lifestyle refugee

Something’s been bothering me about these lately. It seems to me that you wouldn’t dream of drawing a cartoon depicting a broad racial/ethnic/gender other un-PC stereotype, but you’re more than happy to traffic in stereotypes of “hipsters” and other groups that haven’t historically been discriminated against. (Top-of-mind examples: This one, and the Apple store cartoon a few days ago.)

You seem like a smart guy, but this incessant reiteration of stereotypes just strikes me as boring and cheap.

(It’s entirely possible that there’s something going on here that I’m missing. If that’s the case, please clue me in.)

George:

“1. A few deca­des of matu­rity and real-life expe­rience, it seems.”

I’m almost 40. I’m a lawyer in a large Southern city. In the past I’ve been an Internet journalist, English professor, short-order cook, and construction worker.

“2. The part where YOU pro­duce something crea­tive that is bet­ter and more popu­lar than what you see here, if you know so much about it.”

I’m also an award-winning independent filmmaker. I didn’t claim that I could make better cartoons than these.

“3. The whole rest of the inter­net, if this part of it dis­tres­ses you so much.”

Distresses me enough to take two minutes to post a comment?

I’ve been subscribed to this site’s RSS feed for a while, because I stumbled across it somehow and liked the cartoons. When I noticed a pattern I thought I’d offer some constructive criticism. Most of the responses, including Hugh’s, completely ignore the points I tried to make and go straight for ad hominem attacks.

Nice conversational skills, y’all. Adios.

As an avid student of social psychology, I find the phenomenon of trolling interesting.

Everyone knows, on some level, that one generally gets the kind of response one invites. This is an obvious rule of life that even children instinctively grasp. Civility invites civility, and hostility invites hostility, and the same is true for everything in between.

But the troll, like MM here, expects others to treat him better than he treats them. He expects a completely different set of rules to be applied to others versus himself, an ethical scheme that is, in may ways, exactly inverted.

MM introduces himself with comments consisting of dismissive sarcasm (the Apple store post) and hostility (“boring,” “cheap” and characterizing social satire as an incipient form of racial bigotry, of all things). Then, when he gets the obvious response that such comments call for, he makes a fuss about how unfairly he is being treated, how he only offered “constructive criticism” and resents the personal nature of the antagonistic response. Suddenly, he only wants to talk about the subject matter, in an academic and constructive way, you see, and lectures us by telling us that getting personal is out of bounds.

And then, after having invited hostility and received hostility, and after acting surprised and offended that hostility should invite hostility (a social reality that even children understand), he offers the final parting shot that we (meaning me, in particular, I suppose), lack “conversation skills.” See? A neat inversion of the usual social rules.

In light of all of this, which is repeated a million times a day all over the internet, there is only one reasonable conclusion — people like MM are looking for a fight. They want it. They create it, if they have to. The get the response they invite, because they like to be yelled at. They have some psychological need for it. They prefer it to other modes of conversation. One can only assume that people like this feel anxious and lost when they find themselves being engaged with people in a less antagonistic way.

I think this phenomenon has something useful to teach us about marketing — how a well-=crafted marketing strategy can invite the desired consumer response, depending on the mindset and social expectations of the consumer group in question.

Can you say… “Marfa”?

P.S. Hugh’s mockery of “hipsters” is a major reason I like his comics. When I laugh at these jokes, I’m not laughing at “hipsters.” I’m laughing at myself.

George: You’re reading a lot into a little. Honest criticism is not the same as trolling. I’ve posted positive comments on Hugh’s drawings in the past. I believe that an artist–of any kind–who takes his work seriously should welcome criticism.

Hugh: Fair enough. Here’s a blog I kept from May 2003 until October 2008, when I got tired of it: http://informationbureau.wordpress.com/

Note: A lot of the images and such are broken links; I had my own domain for a lot of that time, then migrated the posts over to free-parking WordPress when I shut it down. Nonetheless, all 964 posts are there.

I like the idea of “lifestyle refugee” though I’m not sure I really get it. I’d like to see more on this.