Wasik, Bill. “My Crowd.” Harper’s Magazine. Mar. 2006: 56-66.

I was completely enamored of this article written by the inventor of the flash mob fad of 2003 and about same. Totally rapt and engaged, for two chief reasons. First was the discussion of the work of Stanley Milgram, “the social psychologist best known for his authority experiments” (60). Wasik created the flash mob in order to “study” (as he argues here; the article is structured according to the scientific method) conformity and crowd-following among e-savvy hipsters in New York; creating a scenester event that is, as he says, “pure scene” (58) ends up connecting very nicely with Milgram’s findings—indeed it’s one of the many things that moves the article beyond gloating about duping an entire culture.

What I care most about with the Milgram stuff is the non-FM place it eventually gets to, an analysis of Candid Camera:

[T]he show is managed down to a simple, digestible narrative message—in Candid Camera’s case, for laughs, but the point couldhave been as easily applied to the cheap drama of The Apprentice or the luridity of Trading Spouses. “[T]he viewer is instructed by the narrator about exactly what to look for; comments reinforce the notion that what we are about to see will be funny,” Milgram wrote. “Studio laughter accompaanies each episode as a way of continually defining the actions as funny, prompting the home viewer to experience the scene as amusing, rather than feeling sympathy or compassion for the victim’s plight, or searching to understand it.” It is precisely here that we who would make Milgramite art must keep vigilant: in resisting simple story lines and embracing, instead, the ambiguities of our data (61).

The passage gave me this idea: that if laughter is a balm, laff tracks are a poison. The idea isn’t at all original, but it’s one that’ll serve me well in an essay I’m trying to put together.

Okay, allow me just one more instance of dorkiness and I’ll let you go. Much is said here about hipsters, which Wasik describes as “those hundreds of thousands of educated young urbanites with strikingly similar tastes” (56) who

make no pretense to divisions on principle, to forming intellectual or artistic camps; at any given moment, it is the same books, records, films that are judged au courant by all, leading to the curious spectacle of an “alternative” culture more unanimous than the mainstream it ostensibly opposes (56).

I don’t exactly agree with this last bit—particularly what it implies about the almost magical way that things storm onto the scene—or the general way Wasik reads hipsterism solely as a consumer demographic. One important thing it overlooks is that hipsters can be defined by their ironic stance. Indeed, the products of hipster culture that Wasik addresses (McSweeney’s is a prime example) are fueled by such a stance. Another one is The Onion. I’m reminded of one of its headlines that went something like, “Area Man Surprised Father Likes Johnny Cash.” Also, wasn’t there a story about a tragic horn-rimmed glasses accident at some Yo La Tengo show?

Anyway, what I’m getting at is this: by seeing the above examples of hipsters (which despite their nerdy appearances as seen in The Aristocrats the writers for The Onion unquestionably are) making expert fun of hipsters, and by defining hipsters in terms of their ironic stance, does that make hipsterism the sole demographic where self-criticism makes you more of a member? Where the ultimate hipsters are hipsters that make fun of the idea of the “ultimate hipster?” (J. Foxworthy’s “You Might Be a Redneck” jokes complicate this issue, but for the sake of working this argument out, let’s pretend either that Foxworthy doesn’t exist [heaven!] or that his jokes, in their formulaic, almost mantric delivery, are more celebration or meditation than they are critique.) Wasik admits to owning Strokes and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah records, which makes him a hipster on some level, on the level he focuses on here. But to me what makes him a total hipster is the fact that he invented the flash mob. Who else but a hipster—two parts irony to one part market savvy—could have done it? Something I want to commend hipsters for is that their nature makes them untouchable; any criticism thrown their way will be accepted with a “Yeah, duh.”

I tried to argue a similar thing in my Cather class a couple weeks ago in relation to satire, how, in contemporary satire (say, South Park), everything and everyone is up for ridicule, including its viewers, and that the only thing that saves a person from being seriously hurt by the ridicule is the awareness that one is up for ridicule. But that’s another thing all together, and I’ve already taken up way too much of your time.