Pinchbeck argues that the Christie's auction of Jim Irsay's collection, in which Jack Kerouac's On the Road scroll sold for more than twelve million dollars to the musician Zach Bryan, marks the final conversion of countercultural artifacts into luxury assets, and that the conditions which produced such a counterculture no longer exist. He draws on his mother Joyce Johnson's memoir Minor Characters and her relationship with Kerouac to describe a bohemian order in which artistic poverty carried value. He argues that hypercommercial media now consumes subcultures before they can form, that transgressive energy has migrated to the alt-right, and that oligarchs including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison, along with Palantir's Alex Karp, are actively pursuing social disruption.
In brief
- The sale of Kerouac's 120-foot On the Road scroll, Bob Dylan's handwritten lyrics for The Times They Are a-Changin', Hunter S. Thompson's Chevrolet convertible and Jerry Garcia's guitar Tiger converts objects that once stood for creative and erotic freedom into trophies for the very wealthy.
- Joyce Johnson's account of the pre-East Village bohemia describes a milieu in which avoiding steady employment was an accomplishment and poverty signified refusal of mainstream values, a stance Pinchbeck says is no longer available in a society that values financial success alone.
- No counterculture can now consolidate because mass media and influencers expose and monetize any emergent subculture before it has time to develop organically.
- The rebellious and transgressive ethos of the 1950s and 1960s has been transferred to the alt-right, while social networks and media consolidate under right-wing tech oligarchs who have backed the Trump administration, its war in Iran and the Heritage Foundation's program for a Christian nationalist America.
- Alex Karp's public prediction that artificial intelligence will strip economic and political power from educated, largely Democratic workers is treated as an admission that Silicon Valley leaders regard the resulting class conflict as intended rather than incidental.
Full text
Last week, Christie's auctioned off trademark items from the 1950s counterculture and the history of rock and roll. At its galleries at 20 Rockefeller Plaza, they exhibited the objects, which came from the collection of Jim Irsay, a billionaire who owned the Indianapolis Colts and died last May. The pieces for sale included Jack Kerouac's totemic scroll of his breakthrough novel On the Road. He typed the original scroll in April 1951 in a near continuous burst, often described as 3 weeks. Christie's called it a 20-day marathon, which took place while he was living in Chelsea at 4054 West 20th Street. He was just 29 years old at that time.
So, I I I admit the On the Road scroll is quite an extraordinary thing. The scroll is over 120 ft long, one continuous paper roll, typed single-spaced. Kerouac and his Beat collaborators were all fascinated by the concept of spontaneous creativity, which they expressed in aphorisms. First thought, best thought. You are a genius all the time. Or, look for diamonds on the sidewalk. Kerouac had been a high school and college football star. The scroll seems an athletic as well as a literary accomplishment. The Christie's auction included many other totemic objects of the once radical counterculture. These included Bob Dylan's handwritten lyrics for The Times They Are a-Changin', which sold for 2.5 million.
And the so-called Great Red Shark, the red Chevrolet Caprice convertible owned by Hunter S. Thompson and used in the 1998 film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which sold for 250,000. There was also a ton of Beatles memorabilia, including George Harrison's 1964 Gibson guitar, which sold for 2.3 million, and John Lennon's Broadwood upright piano for 3.2 million. Also, Ringo's first Ludwig drum kit, 2.3 million, and one of his signature rings at 120,000. Christie's actually sold off dozens of guitars. Guitars belonging to Janis Joplin, 380,000. Prince, 635,000. Johnny Cash, 150,000. Kurt Cobain, 7 million. David Gilmour, 14.5 million. And so on. The collection even included Jerry Garcia's legendary guitar named Tiger, crafted by luthier Doug Irwin.
This iconic instrument was Garcia's primary guitar from 1979 to 1989. It went for 11.56 million. As some of you might know, I have a personal connection to the Beats. My mother, Joyce Johnson, wrote a memoir Minor Characters, covering her childhood on the Upper West Side, her time as a student at Barnard, her early years as a writer and editor in New York City, her first relationship with a young Columbia professor, and her relationship with the Beat icon. When she started dating Kerouac, she was 21 and he was 34. They were set up actually at a blind date by the poet Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac was even living with her in 1957 when On the Road came out.
It took him 8 years to get the book published after many rejections. But the moment was suddenly right for it. The book was immediately hailed as a generation-defining testament, even by The New York Times. Kerouac was a complicated, charismatic, and wounded person. He wasn't able to handle his sudden fame. My mother witnessed firsthand as the limelight hastened the self-destruction via alcoholism. It was a predictable yet weird experience to see these artifacts of the 1950s and '60s, representing a quest for creative freedom, spiritual and erotic liberation, turned into ultimate consumer products, sold off to the highest bidder. The On the Road scroll carried an estimate of 2.5 to 4 million, but sold in the end for over 12 million.
Sir? 10 million dollars is yours. And selling the Kerouac scroll for 10 million dollars. So. Rolling Stone reported the buyer was country musician Zach Bryan. And Bryan plans to install it in the new Jack Kerouac center he's building in the writer's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. My mother is now 90, but she still remembers how poor Kerouac was when she first knew him. She was an assistant at a publishing house, and she would often have to buy Kerouac soup, or she'd buy him frankfurters in Howard Johnson's, because he really had no money. But back then, there was a kind of elegance to artistic poverty, which symbolized bohemian resistance to the commodified value system of the mainstream.
