Once upon a time in Canada, a weird little subculture was born.
In the early 1990s, a couple of Quebec publishers started a community newspaper as part of an employment program to supplement government welfare checks; they called it Voice of Montreal and filled it with local listings. Soon, three of its young staffers developed grander ambitions. They began selling ads in other Canadian cities, shortening the name of the paper to Voice, and eventually cut ties with the original publishers. By 1999, flush with cash from a Canadian software tycoon, Voice had become Vice and moved to New York City.
Vice eventually expanded into a media and branding juggernaut that included an HBO series and a raft of Emmys. But in the aughts it was mostly known as a glossy magazine that posed a defiant middle finger to the cultural mainstream. Vice’s sensibility was decadent and caustic, a welter of expensive drugs, cheap beer, porn-inspired sex and adolescent high jinks. A feature called Gross Jar offered intermittent updates on what was happening inside a jar whose foul contents included urine, pieces of raw chicken and an editor’s facial scabs.
But the giddy attacks on mainstream tastes were curdling into something darker. One of Vice’s founders, Gavin McInnes, learned that he could use racism and misogyny as reliable bits for generating outrage (“I think hate is great. It’s super!”). In McInnes’s hands, the magazine’s infatuation with trucker hats and Pabst Blue Ribbon looked like more than just trash-camp aesthetics. “I love being white and I think it’s something to be very proud of,” he told The Times in 2003. That was the same year he wrote an essay for Pat Buchanan’s The American Conservative depicting illiberalism as the last hipster frontier: “Suddenly it had become fashionable to link liberalism with weakness and conservatism with honesty.”
It was only a matter of time before McInnes’s cultural provocations spilled into the political realm. In 2008, he left Vice; eight years later, he founded the far-right paramilitary group the Proud Boys.
The strange story of Vice and McInnes is recounted in “Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century,” an ambitious new book by the culture writer W. David Marx. Vice and its hangers-on were “niche players” in a global culture dominated by polished superstars like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. But Marx identifies Vice as a key institution in a burgeoning “counter-counterculture” eager to distinguish itself from the mainstream by tacking increasingly right-wing.
In place of the bohemian idealism of previous countercultural movements, this counter-counterculture embraced cynicism, scoffing at inclusivity and progress. Marx traces a faint but discernible line from the ironic nihilism of these hipsters to the rank bigotry of the Groyper.
Ever since an unlikely coalition of conservative business owners, Christian evangelicals and alt-right edgelords first propelled Donald Trump into the White House in 2016, a growing body of literature has explored the once-fringe world of online extremists, finding a combustible mix of personal dejection, craving for attention and generalized revulsion at the world. In last year’s “Black Pill,” the award-winning journalist Elle Reeve (a correspondent for Vice’s series on HBO from 2016 to 2019) detailed the despairing logic behind this “gleeful nihilism”: “If the present reality is corrupt and dying, then you are no longer bound by its moral and ethical restraints. You are riding out the collapse of society. You can do anything.”
In “Blank Space,” Marx shifts the focus to the larger system that this reactionary subculture is railing against. His book charts the rise of a “pluralistic monoculture” that became synonymous with a liberal establishment — one that exalted inclusivity and commercial success, while taking its own dominance and appeal for granted.
This American mainstream was supposed to be so formidable that in 2024 Kamala Harris tried to sail into the highest office on a wave of celebrity endorsements. Yet megawatt star power couldn’t generate the energy her campaign needed; celebrity efforts like a get-out-the-vote video by the “Avengers” cast were roundly ridiculed as condescending, “cringe” and out-of-touch. The culture that had made these actors famous and rich felt sluggish and stale. A degraded media ecosystem selected for outrage and shamelessness. All of this softened the ground for the reactionary right.
‘Let People Enjoy Things’
It’s not as if the last quarter century has suffered from a lack of new material. Substack, YouTube, Instagram, SoundCloud — more content is being made and shared than ever before. Expensive barriers to entry have dwindled in the digital age. In 2004, Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, predicted that the market would no longer revolve around big hits but spread out across a “long tail” of niches.
We can now see that it didn’t work out that way. An endless stream of content inevitably bumped up against the limits of human attention. Moreover, despite so much frenetic activity, artistic innovation has become scarce. Compared with the burst of modernism of the early 20th century, in which a succession of avant-garde artists set out to push culture forward as a matter of course, the current moment keeps us circling around a whorl of content. Marx suggests that a scarcity of genuine cultural innovation — the “blank space” in his title (which is also the name of a Taylor Swift song) — has left us vulnerable to the fleeting seductions of ephemera and novelty.
