Post-Bohemia

If you are a subscriber and you forgot what the hell this Substack is about again, I look at media, culture and tech. I like to compare today’s media landscape with that of the past because time is cyclical and the past is prologue. If this ain’t your thing no hard feelings. If it is, please share and consider a paid subscription.

The Only Place Left

You know when reading is downright magical? When someone is on about an idea, but then they mention a sentence, or even a word, in passing, offhandedly, and your jaw snaps open in wonder and excitement? Recently,

Ross Barkan

wrote about the end of bohemia. He even called it The End of Bohemia. But that magic moment is nestled in the last paragraph. Fortunately I read it. I often skip the last paragraph of many things I read, exhausted with the argument by that point. Barkan’s article held my attention, but this moment burnt the path behind it to ash:

The post-bohemia world will be about, at the start, reclaiming some of that ambition.

Post-bohemia…I thought I might dive deeper. After all, Barkan did the same for me when I wrote about the mesoculture — a coin I termed after reading

Ted Gioia

’s piece on microculture and macroculture on the M train while taking my sick cat to Juniper Valley Animal Hospital in Middle Village.¹ His piece mentioning the mesoculture gave me a flood of subscribers, more than the three I had at the time:

Trafton Crandall

Salty K. Pickles

and

Katherine Dee

. I looked up the term “post-bohemia”: turns out that Ross Barkan coined it.

Odd that no one has ever used it before, or even conceived of it before. Much of his article, which focuses on rising rents and the decline of bohemia, has been pored over. More than the lead-up to war with Iran, frankly. But the idea of a post-bohemia? Nonsense, apparently. There must be a bohemia somewhere. Austin, right? Dammit, now Joe Rogan moved there and Elon Musk is slumming around Mayfield Park. We know downtown Manhattan and Bushwick are dunzo, but Ridgewood? Look, you can buy a candle for a hundred bucks…OK, there’s Philadelphia, right? Right.

Now it’s not just the term post-bohemia that got me all razzed up. It was the very last line:

A bohemia can live in the mind and heart, too.

Not only can this be true: it is the only place where it exists now.

Like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters maniacally building Devil’s Tower out of his mashed potatoes, I am driven to draw a map of post-bohemia.

The Map

If we look at the idea of bohemia closely, it does not intuitively make sense. A city neighborhood where poor artists can afford rent to make their art? Why would such a place exist, let alone be expected to exist in major cities? They chose the path of the starving artist; if they can’t afford rent because a 9 to 5 is beneath them, tough titty.

19th century Paris was where the idea of bohemia began. Here’s a history from an older post of mine (the source of the history is The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village) :

For centuries, artists worked for church and state. Fair labor wasn’t even a concept. When the Industrial Revolution dawned, creatives rebelled because now the market had them serve the bourgeois marketplace instead of answering to a loftier authority. Many artists like Baudelaire and Rimbaud became bohemians, willing to starve for their hashish-fueled visions as opposed to whoring themselves in the marketplace.

There you have it: starvation was the point. Baudelaire and Rimbaud didn’t move into some cheap neighborhood to try to make it as poets. They had no idea they were going to make it. Whether they made it because of their poetry or because of their outlandish lifestyle will not be the focus here. What does need to be said is the “starving artist” was always a myth. Most artists, certainly many of the ones during the bohemian era of the past 150 years, were always closer to bourgeois life than they let on. Some through a day job, most through wealthier relations. What makes the Parisian origins different from most of what followed was that these artists truly bet it all, with no hope of a payday, and, what’s more, no precedent. The closest thing to the manic, shocking scribblings of the French Symbolists was the work of the Marquis de Sade, who was not considered a success story at the time — it took years of rehabilitation for his cool points to accumulate.

Even at this time, the novel La Vie de Boheme was published, soon to be turned into the opera La boheme by Puccini, and the bohemian lifestyle was already seductive to the bored upper classes. From there, the concept was solidified, certainly in places like Greenwich Village: a city that wanted to make a vital contribution to culture would need a place with cheap rent for starving artists.

