Where did all the hipsters go? You may have noticed, as author JD Cowan did, that the hipsters who once infested the cultural landscape seem to have vanished overnight.
So did writer Sam Kriss, who has an interesting theory as to where all the mustache wax-sporting, Pabst Blue Ribbon-drinking oddballs went.
Now, innocent people sometimes wonder where all the hipsters went. They were everywhere, once, and now they’re gone: what happened? Who killed them? What happened is this: hipsterism as the dominant mode of mass culture could only exist under very specific informational conditions. Before the turn of the twenty-first century, most of the things that people said and did simply happened, and then fell away into the past—although it’s true that in certain repressive states there were bureaucracies dedicated to capturing the world as data. Enormous piles of paper documents and magnetic tape. From the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the Holy See received frequent detailed reports on exactly what was happening across its domain; before that, monasteries would keep pedantic records of every Mass and every meal; before that, all human activity, every twitch of every fibre, was recorded in the extratemporal and omniscient databases of God. But from the 1990s on, and increasing every year, people started to individually record every detail of their lives in a single vast and open archive, and this was new.
Around the turn of the century, the world contained around 50 exabytes of data: from the first Mesopotamian documents pressed into clay tablets, through five thousand years of books and pamphlets and diaries, to Shrek. Today, there’s around 65 zettabytes. A zettabyte is a thousand exabytes; an exabyte is a billion gigabytes. (Every word ever spoken by anyone who ever lived would come up to about 5 exabytes: a rounding error. One molecule of DNA contains about a gigabyte and a half: the instructions for building you take up about as much data as Shrek in 1080p.) Almost all the information ever produced by our species has been produced in the last few years. The last man to have read every single piece of publicly available data was the fifteenth-century polymath and mystic Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. (People sometimes make the same claim for Samuel Taylor Coleridge; they are wrong.) He knew the entire corpus of Greek and Latin texts, and also Hebrew and Arabic; he studied Kabbalah with the Italian rabbi Yohanan Alemanno; he could recite the poetry of every European vernacular. A contemporary Pico, meanwhile, would have to read not just every crap novel ever published, but every article in every newspaper, every Facebook post, every page on every corporate website, every tweet, every status report from every wifi-enabled lightbulb. The task is impossible. And so, for a while, we had the hipster.
Related: Subcultural Experiences
The hipster was an information-sorting algorithm: its job was to always have good taste. The hipster listened to bands you’d never heard of. The hipster drank beers brewed by Paraguayan Jesuits in the 1750s. The hipster thought Tarkovsky was for posers, and the only truly great late-Soviet filmmaker was Ali Khamraev. The hipster bought all his toilet paper from a small-batch paper factory in Abkhazia that included small fragments of tree bark in the pulp. The hipster swam deep into the vastness of human data, and always surfaced with pearls. Through its powers of snobbery and disdain, the hipster could effortlessly filter out what was good.
That was the theory, at least. In fact, the hipsters were generally very bad at their job. Most of the stuff they liked was awful. They flourished in a brief gap: after we started producing impossible volumes of information, but before we had the technological means of efficiently processing it. In the 2000s, the best tool available was keyword search, the utility of which drops in line with the size of the data set. We still needed people to like things manually. But in the 2010s, we developed algorithmic processes capable of efficiently discerning patterns in the ungodly excess of human cultural production and sorting it appropriately. The hipsters were no longer required. So we shot them all and burned their bodies on a hill. Today, the hipster era survives only as an aesthetic: flash photography, guitar music, tits out. The particular form of snobbery and disdain that powered it is entirely extinct. In the post-hipster era, you listened to what Spotify told you to listen to. If you read a book, it was because the precise pattern of blobby pastel-coloured shapes on its cover contained coded instructions to TikTok’s algorithm that sent it zooming to the top of your feed. Your tastes and preferences were decided for you by vast crystalline machines coiling and uncoiling in the livid molten core of the earth. But these algorithms tend to work in a very particular way. At best, they present you with a caricature of yourself that you then have to conform to. At worst, their processes of cumulative reinforcement serve you up the exact same bilge as everyone else, but shrouded in the aura of individuality. It was at the dawn of the algorithm era that all my Dalston friends started playing Taylor Swift at their parties. A few years ago, I was dragged to some fashion-world event in the Bowery in New York: the room was full of cool young people there to be seen, and they were listening to a playlist of Top-40 pop music curated for them by a proprietary mathematical equation. As someone who had grown up in the hipster age, all these people seemed incredibly lame. The world had been given over to the nerds.
