“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.’
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.
There are many perceptive thoughts here. But I feel that the distance plus focus of an older (Marxist) cultural criticism could build on (and with) these good observations. What I see is the ever more thorough commodification of cultural activity. Once people convened and discussed freely. Now we pay to follow. This can be worth it here, or sometimes with Ted Gioia (who can also be very funny), but it’s probably a mistake to write as if epiphenomena such as 19th c. Romanticism were active factors in the history of the present. I consider Louis Menand’s The Free World exemplary and I also think that the social criticism that got washed away by the tsunami of literary theory would be worth recovering. Sorry if that’s changing the subject…
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.)
“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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
"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.’
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
There are many perceptive thoughts here. But I feel that the distance plus focus of an older (Marxist) cultural criticism could build on (and with) these good observations. What I see is the ever more thorough commodification of cultural activity. Once people convened and discussed freely. Now we pay to follow. This can be worth it here, or sometimes with Ted Gioia (who can also be very funny), but it’s probably a mistake to write as if epiphenomena such as 19th c. Romanticism were active factors in the history of the present. I consider Louis Menand’s The Free World exemplary and I also think that the social criticism that got washed away by the tsunami of literary theory would be worth recovering. Sorry if that’s changing the subject…
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.)