Or, to the point, in the face of society’s rapid industrialization, bohemia would be an affordable shelter for the artists struggling to survive with the rapid alienation and dehumanization. So post-bohemia could be considered the same thing, except instead of a livable neighborhood in a rapidly expanding city, it is a type of dark forest online where creative people can gather, safe from the algorithmic menace of clear web social media platforms. If Instagram is Times Square, Substack is downtown Manhattan (for now).² Bohemia was a place for starving artists in cities. Post-bohemia is the same but online.

If bohemia was a cohesive place where creative dissidents that opposed the machine gathered (East Village in the ‘70s, etc.), post-bohemia knows it’s all machine now. To be against the machine now is to be alone or off the grid, which is often one and the same. Post-bohemia is the pro-artist side of the Internet as opposed to pro-content; instead of neighborhoods, or even venues, there are isolated live events, many of them pop-ups. Certain neighborhoods are preferable for these events, but if a reading, say, for your favorite Substack writer, is near Columbus Circle, sure, why not?

This is markedly different from the 2000s, when the Williamsburg music scene coalesced. Musicians that lived there performed there, creating something so vibrant and attractive, Manhattan’s reputation would take almost two decades to recover. This is not to say that even then, WIlliamsburg wasn’t full of obnoxious gentrification or pretentious creatives that thought they were artists. But Williamsburg was where it was at and, for a brief window of time, you could live where it was at. ³

And now Substack is where it’s at? Wow, sign me up for a paid subscription to Cross Current on the double…Christ, Diggs, you’re depressing me here!

Yes, an online platform is not as romantic as an exciting neighborhood. But this is the life we chose. By riding the subway and looking at our phones instead of our subway windows, we gave all our attention to online portals and, unlike cities, portals only need our attention to make money. All artists can do for now is choose platforms that serve them instead of grinding them into the chum bucket to feed the AI sharks. This is not to say that Substack has no AI content. Recently a provocative piece was published on how there is no need to apologize for using AI to help with writing. But even this was well-thought out; it wasn’t an AI-animated rage bait video.

Which brings us to the new conflict. For more than a century, it was understood that bohemia was a place where artists retreated and regrouped to fight the suits at all the major publishers, labels, studios, etc. If they were captured, by then they would have enough wiles, ideally, to infiltrate and infect the machine from within. Now, the macroculture, like the microculture, is online, so the battlefield has changed: on one side, mega-platforms like YouTube and Instagram that broadcast content; on the other side, smaller ones like those of the letterverse (Substack, Beehiv, Ghost) as well as Discord, subreddits and Soundcloud, where users gather to create something more substantial. The term for this is “dark forest.” I called it post-bohemia. You can also call it alt-social. As soon as any of these spaces get too big, on to the next. Just like IRL bohemia from back when.

One way post-bohemia manifests: publications native to Substack like

Mars Review of Books

,

The Metropolitan Review

and

The Republic of Letters

.⁴ All three are helmed by writers (

Noah Kumin

Ross Barkan

Sam Kahn

), making them a sort of mutual aid society for scribes worldwide. Or as I previously said:

Katherine Dee sees collective action as the only option: either get acquired by legacy media or make/join a collective […] A benefit of this approach: it frees creatives from the creative entrepreneur trap. Now someone else can count the beans and you are free to do what you do best. A second benefit: yes you would make more money as a solo creator, but as we have discussed, this is like winning the lottery. Getting a paycheck from a smaller entity — let alone a larger one — might mean less money, but it is a more practical goal.

Yancey Strickler

would say this is an online manifestation of “scenius,” a term Brian Eno coined regarding the collective genius an artistic or music scene has, back when bohemia existed.

There’s been a lot of din on Substack over all the novels being published by Substack writers.

