Why Did America Stop Being Weird?
There was a time when every American city seemed to contain at least one store that made no economic sense. It might sell used records, military surplus, incense, old magazines, model trains, taxidermy, comic books, pornography, fishing equipment and three objects nobody could identify. The owner was usually behind the counter, and the owner was also usually the reason you went there. There were local television personalities who were famous within a radius of perhaps forty miles, radio DJs who chose their own records, restaurants decorated by somebody who had apparently never encountered the concept of interior design, and newspapers that ran columns written by genuine eccentrics. Every town had buildings modified so many times that nobody could remember what they originally looked like. You could encounter a hand-painted sign advertising a business whose purpose remained mysterious even after you had read it.
America was weird, and I don't mean that nostalgically in the usual sense. Plenty of things were worse. Downtowns could be filthy. Local newspapers could be terrible. Weird little stores often smelled weird for perfectly good reasons. Television offered three channels, two of which might be showing golf. If you wanted a particular book or record and nobody in town carried it, you might simply never find it. But American life once possessed an enormous amount of unintentional regional variation. Rockford didn't quite look like Milwaukee. Milwaukee didn't quite look like Madison. Madison didn't quite look like Des Moines. The differences weren't planned by tourism bureaus. Nobody had hired a consultant to develop an "authentic local identity." They happened because places were partially isolated from one another, and strange things flourish in isolation.
The Great Flattening
The obvious suspect is the internet, but blaming the internet is too easy. The flattening had begun long before most of us got online. Interstate highways moved commercial life toward exits. Shopping malls pulled stores away from downtown. National chains learned how to reproduce exactly the same environment hundreds and eventually thousands of times. Consolidation transformed radio. Local newspapers weakened. Walmart and other giant retailers replaced thousands of peculiar little stores with extremely efficient enormous ones. The internet finished a job already underway.
That is one of the great ironies of the digital age, because the internet was supposed to produce exactly the opposite result. Suddenly everyone could publish. Everyone could broadcast. Everyone could find everyone else. A kid in Rockford interested in an obscure Japanese noise band no longer had to hope that one battered cassette somehow reached northern Illinois. The entire history of recorded music was becoming available to everybody. This should have caused an explosion of weirdness. Instead, we eventually built a handful of enormous machines that became remarkably good at showing millions of people the same things. The old gatekeepers disappeared, and then we discovered algorithms.
Part of the old weirdness came from inefficiency. Consider local television. Stations needed hours of inexpensive programming, so somebody might be hired to host old horror movies on Saturday night. The budget was approximately eleven dollars. The set looked like something constructed backstage during a high-school play. The host invented a character, told jokes, interviewed a local wrestler, showed a terrible movie and became a celebrity in three counties. Nobody in New York had approved this, and that was important. The same thing happened in radio. A DJ could decide that some peculiar song deserved to be played. A record-store employee could put something unfamiliar near the register because he liked it. An alternative newspaper could devote 1,500 words to a local performance artist because the editor happened to think the person was interesting.
Most of these decisions went nowhere. That's the part nostalgia edits out. For every strange local institution people still remember fondly, there were dozens of lousy ideas, incompetent businesses and boring programs. But failure was inexpensive enough that weird things could survive. Modern culture is much better at measuring attention. That sounds like progress until you consider what measurement does to behavior. If every article, photograph, song and video immediately produces numbers telling you whether people liked it, the temptation to make the next thing resemble the thing that produced the best numbers becomes enormous. Eventually the audience isn't merely consuming culture. It is training it.
When Weirdness Becomes a Format
The algorithm doesn't hate weirdness. That's almost worse. It loves weirdness that performs. A genuinely strange person can become enormously successful online. An obscure hobby can suddenly acquire millions of viewers. Something made in a basement in Rockford can reach Tokyo before dinner. None of that was possible in the world I am describing. But once something succeeds, the machinery surrounding it immediately begins manufacturing versions of it. One person restores an abandoned cabin and soon there are ten thousand abandoned-cabin channels. Somebody films himself silently cooking beside a river and suddenly half the internet is silently cooking beside rivers. A peculiar visual style catches people's attention and within weeks it has become an aesthetic category.
