Hipster rebel punk outsiders -- 99 cents a dozen

A disillusioned ex-boho argues that consumer culture has turned "rebellion" and "individuality" into meaningless poses, about as transgressive as a turtleneck.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Books, Pop Culture, Reviews, Book reviews, American Idol

Illustration by Val. B. Mina

May 2, 2006 | Every weekday, everyone in New York who is tangentially involved in the entertainment business receives a depressing piece of e-mail spam that demands, "Are You VIP?" If you decide you are, it invites you to click through to some nightclub promoter's Web site, where you can get on the guest list for a party that features "Guaranteed Celebrities in the Building!!!"

Meanwhile, laddish authors like Tucker Max and Frank Kelly Rich (founder of Modern Drunkard) achieve short-lived fame for being young men who celebrate drunkenness and boorish behavior. (Imagine that.) Then there's that just-above-the-coccyx tattoo on young women, which seemed, 15 years ago, like some vaguely racy advertisement for hedonism and is now just today's answer to raspberry lip gloss. And let's add the snowboarders who showcase their uncontainable, slope-shredding radicalness in Mountain Dew commercials.

These may seem to you like disconnected little pieces of pop monoculture, with nothing threading them together except the vacuum-cleaner whine of boredom that fills your head when you try to think about them. But Hal Niedzviecki, the author of "Hello, I'm Special," sees a pattern. A Canadian essayist and fiction writer who founded the alt-culture magazine Broken Pencil, Niedzviecki identifies phenomena like these, and many more besides, as characteristic of a paradoxical culture in which "individuality is the new conformity" or, to say the same thing backward, "nonconformity is now the accepted norm of society."

On one level, this idea is so obviously true it hardly bears mentioning, let alone repeating and reformulating over and over again (as Niedzviecki tends to do). This is after all the age of "American Idol" and "Survivor," perhaps the greatest celebrations of pseudo-individuality on a mass scale ever witnessed. The flannel-suited organization man, with his ideal of outward social conformity and private, inward individuality, has all but disappeared as a cultural icon, except as the butt of sitcom humor or an object of reactionary nostalgia. As Niedzviecki frames it, these days one must present the outward appearance of being distinctive and special, even eccentric, while pursuing the most hackneyed and conventional dreams of money, power and celebrity.

Today's avatar of success has abandoned the bowling leagues, country-club parties and Presbyterian church socials that supposedly occupied the organization man's leisure time. His signifiers are different: He plays Texas Hold 'Em in Vegas, BlackBerrys his broker from his whitewater kayak, hits all the best spots for mojitos in South Beach, chaperones models to the Croatian Riviera and leaps from job to job in a lonely, lustful quest for accumulation and domination. At least, he aspires to do all those things. He (or, increasingly, she) has upgraded from an old version of conformity to a new one, whose central oxymoronic commandment is: Be yourself. If "yourself" turns out to be nothing more than an amalgam of brand names and images plucked from TV shows, movies and magazine layouts, so much the better.

On the other hand, there's something wobbly about Niedzviecki's contention that the "individual conformist" lies at the heart of our culture; he doesn't always seem to believe it himself. A blend of cultural analysis, reporting and memoir, "Hello, I'm Special" is full of sharp and funny observations (most of them somewhere on the spectrum from bemusement to rage) and is generally a bracing read. But as Niedzviecki wanders from New Age Judaism to self-esteem training for teens, the "low-power" TV movement, karaoke clubs, the real estate boom in the remote coastal islands of British Columbia and boy-band entrepreneur Lou Pearlman's latest product (a group called Natural whose members actually play instruments), it becomes increasingly less clear what his target is.

Sometimes he's writing about the rise of conformist individuality. Sometimes he's writing about the paralytic disorder of celebrity worship (with its concomitant belief that each of us is a potential celebrity). And sometimes he's writing about the pop-culture economy that makes these things possible, a bloblike entity whose only products are image and spectacle and that has grown so big that nothing, including our purportedly private inward selves, can be said to remain outside it.

There are times when Niedzviecki seems like a paleontologist trying to reconstruct an entire extinct critter from a single metatarsal, or like a physics undergrad who has noticed a peculiar relationship in the lab between mass and energy, but doesn't know about that famous equation. His reading is eclectic, ambitious and scattershot: He draws from classic works of sociology by Ulrich Beck, Serge Moscovici and George Simmel; contemporary cultural analysis by Benjamin Barber and Stuart Ewen; and the great postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault. But he doesn't seem fully aware that for 50 or 60 years cultural critics of various stripes have been wrassling pretty much the same problem he is: that is, the tendency of late-capitalist culture to absorb all forms of opposition and resistance, whether real or symbolic, and then crap them out on our heads as interchangeable commodities.

This isn't entirely a liability. The world of ideas doesn't really need another grad student hauling the brains of dead Marxists around in his suitcase. Niedzviecki can't (or at least doesn't) call upon the dour heavyweights of the Frankfurt School, the apocalyptic bravado of the Situationists or the dense aphorisms of Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and company. That sometimes leaves him bumping around in the dark, stumbling over objects discovered long ago by others, but it also lends his account an undeniable freshness and vigor.

Whatever the theoretical or analytical weaknesses of "Hello, I'm Special," it offers you the experience of an intelligent young writer struggling to think for himself. As Niedzviecki is well aware, this is something that the culture of individualistic conformity has made obligatory, and thereby almost impossible.

In his early 30s, as Niedzviecki explains in his introduction, he experienced a sort of personal epiphany. He had devoted his post-collegiate years to playing the role of anti-establishment, hard-partying bad boy, a "pop-influenced semi-slacker" who celebrated deviance and attacked corporate culture. When his parents, two years running, gave him Hallmark cards that celebrated his nonconformity ("Happy birthday to a one-of-a-kind you!") he abruptly realized that his alleged defiance of convention had become utterly conventional, a ritualized behavior that was "not merely tolerated, but replicated and accepted."

"Hello, I'm Special" is not primarily a memoir, but its quality of personal quest, fueled by both confusion and anger, lends it a peculiar power. Writing the book, Niedzviecki tells us, is partly an act of self-indictment; he has looked into himself and found the same infection of "narcissistic I'm Specialness" and "pop-culture-inspired fantasies" that afflicts almost everyone else in North America. His punk-anarchist-intellectual pose was mostly about "exuding a pretense of cool," and it's now time, he writes with disarming frankness, to "get on with the business of figuring out what and who I want to be."

Next page: Most of us were raised to believe we are unique individuals with special destinies -- but we're not