Naomi Kanakia

called it “Substack Summer” after a bunch of these works, including her own, were featured in The New Yorker. Yes, there have been comments about how these writers are backslapping each other. A couple of things: creative communities have always favored each other this way. If Allen Ginsberg could have written a favorable review of On the Road on a major platform, he absolutely would have. I know this because Ginsberg, who worked in advertising briefly, actively worked to signal boost beat generation culture through the media. Nowadays, it may sound awful to wax poetic about anything on Substack. Imagine how the literati felt when Ginsberg said “The typewriter is holy.” Gatekeeping is not perfect, but as we have all seen, it is preferable to algorithmic, marketplace-driven recommendations. Heck, compared to that, cozy clique-ishness is downright warm and endearing.

As many longtime readers of this Substack know, all this is for naught without a mesoculture and as

Chris Jesu Lee

wrote, literary readings at live venues are a great example of mesoculture. He mentions a valid sticking point:

If these readings do have a downside, it’s that they don’t seem geared towards creating great art […]Good writers often aren’t good performers (and vice versa). And a lot of prose writing just doesn’t lend itself to performance anyway.

Absolutely agree. I would even add that, much like an alt-comedy show tends to work when fans of particular comedians show up (“Wow, John Mulaney and Maria Bamford!?”) as opposed to people who just randomly walk in expecting comedy, live readings are better with writers that draw their fans. If you go to a live reading and you don’t know or like anyone on the line-up, good luck.

It does seem for now that post-bohemia is primarily driven by writers from the letterverse, but there are notable, exciting exceptions, particularly in music. Many of the rappers on Soundcloud that Kieran Press Reynolds raves about on the blog No Bells, are members of wild subgenres like rage rap and pluggnb:

At the skate-park concert, it occurred to me that art itself might be the answer. The headliner was a trio—the rappers Polo Perks and AyooLii with the rapper-producer FearDorian, who hailed, respectively, from New York, Milwaukee, and Atlanta, but had linked up online and developed in-person friendships.

That last part: from different cities, but met online, then in person? This is a major paradigm shift from the way we understood bohemia to work. Artists from different cities met by moving to San Francisco in the sixties or Seattle in the nineties and developing in-person friendships then. Now, many artists meet this way. Another way — they live in a more affordable outer borough, or even in the suburbs, and commute to events either they are performing in or their online friends are. One notable example is

Nick Dove

, a celebrated photographer of downtown Manhattan events, who lives in Jersey City. Some live far away from major coastal cities to visit online friends and write about the trip with exquisite prose. I am of course writing about fellow

The Metropolitan Review

critic

Adam Pearson

, who lives in Louisiana and recently published a piece on his visit to New York City, where he met

Ross Barkan

,

wayback machine

,

Matthew Gasda

and other writers. It is a testament to his writing that I read the whole thing from beginning to end despite it having none of the salacious, titillating details of a Dimes Square event, like

Mike Crumplar

excels at. Himself an outsider to that scene (at the beginning anyway), Crumplar also found a way to be involved without living there. The end of bohemia does not mean the end of cultural centers — it just means that now many of the creators don’t live there.

Soft clubbing is a new phenomenon developing in response to the increasing lack of artistic venues. That’s right: rents are not only rising for artists, but for venues as well. Literary readings are often done in noisy bars, as if the writers were stand-up comics doing open mics. Soft clubbing events are often pop-ups in unlikely venues like coffee shops and hair salons. Many of them are in the morning, afternoon or evening. They are intimate and focused more on the music than on any kind of debauchery. I know, there goes Gen Z being responsible again. Ugh, right? Shh! They are leaving the house. This is where they are at right now. They have enough media bombardment from their phones. They have enough psychedelic shock from all the AI they see and interact with. Mellow is the only option. More than all the examples above, online engagement is the driver, but the IRL experience is a vital component. Who cares where you’re from? Who knows where you’ll end up?

