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By Russel Walter - Nov 14, 2025
‘Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.’
—George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose (1945)
I was born on the border between Gen Y and Gen Z. I guess you could call me a Zillennial. But only a Millennial would call themselves a Zillennial. The term reeks of desperation. Desperation to remain adjacent to whatever generation is currently cool. And let’s face it, Millennials aren’t cool. They’re uncs. They’re cringe. They’re chopped.
And yet, the term Zillennial isn’t altogether useless. Because there is something distinct about growing up in that liminal space. You know both generations well, but fit into neither neatly. For example, I associate the lumberjack aesthetic with people older than me, and Y2K nostalgia with people younger than me.
As a Zillennial (yes, I’m going to say it), I think I am uniquely positioned to dissect the differences between Gen Y and Gen Z.
Recently, Sebastian Jensen wrote a piece titled Zoomers are the status-seeking generation, in which he argues that Gen Z are more status obsessed than Gen Y. I disagree. Gen Z aren’t more status-obsessed. They simply seek status in a more transparent way.
Millennials pursued status implicitly through ‘taste’ (arthouse films, Moleskine notebooks, natty wines). Gen Z pursues status explicitly through universally legible symbols (money, muscles, clout). This explicitness makes Gen Z appear more status-obsessed, but they’ve just dropped the pretense that Millennials maintained.
In this essay, I want to explore the generational shift from implicit (Gen Y) to explicit (Gen Z) status-seeking.
Millennial Apologia
You may have noticed that Millennials have become a much maligned generation. There’s no shortage of essays cataloging their failures and ‘quirky’ affectations. I myself have contributed to this burgeoning genre of generational schadenfreude (see here, here, and here). I get it. Arrested development. Girlboss feminism. Unironically using words like ‘doggos’ and ‘adulting’. All extremely pathetic. All extremely painful. All extremely Millennial.
But I want to interrupt the regularly scheduled programming to say something nice about Millennials. More precisely, I want to argue that their implicit status-seeking through taste made them a culturally generative generation.
Millennials were raised by Boomers, the most prosperous generation in human history. When prosperity is common, it stops being impressive. Nobody at my high school wanted to be a corporate lawyer. In fact, nobody wanted to be corporate anything. They wanted to be journalists, artists, musicians, teachers, graphic designers, maybe work for a nonprofit or an NGO. If they did want to be a lawyer, it was a human rights lawyer (i.e., the sort of person who fights for indigenous water rights in Ngarrindjeri Country).
I don’t think this was just my social milieu. It was part of a broader generational trend. Millennials valued cultural capital over economic capital because we were raised in a solidly middle-class environment. When prosperity is widespread, it loses its cachet. So taste, rather than money, became the primary status marker.
Taste is the ability to discern quality. Little Roquefort cheese morsels wrapped in crushed nuts are tasty. A quarter pounder is not. À rebours is literature. Twilight is not. Barry Lyndon is kino. The Avengers is not.
A very tasteful bookshelf.
In an ecology where taste was the primary status marker, the hipster rose to the top. By mastering the art of discernment, he became the apex Millennial.
The term hipster was first popularised by Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay, The White Negroe: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. The hipster, according to Mailer, rejected postwar conformity by becoming a wigga. He listened to jazz, lived dangerously, and relinquished ‘the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body.’ He ‘absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.’
The existentialist synapses of the Negro! How profound! How deep! How deeply profoundly deep!
Of course, the hipster that Mailer described is different from the Millennial hipster of the 2000s and 2010s. But it should be clear why the people of Williamsburg adopted the moniker. Like the hipsters of the 50s, they rejected mass-market conformity, and were obsessed with all things foreign. All things exotic. All things, dare I say, negro. To quote Alan Schmidt:
This irresistible curiosity for the other expressed itself most obviously in hipster culinary culture. Hipsters loved pho, ramen, laksa, bánh mì, etc.
‘We’re going to get injera.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You’ve never heard of injera? It’s an Ethiopian pancake that’s sour, spongy, and covered in mushy beans. It’s so tasty.’