The strange thing becomes a format, and formats are the natural enemy of weirdness because real weirdness doesn't know what category it belongs in yet. I miss stores that operated on this principle, particularly stores that appeared to have no business model. You could walk into one and immediately wonder how the rent was being paid. There might be six customers all afternoon. The inventory looked as though it had accumulated geologically. Nothing matched. Prices were written in pencil. Somewhere in the back was an object that had probably been there since the Carter administration.
Amazon is infinitely better at selling you the thing you already know you want. The weird store was better at showing you something you didn't know existed. That difference is larger than it appears. Recommendation systems are extraordinarily sophisticated, but they are still recommendations. They begin with information about you: what you searched for, what you watched, what people similar to you bought. The dusty store had no idea who you were. Neither did the garage sale. Neither did the library shelf. Neither did the box of records somebody put on the curb. Discovery used to involve more collision. You went looking for one thing and came home with another.
The Geography of Weirdness
Walking around Rockford for years has made me increasingly interested in the physical remnants of this older America, and not necessarily the grand buildings. The small evidence is often better: a faded sign painted on brick, a storefront whose shape reveals the business that occupied it forty years ago, a staircase leading to an apartment that no longer exists, a little building sitting at an angle because it predates everything surrounding it, an abandoned chair beside the road, a bicycle pulled from the river. It is the accumulated archaeology of people improvising their lives.
These things interest me partly because they haven't been optimized. Nobody placed the chair there to improve my experience. It is simply there. That may be why walking has become one of my favorite ways of encountering a city. A car turns geography into destinations. The internet does something similar to information. You announce where you want to go, and a machine efficiently takes you there. Walking is inefficient because you have to pass everything in between, and the in-between is where the weird stuff lives.
Something else changed when everybody acquired a camera and an audience: we became more aware of how things look from outside. Restaurants now know customers will photograph the food. Businesses know their interiors will appear online. Artists know the opening will be documented. People know almost any public moment can become content. Even places trying to look weird frequently possess the same professionally designed version of weirdness: mural here, exposed brick there, Edison bulbs overhead, ironic object attached to wall. We have become extraordinarily good at signaling authenticity.
Actual authenticity was usually less photogenic. The old neighborhood tavern wasn't trying to resemble an old neighborhood tavern. It just hadn't been remodeled since 1974. The eccentric shopkeeper wasn't cultivating a personal brand. He was a man who wanted to talk about Civil War bayonets for forty-five minutes even though you had clearly indicated several times that you needed to leave. Nobody called him a creator. He was just Bob.
Maybe America Is Still Weird
There is a danger in arguments like this. Every generation eventually decides the world of its youth was richer, stranger and more authentic than the world that replaced it. The people who grew up before television probably thought television destroyed something. They were right about some things and wrong about others. America has not actually stopped being weird. I've walked enough streets to know better. People are still making inexplicable things in garages. They're still painting strange signs, collecting objects nobody else values, opening businesses everyone tells them will fail, writing poems nobody requested, playing music nobody knows how to categorize and constructing elaborate private worlds that may never attract more than twelve participants.
Maybe weirdness hasn't disappeared. Maybe it has become harder to see because the normal world has become so much louder. The strange little store now competes visually with a thousand corporate signs. The local musician competes with every musician who ever recorded anything. The neighborhood eccentric competes with professional eccentrics whose job is being eccentric for millions of followers. And yet the real thing persists.
This may be another reason I keep returning to the same streets. Online, somebody is always trying to show me something. Outside, most things don't care whether I notice them. A weed comes through a crack in the sidewalk without developing a content strategy. Somebody leaves a freezer in an alley. A blackbird pulls something from the mud. An old industrial building loses another window. A hand-painted sign fades one summer further toward illegibility. None of it has been selected for me, and that increasingly feels luxurious.
Perhaps America didn't stop being weird. Perhaps we built systems that became extremely efficient at directing our attention toward whatever everybody else was already looking at. The weird America is still underneath that layer: in alleys, basements, garages, small presses, old buildings, flea markets, independent stores, forgotten websites and conversations with people who have never considered whether what they're saying might perform well. You can still find it. The trick may be to stop asking the machine where to look.
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