Elevate me later

There was a brief period in the early 1990’s when I felt that I was just ahead of the curve, culture-wise. My habitual approach to life – a mix of unfocussed ambition, vague dissatisfaction and general underachievement – was given a label, and for a while it seemed as if I was where it was at. I was a slacker, part of what might have become a movement if it had got its act together. Once it was identified though, slacking started to become hard work. It wasn’t enough any more to spend your free time getting stoned, reading comic books and listening to Pavement records; you had to consciously cultivate some sort of lifestyle. Ultimately it all became commodified, just like every other strand of youth culture. There wasn’t much resistance to this process, which was inevitable I suppose, since the essence of slackerdom (for me anyhow) is that feeling that there is something wrong with your life, or the scene, or the government or something, but you can’t quite be bothered to find out exactly what it is, let alone do something about it. Or maybe that’s not it. Whatever.

Anyway, I was thinking about this while doing some half-hearted research into the whole social-networking phenomenon, and more specifically into Facebook. I knew that this wasn’t exactly bleeding-edge stuff, but I didn’t realise quite how lame and dated any post on the subject would look until I saw that even the Daily Telegraph had already printed dozens of articles about it.

I suppose I can take some comfort from the knowledge that this blog is proof that I haven’t sold out that underachieving slacker ethos.