The coming of the nerds destroyed hipsters?
Big if true.
Related: Revenge of the Nerds
Yet all is not well in Nerdville.
But now, the nerds are dying too.
Related: Nerd Culture Is Dead
For the last decade, mass culture has been nerd culture, and a nerd is someone who likes things that aren’t good. This is not to say that everyone who likes things that aren’t good is a nerd. Fast food is bad food: cheap, tasteless, unhealthy, and unsatisfying. But if you grew up eating frozen burgers as an occasional treat, and you still find it nice to sometimes stumble drunk into a McDonald’s late at night and wolf down a Big Mac—because it reminds you of something, because it’s the sign for a certain vanished pleasure—then you are not necessarily a nerd. But imagine a person who collects the boxes from every McDonald’s order he’s ever made, who’s yapping with excitement about the new McDonald’s partially hydrogenated soybean-canola oil blend, who can’t wait for them to release the McBento in Japan so he can watch video reviews all day, and who acts incredibly smug every time McDonald’s posts its quarterly earnings and they’re growing faster than Burger King’s. You know exactly what this person looks like. A total failure of an adult human being. Fat clammy hands; eyes popping in innocent wonder at every new disc of machine-extruded beef derivatives. An unbearable, ungodly enthusiasm. Does he actually like eating the stuff? Maybe not. It hadly matters. His enjoyment is perverse, abstracted far beyond any ordinary pleasure. It signifies nothing. This person is a nerd.
This is why nerds are always so belligerently defensive about the dreck they choose to consume. They are mortally offended by the suggestion that Marvel might be somehow less good than Chris Marker, or that K-pop might be worse than Rimsky-Korasov. A kind of inverted snobbery; a snobbery against value as such. It’s not enough that the things they like are, by definition, globally hegemonic, blotting out any other form of mainstream cultural production—if there is even one person who still tries to consider things by some measure of quality, it’s like a needle sticking sharp in their side, a constant tiny unbearable pain. Any kind of judgement feels like a personal attack against the individual nerd, which it is. It feels like a form of discriminaion, a coded bullying, which it is. It’s the imposition of an entirely foreign system of distinctions: like trying to give a mark out of ten to the sun. Why are you judging? Why are you hating? Why do you keep saying these things are bad? Nerd culture is never bad, because it’s not attempting to be good. Its only function is to exist.
Related: Nerdocracy
This is the secret manifesto of the nerd. The greatest lie the nerds ever told us was that being a nerd had something to do with being unpopular, being uncool, being outside the cultural mainstream, being unusual, being creative, being funny, being different in any way. Andy Warhol was cool, this slight shy serious closeted bespectacled nerd who lived with his mother; possibly the coolest person to have ever lived. He was popular; nerds have always gravitated to the popular; nerds have always delighted in the flat infinity of the Same. He liked things. Being a nerd has always meant being a machine for liking things. The nerds were the messianic faithful, awaiting the incoming of the algorithm. Waiting to fuse themselves with machines. To live in a world where you could like something simply by pressing a button. Waiting for the utopia where let people enjoy things is the whole of the law.
