9 ms·

The Cosmetic Class

122 points by thisisit 8y ago

_bxg1 8y ago
If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend the movie Ingrid Goes West. It's this article in the form of a brilliant dark-comedy.
kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
One could just live in the real world where you don't know or care what a finsta is.
- cgoecknerwald 8y ago
  Eh. For many young people, this IS the "real world". These are their experiences. It's not productive to discount so many other people's realities.
  - cirgue 8y ago
    Nope, it is plenty productive to call out corporate pseudo-cultural production for what it is: fantasy.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      This isn't the first generation to live in a "corporate pseudo-cultural production" world. Movies and movie conventions. Baseball cards and other popular collectibles. Sport events. Music events. All those things are just "corporate pseudo-cultural productions". Yet they're also the culture, because - for better or worse - commerce is part of our lives too.
      - cirgue 8y ago
        > Yet they're also the culture, because - for better or worse - commerce is part of our lives too. And I am saying it is enormously productive and beneficial to be skeptical of those things.
- peteretep 8y ago
  > One could just line in the real world where you don't know or care what the "web" is Here, I rewound the comment 25 years for you.
  - freetime2 8y ago
    I think saying that "finstas" are as important to society as the "web" is a false equivalence. As evidence I would point to the fact that "finstas" are in fact just a very tiny subset of the web.
- msla 8y ago
  One could also just live in the real world where you don't know or care what baseball is.
carapace 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_sentence !?
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Are you asking why the author chose not to include one?
  - tranchms 8y ago
    The context would have helped immensely. Instead I had to read the first half of the article again after I finished. The author captures the essence of the vapid absurdism permeating social media, and our culture more broadly.
  - carapace 8y ago
    Some people write to communicate, others to show off their linguistic skills. Nethercutt, whether he knows it or not, is the latter. (There are people who can do both. Wendell Berry comes to mind. His essays have been compared to "fine whiskey for the mind.")
- deno 8y ago
  Just ask for tldr…
_bxg1 8y ago
Sometimes I think the deepest, most absurdist corners of the internet are its last bastion of humanity. Where the memes are fueled by people's desire to be so incredibly nonsensical and inscrutable as to defy marketability. Of course, if you look at recent trends in corporate Twitter accounts you can see companies doing their very best to appropriate even that.
- freeone3000 8y ago
  How many levels of irony are you on, my dude?
  - jhoh 8y ago
    E
- trophycase 8y ago
  Even commercials are tapping into absurdist themes. I can remember a few asian ones I've seen but a recent one that comes to mind is the newest Sprite commercial where the kid is running around the house yelling about how they are out of sprite.
  - flanbiscuit 8y ago
    Haven't commercials been doing absurdism for a while? Speaking of Asian ones, it's been known that Japanese commercials can be weird AF (to the western mind) that it was made fun of in the Simpsons with the Me Sparkle episode back in the early 90s. US has also been creating absurdist commercials pre-internet for a while now as well
    - elboru 8y ago
      So they aren't weird for the Asian mind? I doubt it.
      - flanbiscuit 8y ago
afpx 8y ago
Reading this kind of reminded me of old Christian Slater movies like Pump up the Volume and Heathers, and other movies of the GenX era. (But, I’m sure films of the 60s fit, as well) Hopefully this is a sign that this generation is forming its identity and ready to express it with some real cultural movements! I’ve been waiting eagerly for their cultural identity to emerge and express itself with authentic art, music, film, etc. However, I also find the essay ironic. When the Internet first went mainstream, one phenomenon was “the lurker” - the fact that most, the mass majority, of internet users only “consumed content” (although, back then it wasn’t called content). That’s because few of us felt confident enough to claim enough expertise to share much. Therefore, most of us just “lurked”. We let the experts speak, and we indulged in surfing on their knowledge. In this “Instagram era”, though, everyone is expected to be a “content creator”. (e.g. everyone has a github!) But, to be one, one unfortunately misses out on a long history of prior work. One gets so bogged down by creating new content and reading all of the new content created within the previous few hours, that much of the past 108 years of knowledge and wisdom isn’t fully accessible. And, although the author seems to try to escape that vortex, they also seem to have ignored that they’re mostly reinventing ideas that were created between McLuhan and 2010. But, that is ok! I actually read the whole thing and enjoyed it (because it also kinda reminded me of reading Zines). Yeah, as others have said, it could use some editing, but at least it has paragraphs!
- flanbiscuit 8y ago
  > I’ve been waiting eagerly for their cultural identity to emerge and express itself with authentic art, music, film, etc. I think it's already happening/happened, it's just not as easy to see and commodify because media is not being funneled through a few mediums. I don't think we'll ever see these large generational "identities" like we did pre-internet and especially pre-social-media. I predict that from now on the defining identity trait is that there is no defining trait. You can choose one identity from the many pre-existing ones or create your own, then find your community online to make you feel good about your choice. I also enjoyed the article. Not perfect but hey, it's fostering discussion. I'm actually more interested in their authenticity article, which I will read next
- chris_st 8y ago
stealthmodeclan 8y ago