You suspect that McDonald’s would be tastier. But you recognize that this suspicion is indicative of poor taste. So you eat the sour, fermented pancake covered in lentil slop, and you scream, ‘MMMmmmm, so YUMMY!’
For the hipsters, food wasn’t just food. It was a way to signal worldliness and cultural capital. They competed in an arms race of taste, and this competition sparked a culinary renaissance. Hipsters were pioneers in the third wave of coffee. They obsessed over roast profiles, bean origins, and extraction methods. They applied similar obsessiveness to craft beer, natural wine, artisanal bread, farmer’s markets, and the much maligned millennial burger (which, if we’re being honest, is really quite good). To quote Alan Schmidt once again, ‘while much of the restaurant scene was performative, it allowed non-chains with good food to get the attention they deserved.’
Listening to some hipster pontificate about pour-over ratios or barrel-aged imperial stouts might be tedious. But it’s undeniable that this obsession with taste raised the baseline quality of everything. Coffee got better, restaurants got better, beer got better.
For the hipster, every aspect of cultural life became an arena for status competition. Music, especially, was subject to a taste hierarchy. Nowhere was this taste hierarchy more ruthlessly codified than at Pitchfork Media, the indie music publication. Pitchfork became the ultimate arbiter of what was ‘authentic’ (that much-beloved Millennial adjective) and what was vapid, cliché, cookie-cutter. To quote W. David Marx:
Naturally, the shameful bombs were the albums most beloved by the hoi polloi. Popularity was damning evidence of poor taste. Listening to pop music was like eating McDonald’s. Totally gauche. Totally déclassé. Totally prole-coded. To quote the former Pitchfork journalist, Nick Sylvester:
Taste-makers acted as a bulwark against pop culture’s homogenizing force. While Top 40 radio played whatever focus groups said would sell, the indie ecosystem championed artists like Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Four Tet, Caribou, LCD Soundsystem, Radiohead, John Maus, and Ariel Pink. By being aggressively anti-populist, hipsters created space for art that was weird, experimental, and uncompromising.
The hipster obsession with taste extended to every domain of cultural life. In the words of Sam Kriss, ‘The hipster was an information-sorting algorithm: its job was to always have good taste.’
Of course, this status-seeking through taste was insufferably pretentious. Pretentiousness, as the etymology suggests, comes from pretense, or pretending. The hipster had to pretend he wasn’t seeking status. He just liked Soviet cinema. It had nothing to do with signaling sophistication.
Hipsters scorned overt status symbols, like sports cars, designer labels, and big muscles. They pursued status covertly through taste. This obscurantism, while pretentious, was culturally generative. It forced millennials to sublimate their competitive drives into learning, creating, and discerning.
Twilight of the Hipsters
The hipster is now a maligned figure. Nobody wants to be a hipster. Not even hipsters want to be hipsters.
What happened?
They were, in large part, victims of their own success. A subculture defined by opposition to the mainstream became mainstream. The affectations and habits of upper-middle-class kids from Williamsburg were adopted by middle-class kids from the suburbs. Hipster beliefs and shibboleths were adopted in ways that were zany and off-kilter, and the result was often disturbing and uncanny. Edison bulbs, mason jars, and pour over coffee in... Ohio. Ohio!? Do you really want to be associated with those people?
Of course, Edison bulbs, mason jars, and pour-over coffee didn’t just spread to the suburbs of Ohio. They spread everywhere and anywhere. The fixie, flannel, and artisanal pickle could be found in Portland, Austin, Berlin, Melbourne, London, and eventually, every second-tier city in the western world.
The hipster aesthetic was supposed to signal individuality. But everyone was trying to be individualistic in the exact same way. The mathematician and neuroscientist, Jonathan Touboul, called this the hipster effect. To quote him, ‘Trying hard to be different often ends up in hipsters consistently taking the same decisions, in other words all looking alike.’
