“These worlds are usually white, but they don’t have to be, and what left-liberals never quite understand is that there is far more solidarity between a Black Swarthmore graduate and a white Swarthmore graduate than a white attorney from Grosse Pointe and a white Dollar General clerk in the Lansing exurbs.” This is such a great line that needs to be shouted from the rooftops.
I believe mesoculture will come about in the generation who witnessed their parents descending into device clutching zombies. It will come about literally by word-of-mouth, by private recommendations, by valuing opinions unfiltered by algorithms designed solely to monetise under the false pretext of socialise.
Good piece. A lot of people are looking for that nice middle ground between complete alienation and complete overexposure. The death of local scenes has put people into a horrible binary: be a nobody, or strive to be someone who's so famous s/he'll get cancelled for having said "fatso" in high school.
The point about Substack not being the same as a physical paper is funny, cause if Hellgate/the City/and a handful of local substack actually where able to product a physical broadsheet it could certainly fill a niche left by the Village Voice. Good piece, this explains partly why I stopped doing my own newsletter even though it had nearly 5,000 subscribers cause it didn't pay enough, and I realized that I was getting more out of a local community book club, than digital applause after a while. If monetizing the hobby doesn't work, then might as well engage with my local community with my free time.
Great article with such spot on insights. Substack’s birth and beginning mirrors the birth of Capitol Records under Johnny Mercer, Buddy DeSylva and Glenn Wallichs or the birth of Reprise Records started by Frank Sinatra and then made successful by Mo Ostin. Artist driven entities that nurtured and cultivated the music art forms and were hugely successful because of that ethos. Both dried up as “The Suits” flogged the bottom line. As it is presently working so nicely at Substack, hopefully the business model protects the writers (artists) and continues to be an avenue of commerce and dissemination for artists for a long time.
This post is very suggestive, but I really wish you had tried to define macro / meso / micro rather than assigning media entities to one or another of these categories in passing and expecting the reader to see the pattern. Maybe then I would understand why Facebook is macro but Insta is micro?
Small disagreement about the 35 divide, which I'm only mentioning because it speaks to a larger issue about the overall political divide. While there certainly is a colonial awareness among younger people, a significant number of people of all ages don't support Israel's war because the US funds it. People are tired of American military intervention and funding abroad. As inflation soars and healthcare costs break people's bank accounts, there's not a lot of enthusiasm for sending billions to Ukraine and Israel. And yet, this widespread sentiment is not taken seriously and the macroculture, if you will, actually condemns it as antisemitic/pro Putin when all people want is for the US government to spend a little more time and money on its own problems.
Defense spending as a percentage of GDP is down to the level Obama got it to after Bush…the notion we are spending too much on Ukraine and Israel is absurd especially when we are not spending more and very clearly getting value for our spending in Ukraine. Plus, you do realize the Military Industrial Complex creates solid union jobs in America??
We’re not getting any value out of the Ukraine war. You might have some fantasies about sticking it to Putin or whatever, but we’re losing the war and will have to pay for the Ukraine reconstruction. We’re already bankrolling the whole country and this is a bill that will continue for years to come. Not to mention all the lives lost by prolonging that war, but hey, union jobs.
You do realize Ukraine believes this is a cause worth dying for?? So trying to force your opinion on Ukrainians is no different than how Bush/Cheney operated forcing countries to fight in wars that they didn’t want to wage. Most Americans believe some causes are worth dying for and it’s up to the country to decide if it rises to that level.
If you really think this is just about patriotism and “causes worth dying for,” you’ve been duped by a lot of pretty low grade, painfully obvious propaganda. Buddy, you’ve been tricked into supporting a pointless proxy war that needs up defense companies’ bottom line.
Lol, you’ve been duped by the same people that pushed the Iraq War. You are clueless. Go watch Taibbi on Laura Ingraham trying to get more nitwits to pay $5/month so he can buy a new mansion.
This, right here. A lot of this has to do with the Internet, in how was first a series of walled gardens (AOL), then was swallowed whole by the macroculture conglomerates, but is now fracturing under the weight of it all. As individuals move between the macro and micro in their consumption of media—watching The Crown on Friday night but listening to a new album they got on Bandcamp on Saturday—mesocultures (plural) will form.