Yes, it's absurd. I've my 20 able developer friends who weren't able to find job despite being very good developers. They were always messing up interviews. Yes, they can solve whatever tricky questions you throw at them because they've lots of experience working on low level stuff. People's eyes are so used to Instagram people that they think less attractive people are less healthy so they'll not be good at problem solving which takes great genes. This is what most have concluded from Instagram photos of bodybuilders/athletes/celebrities. I am guilty of this myself, I've dated many beautiful ladies who i chased with passion. They all had invested lot of money into their looks. They always complained about not being well off like me but now you know why.This is what attracted me to them. Face is the first thing i notice, i was young and naive and got fooled by clever makeup. So why you can't do same as a man? Hack your way to success. If you are a good programmer and still not getting paid well or getting promoted faster, then it's probably this. Here comes the twist. We finally figured out it has to do with their appearance. No one gives this as reason to you, they simply reject you period. So we got a writer and analyst, to figure out what the market truly wants then created a script and we gave it to the programmers to memorize. Add some professional make-up artists, took some photographs at a studio with many others (pretending to be at some event of great importance). This went straight to their Instagram account. And 16 out of 20 programmer friends showed up for interview and got a successful placement. But still 4 of them didn't find job yet. What is this? This is new normal and this is what people who are interviewing and recruiting want.
- LandR 8y ago
  The fuck? This is a joke right? I would have thought development would be the one sector unaffected by look / image etc. Unless you're interviewing for some hipster startup.
  - stealthmodeclan 8y ago
    > This is a joke right? I would have thought development would be the one sector unaffected by look / image etc. I know this guy who used to screen models at a Hollywood studio. Now he works as a recruiter in a tech company (he met a VP at stripclub who got him in), what do you think he does? They are still same people! They look for same signals. They give it weird names like vibes / cultural fit or whatever.
grive 8y ago
I really, really dislike this kind of medium-to-long form article that don't bother to even expose some sort of context (topic introductory line). This is incredibly disrespectful to the reader. You read the first half trying to put the pieces together, while given that this is a proto-longform article (does not have the length, but has the tone), there is fluff added here and there for flavor. This is so frustrating to read. > The truth, then, is this: our generation was raised with the understanding that the image we portrayed mattered more than who we actually were not out of some malevolent, externally imposed agenda, but because it was actually true. The result was that nothing we ever did felt organic; instead, everything felt like a checked box. As every generation before? Why even speak about generation here? This seems like an absurd reduction from the author, while this is the kind of thing you learn to recognize as you age and you start seeing the word with your own eyes. Most people becomes disillusioned as time goes on, seeing how much public action is fake. A much more interesting analysis would be to show how the new engaging platforms distord this longstanding social behavior (signaling), amplifying it or distording it. But to say that they are an "Instagram" generation is giving far too much credit to Instagram. The world was not "disrupted" by Instagram, it was only a lens and a way to capitalize on this behavior. I could go on with the "lost authenticity", but I feel I'm just trying to justify the time taken to read this empty piece.
- V-2 8y ago
  "I am 23 as I write this". I can't say I'm surprised, and the author is clearly of the "I love the sound of my own voice" type. That's how the piece reads at least. Narcissism isn't only about looks.
  - freetime2 8y ago
    My first thought when reading your comment was “wow that’s more sharply critical than the author deserves”. But on second thought it is a bit ironic that a piece so critical of “signaling” and empty gestures (the author cites things like joining student counsel) would be posted to the author’s personal blog. I think it would have leant credibility to the article if the author had the self awareness to point out the fact that blogs are a form of self promotion not too far removed from Instagram.
scns 8y ago
I do not like being so negative, but i feel like reading this article was a waste of time.
hypnotist 8y ago
> Its business, after all, is driven by engagement, and because engagement is well-understood to be eroded by the presence of nuance and depth — two traits that are essential for a complete understanding of anything — Instagram promotes neither. This must be the best description of fb/insta mechanics.
Ensorceled 8y ago
There are several comments complaining about the lack of an introduction or topic sentence. Maybe it’s me, but I knew what ride I was on from the large clear title and subtitle: “The Cosmetic Class” “What happens when a society with a penchant for the cosmetic meets a medium dominated by it?”
- akvadrako 8y ago
  That says nothing about if it's worth reading the article. I wish every article came with an abstract and conclusion like a scientific paper. Generally that's enough and you don't even need to read the middle.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    That was supposed to be gold standard. The "inverted pyramid"[0]. It's taught to journalists as very important. It's also universally ignored everywhere. I've seen one news source do that, by putting a bullet-point summary at the beginning of the article. Sadly, I don't remember which one was that (I don't usually pay attention to who is writing, when an article lands on HN). Most others prefer to do the inverse - bait you with the headline, make the beginning confusing, and only later on reveal the important details. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
  - j2kun 8y ago
    Your scrutiny of the worth of scientific results must be spot on! You can tell from the first few sentences or paragraphs whether an article is worth reading. If you're not interested you stop reading it!
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dmschulman 8y ago
I think it's worth noting that the author of this piece has a private Instagram account.