Hipsters complained about the imitative behavior of mainstream society while simultaneously engaging in widespread imitative behavior themselves. This hypocrisy was fatal to a subculture built on ‘authenticity’.
The hipster, once celebrated for authenticity, began to be dismissed as performative. No, you don’t actually like Tarkovsky. You’re just a pretentious little status-seeker.
Poptimists & Performative Males
The word ‘performative’ has become a staple in the Zoomer lexicon. It is a Gen Z pejorative used to describe someone who is fake, inauthentic, and pretentious. It gained traction in 2024, when a photo of a man reading on a window ledge went viral. It was captioned ‘U r not a vibe bro’, and he was lampooned for being a ‘performative male.
The term performative male is sometimes used in a narrow sense to describe Gen Z men who embrace female interests (astrology, Sally Rooney, feminist literature) because they are interested in embracing females. In other words, because they want pussy. They go to therapy, they’re into ethical non-monogamy, and their love language is touch.
But more broadly, the term ‘performative male’ is used to describe people who seek status implicitly through taste. This strategy worked for Millennial hipsters, but it doesn’t seem to work for Zoomers. For example, a Millennial man photographed reading Stendhal in public might have ended up on Hot Dudes Reading. But if a Zoomer is photographed doing the exact same thing, he is more likely to end up in a TikTok cringe compilation.
How did this happen? How did taste become distasteful?
I think it can be attributed, in part, to the rise of poptimism. Poptimism was a reaction to the aggressive anti-populism of the hipsters. Poptimists argued that taste-makers (à la Pitchfork) dismissed pop music simply because it was popular. In other words, hipsters were cultural aristocrats who had contempt for the populus. They obfuscated this aristocratic contempt by talking about lyrical depth, sonic experimentation, and 'dreamy guitar work’.
The poptimists loved to point out that hipsters were overwhelmingly white, educated, and upper-middle-class (never mind that they themselves were overwhelmingly white, educated, and upper-middle-class). Meanwhile, the music they dismissed (R&B, rap) was often by and for minorities.
In short, the poptimists argued that the taste hierarchy was just a racial and class hierarchy. There was no ‘high culture’ and ‘low culture’, there was just high people and low people. And the high used ‘taste’ as a tool of cultural authoritarianism against the low.
No, Nicholas Jaar isn’t more elevated than Nicki Minaj. He doesn’t operate at some higher register of prestige or sophistication. And if you think otherwise, you’re a snob. Worse still, you’re a racist, sexist, classist snob.
That, at the very least, was the opinion of the poptimists. It was a stupid and sanctimonious opinion. And yet, it became totally dominant in the 2010s. To quote Freddie deBoer:
So the hipsters abandoned their snobbery, and embraced poptimism. The Pitchfork music critic, Matt LeMay, even apologised for his ‘condescending and cringey’ reviews, which further propagated the elitist ethos that ‘indie rock good / pop music bad.’
Pitchfork itself became one of the most relentless and hectoring proponents of poptimism. By 2011, their ‘best songs’ list had Nicki Minaj’s ‘Super Bass’ at number 4, while Nicholas Jaar’s track ‘Space is Only Noise if You Can See’ trailed at 44. And what did the esteemed critics at Pitchfork have to say about ‘Super Bass’?
The carbonated beat! The perfect alchemy of idiosyncrasy and pop appeal! The existentialist synapses of the Negro!
Poptimism was part of a broader left-wing assault on the notion of taste. In the academy, canonical writers—such as Homer, Shakespeare, and Goethe—were dismissed as ‘Dead White Males.’ Similar attacks occurred in the visual arts, architecture, and cinema.
Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. So dead! So white! So male!
The zeitgeist now proclaims, ‘just let people enjoy things.’ We are sick and tired of arthouse cinema, canonical literature, and obscure indie bands. We are sick and tired of hipsters and performative males! But perhaps, when they’re gone, we will miss them. To quote Freddie deBoer once again:
This raises the question, what is the opposite of a performative male? What is the opposite of a hipster? What is the equal and opposite type of person?
