The Committee to Nuke Elysium

The tastes and habits of the world’s bohemias are real symbols of a certain way of life and way of thinking; there’s fidelity to a certain truth in the underlying reality, and that is how a Tokyo hipster can quickly recognize what might prove to be a kindred spirit in Buenos Aires or Austin. This kind of symbolism has been around since at least the time of Oscar Wilde, when the greenery-yallery aesthetes drifted about carrying “a poppy or a lily” (q.v. Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience.) In the age of the Internet, though, that symbolic force has become just hugely magnified, because new symbols can penetrate the hive mind so quickly, and so deeply.

So today’s bohemians get in a big gang and live together, as they have for over a century at least; almost every city of any size in the Western world has at least one such neighborhood, and the big cities have many, each with its own flavor. In effect, though, all these places are the same place, like Solzhenitsyn’s “archipelago” (except not a prison camp for political dissidents): a series of far-flung islands but really one place, invisibly linked. In this case, residents of the archipelago value inventiveness, intelligence and taste over wealth and conformity; what Lethem is calling “connoisseurship.” There is lots of artw