Why does every article on Racked read like a Patrick Bateman monologue, stripped of any sense of irony? It's as if aliens were writing about human society from the perspective of a banner ad.
I imagine every article about style/fashion/clothes sounds that way to HN readers. Consider pg's article on "submarines,” which to me was just a blithe lack of understanding of cyclical fashion, and his noble defense of wearing sneakers in professional settings. A fashion editor trying to write about trends in software frameworks would probably fare no better.
I actually find a lot of style and fashion stuff interesting. But there's something about the unsanitized corporate speech of Racked that is just unnerving. I know we live in an era where subtext is text, but this is more like parody as sincerity.
The submarine article wasn't denying the existence of fashion cycles. I don't know how you got that message.
It was about articles that exist to promote what someone wants to be the style, and which the journalist wrote about because a PR agent did the work for them. (Rather than because the journalist independently spotted a real trend.)
There's a big difference between "oh wow react is on the rise, let me write about that" vs "a google employee fed me a prewritten article about how all the cool kids use angular, I'll just pass that on."
SoCal does have a feeling of superficiality, you can pick up on it a little after people move back to the Bay from LA.... but then again the Bay so many people that have this feeling of entitlement that came outta no where.. just something I've noticed within the past 15 years....
On the flip side, there are also a handful of people that I met around from both areas that are down to earth. Maybe it's just high concentration.... or monkey see, monkey do.
As a SoCal transplant to the bay area, my biggest observation is that it's basically mandatory to "have a cause" in the bay area. It doesn't really matter what it is. It could be cycling over driving. It could be how you eat. It could be political activism. But it has to be something, or people look at you funny.
Aside from the Venice Beach / Santa Monica scene (which is absolutely superficial), I find SoCal to be much more laid back. Live and let live, if you will.
Somewhat ironically you must have an _approved_ cause, or you may be judged as much as not having one. To be fair I've found this is far more prevalent in SF than the South Bay, so I think that's where it comes from.
I'd say it matters a great deal what it is -- for instance if your cause is the pro-life movement or the expulsion of illegal aliens then you might have difficulties getting social approval in San Francisco.
I find it a hilarious instance of California insularity that the grandparent post thinks it "doesn't matter what it is" -- I'm guessing that he'd failed to consider the fact that non-left causes even exist.
> I'm guessing that he'd failed to consider the fact that non-left causes even exist.
In this case, you would be guessing wrong. My omission is not evidence of insularity but of walking on eggshells. I've made this point to many up here and found they are more willing to discuss and agree if I omit the narrow scope of "any cause".
There are two very valid points here: activism and alignment. I intentionally chose not to bring up alignment because it's tiring in circles like HN and/or SF. Additionally, bubbles like this aren't unique to the bay area. The focus on causes and activism is much more unique.
I grew up in Santa Monica and went back to visit recently. There is so much money there now it's insane. You don't realize it until you live somewhere else, but there are so many expensive vehicles, the people in tshirts are in really expensive tshirts, all the buildings are freshly remodeled, the roads are smooth. It seems everyone there has bought into the California aesthetic. It's a beautiful place but everything is a bit unnervingly nice.
I have been seeing this in my hometown of Atlanta over some years since I moved away. Obviously the new wealth is absurdly imbalanced, but overall the economy is booming and every time I go home there's a bevy of new glass-and-steel condos and brand new Model Xs and Panameras outnumber Civics and Accords 10 to 1.
On the one hand I'm glad to see the city thriving, but on the other it feels inauthentic and the vast sums of money seem to strip the place of what makes it unique.
“It’s a common language,” says Buchman. “You have images of the ocean, sand, and pretty people smiling and laughing, and that’s universal.”
Yep, as everyone knows, California invented beaches. There were no "beach kids" before California, and everyone who grows up elsewhere on any coast is emulating southern California.
The particular form of beach kid immortalized (to the extent of maybe a few decades more) on californian beaches
Which is a style replicated, distinctly with the californian beach in mind, in other locales
Obviously not because californian beaches were the pinnacle of beaches, but because the media treated it as such, and entered a positive feedback loop to entrench its (current) position there
In the same way, the East Coast has beaches are associated with yuppies and yatchs, and the hawaiins with hawaiins and tourists
Its an image ingrained within the American conciousness; regardless of whatever "true" merit it might have, the descriptive language is universal (to all who consume american media, and media deriving from it).
There is reality, and then there is the image of reality. The image is a snapshot of reality in a particular slice of time, typically superimposed across time and space.
At best, it covers the majority of the relevant space, for the relevant time.
At worst, it's a hyperexaggerated representation of reality, possibly one that is hoped to exist (but does not), from a minor section of the world applied to a much, much larger area.
