I spent a year of my life—specifically, my freshman year in college—fascinated by hipsters from afar. I was at a dull school, wondering how on earth my life was supposed to begin, and I lived close enough to New York City that I could imagine a more exotic life happening just beyond my grasp. I couldn't imagine the world of art, culture, and riches that the Internet suggested was happening out there. And enough people within that world spent enough time complaining about hipsters that I found myself anxiously wondering which of the people I was following were "real" and which were not.

Who was I supposed to find interesting? Was I letting myself be suckered by a bunch of snake oil salesmen from a distance? Was I simply too cut off from anything real or interesting or good to even know what the "correct" things were to like?

In retrospect, this anxiety of mine was what defined the so-called hipster: a fear of trusting your own preferences. Judgment could come from so many different directions that the thought of liking something became a little paralyzing; the dream was to find something so compelling, on every possible level, that you could enjoy something and feel beyond reproach. (Of course, whenever someone did discover something like that, news would spread like wildfire, which created a new reason to hate that thing, forever sullying its potential to be a Genuinely Enjoyable Thing.)

A year later, I was living in a major city, surrounded by art students with the hippest and weirdest tastes imaginable. And I learned what should have been an obvious truth from the start, which is that people like all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, and that youth are doomed to always be confused; some people like obscure things because they're very peculiar people, and other people like them because they enjoy treasure hunting, or because they started from a deeply unusual vantage point. In any event, I'd started to learn that some things just spoke to me, and I made some friends who seemed to respond to the same kinds of thing that I did; over time, I found great ways to discover things that I loved, and stopped thinking about the matter all that much.

That was about the time that poptimism surged into the mainstream. Poptimism started out as a response to the kind of dipshit dude who insisted that rock n' roll was the only "authentic" kind of music, particularly compared to the sugariness of pop; it insisted that pop music not only had value in and of itself, but was capable of saying serious things about the world around us. Over time, this ballooned beyond pop music to become a statement about pop culture in general: it embraced that which was mainstream, and gave as much attention to hit TV shows or Disney films as previous cultural movements paid to relatively niche subcultures like shoegaze or the Young British Artists. That was perfectly timed to coincide with the rise of streaming services, which helped collapse culture into an increasingly top-heavy configuration. The biggest musicians in the world started taking up more and more space, aided by services like Spotify; hit TV shows were not only available on demand for a fraction of the price of cable, but generated endless memes, permeating every corner of our culture with almost no latency.

This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, mind you! It was just a Thing. And while most Things do get annoying with overexposure—which is part of why people have found themselves irritated by earworms since the advent of radio—there are certainly a lot of interesting aspects to pop culture. And there's nothing wrong about simply enjoying things to begin with: you're allowed to like what you like, and there's not much point to thinking less of other people for what they like. Especially since, with virtually anything, the deeper you dive the weirder it gets.

But with the rise of poptimism came a certain backlash to people who weren't fundamentally concerned with pop culture—and a kneejerk backlash to anyone who would dare criticize it. This, not poptimism itself, is where things get interesting to me. 

Over the years, I've developed a neurotic dislike of being called "pretentious." I'm fine with being called picky, or snobbish, or opinionated, or even elitist; it's just "pretentious" that sticks in my craw. That's because I only encounter that word from one kind of person: the kind that assumes I only like what I like, or think what I think, as an excuse to judge or belittle other people's preferences. The undercurrent of the accusation is always: Oh, you think you're better than me, huh? And it's almost always offered as a substitution for actual conversation. I'm not accused of not listening or not taking someone seriously: the charge is that I only like things as a form of social maneuvering. Which offends me less because it's false—though it is—than because I spend an awful lot of time obsessing quite naturally about the weird shit that I find interesting. Ironically, when that very-central aspect of my personality gets overlooked or dismissed, it feels very easy to feel like the person I'm talking with either isn't listening to me or isn't taking me seriously—or that they're approaching our conversation as, well, a sort of social maneuvering.