As my mother writes in Minor Characters, scuffling was what you did in my new new neighborhood, soon to be called the East Village. The original poor of the Lower East Side had scuffled without hope, of course, selling their labor for low wages. Their children grew up and fled to Queens or Jersey, leaving room in the tenements for middle-class children, loosely defined as artists, who believed for a while, under the influence of all the new philosophy and rejecting the values of their own parents, that they had no use for money. Nomads without rucksacks, they joyfully camped out among the gloomy Ukrainians, the suspicious Poles, the Italian fruit vendors, the retired Jewish garment workers dying in their fourth-floor walk-ups. The newcomers to the neighborhood regarded jobs the way jazz musicians regarded gigs, brief engagements.
A steady gig, really a contradiction in terms, was valued chiefly as a means of getting unemployment insurance. The great accomplishment was to avoid actual employment for as long as possible and by whatever means. So, I would say I grew up with that art bohemian artistic prejudice against financial gain, which in some ways it's hard not to regret a bit at this point, since financial success, no matter what means are used to attain it, now seems to be the only thing that matters or is valued in any way by this society. The Christie's exhibit made me reflect on a few things, including the artist as a kind of living algorithm. As a particular consciousness and worldview embedded in a certain time and place, he or she assembles the raw data of their time and converts it into something that catches the universal gestalt and even potentially shapes the future.
Kerouac pounding away at his typewriter in 1949 would really have not had an idea that he was going to help unleash the mass hippie movement of the '60s. Today, we find ourselves at a jarring threshold of social and cultural transformation. At such junctures, the meaning of the past changes, as well as the sense of possibility latent in the present. Something of the rebellious and transgressive ethos of the 1950s and '60s counterculture feels like it's been transferred to the aggressive, destructive, to my mind even kind of ruinous alt-right movement. We seem to be in an invisible war over what kind of subjectivity or identity will will be valued and seen as essential as we move forward from this point.
We don't really have a counterculture anymore, as any hidden subculture is quickly exposed by mass media or influencers hungry hungry for content before they allow a scene to grow organically. Subcultures kind of need time to develop. But today's hypercommercialism immediately consumes any new thing that pops up. Kerouac, Dylan, Hunter S. Thompson, Jerry Garcia, they all kind of exemplified the ideal of creative freedom for past generations. But that arena of individual freedom and kind of rebellion is in real peril right now. We're seeing the consolidation of social networks and mass media by right-wing tech oligarchs like Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, who've all tacitly or explicitly supported the psychotic project of the Trump regime.
That project now includes an incoherent war in Iran, support for the genocidal project of Israel, and the Heritage Foundation's Handmaid's Tale-like plan for an American future of conscripted Christianity, where women forfeit all of the gains they have made over the last century. Unfortunately, it seems that our broken system has given far too much power to a tiny echelon of the super wealthy. They get to say or do whatever they want, it seems, while the rest of us have to watch our backs. In a recent interview, Alex Karp, the manic, samurai sword-wielding CEO of Palantir, openly predicted class war as a result of the implementation of AI. Thing though that I think, even now, is underestimated by all actors in industry, and including in Silicon Valley, is how disruptive these technologies are.
If you are going to disrupt the economic and therefore political power significantly of one party's base, highly educated, often female voters who vote mostly Democrat, and military and working-class people who do not feel supported, and you feel like that's you believe that that's going to work out politically, you're in an insane asylum. Like, that you cannot have it This technology disrupts humanity's trained, largely Democratic voters, uh and and makes their economic power less, and increases the power economic power of vocationally trained working class often male uh voters and and and so these disruptions are going to disrupt every aspect of our society. And it to make this work, we have to come to an agreement of what it is we're going to do with the technology, how are we going to explain to people who are likely going to have less good and less interesting jobs from their perspective, and how is it that we are going and by the way on the military thing, these technologies are dangerous societally. The only justification could possibly have would be that if we don't do it, our adversaries and uh will do it, and we will be subject to their rule of law. So, you if you decouple this from the support of the military, you're going to have an enormous problem explaining to the American people why is it that we're absorbing the risk of disrupting the very fabric of our society, including the most powerful parts of our society, uh if it's not because it's about maintaining our ability to be American in the near term and and and long term.
I actually found it quite astonishing that Karp would blurt this out so clearly. The candor is almost clarifying, or it would be if what he described wasn't so grim. These men are not forecasting disruption as a regret- regrettable side effect. They are all for it. They're seeking to exacerbate it. The counter culture that produced Kerouac's scroll, Dylan's handwritten lyrics, was grounded in a conviction that inner freedom would survive, even flourish, outside the terms of the dominant order. My mother's generation had the luxury of elegant poverty as a value. We do not seem to have that option anymore. What we have now is the question of whether anything like genuine freedom, unbranded, unsellable, ungovernable, can survive what we face with algorithmic capture, hyper commodification, and the growing threat of techno fascism.
Transcript of the video essay, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.