Weekly Scroll: A Flattened Culture

Cultural Stan Wars, New Slang, TikTok Flailing and the Volcano God

A Theory of Stan Wars

Ryan Broderick over at Garbage Day had a very good piece a couple weeks back talking about Coolness as Scarcity:

All that said, I do think there is something weird happening to the way we understand subcultures. These communities, of course, still exist. There are punks and metalheads and hippies and queer kids and weebs and ravers and all the rest. And, thanks to the internet, there are more sub- and sub-subcultures than ever, with platforms like TikTok generating new ones every day. But, also, thanks to the internet, the barrier for entry into these communities has, effectively, been eliminated…

But you can’t have coolness without gatekeeping. Because coolness, in many ways, is just scarcity. And you can’t really create scarcity without gatekeepers. So how do you bring back scarcity to the world that millennials built to kill it? Well, the answer is: It’s hard and, currently, it’s actually kind of a mess.

This was one of those pieces where it felt sharp and penetrating, but also like it was just putting together ideas that you’ve already noticed but hadn’t connected yet. Culture really is in a weird place right now thanks to the flattening effect of the internet. God, I hate it when people other than me are insightful and interesting.

Noodling over this for the past couple weeks has brought me to the following conclusion: this isn’t just a piece about subcultural creation, it’s actually about the entire phenomenon of cultural clash and fandom battles.

People have different goals when they interact with culture. Some people are chasing ‘cool’, and want to be on the bleeding edge of what’s hot, what’s trending, what’s awesome but not yet famous. This is massively dependent on scarcity, timing, and a reaction-to-the-previous-thing artistic ethos. This is the person on your feed complaining that Chappell Roan is already too mainstream and hyping some unknown artist we’ll all know by next year.

But some people aren’t chasing cool. They just want to like what’s popular. They want to feel connected to mainstream culture, and have something to talk about at the watercooler. They conform to the Main Thing. This person loves Taylor Swift! And Marvel! And House of the Dragon! And there’s nothing wrong with that, those are giant beloved cultural institutions for a reason.

There are endless varieties of those two forms, but those are the main two ways we interact with culture - discovery mode and appreciation mode. And most of us go through both modes at some point in our lives. We’ve all gotten swept up in some very popular song or show before, saying ‘Oh man this is great, I can’t wait to talk about this with everyone’. We’ve also all experienced the idea of ‘I’m so tired of Main Thing, this sucks, the new Niche Thing is so much cooler’. Sometimes it’s even for the same piece of content - lots of movies, tv shows, influencers and musicians graduate from niche to wildly popular, and gain a bunch of new fans while losing the cutting edge coolness they used to have. You used to be a fan of X, before it sold out and went mainstream.

I think this is where a lot of generational clash, stan wars and pop culture fights come from. When I think about culture wars - the ones that are actually cultural and not just political battles - they happen because we’re all mashed into the same universal feeds and existing in the same spaces. The cutting edge girlies and the mainstream wine moms are are trying to do fundamentally different things. One group is celebrating the Current Thing, while the other is rebelling against it. That used to happen in a more segmented, separated, offline way. But now we’re jammed together and that creates dissonance and conflict.

I don’t think I’m saying anything profound or revolutionary here, but I do think this helps us understand a certain kind of internet fandom behavior. Why are stan armies constantly fighting each other instead of just appreciating their idol? Why do sports bros and fashion girls conflict? Why are we so concerned if a show has turned cringe or not? Why do gamers (gestures expansively at everything gamers do)? Because they’re all mashed together in the same spaces with fundamentally conflicting approaches and goals.

(I think this also explains the constant accusations of being an ‘industry plant’ that popular new artists like Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter face)

AI’s attempt at ‘pop culture stan wars’

The New Slang

Also in the ‘social media forces everyone together in one giant space and that has weird effects on culture’ beat: The Atlantic complains that the internet has ruined slang.

The core insight here is that while different subcultures used to have identifiable slang unique to them, social media’s flattening effect makes it so that subcultures are all mashed together and now slang is universal. People who are nowhere near to black drag culture or underground hyperpop still might use phrases that originated from those spaces.

But wait! The New York Times disagrees, and thinks today’s online teens have invented great new slang that is better than previous generations. The argument is that most past slang was just a new way to express the same generic ideas: hip, groovy, dope, phat, rad, all to mean “cool”. But new internet slang actually captures specific ideas and feelings that are new, like ‘mid’ to signify something that’s fine but unimpressive.

I tend to think what’s really happening in the Unified Era of Online Slang is that the Atlantic is right: it’s harder and harder to differentiate subcultures and scenes by their lingo. But there are still ways to tell. Older generations tend to use social media very differently, and confuse new slang terms that make intuitive sense to younger posters. Case in point, the NYTimes article above makes a deeply embarrassing error in claiming that ‘based’ means ‘based in fact’, which sounds like a BoomerGPT hallucination.¹

The end result of this path is likely that in the future, slang won’t be differentiated by age or gender or race or subculture. Your slang will just tell people how online or offline you are.

War on Links update

A few weeks back we talked about the War on Links:

Links are becoming an endangered species in many ways. Google’s search results now prioritize ‘search generative experience’ and AI-driven results rather than just show you some links. Many social sites like Instagram make it nearly impossible to link offsite, while other Meta properties like Threads and Facebook openly deboost external news and links. Twitter is a black box of pain under Elon Musk, and users have reported that links seem to be punished by Twitter’s algorithms now.

