Here Comes a Regular
Taste is obsolete & gatekeeping is code for what the internet took from us
“Gatekeeping” is an internet neologism that quietly split off a second definition from an existing word, gaining new relevance in post-pandemic culture. If gatekeeping originally meant holding a position of relative power and selectively excluding others from opportunities you controlled, it now increasingly means withholding information, or not wanting others to know what you know—trying to keep a secret in a world where secrets are generally doomed. This newer definition is a departure from the image a literal gatekeeper evokes: Today we might “gatekeep” a neighborhood restaurant, or music we like, or any other kind of hard-won cultural knowledge, in a quixotic bid to preserve some hypothetical personal edge that is always threatening to slip away (the word “taste” is often shorthand for this dilemma).
If, again, the older version of gatekeeping implied power, this newer version is a response to the loss of that power—the erosion of institutions and communities that actually had gates to keep and their ongoing replacement by an atomized landscape where information is the primary resource many of us can still claim. And our grip on even that is tenuous and fleeting, of course.
The internet redefined gatekeeping by repositioning the gates themselves—or eliminating them altogether—and thereby changing what could be gatekept and who could gatekeep it. Universal access became a normative (if often illusory) condition, rather than an exception, which was liberating at first and in many ways still is, especially for those who had previously been on the wrong side of it.
The digital democratization of information needs no explanation here, and its second-order effects have included the equally familiar destabilization of countless societal structures, a process often described using an array of colorful terms: disruption, fragmentation, flattening, enshittification, slop, etc. The broad replacement of institutions with platforms, a shift that Mike Pepi just wrote a great book about, tore down many longstanding walls (and gates) but also left us exposed to the outside elements, while substituting symbolic capital for material prosperity. By constantly threatening to commoditize everything that had formerly made us unique, and often succeeding, this process made information more valuable in the aggregate yet harder to possess, in the old sense, but because it was all we had left we still had to try. When there’s nothing else to gatekeep, we just gatekeep our selves.
THE COOL CRISIS
Nothing feels cool anymore and we wonder what changed. Something obvious that changed is the media infrastructure that transmits culture—the internet, and social media in particular, which erodes traditional cool in various ways: the glut of poorly filtered user-generated content, the incentive to overshare, the need for constant self-promotion. But that’s a matter for a separate post and others have summarized it well lately, such as this piece about the NBA’s swag crisis and this Blackbird Spyplane essay about a generalized version of the same, which identifies “a longing for some solid signal amid the idiot noise.” Importantly, the latter essay concludes with a call for better institutions that can support a caliber of culture that digital platforms inherently cannot (this is also Pepi’s argument in Against Platforms).
Diagnoses of this contemporary Crisis of Cool often praise the kind of gatekeeping that the internet has undermined. When every once-cool domain seems to be full of chuds, as is often the case, you can’t help but wish that some scrupulous door guy existed to turn most of them away. You also must consider the possibility that you would have been denied entry yourself. But even that would be okay: It’s better to know that something good is thriving without you than to be inside and realize it’s over, or even worse, that you had a hand in ruining it. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, maybe you don’t want to pass through any gate that would actually let you through.
The platonic ideal of gatekeeping was always the gate that nobody could get through, something Blackbird Spyplane wrote about in the post linked above:
“WASPs are the purest domestic distillation of A Class You Can Emulate but Cannot Join Except Through Birth. To put this in the contemporary parlance, WASP culture is America’s foundational genetic expression of ‘gatekeeping.’”
The enduring fascination with WASP culture despite its obvious problems provides an instructive example of what this pro-gatekeeping discourse is often really about: an indirect yearning not for the exclusivity itself, but for the bygone world where universal access (as enabled by the internet) was not yet a default assumption—a segmented world made of coherent communities and institutions as well as localized subcultures grounded in physical space, where we transacted in currency that was harder to counterfeit and the cheat sheet for faking it was more than a Google search away. What we now describe as gatekeeping was also supported by limited mobility and slower information flow, meaning the gatekeeping often happened somewhat organically. Being part of various scenes that seem inaccessible in retrospect may have merely required you to actually be there, which few were. Geography is a natural filter—having to physically show up somewhere eliminates a lot of people right off the bat, and most people who could show up wouldn’t even know to, much less want to. Similarly, being part of a community in the traditional sense restricts your ability to be a part of others, if only because one takes up too much time. Even the truly exclusive enclaves of pre-networked society had less difficulty keeping the hordes at bay because fewer knew what they were missing. It’s easy to idealize all of this and forget what the drawbacks were, but the good parts certainly feel elusive in late stage internet culture.
GATEKEEPING AS SECRECY
Back in the heyday of Twitter, probably ten years ago, someone described the site as a party that too many people showed up to (fittingly, I can’t find the tweet or remember who said it). In post-pandemic inflationary culture, everything sort of feels that way (except Twitter itself, ironically, which now feels like a party that you should have left an hour ago). Unlike its physical counterpart, the nature of digital space is to admit all comers, expanding as needed to contain the swelling crowd. Here, the bottleneck is no longer capacity but attention and processing capacity, which are managed by different means. Everyone gets into the club but most people remain invisible once inside. Social media feels like an overcrowded party not because the lines are long but because no one can hear you speak.