The Rise of the Cloutocracy
Unlike Millennials, Zoomers never experienced life without social media. Tech companies have been strip-mining their limbic systems since birth. Their most ooga booga drives—lust, envy, and the desire for tribal recognition—have been exploited for ad revenue.
Social media has intensified status competition. Our ancestors competed for status with maybe 150 people (à la Dunbar). Now, Zoomers compete with the entire world. Between 2005 and 2021, the internet grew from one billion users to over five billion. Every class, creed, and continent now competes for status in the same arena.
This competition is quantified and gamified. Metrics like likes, comments, and followers provide real-time feedback on each user’s position in the global village. To quote Will Storr:
When status competition becomes global, subtle signals get lost in translation. Reading Patrick White signals sophistication in Australia, but nobody outside of Australia knows who he is. By contrast, even a Pakistani goat herder knows what a Bugatti is.
I think Zoomers gravitate towards low-complexity status symbols, like Bugattis and defined deltoids, because they’re universally legible. You don’t need any cultural literacy to decode them.
Another reason Zoomers favor these low-complexity signals is because they lack the attention span to appreciate the high-complexity ones. As Sebastian Jensen points out, Zoomers read less than previous generations and dominate shortform platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram. These shortform platforms fundamentally change the way that people seek status. When a global audience is scrolling at high speed, signals must be immediately comprehensible. They must, in other words, be explicit rather than implicit. As a consequence, Gen Z pursues status much more explicitly than Gen Y.
Gen Z also talks about status much more openly, a shift that is reflected in their lexicon. Mid. Mogg. Chad. Clout. These words are used to discuss status in an unapologetically explicit way. Millennials, by contrast, always maintained an egalitarian pretense, and considered it gauche to talk about status openly.
Furthermore, taste can’t serve as a strong status signal when curation has been algorithmically automated. The hipster had to invest real time and effort into developing their taste. Now, Spotify’s algorithm will generate a perfectly curated playlist of obscure indie bands. In other words, taste has become easy to fake. And when a signal becomes easy to fake, it loses its value as a signal. The hipster, that ‘information sorting algorithm’, has been replaced by actual algorithms.
Poptimism. Globalisation. Shortform content. Algorithmic curation. All these forces have conspired to undermine taste. I think clout, rather than taste, is now the primary status marker.
This brings us back to the question posed earlier on. Namely, what is the opposite of a hipster? What is the opposite of a performative male? The answer, in my opinion, is the cloutocrat.
The cloutocrat is someone who seeks status explicitly rather than implicitly. Their lack of pretentiousness is, in many ways, refreshing. But I think the cloutocrats will ultimately make us nostalgic for the hipsters, theatre kids, and even–dare I say–the performative males.
Was St. Jerome a performative male?
Conclusion
I am not a Zillenial. I am a proud Millenial. And as a proud Millenial, I feel obligated to defend the ‘cultural authoritarianism’ of taste. Taste is a bulwark against the forces of commercialism, which are constantly conspiring to turn culture into fast food. Commercialist kitsch, like fast food, is mass-produced, hyper-palatable, and extremely bad for you.
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM! You got that super bass. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM! You got that super bass.
The high-fructose corn syrup carbonated beat!
You should feel embarrassed to listen to this music. But the cultural zeitgeist proclaims, ‘just let people enjoy things.’ So people enjoy Marvel, McGriddles, and Nicki Minaj. In the absence of taste hierarchies, culture defaults to the lowest common denominator.
Nowhere is this more apparent than on shortform platforms. These platforms incentivize creators to aim for quantity over quality. Consequently, there’s no incentive to create, or celebrate, culture with high symbolic complexity. So Zoomers gravitate toward the explicit over the implicit, the universal over the obscure, the quantifiable over the qualitative.
Contra Sebastian Jensen, Gen Z aren’t more status-obsessed than Millennials. They’re simply playing a different status game. Millennials obscured their status competitions and pretended they cared about art for art’s sake. Gen Z dropped the pretense and pursued status explicitly.
