{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "Give David Brooks all the shit you want but his concepts of \"patio man\" and \"bourgeois bohemians\" were, written in the moment,...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/185919104413/", "html": "

the-grey-tribe:

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kontextmaschine:

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Give David Brooks all the shit you want but his concepts of \u201cpatio man\u201d and \u201cbourgeois bohemians\u201d were, written in the moment, pretty insightful takes on the changing self-conception of the white (red AND blue) upper middle class in a time (mid 90s-2000s) when a self-assured white upper middle class was absolutely in the national drivers\u2019 seat

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Patio Man reminds me of the way Microsoft UX people used to create elaborate personas of potential users: \u201cBut would a Karen use the regex search feature?\u201c

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I remember a lot of this sort of profiling in the 90s-00s: Faith Popcorn-style trend analysts dividing us up into 12 broad types, political consultants declaring this election would be decided by the “angry white man” or the “security mom” or the “NASCAR dad”

Honestly might just have been the state of the art of market research at the time and now between GoogFace tracking and a generation that grew up with R and Stata we get too fine-grained to name every cluster

(proposal: machine learning on market analysis Powerpoint slides to build an AI that can name every cluster)

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