Marvel is failing because they thought that most people were nerds: that mass audiences would actually want to delve deep into their joyless multiverse and slog through all its lore. Nerds like that sort of activity; nerds don’t need to actually like the things they like. But not everyone has the good fortune to be a machine: most people are not nerds. Most people will passively accept culture produced under the regime of alibidinal information-sorting algorithms, if it’s the only thing available—but only up to a point. After that point, they will simply check out, which is exactly what they’re now doing. It’s not just Marvel: nerd culture is collapsing everywhere. Sequels and franchises no longer drag as many people into the cinemas. The ecstatic boyband fans have gone quiet: increasingly, new music in general is being oucompeted by Spotify’s century-long back catalogue. Over the last year, sales of books in print went up by 4.2%—except for young adult novels, which have declined. As I’ve argued previously, algorithms in general are starting to collapse. The nerd world is dying. And since the nerds gravitate towards homogeneity and popularity, their extinction will be total. Soon, very soon, every single one of them will be dead.
Related: The Internet of Shit
Did nerds destroy hipsters? Maybe not directly. But the end of the conditions that allowed one scene to thrive paved the way for the rise of the other. And that paradigm, in turn, is hurtling toward its end.
This is what I’ve been saying for a while now.
Nerd culture is only possible in a monoculture enforced by entertainment cartels with near-total gatekeeping power.
An identity based on being seen to consume the latest big thing disintegrates when there is no next big thing everybody consumes.
You see it everywhere from Hollywood to the record industry to gaming. Corporate acts with astrotured careers are ostensibly raking in historic revenue. Yet no one can sing two verses of the latest chart-topper, and working actors who once made a comfortable living are having to moonlight as Uber drivers.
It’s an overused meme in counterculture circles to say that people are waking up to something. I think they’re waking up from something.
And that thing is the 20th century.
The socioeconomic conditions most of you reading this think of as “normal” were in fact an unequaled anomaly in terms of world history. Those anomalous conditions resulted from America coming out on top in two successive World Wars, and they depend on the US havint enough military and economic muscle to enforce American hegemony on the rest of the world.
Just as American megacorps are losing their grip on the market, everywhere you look, US foreign policy and the dollar are hemorrhaging credibility.
There were no nerds in the 1920s and 30s. Nobody had enough idle time to obsessively collect comic books or all the memorabilia associated with a given movie serial. People read comics and went to movies to unwind from the back-breaking labor they had to perform to survive.
All the indicators suggest we’re heading for a cultural contraction of a kind not seen since the 1930s.
If that’s what it takes to cleanse American culture of the scourge of nerdery, so be it.
That’s not to say everyone is screwed. Names and fortunes were made in every era of recorded history; even the 1930s.
And artists these days have one massive advantage over our predecessors a century ago: advanced digital tools that can turn one man into his own publishing house/indie film company/graphic design studio.
For an idea of what’s coming, imagine 1930s movies without the studio system and publishing without the big NY houses.
Of course, without corpo cartels footing the bill, the new artists will need a new patron class to fund the entertainment they want made.
A neopatroange system, if you will.
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If there’s one missing element in this essay that neither article speaks about, is that alot of what was driving so much of 2000’s nerd and hipster culture is the over use of credit to buy up a variety of used goods from the arts and entertainment sectors.
There’s a whole lot of memory holing that for the last 34 odd years, is that we had a massive explosion of credit usage from banks to retail to online to even groceries. When money printers go brrrrr, and everybody and anybody is borrowing their future earnings for all sorts of silly tat, you end up with a variety of massive distortions with various marketplaces be it culture to the local construction business. But the down side to credit shenanigns is that the costs will always come due after decades of over financed cultural products that no one wants.
When I was following events back in 2014, one item that constantly struck me was how so many socialist leaning gaming journalist websites constantly were complaining about the newly received shortfalls in their advertising revenues, or how I saw hipsters working in jobs that you couldn’t make a proper living somehow being able to afford all sorts of expensive swag I knew they couldn’t afford with their income living in some of the most expensive places in the world. Turns out they were just mostly borrowing money to pay for all of the consumption. The death of the corporate nerd and the hipster at their most consumptive and anti creative rose on the back of the explosion of cheap credit in the 90’s.