Agreed (swallowed whole). I feel that what's fracturing under it all is Western Civilization. There are no constraints and the time spent watching or listening to gratuitously ugly offerings continues to rise. Families collapse under deviant beliefs adopted from media and the Intersectional grifters marketing incompetence. I watched this happen to a formerly beautiful and functional state so my remarks are experiential but the Stockholm Syndrome of unending tolerance and accommodation is clearly suicidal.
I appreciate the well written, interesting, informative posts.
I'm just a guy who pays attention and watched a city and a generation shake hands with the devil and I sometimes spout off.
I see it less about Western Civ collapsing under its weight so much as western civ being one of major fronts between the micro-macro cultural war. Progressives have been pronouncing Western Civ over for decades (remember Jesse Jackson chanting "hey hey ho ho western civ has got to go" back in the 80s). Conservatives have responded in a variety of ways, but mostly by championing it (while denying its faults out of a misguided sense of patriotism). But that front of the war was until recently part of the macroculture (think CNN versus Fox 1998–2008). Talk radio was a microculture that became a partisan macroculture. Likewise for Twitter but for Progressives.
I'm painting with a broad brush and there are exceptions to these trends. I think the Micro and Meso cultures are were WC will thrive and renew itself. And sure, maybe it won't, but I'm optimistic. But I am convinced the macro lacks the self-confidence in itself to defend anything well.
I appreciate what you're seeing and thank you for expressing them to me. I'm a poor writer. I worked in a now deep blue city as a behavioral health counselor before and during it's fall and I've seen what you describe grow and morph.
"These worlds are usually white, but they don’t have to be, and what left-liberals never quite understand is that there is far more solidarity between a Black Swarthmore graduate and a white Swarthmore graduate than a white attorney from Grosse Pointe and a white Dollar General clerk in the Lansing exurbs."
They do not understand because they do not want to.
If those Swarthmore grads are nothing else, they are herd animals.
This is excellent. Would not necessarily call these ‘factions’ since I associate that with belief systems and cultural practices but more like ...modalities? The different ‘factions’ such as they are all exist in these different regions/modalities, what-have-you. Very helpful way of dividing them. I love the term ‘mesoculture.’
I did not love the phrase "factions." I was searching for something punchy. "Types" didn't quite fit. "Modalities" is interesting if worthy. Maybe "segments"
For someone who pretends to be interested in the "meso" culture you spend very little time in fly-over country. You berate Rogan for remaining true to the anti-war, pro-marijuana, free speech culture that you and the left have rejected. And he was famous for his quirky rôle on News Radio well before his comeback as host of the grotesque Fear Factor.
You lament the moral and financial bankruptcy of the record label executives but you don't explain what Oliver Anthony would want from corrupt jerks like them. Apparently they had no answers for him either, so he turned his back on their multi million dollar recording "contract" and its systematic degradation of the artist.
You pretend to care about the protest movements, but when unarmed Americans show up to sincerely protest and an unarmed veteran woman is murdered by Capitol police you hate her more than words of yours express. I myself don't believe you want to allow anyone to the right of Lenin to live outside a death camp. Which is why the left never objected to the cia and fbi murdering JFK, RFK, and MLK Jr. You hate them for representing a conservative Democrat culture you want to deny ever existed.
You think you live in one country because you don't go into the states that are sick and tired of people like you defining the Overton window of allowable cultural and political discourse. You are a dinosaur in a world of mammals who are not going to apologise for inventing the Internet technologies you barely understand.
Yeah, dinosaur death throes crush a few mammals. But they aren't the best choice in the contest. You lament the struggles of the pet hoax stream media of the military industrial financial pharmaceutical complex. But the people who used to volunteer to fight their wars won't. Which is going to become a whole new anti war and anti draft culture.
It's kind of like looking at a cultural convection process.
The first thing about the microculture is that it responds (or reacts) to the macroculture. The second is that when it's successful, it becomes macro itself—crowded, mercenary, tending towards recursion and conservatism. It's the incremental movement from Black Sabbath towards Imagine Dragons, or from a landscape where memes are the provocative & risible currency of the in-the-know to one where your coworkers share them on Slack and you hit the LOL emoji button even though you felt nothing.
