What’s a Culture Snob to Do? | Hacker News Reader

What’s a Culture Snob to Do?

vanityfair.com

13 pointsrobg17 comments

I love how the author felt that he couldn't express his snobbish tastes on a train, so he wrote a whole article to name drop every esoteric book and play he wishes his audience to realize he's into.

is that Bathos? ....or Pathos!? ... no, Hubris!? That's the one!

[EDIT: Just finished reading the OP... From wikipedia Hubris: "a term used in modern English to indicate overweening pride, superciliousness, or arrogance, often resulting in fatal retribution or nemesis."

From OP: "An overgrown man-child and his precious collection can become a closed-loop co-dependency that functions as a moat"

I'm pretty sure that's a classic set up for Hubris? Well written piece methinks]

like some kind of irritating Three Musketeers

I might feel the same way if I didn't buy a Kindle specifically so people on the train couldn't see what I was reading.

Not out of any kind of principle or anything, I just don't want people knowing that every book I read has a dragon or a spaceship on the cover.

There was an article a while back about how the driving demographic for the sales of the Kindle is women who do not want everyone to know that they're reading bodice-ripper romance novels.

Maybe something like this could be a big seller in Japan, where riders may want to conceal the fact that they're reading tentacle porn. (Or maybe at this point, they just don't care.)

In a world where everything is digital and downloaded to players, Sturgeon's law will still hold sway. Except, instead of a 10:1 ratio, the dirt:truffle ratio might be even higher.

Display your culture (in the larger sense) by producing culture. Download knowledge into yourself. Cook. Tell stories. Play music. Write. Code. If you want to display your culture to strangers on the subway, go out to some website and make yourself a custom T-Shirt with an obscure quote.

"Consume the Minimum. Produce the Maximum!" -- The coders of Deck

" If you want to display your culture to strangers on the subway, go out to some website and make yourself a custom T-Shirt with an obscure quote."

Wait; so I can't just parade around in my faded PiL logo T-shirt anymore?

Wear whatever T-shirt you want. The more signifiers lose their meaning, the more we can get down to the business of being aware of culture directly.

I have a strangely immortal Jamaican Independence Day college party T-shirt (Bob Marley on it, of course) from 1982. Yes, it's real, yes it's that old, and yes, there's some sort of magic that keeps it young forever. It was already 10 years old when it was gifted to me.

Hoarding physical goods as a method of passively boasting is stupid. Good riddance to limited edition releases, and paying exorbitant prices for imported editions with special content.

If you're really into what you like, and want to 'show off', do something constructive. The Nine Inch Nails fan community is a great example: nincatalog.com and nintourhistory.com are crowdsourced and way cooler to check out (as a fellow fan) than a shelf of CDs and records at someone's house.

How the author managed to bang two pages out of this is a mystery to me.

A master's in English isn't earned for nothing..

Well, it's his job. I haven't read VF much since my mother-in-law quit subscribing, but I don't recall having much difficulty distinguishing it from (say) Communications of the ACM.

I found it quite entertaining, but that's because I'm a culture-snob too :p

The New Yorker would have had nine.

The New Yorker would have said more things than could have been fit into a paragraph. Say five pages of use and four of tripe. Here it was a good 95% garbage and another 3% quoting other people saying garbage.

Article consists of a 54 year old man glamorizing physical media in comparison to digital media.

I may live in a world where I no longer have the fun of meticulously organizing my album collection or noticing cute girls reading smart books on the transit system, but at least I'll be able to pack a hard drive and a couple gadgets with me instead of a whole U-Haul full of books and records whenever I want to move. As someone who's moved ten times in six years and wouldn't mind moving some more in the future, I don't mind reducing my data to a more efficient physical form.

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