Authenticity, Manufactured Culture, and the Smoking Deaths Billboard
Source: Hank Green, “Here’s Why New Year’s Eve is Bad Now” (YouTube, 2025)
The Argument in Brief
New Year’s Eve at Times Square feels hollow — not because people have forgotten how to celebrate, but because the celebration has been fully colonized by the ad-revenue model. People aren’t broken or atomized. They’re rejecting a fake version of community. Meanwhile, an entirely organic block party has formed around the LA Smoking Deaths Billboard on Santa Monica — a counter that wasn’t designed to mark the new year but does, by default — and that party is alive.
The diagnosis isn’t that people can’t come together. It’s that they correctly sense when coming-together is being performed for them rather than by them.
Key Concepts
Simulation of a Party vs. Actual Party
Times Square NYE is not a celebration anymore — it’s the delivery of eyeballs to advertisers. The people attending aren’t fully there to celebrate; they’re there to be on TV, to be part of a tradition that has long since passed cultural relevancy. It is, in Green’s words, “hollow like an empty plastic milk jug.”
This is Bellah’s “lifestyle enclave” made literal: the form of community without the substance. See also Loneliness Epidemic — people surrounded by others but not known by them.
Authenticity Famine
Institutions that once carried genuine meaning — Times Square, network TV, and now the internet itself — have been progressively colonized by the ad-revenue model. The result is an authenticity famine inside our most prominent cultural spaces, even as authenticity is abundant in the margins.
The internet was originally a place where community evolved organically. Now it’s becoming Times Square: “hanging advertisements on everything… not for providing value to us, but for us being the value being provided for someone else.”
Irony as Survival Tool, Not Nihilism
The Marlboro car driving past the Smoking Deaths Billboard looks like detachment or nihilism. Green argues it’s actually a gateway to sincere connection. When everything sincere gets immediately monetized, irony becomes the protective layer that makes sincerity possible.
“We use it as a shield. We joke because being sincere in a world that only wants to ever monetize your sincerity is kind of dangerous.”
This is worth holding carefully for CLT: some community members will show up ironic, detached, or seemingly disengaged. That may be the mode they need to enter — not a sign they don’t want connection.
”We Will Crawl Under the Fences of the Optimized World”
People route around inauthenticity instinctively. The Smoking Deaths Billboard party, the Chicago Rat Hole, the Boston Cop Slide, Binley Mega Chippy — these are all examples of people collectively applying meaning to something precisely because no institution chose it. The unchosen-ness is the point.
“People took infrastructure that was meant for one meaning and they gave it a completely new meaning.”
This isn’t planned. It’s emergent. And it’s robust in a way that designed culture isn’t — because there’s no stakeholder to capture it and no brand to hollow it out. (Green notes the danger: “the moment we find something real, people will try to buy it.“)
The Hardware Point
The billboard party works because the physical infrastructure already existed — a sidewalk, a building, a counter. The community formed around it, not because of it. This echoes the hardware/software framing from Community is Easy, Actually - Happy Urbanist: you can’t manufacture the software of community, but you can create conditions where it emerges.
The Rebuttal to Grygiel / Burke
The Burkean argument (see Burkean Communitarianism - A Critical Frame) blames individual taste-expression for community collapse. Green’s argument locates the cause correctly: monetization and the ad-revenue model, not individual customization. The oat milk latte isn’t the problem. The Planet Fitness hat on the Times Square ball drop is.
The remedy is also different:
- Grygiel: constrain individual choice, restore conformity to shared ritual
- Green: find or create spaces the ad-revenue model hasn’t reached yet; support weird, unauthorized, unpolished things built by people rather than brands
One is nostalgic and top-down. The other is emergent and generative.
Relevance to CLT
- The CLT community must not become Times Square. If it starts to feel optimized, performed, or like it exists to deliver something to a stakeholder, it will hollow out. The authenticity has to be structural, not cosmetic.
- Irony and weirdness are on-ramps, not red flags. The people at the billboard weren’t earnest in a conventional way. They were earnest through the absurd. CLT should be a space where that’s okay.
- Emergent traditions > designed traditions. The best rituals will probably be the ones nobody planned — the thing that keeps happening because people keep showing up for it. Design the conditions; don’t design the culture.
- “Look for the glitches.” Green’s practical suggestion is useful: find the cracks in the optimized world where authentic connection can happen. CLT is, in some sense, a deliberate crack.
Source
- Hank Green, “Here’s Why New Year’s Eve is Bad Now” — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMWPs75q2_Q