In his book, Marx writes about restive Americans filling up on the junk food of NFTs and memes while the mainstream keeps pushing out warmed-over versions of bland comforts. Movie studios play it safe with sequels and reboots. Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain, hired a reporter whose entire beat consisted of Taylor Swift.
Big Tech clearly plays a role in this brave new world of timid familiarity. Kyle Chayka’s book “Filterworld” (2024) showed how algorithmic recommendations nudge people into a culture of “slick sameness.” But technological and economic imperatives are only part of the story. In “Blank Space,” as well as in Marx’s earlier book “Status and Culture” (2022), the moral dimension of his argument is inescapable: He laments a shift in “our cultural values toward neglecting, if not rejecting, cultural invention.”
This shift in values reflects in part a democratization of culture and criticism — a change that Marx concedes was long overdue. “Genius” is no longer a term of praise reserved for white men. In music criticism, an openness to the creative possibilities of all styles and genres means that rock is no longer treated as inherently superior to pop and R&B. Everyone can access every kind of art, at any time of day, on their phones.
But Marx notes that what started out as a call for receptivity and pluralism hardened into an ideology. Fans expected “not just tolerance for their taste but deference to it.” They issued death threats when a critic deigned to give their favorite pop star’s latest album a score of 8.0 out of 10. Catering to what people already knew they wanted became a reliable way of generating clicks for media companies, at a time when web metrics were a matter of survival.
Popularity became the supreme arbiter of value. Let people enjoy things went from a matter of etiquette to a moral command: If enough people liked something, it had to be great.
Not that this meant anything goes. Artists were still booted from the limelight, but disapproval often took on a political edge. At a time when uncompromising aesthetic pronouncements were associated with killjoys and snobs, “political denunciation became an effective means to clear out the old,” Marx writes. The bland liberalism of the monoculture closed ranks. Pop culture turned into an ideological battleground.
Disciples of a “vengeful illiberalism,” complaining about getting canceled, attacked liberals for hypocrisy. Right-wing culture warriors appropriated the lingo of the left, including the work of Antonio Gramsci, the long-dead Italian Communist, to attack liberalism’s “cultural hegemony.” Haters of all kinds found one another online, whatever it was they loathed — country music, female superheroes or a functioning, pluralist society.
The Audacity of Hate
During the early years of the Biden administration, after the twin shocks of the pandemic and Jan. 6, a collective ennui set in. With Trump (temporarily) in the wilderness, MAGA took the opportunity to amass forces for its unfinished cultural revolution. In 2022, Vanity Fair reported that anti-progressivism was becoming “quietly edgy and cool” among tech bros, while right-wing women had taken to wearing “demure” cross necklaces as a marker of “transgressive chic.” The host provocateurs of the “Red Scare” podcast, previously supporters of Bernie Sanders, started hanging out with Alex Jones.
In this milieu, a coherent worldview was secondary to shared revulsions. A market had opened up for illiberal transgressions, no matter how banal and empty. According to Marx, cultural inertia accelerated this development. “We see how this cultural stagnation has political consequences,” he writes, adding that the MAGA movement’s “rejection of liberal values” had been taking shape in a reactionary subculture that seized on a vacuum in the mainstream. “This long-term project to rebrand conservatism as cool and transgressive succeeded precisely because we removed cultural invention as a potential countervailing force.”
It’s tempting for anyone who cares deeply about culture to believe that stasis leads inexorably to political crisis. But is it true? Would more innovation necessarily lead to greater appreciation for pluralist democracy? It’s not as if the modernism that Marx wistfully cites provided a “countervailing force” that made the first half of the 20th century any less authoritarian or violent (and some modernists, like Ezra Pound, were thrilled by fascism). Are the young extremists who happily swallow the technomonarchical dross of Curtis Yarvin really hungering for a new Proust?
Besides, complaining about mass culture is a longstanding critical tradition. There is something (ironically) old-fashioned about Marx’s conclusions: He yearns for the kind of hierarchical judgments that used to be the purview of cranky mid-20th-century critics like Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald. At the same time, Marx’s big, categorical statements stand out because he’s one of the few people right now willing to make them. He’s engaging in the risk-taking that he calls for in his book.
“With creators no longer required to pursue artistic excellence,” Marx writes, “culture became a lowest-common-denominator battle for attention.” So far, the counter-countercultural right has most notably excelled in the attention-getting forms of memes and A.I. slop. But celebrating brutality from the margins is not the same as celebrating brutality from the center of power. What might look edgy in the recesses of 4chan looks craven when blasted from official U.S. government accounts. Maybe the fatuousness of such gambits will accomplish what the hapless “Avengers” could not: Make cruelty cringe again.
Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.
The post Pop Culture Got Stale. Counterculture Went Right-Wing. appeared first on New York Times.
