I think what these kinds of trends reveal is that very few people are true individuals, and that "individuality" can be bought and sold much like any other good. Johnny Rotten of the sex pistols, in a mid-career interview, once complained about how he dressed the way he did to be an individual, but people started showing up to his shows dressed like him, to try and be an individual like him, which he despised. If it weren't an app and an algorithm telling us what to look like, we'd get our influence from somewhere else. I think what's most alarming about our age is as we've gotten better at communicating and labeling these trends (goth girl, trad, norm core, etc.) we've collectively realized that we're almost all followers, and this is something we're probably better off not knowing.
> I really should take some time to think about what’s actually me.
Well, I'd say you have an astoundingly deep vision of current reality, and it comes through in every paragraph. So deep, I'll just ask this: have you read Ecclesiastes, where it says "For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief."
I hope you don't let knowledge get you down, because it will only keep increasing as you get older.
Found my way to this article from Longreads today.
Reading this got me thinking about the sort of early social media hipster-dom era. If I said my favorite band was the White Stripes, that wasn't enough to qualify me as a White Stripes fan in the minds of the hipsters because being a fan of the White Stripes didn't merely mean that I liked that band. Because they were a Cool Band associating myself with them would imply that I am a Cool Person and my liking of them needs to be, in essence, authenticated by me displaying a thorough familiarity with their full catalogue and a preference for their less commercially successful work. I think that era of culture is sort of the precursor to our self branding era. It's less about being authentically yourself and more about being an authentic representative of your brand which is what is driving the conformity. If I am presenting myself to the world as Dark Academica then I need to earn the right to that identity by doing ALL of the Dark Academica things or else I'm being deceptive.
Well, it seems to me that they created the fetishism merchandise algorithm on purpose ?
"In Marxist philosophy, the term commodity fetishism describes the economic relationships of production and exchange as being social relationships that exist among things (money and merchandise) and not as relationships that exist among people."
I think what these kinds of trends reveal is that very few people are true individuals, and that "individuality" can be bought and sold much like any other good. Johnny Rotten of the sex pistols, in a mid-career interview, once complained about how he dressed the way he did to be an individual, but people started showing up to his shows dressed like him, to try and be an individual like him, which he despised. If it weren't an app and an algorithm telling us what to look like, we'd get our influence from somewhere else. I think what's most alarming about our age is as we've gotten better at communicating and labeling these trends (goth girl, trad, norm core, etc.) we've collectively realized that we're almost all followers, and this is something we're probably better off not knowing.
> I really should take some time to think about what’s actually me.
Well, I'd say you have an astoundingly deep vision of current reality, and it comes through in every paragraph. So deep, I'll just ask this: have you read Ecclesiastes, where it says "For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief."
I hope you don't let knowledge get you down, because it will only keep increasing as you get older.
Found my way to this article from Longreads today.
Reading this got me thinking about the sort of early social media hipster-dom era. If I said my favorite band was the White Stripes, that wasn't enough to qualify me as a White Stripes fan in the minds of the hipsters because being a fan of the White Stripes didn't merely mean that I liked that band. Because they were a Cool Band associating myself with them would imply that I am a Cool Person and my liking of them needs to be, in essence, authenticated by me displaying a thorough familiarity with their full catalogue and a preference for their less commercially successful work. I think that era of culture is sort of the precursor to our self branding era. It's less about being authentically yourself and more about being an authentic representative of your brand which is what is driving the conformity. If I am presenting myself to the world as Dark Academica then I need to earn the right to that identity by doing ALL of the Dark Academica things or else I'm being deceptive.
https://iweothers.substack.com/p/manifesto-image-and-certificate-01
https://iweothers.substack.com/p/manifesto-image-and-certificate-02
https://iweothers.substack.com/p/manifesto-image-and-certificate-03
Well, it seems to me that they created the fetishism merchandise algorithm on purpose ?
"In Marxist philosophy, the term commodity fetishism describes the economic relationships of production and exchange as being social relationships that exist among things (money and merchandise) and not as relationships that exist among people."