I spent a good part of last week listening to the book version of Stuff White People Like as an audiobook I got from Audible.com. (I tried the audiobook route because I could get one free as part of a promotion, not yet sure how I like the whole audiobook idea yet, but it’s something you may want to check out.)

The skinny: It’s awesome. Most of the awesomeness, admittedly, can be gotten from reading the blog, but get the book anyway, it’s a good way of supporting people who do cool stuff online. Oh, and before you read this review, I must warn you that it will not be the most entertaining review of the book you will read; this review is the most entertaining review of the book you will read. But more on that later.

For those of you who haven’t yet read through all the blog’s archives: what is wrong with you? But seriously: for those who haven’t read the blog, Stuff White People Like is dedicated to mocking upper-middle class urban hipsters. White ones, specifically. The decision to constantly refer to them as “white people” is at once inexplicable and brilliant. Some of the entries–those that make fun of liberals who feel guilty about being white–are clearly race-specific, yet the “white people” tag seems to work for all the entries. I suppose that unfortunately, poverty is still endemic enough to the Afro-Yankee community that there isn’t room for stereotypes about upper-middle class members of said community. But why don’t upper-middle class Asians seem to intuitively fit the stereotypes for upper-middle class urban hipster whites? I’m not sure, except that after three years of living in an upper-middle class urban hipster enclave, I cannot think of a single instance of seeing an Asian hanging out in the urban hipster circles I’ve run in. (Aside: some people have suggested that the impact of the name mainly comes from people not normally thinking of whites as a homogeneous group. But I’m pretty sure the lack of hipster Asians also has something to do with it.)

The content can be broken down into a couple of key categories. The first is ones that involve believing you’re rebelling against some cultural trendy, but really just end up being trendy yourself: i.e. indie music. Of all these entries, one probably hit home for me more than any other: Not Having a TV. For most of the past three years, I’ve not had a TV, though that’s changed with my new apartment. I’ve felt very proud about this, feeling all the time I spend blogging and reading is much more worthwhile than watching TV. However, once I reflect for a moment, I realize that actually, a lot of TV shows out there are far more worthwhile than many books I read. This is not going to stop me from reading those kind of books and watching more TV, because as a wannabe academic, I believe I will be cheating my future employers out of their money if I do not spend a good deal of my life reading crappy books. However, I am forced to consciously realize this, and admit that my former sense of superiority was just a fashion I had osmosised out of white person culture.

Once this phenomenon pointed out, you see it everywhere, but what to make of this? The psychologist Steven Pinker has argued that fashion is, ultimately, about the those on the top of the social hierarchy trying to show their status to everyone. Because everyone wants to be perceived as high status, everyone not at the top of the heap imitates those above them. But this puts the elites at risk of being confused with everyone else, so they have to be constantly reinventing their fashions to avoid this. Hence the need to adopt (totally fake) measures to appear avant-garde.

The second big category of posts deals with the transformation of legitimately good causes–like helping poor people–into mere fashions. Take the entry on awareness. I recently saw a Facebook group called “Create Awareness.” Here was the description:

I’m asking for your awareness. When you eat, remember those who can’t. When you see a tree, remember the forests that used to cover the land that we’re mooching off of. Remember to prize your freedom.

I’m trying to think of a joke to put here that would make this light-hearted, but I’m pretty serious about this. Let’s take steps to be global citizens together. Awareness is the first step towards drastic change. We belong to the information age; let’s act like it.

Do you guys have any suggestions as to what we can do?

It’s clear enough that this was meant in all seriousness, but it would still have fit well into the Stuff White People Like entry. I feel a little bit bad about including a reference to this group in this review, because the only reason I know about the group is that two good friends of mine joined, making it appear on my Facebook newsfeed. These are people who I would generally tell you are wonderful and genuinely concerned with making the world a better place. But the group still rubs me the wrong way.

Admittedly, this sort of liberal mentality can be useful, insofar as it provides a selfish motive for good deeds that wouldn’t otherwise get done. Peter Singer recently wrote an article making that case, specifically taking aim at Jesus. The problem: the people involved in the Facebook group–and millions of other white people who go around telling each other to “create awareness” aren’t doing anything directly useful to earn their self-pat-on-the-back.

