The preceding pandemic year had been a time of unprecedented digital immersion. With less material to draw upon from the outside world, we frantically generated content about content. Memes evolved at an accelerated rate, all the more recursive because they were all we had. At the time, this didn’t even feel strange, because it was the mere culmination of what we’d been building toward for the prior decade, and we were already acclimated. 2020 put the finishing touches on that process of rewiring our brains for social media, fully orienting us toward a world where everything is content and potential raw material for memes and discourse.

New Gentrification — metagentrification — is post-millennial, illegible, and hyper-self-aware (“Not me eating breakfast at Dimes!”). Micro-neighborhoods and scenes rapidly emerge, memeified from the start, encouraging an incessant exegesis among their ever-expanding horde of participants, many of whom seem to simultaneously exist within those worlds and at an ironic distance from them. The most sophisticated providers of detached commentary, and the most viral memes, become symbolic pillars of the neighborhood itself. The entire construct feels like a Russian doll of such knowingness, the center of which, if you ever reach it, may or may not turn out to be anything at all.

Hipsters had a coherent if embarrassing system of values, celebrating elusive objectives like authenticity; with so many of those ideals long since commodified or extinguished, an impenetrable nihilism has replaced it, accepting that if everything is just content, it can all be worn like a costume and then discarded when the starter pack of which it’s part evolves and renders it obsolete.

Sundberg quotes a Dimes Square local who worries that the neighborhood’s new hotel development will unleash another wave of thinkpieces and clueless tourists — people who “think it’s a real thing.” She continues, “It’s not a real thing. It was a joke that journalists and people who don’t live here kind of escalated into a reality.” To the tourists, the firsthand experience of the place must indeed be puzzling, even disappointing, like visiting the diner from Seinfeld. Clandestino is an ordinary bar, albeit more crowded these days. The real thing is anchored somewhere else, and those visitors have probably already found it.