The Roots of Post-Bohemia

Bohemia’s death might be recent, but it was under constant attack from the eighties on. Just look at this

David Polonoff

piece from Newsday in 1988. New York’s high crime rate initially meant cheaper rent. But as the artists came in, so did the Wall Street cowboys who moved in and often bought the art. The art world’s incestuous relationship with capitalism got intense from the eighties onward. By the nineties, we got the Bilbao effect and the word was out: if you want to revitalize your city, put money into the downtown district, so you can attract tourists and investors. Maybe even the rent will go up. If you want to go further into how bohemia died, I’ll redirect you to Ross’s piece.

How far back do the roots of post-bohemia go? The 2010s, with the beginnings of vaporwave, the first notable artistic movement that was formed online. If it needs to be said, many of these musicians would perform live as well, bringing their online fans to the venues they played. Another example: Weird Twitter, an absurdist movement that formed online, back when social media could still be considered a microculture, and Hollywood had nonstop IP-driven hits. Though most Weird Twitter icons, like dril, would not perform live, two minor figures in the movement met in real life and formed the Chapo Trap House podcast — which would go on to have live events.

Since journalists found it difficult to write about online scenes until it was too late, they ended up writing about a potential IRL bohemia instead in the early 2020s:

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.”

Oooh, what’s this? A new bohemia? Downtown Manhattan is hotter than it has been since the eighties? No. But we can’t in good faith say nothing happened, either. As

Drew Austin

said here, Dimes Square was Manhattan’s first meme neighborhood.

From the piece:

Somehow, my various feeds — Twitter, Instagram, podcasts — had gradually become firehoses of information about Dimes Square and its associated haunts and characters, pulling me into a vicious cycle of ersatz knowingness that in turn ensured I would go deeper down the rabbit hole. Soon I found myself following accounts like nolitadirtbag, which, as any good meme account does, trains its followers to get its esoteric jokes. Before long, the types of people who loiter their days away at ​​Café Leon Dore were living rent free in my head.

Meme accounts training followers to follow esoteric jokes would lead to massive FOMO among creative types that were scared they were missing the next Williamsburg. As he says later in the piece, the hype backfired: rents immediately skyrocketed. After the piece was published, luxury hotels moved in. Before long, downtown Manhattan was known less for excellent literary work from the likes of Madeline Cash than it was for gossip about Peter Thiel, shady memecoins and Curtis Yarvin’s now-failed Urbit project. That, and gossip about which writers were fucking which podcasters, and decoding the memes and/or autofictional novels about it.

This did not — perhaps does not — mean that downtown stopped being a cultural center. Just that: a) no one can afford to live there, which is a base requirement for an authentic bohemian neighborhood; b) events with the fringe scenester aesthetic are in many different places, like FiDi, Murray Hill, even Bushwick.

Speaking of Bushwick, if Dimes Square is a meme neighborhood, Bushwick is just a meme. Home of the largest nightclub scene on the planet, Bushwick is known even less for local celebrities than it is for world-renowned DJs playing its storied venues (Boss Nova Civic Club, Market Hotel, Elsewhere). Indeed, the venues are the stars, as they are the focus of meme accounts like Meet Me at Trans Pecos.

No entity is larger in Bushwick than the holy trinity of Dunkin’ Donuts, Checkers and Popeyes at the Myrtle-Broadway JMZ stop. Some will check out the Pride Party at Market Hotel, some will go to Bossa Nova for deep house, all seem to end up hoovering drunken munchies at one of the three junk food spots that by day are ugly corporate eyesores, but at 3 am become a brightly-lit oasis of revitalization. Then, they take the M train home, that home not being Bushwick.

Both Bushwick and Dimes Square were hyped to become the next “it” neighborhoods. Again, the rents got too high before anything organic and local could happen like it did in Williamsburg. Now Bushwick is a place to dance, snort K, maybe do some gay-ish stuff before riding home hung over, with the taste of Sweet Heat sauce burning at a low flame on your lips. Dimes Square, meanwhile, is a Thailand for a certain type of extremely online intellectual, hoping to maybe make some ironic jokes about race science. Like Thailand, nice place to visit, but only rich creeps actually live there.

