Bacon is the new cupcakes

I’ve been reading some 1995 Clifford Stoll ranting against technology and have to laugh at his—and my own, at times—grumpy resistance to all that is new and cool. Stoll is grumpy in general about technology: kids don’t need computers, he says, they need to get outside and play. In his words, “Sensation has no substitute” (Silicon Snake Oil, p. 138, http://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Snake-Oil-Thoughts-Information/dp/0385419945). But if we create a virtual simulation that feels real to a user, haven’t we found a substitute for “real” sensation?

Technology works on trends, on social and cultural waves I won’t pretend to know anything about (because I haven’t yet read The Tipping Point, http://www.amazon.com/Tipping-Point-Little-Things-Difference/dp/0316346624). Not only do we stick with trends that work—that make life easier, education more effective, economy more efficient—we stick with those that are catchy. In short, we stick with what’s cool until something cooler comes along.

In this week’s Newsweek, Jennie Yabroff talks about the cupcake trend that, over the last five years or so, has brought an American individualist ideology to the dessert sector (read Yabroff’s column at http://www.newsweek.com/id/216053). Yabroff identifies our collective latching-on to childhood icons as laughable, calling dessert an undeserving leader of a cultural paradigm shift. The cupcake, after all, is just a trend, and Yabroff identifies bacon as the next “it” food to follow.

She’s right. I’ve had at least three conversations in the last month that involved the question “Have you heard of Baconnaise?” followed by simultaneous shouts of “Ewww!” and “I would so eat that.” (Check out the latest spread at http://www.baconnaise.com/). I’m left wondering, at what point in a trend does latching on stop being trendy? At this point, cupcake shops are so overdone that opening one would be passé. Baconnaise will have no conversational cache by the end of the year. And, on a completely separate subject, I’ve waited so long to join Facebook—As of early 2008, numbers indicated that clued-in college students were moving on; read more at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7257073.stm—that to give in now would be like opening a cupcake store. That trend has sailed.