When a strain is unsuccessful, it fissions. One or more of its progeny moves towards the line between micro and macro with renewed upwards velocity, while some others (probably the ones most resembling the original iteration) either coast for a while or succumb to gravity and die off. (I got used to seeing this sort of thing in goth club music during the aughts.) Some strains in the former category might cross over; others will do the parabolic somersault and split off again while they're on their way down. Probably a lot of micro (and macro) culture resides in the mesoculture during its afterlife.
And the thing about mesoculture is that when a strain crosses a certain threshold of success, it must inevitably go online, join the microculture, and orient itself towards crossing over into the macro in order to survive, having uprooted itself from its substratum in the meso.
(Side note: I don't think we can call someone like Mr. Beast part of the microculture, even though he operates in the petri dish where it's cultivated. If there are more people seeing a given YouTuber's video than pay tickets to see a given film manufactured in Hollywood, to say the particular film represents Macro and the particular YouTuber represents Micro is more a statement about business models than success or influence. And there's the rub, isn't it? Categories no longer adhere to the facts as well as they used to. It's like the historical stage in which the bourgeoisie of Europe had grown so powerful that their subordination to the nobility and clergy in the ternary "feudal" system no longer made sense.)
It's no longer true that the microculture responds to the macro; increasingly, the micro is setting the agenda and that's why the macro is obviously afraid of it. Also, I don't think the meso cares about crossing over into the micro or macro; what made the meso culture of the late 2000s and early 2010s so fun was that it took pride in being separate from the micro (which wasn't much of a force at that point) and the macro (which was still setting the agenda in the cultural mainstream)
It's dishonest to say Trump faced "abject defeat" in 2020. Even if you won't admit the election was stolen, you can't honestly say Trump experienced "abject defeat."
Trump lost, but I would not call losing an election in which Biden enjoyed every organizational and institutional advantage other than incumbency, then took two weeks after election day to wheeze out a victory, an "abject defeat".
And I did not vote for either legacy party candidate, not in 2016, not in 2020, nor have I any intention of doing so.
“These worlds are usually white, but they don’t have to be, and what left-liberals never quite understand is that there is far more solidarity between a Black Swarthmore graduate and a white Swarthmore graduate than a white attorney from Grosse Pointe and a white Dollar General clerk in the Lansing exurbs.” This is such a great line that needs to be shouted from the rooftops.
I believe mesoculture will come about in the generation who witnessed their parents descending into device clutching zombies. It will come about literally by word-of-mouth, by private recommendations, by valuing opinions unfiltered by algorithms designed solely to monetise under the false pretext of socialise.
Good piece. A lot of people are looking for that nice middle ground between complete alienation and complete overexposure. The death of local scenes has put people into a horrible binary: be a nobody, or strive to be someone who's so famous s/he'll get cancelled for having said "fatso" in high school.
The point about Substack not being the same as a physical paper is funny, cause if Hellgate/the City/and a handful of local substack actually where able to product a physical broadsheet it could certainly fill a niche left by the Village Voice. Good piece, this explains partly why I stopped doing my own newsletter even though it had nearly 5,000 subscribers cause it didn't pay enough, and I realized that I was getting more out of a local community book club, than digital applause after a while. If monetizing the hobby doesn't work, then might as well engage with my local community with my free time.
Great article with such spot on insights. Substack’s birth and beginning mirrors the birth of Capitol Records under Johnny Mercer, Buddy DeSylva and Glenn Wallichs or the birth of Reprise Records started by Frank Sinatra and then made successful by Mo Ostin. Artist driven entities that nurtured and cultivated the music art forms and were hugely successful because of that ethos. Both dried up as “The Suits” flogged the bottom line. As it is presently working so nicely at Substack, hopefully the business model protects the writers (artists) and continues to be an avenue of commerce and dissemination for artists for a long time.
I miss the alt newspapers the most. Will check out County Highway!
This post is very suggestive, but I really wish you had tried to define macro / meso / micro rather than assigning media entities to one or another of these categories in passing and expecting the reader to see the pattern. Maybe then I would understand why Facebook is macro but Insta is micro?
Small disagreement about the 35 divide, which I'm only mentioning because it speaks to a larger issue about the overall political divide. While there certainly is a colonial awareness among younger people, a significant number of people of all ages don't support Israel's war because the US funds it. People are tired of American military intervention and funding abroad. As inflation soars and healthcare costs break people's bank accounts, there's not a lot of enthusiasm for sending billions to Ukraine and Israel. And yet, this widespread sentiment is not taken seriously and the macroculture, if you will, actually condemns it as antisemitic/pro Putin when all people want is for the US government to spend a little more time and money on its own problems.