In other words, it's a cynical accusation of cynicism. Which is surprisingly similar to the old hipster conversation, for all it pops up on the opposite end of the cultural spectrum from the place the hipsters used to dwell.

(Or does it?)

I've been thinking recently about the old Jon Stewart appearance on Crossfire, the one that eventually got Crossfire canceled. (Man, remember when Tucker Carlson was just a harmless blowhard in a bow tie?) What made it so shocking, and so compelling, was that Jon Stewart kept trying to have a sincere conversation—and that the thing he wanted to be sincere about was this crazy idea that politics wasn't just a team sport, and that treating it like just another flavor of entertainment might be culturally corrosive. And the two hosts of Crossfire, Tucker especially, just could not take him seriously. What's your angle? they kept seeming to say. What's your motive? What game are you playing? They just couldn't fathom the idea that Stewart meant what he said—and that exposed, somewhat jarringly, just how little they believed anything that they were saying. It was all positioning, positioning, positioning. The words they used were tactics, not substance. They no longer seemed to believe that anything could be real.

That was the alleged hipster in a nutshell. That was the thing that made people so despise the word "irony" for so long. The hipster wasn't real. All their tastes were part of a game with Byzantine rules, one that was so up its own ass that you'd have to be a hipster just to know what you were playing. They treated subcultures like chess pieces: they didn't want to enjoy, they wanted to impress. They wanted to be photographed with the right microcelebrities at the right underground concerts. You were supposed to be impressed with who they namedropped—and if you weren't impressed, well, that was proof that you were too lowbrow to know you were supposed to be. It was one giant game of gatekeeping, one whose only reward was... well... not losing. 

Funnily enough, it was never the "hipsters" that I knew who worked like this. I found this behavior far more commonly among geeks. Gamers would try to impress each other with their knowledge of obscure RPGs, or offbeat pen-and-paper games; comic book fans would get outright hostile with one another while discussing Batman's least-known villains. The science fiction/fantasy readers I knew were a lot more aggressive about their favorite authors than the people I knew who were busy reading Dostoyevsky, or discussing Junot Díaz books. Generally speaking, the biggest distinction I saw was between people who dedicated themselves to single cultures and people whose tastes were more omnivorous; the monoculture people tended to be a lot more arrogant about the supremacy of their chosen tastes, and a lot more paranoid about the idea that the cosmopolitan sorts were looking down their noses at them. (The "fake gamer girl" meme was a good microcosm of this: how dare someone enjoy a few games but also enjoy other things, and maybe look attractive while doing so??)

Both types of people have interesting patterns to their tastes. The more obsessive you get about a single culture—ask me how I know—the more you start appreciating highly particular traits in the individual pieces that you consume. Things that feel more generic, or less heightened, put you off because you've simply encountered it before. The broader your tastes get, on the other hand, the less likely it is that you'll be consumed by a single kind of culture just because it exists: you're operating with a wider palate, and may be less taken by one particular innovation within one particular movement. On the other hand, the things that do grab you may well be less interesting to the true devotees, because you appreciate things which to them have long since lost their flavor.

Pop culture makes for a particularly interesting sort of monoculture. It's never truly monocultural, since by its nature virtually everybody is exposed to it, and people with all sorts of interests find they enjoy one big thing or another. But it also serves as a default monoculture of sorts: if you're not particularly curious about a particular facet of culture, it's the likeliest thing you'll run into. The Big Bang Theory was not an especially good sitcom, but it was an exceedingly popular one, so it was likely that, if you watched exactly one sitcom, that was the one you'd wind up watching. Billboard 40 music functions as a genre in and of itself—albeit one that shifts around in interesting ways—and it's possible to wind up listening to little else. Pop is simultaneously broad and narrow. It subsumes a broad variety of other cultures, but is monocultural in and of itself.

