As for your question, I advise everyone to pursue larger-than-life celebrity. It just feels right in The world has spoken, and it prefers genuine fakes to fake genuines. Mids indie was full of fake genuines. I won't name names. The smallest artists now rely on big corporate money to get started. Marketers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to create something people will share with their friends, only to be beaten time and time again by accidents and genuine ineptitude.
But a handful of internet-savvy people have gone for that reaction on purpose. Of these, the most successful and maybe the best is Hipster Runoff , a website whose evolution after finding an audience is part success story, part cautionary tale for anyone looking for a foothold in web culture.
Those who stick around will find out pretty quickly what drives Carles: blog hits, memes, and a desire to be relevant, whatever the cost. And with Hipster Runoff, Carles was finally crying out for his due. Early Hipster Runoff posts had a sort of free-form irreverence to them. Carles mostly posted mp3s of songs that he liked and occasionally riffed on a topic — like, for instance, a genre he invented out of nowhere. Therein lied the central conceit of Hipster Runoff, and the main reason why it was so incredibly funny.
The world has spoken, and it prefers genuine fakes to fake genuines. Mids indie was full of fake genuines. Also: is there more content than ever or just more mediums of consumption?
Yes, there is more content today. The person becomes the personal brand, and ideas become content. We all watch this process every day. Do you feel out of sync with the times now that you create less content? As his profile continued to grow in , Carles was more flagrantly ironic and scrupulously invested in 'the scene' than ever.
For the record, yes, he still likes it. I will probably be like 'the old guy who thinks the Beatles r awesome' except with chillwave. Carles, naturally, used the spotlight to advertise his t-shirt brand 'Genre Shirt'.
In early , Carles announced he was calling it quits. I can't imagine myself blogging about anything else ever again because I feel like I have already blogged about everything and I am just a slave to boring alt memes… Thanks for the memories. We had a good run. I apologize to every one who I have hurt. In a postscript he emailed to Gawker, he explained that "in a world filled with tumblrs, twitters, listicles, and an intense meme cycle, I don't think there is any thing very fun or special about [blogging].
You still couldn't tell if this was another joke, kind of sincere, or a joke deflecting all kinds of kind-of sincerity. Instead of actually giving up, Carles moved to mimic and mock the media that was drowning him; the round-the-clock clickbait manufacturers like Buzzfeed and Huffington Post. When it did, Carles adapted.
Driven by the urge to generate more page views, or to comment on the futile practice of generating more page views, Carles launched 'verticals' like the Alt Report and the Mainstreamer, where he would post more nonsensical TMZ-like fare. Naturally, this is where some of his biggest traffic hits came from—Perez gave me access to his Google Analytics, and the majority of his top posts are, unsurprisingly, celebrity-related. A post about Chris Brown's penis was one of the biggest; it drew around a million views.
It was undeniably self-aware and often very funny… but it was also a sign that Carles was content with abandoning his burgeoning post as the hipster Jonathan Swift in favor of something that looked more like a hipster Perez Hilton. I was just more interested in the internet as a way to experiment with communication, and probably 'evoking a reaction' with non-traditional content in relations to more standard formats," he said.
Carles was pushing the limits of the system itself, to see how far he could 'scale' his satirical product, the joke collapsing in on itself as it multiplied—was a winking post about Zooey Deschanel's nip slip still winking if the hundreds of thousands of people who clicked on it didn't know it was a joke?
Did Carles, or anyone, care anymore? The likes of Buzzfeed and Huffington Post were betting huge sums of capital that they did not. I was fortunate to have 'mattered' in a time when the scale of the internet wasn't as vast, and there was a monetizable metric that allowed me to continue to create for an audience whose attention I could keep.
In late , Lana Del Rey arrived on the 'indie' scene with an aggressively contrived "vintage gangster" look and meticulously crafted siren sound. To Carles, she was the apotheosis of a 'product' crassly designed to exploit the once-vaguely counterculture blog network that he loved, trafficked, and parodied.
Carles' cynicism, which had grown in tandem with the aforementioned professionalization of independent music—Pitchfork's rise into a major media corporation, 'indie' bands partnering to sell clothing lines at Urban Outfitters, Bon Iver becoming the face of whiskey brands—finally reached its boiling point.
That the "indie" music scene could be so easily duped into promoting someone he considered so obviously pandering—the music blog world helped lift her from obscurity to the stage of SNL in a matter of months—was the final straw. She repackaged herself as a brunette with collagen filled lips packaged as a lofi diy broad," HRO sneered. The tacit sarcasm, of course, implies that none of this should really matter to anyone, but the fact that his Lana Del Rey diatribes were also his biggest hits ever—combined with the beyond-sarcasm disillusionment—sent Carles into his infamous live-blogged death spiral.
The LA Times called it a "psychic meltdown. This was success? Carles lost it. Every day, I prey upon different buzz topics, exploiting my voice, but more importantly, my position as a 'recognized outlet 4 buzz' to try to trick people into thinking I am 'relevant', which basically just means that I am trying to make ppl talk abt my blog and get them addicted to my web brand even if they hate it.
There's the sense, as always, that it's more than just frustration—that the man behind Carles is having an existential crisis, too, having devoted his life and work to something so superficial and limiting. He'd tweet nothing but "help. I don't know, it was weird. Carles continued to blog out the rest of the year at HRO, too, before tapering off and finally going dark, essentially for good, in By then, other prominent 'bloggers' were on the wane or long gone.
Political blogstars like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias had long been absorbed into the mainstream media machine. Andrew Sullivan, the ur-blogger, just announced he was walking away from his blog in January The future of the 'blog' itself is highly in question.
The cultural critique was salient as ever, but the approach seemed dated, or simply bizarre to new audiences. Everybody's self-curating on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, and that's kind of the transition that took place—how to become famous became a much more self-aware process over that period.
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