Defense spending as a percentage of GDP is down to the level Obama got it to after Bush…the notion we are spending too much on Ukraine and Israel is absurd especially when we are not spending more and very clearly getting value for our spending in Ukraine. Plus, you do realize the Military Industrial Complex creates solid union jobs in America??
We’re not getting any value out of the Ukraine war. You might have some fantasies about sticking it to Putin or whatever, but we’re losing the war and will have to pay for the Ukraine reconstruction. We’re already bankrolling the whole country and this is a bill that will continue for years to come. Not to mention all the lives lost by prolonging that war, but hey, union jobs.
You do realize Ukraine believes this is a cause worth dying for?? So trying to force your opinion on Ukrainians is no different than how Bush/Cheney operated forcing countries to fight in wars that they didn’t want to wage. Most Americans believe some causes are worth dying for and it’s up to the country to decide if it rises to that level.
If you really think this is just about patriotism and “causes worth dying for,” you’ve been duped by a lot of pretty low grade, painfully obvious propaganda. Buddy, you’ve been tricked into supporting a pointless proxy war that needs up defense companies’ bottom line.
Lol, you’ve been duped by the same people that pushed the Iraq War. You are clueless. Go watch Taibbi on Laura Ingraham trying to get more nitwits to pay $5/month so he can buy a new mansion.
*beefs up
“Slowly, the mesoculture crawls back.”
This, right here. A lot of this has to do with the Internet, in how was first a series of walled gardens (AOL), then was swallowed whole by the macroculture conglomerates, but is now fracturing under the weight of it all. As individuals move between the macro and micro in their consumption of media—watching The Crown on Friday night but listening to a new album they got on Bandcamp on Saturday—mesocultures (plural) will form.
Agreed (swallowed whole). I feel that what's fracturing under it all is Western Civilization. There are no constraints and the time spent watching or listening to gratuitously ugly offerings continues to rise. Families collapse under deviant beliefs adopted from media and the Intersectional grifters marketing incompetence. I watched this happen to a formerly beautiful and functional state so my remarks are experiential but the Stockholm Syndrome of unending tolerance and accommodation is clearly suicidal.
I appreciate the well written, interesting, informative posts.
I'm just a guy who pays attention and watched a city and a generation shake hands with the devil and I sometimes spout off.
I see it less about Western Civ collapsing under its weight so much as western civ being one of major fronts between the micro-macro cultural war. Progressives have been pronouncing Western Civ over for decades (remember Jesse Jackson chanting "hey hey ho ho western civ has got to go" back in the 80s). Conservatives have responded in a variety of ways, but mostly by championing it (while denying its faults out of a misguided sense of patriotism). But that front of the war was until recently part of the macroculture (think CNN versus Fox 1998–2008). Talk radio was a microculture that became a partisan macroculture. Likewise for Twitter but for Progressives.
I'm painting with a broad brush and there are exceptions to these trends. I think the Micro and Meso cultures are were WC will thrive and renew itself. And sure, maybe it won't, but I'm optimistic. But I am convinced the macro lacks the self-confidence in itself to defend anything well.
I appreciate what you're seeing and thank you for expressing them to me. I'm a poor writer. I worked in a now deep blue city as a behavioral health counselor before and during it's fall and I've seen what you describe grow and morph.
Thanks again.
Don’t let up. I think you’re on to something. I could still be wrong too. Cheers.
Godspeed.
Being in a war zone has certainly colored my views.
"These worlds are usually white, but they don’t have to be, and what left-liberals never quite understand is that there is far more solidarity between a Black Swarthmore graduate and a white Swarthmore graduate than a white attorney from Grosse Pointe and a white Dollar General clerk in the Lansing exurbs."
They do not understand because they do not want to.
If those Swarthmore grads are nothing else, they are herd animals.
great article. never thought about the current environment in those terms.
This is excellent. Would not necessarily call these ‘factions’ since I associate that with belief systems and cultural practices but more like ...modalities? The different ‘factions’ such as they are all exist in these different regions/modalities, what-have-you. Very helpful way of dividing them. I love the term ‘mesoculture.’