Moreover, pop has increasingly incorporated geek culture under its umbrella. Marvel and Star Wars have become major institutions, while somehow convincing the old comic-book geeks that they're still connoisseurs of niche products. The cottage industries that pop up around popular shows—podcasts, episode-by-episode recaps, wikis—feel like a mainstream variant of what used to be geek-only behaviors. Word-by-word dissection of song lyrics, which became especially common around hiphop's multilayered allusions and wordplay, became regular habit for fans of BTS and Harry Styles and Taylor Swift. Obsessions are encouraged. More than encouraged: they are enabled, masterfully engineered, by corporations with big budgets who can afford to craft entire experiences around products they think might make them billions-with-a-b. Pop culture can literally afford an appreciation that's simultaneously broad and deep. In the same way that social networks manipulate their users into never quite losing their focus, Netflix can algorithmically calculate how to keep its viewers invested, while pop stars engineer their every look to maximize online discussion. Attention is a resource—and what is culture if not our collective attention?

But it's not just about the numbers. Rather, on some level it's about other kinds of numbers: the aggregated scores that critics give various products, on sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. On these sites, even critics who don't offer easily-quantifiable ratings have their reviews reduced to numbers; Rotten Tomatoes decides whether an individual review is a rave of a pan, while Metacritic goes a step forward and decides whether an individual piece of writing feels more like a 70% or a 75%. These numbers inspire tremendous aggression: it's been 15 years since Jeff Gerstmann was fired for daring to give a game a tepid review. Nowadays, critics who pan the wrong product can be attacked or even assaulted by fans who can't bear to see a product get 99% consensus rather than unanimity.

That's not such a big problem, though, because corporate interests have discovered the formulas that do prompt critics to say nice things. About a decade ago, every Disney film started to receive rave reviews; it's rare that a product under the Disney umbrella—meaning Pixar, Star Wars, and Marvel—will get a Rotten Tomatoes score below 80%. (For a while, even sub-90% scores were rare.) They cracked the code, so to speak, and figured out what blend of wit, narrative pacing, emotional turn, and satisfactory resolution would consistently make critics just happy enough that consensus leaned Fresh rather than Rotten. TV shows enjoyed similar coding, at least for a time (though television reviewers seem more fickle than film reviewers overall, perhaps because of how much time they need to dedicate to every individual show). AAA game designers have long known how to ensure the satisfaction of their fans.

This consensus-manufacturing extends to political consensus—because content creators know that critical appreciation is increasingly linked to a sense that a given product is "good" for the world. That's how you get Black Panther as politically radical filmmaking, Taylor Swift as queer icon, and the faux-academic writing style that I used to associate with sites like Tumblr, which put a shallow "intellectual" patina on convoluted arguments that a given mass-media product is actually highly woke, feminist, or bisexual. This flavor of politics is easy to codify, because it is literally formulaic: its output is as patterned as a meme because it is a meme, and you can reduce political advocacy to a series of broad symbols that serve as wards, ensuring that nobody can actually take issue with your product without being accused of being bigots themselves.

I touched upon this last year, when I touched upon the Scorsese-vs-Marvel controversy that still seems to be ongoing. Scorsese's criticism of Marvel was that it had reduced filmmaking to product design, stripping it of what he felt was vital to cinema; Marvel fans responded by claiming that Scorsese was literally a sexist, strip-mining his movies for proof that his mission in life was to demean and degrade women. The issue isn't that it's wrong to take issue with Scorsese's depiction of women—it's that, as with Crossfire, the accusation was tactical rather than substantial. Nobody cared whether or not Scorsese was actually misogynist—hell, Martin Scorsese fans have more serious debates about his misogyny. The accusation was intended to invalidate Scorsese without refuting him, ignoring whether or not he had a point to dwell instead on whether or not he had a right to be listened to at all.

This is a prime example of what Harry Frankfurt calls bullshit: a statement that's made, not because it's true or even because it's a useful lie, but because it pushes an image. The person who makes the statement isn't lying, exactly, because they don't care whether what they're saying is true or false. Validity is beside the point. What matters is steering the conversation towards one thing and away from another.

