Hipsters and Hashtags: On n+1 and the Value of Microengagement

The n+1 editors are some sensitive altbros. Original photo: NYT

Upon first reading, Mark Greif’s NYT essay on “The Sociology of the Hipster” inspired in me something of an epiphany. I did not wonder, as I have since, if the empty tenor of his article (more zen than nihilistic; more antiseptic than cynical) was cultivated from some number of pre-“making it” years cobbling together a living by writing laudatory commercial copy for academic literature. My brain did not assemble the manifold Marxist ironies, identify the doctrinal heresies. No – instead I was hit with a simple clarity of divine proportions. I knew exactly what I thought about the essay, and I knew that thought’s name. I knew its name could not be spelled out; it had to be abbreviated: “WTFC.” Who The Fuck Cares.

I must emphasize that although I am now aware such an acronym pre-existed my kneejerk brainstorm (or so Urban Dictionary tells me), at the time I had never heard or seen such a term used. Yet out of the electronic detritus, the chaos of feeds and links – pushing past the dusty volumes of critical theory I’ve stored away in my memory out of loyalty to my alma mater, that dying figurehead of that dying species, the public intellectual institution – this is what came to me, springing forward, pure and resolved: WTFC.

I can see a younger, less “wired” version of myself getting spitting mad about Greif’s essay. I’d wave my arms around and say something about self-importance, and lack of class consciousness, and Bourdieu, and Marx, and the takeover of the Times by the Style Section, and the bourgeoisie, and the narcissism of armchair intellectuals, and even more stuff about class – most likely butchering the points that have been concisely and cogently phrased here and here, and in Bourdieu’s own work (which serves as its own response to Greif’s project).  I probably would have been annoying, a little hypocritical, perhaps shrill – displaying much worse than the quiet dignity with which Greif put forward his 1000 words of nothingness.

So what joy to find a new tool in the toolbox, to discover how my psyche has secretly cultivated a nuanced practice of micro-engagement – a way of responding to things that are not worth fretting over in the larger scheme of things, but are significant within particular echo chambers I frequent, or are just irksome enough to call for detractors to voice their dissent if and when they are bored at work, all while maintaining healthy emotional distance. Micro-engagement: small assertions of my taste as applied to your ideas or philosophies, but pls note I can’t be bothered to spell them out. Micro-engagement: it makes me one very blasé hipster.

Taste is not stable and peaceful, but a means of strategy and competition … These conflicts for social dominance through culture are exactly what drive the dynamics within communities whose members are regarded as hipsters.

Mark Greif, The Sociology of the Hipster (Nov. 12, 2010)

My spontaneous acronym-creation branched – I speculate – from the practices of limited-scope voice I have developed with Internet’s help over the last 10 years: the upvote and the downvote, the tumblr heart and the reblog, the retweet, the hashtag, the 1-5 stars, the facebook “share.” If NYT has not yet installed a rating feature for me to actualize the irritation brewing inside me (“this was not funny! this was not useful! this was not cool!”), my brain will invent its own noncommittal platform, allowing me to express in four very capslocked letters the vague disapproval I feel vis-a-vis Greif’s unselfconscious insularity while maintaining a grasp on proper perspective. That perspective being: this is far from an important topic.

Hydra has previously mulled over how the Internet affects the human cognitive process – whether it short-circuits our logical functions, whether it degrades our attention spans, whether it presents potential for new modalities of creative learning and/or teaching. It was a fascinating experience to be confronted without warning by a personal demonstration of how the brain can be cultivated by the digital milieu, by the “habitus” of constant abbreviation and meme-making. (Couldn’t help it, Bourdieu is my dawg).

Although much has been said about the Internet’s encouragement of intellectual micro engagement, less critical thought has gone into the idea of emotional micro-engagement. By this I do not mean to invoke the “oh my god our children will never be able to have friends IRL” luddite fearmongering of the early 2000s, nor to make claims about the depth of feeling that can be achieved by online dating or gchatting. What I am referring to is emotional micro-engagement with current events, with newspaper and magazine articles, with essays, with literature, with the products of that industry we call content.

The closest thing we have to a treatise on this phenomenon is, ironically enough, the Alt Report / Hipster Runoff – and that’s more a performance of emotional micro-engagement than an explication. Still, instructive. Reducing emotions to a few limited options: <3 u. miss u. h8 u. Because how should we feel about the troublesome race and gender dynamics in Diplo’s relationship with Skerritt Bwoy and daggering, and how can we feel anything about it without warping things out of perspective, without taking too seriously something that is kind of inane and frivolous to begin with? (Here is one suggestion: don’t publish a book on it.)

Developing practices of limited engagement may be dystopic to some. It stinks of empathy fatigue and insincerity – those hallmarks of hipster apathy. But the reality is that there is too much content for everybody to care deeply about everything (a problem we at Hydra aspire to perpetuate). The question is not whether to approach the world with seriousness (as explored in this previous Times piece featuring n+1 and the Believer), but when, how, and how much. One might call it the equitable  (ethical?) distribution of one’s passions. New media has changed the parameters, if not the question, of that experiment.

Moreover, there is value in being able to respond to a premise without reifying or legitimizing it. I could write a letter to the NYT editor expressing my grievances regarding Greif’s essay, but then I would be complacent in the newspaper’s choice to publish the piece.  I would be overstating my opposition to the essay, holding up its merits as something to be debated, when in actuality its primary effect was to cause my eyes to glaze over.

But in this new collaboration between me and my friend Internet, there is potential for us to stay in the conversation while de-legitimizing the content we encounter.  By platform-switching (pushing an excerpt of a Times article to a tumblr, for example) we can say without words: “This does not belong in the book review section, and not just because people shouldn’t be allowed to review their own books. This is at most a ‘note’ on Facebook that I do not wish to be tagged in.” Twitter may or may not make us a social movement in the aggregate, but it achieves something on the individual scale irregardless:  it lets me put Greif’s “sociological investigation into the hipster” on the same plane as my mother narrating her television shopping network adventures — lets me care about his essay and its goals the exact amount that it deserves to be cared about, which is just barely at all.  #wtfc: micro-engagement makes this a position statement, an ethos.

***

“What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation” was published last month.  It is available at New York and LA bookstores and at the n+1 store.