The Age of the Influencer Has Peaked. It’s Time For the Slacker to Rise AgainThere are signs that our individualist culture of achievement and brand alignment has jumped the shark.
Nirvana, patron saints of nineties slacker-dom. Photo by Getty Images/Mark and Colleen Haywar
It’s hard to remember a time when scrolling through Instagram was anything but a thoroughly exhausting experience.
Where once the social network was basically lunch and sunsets, it’s now a parade of strategically-crafted life updates, career achievements, and public vows to spend less time online (usually made by people who earn money from social media)—all framed with the carefully selected language of a press release. Everyone is striving, so very hard.
And great for them, I guess. But sometimes one might pine for a less aspirational time, when the cool kids were smoking weed, eating junk food, and… you know, just chillin’.
Back in the 1990s, our heroes were slackers: the dudes and the clerks, the stick-it-to-the-man, stay-true-to-yourself burnouts we saw in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Slacker, and Reality Bites. In the latter, Winona Ryder’s character, Leilana, chooses the disillusioned musician (Ethan Hawke) over the TV exec (Ben Stiller), and it’s presented as an excellent choice. Nobody cool was trying to monetize their lifestyle back then, or rake in the brand endorsements. Selling out (remember that?) was whack.
The cast of ‘Reality Bites,’ a celebration of slacker-dom. Photo by Universal Pictures
But somewhere in the early 2000s, the slacker of popular culture lost ground to the striver. I am not immune to this thoroughly aspirational mindset, and you probably aren’t either. Whether we have side hustles, personal brands, gig economy jobs, or entrepreneurial leanings (I’ve had all four), to survive in the modern economy is to aspire to something much greater than what we are.
9/11 ended the counter-culture, as it was intended to.
The internet influencer is the apotheosis of all this striving, this modern set of values taken to its grotesque extreme: Nothing is sacred, art has been replaced by “content,” and everything is for sale. This is true even when the message is swathed in the language of counter-culture: Eco-conscious influencers see no issue in flying long-haul on free trips from brands. Yoga gurus who traffic in anti-consumerist spirituality promote tea brands owned by Unilever.
The devil\Yahweh is a much better "influencer" than any clown on social media could ever hope to be. This is why most 'influencers' are influenced fools themselves, and make choices they would never even have come up with by themselves. If they ever truly took the time to know themselves of course....
Perhaps a better title for this article would have been:
The Age of the Westerner Has Peaked. It's Time For the Slacker to Rise Again ?
But as anyone who has lived a few decades knows, youth culture swings like a pendulum. The buttoned-up post-World War II period gave way to the countercultural Free Love generation (arguably the original slackers, as they were the first to have middle class comfort to rebel against). Similarly, the 1980s excess of Gordon Gecko’s Wall Street set the stage for the slackers amid the economic recession of the 1990s, with their flannel shirts, skater culture, Beastie Boys and Nirvana records.
Skater culture doesn’t strive. Photo by Reuters/Lucy Nicholson
Of course, it’s reductive to lump the experience of the billions of people living through those ages into one mostly American cultural trope. But there’s always something to glean from the dominant youth culture of an era. What was cool—what the kids were into—tells us something fundamental about what we valued. And seen through that lens, there’s a marked difference between today’s striving and the slacking of the 1990s.
And, in a modern aspirational marketplace so saturated that fake influencers are now posting advertising-like content that nobody even paid them for, there are signs that our individualist culture of achievement and brand alignment has jumped the shark. If the cycle of history is any guide, once our culture of striving flames out, it may well be time for the slacker to rise again.
The Neoliberal Self
For the internet influencer, everything from their morning sun salutation to their coffee enema (really) is a potential money-making opportunity. Forget paying your dues, or working your way up—in fact, forget jobs. Work is life, and getting paid to live your best life is the ultimate aspiration.
This existence is perfectly aligned with what Will Storr, in his 2017 book Selfie: How the West became self-obsessed, described as the defining person of our age, the neoliberal self: “an extroverted, slim, beautiful, individualistic, optimistic, hard-working, socially aware yet high-self-esteeming global citizen with entrepreneurial guile and a selfie camera.” And while the generation most associated with this archetype—millennials—gets flack for their entitlement and unwillingness to work toward a typical middle class life, there are plenty of reasons millennials have so thoroughly embraced and innovated upon this neoliberal ideal.
“You can see why that happens in terms of the shrinking of middle class industries and the economy,” says Laurence Scott, author of Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality, an exploration of the nature of reality in the digital age, and a lecturer at NYU’s London campus. “Neoliberalism has hollowed out so many ways of [making a] stable income that it’s not surprising that the influencer economy has risen up in this really precarious economic climate for millennials.”
That neoliberal sensibility—emphasizing the importance of markets above the intervention of the state, and typified by the attitude that the tide of growth and globalization will lift all boats—has also given rise to the thoroughly modern affliction that we now call “millennial burnout.” A coinage by Anne Helen Petersen in her memorable piece for BuzzFeed, the idea is that all this self-optimization in the digital age is taking a toll, and leaving us with multiple afflictions, including “errand paralysis.”
Petersen argues that we’re obsessed with self-optimization because—post-financial crisis, saddled with student debt, with little hope of a pension—we simply have to be: “We couldn’t just show up with a diploma and expect to get and keep a job that would allow us to retire at 55. In a marked shift from the generations before, millennials needed to optimize ourselves to be the very best workers possible.”
The result is an economy where it’s more possible than ever to be your own boss, and a lot less possible to buy your own home. And one where it’s literally unimaginable that we’ll ever be able to stop working—at the end of the workday, or in the later years of our lives.
It’s enough to make you want to throw up your hands and admit defeat, if only for a moment of respite. And it’s easy to see how this exhaustion could precipitate the next cycle of slackerdom.
Scott first raised that idea in an interview on Russell Brand’s podcast. “The generation after [this one] may just look and think, ‘I cant believe there was that kind of economy and that’s how people were presenting themselves,'” he said. “There may be a slight distaste to it and reemergence of a slacker 1990s pendulum swing, rather than this quite needy attention-seeking.”
Entire article:
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-age-of-the-influencer-has-peaked-it-s-time-for-the-slacker-to-rise-again?utm_source=pocket-newtabI already feel this way. I believe the current culture is extremely sick and all "influencers" really do is spread the sickness around, at the cost of their own spirit obviously.
25 Years After Kurt Cobain: Where Is the Counterculture?What happens to the art isn't important. What's important is that it was being made. I remember that raw feeling of someone standing up for what they believe, and not caring what anyone thinks. I haven't felt that feeling in a while.
In 1991, Kurt Cobain was the definition of cool.
The Billboard charts that year were overrun by mainstream hits by Paula Abdul, Vanilla Ice, and Boyz II Men. Music was about looking good. And lip singing.
And then in September of 1991, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana came out with Nevermind, and it felt like the biggest **** you to mainstream culture.
I remember Kurt wearing a "Corporate Magazines Still Suck" t-shirt on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. And I remember thinking of all the other celebrities on the magazine that year, and how they must of worked so hard to project an image of "looking good."
I remember the band open-mouth kissing during the SNL credits just to "**** off the redneck homophobes" and how it probably did.
I remember that raw feeling of someone standing up for what they believe and not caring what anyone thinks.
I haven't felt that feeling in a while.
Entire article:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/25-years-after-kurt-cobain_b_9619740How I too long for days were people stop caring what everyone else thinks of them....