Tom Scocca touched upon this in his iconic 2013 spin on Frankfurt, "On Smarm." In it, he looked at the connection between positive-reviews-only culture and the quantity-as-quality argument for cultural assessment: it is better to be positive than negative, and on top of that, if this many people like something, it must be good! "Smarm" was his term for something that claimed to be earnest and anti-cynical, while simultaneously being extraordinarily cynical. It seems innocent to say that everyone's opinions are equal, because on some level that's completely true; it seems harmless and even beneficial to say that, because everyone's opinions are equal, it's wrong to dismiss other people's opinions, which again is true for some interpretations and not others. It's easy to extend from that to saying that people shouldn't spend time voicing negative opinions, which makes a bullshit equivocation of "criticism" and "dismissal" (and of "a thing" to "people who like that thing"). And then you're left with the proposition that, if all opinions are equal, then the only true assessment of anything is popular opinion. Because something liked by more people—and thereby more equally-valid assessments of quality—must objectively be better than something that's liked by fewer people. Voila: quality is a myth. It's the kind of postmodern language game beloved by the exact sorts of people who claim to hate postmodern language games, because it's savvy enough not to use the word "postmodern."

Perversely, this means that poptimist logic is identical to hipster logic. The hipster sought media that was critically unassailable by searching for things which, in their obscurity, could make a claim to "authenticity." The poptimist seeks media that's critically unassailable by claiming that only the least obscure things are authentically, verifiably likable. A "poser," to a hipster, was anyone who claimed to like something that would otherwise be "authentic" for the sake of their own image—a claim you could make of anybody who liked anything you couldn't otherwise dismiss. "Pretension," to a poptimist, is liking something simply because you like it, rather than liking it because you can prove that other people like it too.

There's an anxiety at work in both cases: a fear, not just of criticism, but on some level of powerlessness. It's the insecurity that your opinion is meaningless unless you can "justify" it somehow—and that, conversely, you will be meaningless unless you can keep yourself from being dismissed. It's the same paranoia that defines much of geek culture, that sense of persecution, of being beset on all sides. Unsurprisingly, it's a paranoia that also manifests itself across political classes, whether you're alt-right or progressive left or extremist center. (Although this paranoia is backed up by genuine persecution in some cases, and by bullshit "persecution" in others. My sympathy is with the ones who genuinely suffer, for some reason.)

In 2008, the historian Gregory Afinogenov left a comment on the community weblog MetaFilter, offering his perspective on the phenomenon of the hipster. Hipsterdom, he said, was a tremor caused by the collapse of "authenticity" as a concept: by the belief that no culture could ever be "genuine" again, because every counter-culture is immediately subsumed by capitalism and turned into a product, just as subculture can be subsumed by pop culture and turn into pop.

He was writing this shortly before the advent of poptimism. Looking back, it almost feels like he's describing hipsters as a necessary precursor to poptimists: the Disney/Marvel/Netflix world is what we get once that self-conscious struggle gives up. Capitalism is culture; culture is capitalism. There is no longer any need to ask whether there's something uncomfortable with letting our society revolve around consumption, or with letting it be mass-produced. The numbers clearly prove that everything's okay.

The thing is, I was never curious about hipsters because I wanted to be right. Sure, I picked up some self-consciousness and some anxiety along the way, but that was a byproduct of what I really wanted: discovering cool things. I wanted to know what movies and what music and what books were out there; I wanted to know what people were up to, because I was trapped in a place where nobody was up to anything. And if I reacted strongly to someone dismissing something that I liked, it wasn't with defensiveness but with hope: maybe something even neater was out there, and if it was, I wanted to know about it. 

We are not in the best place these days, culturally and politically speaking. But that hasn't stopped people from doing tremendously fascinating things. Most of the people I know who are making art still struggle; plenty of them feel like the stabilizing institutions they might once have depended on are gone. Maybe we're on the verge of a genuine collapse, where artists stop being able to create meaningful culture altogether. But I doubt it. Art and culture have a remarkable tenacity: they thrive even as things fall apart. The urge to create something worth a damn is rooted in something deeper than profitability, or even popularity. Substance is more than merely tactical. So long as it remains true that some things are just worth saying, people are going to find a way to say it.

