Name: The Conquest of Cool
ISBN: 9780226260129

The Conquest of Cool

While the youth counterculture remains the most evocative and best-remembered symbol of the cultural ferment of the 1960s, the revolution that shook American business during those boom years has gone largely unremarked. In this fascinating and revealing new study, Thomas Frank shows how the youthful revolutionaries were joined - and even anticipated by - such unlikely allies as the advertising industry and the men's clothing business. In both areas, each having also been an important pillar of fifties conservatism, the utopian, complacent surface of postwar consumerism was smashed by a new breed of admen and manufacturers who openly addressed public distrust of their industries, who recognized the absurdity of consumer society, who made war on conformity, and who finally settled on youth rebellion and counterculture as the symbol of choice for their new marketing vision. The Conquest of Cool is a thorough history of advertising as well as an incisive commentary on the evolution of a peculiarly American sensibility, the pervasive co-optation that defines today's hip commercial culture. By studying the devices and institutions of co-optation rather than those of resistance, Frank offers a picture of the 1960s that differs dramatically from the accounts of youth rebellion and sell-out that have become so familiar over the years.

What Hacker News says

sfpotterFeb 2023

The extent to which these kinds of lifestyles are astroturfed is always interesting. Not claiming it is necessarily the case, just that it does happen from time to time. Thomas Frank’s “The Conquest of Cool” is a good reference here.

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leocJan 2020

There's plenty of alarmism in The Hidden Persuaders—I think it's fair to say that Freudian 'depth psychology' and subliminal imaagery turned out to be less of a threat than once feared—but once you read what he says about "good guys" versus "bad men" in childrens' TV https://books.google.ie/books?id=29jhBwAAQBAJ&pg=PT76&lpg=PT... you'll never look at Scooby-Doo or the 1960s in the same way again. In that respect I think Thomas Frank's The Conquest of Cool https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo36... may be something of a successor to Hidden Persuaders, but I haven't been able to read it myself yet.

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clickokAug 2015

The main objection against the ending refrain of "go home, yuppies" is that, since hackers (however you define the term) have valuable skills, they should be able to earn money using them. If the alternative is working in a menial capacity for some large alienating infrastructure (see what I did there?) with hacking as a hobby, then I'd rather be working on something interesting, even if it makes me complicit in gentrification[0].

So, that's the whole issue right there-- being a hacker has become a career path, and it's iteratively becoming more mainstream as the expected benefits are formalized and the stigmas exorcized[1]. That doesn't really sound all that bad, but the problem with gentrification is that it pushes the original tenants out, which is kinda scary when we're talking about the gentrification of an idea.

"Real" hackers become hard to identify among the masses who can sling a little javascript, and so they end up on the fringes of their own movement.

Of course, I'm not really sure how much such real hackers care. It'll be inconvenient when you can no longer identify a member of the tribe by a simple shibboleth, but that is not an insurmountable obstacle.

In my opinion, l33t H4x0r status is something you earn[2]. A yuppie having "hacker" on their business card is likely doing about as much damage to hackerdom as the self-titled programming rock stars, ninjas, wizards, etc. etc. did to those professional groups.

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0. Incidentally, does anyone else get reminded of things like The Rebel Sell or The Conquest of Cool by pieces like this? All of this handwringing serves to subtly indicate that the author is the sort of person who happens on these scenes before they were cool.

1. Even if you can't get rid of the more Stallman-esque members of the tribe, they get romanticized, deified, reduced to stories instead of people who could be brilliant, visionary, and kind, but moments later gross or needlessly rude.

2. Generally by spelling with your number keys.

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