But neither I nor this article (and marketing in general, as does much of the arts) does not speak of reality. This is a discussion of the image, shared between most of the country. (Reality itself is only shared between those happen to percieve it, and that is rarely more than a very minor subset of the population that has access to the image)
Thus: it isn't relevant what New Jersey is really like. It is how New Jersey is perceived that matters. (Which I may still be wrong about; I can't say I know much about people's image of NJ).
Seaside "beach kid" here, our beach culture is most definitely NOT any of that shit. Sure, it exists as an outlier (some of the families have owned property down here forever, super wealthy, etc), but the main things that come to mind for beach culture are just the simple things like the boardwalk, beach, and the local shops.
The yuppies and yachts mostly come from NY and elsewhere ;)
Yeah, in childhood my family used to go to New Jersey beaches in the summer. A solidly middle class experience. And nothing like a certain reality TV series either, which unfairly gave it a bad name.
> Mine starts at birth, in San Diego. [...]. I realized that California didn’t belong to me soon after moving out East.
I was also born and raised in San Diego, but left ten years ago, and it feels weirder and weirder every time I go back. Meanwhile, everywhere I am in the world—Thailand, Kenya, Bulgaria, England, etc—I see California t-shirts or hear Tupac rapping about California on the radio. So I've also felt and wondered about the myth (legend?) of "California" over this time. :)
I'm not really sure where this idea of a laid back California comes from... in my general experience people seem way more agro on BART and Muni and around the bay than in NYC. Hell, even in LA when going out for drinks bouncers and such seem way more keyed up than on the east coast (or the north west).
Californian here. Completely opposite experience, especially SoCal vs the Northeast. NYC, Boston, northern Virginia, etc...always seemed like people were much more uptight and kept to themselves. Boston especially, you seem to have to get through like 4 layers of rudeness/offputedness before people open up to you...which doesn't always seem worth it.
Meanwhile, going to a friends' party in San Diego or Los Angeles and I can walk out with 4 new friends/acquaintances, which lead to more invites and potential connections.
And the differences only get further expounded professionally. I regularly go to work in a T and jeans. Sometimes even board shorts, when summer gets toasty enough. I would never dream of doing any of that working for any companies I've interacted with on the East Coast. In fact, it's regularly something they'll bring up in conversation.
There's a plethora of reasons behind those differences and neither is necessarily bad, but that's where my opinion of "laid back" versus not stems from.
Anecdotal as well, I suppose, but my experience is similar. I grew up and lived in LA for 20 years, frequenting San Diego (SD) once or twice a year on average before moving there for about a year. I've been to some of the large cities (St. Louis, Newark, Boston, Detroit, NYC, Portland, San Francisco, Sacramento) and now live in Seattle. Northern California (NorCal) is very different from Southern California (SoCal), which itself is very different than any other place I've been to.
The sun, the sand, the year-round summer-like temperatures -- it all feeds into the lifestyle. This was much more pronounced in SD than in LA. I had trouble conversing with random people on the street or elsewhere in the Northeast or Northwest (Midwest was actually easier than SoCal).
The near-constant pleasantness of the weather encourages you to be more active and "out" more often. It was a very regular thing in SD to go watch sunsets on the beach (regardless of season) after work. The proximity to the border made it pretty hard to find a bad Mexican food place and the tacos -- oh, the tacos -- were amazing. There are whole companies (mostly startups) that brand themselves as a "go surf in the early morning, come to work later" sort of place. There certainly is a myth and sort of "magic" to it that I don't even think the movies and media capture.
> A more outgoing person might seem agro, if that's not what you're used to.
That was my experience coming from a large town/small city to bigger places. Random dude I don't know started talking to me, that put me on alert. It was stressful. Why is this guy talking to strangers? Is he crazy? Is he sizing me up to attack me? It did not feel laid back.
There's a stereotype of small towns as being places where everybody talks to everybody, but my hometown was big enough that you didn't know everybody, and people only talked to who they knew. Maybe in really small towns people talk to everybody because they know everybody, and in cities people talk to strangers because they're always surrounded by strangers, but what was familiar (and hence "laid back") to me in my upbringing was to ignore people you didn't know. If you were curious about someone you didn't know, you'd wait until they were gone and then ask your friend, "Do you know who that was?" Any interaction with a stranger would be preceded by a sincere apology and a REALLY good excuse.
While I see the merit to this article, keeping the 'whitewashing' theme alive in the public sphere, I have to say, with a twinge of regret, stuff like this helped put Trump in the White House.
Wouldn't your exact comment right now be considered unsubstantive since it's a redundant repeat of rules which should have already been read by the user?
