Of Strategic Hipsters and Strategy Blogging
Perhaps the most fitting way to mark my moving to a new blogging platform is to blog…..about blogging about strategy. Specifically strategy hipster bloggers.
At CIMSEC, someone has seen the enemy; and its those damn, dirty stinking hipsters:
The 20th century American strategist Rear Admiral J.C. Wylie said, “I believe deeply that strategy is everyone’s business.”1 The expansion of internet-based strategic commentary, and the greater distribution of traditional sources of strategic discussion like the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, and The Naval War College Review have certainly played a role in achieving Admiral Wylie’s desire. The works of strategic theorists such as Carl von Clausewitz, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Sir Julian Corbett, and Wylie himself are discussed on a daily basis in multiple global mediums. Many would-be strategic thinkers are happy to drop comments from all four of these experts within their writings in support of the policy they advocate. These “hipster” strategists and their overly-familiar homilies to the teachings of “Uncle Carl” and “Sir Julian” (as if these long-dead strategists were their drinking companions) often obscure the backgrounds, geopolitical world views, and national goals of these noted military theorists.
Now, as a Los Angeles native that has seen his fair share of hipsters (at one point in high school I was going almost every other week to an indie rock concert to see an aspiring young hipster strum a guitar and fake a British accent) I find this a bit puzzling.
Certainly the author is not entirely off-base. Name-dropping alone is certainly a part of being a hipster. Not keeping up with the latest indie bands was a ticket to social irrelevance in certain circles. The author’s reference to “Internet-based” strategic hipsters also rings a bell too. The Internet proved to be a boon to hipsters of all stripes. Sites like Pitchfork Media were meccas for discerning hipsters, and I often went on Pitchfork constantly at the peak of my own aspiring hipsterdom to see what kind of bands I had to pretend to be familiar with to move in the social crowds I desired membership within.
But that’s not all of what it means to be a hipster. Obsession with authenticity and constantly revising the hipster goalposts to make yourself more authentic than other hipsters was more important. For example, a hipster could only derive cultural cachet from being a Strokes fan if he (and let’s be honest here, it really is mostly a “he” I’m talking about) could be confident that there were not too many other Strokes fans. When the Strokes became popular, the hipster thing to do would be to say that you like their first album but don’t enjoy their new stuff.
Other hipsters distinguished themselves through their real or perceived tastes in obscure and old cultural products. I remember many people in LA that were more fluent with 1930s blues music than modern pop culture, and others that collected music from obscure mid-century proto-punk bands. Some hipsters collected old guitars and had closets full of vintage LPs that they would listen to on record players. Other hipsters raided vintage clothing stores, Army surplus shops, and Goodwill outlets in search of fashionable outfits. Until it became uncool to like American Apparel, the company made a good degree of money marketing itself to said hipsters.
The antiquarian bent of these LA hipsters stemmed from a perception that old greats were better than the new, and that they provided the modern day hipster with a kind of template as to what was cool and hipstery. Fellow California native DJ Shadow made his career out of crate-digging for samples to use in his albums from some of the most obscure and old sources possible. And many of my hipster friends in LA played in bands that spanned the spectrum of 1980s post-punk rock influences that few top 40 listeners would be familiar with.
Of course hipsters did not uniformly like all old obscure, antiquated cultural products. Wynton Marsalis, the jazz traditionalist whose music I listened to while playing in an jazz band when I lived in Los Angeles, had a cutoff point for what old jazz he would consider “classic.” Spoiler: Sun Ra and Bitches Brew era Miles Davis and everything after that didn’t sit too well with Wynton. The last ingredient of the hipster (at least the kinds that I observed) was the dogged refusal to admit they were a hipster and a willingness to point the finger at other hipsters.
