No Core, No Lore

Why the Downtown Manhattan Art Scene Lore Might Go the Way of eBaum'S World and Facebook Pokes

As long as we have had people, we have had lore. As long as we have had language, we have had lore. Many say that language evolved out of early humans’ need to gossip. That’s part of the story. Gossip is the shadow side of lore. We are more familiar with gossip than lore since most of us work dayjobs and most of us are more likely to throw shade at the other schmucks working the same shitjobs we have than we are to spread lore about them. But those people who worked here long ago, before the takeover?Kathy, who told jokes you can’t tell anymore at happy hours we don’t go to anymore? Every new person has to hear the lore about Kathy.

If something as quotidian as a dayjob can have lore, imagine the Internet, which is comprised entirely of writing. Even TikTok videos have enormous blocks of text that threaten to devour the entire screen, as if the hashtag soup in the caption wasn’t enough.

So why is lore having a moment now then? For one, ever since 2020, narratives that were supposed to regenerate and restore faith in institutions and leaders have proven impotent. 2022 was supposed to be the normal year. It felt like an uncanny valley year, where things should have been normal, but something was off. A vibe shift perhaps. It is true that lore about the vibe shift existed before Sean Monahan and New York Magazine’s official definition of it. But, as more and more articles came down the pike, it was hard not to be excited about the possibility that downtown Manhattan was to be at the center of culture for the first time since the mid ‘80s.

Not all the breathless predictions of early ‘22 have been false. Indie rock is back. And while there hasn’t been as big a rollback on wokeness as previously hoped for predicted, male sleazeballs seem to gaining popularity as women grow more impatient with sensitive soyboys that are too shy to even look in the mirror. But several 2023 predictions mentioned the end of the new right, which is towards the center of a lot of the new downtown. They are not just blindly playing pin the tail on the future trend by the way. Mad Realities, the TikTok channel that is trying to bring the Manhattan movement to the masses, has not caught on, with most videos not even breaking 100 likes. Tomorrow, a YouTube variety show that takes place exclusively at the chic rock venue Baby’s All Right, premiered its pilot episode this week with less than 1,000 views.

This can’t be what all the fuss was about. Something is missing. Something is off. While I am tempted to ring the bell of doom for downtown, I am not pulling the rope up and down just yet. When an outsider read articles about the Village in the early ‘60s, the music of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez more than backed it up. Few historians would disagree that the culture of the ‘60s was a watershed moment for America. But before the ‘60s lore expanded to Paul McCartney being really dead or the FBI killing Sam Cooke, before the music itself became more than earnest folk songs humbly strummed and quietly sung, there was LSD.

From 1965 to 1966, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were holding acid tests in San Francisco. Though pop music hadn’t caught up yet with the energy of these heady experiments, the lore of these experiments reached college students nationwide. By 1967, psychedelia was everywhere. Because there was more time for an artistic scene to coalesce around LSD. But also because LSD kept people coming back, even after it was illegal.

So if ‘60s counterculture was not centered around music or film but around acid, this begs the question what is at the core of today’s downtown. I was initially in agreement with Dean Kissick that the lore of downtown microcelebrities was at the center of all this. But I failed to look deeper at the core of the lore. Why were these microcelebrities on our radar to begin with? The most in-depth look gives us the answer: Web3.

LSD :’60s San Francisco

Web3 : today’s downtown

Though the article looks specifically at Urbit, there are also many NFT artists on the scene as well. Although I am reluctant to call the time of death for the Canal creatives, I don’t think it’s an accident that their decline in popularity coincides with the crypto crash. Since crypto has proven too weak to be the core of downtown lore, I would even bet that Dimes Square’s days are numbered. But the CIA many powerful people have invested too much in Web3. Sunken cost fallacy warnings will not scare them off even though this fallacy might very well be what is at the heart of the scene that might have been.

Is this unprecedented? Somewhat. Most cultural movements are either built around strong cultural work or at the very least a cohesive political movement. Though LSD may have formed the inner core of the ‘60s moment, the antiwar movement had a hard enough exterior to make a strong outer core. Meanwhile the crypto inner core of today has a weak outer core of quasi-ironic reactionary politics. It is post-liberal, yet they follow their wildest whims like only a group of individualists can. There may be a hunger for cultural figures who fly in the face of woke orthodoxy, but Kanye West’s and Elon Musk’s antics have shown how far that can go. Far enough to overshadow anything else they do.

The Internet is almost entirely composed of lore. Harry Potter lore. Witcher lore. Even the podcast bros geek out over hearing Joe Rogan discuss Comedy Store lore with guests. But all of these are centered around properties or guests that have had major cultural impact. And lore that is centered around an emerging technology will only remain relevant if the emerging technology doesn’t remain submerged.