more and more these days i find myself asking, "what happened to the cool kid code?" this might make me seem like a snob or a jerk, or an old person! but the question needs to be asked, by everyone!!

what is the cool kid code, you ask? well it's a number of spoken and unspoken, things that let you know that someone is the type of person that you would wish to associate yourself with on a deeper level than normal. growing up in the 90's and early 00's there were certain habits and personal effects that one adopted that to those "in the know" were like tiny awesome smoke signals to people who might become your very best friend! for instance, at age thirteen i knew that most any boy who had a skateboard was a boy that that was pretty interested in hanging out with. not because i was some kind of badass future z-boy but because i knew that if that person had that interest our musical tastes, humor and general outlook on life were bound to be pretty similar. now was that an absolute? certainly not. but i knew i had much more in common with that person than say, someone who was super into paintballing and lacrosse.

the same was pretty much true for music and musically themed garb. if someone was wearing, say, a dinosaur jr. shirt they had to search FAR AND WIDE to find that shirt if they couldn't go to a show. sure, if you were lucky there were small amounts of reproductions at your local harmony house but nothing like now. at that point not only did you have to search for that thing, but you had to KNOW about it first. which was a feat back then.

i knew that girls who read sassy magazine, had pink hair, wore chuck taylors, painted their nails black, and had an iggy pop button were girls i wanted to have sleepovers and eat nachos with. THEY were the fun ones. the ones whose closets i wanted to borrow clothes from and start all-girl bands with! and all those other girls who were into n'sync could totally suck it.

you see the secret then was that the mere fact of knowing ABOUT something was the astonishing part. wikipedia did not exist to quench your every inquiry about how to make your hair more "emo". there was no one stop shop to become goth. you had to make yourself goth. you were forced to compile your "identity" over time and from bits and pieces of things you thought were awesome. and the more you did that the more you learned about other things that were awesome.

i know everyone likes to wax nostalgic about their youth and how it was so much better and different than how things are now but in all honesty things, not even ten years ago were so much different than they are now. no more when you see a boy wearing a pair of vans does it mean he actually owns a skateboard. it only means he probably went to the mall or shopped on some internet store. ten year old kids wear shirts with kurt cobain's face on them. everyone has 10 holes in their face a shaved head. the widespread availability of information via the internet, social media, and the ability of the internet to more effectively mass market identities and lifestyles to people has blurred the lines of the cool kid code forever!

so with this overwhelming amount of data ready for a young person's consumption you end up with a poorly chosen mishmash of things that would have maybe once been cool if honed properly and the information wielded correctly. instead we have world full of pseudo sid + nancy alterna-teens with arm warmers, pierced lips, swoopy hair and the misfits entire discography. where once you had to REALLY try to look this stupid (there were about five people in my school who went out of their way to do this out of the entire school population) now it is commonplace.

"It's not just that the data is in unrestricted places-- it's that one no longer needs to know quite how to find it. The acquisition of knowledge used to mean pursuing a prescribed path and then getting to the knowledge desired when the path reached there. The seeker had to jump through the hoops left and right by his predecessors. Now, the seeker can just get the answer." - Program or be Programmed - Douglas Rushkoff

at this point i have no real solution to this problem aside from exploding the internet and moving in with prince. all i know is that my kids won't be texting or crumping and will only be allowed to read immanuel kant and listen to the who until they're 11.

in the spirit of the code here's some photos:









THE INTERNET HAS STRIPPED THE MEANING OUT OF EVERYTHING! this message has been delivered to you from my blog ;)