Is the Dream of Bohemia Still Alive?

Now, it is true that the death of bohemia is not the same thing as the death of the counterculture. Only a month ago, the alt-left seemed fringe. Now, between the mainstream media’s hare-brained attempts to convince everyone that Mamdani is an antisemite, as well as them peddling yet another forever war to us, the alt-left is gaining momentum. Most trans and gays in Bushwick are well aware that capitalism is just as much a problem as bigotry. Downtown Manhattan, already devoid of woke moralizing, has pulled more left since Norman Finkelstein spoke at the now-defunct Sovereign House. Zohran Mamdani has become an unlikely hero even in post-liberal downtown.

A couple of things: one, the antiwar counterculture is on very thin ice right now. As of this writing, the US bombed Iran Saturday evening. We can expect more censorship than there has already been of the antiwar left. Further still, let’s look at that last sentence from the piece that inspired this one again: “A bohemia can live in the mind and heart, too.”

But will it? Does anyone want it? We have looked long enough at the decline of bohemia, but it’s not just the rent hikes causing it. The devaluation of art has played a major role as well. Challenging art has never been more unpopular. This goes back to the ‘00s. In places like Williamsburg, oddly enough. W. David Marx traces it specifically to the Ashlee Simpson lip-syncing scandal of 2004. The discourse around this scandal inspired Kelefa Sanneh to write an article for The New Yorker later that year against rockism. The essay was celebrated as an ur-text for the poptimism movement. A movement which gradually found adherents in bohemian neighborhoods like Williamsburg, leading to this deliciously absurd paradox in the piece:

The most interesting thing about this ideological shift is how much it moved in the opposite direction from the century’s other consumer ethics. In the last two decades, many in the professional and creative classes have wanted to use their pocketbooks to push back against the influence of multinational corporations — à la Naomi Klein’s No Logo. We should buy young designers’ clothes, avoid highly-processed food, support independent bookstores, drink local-roasted Fair Trade coffee, etc. But when it came to music, the most moral action was to embrace the most openly manufactured pop.

Or, as Scott Timberg says in Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class:

In the gentrified neighborhood, art becomes a lifestyle amenity, merging seamlessly into the rest: the bicycle shop, the farmers market, the yoga studio. It becomes another upper-middle-class commodity. Yes, it is a creative commodity, but so are the others. The cocktails are “creative,” and the macchiatos are “creative,” and the watches and the razors and the lightbulbs are “creative.” The work the techie yuppies do is also “creative.” Art becomes submerged within the larger category of “creativity,” understood as an economic concept and aligned with ones like “innovation” and “disruption.”

Bohemia and counterculture are not the same thing, but they are intertwined. The hippie movement had deep roots in the literary bohemianism of the beat generation, with Bob Dylan befriending Allen Ginsberg and The Grateful Dead jamming at the acid tests for Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady (who inspired the character Dean Moriarty in On the Road).

Compare to the ‘00s, when Williamsburg was full of artists, but also Millennial bobo creatives and strivers who preferred to learn a trade than to push the boundaries of their form. As David Brooks says (via

Sam Kahn

):

I’ve come to recognize this as the Miss America syndrome. You ask a certain kind of promising undergrad a question, and he or she will put on a beaming Miss America smile and give you the perfectly articulated answer that is carefully designed to warm the cockles of your middle-aged heart.

And so it was: musicians crafting perfect pop, preferably with Jack Antonoff’s help. Writers crafting novels like college essays on what it means to be American in this skin. A while back,

Venkatesh Rao

coined the term “premium mediocre,” which is self-explanatory. I built on this term to describe the contemporary creative ideal: Shake Shack. Just like Shake Shack is a pricey burger that uses the best ingredients for the very best taste, today’s creators often set out to be masters of their chosen genre. A quick example: the film Gone Girl. Never read the book, but I can tell you it is a flawless noir film. Every string is taut; every coil is well-oiled. All the actors are great, without anyone’s performance crowding the stage. At best, that is what many of today’s award-winning films, albums, etc. are. I especially notice this in the world of streaming. “The Pitt” is by far the greatest medical drama of all time. I did not remember it until I did a Google search for the best shows of 2025.