By Russel Walter - Nov 14, 2025
‘Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.’
—George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose (1945)
I was born on the border between Gen Y and Gen Z. I guess you could call me a Zillennial. But only a Millennial would call themselves a Zillennial. The term reeks of desperation. Desperation to remain adjacent to whatever generation is currently cool. And let’s face it, Millennials aren’t cool. They’re uncs. They’re cringe. They’re chopped.
And yet, the term Zillennial isn’t altogether useless. Because there is something distinct about growing up in that liminal space. You know both generations well, but fit into neither neatly. For example, I associate the lumberjack aesthetic with people older than me, and Y2K nostalgia with people younger than me.
As a Zillennial (yes, I’m going to say it), I think I am uniquely positioned to dissect the differences between Gen Y and Gen Z.
Recently, Sebastian Jensen wrote a piece titled Zoomers are the status-seeking generation, in which he argues that Gen Z are more status obsessed than Gen Y. I disagree. Gen Z aren’t more status-obsessed. They simply seek status in a more transparent way.
Millennials pursued status implicitly through ‘taste’ (arthouse films, Moleskine notebooks, natty wines). Gen Z pursues status explicitly through universally legible symbols (money, muscles, clout). This explicitness makes Gen Z appear more status-obsessed, but they’ve just dropped the pretense that Millennials maintained.
In this essay, I want to explore the generational shift from implicit (Gen Y) to explicit (Gen Z) status-seeking.
Millennial Apologia
You may have noticed that Millennials have become a much maligned generation. There’s no shortage of essays cataloging their failures and ‘quirky’ affectations. I myself have contributed to this burgeoning genre of generational schadenfreude (see here, here, and here). I get it. Arrested development. Girlboss feminism. Unironically using words like ‘doggos’ and ‘adulting’. All extremely pathetic. All extremely painful. All extremely Millennial.
But I want to interrupt the regularly scheduled programming to say something nice about Millennials. More precisely, I want to argue that their implicit status-seeking through taste made them a culturally generative generation.
Millennials were raised by Boomers, the most prosperous generation in human history. When prosperity is common, it stops being impressive. Nobody at my high school wanted to be a corporate lawyer. In fact, nobody wanted to be corporate anything. They wanted to be journalists, artists, musicians, teachers, graphic designers, maybe work for a nonprofit or an NGO. If they did want to be a lawyer, it was a human rights lawyer (i.e., the sort of person who fights for indigenous water rights in Ngarrindjeri Country).
I don’t think this was just my social milieu. It was part of a broader generational trend. Millennials valued cultural capital over economic capital because we were raised in a solidly middle-class environment. When prosperity is widespread, it loses its cachet. So taste, rather than money, became the primary status marker.
Taste is the ability to discern quality. Little Roquefort cheese morsels wrapped in crushed nuts are tasty. A quarter pounder is not. À rebours is literature. Twilight is not. Barry Lyndon is kino. The Avengers is not.
A very tasteful bookshelf.
In an ecology where taste was the primary status marker, the hipster rose to the top. By mastering the art of discernment, he became the apex Millennial.
The term hipster was first popularised by Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay, The White Negroe: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. The hipster, according to Mailer, rejected postwar conformity by becoming a wigga. He listened to jazz, lived dangerously, and relinquished ‘the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body.’ He ‘absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.’
The existentialist synapses of the Negro! How profound! How deep! How deeply profoundly deep!
Of course, the hipster that Mailer described is different from the Millennial hipster of the 2000s and 2010s. But it should be clear why the people of Williamsburg adopted the moniker. Like the hipsters of the 50s, they rejected mass-market conformity, and were obsessed with all things foreign. All things exotic. All things, dare I say, negro. To quote Alan Schmidt:
This irresistible curiosity for the other expressed itself most obviously in hipster culinary culture. Hipsters loved pho, ramen, laksa, bánh mì, etc.
‘We’re going to get injera.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You’ve never heard of injera? It’s an Ethiopian pancake that’s sour, spongy, and covered in mushy beans. It’s so tasty.’