“Of course, without corpo cartels footing the bill, the new artists will need a new patron class to fund the entertainment they want made.”
How much cash are all of the people entering our southern border carrying, and how is their English literacy? Because the collapse of America’s algorithmic monoculture isn’t stopping the rest of the world from inserting itself into America.
I seem to recall it being said that if you take into account foreign remittances, plus costs associated with drunk driving, violent crime, etc., mass immigration is a net economic negative.
That’s why one school of thought says the invaders will leave after they’ve stripped the buffet.
A couple of thoughts:
1) “I was dragged to some fashion-world event in the Bowery in New York: the room was full of cool young people there to be seen, and they were listening to a playlist of Top-40 pop music curated for them by a proprietary mathematical equation. As someone who had grown up in the hipster age, all these people seemed incredibly lame. The world had been given over to the nerds.”
I’ve worked in the restaurants and been in enough retail stores to know how lame and frustrating the music selection is. Kid you not, went on a trip to the beach with some friends and every radio station was playing the same 6 to 8 songs. We’d swap from one station to another just to escape a specific song(s) only to hear it soon after swapping stations. The distribution industry for music (and entertainment as a whole) is broken.
2) A good theme for everything now is “inflation”. Financially we are inflated, morally inflated, politically inflated, culturally inflated. It never sat right with me that nerd stuff like comic books and anime got huge. I think 20- years ago, it was at a fine size, just large enough to warrant shelf space in a book store, but not large enough to occupy a whole wall. It flew a bit under the radar, sure most people would see it, but they wouldn’t think much of it. Now everyone knows about it and wants to jump on the bandwagon – inflation.
I don’t think it will all come crashing down like people think think it will, I just see a nicely paced deflation, bringing us back to a healthy equilibrium.
I never hear modern music anywhere I go. Almost inevitably if I walk into a store and they’re playing anything, it’s music from before the year 2000 aside from a small selection of past hits in the ’00s. I’ve never heard a Taylor Swift song in my life but I’ve heard Van Halen more times on the store speaker system this year than I ever did even back in the ’90s.
In fact, the last time I think I heard anything new was a few years back when I was in a taxi and the instrumental track playing sounded indistinguishable from Retrowave. That was surreal.
Whatever new paradigm is emerging will at least be interesting.
The songs on the radio I hear all the time date back from 2006-2012, depending on the station.
It’s an odd phenomenon that zoomers have latched onto the 90’s as their decade of choice to build an identity around. I had some as subordinates and they threw a fit if the 90’s station wasn’t on. I have a zoomer office aid now who plays the game of “have you head of this word or phrase?” thinking I’m too old to know what it is. Sometimes I won’t, but other times I laugh because it’s just an old 90’s word or phrase being recycled in the current year.
That’s a good way of looking at it. I was going to counter the theme is bankruptcy, but perhaps these are two sides of the same coin. There is a kind of bankruptcy at the bottom of the inflationary spiral because if the currency had real and lasting value relative to the goods involved, it would not have needed inflating. Grade and credential inflation hide the intellectual bankruptcy of students and the schools which have become diploma mills. Social media posturing about the issue of the week allows the griefers the appearance of relevance and concern without costing them anything.
I would only add the deflationary spiral has already started on some of these properties. The normies have stopped caring about cape stuff. The Mouse Cult is driving “Flash Gordon, Space Samurai” into the ground. They’re not even worth being mad about at this point. Someone, possibly J.D. or maybe David Stewart, has observed “Get woke, go broke” is backward. They “get woke” because they “went broke”, which is true artistically whether or not it’s an accurate statement about cash flow.
The inflation is a product of the bankruptcy. “We don’t have enough of the valuable thing so we need to [make] more of that thing!”
