One can easily see parallels between the commoditization and commercialization of hipster culture & music, and the software industry. Being a software geek went from, as the article states, "being reprehensible to being the thing that everyone is doing." While I maybe wouldn't use the word reprehensible, it's certainly been my observation over the past few years that what was once seen as a hopelessly obsessive, almost autistic hobby or pasttime, has now been elevated to a signal of social status - even to the point where the first image in the article is of the cover of a pop magazine with the encouraging words, "You can learn to code at any age!"
More to the point, the practice of software craftsmanship, of hacking, has been commoditized and reduced to a means to extracting value out of the market, instead of the once subversive, countercultural, and even anticommercial hobby that it once was, practiced simply for the joy of programming. There is a palpable difference between the authenticity of a grizzled programmer who spent his early days implementing toy programs or cellular automata in obscure, completely impractical programming languages with almost no industry application; and the new "careerist" sort of software developer transplanted from a completely unrelated discipline, with no prior connection to geek culture, who puts on the airs of a computer geek so they too can get a slice of the tech industry pie, but comes across as a Big Bang Theory-esque facsimilie of what popular culture thinks geek culture is like. "Posers," as they might have been called in that bygone hipster era.
"Cultural Conformism" is the term introduced by the article to refer to the aesthetic of authenticity, beneath which no genuine article is to be found. We have labels, or symbols, like '"artisanship", "craft," "small-batch," "single-lot," and so on' which signal authenticity despite its absence: "hand-crafted Popeye's tenders."
More broadly this is just a continuation of the accelerating trend of postmodernism noted by thinkers such as Baudrillard in his description of what he called "third-order simulacra": symbols that "mask the absence of a profound reality" and are exchanged, not because those symbols actually represent or refer to anything genuine underneath, but because the symbols have come to take on value themselves as things or realities (Baudrillard would say, "hyperrealities") in their own right. Money and currency itself is a prime example of this phenomenon.
Once you understand this concept it becomes hard to unsee these marketing slogans, symbols like "small-batch chicken tenders" as anything but linguistic games, magickal incantations meant to evoke a reality that does not actually exist.
Elsewhere in this thread the concept of "profilicity" was introduced, and it is interesting to investigate the parallels between the third-order simulacra of "small-batch chicken tenders" and the aesthetic of authenticity; and the third-order simulacra of social media profiles which lend to the aesthetic of an actual person, but which actually "mask the absence of a profound reality," beneath which there is no actual "self" or "person" to be found - just pixels on a screen.
That third-order simulacra is really interesting. Fits social media like a glove: the metrics become the thing that drives engagement and content, so they become seen as legitimate to a public that once laughed at the concept of talking to other people on the Internet.
More to the point, the practice of software craftsmanship, of hacking, has been commoditized and reduced to a means to extracting value out of the market, instead of the once subversive, countercultural, and even anticommercial hobby that it once was, practiced simply for the joy of programming. There is a palpable difference between the authenticity of a grizzled programmer who spent his early days implementing toy programs or cellular automata in obscure, completely impractical programming languages with almost no industry application; and the new "careerist" sort of software developer transplanted from a completely unrelated discipline, with no prior connection to geek culture, who puts on the airs of a computer geek so they too can get a slice of the tech industry pie, but comes across as a Big Bang Theory-esque facsimilie of what popular culture thinks geek culture is like. "Posers," as they might have been called in that bygone hipster era.
"Cultural Conformism" is the term introduced by the article to refer to the aesthetic of authenticity, beneath which no genuine article is to be found. We have labels, or symbols, like '"artisanship", "craft," "small-batch," "single-lot," and so on' which signal authenticity despite its absence: "hand-crafted Popeye's tenders."
More broadly this is just a continuation of the accelerating trend of postmodernism noted by thinkers such as Baudrillard in his description of what he called "third-order simulacra": symbols that "mask the absence of a profound reality" and are exchanged, not because those symbols actually represent or refer to anything genuine underneath, but because the symbols have come to take on value themselves as things or realities (Baudrillard would say, "hyperrealities") in their own right. Money and currency itself is a prime example of this phenomenon.
Once you understand this concept it becomes hard to unsee these marketing slogans, symbols like "small-batch chicken tenders" as anything but linguistic games, magickal incantations meant to evoke a reality that does not actually exist.
Elsewhere in this thread the concept of "profilicity" was introduced, and it is interesting to investigate the parallels between the third-order simulacra of "small-batch chicken tenders" and the aesthetic of authenticity; and the third-order simulacra of social media profiles which lend to the aesthetic of an actual person, but which actually "mask the absence of a profound reality," beneath which there is no actual "self" or "person" to be found - just pixels on a screen.