You suspect that McDonald’s would be tastier. But you recognize that this suspicion is indicative of poor taste. So you eat the sour, fermented pancake covered in lentil slop, and you scream, ‘MMMmmmm, so YUMMY!’
For the hipsters, food wasn’t just food. It was a way to signal worldliness and cultural capital. They competed in an arms race of taste, and this competition sparked a culinary renaissance. Hipsters were pioneers in the third wave of coffee. They obsessed over roast profiles, bean origins, and extraction methods. They applied similar obsessiveness to craft beer, natural wine, artisanal bread, farmer’s markets, and the much maligned millennial burger (which, if we’re being honest, is really quite good). To quote Alan Schmidt once again, ‘while much of the restaurant scene was performative, it allowed non-chains with good food to get the attention they deserved.’
Listening to some hipster pontificate about pour-over ratios or barrel-aged imperial stouts might be tedious. But it’s undeniable that this obsession with taste raised the baseline quality of everything. Coffee got better, restaurants got better, beer got better.
For the hipster, every aspect of cultural life became an arena for status competition. Music, especially, was subject to a taste hierarchy. Nowhere was this taste hierarchy more ruthlessly codified than at Pitchfork Media, the indie music publication. Pitchfork became the ultimate arbiter of what was ‘authentic’ (that much-beloved Millennial adjective) and what was vapid, cliché, cookie-cutter. To quote W. David Marx:
Naturally, the shameful bombs were the albums most beloved by the hoi polloi. Popularity was damning evidence of poor taste. Listening to pop music was like eating McDonald’s. Totally gauche. Totally déclassé. Totally prole-coded. To quote the former Pitchfork journalist, Nick Sylvester:
Taste-makers acted as a bulwark against pop culture’s homogenizing force. While Top 40 radio played whatever focus groups said would sell, the indie ecosystem championed artists like Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Four Tet, Caribou, LCD Soundsystem, Radiohead, John Maus, and Ariel Pink. By being aggressively anti-populist, hipsters created space for art that was weird, experimental, and uncompromising.
The hipster obsession with taste extended to every domain of cultural life. In the words of Sam Kriss, ‘The hipster was an information-sorting algorithm: its job was to always have good taste.’
Of course, this status-seeking through taste was insufferably pretentious. Pretentiousness, as the etymology suggests, comes from pretense, or pretending. The hipster had to pretend he wasn’t seeking status. He just liked Soviet cinema. It had nothing to do with signaling sophistication.
Hipsters scorned overt status symbols, like sports cars, designer labels, and big muscles. They pursued status covertly through taste. This obscurantism, while pretentious, was culturally generative. It forced millennials to sublimate their competitive drives into learning, creating, and discerning.
Twilight of the Hipsters
The hipster is now a maligned figure. Nobody wants to be a hipster. Not even hipsters want to be hipsters.
What happened?
They were, in large part, victims of their own success. A subculture defined by opposition to the mainstream became mainstream. The affectations and habits of upper-middle-class kids from Williamsburg were adopted by middle-class kids from the suburbs. Hipster beliefs and shibboleths were adopted in ways that were zany and off-kilter, and the result was often disturbing and uncanny. Edison bulbs, mason jars, and pour over coffee in... Ohio. Ohio!? Do you really want to be associated with those people?
Of course, Edison bulbs, mason jars, and pour-over coffee didn’t just spread to the suburbs of Ohio. They spread everywhere and anywhere. The fixie, flannel, and artisanal pickle could be found in Portland, Austin, Berlin, Melbourne, London, and eventually, every second-tier city in the western world.
The hipster aesthetic was supposed to signal individuality. But everyone was trying to be individualistic in the exact same way. The mathematician and neuroscientist, Jonathan Touboul, called this the hipster effect. To quote him, ‘Trying hard to be different often ends up in hipsters consistently taking the same decisions, in other words all looking alike.’
