On the Declining Value of Dimes

RIP Dimes Square 2020-2023

picture from a Curbed article with a photo negative effect from Fotor

Perhaps the cruelest irony about the Google Trends screenshot above is that interest in Dimes Square was as high as it could go the week before October 7th. Why? Taylor Swift producer Jack Antonoff (he has other credits but decades from now this will by far overshadow everything he’s done) made a few snide remarks about Dimes Square in an interview with The Face:

Dimes Square falls under this thing where it’s like, well, what’s the export? What’s the book, what’s the band? The toxic podcast can’t be the genius cultural export.

If I had to guess why this led to so many searches, perhaps an army of SuperSwifties wondered what the heck Tay’s Colonel Parker was mouthing off about.

After October 7th, we see a truly sharp decline in interest in Dimes Square. As of this writing, the past month has yielded very few articles on it according to Google and zero think pieces. Even around December 4th, 2022 in the GT screenshot above, when interest was at its lowest, there was a glut of Dimes Square thinkpieces.

Even on this Substack, my last time mentioning Dimes Square was February 18th. So why the precipitous decline of interest in an area that was supposed to be the center of the downtown Manhattan artistic renaissance?

I subscribe to several Dimes-adjacent Instagram accounts, like ioncellectuals, mcrumps, etc. All of these accounts have content that is absolutely irrelevant to our current moment. Why? Joseph Biden is unpopular. The center left mainstream media has never been more reviled. Isn’t this the bread and butter of the Canal creative class?

Sort of. Adam Lehrer, a central figure in the scene, had this to say about Artforum firing its editor for publishing a pro-Gaza letter:

The worst aspect about David Velasco being fired from Artforum after publishing this letter condemning the shelling of Gaza and generating the ire of the Zionist big wigs behind some major galleries as well as their collectors ISN’T that it reveals the art world once again as a space of abject hypocrisy that celebrates freedom of expression exactly up until the moment that certain ideological tenets are challenged. No, we already fucking knew that. The real problem with all of this is that Velasco, a terrible editor who was all too happy to encourage cancel culture and ideological hegemony and narrowed contributors down to his hyper-educated multi-”culty” friends during his tenure at the magazine, is now being martyred as some bastion of moral courage. I assure you, that’s not who this guy is. He is no Norm Finkelstein, OK? He simply only associates with people who all think the same way and didn’t understand the split that Israel would represent between liberals and their bratty leftist subs. That’s it. Nevertheless, the event is intriguing in its demonstration of the fact that “the left” has clearly run out its usefulness for the liberal ruling class.

True or not, this made me realize the central dilemma for the neoreactionary crowd: they certainly bristle at the online idpol SJWs standing up for Palestine, but are uncomfortable backing such a mainstream perspective as supporting Israel. Supporting Israel places these former artistic rebels in the awkward position of supporting the mainstream media that was so easy for them to rail against last year.

Another example: Bari Weiss. Here are two thinkpieces about this peripheral figure of the scene.

This Vanity Fair piece was published on October 2nd, and talks about how Weiss is building a right-wing intellectual community in Los Angeles (already we are moving away from Manhattan).

This November 30th Wall Street Journal article, however, is about how The Free Press (the newsletter/media empire Weiss runs) is the go-to source for those frustrated that the media is not standing up for Israel enough. Whatever your take on the conflict is, it is hard to deny that subcultural cool declines when you want the media to be more supportive of the American military-industrial complex. It may be the correct position, but it is also the mainstream position.

So it seems this conflict ended the momentum of Dimes Square. This is different from the Brooklyn hipsters of the ‘00s, whose influence only got greater as the Iraq War raged on. Back then, they had a president to oppose and (for a few years anyway, until they changed their tune) a mainstream media that was not critical enough of the war. Nowadays, while Dimes Square can’t find a strong, defiant way to support American foreign policy, the average TikToker is the transgressor exposing shitlib hypocrisy.

I have pointed out the parallels between the current movement and the ‘60s counterculture too many times to mention. One big one I noticed: now, like the ‘60s, the normies are getting weird. And that weirdness has nothing to do with bucket hats or retro dance rock.

TikTok is a major factor not only in the decline of the Israel narrative but the Dimes Square one as well. As I pointed out here, Dimes Square was more concerned with Urbit or NFTs than it was with TikTok. This was to its detriment. TikTok had and has a cool factor that Urbit or NFTs boosters can’t fathom. Which explains why AI wants to kill TikTok so bad.