At least with bankruptcy, assets are seized to try and balance the books. But what will be taken from this inflation? Nothing of value. At least with our current cultural deflation, we will see all the waste get flushed and it will allow the opportunity for something better to take its place.
“Someone, possibly J.D. or maybe David Stewart, has observed “Get woke, go broke” is backward. They “get woke” because they “went broke”, which is true artistically whether or not it’s an accurate statement about cash flow.”
Could it be Razorfist that you’re thinking of? He’s the one who coined the phrase “Go broke, get woke, ultimately croak.”
“I don’t think it will all come crashing down like people think think it will, I just see a nicely paced deflation, bringing us back to a healthy equilibrium.”
People really like spectacle, including in the economic realm. If everything crashed economically, we’d suffer from a mass starvation event. That’s possible. God doesn’t avoid famine as a means of correction. However, it seems a risk business to have a hard stop on globalization, rather than a slow decline.
What’s preventing deflation right now is the Boomer effect. Pensions need to be paid. They have been under funded for decades. Bankers are much happier went all assets slowly (or quickly) climb to the stratosphere. Boomers are thrilled to think their house is worth a billion dollars or whatever and get payouts from banks in the form of a reverse mortgage. So much of our current economic structure assumes inflation, slow or fast.
Deflation benefits the young and the poor. Inflation benefits the old and the already wealthy. In my tea leaves, they’ll try to keep us in inflation mode until it cannot be kept up any longer. What the deflation looks like at that point is anyone’s guess.
The clock is ticking for Boomers. Each day we make it forward, is another day closer they are to the grave or nursing home or irrelevancy. It’s a small bit, but deflation is happening now. Just give it some more time.
I think what threw me off for so long was that I liked things for what they were and was mystified that I kept running into people liked things for vague, abstract reasons. And overnight it went from weird obscure underground alternative music like Boris or the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion to Star Wars and Marvel. This helps explain a lot of the mindset shift that puzzled me at the time. All of a sudden the problem was “normies” like mainstream material that had sold millions of copies for decades “invading” hyper-exclusive nerd chambers that were never hyper-exclusive at their peak. It’s very strange.
Scott Pilgrim is also one of the pieces of media that really highlights this change from pseudo-obscure winking hipsterism to unabashed mainstream nerd worship in its mere existence. It also, naturally, never really pierced the mainstream despite its success. That’s because its audience was and is entirely composed of hipsters that became nerds. None of the people in that story exist anymore–they only existed in that one place and time. Just like the current crop of nerds are already fighting amongst themselves between joining the Death Cult or stubbornly remaining in the long-dead 2000s-era nerd culture bubble. That’s the real crux of most online entertainment culture-warring. The lack of monoculture means this will be continuing on for at least a good while. But it will eventually end.
Whatever comes next, is anyone’s guess.
“I think what threw me off for so long was that I liked things for what they were and was mystified that I kept running into people liked things for vague, abstract reasons.”
Many people can’t or won’t distinguish between taking up a hobby and joining a subculture.
“Any kind of judgement feels like a personal attack against the individual nerd, which it is.”
If your identity is constructed around consumption, you will experience any criticism of your consumer preferences as an attack on your innermost authentic being. No room remains for discussing the merits of a thing, only frantic defense of an unstable self made all the more rabid by the awareness of its precarity.
Well put, with one suggestion: Scott Pilgrim’s audience was mostly nerds that became hipsters in the mid 2000s. Some grew out of it, and others reverted to nerdery once hipsterism imploded on itself.
“…I kept running into people liked things for vague, abstract reasons.”
Sounds a lot like the people who’ve been destroying properties like Star Wars with their insane ideologies for the past decade-plus! This type isn’t interesting in a story or work for its own sake, but as a vehicle to advance their agenda, no matter how awkward it must be hijacked to do so.
Hipsters are probably The Last Clique; the last category of people you could choose to belong to or not belong to.
