I don’t live in Brooklyn and I don’t dream of opening a coffee shop. But, if I told my friends that I am going to move to Brooklyn and open a coffee shop, I imagine (or hope) that someone would tell me that it’s a crowded market. They would then probably say, if I said my heart was set on it, that I’d have to do something totally different, something completely unique that would really stand out from the crowd.
Knowing me, I probably wouldn’t be up for the challenge and I think most entrepreneurs would feel the same. Achieving the Next Big Thing is hard. It’s easier to find a market that’s less crowded. Of course there are those who live for this kind of thing. Not me.
Crowded markets
Today we’re more suspicious of crowds than ever. From social media influencers and master chefs to shaming, canceling social justice warriors and lonely, right-wing-forum-posting young white men with guns; from Left to Right; from rich to poor; from every existing identity to every new possible identify, we live life as entrepreneurs seeking out new markets and, increasingly, mind-boggling levels of fame and attention. What was once achieved through art, fashion, music, literature, pop, celebrity personalities, and so on, is today our actual, everyday lives. Whatever brand we’re pushing on social media. Whatever life we’re living our best. Whatever self-care remedy we’re sharing with fellow activists. Whatever virtue we’re signaling when tragedy hits. It’s hard to find anywhere in contemporary cultural production where crowded-market thinking isn’t driving us to innovate ourselves to extract cultural capital. If any self care is needed, it’s from this stress of constantly fleeing from crowded markets. It’s tiring working against the tide, knowing that, eventually, we will lose. Eventually, we will miss something, say something off, or maybe just fade out once the narcissistic moment passes, once we’ve survived the game.
“Crowds are that against which individuals define themselves.”
Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party (2016)
Jodi Dean’s Crowds and Party opens with a thorough look at the stress we feel today and of the fiction on which the individual is based. She makes a case for the crowd in this context, noting “the power of the many and the relief it provides from the unbearable demand for individuality.”
Populism, today’s theoretical bogeyman, is as hard to define as explaining what it’s like to be in a crowd. Sometimes you’re in a crowd and something happens—a plate drops, fireworks, a car crash, a goal is scored. Planned or random, there’s a moment when the crowd is something more than the individuals making it up. It’s not a singularity, but it is a way of experiencing that can be very different from how we are when we are alone.
I think I’ve felt the relief from the “command individuality” that Dean describes. When I’m in a crowd, I can’t ignore that I am in a crowd, part of it. I’m obligated in every instance to consider the whole of it. My attention is scattered but not distracted. I’m constantly looking, listening. I can’t hold a conversation for long because everything I’m hearing is mixing with a wider set—thoughts are coursing through me as faces, body parts, ads, buildings, and objects spark a memory, impression, or idea. There is a blurriness between me and everyone else. But it’s never distinct. People talk and I hear fragments; it’s always in this situation that I hear pieces of conversations that have a déjâ vu feel, phrases I heard just the day before, a topic I was just talking about. Floating mumblings carry an odd resonance. Connections to a wider world are made. (Coincidence is a strange egg and it happens more in a crowd.) Social media is a poor simulacrum of this aspect of the crowd experience.
Avoiding the crowds (of basic bitches)
A friend I once had often expressed how much she didn’t like crowds. They made her feel uneasy, anxious, she explained whenever she could. It was who she was, she said. She wasn’t a “crowd person,” but a “home body,” she always politely affirmed.
I remember once inviting her to go with me and a few others to a festival where we live that happens every year. She declined, but not without making it another opportunity to tell me that she doesn’t like crowds, that she doesn’t go to places with crowds. I made the mistake of lightly insisting that it would be fun, she should come. She added that for a woman, especially one of her size, a crowd is threatening. I wouldn’t understand the vulnerability she felt. I felt ashamed because I was being told to check my cis-male privilege.
The festival is held to celebrate the blooming of lilacs. It draws a crowd, but not a particularly large one. Because it’s free and centrally located, people from all over and from all walks of life attend. There is free music and lots of the usual rip-off fanfare that goes with an event like that. The air is filled with fried-food smells. There is beer.
Middle class, white, cis, heterosexual, and highly educated, many people like my friend attend this festival and others like it in Rochester. But there are also many more who don’t fit this description that go. In the years since this friendship ended, I’ve often thought about her view on crowds and have seen it reflected in other people and cultural products. Most awkward-loving hipsters tend to be nervous about crowds, preferring the solitary space of the thoughtful. They’ll use terms like “home bodies,” and say they’d rather stay home and watch Netflix than go to a busy bar with loud, obnoxious people everywhere. Maybe they’d rather stay home and read book. Or binge on a new show.