122 points by thisisit 8y ago

If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend the movie Ingrid Goes West. It's this article in the form of a brilliant dark-comedy.

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago

One could just live in the real world where you don't know or care what a finsta is.

cgoecknerwald 8y ago
Eh. For many young people, this IS the "real world". These are their experiences. It's not productive to discount so many other people's realities.
- cirgue 8y ago
  Nope, it is plenty productive to call out corporate pseudo-cultural production for what it is: fantasy.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    This isn't the first generation to live in a "corporate pseudo-cultural production" world. Movies and movie conventions. Baseball cards and other popular collectibles. Sport events. Music events. All those things are just "corporate pseudo-cultural productions". Yet they're also the culture, because - for better or worse - commerce is part of our lives too.
    - cirgue 8y ago
      > Yet they're also the culture, because - for better or worse - commerce is part of our lives too. And I am saying it is enormously productive and beneficial to be skeptical of those things.
peteretep 8y ago
> One could just line in the real world where you don't know or care what the "web" is Here, I rewound the comment 25 years for you.
- freetime2 8y ago
  I think saying that "finstas" are as important to society as the "web" is a false equivalence. As evidence I would point to the fact that "finstas" are in fact just a very tiny subset of the web.
msla 8y ago
One could also just live in the real world where you don't know or care what baseball is.

carapace 8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_sentence !?

saagarjha 8y ago
Are you asking why the author chose not to include one?
- tranchms 8y ago
  The context would have helped immensely. Instead I had to read the first half of the article again after I finished. The author captures the essence of the vapid absurdism permeating social media, and our culture more broadly.
- carapace 8y ago
  Some people write to communicate, others to show off their linguistic skills. Nethercutt, whether he knows it or not, is the latter. (There are people who can do both. Wendell Berry comes to mind. His essays have been compared to "fine whiskey for the mind.")
deno 8y ago
Just ask for tldr…

