Are we spending so much time talking about culture online that we forget to actually participate in it? That’s the topic at hand in a recent piece by Drew Austin for his Substack newsletter, Kneeling Bus.
Austin is an urban planner and writer based in New York City, and he’s fascinated by the ways that digital culture permeates life in the real world. In the piece, which is called “Microtrends at the End of the World,” Austin marvels at our obsession with giving everything we see online, no matter how specific, a hashtag.
As he recently told The Show, it’s easy to forget that the internet is an unreliable narrator.
Full conversation
DREW AUSTIN: Like if I'm reading on the internet about how everybody is wearing Adidas Sambas and then I go outside and I see two people wearing them, then maybe that's a “micro trend” or maybe they're just really popular shoes in general. And I, I just saw something that, that I pattern matched based on this narrative that was put in my head from TikTok or, or reading something on the internet. It's gone so far. Now, I think no one even knows what everyone else knows, you know, you, I don't know if you're seeing the same things that I, that I am.
SAM DINGMAN: Right. And yet my particular internet enclave could be really the animating focus of my entire existence. Like, let's say, for example, I was inclined towards fashion. I'm, I'm not personally, but I think this is a good example.
Our, our producer Athena sent me this Pinterest page that I think you'll get a kick out of, which is this one Pinterest user who's been assembling a bunch of different fashion phenomenons. And we have just to name a few: dark academia, light academiacore; frogcore; coconutgirlcore; Barbiecore; fairycore; cottagecore; yeehawcore.
And this is not intended to make fun of this particular Pinterest user, but it, it is clear that we, we're at the point where you can just kind of attach “core” to anything and attract a following online. Perhaps become a part of a, a really vibrant, or some might say seething, community that gives you this potentially false sense of gathered energy in the culture when you might just actually be looking at the tiniest little pixel of the entire picture.
AUSTIN: Exactly. People just really want to feel like something is a part of something bigger.
DINGMAN: Yes. Well, that, that was a big question that jumped out for me in reading your piece. And I'm curious to know if you accept this, this framing. Is, have we moved past the era of digital culture where it was about chasing likes or chasing clicks in order to attain some version of theme? And in fact, entered a new era of digital culture where it's about perhaps this just kind of desperate desire to participate in something that feels collective because there are so few examples of that remaining in public outside life.
AUSTIN: Yes, my thing that I think about, and I'm old enough to have been in high school before social media. It was kind of, you know, like MTV era when MTV was still what it was in its heyday. And me and a lot of my friends, there was more of a feeling of like whatever trends were, were visible, felt kind of oppressive and we almost wanted to opt out of them or, or get away from them.
The internet was actually a weird place where everything you, you encounter on the internet was actually pretty strange and it was kind of refreshing to find something that was really different and unrelated to anything else. And now I think the end result of that is like everyone is having their own unique experience that doesn't have anything to do with anything else.
DINGMAN: So tell me about how for you all of this hops out of the realm of online life and into the built environment and, and how you think about addressing this in your urban planning work.
AUSTIN: You know, like not to generalize and say that everybody is trying to ignore what's going on outside of their immediate surroundings. But I think that this enclave mentality, like I see it a lot in Brooklyn or like New York, you know, there's certain levels of affluence allow you to kind of close yourself off from the rest of the city in various ways.
I think Uber is a good example of that. You know, you can opt out of taking the public transit system and if you have the money, you can only ride Ubers and that's a completely different experience of getting around. You know, obviously not even just that it's faster and more comfortable, a lot of the time, but you can kind of just be on your phone and it's like you teleported from one place to another. Whereas if you get on the subway you're gonna have to be around other people, whether you like it or not.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's almost like we're all, we're also consumed by living our convenience core lives.
AUSTIN: And I actually think that you know, New York, despite all, a lot of its problems, it still has a lot of good public infrastructure. I would say that like the walkability and, and public amenities that New York has, they're not what they used to be. But I think New York is still a pretty good city in that, in that way.
DINGMAN: I mean, it's interesting. It's just making me think about the fact that I, I went to, you know, here in, that we're in Tempe, the radio station, which is where [Arizona State University] is. And obviously there's tremendous number of college students coming into town over the last couple of weeks.
And I went to Target the other day and the entire store was college students and their parents getting stuff for their dorms, getting clothes. There was ASU gear for sale everywhere like that. The entire store was defined by this influx of ASU energy. And I was standing there with a cast iron skillet which, you know, maybe there are some college students buying cast iron skillets, but I haven't been to college in a while, but I don't think you have a lot of use for one at a, in a dorm kitchen.
But I spent some time in New York because I have family back there. And I actually moved to Phoenix from New York. And I was standing there thinking, this is such a different experience than I remember having in New York City, where if I'm on the subway in New York City, I might have my cast iron skillet. Somebody else might have like a, a paint bucket that they're gonna use as a drum, somebody else might have a briefcase, somebody else might have a telescope.
And I wouldn't have thought of this until our conversation, but it's almost like it's this collective realization that we're all living in our own microtrend. It feels like a moment where it's less that we're realizing that all of our microtrends are invalid, but rather just an awareness that they all do exist and are of equal importance to all of us. And that feels important to, to sit with.
AUSTIN: It's a beautiful thing. I like we, what you just described, I mean, in New York and, and a lot of other places too, like you, it's kind of the best and the worst thing. At the same time that you're living elbow to elbow with other people, you see a lot of different things and you kind of learn to appreciate the tapestry of, of differences that you observe in other people and you could call it microtrends or just individuality.
Also just sharing space with other people physically is its own kind of connection. It also is the source of a lot of annoyance, which is the other side of it. But I think if you can really learn to appreciate it, then there's a lot to celebrate there.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, the only way to break out of conveniencecore is annoyancecore.
AUSTIN: Annoyancecore.
DINGMAN: Reckoning with it.
