Thread by @wolftivy

Was talking to a friend the other day and this came up again. I'm going to refine the take:

"Based" is becoming what the boomer counterculture was. Radical and interesting at first, but rapidly taken over by imitators and yuppies and people for whom it's a fashion scene.

https://twitter.com/wolftivy/status/1406351612151357441

A fashion scene can definitely be the coolest underground social phenomenon, but it's just that.

The trouble is that because such a thing is so obviously a pile of resources for the taking, anything built on it will be fake, because fakers are faster than substance.

And this is the ultimate condemnation. Once its coolness of something becomes legible, it's all over. It's either already established with a centralized hierarchy (eg apple computing) or it's getting eaten by grifters and watered down (boomer counterculture).

In 40 years, uncool old people will be saying "based" and public aesthetics will be influenced by this brief period of cool cultural ferment. But it will be commercialized and recuperated like boomerism.

This isn't to be down on it, just to be realistic. Serious people shouldn't attach themselves to countercultural identities (nor mainstream), but rather to illegible substance that becomes established before it becomes well known.

Funny enough, apple actually came out of the boomer counterculture in a way, but by focusing on its own substance, and exploiting the thing as an aesthetic. And in the end it was apple (and Jobs), not boomerism, that made it work.

Another play is to be the Steve Jobs of based; build something real with substance, and throw out a big counterculture sail to catch that tailwind and accelerate it.

But this is ultimately just part of the commercial recuperation process; the original radicalism is ngmi.