The Merchants of Cool Invade the Internet
My return to New York has reminded me of the existence of “Cool.” It was conspicuously absent from my summer stomping ground, Menlo Park, and I certainly don’t have much of it naturally, so I forgot about it until a few weeks ago.
You can imagine my not-in-Kansas-anymore reaction to passing clubs on a Saturday with a line around the corner — “hackathons” don’t exactly draw such crowds. While I’ve lived in NYC twice before during the summers of 2002 and 2009, I had mostly forgotten about Cool. Perhaps it’s because the tech world has always been the anti-Cool (or “Zero Cool” if you want…) and much of its culture and identity has been developed around an aversion to all forms of hipness.
Yet I can’t help but think about how the release of The Social Network will change mainstream perception of the tech world. In the same way that Hot Topic and Urban Decay hip-ified and mainstream-ified punk/goth/grunge right around the time when kids like me worshipped Kurt Cobain, I wonder if the same thing will happen to the once sacredly anti-Cool world of nerdom.
One of the first things I did upon my return to the city was accompany a friend to “Nerd Nite“. It was a series of lectures about topics that ranged from Race & Role Playing Games to Cancer. And while I thought I knew the types of people that attended stuff like this, I had clearly misjudged – when I looked around the room halfway through I noticed there was a healthy percentage of very dressed-up model-esque types in attendance. And for further evidence, look no further than the NY Times Sunday Styles section — with stories on TEDx, iPhones for babies, and, of course, The Social Network.
Has geekdom officially jumped the shark?
I was in high school in 2001 when the PBS Frontline Report “The Merchants of Cool” came out. I watched it with my best friend and remember how it shook our collective worlds in this profound way (when you’re 17, everything is profound). It was an hour-long exploration into how marketers try to manipulate teens. We were right in the sweet spot of the demographic and I was at once outraged and enlightened. Was everything I so deeply believed in just the product of some evil marketing overlord?
Thankfully, nerds have always been pretty crappy marketers (huge exception: Apple). They never had to be good because of phenomenons like “virality” and network effects and because advertising and branding were professions reserved for people who had some interest in Cool. The marketing budget for many tech/mobile startups is $0, even today. But I dare you to try and launch an energy drink with a $0 marketing budget.
I believe that is changing. There’s a great presentation about the impending convergence between Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley. While it will still take some time for Cool to trickle all the way across the country to Silicon Valley, I can feel its omnipresence in NYC Tech, even more strongly than I did just last summer. NYC knows how to manufacture Cool, and the cruise-ship-like behavior of big brands is finally starting to embrace “digital spend” in more creative ways (thanks Old Spice guy).
This feels somewhat new, and I’ll be honest, kind of bizarre. What happens in a world where where Paul Graham and Ashton Kutcher are homeboys, Biz Stone hawks liquor and Mark Zuckerberg is the new Kurt Cobain?
Stay tuned.
Amanda Peyton is the co-founder of MessageParty, a location-based mobile messaging application. She is a Y Combinator alumni, recent MIT Sloan graduate, and New York City resident. This column has been modified from a version originally published in her newsletter. Find out more at amandapeyton.com.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
