centrally-unplanned:

Speaking of Ye Old Internet, loved this article on Hipster Runoff, a 2010′s alt ‘blog’ on indie/hipster gossip, in relation to the fake-real trend of Indie Sleaze today. Honestly just great for showcasing how long-form articles, talking about music and culture, would back then organically use AOL IM tics like “I am trying to make ppl talk abt my blog” and “h8-wave-warketing”. This crew of new internet writers were texting-first, websites-second people and they just unapologetically dragged those norms with them.

Which I think makes sense when that generation of writers were so flippantly apathetic to the idea of greater meaning beyond status games and internal aesthetics, as summed up one of the final essays by the founder of Hipster Runoff:

I am not a writer. I am not a blogger. I am a content farmer. These words mean more to the Google robot than they do 2 u. There is nothing exciting about writing, tweeting, or sharing opinions. I do not want to inspire any one to follow me into this dark prison, surrounded by a pile of memes, while I must sort thru them and spin them as ‘meaningful’, ‘interesting’, or whatever else will generate a pageview.

Which was not a ‘confession’ or a break of kayfabe, instead par for the course of the irony-filled Obama generation. As the article points out, for the current generation of internet discourse, when:

The culture we consume no longer tells us where we fall on the spectrum of ‘mainstream’ to ‘alt’; it tells us whether or not we’re a good person, whether we deserve good or bad things to come our way.

Well then you need to polish up your writing skills and shed the silly jargon for such a job of import, right?

(Also character limits on texts went away. That is like, 80% of it, kids wouldn’t get the joke now. But I mean, twitter brought that back to be vintage, so who knows)