Add another one to the War on Links pile, in the form of Perplexity AI.

Perplexity is an AI platform that claims it can be a ‘mixture of ChatGPT and Wikipedia’. But according to an investigation by Wired, it accomplishes that by stealing content from websites that it’s not allowed to scrape data from. And it’s not really ambiguous - the specific Perplexity IP address was caught access pages where it should have been blocked by the robots.txt protocol that underlies much of the modern web.

At its core, Perplexity is a service that scrapes real content and journalism, badly re-phrases that work with AI, and tries to make money off it. If a human did this, they’d be relentlessly mocked and probably sued at some point. Quoting Casey Newton’s commentary:

“Like Clearview, Perplexity’s core innovation is ethical rather than technical. In the recent past, it would have been considered bad form to steal and repurpose journalism at scale. Perplexity is making a bet that the advent of generative AI has somehow changed the moral calculus to its benefit.”

“So that’s Perplexity’s real innovation here: shattering the foundations of trust that built the internet. The question is if any of its users or investors care.”

This, to be blunt, sucks. Journalism is a dying industry, where even institutions like the Washington Post are losing money. It’s harder than ever to make money writing, and in comes an AI that will steal your content, rephrase it in bland AI tone, present it without attribution, and make money instead of you. It does this despite the fact that you’ve blocked webscrapers via the robots.txt protocol. And it’s not like the AI is even good - Perplexity is just as prone to hallucinations and making shit up as any other AI. The War on Links is now so deeply seeded in the culture that we don’t even realize the links that we’re missing.

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TikTok Flailing

We talked in the last paywalled post about how TikTok-only stars can’t seem to make any money off their giant audiences on the site. And this week a slew of news seems to reinforce my general view that TikTok is an app that’s massively successful in the culture, but can’t figure out a business strategy to save their lives.

And ‘save their lives’ may be literal² here. The company is reportedly in deep denial about the reality they’re facing in the US, where barring court intervention they’re going to be banned next year. They’re reportedly banking on a Trump re-election as their entire political strategy.

That assumes two dangerous things - that Trump wins, and that he would intervene somehow to stop the ban. But it’s not clear if Trump could stop the ban, even if he wanted to. The ban was implemented with a massively bipartisan vote in Congress, not via executive action. Trump can’t unilaterally overturn legislation.³ And even if he could stop it, it’s not clear he would. He pledged he would never ban TikTok, but that’s campaign bullshit from an incredibly transparent bullshitter. His administration also tried to force TikTok to divest, and he’s incredibly anti-China in his politics. TikTok relying on a Trump victory is wishcasting, not a real plan.

So what has TikTok been doing, if they haven’t been seriously engaging with politics? They’re leaning more heavily than ever on the TikTok Shop. They came out with a half-baked Instagram competitor that seems doomed to fail. They’re also playing around with AI influencer advertisements, which seems the right level of dystopian for an app partially controlled by the CCP. These moves, as central pillars of the company’s core strategy for the next few years, are incredibly underwhelming.

Every single news item I see about TikTok as a company makes them appear like a clownshow that somehow stumbled into technical success and has no idea what to do with it.

Disrespectful Updates

Things have not gotten any better for accused pdf file Dr. Disrespect. The Doctor was canceled last week by the woke mob, for the small, small crime of sending sexy texts to an underage fan. And things keep getting worse.

First, a former Twitch employee says the good Doc knew the individual in question was a minor and continued sending explicit messages anyways. Second, his streamer bros in the anti-woke/alpha male category like NickMercs and TimTheTatMan are now denouncing him. Even his subreddit is in full meltdown. Third, YouTube has demonetized his accounts so he won’t be able to make a cent from ads, subs or tips.

I’m sure some segment of his fans will stick with him, but it looks more and more like the end for one of the larger personalities in livestreaming history.

Links

• Apple is delaying the roll out of a bunch of their new features, including Apple Intelligence, in the EU. They’re pretty explicit that it’s due to regulatory concerns with the EU’s new DMA. European regulators are angry and denouncing the move, but I’m not sure they have a leg to stand on here. You don’t get to do massive amounts of regulatory micromanagement and then be shocked when it impacts business decisions!

• Paramount has taken down the entire library of content from sites like MTV News, Comedy Central, and CMT. Devastating day for fans of the Daily Show, Colbert Report, and more. The move is supposedly to drive users to Paramount’s new subscription service, where old seasons of the Colbert Report and Daily Show are not available.

• This week in horrible AI enshittification: Googling “[female celebrity name] bikini” now returns AI-generated pictures of those women.

• Partial pushback against the Smartphone Bad Hypothesis: It may be a primarily Anglophone phenomenon.

• Instagram Reels may perform better when you don’t post them on your personal grid.

• How small claims court became Meta’s de facto customer service.

• The six laws of dying genres

Posts

• A great ad from Oslo, Norway. Normally these attempts at ‘subversive’ ads fail and end up in the cringe zone of Gen X marketing execs trying to do millenial/zoomer irony in a way that doesn’t fit. But this one was very good!

• A truly ridiculous last minute soccer goal.

• This would make me believe in a volcano god

• Smiling Robot Face Made of Living Skin

• Day 180 living in Poly spaces

• A good debate tweet

• An important hot dog investigation

1. The actual origins come from rapper Lil B The Based God and from alt-right online communities to mean ‘cool in an anti-woke way’.

2. Their corporate lives, that is.

3. But give him time, if he’s re-elected I’m sure he’ll try