Normpunk: a living strategy for a priceless life
Note: this post is part of an experiment in sharing ideas and writing at an early stage. I put care and thought into everything I share, but understand that it’s a work in progress.
The problem
It’s the pressure to present a certain image on social media, or a quiet disenchantment as you scroll through curated views of other people’s lives. It’s the feeling that you need a “personal brand” to succeed at work, or that your hobby has to become a “side hustle”.
Maybe you’ve got deep, nuanced views that don’t seem to fit in a shouty, polarized online space, and you’re wondering how we’ll ever fix anything in the world. Or maybe your nervous system is just exhausted from constantly being fed outrage and aspiration to keep you scrolling and buying.
So, what are your options? You want to be authentic, but not have to post about it. You want to challenge the hateful things you see online, but you suspect it’s all clickbait. And you’ve seen activists burn out with little change to show for it.
A hut in the woods sounds good sometimes, but you also know the algorithms have a knack of capitalising on your longing. Now your feed is full of photos of shepherd’s huts and caustic quotes about consumer culture…
What do you do when you’re not sure how to engage and not sure how to escape?
Normpunk is a strategy of resistance to the attention economy and the commodification of the self. An aikido move, rather than a defensive crouch, its purpose is reparative rebellion that can’t be co-opted or recuperated by the systems it opposes. Its aim is to revive and strengthen non-performative, uncommodified ways of living, shunning spectacle and neokayfabe culture.
Normpunk conserves and cultivates human energy, as well as bringing discernment of worth back to the individual, and through the offline world. Neither dys- nor utopian, it aims to ground experience and free imagination, so new possibilities for the future can emerge.
But how?
The primary methods of normpunk are strategic disinterest and cultural arbitrage.
Strategic disinterest
This has two strands:
Becoming uninteresting to the attention economy (traditionally through the folk practice of “being boring”, though normpunk allows for broader, more creative approaches).
Disentangling and detoxing your own attention away from spectacle, and towards what you find meaningful, joyful and worthwhile in “normal” life. This includes valuing boredom as fallow time for your attentional energy.
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with our attention is what we do with our lives.”
Cultural arbitrage
This is a necessary tactic, where the mainstream devaluing or erasure of traits, behaviours or aesthetics is welcomed as an opportunity for “profit”. In normpunk, rather than losing energy on resentment about the ways you feel devalued or unseen, this is instead embraced as a type of “invisibility cloak” - creating space for creative resistance and the composting of stereotypes. A good pop culture example of this is the new Matlock, where the central character uses the devaluing of herself as an older, unassuming woman to great advantage.
Cultural arbitrage is also necessary in opposing dynamic and recuperative systems like the attention economy and neokayfabe, where static positions are liable to be exploited. For example, were normpunk to solidify into something that could be easily recognised, policed, or sold back, it would cease to be normpunk. Likewise, blank slates can attract projection, so there may be times where pivots or displays are needed.
Is it punk?
Rebellion comes in different forms - especially in complex, performative times. Normpunk lives in the fertile space between conformity and fashionable non-conformity. It’s the path between being silenced and having your voice exploited, and between exaggerating your impact and being hobbled by your limitations.
Where cyberpunk and solarpunk explore differing views of the future, normpunk concentrates on improving our relationship with the present in unmediated, usually quiet, “normal” ways. While creativity, gardening and cooking may be normpunk expressions of the DIY ethos, the main site of rebellion is recovering your attentional power and cultivating a non-spectacular experience of life. This is ballast and fuel for meaningful action in the world, not an escape from it.
Depth over display, action over motion.
[“For yourself” doesn’t imply aggressive self-interest or being without community. Rather, it’s about normpunk always being a personal choice - never something that should be imposed.]
Appearance
If you can immediately spot it, it’s probably not normpunk.
While normpunk unhooks from fashion cycles and status signalling, there’s plenty of space for variety, pleasure and adornment. The key is that those are intrinsically experienced and intentionally chosen.
It shouldn’t be confused with:
Minimalism (normpunk might be quietly messy)
Normcore (which became a marketable look)
Quiet luxury (where scarcity and quality are about in-group status signalling)
Deliberately uncool aesthetics like granny chic (irony or nostalgia aren’t normpunk)
Forced uniformity
Any moralistic or externally imposed notions of modesty
Thanks
Some of the specific influences on this piece are Herbert A. Simon (attention economy), Guy Debord (spectacle), Abraham Josephine Riesman (neokayfabe), Édouard Glissant (right to opacity), Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick (reparative reading), Francis Weller (ordinariness), Ziauddin Sardar (postnormality) and Daniel Deardorff (trickster wisdom). While these thinkers have helped shape this philosophy, it’s ultimately a tribute to the raw, grassroots spirit of a movement that found its power in uncredited, uncommodified rebellion.
Now I’m off to get my line of normpunk t-shirts popping on the socials (jk).