This week, we’re joined by scholar, editor, and philosopher, Robin James, to talk about her provocative recent essay entitled “We’re through being Cool: Tech Bros, Manosphere Influencers, Ancient Greek Masculinity, and AI,” posted at James’ blog, It’s Her Factory.
When we think about “cool,” we think about effortless, confident, style… but being cool has always been about more than style. It’s about resistance to authority, overcoming patriarchy, refusal to fit in. Yet, a cohort of manosphere influencers have recently been rejecting “cool” as a way of affirming their masculinity. What happens when “bro culture” asserts old forms of masculinity as new forms of mastery, which then get linked with AI hype, making “cool,” well, no longer cool.
If cool is dead, maybe what comes next is something much colder.
In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers/texts/ideas/etc.:
- Robin James, The Future of Rock and Roll: 97X WOXY and the Fight for True Independence (UNC Press, 2023)
- Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: acoustic resonance, neoliberalism, & biopolitics (Duke University Press, 2019)
- Robin James, Resilience & Melancholy: pop music, feminism, and neoliberalism (Zero, 2015)
- Robin James, The Conjectural Body: gender, race and the philosophy of music (Lexington Books, 2010)
- Robin James’ blog It’s Her Factory
- Punk “year zero”
- The Rolling Stones album, The Beggars Banquet
- The Salty Dog cocktail
- David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (Routledge 1990), in which he discusses what is often called ancient Greek homosexuality
- Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 2 (published first in French in 1984)
- The anthropologist, Nick Seaver, and his research on the right-wing manosphere
- The miasma theory of disease
- Matthew Morison, Blacksound (University of California Press 2024) on the cultural appropriation of Black culture as commodity
- Eric Lott, Love and Theft (Oxford University Press 1993)
- Ingrid Momsen, particularly on the white, masculine appropriation of jazz
- Robert Gooding-Williams, “Aesthetics and Receptivity: Kant, Nietzsche, Cavell, and Astaire,” in The Claim to Community (Stanford University Press 2006)
- Shannon Winnubst, Way too Cool (Columbia University Press 2015)
- Jodi Dean, “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics”
- SPEP, The Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, and its upcoming conference, at which Robin James is speaking
- The right-wing podcaster, Charlie Kirk
- Silicon Valley Stoicism
- Plato, Republic (c. 375 BCE)
- Christian Apologetics
- Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (Harcourt Brace, Javanovich 1977-78), on the stoics (see p. 151-166 in particular)
- Frederick Lynch, Invisible Victims (Praeger 1991)
- Frederich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals (1887)
- Our previous episode on a section of Nietzsche’s Genealogy
- Emmanuela Bianchi, The Feminine Symptom (Fordham University Press 2014)
- The Greek concept of sophrosyne
- Potentiality and Actuality in Aristotle, Metaphysics (4th century BCE)
- The judgment of taste in Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790)
- The categorical imperative in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
- Nick Seaver, Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation (University of Chicago Press, 2022)
- Ethan Coen, “The Drunken Driver has the Right of Way”
- Probability density function in Large Language Models (LLMs)
- bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (Routledge, 2003)
- Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)
- Sarah Banet-Weiser, Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Duke University Press, 2018)
- Dave Parisi, Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing, (University of Minnesota Press, 2018)