The Last Clique is giving way to the One Church.
I know someone who hated the short “World Record” from the Animatrix, with the reasoning “it’s about a jock that leaves the matrix. Only nerds deserve to leave the matrix; the Matrix is a movie for nerds.” Put aside the fact that the outcome for the “jock” in that short is rather horrible, the idea that The Matrix was some secret anti-normie flick that only nerds could appreciate was absurd. It set several box office records and everyone was familiar with things like bullet time or the question “what is the matrix?” Even in 2003 the idea was that nerds were some sort of underclass.
There is some sliver of truth to the idea. I DID have a couple of people make fun of me for playing D&D in high school. Some of my friends who were particularly unathletic got fun of for that (though the ones on sports teams never did and also never had to give up their nerd cards, since they liked the right things.) But most of what is considered “nerdy” was not a risk in the 90’s. If you liked things like Spiderman, Batman or the X-men it’s because you watched the cartoons and so did all the other guys in school (even the “jocks.”) Video games were even less of a “nerd” interest; there were many times were former enemies were able to get along because someone got a new console or game. People thought that they were downtrodden nerds for liking bands like The Prodigy, The Crystal Method, Rammstein, Korn, etc., but again these were all generally popular at the time. When super hero movies started coming out nerds talked about how great it was to finally have movies for them (ignoring earlier stuff like the mainstream success of the Star Wars and Star Trek movies) but even the most non-“nerd” girl I knew in 2003 was hyped about seeing Ang Lee’s Hulk.
I don’t know if its believing the hype of stuff like The Revenge of the Nerds, since we certainly did watch that type of boomer fiction growing up, but everyone was convinced that liking these popular things made them a special breed of oppressed people, and when the mainstream went full on nerd post MCU they either celebrated their “conquest” of the mainstream or complained about the “invasion” by the normies, when the truth was that this stuff had been popular all along.
It’s an interesting hypothesis that I think touches on some aspects of the odd transition of Hipsterism to Nerd Culture and subsequent decline – especially the psychology of the Consoomer archetype, but I think a few pieces are missing. As a guy who was a nerd first and later a hipster, I will attempt to illuminate further.
I was a nerd because I thought nerd stuff was better than mainstream stuff. I loved Stargate SG-1 because it was imaginative and fantastic and fun, all of which appealed to my adolescent self, and Friends or CSI or whatever was lame and boring. I absolutely liked nerd stuff because I thought it was better than the mainstream.
So it wasn’t much of a stretch that in college I pivoted to the Hipster subculture because it felt like an extension of the same ethos. Abercrombie was for douchey jocks, Urban Outfitters and skinny jeans were for cool people with taste. Nickelback was butt rock, Broken Social Scene was real music. And so on. However, I wasn’t really trying to gatekeep, I was happy when bands or shows I liked got a bigger audience. Yet it was very much about trying to build your identity around having better taste than everybody else. It was both a symptom of, and reaction to, the post-Ground Zero culture rot.
One thing that I think got overlooked in Kriss’s analysis was the decline of hipster tastemakers like Pitchfork Media. In the mid 2000s they’d tell you about cool albums by M83 or Boris, but by 2012 they were just slapping Best New Music labels on top 40 pop and rap music. They’d completely been bought out by big media and ended up shoveling the same crap for which they were originally supposed to be an alternative. This happened across hipster publications. Part of the reason why hipsterism died is that it got absorbed into the mainstream and no longer presented even a distinctive alternative taste. When everybody is wearing skinny jeans, the hipster doesn’t stand out much anymore.
So the metaphorical neighborhood of hipsterism was, ironically enough, gentrified by the mainstream, and the Geek identity that had been being cultivated ever since The Big Bang Theory started plaguing television sets sort of took over its cultural place. But I don’t necessarily think hipsters turned into BBT and Marvel-consooming nerds. I think it was nearly the opposite, and like me a lot of nerds evolved into hipsters, and a lot of times were a bit embarrassed about their nerd-past at least until Scott Pilgrim made it okay to be both at the same time. The new BBT/Consoomer nerds had a different origin for the most part. Actual 2000s hipsters either grew up and grew out of it to be fairly normal people, or they turned into shrieking social justice warriors.