And so, like Kafka’s hunger artist, who slowly dies as passersby ignore his extreme determination to prove his asceticism, today’s urban avant-gardists are met by baffled crowds who say “That doesn’t look like fun, sweety.”

How could I be such a fool: all this time I wondered why the alt-left failed to create anything of cultural merit as the right-wing fringe scenesters of downtown seemed to have more progress. With pop culture itself bizarrely protected as an endangered species from mean, conservative-coded critics, no wonder. In the woke, Tumblr-addicted 2010s, it was so much easier. Like a genie lamp with endless wishes, slacktivists demanded more black representation in superhero movies: voila! Pronoun declaration in Zoom meetings: presto! You can’t help but wonder if many of these youths still hope that, by shunning Beyonce on social media, she will change her mind and signal boost the pro-Gaza message. Radical ideas can only successfully be borne by radical artists. Nope: the TikTok Maoists insist on praising Mackelmore and Kneecap for doing the right thing, regardless of the quality of their work. This is all better than the No Kings protesters, with their corny Bluesky Boomer-humor meme signs: If Kamala Won, We Would All Be Eating Brunch Right Now.

The largest group in New York is not left or right wing: it’s just rich. West VIllage influencers post videos of themselves living in a “Sex and the City” sleepaway camp. Or, as

Sean Monahan

articulates clearly, Dimes Square is downright quaint compared to the current mask-off elitism of NYC TikTokers. Perhaps no show currently captures our current moment better than HBO’s “The Gilded Age,” about a much earlier generation of ambitious social climbers in New York.

Now I can admit that the celebrity blockout of last year was an absolute failure. But this does not mean that we are not still feeling personality exhaustion. In response to the aforementioned crop of NYC influencers, a few are openly mocking them for their soulless, brazen gentrification.

@daadisnacksan update on project de-influencing #influencer #nyc

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Not enough for a revolution, sure. But I maintain there is hope for post-bohemia. As I mentioned, for now it is primarily literary, through Substack. The road was paved by the alt-lit of the 2010s, another forerunner of our current post-bohemia moment. Many of the writers were New York-based, but the greatest writer of the movement, Scott McClanahan, came from West Virginia, where he still lives with his wife

Juliet Escoria

, a great writer and Substacker in her own right. Alt-lit was the soil that the downtown movement grew out of, and now here we are with Substack Summer. Before you despair, remember two things: the disgust you may feel with a mid-tier social media app being part of a potential creative revolution is not that different from the repulsion many had with the hippies and their comfort with mass media, which from the thirties till that moment was understood by academics to be primarily a tool for fascism. Wisely, the hippies wanted the airwaves. We should demand the same. And of course, the sixties counterculture had literary roots. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” got its title from Kerouac’s The Subterraneans. On the Road inspired Easy Rider.

Rent Notice

Derek Thompson

recently joined Substack. Welcome. Here’s a housewarming pie. Just hope the rent doesn't get raised.

1. He died on December 19, 2023. The mesoculture piece was my first piece I wrote since he died. His name was Double Stuf because he was a chubby cow cat. I still have a picture of him on my key chain.

2. There are, as

Nick Dove

told me, group chats on X and Instagram that downtown Manhattan artists use. But these are private group chats you need to be invited to. They are not algorithmic feeds.

3. Alt-comedy in the ‘00s was primarily performed in downtown Manhattan, near the industry, but also at venues like Rififi and the UCB theater. Stand up comedy in Williamsburg is almost strictly a phenomenon that began in the 2010s. In a roundabout way, 2000s alt-comedy was a precursor to post-bohemia, if only for the fact that most of the comics who performed in downtown Manhattan could not afford to live there, living either in Bushwick or Astoria.

4. MRB has a print edition as well; TMR is slated to have its first print issue soon.