“Hipsters disappeared because everyone became a hipster.” That’s how Eugene Healey (@eugbrandstrat on IG) opens a video I can’t stop thinking about. The internet was supposed to kill monoculture and set the individual free. AI memory is finishing the job, and in doing so it removes the one thing that made niches worth having: other people.
Hipsterism was a stance on consumption, a preference for the crafted and the thing you probably haven’t heard of™. 20 years on, that stance is the default language of shopping. Everything is craft, provenance shows up where there is none, natural wine comes from the world’s biggest vineyards, and tech bros dress in Aimé Leon Dore.
Healey’s diagnosis: values don’t sell, aesthetics do, and capitalism absorbs its critics. Guy Debord said the same in 1967, with fewer jokes and more numbered and poetic, albeit convoluted, theses. In thesis 59 he notes that “dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity.” Debord’s crowd called it recuperation: the revolt gets bought, repackaged and sold back to you. (Thomas Frank got the better title in ‘97’: Commodify Your Dissent., here’s chapter one, NYTimes)
Healey ends on an optimistic note. Subcultures, he says, are the R&D department of the mainstream. I’d like to agree. But his own point about the algorithm gets in the way: the feed doesn’t push one monoculture, it circulates a million niches inside “specific reality bubbles.” And the chat tools we now tell everything to are shrinking those bubbles to a size of one.
We’ve already seen the first stage. When streaming arrived, the shared Monday conversation broke down: have you seen it? No, what is it? Don’t tell me, I haven’t caught up. Cultural cohesion went from epoxy to post-it glue.
No audience.
The hipster niche was social. Knowing the band mattered because someone else knew it too. AI memory collects your very specific preferences and tunes everything to them, and no subculture forms around an audience of one. If subcultures are the mainstream’s R&D department, AI memory just closed the lab.
In advertising we sometimes used to sort audiences by media diet, and you couldn’t fake it. Read The Spectator and you were in the Spectator segment, like it or not. We all knew what kind of person we were talking about, without resorting to iffy personas. That signal is gone, because no two people’s diets match anymore. The platform has something better than the segment: it has you.
You hand over the data yourself
Feed algorithms guess from your clicks, views, and actions. In a chat you volunteer it, in detail, in what feels like an honest conversation. Swap the images in Debord’s thesis 4 for a personal conversation partner and it still holds: “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”
Now that SEO is moving into GEO, they will do their best to tune the responses to whatever the AI memory knows about you. With the aid of LLM’s, because how else? Obviously, the best vector is through services that both serve the images (Meta) and information (Google).
The bubble writes its own content.
The feed chose from what already existed. The chat makes it for you, on demand, and you can’t see the edge of the bubble anymore. In thesis 17 Debord traced a slide from being to having, and then from having to appearing. The next step is appearing only to yourself, as virality may not apply in your vicinity.
The result
The average person gets sealed in tighter, and anything from outside needs ever stronger bait to break in. Awareness won’t save us. We all know advertising works on us, and knowing has never once stopped it.
Of course, I wrote parts of this with an AI that remembers me. It knows my two writing voices better than most of my colleagues do.
AI memory isn’t going away, so the adult move is unglamorous: seek out shared references on purpose, and read the thing the machine didn’t pick for you.
Hipsters wanted what nobody else had. We’re getting it now, and it’s a monkey’s paw.