“Now, innocent people sometimes wonder where all the hipsters went. They were everywhere, once, and now they’re gone: what happened?”
I can tell you where some of the hipsters went. Some, no joke, ended up in the traditionalist/conservative/homeschool social sphere in American Catholicism. It surprised me when I realized it.
Full disclosure: As the daughter of a working class family who barely cared if I was dressed at times, I was never a hipster. I did try in middle school, the late 1980’s, arguably the height of mass culture hipster. But poor and weird and lazy does not a hipster make. 🙂
Anyway, inside American Catholicism is the “Pints with Aquinas”/Matt Walsh/Trent Horn/Steubenville subculture. It’s men dressed in sharp shirts and sweaters. It’s women with tiered, flowy dresses. Sometimes veiled at Mass, sometimes not. Everyone is at their correct weight, remarkably even after having several children in a short span of time, which is both a good thing but also the mark of the old hipster culture. It’s organic food, if the family hasn’t gotten too large yet. It’s willing to call communism and racism bad with same sort of emotional emphasis as the rest of the conservative culture. It’s walls of books and nods to Chesterton* and Aquinas and number of high brow art. Homeschooling is there as serious option, although the right Catholic school is acceptable.
Usually there will be a fashionable interest in either Eastern Rite Catholicism or the Missal of 1962 communities. They can be found, however, at a current missal parish, provided it’s the right one with the right priest. There will be at least a little Latin in that Mass and for sure platens at communion. Where they will not be found is attending the parish closest to them, if it involves too many old people, contemporary hymns, and possibly brushes with Catholics who might have never heard of Aquinas or their obscure patron saint.
Hipsters it seems are still with us. But I am sure that God loves hipsters too. 🙂
*Note: I am very fond of many of Chesterton’s works and in part because he doesn’t really have much use for intellectualism circles.
I think tradCaths/TLM goers being “hipster Catholics” checks out to some extent. I had hipster tendencies and still do to some extent, and it’s probably what brought in me into the whole trad-scene/TLM community where I was eventually confirmed into the Church. So yes, God loves hipsters too.
More observations from disparate corners:
“The socioeconomic conditions most of you reading this think of as “normal” were in fact an unequaled anomaly in terms of world history. Those anomalous conditions resulted from America coming out on top in two successive World Wars, and they depend on the US having enough military and economic muscle to enforce American hegemony on the rest of the world.”
Such a critically important truth that needs to be understood by more people, as is the truth that all of it was underpinned by the morally corrupt inflation of the monetary supply by the “creature from Jekyll Island”, the Federal Reserve, which was established in 1913. We’ve been riding a century long wave of fake wealth at the expense of the future. Hint for those catching up: anyone reading this and anyone after us are the future they stole from.
“Nerd culture is only possible in a monoculture enforced by entertainment cartels with near-total gatekeeping power.”
The state-granted distribution monopoly known as “copyright” continues to be a blight upon the arts. That’s what these cartels are built on, after all.
On the video game front, what is your take Brian on the great JRPGs that have recently come out within the last year or two? A resurgence like Beat Em Ups had with Streets of Rage 4 (however brief of a resurgence that was.)? Unicorn Overlord is up there as one of my favorite games of all time. Octopath Traveler (both 1 and 2) and Fire Emblem Three Houses were great as well. The latest Fire Emblem, Engage, was a bit of a let down though. I have noticed with the games mentioned (aside from Engage) there is the Japanese style Catholic religious feel to the games. Truly beautiful cathedrals, background music, feel.
Too busy playing FFVIII on my PS2, sorry.