Eliezer Yudkowsky has said that every cause wants to be a cult. In saying this, he explicitly applied it to completely worthy causes. The liberal hipster culture by and by large doesn’t approach full blown cultishness, like Eliezer’s example of Wikipedia admins becoming obsessed with banning anyone who even might be a critic. But I think the case of liberal hipsterdom suggests a corollary to Eliezer’s principle: “Causes that aren’t cut out to be cults become fashion trends.” When this happens, they become useless, because people don’t understand the original reason for the good idea and therefore cannot see if the movement takes a wrong turn.

This is where I get to talk about that review I linked early in the post, which declares that the site/book is “reactionary garbage.” As evidence of this, it takes a quote from the item on free healthcare:

Though their passion for national health care runs deep, it is important to remember that white people are most in favor of it when they are healthy. They love the idea of everyone have equal access to the resources that will keep them alive, that is until they have to wait in line for an MRI.

The point is obvious enough: most white people who go in for a fashionable endorsement of free health care haven’t thought through carefully what this would actually be like. Now the bold rebuttal:

Perhaps Mr. Lander would like to talk to these white folks about national health care. They had good old American style health insurance (you know, the kind where you don’t have to wait in line) when their daughter was diagnosed with a stomach disorder that would require her to have a feeding tube the rest of her life. A treatment available in Massachusets was shown to remove the need for a tube, but their insurer, United Health Care, would have nothing of it. Fortunately, a campaign by activists around the country forced UHC to reverse their decision. While arsewipes like Lander disparage Moore, without his movie it’s unlikely that the Griggs’ case would have received the attention it did.

This is conclusive evidence that the critic hasn’t the faintest capacity for thinking rationally about health care policy. It’s a complete non-sequitur: just because our system has flaws doesn’t mean other proposed systems don’t also have flaws.

Oh, and by the way, I know the author of that post personally. He’s a member of the campus International Socialist Organization branch. A rather clueless group, altogether. I remember one case where a bunch of friends, including one ISO member, were arguing economics. The ISO member, who was expecting his parents to pay his way though Harvard Law, got frustrated and declared that more people would agree with him if more of us were working class. At which point, a guy who had been particularly staunch in defending capitalism said “hey, I’m working class!” This was true: he was working his way though college, not without difficulty (he was late registering sophomore year because it took him awhile to get together tuition money), but generally doing a fine job of showing that you can work your way up from the bottom in our society. I’m confident he’ll become a good research scientist in a few years.

But back to the main thread: In spite of some people’s evident immunity to the site’s treatment, I found reading it a very valuable experience. I would, in fact, suggest a general maxim: if you think the people out there mocking you are all idiots, find smarter people to mock you. We all naturally absorb silly beliefs, and need something to excise them.

Stuff White People Like is a prime example of what I was talking about in the comments for my post on God and common knowledge when I suggested that internet comedy might take the level of phoniness in society down a notch. TVTropes.org is another good example. But will it really work? Back in the 40′s, George Orwell wrote Politics and the English Language, which took aim at various rhetorical tropes that tended to bypass thought by their very vagueness, and provided the inspiration for Newspeak in /1984/. One of Orwell’s targets was the “not un-” formation, which he said should be possible to laugh out of existence by memorizing the sentence “A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.” Yet more than 60 years later, the “not un-” formation and its cousins are alive and well. At time of writing, “not unlike” gets 5.4 million hits on Google, “not impossible” gets 6.14 million, and “not uncommon” gets 8.44 million. Currently, these are the only such search terms I can think of that get more than a million hits, though many others get hundreds of thousands: “not unrelated,” “not unheard of,” “not inconceivable,” “not unlikely,” “not dissimilar,” “not unknown,” “not unprecedented,” “not unaware,” and so on. (Mad props to anyone who can find another million-hit phrase.) It’s hard to grasp how many people continue using this simple, easily-excised mark of bad prose.

Ultimately, we don’t know whether the internet will be more effective at killing these tropes than mere print essays. But here’s to hoping.