Hipsters complained about the imitative behavior of mainstream society while simultaneously engaging in widespread imitative behavior themselves. This hypocrisy was fatal to a subculture built on ‘authenticity’.
The hipster, once celebrated for authenticity, began to be dismissed as performative. No, you don’t actually like Tarkovsky. You’re just a pretentious little status-seeker.
Poptimists & Performative Males
The word ‘performative’ has become a staple in the Zoomer lexicon. It is a Gen Z pejorative used to describe someone who is fake, inauthentic, and pretentious. It gained traction in 2024, when a photo of a man reading on a window ledge went viral. It was captioned ‘U r not a vibe bro’, and he was lampooned for being a ‘performative male.
The term performative male is sometimes used in a narrow sense to describe Gen Z men who embrace female interests (astrology, Sally Rooney, feminist literature) because they are interested in embracing females. In other words, because they want pussy. They go to therapy, they’re into ethical non-monogamy, and their love language is touch.
But more broadly, the term ‘performative male’ is used to describe people who seek status implicitly through taste. This strategy worked for Millennial hipsters, but it doesn’t seem to work for Zoomers. For example, a Millennial man photographed reading Stendhal in public might have ended up on Hot Dudes Reading. But if a Zoomer is photographed doing the exact same thing, he is more likely to end up in a TikTok cringe compilation.
How did this happen? How did taste become distasteful?
I think it can be attributed, in part, to the rise of poptimism. Poptimism was a reaction to the aggressive anti-populism of the hipsters. Poptimists argued that taste-makers (à la Pitchfork) dismissed pop music simply because it was popular. In other words, hipsters were cultural aristocrats who had contempt for the populus. They obfuscated this aristocratic contempt by talking about lyrical depth, sonic experimentation, and 'dreamy guitar work’.
The poptimists loved to point out that hipsters were overwhelmingly white, educated, and upper-middle-class (never mind that they themselves were overwhelmingly white, educated, and upper-middle-class). Meanwhile, the music they dismissed (R&B, rap) was often by and for minorities.
In short, the poptimists argued that the taste hierarchy was just a racial and class hierarchy. There was no ‘high culture’ and ‘low culture’, there was just high people and low people. And the high used ‘taste’ as a tool of cultural authoritarianism against the low.
No, Nicholas Jaar isn’t more elevated than Nicki Minaj. He doesn’t operate at some higher register of prestige or sophistication. And if you think otherwise, you’re a snob. Worse still, you’re a racist, sexist, classist snob.
That, at the very least, was the opinion of the poptimists. It was a stupid and sanctimonious opinion. And yet, it became totally dominant in the 2010s. To quote Freddie deBoer:
So the hipsters abandoned their snobbery, and embraced poptimism. The Pitchfork music critic, Matt LeMay, even apologised for his ‘condescending and cringey’ reviews, which further propagated the elitist ethos that ‘indie rock good / pop music bad.’
Pitchfork itself became one of the most relentless and hectoring proponents of poptimism. By 2011, their ‘best songs’ list had Nicki Minaj’s ‘Super Bass’ at number 4, while Nicholas Jaar’s track ‘Space is Only Noise if You Can See’ trailed at 44. And what did the esteemed critics at Pitchfork have to say about ‘Super Bass’?
The carbonated beat! The perfect alchemy of idiosyncrasy and pop appeal! The existentialist synapses of the Negro!
Poptimism was part of a broader left-wing assault on the notion of taste. In the academy, canonical writers—such as Homer, Shakespeare, and Goethe—were dismissed as ‘Dead White Males.’ Similar attacks occurred in the visual arts, architecture, and cinema.
Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. So dead! So white! So male!
The zeitgeist now proclaims, ‘just let people enjoy things.’ We are sick and tired of arthouse cinema, canonical literature, and obscure indie bands. We are sick and tired of hipsters and performative males! But perhaps, when they’re gone, we will miss them. To quote Freddie deBoer once again:
This raises the question, what is the opposite of a performative male? What is the opposite of a hipster? What is the equal and opposite type of person?
