Stuff White People Like
by Christian Lander · first published 2008
12mentions
0recommended by
12HN commenters
2008–2019first – last mentioned
92% neutral8% critical
They love nothing better than sipping free-trade gourmet coffee, leafing through the Sunday New York Times, and listening to David Sedaris on NPR (ideally all at the same time). Apple products, indie music, food co-ops, and vintage T-shirts make them weak in the knees. They believe they're unique, yet somehow they're all exactly the same, talking about how they "get" Sarah Silverman's "subversive" comedy and Wes Anderson's "droll" films. They're also down with diversity and up on all the best microbrews, breakfast spots, foreign cinema, and authentic sushi. They're organic, ironic, and do not
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…kind of white people, and struggling musicians. In real world terms, these three developments would be equivalent to a check cashing store, a TGIFridays, and a housing project." - Christian Lander, "Stuff White People Like" - #106 Facebook http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/07/31/106-facebook/
on “Why MySpace Failed (Or When You Kill The User Experience, You Kill Yourself)” ↗Stuff White People Like #120 Taking a Year Off When someone goes through a stressful experience they usually require some time off to clear their head, regain focus, and recover from the pain and suffering. Of course, in…
on “Gap Year: The Growing Appeal of Not Going Right to College” ↗Agreed. "Stuff White People Like" is perhaps the earliest one I can think of, but "Shit My Dad Says", Dan Lewis' "Now I Know" and even our own Patio11's "Sell More Software" have all executed this business model, or one close enough…
on “Everything Is Bullshit: A Book by Priceonomics” ↗So you're telling me that as someone who comes from a historical power structure, I'm not allowed to have feelings? That I cannot be offended by a book about "Stuff White People Like," because of the "context of historical power"? That I am to be judged solely by my race and not as an individual? That standards should be different for me because I'm white? Hardly seems the world…
on “The New Intolerance of Student Activism” ↗…finding a way to make money. My impression is that Indigo is a seller of physical books at a time when reading is increasingly going online, so they are turning into an odds-and-ends store for the people Stuff White People Like was written about. It's as if people started drinking less and less coffee and Starbucks slowly morphed into a kitchen-gear store.
on “How Indigo, a Canadian Chain, Is Reinventing Book Selling” ↗…focussed centrality on vague psychological bias, whether as a witch hunt or any other way; their central focus is material accountability for concrete instances of material injustice. > The virally popular Stuff White People Like blog of 2010 was a wry self-parody of the cultural mores that had settled in by roughly the late 1990s amidst a certain stripe of educated white people. “Being Offended” was one of the cleverest entries,…
on “Third-wave antiracism makes sense, but it's a dead end” ↗Have you ever read something that made you feel just completely transparent? Try reading Stuff White People Like.org!
on “White People Like Recycling” ↗"And finally, whatever you do, do NOT attempt to surround yourself with people who consider themselves "interesting." That's the absolute WORST." Sounds like the "Stuff White People Like" kind of white people.
on “Ask HN: How do you deal with alienation?” ↗…and iPhone users is probably pretty substantial. Plus I think given the socio-political aspirational goals of many Mac users, I think it could be a good fit. To phrase this a little more politely than Stuff White People Like did, there are a lot of people who think it is important that they are educated and cosmopolitan enough to learn a foreign language. They also tend to overlap quite a bit with Mac users.
on “The iPhone Could Be The Ultimate Study Machine” ↗I didn't get Stuff White People Like. It seems to be Stuff Yuppies and Hipsters Like.
on “Why There Are No Girls In San Francisco” ↗Indeed. For many people on the left, intellectualism is an exclusive club, whose members must be the kind of folks described in Stuff White People Like. It must be fairly embarrassing that Republicans are still having internal debates on what their party really means, what the government's role should be in a crisis, how to come up with a compromise…
I wouldn't assume there is such a thing as a single, monolithic "white culture", to start with. (Or black culture, or Latin culture, or...) Stuff White People Like describes what is specifically the culture of coastal urban white hipsters, which is a relatively small subset of white people in the US. It's really inaccurate to think of those traits as "white culture"…
on “On Being a Black Man” ↗