Discussed: moxie, feedback loops, identity, smoking cigarettes, perhaps forced mathematical metaphors, idiotic genes, chaotic functions, shitheads
I’m middle aged and I wonder what is even cool anymore. This has to be a pretty common thing. But I also wonder if the state of our culture has rendered cool moot and that it actually no longer exists. Is cool only for youth and youthful nostalgia or did it actually used to be a thing and is actually now not a thing?
First, taken at face value, let’s look at what cool is supposed to be, traditionally. I’m not 100% sure so I’ll just spitball: it’s bucking trends, being authentic, having some moxie, having the right mix of enigma and magnetism. Cool is what you want to be when you see it. Cool style is cool because it makes you cool. Cool music is cool because only cool people listen to cool music. And it’s not about marketing, it’s about identity. All those traits I spitballed are generally positive, nobody wants to be described as unoriginal, fake, pathetic, predictable, or forgettable. That is unless it were cool to be as such since to be those things in the face of such non-coolness would close the loop and actually fit the spitballed definitions. And this is where things get interesting. Cool only exists as a reference to itself.
That little cool-uncool-cool transformation is a feedback loop in action; a recursive function. We live in a time where our cultural feedback loop is really, really short. Also the input, or the sum of the information processed by the loop is orders of magnitude larger than what it was 10, 20, 50 years ago. This is not new stuff I’m saying. Anyone can be anything or have access to anyone being anything. We also live in a generally liberal society whereby we tend towards acceptance of things that were maybe taboo or frowned upon (to sugar coat it) in the past. This contributes to an environment where philosophies, politics, and self-expression are almost entirely about personal identity. This is mostly fine, by the way. It’s better that people of color, LGBTQ, and other long oppressed communities are empowered to have their voices heard and be who it is they actually are. The main point is that being who you are despite what others think is part of what traditionally was “cool”. However since we were dealing with longer feedback loops in the past the margins in which “cool” people were allowed to operate were still small. You could wear a leather jacket and smoke cigarettes and, you know, brood and stuff but just don’t be black or gay.
I’d argue that today most Westerners feel entitled to be as they are (though still not totally free of a variety of unfortunate consequences). The margins of what’s “ok” to be might not even exist anymore. That all but eliminates one trait of what is traditionally cool. Combine that with the feedback loop being so short and cool pretty much vanishes. If you can’t lean on your authentic self as a pillar of cool you must rely on trends as the negative space in which to operate, working your way into the cultural psyche, and others recognizing that what is cool now is old news and this other way is the new cool news. That’s gone. There is no counter culture. The wheel is moving so fast it appears motionless, all colors blurred into one. There is no place to go.
This puts us in a weird spot. To totally buy into this “cool is dead” thing runs the risk of becoming close minded, having no foresight, nihilism, technophobia, bad stuff. Let’s not do that. The main thing to acknowledge though is that as the inputs have grown and as the velocity of self-reference has increased the boundaries of the system have started to take shape. And a system cannot step outside of itself to describe itself; the map can have an infinite degree of fidelity but it will never be the territory, it will always exist as a contained component. Everything is cool so nothing is cool so everything is cool, on into infinity. It all exists as the same smeared feed of information.
This blur of activity that erases traditional notions of cool puts everything on the table. My assessment, though, is that we don’t know what the hell to do with what’s on the table at the moment. We’re still trying to get ahead of a curve that has already passed. There is a lot of outlandish shit going on because of that. We don’t understand what’s intrinsically valuable, we only try to understand which FOMO has the biggest F. We’re idiots bound by genetics that can’t keep up.
Cool as a social standing is a no-op. Those inputs are tired and are producing absurd results. I’m worried it’s all too noisy and the velocity of feedback is too great to overcome. So in a closed, self-referencing system can there be trend buckers and brave, authentic acts, the most pure forms of cool? Yeah probably. Just because you can’t step outside the system doesn’t mean you can’t wreak havoc inside of it. Ask the Mandelbrot set. As the Logistic Difference Equation. Ask Nelson Mandela. There are legitimately cool people forcing America to face its racism. The problem is it’s too easy for things to get swept up in the loop, hijacked by the din of voices who have no idea what the fuck they’re talking about. And we all hate each other because personas become attached to the totality of output that don’t represent actual human beings but rather the disposition of our collective worst selves. There are people who despise you…well not You you, but the bucket of output you fall into.
What does all of this mean? No idea. Maybe nothing, maybe everything. I was thinking about punk rock the other day and how at certain points in time it has legit been the epitome of cool. Hip hop too. Sometimes shitheads need to be told to go fuck themselves by smart, slightly scary, rather angry people. It’s important. It’s why cool matters: cool can change things for the better. I hope I’m just old and having a typically old guy reaction to the times. I hope that we can bust out and find ways to cause positive disorder that aren’t just big internet jokes. I hope that I die before cool does.