The Rise of the Cloutocracy
Unlike Millennials, Zoomers never experienced life without social media. Tech companies have been strip-mining their limbic systems since birth. Their most ooga booga drives—lust, envy, and the desire for tribal recognition—have been exploited for ad revenue.
Social media has intensified status competition. Our ancestors competed for status with maybe 150 people (à la Dunbar). Now, Zoomers compete with the entire world. Between 2005 and 2021, the internet grew from one billion users to over five billion. Every class, creed, and continent now competes for status in the same arena.
This competition is quantified and gamified. Metrics like likes, comments, and followers provide real-time feedback on each user’s position in the global village. To quote Will Storr:
When status competition becomes global, subtle signals get lost in translation. Reading Patrick White signals sophistication in Australia, but nobody outside of Australia knows who he is. By contrast, even a Pakistani goat herder knows what a Bugatti is.
I think Zoomers gravitate towards low-complexity status symbols, like Bugattis and defined deltoids, because they’re universally legible. You don’t need any cultural literacy to decode them.
Another reason Zoomers favor these low-complexity signals is because they lack the attention span to appreciate the high-complexity ones. As Sebastian Jensen points out, Zoomers read less than previous generations and dominate shortform platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram. These shortform platforms fundamentally change the way that people seek status. When a global audience is scrolling at high speed, signals must be immediately comprehensible. They must, in other words, be explicit rather than implicit. As a consequence, Gen Z pursues status much more explicitly than Gen Y.
Gen Z also talks about status much more openly, a shift that is reflected in their lexicon. Mid. Mogg. Chad. Clout. These words are used to discuss status in an unapologetically explicit way. Millennials, by contrast, always maintained an egalitarian pretense, and considered it gauche to talk about status openly.
Furthermore, taste can’t serve as a strong status signal when curation has been algorithmically automated. The hipster had to invest real time and effort into developing their taste. Now, Spotify’s algorithm will generate a perfectly curated playlist of obscure indie bands. In other words, taste has become easy to fake. And when a signal becomes easy to fake, it loses its value as a signal. The hipster, that ‘information sorting algorithm’, has been replaced by actual algorithms.
Poptimism. Globalisation. Shortform content. Algorithmic curation. All these forces have conspired to undermine taste. I think clout, rather than taste, is now the primary status marker.
This brings us back to the question posed earlier on. Namely, what is the opposite of a hipster? What is the opposite of a performative male? The answer, in my opinion, is the cloutocrat.
The cloutocrat is someone who seeks status explicitly rather than implicitly. Their lack of pretentiousness is, in many ways, refreshing. But I think the cloutocrats will ultimately make us nostalgic for the hipsters, theatre kids, and even–dare I say–the performative males.
Was St. Jerome a performative male?
Conclusion
I am not a Zillenial. I am a proud Millenial. And as a proud Millenial, I feel obligated to defend the ‘cultural authoritarianism’ of taste. Taste is a bulwark against the forces of commercialism, which are constantly conspiring to turn culture into fast food. Commercialist kitsch, like fast food, is mass-produced, hyper-palatable, and extremely bad for you.
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM! You got that super bass. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM! You got that super bass.
The high-fructose corn syrup carbonated beat!
You should feel embarrassed to listen to this music. But the cultural zeitgeist proclaims, ‘just let people enjoy things.’ So people enjoy Marvel, McGriddles, and Nicki Minaj. In the absence of taste hierarchies, culture defaults to the lowest common denominator.
Nowhere is this more apparent than on shortform platforms. These platforms incentivize creators to aim for quantity over quality. Consequently, there’s no incentive to create, or celebrate, culture with high symbolic complexity. So Zoomers gravitate toward the explicit over the implicit, the universal over the obscure, the quantifiable over the qualitative.
Contra Sebastian Jensen, Gen Z aren’t more status-obsessed than Millennials. They’re simply playing a different status game. Millennials obscured their status competitions and pretended they cared about art for art’s sake. Gen Z dropped the pretense and pursued status explicitly.
