Alissa Quart - Republic of Outsiders: The Power of Amateurs, Dreamers, and Rebels

REPUBLIC

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OUTSIDERS

Also by Alissa Quart

Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers

Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child

REPUBLIC

OF

OUTSIDERS

THE POWER OF AMATEURS,

DREAMERS, AND REBELS

ALISSA QUART

2013 by Alissa Quart

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to
Permissions Department, The New Press,
120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.

Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2012

Distributed by Two Rivers Distribution

ISBN 978-1-59558-894-4 (e-book)

CIP data available

The New Press was established in 1990 as a not-for-profit alternative to the large, commercial publishing houses currently dominating the book publishing industry. The New Press operates in the public interest rather than for private gain and is committed to publishing, in innovative ways, works of educational, cultural, and community value that are often deemed insufficiently profitable.

www.thenewpress.com

Book design and composition by Bookbright Media

This book was set in Goudy Oldstyle and Futura

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CONTENTS

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OUTSIDERS

A n artist who is also autistic argues for the value of thinking differently in a world that would rather cure her. A group of financial outsiders, sick of what they believe is a corrupt traditional financial system, are struggling to start their own bank. Cutting-edge scientists work to create artificial meat in labs, in the hopes of changing the lives of creatures around the planet. Bedroom rockers and micro music labels draw cult followings, never even dreaming of attracting major labels or reaching the Top 40. Film collectives and video sharers band together in spaces outside Hollywoods stranglehold. Bipolar people meet up around the country and are so ambitious about their own insanity that they claim the name Mad Pride. A new type of gender activist struggles against mainstream images of what it means to be female or male, and also the confines of gender itself. Crafters and urban farmers make or grow every shirt or vegetable they consume.

These are social outsiders and renegades who rethink what it really means to think differently. And they are just some of the amateurs, dreamers, and rebels who now compose an America within America, making up what I call the Republic of Outsiders.

The rebels in this book are trying to liveand, sometimes, earn a livingoutside the mainstream. They offer us alternatives by rejecting the dictates of convention. Using technology to dispense their cultural products or their ideas, they shake off the traditional constraints. While in the past being a social rebelidentifying as marginal or off-kilter or unprofessionalmeant that it was unlikely you ever would reach wide audiences or change minds, the Internet has altered this equation, mostly for the better, though sometimes for worse. Today social rebels may try to bypass major manufacturers or conventional distributors. They may enjoy a more direct, more personal relationship with their audiences. They may reject outright typically distant, industrialized relationships between makers and users. Thanks to improved technology, they gather and organize much more easily now and turn their subcultural positions into strengths rather than weaknesses. These creative outsiders push up against the constraintssome legal, others more tacitthat society places upon them.

While all of these groups may seem at first to be disparate, they are all people on the fringes of American culture who are using similar mechanisms to get their messages, identities, ideas, or products to others like themselves and to the broader society. The people in this book represent not one sort of resistance but a continuum of rebellion. Yet all live out their beliefs and values more fully than many of us who tend to express our endorsement of difficult positions, identities, or causes simply by liking, Digg-ing, retweeting, donning plastic bracelets, or complaining in online comments.

Instead of relying on likes on Facebook, these outsiders work to create identities more authentic than those offered or imposed by mainstream society, in a process I call identity innovation. These identities are often rooted in larger communities that act as a shield from and a challenge to the dominant culture.

Most of the people in this book share what I think of as post-identity politicsthey are part of marginal groups united by chosen politics and tastes. Even the groups in this book who are initially outsiders by dint of more traditional identity markerstheir mental illness, their gender nonconformitynow occupy specialized chosen niches such as Mad Pride or trans feminism.

More than forty years after coolness became a product heavily sold to American teenagers and then adults via blue jeans and rock n roll, the people in this book represent a range of responses to the commercialization of, well, everything. Today, many acts of rebellion have become extremely elaborate negotiations with commercial culture. In a market-driven country where capitalism is all-consuming, most of the outsiders in this book respond to American entrepreneurialism with their own kind of cultural entrepreneurship. During a financial crisis, facing the inevitability of high unemployment and a contraction of the national economy, they often must piece together their own economic exchanges, as they have no other choice.

By innovating in this way, they are taking their lives into their own hands. We have long received our information, therapy, films, and even vegetables from authoritative sources: from insiders, trained or ordained to dispense this knowledge or cultural products. Most of the rebels in this book are changing that equation. They are proud amateurs who are doing for themselves and for others what only experts and professionals once did. They refuse simply to be a passive audience or designated consumers.

The traditional duality between insider and outsider has, to some extent, broken down. Media renegades, for instance, tend to be people who in a previous era would have been marginalized from established newspaper and media culture; now they create separate spheres where their voices are often more popular than the output of traditional news organizations. But then the most popular of these once-outsider voices are seemingly inevitably swallowed up by the big media brands. Or take a look at formerly fringe stances such as animal protection, which has become so familiar that its appropriated by burger franchises.