The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/“The White Negro” Revisited: The Demise of the Indispensable Hipster: Difference between revisions

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You wouldn’t necessarily guess that in a country undergoing a revolution, albeit a digital one, conformity would be on such a roll. Yet what strikes me as odd in America today is our seeming inability to produce authentic nonconformists in any significant numbers. Folks that show up locked and loaded for Tea Party rallies — Christian Lorentzen called the type “the radical square”{{sfn|Lorentzen|2007|}} — don’t count, since the point is to question groupthink, not enforce it. What I’ve got in mind is Norman Mailer’s definition of that quintessential American existentialist: the hipster.

How did the hipster sink so low? There are at least three reasons: For starters, existential terror isn’t what it used to be; second, the triumph of economic convention over truth in our society has made it hard to talk about the scope of what really matters in life; and lastly, today’s online revolution is helping blunt the very sensibilities we’ll need to strike some kind of humane balance. Yin follows Yang, and maybe we’ll pull out of this existential blind alley, but meanwhile where are Mailer’s psychic outlaws when we need them?

It is hard to outdo the Fifties, with its raw memories of Nanjing, Dresden, Hiroshima and the Holocaust, for inducing bone-chilling dread. As Mailer noted:

Could that be in part because Americans are locked into behaving primarily as economic actors?

According to Mailer’s hipster formula, a society in which deep-dish sacrifice is discouraged by circumstance less than direct political fiat is unlikely to produce many committed rebels. What was true then is truer now. In “Dehumanized,” his 2009 essay in ''Harper’s Magazine'', Mark Slouka argues that our submission to economic “orthodoxy” is nearly complete:

Today, our nihilism excludes such optimism. Still ensorcelled by the gods of consumption, we’re stuck in a vast holding operation of the psyche. No wonder we’re fascinated by dark and handsome Don Draper, the womanizing, corner-cutting protagonist of AMC’s hit TV series, Mad Men, about ad execs at bay in the early sixties. Draper is our televangelical Odysseus, “the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course,” who we suspect is headed for a moral train wreck.{{sfn|Homer|1996|p=77}} But who’s to say Draper’s charm and luck won’t see him through? We know the feeling: We’re hoping for a little luck ourselves. Unlike the retro Draper, though, we’ve got the Internet, where we can still fly through the air with the greatest of ease. Maybe social media will help us get back on track?

The Internet is our millennial magic carpet ride. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube take us into places like Cairo’s Tahrir Square where, earlier this year, we witnessed historic events, in real time, and met people literally changing the world. And there will be a lot more Internet-inspired problem solving where that came from, we’re told. Crowdsourcing guru Clay Shirky argues, for example, that the time we save in our computer-networked world not watching TV as much anymore creates “cognitive surplus” that we can invest in socially redeeming pursuits — like-minded people gathering on the Web to talk, collaborate and act to benefit the commonweal in ways small or big. It’s convergence, not conformity, in Shirky’s view, because people will do things increasingly for love, not money. In his book, Cognitive Surplus, he observes, “Expanding our focus to include producing and sharing doesn’t even require making big shifts in individual behavior to create enormous changes in outcome.”{{sfn|Shirky|2010|loc=ch. 1, loc. 327}} Thus, like Mailer’s hipster of old, the techno-hip enable a new human order, this time one in which the love of sharing eventually trumps the desire to consume. It is Shirky, by the way, who is widely credited with popularizing the phrase “the Internet runs on love.”{{sfn|Garber|2010|loc=¶11}}

That does sound a little crazy in today’s world where the Internet cognoscenti talk about life as the “survival of the busiest”{{sfn|Carr|2010|p=35}} and people generally squirm at the prospect of failing our new technological gods. Younger friends have told me that they suspect our growing addiction to social media may be robbing us of what it means to be human but fear it would be antisocial to put up too much of a fight. Intrepid souls declare e-mail “sabbaticals” or even “bankruptcies,” but it’s crazy to think any of that will turn the tables. When it comes to fighting techno-conformity, to paraphrase the old-time boxing commentators, we’ve got a punch that wouldn’t crack a potato chip.

In a long interview for ''The Fifties'', a documentary series I helped create some years ago, Allen Ginsberg said the whole purpose of the Beat movement was to “define some kind of new vision of America.” Kerouac, he explained