I did not love the phrase "factions." I was searching for something punchy. "Types" didn't quite fit. "Modalities" is interesting if worthy. Maybe "segments"
For someone who pretends to be interested in the "meso" culture you spend very little time in fly-over country. You berate Rogan for remaining true to the anti-war, pro-marijuana, free speech culture that you and the left have rejected. And he was famous for his quirky rôle on News Radio well before his comeback as host of the grotesque Fear Factor.
You lament the moral and financial bankruptcy of the record label executives but you don't explain what Oliver Anthony would want from corrupt jerks like them. Apparently they had no answers for him either, so he turned his back on their multi million dollar recording "contract" and its systematic degradation of the artist.
You pretend to care about the protest movements, but when unarmed Americans show up to sincerely protest and an unarmed veteran woman is murdered by Capitol police you hate her more than words of yours express. I myself don't believe you want to allow anyone to the right of Lenin to live outside a death camp. Which is why the left never objected to the cia and fbi murdering JFK, RFK, and MLK Jr. You hate them for representing a conservative Democrat culture you want to deny ever existed.
You think you live in one country because you don't go into the states that are sick and tired of people like you defining the Overton window of allowable cultural and political discourse. You are a dinosaur in a world of mammals who are not going to apologise for inventing the Internet technologies you barely understand.
Yeah, dinosaur death throes crush a few mammals. But they aren't the best choice in the contest. You lament the struggles of the pet hoax stream media of the military industrial financial pharmaceutical complex. But the people who used to volunteer to fight their wars won't. Which is going to become a whole new anti war and anti draft culture.
kthxbye
And all that's old becomes new again - thanks for the reminder Ross.
It's kind of like looking at a cultural convection process.
The first thing about the microculture is that it responds (or reacts) to the macroculture. The second is that when it's successful, it becomes macro itself—crowded, mercenary, tending towards recursion and conservatism. It's the incremental movement from Black Sabbath towards Imagine Dragons, or from a landscape where memes are the provocative & risible currency of the in-the-know to one where your coworkers share them on Slack and you hit the LOL emoji button even though you felt nothing.
When a strain is unsuccessful, it fissions. One or more of its progeny moves towards the line between micro and macro with renewed upwards velocity, while some others (probably the ones most resembling the original iteration) either coast for a while or succumb to gravity and die off. (I got used to seeing this sort of thing in goth club music during the aughts.) Some strains in the former category might cross over; others will do the parabolic somersault and split off again while they're on their way down. Probably a lot of micro (and macro) culture resides in the mesoculture during its afterlife.
And the thing about mesoculture is that when a strain crosses a certain threshold of success, it must inevitably go online, join the microculture, and orient itself towards crossing over into the macro in order to survive, having uprooted itself from its substratum in the meso.
(Side note: I don't think we can call someone like Mr. Beast part of the microculture, even though he operates in the petri dish where it's cultivated. If there are more people seeing a given YouTuber's video than pay tickets to see a given film manufactured in Hollywood, to say the particular film represents Macro and the particular YouTuber represents Micro is more a statement about business models than success or influence. And there's the rub, isn't it? Categories no longer adhere to the facts as well as they used to. It's like the historical stage in which the bourgeoisie of Europe had grown so powerful that their subordination to the nobility and clergy in the ternary "feudal" system no longer made sense.)
It's no longer true that the microculture responds to the macro; increasingly, the micro is setting the agenda and that's why the macro is obviously afraid of it. Also, I don't think the meso cares about crossing over into the micro or macro; what made the meso culture of the late 2000s and early 2010s so fun was that it took pride in being separate from the micro (which wasn't much of a force at that point) and the macro (which was still setting the agenda in the cultural mainstream)
It's dishonest to say Trump faced "abject defeat" in 2020. Even if you won't admit the election was stolen, you can't honestly say Trump experienced "abject defeat."
Election wasn't stolen, Trump lost.
Trump lost, but I would not call losing an election in which Biden enjoyed every organizational and institutional advantage other than incumbency, then took two weeks after election day to wheeze out a victory, an "abject defeat".
And I did not vote for either legacy party candidate, not in 2016, not in 2020, nor have I any intention of doing so.