Class War Created the Performative Male

Or, how we accrue status in the absence of social mobility

via Baylor Lariat

Through the life of the ‘performative male’ trend, I’ve seen precisely two pieces of content that are actually funny, and even enlightening. Brian Park’s not-problematic-but-insufferable New York Creative Strategist you’re stuck on a date with while he peppers you with niche cultural references. “A24”, he says, “is so derivative right now.” Then there is Al Nash’s East London Boy descending into existential crisis as he realises his entire personality is constructed around a set of cultural and consumer touchpoints he feels no real connection to.

@itsbrianparkIn the mood for love fr

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The videos send up an increasingly tiresome feature of young professional conversations that are familiar to anyone living in cities such as London, New York or Melbourne. Have you dined at Fitzroy’s Carnation Canteen? Have you read Mindy Seu’s A Sexual History of the Internet? What do you think of Demna’s move to Gucci?

Taste has always had a role in defining class. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that elites use cultural capital to distinguish their social class from others through subtle behaviours. But this is different. This is cultural signalling within the same economic class.

In the 20th century, the middle class was defined by education, professions, comfortable incomes and home ownership. However now, trades can out pay degrees, everyone rents forever, wealth is inherited not earned.

So instead, status is being fought on different terrain. YoPros in big cities distinguish themselves from one another through what they know, rather than what they earn or own. Through their taste. Through their cultural references.

Put another way, it is class war that created the performative male.

The added complication is that in an age of algorithmic curation, it becomes difficult even to distinguish genuine interest from manufactured preferences. Do you genuinely like Phoebe Bridgers, or do you just like the idea of being someone who likes her? We enter a simulacra of sorts - taste as a copy of a copy of a copy, so detached from any original impulse that we’ve entirely lost reference for what we actually like.

If everything is accessible, nothing is valuable. So status comes from knowing what to know. It’s knowing which books, which artist, which creator filters best for you to consume what “matters”. Those capable of analytical thought outside algorithmic recommendation gain disproportionate power, while the rest sink deeper into passively generated preferences.

@mister.tomfooleryBig week for learning in public #curriculum #internetculture #research #creativetechnology

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And of course, unlike what you wear, knowledge lives on the inside. So this internal accumulation has to be performed externally through taste, references, opinions. It echoes the boom of platforms like Goodreads or Letterboxd. We no longer enjoy knowledge silently. In a wider culture where value is tied to metrics and monetisation, knowledge that isn’t commercialised is treated as worthless.

This creates a tension: the necessity of gatekeeping insider knowledge to preserve the cultural capital of certain spaces butts up against the economic benefits of being the one who shares it with the world. Aided by the algorithm’s ferocious distribution mechanisms, this shrinks the gap between niche renown and cultural omnipresence, which is now so small Charli XCX has proclaimed that cool is dead.

It’s curious that knowledge is having a cultural renaissance at the same moment the institutions that made it accessible to accrue are collapsing. For decades, knowledge was the great democratiser. State investment into public education and cultural infrastructure gave the UK some of its most important contemporary cultural movements: kitchen-sink realism, post-punk, Britpop - waves of creativity built by working-class kids who suddenly had access to literacy, art, theory, rehearsal rooms, grants, time. But as higher education is economically gutted through systematic defunding, the ladder is being pulled up - precisely because it worked too well.

Elites are taking back educational institutions. It’s no longer just about what you know, but how you know it, where you learned it, and what it cost you to learn it. YouTube might teach you the same concepts as a philosophy degree, but the latter still confers legitimacy the former cannot. The more knowledge becomes “democratised” through platforms, the more the credentialing mechanisms will matter.

We’re watching a new class system calcify in real time. Status will come from money yes, but also the things it facilitates: the free time to study and culturally immerse oneself. We’re witnessing a shift towards a more invisible form of exclusion.

But then again, what do I know.