_bxg1 8y ago

Sometimes I think the deepest, most absurdist corners of the internet are its last bastion of humanity. Where the memes are fueled by people's desire to be so incredibly nonsensical and inscrutable as to defy marketability. Of course, if you look at recent trends in corporate Twitter accounts you can see companies doing their very best to appropriate even that.

freeone3000 8y ago
How many levels of irony are you on, my dude?
- jhoh 8y ago
  E
trophycase 8y ago
Even commercials are tapping into absurdist themes. I can remember a few asian ones I've seen but a recent one that comes to mind is the newest Sprite commercial where the kid is running around the house yelling about how they are out of sprite.
- flanbiscuit 8y ago
  Haven't commercials been doing absurdism for a while? Speaking of Asian ones, it's been known that Japanese commercials can be weird AF (to the western mind) that it was made fun of in the Simpsons with the Me Sparkle episode back in the early 90s. US has also been creating absurdist commercials pre-internet for a while now as well
  - elboru 8y ago
    So they aren't weird for the Asian mind? I doubt it.
    - flanbiscuit 8y ago

afpx 8y ago

Reading this kind of reminded me of old Christian Slater movies like Pump up the Volume and Heathers, and other movies of the GenX era. (But, I’m sure films of the 60s fit, as well) Hopefully this is a sign that this generation is forming its identity and ready to express it with some real cultural movements! I’ve been waiting eagerly for their cultural identity to emerge and express itself with authentic art, music, film, etc. However, I also find the essay ironic. When the Internet first went mainstream, one phenomenon was “the lurker” - the fact that most, the mass majority, of internet users only “consumed content” (although, back then it wasn’t called content). That’s because few of us felt confident enough to claim enough expertise to share much. Therefore, most of us just “lurked”. We let the experts speak, and we indulged in surfing on their knowledge. In this “Instagram era”, though, everyone is expected to be a “content creator”. (e.g. everyone has a github!) But, to be one, one unfortunately misses out on a long history of prior work. One gets so bogged down by creating new content and reading all of the new content created within the previous few hours, that much of the past 108 years of knowledge and wisdom isn’t fully accessible. And, although the author seems to try to escape that vortex, they also seem to have ignored that they’re mostly reinventing ideas that were created between McLuhan and 2010. But, that is ok! I actually read the whole thing and enjoyed it (because it also kinda reminded me of reading Zines). Yeah, as others have said, it could use some editing, but at least it has paragraphs!

flanbiscuit 8y ago
> I’ve been waiting eagerly for their cultural identity to emerge and express itself with authentic art, music, film, etc. I think it's already happening/happened, it's just not as easy to see and commodify because media is not being funneled through a few mediums. I don't think we'll ever see these large generational "identities" like we did pre-internet and especially pre-social-media. I predict that from now on the defining identity trait is that there is no defining trait. You can choose one identity from the many pre-existing ones or create your own, then find your community online to make you feel good about your choice. I also enjoyed the article. Not perfect but hey, it's fostering discussion. I'm actually more interested in their authenticity article, which I will read next
chris_st 8y ago

stealthmodeclan 8y ago

Yes, it's absurd. I've my 20 able developer friends who weren't able to find job despite being very good developers. They were always messing up interviews. Yes, they can solve whatever tricky questions you throw at them because they've lots of experience working on low level stuff. People's eyes are so used to Instagram people that they think less attractive people are less healthy so they'll not be good at problem solving which takes great genes. This is what most have concluded from Instagram photos of bodybuilders/athletes/celebrities. I am guilty of this myself, I've dated many beautiful ladies who i chased with passion. They all had invested lot of money into their looks. They always complained about not being well off like me but now you know why.This is what attracted me to them. Face is the first thing i notice, i was young and naive and got fooled by clever makeup. So why you can't do same as a man? Hack your way to success. If you are a good programmer and still not getting paid well or getting promoted faster, then it's probably this. Here comes the twist. We finally figured out it has to do with their appearance. No one gives this as reason to you, they simply reject you period. So we got a writer and analyst, to figure out what the market truly wants then created a script and we gave it to the programmers to memorize. Add some professional make-up artists, took some photographs at a studio with many others (pretending to be at some event of great importance). This went straight to their Instagram account. And 16 out of 20 programmer friends showed up for interview and got a successful placement. But still 4 of them didn't find job yet. What is this? This is new normal and this is what people who are interviewing and recruiting want.