Here's something substantive for you, you should really get to work on getting rid of the nonsense all caps rule or fix your lack of italics notation for Braille users. Every Braille user I've sent here laments your utter lack of disability conformity such as italics notation, things which real hackers should've been able to do from day one.
"X is why Trump got elected" is just lazy shorthand for "displays politics or social tendencies I don't like". Did Trump really get elected because of an over-abundance of online articles writing about whiteness and cultural identity? I highly doubt it. There are so much more obvious factors: a weak opponent, easily exploitable economic anxiety, being the "Change" candidate in a charged election. The parent's comment was lazy kneejerk thinking and the fact that I'm here defending a rebuttal to such triteness is indicative of the perverseness of modern civic 'discourse'
> Did Trump really get elected because of an over-abundance of ... writing about whiteness and cultural identity?
Yes, most emphatically. The white bread bowl of the Midwest is sick of driving 15 year old rusted out trucks and being told they need to support affirmative action, hearing all about how blacks were enslaved, Indians were driven off their lands and slaughtered. That guy driving to the Ford plant in his 15 year old rusted pick-up didn't do any of that. He doesn't see the connection between what happened then and why he should give more today. He's just sick of being told he's privileged.
Because he sure doesn't feel privileged. I know, I know, he probably got out of a speeding ticket somewhere, got the last chicken nuggets, the family practice doc hooked him up with another month of oxycontin, didn't have to pay sales tax at the gun store, whatever, yes, I'm sure he enjoyed moments of white privilege and didn't notice, but that's the nature of white privilege, isn't it? "Whitewashing" is quite pejorative, isn't it?
That subtext in all these 'we whitewashed X' articles, baked into magazines, newspapers, textbooks, has become a core unifying principle of the voters who elected Trump. Nationalism is cultural. Bannon is first and foremost a nationalist and speaks often of culture. Sessions was denied a federal court bench because of his history of racist statements. But he sure loves his country. Both of which probably helped him get elected to the Senate in Alabama. Do you suggest that Trump would have made it without Sessions, Miller (Sessions' former aide), and Bannon spoon feeding him a semi-coherent agenda?
The ugly currents of racism in America aren't going away any time soon. Racism's staying power comes from its paleolithic, evolutionary roots: other is danger. The concept of racism is about as close to the limbic system as civilization gets. And Trump and crew leveraged it to gain power and will continue to leverage it for at least the next 4 years.
Look, I'm a white guy in SoCal, I actually surf, but I grew up in Kansas and Nebraska, and I've lived all over. Man, there are a huge differences between life there and life here. And I'd argue that a lot of the East Coast, especially south of the Mason-Dixon line, is even worse.
But if anyone thinks another lashing is what the penitent need right now, just take a freaking pause. The 63% of America that's white is getting a little weary of it and the lesser minds in that 63% are voting en bloc for raving lunatics. It's not just Trump. It's the whole Republican ticket.
I grew up with this people. The left needs to find an agenda that includes the white guys in pickups who have been eating a baloney sandwiches and potato chips for lunch every day for the last 20 years and, if they're lucky, hope to continue eating baloney sandwiches for the next 30 years. They dream of sending their kids to college too.
> Racism's staying power comes from its paleolithic, evolutionary roots: other is danger.
Yes, but Americans seem exceptionally racist from an outside perspective, too. Not necessarily in the "people with a different skin color are inferior" sense but definitely in the "race is a meaningful way to group people and talk about interactions between groups of people".
To Americans race matters a lot (probably more so to "non-whites" than "whites"). Elsewhere (though of course not _everywhere_ else) it's just trivia: "Oh, you look different, where are you from originally?".
You've provided literally zero evidence for your assertion besides anecedata and some rhetoric plus pulling out one (one) statistic to make an empty point (if you did some digging you'd see a good portion of the 63% that voted for Trump voted for Obama too). Cool.
Feel free to choose your sources. Now, that said, it would be somewhat disingenuous to quote many numbers about who switched from Obama to Trump, since we use an Australian ballot system, and exit polls can't track individual behaviour longitudinally. I'm sure some people switched sides.
Also, you're on an internet forum. It's not like you have some inalienable right to random people on the internet providing you a fully researched dossier on the 2016 election outcomes in the next hour. Professionals will spend years parsing the results. Take a deep breath.
I had a good friend who was Spanish. His grandmother was so proud of him for being a Naval Officer. Then he married a Mexican girl and all his pictures disappeared from grandma's house.
Are you sure you're not conflating "Spanish" with "Hispanic"? As I recall, the two major systems for profiling ethnicity in America include "Latino" or "Hispanic" but definitely don't break out "Spanish".
