From the June 18, 2022 newsletter of The Baffler:

“Hey there—what are your plans this weekend? We’ve got some suggestions. How about an outdoor concert in a city park, sponsored by a major credit card company? Or dinner at the latest upscale new American restaurant, featuring local produce and an expansive list of natural wines? Perhaps a relaxing walk along the newly revitalized waterfront? We’ll let you think on it. 

Readers of our magazine know we’ve been documenting the banal innovations of yippie urban “lifestyle” since the 1980s. The twentieth-century knowledge worker, with their advanced degrees and boundless creativity, fled suburban monotony to grab a slice of the counterculture in the city, only to find a landscape cleared of any culture at all, terraformed by capital and its coconspirators in government.

In 1995, Keith White wrote about the slick publications that packaged this process as a good thing—the city magazine. Outlets like New York and Washingtonian perfected the formula, which offered upwardly mobile (or already wealthy) urbanites the chance to feel like insiders with glossy best-of lists and advertorials for local businesses made to look like articles. As White observed, they imagined cities as brands, barely indistinguishable from one another: 

City magazines deal in counterfeit uniqueness, parceling out life in some easily merchandisable form—sports team, celebrity, coffee shop. City culture, as understood by the city magazines, is just a decoration—and a remarkably cheap one at that, the contemporary equivalent of those old Empire State Building pencil sharpeners or Space Needle paperweights.

In an era where axe-throwing bars and escape rooms and immersive Instagram museums pass for culture and entertainment, White’s coda feels especially poignant—cities are becoming more expensive than ever, while at the same time transforming into “places of wholesomely daring recreation for one class and cesspools of neglect and degradation for everyone else.”

City magazines were just fine with this state of affairs, and by the 2010s, the alternative press had more or less shrugged in agreement. In Baffler no. 21, Eugenia Williamson wrote on the decline of the alt weekly, laying out the forces that turned once-reliable sources of incisive political commentary and cultural reportage into purveyors of watered-down listicles. Alt-weeklies “used to thrive on enmity,” she writes, and were reliable “political scourges”—a refreshing tonic to establishment-friendly publications.

But as the internet changed the game and advertisers fled, surviving alt-weeklies were forced to slim down, conglomeratize, or both. Reported stories and local coverage lost page-space. Williamson wrote:

In the dispiriting ouroboros known as the Internet age, what, exactly, is alternative journalism an alternative to? Why should readers dally with their local alt-weekly when they can get restaurant recommendations from local blogs?

Long before it shuttered in 2017, the Village Voice, for instance, was a shell of its former self. The document of downtown culture went out, not with a bang but a whimper.

That’s not to say downtown culture itself disappeared—it just changed with the city. On our site, Will Harrison offers a skeptical view of downtown Manhattan’s new scene from the vantage point of the ticket booth at Metrograph, a movie theater (founded by a necktie designer) that laid off half the front-of-house staff in February. “Dimes Square” might be small geographically, but dammit if the kids online don’t like talking about it, making memes about it, and over-identifying with the handful of post-left reactionaries who live there. 

So whether you’re sipping Dirty Shirleys at the best patio bar in your up-and-coming neighborhood or just posting endlessly on Instagram about people who do so, that’s a weekend well-spent in the twenty-first century city!”