LandR 8y ago
The fuck? This is a joke right? I would have thought development would be the one sector unaffected by look / image etc. Unless you're interviewing for some hipster startup.
- stealthmodeclan 8y ago
  > This is a joke right? I would have thought development would be the one sector unaffected by look / image etc. I know this guy who used to screen models at a Hollywood studio. Now he works as a recruiter in a tech company (he met a VP at stripclub who got him in), what do you think he does? They are still same people! They look for same signals. They give it weird names like vibes / cultural fit or whatever.

grive 8y ago

I really, really dislike this kind of medium-to-long form article that don't bother to even expose some sort of context (topic introductory line). This is incredibly disrespectful to the reader. You read the first half trying to put the pieces together, while given that this is a proto-longform article (does not have the length, but has the tone), there is fluff added here and there for flavor. This is so frustrating to read. > The truth, then, is this: our generation was raised with the understanding that the image we portrayed mattered more than who we actually were not out of some malevolent, externally imposed agenda, but because it was actually true. The result was that nothing we ever did felt organic; instead, everything felt like a checked box. As every generation before? Why even speak about generation here? This seems like an absurd reduction from the author, while this is the kind of thing you learn to recognize as you age and you start seeing the word with your own eyes. Most people becomes disillusioned as time goes on, seeing how much public action is fake. A much more interesting analysis would be to show how the new engaging platforms distord this longstanding social behavior (signaling), amplifying it or distording it. But to say that they are an "Instagram" generation is giving far too much credit to Instagram. The world was not "disrupted" by Instagram, it was only a lens and a way to capitalize on this behavior. I could go on with the "lost authenticity", but I feel I'm just trying to justify the time taken to read this empty piece.

V-2 8y ago
"I am 23 as I write this". I can't say I'm surprised, and the author is clearly of the "I love the sound of my own voice" type. That's how the piece reads at least. Narcissism isn't only about looks.
- freetime2 8y ago
  My first thought when reading your comment was “wow that’s more sharply critical than the author deserves”. But on second thought it is a bit ironic that a piece so critical of “signaling” and empty gestures (the author cites things like joining student counsel) would be posted to the author’s personal blog. I think it would have leant credibility to the article if the author had the self awareness to point out the fact that blogs are a form of self promotion not too far removed from Instagram.

scns 8y ago

I do not like being so negative, but i feel like reading this article was a waste of time.

hypnotist 8y ago

> Its business, after all, is driven by engagement, and because engagement is well-understood to be eroded by the presence of nuance and depth — two traits that are essential for a complete understanding of anything — Instagram promotes neither. This must be the best description of fb/insta mechanics.

Ensorceled 8y ago

There are several comments complaining about the lack of an introduction or topic sentence. Maybe it’s me, but I knew what ride I was on from the large clear title and subtitle: “The Cosmetic Class” “What happens when a society with a penchant for the cosmetic meets a medium dominated by it?”

akvadrako 8y ago
That says nothing about if it's worth reading the article. I wish every article came with an abstract and conclusion like a scientific paper. Generally that's enough and you don't even need to read the middle.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  That was supposed to be gold standard. The "inverted pyramid"[0]. It's taught to journalists as very important. It's also universally ignored everywhere. I've seen one news source do that, by putting a bullet-point summary at the beginning of the article. Sadly, I don't remember which one was that (I don't usually pay attention to who is writing, when an article lands on HN). Most others prefer to do the inverse - bait you with the headline, make the beginning confusing, and only later on reveal the important details. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
- j2kun 8y ago
  Your scrutiny of the worth of scientific results must be spot on! You can tell from the first few sentences or paragraphs whether an article is worth reading. If you're not interested you stop reading it!

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

dmschulman 8y ago

I think it's worth noting that the author of this piece has a private Instagram account.