Both Kriss' essay, and Scott's response to it, remind me of the "Evil Cannot Comprehend Good" trope from TV tropes, except replace "Evil" with "Very socially motivated people" and "Good" with "Less socially motivated people" (although honestly both sets have a lot of overlap). Both essays seem obsessed with finding some deep, social reason why hipsters and nerds behave the way they do, like the supervillain who is telling the hero that they are "Not So Different." They literally can't comprehend the idea that someone could actually like something, so they try desperately to find some way that liking things isn't something people actually do. People couldn't actually like Star Wars, sportsball, the MCU, or the Beatles, they must be liking them to achieve some social goal like forming an identity or seeking status!
This is one of the two giant flawed assumptions that invalidates the theses of both articles (the other one, of course, is the assumption the the MCU is bad, when it is, in fact one of the human race's greatest artistic achievements*). If you assume that it is possible to like things for non-social reasons, or even in addition to social reasons, hipsters and nerds make much more sense. The reason that nerds like both popular stuff like the MCU, and less popular stuff like postage stamps is because they don't care about if something is popular, they care about if it fascinates them. Whether that thing is popular is orthogonal to how fascinating it is.
That fascination makes them invest a lot of time and effort in it, which in turn makes it part of their identity. They weren't trying to find something to form and identity first and picking Star Wars, identity formation was just a side effect. Similarly, hipsters probably just get bored with things they see frequently and want to seek out new things to be interested in. Making obscure things part of their identity comes second, if at all.
Scott asks if its ever okay to build your identity around liking a thing. I would ask if it's ever okay not to? What's the alternative, building it around social status games or large nonselective identity groups? It seems to me that liking something isn't just a good thing to build your identity around, it's one of the best things to build it around. After all, unlike social status games, you can like something without forcing other people to not like it.
*I've generally enjoyed Substack so far, but one thing I've found perplexing and annoying is how people on this site are constantly going on about how the MCU is terrible. Why? The best MCU movies are amazing classics and the worst are no worse than a mediocre pre-MCU action movie (and even the bad ones can still be a net positive by introducing characters who shine in later movies). It does a magnificent job of faithfully translating the epic serialized storytelling of superhero comics to the screen. It's also magnificently diverse in the variety of subgenres it has, there are political/espionage thrillers, crime dramas, space opera, fantasy adventure, action comedy, and so on. All the criticisms of it, by contrast, sound like cliches, they are often the same criticisms made of action/superhero movies decades ago, or criticisms that make it clear the critic is unpleasable (i.e. the MCU movies have too much comedy, but back in the 2000s people were complaining that superhero movies were too grim and dark).
Both Kriss' essay, and Scott's response to it, remind me of the "Evil Cannot Comprehend Good" trope from TV tropes, except replace "Evil" with "Very socially motivated people" and "Good" with "Less socially motivated people" (although honestly both sets have a lot of overlap). Both essays seem obsessed with finding some deep, social reason why hipsters and nerds behave the way they do, like the supervillain who is telling the hero that they are "Not So Different." They literally can't comprehend the idea that someone could actually like something, so they try desperately to find some way that liking things isn't something people actually do. People couldn't actually like Star Wars, sportsball, the MCU, or the Beatles, they must be liking them to achieve some social goal like forming an identity or seeking status!
This is one of the two giant flawed assumptions that invalidates the theses of both articles (the other one, of course, is the assumption the the MCU is bad, when it is, in fact one of the human race's greatest artistic achievements*). If you assume that it is possible to like things for non-social reasons, or even in addition to social reasons, hipsters and nerds make much more sense. The reason that nerds like both popular stuff like the MCU, and less popular stuff like postage stamps is because they don't care about if something is popular, they care about if it fascinates them. Whether that thing is popular is orthogonal to how fascinating it is.
That fascination makes them invest a lot of time and effort in it, which in turn makes it part of their identity. They weren't trying to find something to form and identity first and picking Star Wars, identity formation was just a side effect. Similarly, hipsters probably just get bored with things they see frequently and want to seek out new things to be interested in. Making obscure things part of their identity comes second, if at all.
Scott asks if its ever okay to build your identity around liking a thing. I would ask if it's ever okay not to? What's the alternative, building it around social status games or large nonselective identity groups? It seems to me that liking something isn't just a good thing to build your identity around, it's one of the best things to build it around. After all, unlike social status games, you can like something without forcing other people to not like it.
*I've generally enjoyed Substack so far, but one thing I've found perplexing and annoying is how people on this site are constantly going on about how the MCU is terrible. Why? The best MCU movies are amazing classics and the worst are no worse than a mediocre pre-MCU action movie (and even the bad ones can still be a net positive by introducing characters who shine in later movies). It does a magnificent job of faithfully translating the epic serialized storytelling of superhero comics to the screen. It's also magnificently diverse in the variety of subgenres it has, there are political/espionage thrillers, crime dramas, space opera, fantasy adventure, action comedy, and so on. All the criticisms of it, by contrast, sound like cliches, they are often the same criticisms made of action/superhero movies decades ago, or criticisms that make it clear the critic is unpleasable (i.e. the MCU movies have too much comedy, but back in the 2000s people were complaining that superhero movies were too grim and dark).