EXIT THE CLOUT MATRIX
One night in the post-Dimes Square party scene
On a cold night in December, I found myself kundled outside a Grapenut party in New York City. Moments earlier, a pretty girl with ribbons in her hair had approached me as I stood on the sidewalk. She greeted my friend Matthew, and started blabbing about her conversion to Catholicism while pulling out a sparkly mesh bag of ketamine. In between bumps, she insisted she was not a tradcath, as if acquiescing to this meme about young internet reactionaries embracing conservative religious ideology would reveal her faith as an aesthetic posture—a trendy contrarianism adopted to stand out from the sheeple.
The tradcath denying she was a tradcath made me think of a line from Nemesis’ latest memo: “One thing is obvious: when too many people try to adopt the contrarian position at once, it’s no longer contrarian. Mavericks become the new herd.”
“God wants you to share your ketamine,” I growled. She giggled and handed over a tiny silver spoon.
Sufficiently dissociated, I wobbled into Bella Ciao, an Italian restaurant on the Lower East Side that the kids were calling the new China Chalet. (The real China Chalet—a randomass dim sum restaurant that let you smoke cigs indoors and do bumps off the banquettes—also buckled in 2020, but some kids broke in there a while back and threw a renegade rave lol…) Surrounding me was a potpourri of edgelord podcasters, terminally online Internet People, swagged-out streetwear designers, washed-up skateboarders, and underground DJs with names like “Ibuprofen73”— basically, the assorted flavors of hipsters and grifters that make up the latest iteration of the so-called “Dimes Square scene.”
A Grapenut Brunch Club party at Bella Ciao (Photo by Justin Belmondo)
Despite partying at a Diet Berghain techno club called Basement till 8am, I’d dragged myself out to this random thing where I knew practically no one for the sake of a singular mission: to find out if this hype-inflated scene is as annoying as it seems. Unfortunately, absconding to LA a few years ago hasn’t shielded me from the nauseating churn of New York Times essays, art magazine columns, and blog posts endlessly dissecting the alleged Zeitgeist Moment happening in downtown New York—as Talk Hole’s Steven Phillips-Horst put it, “[In] the city that never sleeps, a Dimes Square article is published every five seconds.”
Following the deluge of press, Dimes Square is becoming a simulacra of itself: an off-off Broadway play about the microscene’s “masturbatory narcissism” premiered earlier this year, along with a goddamn reality TV show called “The Come Up.” The mainstream media was already sniffing that the Moment was over as the neighborhood ceded to a retrograde era of luxury hotels. Still, I felt the urge to vibe-check it for myself—by seeking an answer to the only question I cared about: are Dimes Square parties actually FUN?!
My desperation was part of the equation; I’m still running to the most dystopian corners of the world chasing a feeling that hasn’t quite hit. Raving, the subculture that made me the crazy bitch that I am, is going through a weird growth spurt—emerging from the pandemic wormhole more commoditized and clout-obsessed than ever. Subversion has ceded to simulation. Hedonism is performed for the algorithm. Instead of a vortex of ego dissolution, the dancefloor feels like a peacock zoo—clogged with the oblivious space-hoggers and culture extractors that McKenzie Wark calls “co-workers” and “punishers” in her upcoming book Raving.
I came up in the 2010s Brooklyn DIY scene, when an underground movement was coalescing around “the juicy vibrations of techno as Black queer frequency.” Those years felt like an extended protest, bodies bound by bass and vibrating between outraged disaffection and joyous solidarity. Warehouse parties were the first places where I heard the phrase “safe space”—and witnessed the messiness of trying to enact these theories into practice. The discourse around the dancefloor, centered around social justice, feminism, and Black techno-futurism, was like a download: this was what counterculture could do.
In the background, however, loomed a more sinister undercurrent that came into sharper focus post-pandemic: the weaponization of wokeness for social capital (who can forget the great plague rave cancellation wars of Techno Twitter?)—as well as the cultural extraction of underground aesthetics by corporations thirsty for relevance. We’re now in the age where Nike sponsors techno influencer parties in Berlin, and New York’s sociopathic culture vultures have discovered queer rave culture is “in.” No wonder the dancefloors feel spiritually vacant.