There is considerable cultural capital to be accrued among the intellectual liberal end of the professional managerial class spectrum for someone who shares, often in a nervous, nearly triggered sort of way, that they don’t like large crowds. Often the implication is that the noise or unpredictability of a crowd causes them considerable anxiety and discomfort. They’re sensitive to undulations that maybe more regular people—basic bitches—don’t even notice.
I wonder if a general fear of a rambling, foaming-at-the-mouth mob—or maybe the image of zombie hordes or disease-infected post-apocalyptic creatures is more contemporary—has entirely replaced our concept of the crowd. My friend’s view of the crowd reflects a trend whereby individuals seek ever greater individuation by accruing cultural capital. There is a folk-like belief in American culture that to be a genius or brilliant or clever means also that you are difficult to understand, struggle to be nice to people, lack social skills, or don’t know how to do the boring, everyday things that “normies” do. Movies like Rain Man and Little Man Tate from the 1990s reflect this myth. People who want to be perceived as more intelligent than average joes, therefore, need to make clear social signals that reflect this accepted image of the genius. There’s an idea that intellectual brilliance is too much for our commonplace world to handle, leading to various psychological problems or even suicide. Expressing personal struggles with everyday activities, like finding crowds overwhelming, can be used to indicate a subtler distinction of intellect, a more vulnerable state that is the curse of being just plain smarter than all the rest.
The fear of the overpopulating masses is nothing new, especially among intellectual elites. The journalist Leigh Phillips conveys this sentiment beautifully in his book Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts, connecting the endless stream of content about end-of-the-world fantasies to a Malthusian hatred for the crowd. But so much theorizing isn’t really needed. It feels shitty when someone condemns something you enjoy as a sign of moral regress, lowliness, and, worse, participation in hateful politics.
Throughout my education and becoming as part of the professional managerial class, I’ve had to learn how to communicate a preference for being alone, doing quiet solitary activities, maybe with a few friends, as a sign of my cultured-ness, of being an intellectual, or at least thoughtful and considerate. But, in the end, I like events with crowds. I like going to places where there are a lot of people. I like big cities. I like wandering around the crowds there.*
Where the crowds of normies are
I especially like the kinds of events that draw a crowd—public festivals, fairs, sports, concerts, parades. Some are held together by a spectacle, others are more loose, with just a few bare minimum requirements (fried food, beer, rides, naive art and the like). I’m lucky to live somewhere that has a lot of free events like these during the summer, an antidote to the long winters here. And, failing any calendar event, Rochester always has its public market, the oldest in New York State, which often has a good crowd, whatever the season.
Not all places with lots of people have a crowd. There’s a difference between a crowded place and a crowd.
A restaurant that’s packed with people with no tables open is a crowded place—everyone’s busy doing their own individual thing, behaving as though they are alone despite everyone else all around. Or take an Apple Store. Always busy, always crowded with people investigating the latest innovation on offer. What a person feels in these situations is what observers like Poe, Baudelaire or Walter Benjamin noticed in their times: there is a strange kind of loneliness one can feel among so many other people.
My antidote to all of this toxic individualistic elitism is to go to whatever free festivals I can go to. I recently went to an annual Greek festival that is run by a local Greek Orthodox church. (It’s true that religion can open the opportunity for a non-commodified crowd space.) The festival is simple, with lots of Greek food and non-stop Greek music (of which I know nothing).
Dancing is a big part of the event. I watched a crowd of people mutate into the beautifully organized movements of various folk dances. It’s mesmerizing—I don’t understand how people remember dance steps or remember when what dance goes with what song. I know nothing about folk dancing, but what I’ve observed is that there are no stars of the show—everyone is necessarily a normie, a basic bitch. Folk dancing is possibly complete anathema to all that is contemporary, to all that is called innovation, for this very reason: it removes the conditions for individuality, achieving a formal expression of the feeling of being in a crowd.
The Left has abandoned this aspect of social belonging for decades. It will need to find a way back to it, in some form, if it’s ever going to be relevant to the millions of normies in the world going to festivals, watching parades, standing around, waiting for something.
*In writing this, I had crowds of people in cities in mind. I still think this is more or less what I have in mind, but there is a something similar I’ve felt to being in the woods, especially in the summer. I mention this because that’s usually understood as a solitary-transcendental-alone experience, when, in reality, you’re hardly alone at all. The woods in the summer in western New York State is very crowded. That same scattered attention I feel in a crowd of people is there. A bird flies overhead. An ant runs over my foot. Leaves tremble in the breeze. The sun’s reflection ripples as a fish breaks the surface of water.