Heh, heh. He said “Pitchfork.”

David Brooks can't keep up with the hipsters (good try, though):

“But on or about June 29, 2007, human character changed. That, of course, was the release date of the first iPhone.

“On that date, media displaced culture. As commenters on The American Scene blog have pointed out, the means of transmission replaced the content of culture as the center of historical excitement and as the marker of social status.

“Now the global thought-leader is defined less by what culture he enjoys than by the smartphone, social bookmarking site, social network and e-mail provider he uses to store and transmit it. (In this era, MySpace is the new leisure suit and an AOL e-mail address is a scarlet letter of techno-shame.)

“Today, Kindle can change the world, but nobody expects much from a mere novel. The brain overshadows the mind. Design overshadows art.

“This transition has produced some new status rules. In the first place, prestige has shifted from the producer of art to the aggregator and the appraiser. Inventors, artists and writers come and go, but buzz is forever. Maximum status goes to the Gladwellian heroes who occupy the convergence points of the Internet infosystem — Web sites like Pitchfork for music, Gizmodo for gadgets, Bookforum for ideas, etc.”

I'm sure everyone has already said this, but I wish some young editor had caught him before they printed “Pitchfork.” We can easily document the backlash against Pitchfork at least as early May of 2007, when David Bazan released the song “Selling Advertising.” Who does the fact-checking these days, anyway? I bet these guys would have caught it.