
The world got wild here for a minute.