In contrast to the earnestly progressive identitarianism of Bushwick techno, the first wave of Dimes Square adopted a counter-politics: reactionary traditionalism performed with a deadpan affect of deep-trolling. It’s like a bunch of kids checked into a woke detox center and emerged as Catholic housewives and crypto-fascist podcasters. Even their party habits seem more trad: instead of hitting the DMT vape at Bossa, they smoke analog cigarettes at Clandestino. (Thankfully, both scenes share an obsession with ketamine.)
I slid into a banquette with Matthew, who has a podcast called Neoliberal Hell and was one of the hosts of the party. Their friends fed me pumps of prescription ketamine nasal spray Spravato while filling me in on the latest gossip: transphobia accusation, drug overdose, shitty crypto rave. The conversation then veered to a discussion panel on chemsex I had flown to New York to moderate that week. I told them that when people gather to share their darkest stories about drugs and sex—of surviving sexual assault while in the post-consensual space of druggie disinhibition and waking up with no memory of anything but self-hatred—the energy in the room somehow feels very pure. “Come on, Michelle—there’s no such thing as purity anymore,” smirked Matthew.
I began to complain to Matthew about the nihilism entrenched in the politics of Dimes Square—how being an anti-woke edgelord just seems like another way of clowning through our collective cultural crisis. They corrected me, telling me that this party could actually be one of the most radical things happening in regressive Dimes Square: “It’s queer/trans POC or people with no clout working to make an outsider space without signifying it’s radical for recognition from the wokes,” they said. “It’s radical by assembling people who aren’t represented in a scene, but also aren’t given token mentions for their identity. It seems to be a rise of ambient wokeness.”
Ambient wokeness!
If what Matthew said was true, the tradcore Dimes Square scene I had come to investigate had perhaps already evaporated—I’m always fashionably late to the party—but it was evolving into something with more potential, something that felt edgy without being full of edgelords.
I stood up to check out the questionably legal club in the restaurant’s basement, but the lights suddenly flicked on. Party over! So now I was back outside with the throngs.
“Dude, I wish I could host a party…” I overheard an art bro lamenting to his friend as I pushed through the dispersing crowd. “How do you become a host?” his friend replied, genuinely confused. I laughed and told them that hosting is one of the biggest scams in the party business—it is a nightlife marketing strategy fueled by social currency where popular people are asked to bring their friends to an event in exchange for getting their names on the flyer.
This particular party’s hodgepodge lineup of hosts, which ranged from Yung Lean to BDSM kinkster Kevin Carpet to Dimes Square gadfly Mike Crumps, was as if algorithmically curated by an AI trained in the clout matrix. In fact, it was formulated using the guidelines of The Host Manifesto—a PDF-only screed published Frost Children’s Angel Prost, a rising star of this post-Dimes Square scene. In the text—which will allegedly be published soon by Semiotext(e)!—Angel dissects the archetypes of each type of host that party promoters should select to lend their events with a gloss of hype, such as “The Community Partner” (a person who hosts a similar party), and “The Zeitgeist” (someone in high demand).
“A host should be thought of as a floating signifier whose power lies in mere presence,” Angel writes, with the wryness of a nightlife pseudo-intellectual. She goes on to encourage party promoters to lie about the attendance of at least one of the hosts (“The Wildcard”), under the guise that “illusion and deception are perfectly acceptable substitutes for actual experience.”
Angel is one of my fave new nightlife writers, but the Host Manifesto’s post-truth trolling seemed to betray a hyper-vigilance around social status that reminded me of the “How To Get Into Berghain” Reddit threads I’m trying to escape from. When I hit up Angel to inquire about her intentions, she picked up the phone over the squeals of rats she was jumping over to get to another party in New York City. She told me that she often calls her writing “deception poetry,” and that the energy it’s giving is: there’s no way out, so play the system or the system plays me. “Host Manifesto is more than just about the clout matrix,” she added. “It’s about encouraging people to create a night that’s a blend of scenes—because that’s more fun.”
(Predictably, most of the hosts that night never showed up.)
As the bouncer locked the door behind us at Bella Ciao, I joined a group congealing to go to an afterparty at someone’s apartment. On a whim, Matthew invited a stranger loitering on the street to come with us. She laughed, asking where we were going. Matthew’s voice suddenly softened. “At the end of the night we’re all humans working to the real cause of just being,” they said. “If you feel this, come with us.” The woman laughed again and shook her head, saying she couldn’t leave her partner behind.
“That was beautiful, what you said to that woman,” I told Matthew as we walked away.
“Oh, what did I say?” they replied. “I don’t remember.”
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