The author, like many hipsters I knew in LA, is both a devotee of an old and obscure set of “artists” (Mahan and Wylie) and dismissive of the old and obscure tastes of other hipsters. He also disdainfully refers to hipsters while implicitly denying that he is an hipster. And to top of it all off, he does so on the Internet:
While the works of all four have a role to play in determining the next U.S. military strategy, the writings of Mahan and Wylie have much more currency than those of Clausewitz and Corbett. Their focus on operational vice strategic issues is a handicap in a new age when preliminary strategic decision rather than operational art is the key. While it is evident that both Clausewitz and Corbett were masters of the strategic geography and warfare methods in their own times, their applicability in the second decade of the 21st century is problematic at best. For these reasons, the U.S. should ignore the strategic “hipsters” and their plethora of Corbett and Clausewitz quotations and instead embrace the sound combination of strategic, operational, and tactical thinking found in the works of Admirals Alfred Thayer Mahan and J.C. Wylie. ….. The rise of new competitors, the return of old challengers, and increasing disorder throughout the globe calls for an emphasis on historical strategic thinkers like Mahan and Wylie rather than operational artists like Clausewitz and Corbett. The strategic hipsters would do well to remember that “Uncle Carl” and “Sir Julian” could not have developed in the absence of underlying strategy that supported their operational theories.
With a few cosmetic re-writes, this could be an article for Pitchfork or an excerpt from the Livejournal posts of people that I knew in high school. Perhaps the most hilarious aspect of the article’s screed against those dirty Internet strategy hipster scum is that the prominence of Mahan and Wylie these days is very much due to the writings of young military officers and civilians on…..you guessed it…..the Internet. One wonders if us strategy hipsters ought to all band together and create a hipster strategy festival every year like Coachella or the one Pitchfork holds. I’m not sure I can still fit into the girl-sized skinny jeans I wore at the height of my aspiring LA hipster days, but its worth a shot if the “bands” playing at such an hipster strategy event are worth it.
I am only half-joking. Perhaps one of the most rewarding things in my professional and intellectual life has been watching the growth of the “Internet-based” community concerning strategy. I am not sure who exactly qualifies as the first strategyblogger. My bias is towards Mark Safranski, the Zenpundit, but if we relax the definition of “blog” one could probably find strategyblogging going back into the Usenet days at the very minimum. I only started blogging in 2006–2007, and I remember that there were very few people actively blogging about defense and strategic affairs. You could probably fit all of them in the notional hipster-infested hole in the wall bar and still have some extra room for a hipster indie rock band to provide a hipster musical soundtrack.
As time went on, the amount of single and multi-author blogs, online publications, and writers in the strategy community exploded. In one way or other (digitally, in person, on listservs) I’ve gotten to know many of them. Sometimes they’ve frustrated me, other times they’ve enlightened me. Some of them have gone on to great things in the government, military, or the private sector; others never really rose out of obscurity or left their day jobs. A particular group of them that I hang out with in DC (though sadly not as much these days as my graduate studies have become more intense) was once dubbed the #stratpack (not a title we wanted, but one we took with some minor amusement).
Today there are many strategy blogs, forums, and publications, but War on the Rocks, Infinity Journal, and the Strategy Bridge stand out as hubs for both up-and-coming strategic analysts and well-established personalities. Frankly, I can’t keep track of all of it anymore — but that’s a pleasant thing, given that I once would constantly refresh the pages of canonical blogs like Abu Muquwama and Ink Spots, hoping in vain for an new post while the authors did other things. Better to struggle to keep up with good content than not have enough of it.
And all of us strategy hipsters, for better or worse, are united in strategy hipsterdom by the strange belief that a panopoly of obscure thinkers about war and conflict hold the key to understanding 21st century security problems. That, and we’re lucky our significant others/spouses put up with us in spite of the aforementioned strange belief and the enormous amounts of time we spend on the Internet arguing with other strategy hipsters. All jokes aside we think that strategy and the strategists that we have all learned either in war colleges, graduate education, or simple self-learning have relevance to some of our era’s most difficult problems. And we won’t apologize for it.
Now excuse me while I get my strategy hipster on wearing my Clausewitz t-shirt and running Python code files on my Mac OSX UNIX prompt named Clausewitz. Yes, you heard me. Every time I boot up my UNIX terminal to do some computer modeling I see the name “Clausewitz” and a blinking cursor. If my current apartment lease allowed dogs, I’d get a dog and name it Clausewitz too. And I’ll do all of this with the conceited grin in my face characteristic of an “Haters Gonna Hate” meme. Maybe you still are gonna hate, but you do you and I’ll do me.