I find some pop culture tepid, because... well... I do. Sometimes I'd argue that something feels objectively shallow or insufficient to my liking; other times I simply like the things I like. I'm dismissive of plenty of niche things, too: you can't go to art school for three years without concluding that a lot of artists are just dumb as rocks. But it's not controversial to dislike things when nobody else likes them. Controversy starts when you dislike things that other people like.

I'm not sure I ever really knew a hipster. I get the sense that the "real" hipster culture was either happening slightly farther away from me, or it peaked when I was still a teenager, and that I hit adulthood at a time when "hipster" was a meme rather than flat-out reality. To the extent that I ever found a "real" kind of hipster, it felt like yet another subset of geek culture, albeit one where the manner of geekery was more oblique than most. But regardless of subculture, the main issue I have is always with bullshit: the confusion of image and substance, the refusal to treat genuine enjoyment as valid, the insistence that genuine criticism or dislike is somehow inauthentic or not allowed.

Afinogenov was right when he said that there is no longer a singular authentic culture. (His point, after all, is that "authenticity" was always a bit of a trap to begin with.) But thoughts and feelings are inherently authentic. Your response to things is a kind of authenticity, whether impulsive or considered. These are the building blocks of any kind of cultural connection; culture is created when we begin to take an interest in each other's reactions, leaving ourselves open to evaluations and responses which were not ours.

Good artists, I have long since learned, are typically both fiercely open-minded and passionately opinionated. This is not a contradiction: you can be curious about things and hold strong opinions about them, once you get over the idea that the point of opinions and tastes is to "win." Similarly, some kinds of namedropping are a contest, or a kind of dismissive gatekeeping; other times, people reference things because they care about those things, and would love nothing more than to introduce you to those worlds. It's kind of hard to talk about culture without talking about culture. It only ever feels like everybody's on the same page when, well, you're caught up in a monoculture.

Recently, a video went viral of a twentysomething man demonstrating his uncanny ability to tell which Taylor Swift songs were produced by Jack Antonoff, a producer who has worked with many popular musicians over the last ten-to-fifteen years. In an interview with Defector, he talked about both how he was able to identify Antonoff productions—a visceral hatred mixed with a genuine enthusiasm in music theory—and came off as genuinely enthusiastic about the subject (and not too cruel towards Jack Antonoff, to boot). I found one strain of response to this interview especially disheartening: people accused him of "not really liking" music, of being too "detached" to genuinely enjoy things, of being—as Taytay might put it—a hater. His feelings, in other words, weren't "real" feelings: they were proof that he just disliked things that other people liked, for no other reason than to belittle people who likes them. A cynical accusation of cynicism, as I keep putting it.

It bummed me out because this truly is a dead-end road. It's infinitely more dismissive than just hating on Antonoff: it insists that there's no possible way for someone to dislike music for something as pedestrian as its sound, or for them to form opinions merely by listening to something. It takes something that I find interesting—sometimes Caleb Gamman can detect an Antonoff song just from the way Taylor Swift inhales—and asserts that it is not possible to find this interesting, because there cannot possibly be anything substantial there, because nobody who holds this opinion can possibly mean what they say.

It's that Crossfire interview all over again. What's his angle? What's his motive? What game is he playing? Nobody would say this just because they mean it.

The old Onion joke about two hipsters angrily calling each other hipsters works when both parties are acknowledged, from a distance, as plausible hipsters. The poptimist, by contrast, not only claims not to be a hipster but would insist that by definition they cannot be one. They alone have the authority to proclaim other people hipsters, because they alone are demonstrably authentic; theirs is the only taste that lies beyond reproach, quantifiably and even ethically so. They alone can truly speak with the voice of the people. They alone are unassailably pure.

Sounds pretty hipster, if you ask me.

Poptimists: pretentious
QED