"Withdrawing in Disgust Is Not the Same as Apathy"

"The world Linklater presents in Slacker is a fleeting snapshot of a time and place that no longer exists—the fliers stapled to the telephone poles have long since disintegrated and disappeared. The independent video stores have mostly gone out of business, replaced first by Blockbuster, then by Redbox, now by at-home streaming. The J.F.K. conspiracy theorists that used to wander the streets looking for a sympathetic ear for their rants can now, on the Internet, find an audience from the alleged comfort of their own homes. There seem to be fewer and fewer pedestrians on the streets, fewer random interactions with strangers as concrete cities are made into virtual ghost towns by cloud computing. With all these devices, we live in a endless summer of social relations. Loneliness has effectively been banished. But is it possible to appreciate it without the contrast of the other seasons? Watching Slacker, there’s the creeping sense that without incidental human encounters, life loses some of its meaning. Places like Austin in 1991 don’t seem to exist anymore—today, the revitalized city centers all look the same, filled with people in American Apparel clothing, working side by side on matching aluminum Macbooks. With the demotion of the physical realm, some essential nutrient required for genuine weirdness to thrive is lost."

Aaron Lake Smith at n+1 looks back two decades to Richard Linklater's Slacker.

And William Deresiewicz in The New York Times wonders about the future of youth culture.