So what do we call these subversive TikTokers anyway? I propose the alt-left. Ever since the alt-right came around, the closest thing the left had to an alt movement was the dirtbag left, which was primarily focused on class instead of identity politics. This did not carry the transgressive charge of today’s pro-Gaza alt-left, which, for the most part, is shocking without trying. Without even making ironic antisemetic jokes, no matter how earnestly they insist they do not hate Jews, much of the media insists on vilifying them, much like the New Left of the ‘60s were branded as Marxists and anti-American.

Brad Troemel said the left can’t meme. At the time, he was right. A large part of memeing is subversive humor and much of what the left was throwing out at the time of his report was smug, self-satisfied support for blacks and LGBT people. Sincere, unfunny, no transgressive charge. Much of the Dimes Square movement, by contrast, was adept at ironic or unironic Pepe Frog memes and flirting with fascism in general.

Now, it is the meme makers and trolls that find themselves stuck. When people who oppose bombing Gaza hospitals are branded as antisemites, fascist-friendly Dimes Square memes will only draw fire away from the alt-left, or, perhaps worse in their eyes, getting them lumped in with the alt-left.

So how will Dimes Square be remembered then? It might be looked at as one of those weird micro-movements during times of major social upheaval, like the Mods or the Teddy Boys were to British society during the ‘60s.

Dimes Square might also be considered a media creation. In the ‘10s, there was a symbiotically close relationship between online media and the mainstream press. Buzzfeed and the New York Times had the same heroes, villains and obsessions. After 2020, the legacy media’s Internet was wildly different from the Internet the youth actually lives in. As Brad Troemel pointed out in his excellent cloutbombing report, the press (especially the New York press) loved writing about Dimes Square for several reasons. Traditionally, reporters covered subcultural movements by going to rock shows, parties, trendy new neighborhoods, etc. Dimes Square enabled especially younger reporters to do similar reporting to their heroes like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. Dimes Square also gave shitlib reporters an obvious enemy so they could feel justified in their constant shitlib obsessions. Like, “Oh, you think no one hates women? Read THIS artist’s shocking screed on the longhouse.”

But a movement that is easier to follow that also helps you stay in fighting weight is not the definition of a major cultural moment. The alt-left, by contrast, has no particular geographical focus (although it does seem, living in Bushwick like I do, that the center is here) and, while it certainly opposes the mainstream press, it doesn’t oppose them in a flattering way. Instead, they are often made out to be hypocrites, bumbling about how this isn’t technically a genocide, etc.

What must be most embarrassing for the still-primarily Boomer-run mainstream media is how it missed both the alt-right until 2016 and the alt-left until now. It is possible that both these movements lead to a Trump election victory.

Perhaps Dimes Square is best seen as a final chapter for two major artistic movements from the 2010s: the alt-lit movement and the post-Internet art movement. Writers like Tao Lin and artists like Jon Rafman were very popular with the Dimes Square movement. We can even say that all this was a precursor for the alt-left much like the beatniks were a precursor for the hippies (perhaps Adam Friedland and Nick Mullen will remain as involved and vital to the alt-left the way Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady were to the hippies).

One similarity between the Beat generation and Dimes Square — both cultures were much darker and skeptical compared to what came later.

From The Hippies:

Until 1965, the Haight’s avant-garde residents were referred to as beatniks. Indeed early media coverage of the Haight-Ashbury presented the burgeoning hippie movement as an evolution of North Beach’s beatnik culture. However, the hippies increasingly colorful attire, flamboyant behavior and gregarious personalities contrasted sharply with the visibly drab, introverted, and cynical beatniks, and thus the local media believed a new appellation was needed to describe this latest manifestation of American bohemianism

Many in the alt-left are skeptical of the mainstream media and how no politicians whatsoever represent us, but they also express an undeniable excitement with how they are moving the needle in the information war.

Ultimately Dimes Square was less a massive cultural movement and more of a fascinating interregnum between COVID and our current moment. Dimes Square first garnered attention in 2020 with The Drunken Canal, a local, now-defunct newspaper that detailed all the drunken, irresponsible sexploits of the time. In 2022, as COVID restrictions started slowly lifting, Dimes Square became more attractive. Now, it may have lost its luster, but perhaps its greatest contribution, more than any artwork or album, is the ire it aimed at the neoliberals and the mainstream media. New York magazine is right in pointing out that the war has created a lot of division in New York City, especially within the New York left. But the division was first visible in the media and art worlds of New York City. The hipster wars pitted the transgressive Manhattanites from Dimes Square against the shitlibs of Bushwick. Now, Bushwick seems to be home to the alt-left while Dimes Square is now the home of overpriced spicy carrots.