Disclaimer: Author is a White person.

If there exists an epicenter for the world created in Christian Lander’s hilarious blog-come-book Stuff White People Like it just might be my current hometown of Portland, Oregon.  From bicycles to beards, organic food to apologies, Portlanders truly embody the spirit and demographic carved out deftly by Lander’s hand.

The SWPL Blog and Its Followers

Taking a step back we see that greater forces are at play.  The SWPL blog has received over 63 million hits and counting, and viewed from an industry perspective there are some very telling inclusions and omissions on the list.  But first, it is necessary to flesh out why the blog has become so popular and how we can use it as a tool predict and relate to industry trends.

SWPL is successful precisely because its biggest fans are the people it lampoons.  What White stands for here are the young, hip white people on the cutting edge of deciding what is “cool” for the rest of the culture. Marx called them the petit bourgeoisie, trade workers and small business owners whose demise he predicted against the cold machinations of capital. These people often own micro-businesses or work in the service industry, or are artists, or perhaps artisans in the ever- growing specialty food and beverage markets.

They pride themselves on their tech and small-business savvy. They frequently have money to spend on things like iPhones and tricked out laptops and accessories, because of their acumen and the fact that they frequently don’t have children.  And they are what marketing directors dream about at night, not only for their personal consumption, but also because of their influence on the collective conscious, tastes, and purchases of society at large.

The Technology They Like

Look to the right and you’ll see a list of the top 20 things white people like. Click here to see the full list. Apple has appealed to this demographic with startling success, and sure enough, Apple Products occupies position number 40 on the list.  The post on why white people like Apple is hilarious and I strongly recommend you read it, but I think I can offer you a reasonable summation with the following quotation for the moment: “Plain and simple, white people don’t just like Apple, they love and need Apple to operate.”

Microsoft is circling the drain not only because it failed miserably to reach this demographic in its marketing slogans, but because its business machinations prohibited it from innovating in a way that appealed to this critical market.  As Marx knew, this demographic is fundamentally an innovative class, because they must constantly reinvent the means of production.  An innovative class demands and rewards product innovation, and this is why we are seeing articles about CRM, marketing using Web 2.0 technologies and Microsoft’s demise popping up outside of industry publications in places like the New York Times, which appears at number 46 on the list, I should mention.

What else can we glean from this pseudo-science?

Interestingly, Google does not make an appearance.  While this demographic was happy to see anyone elbow in on Microsoft’s early omnipresence, they have grown skeptical of privacy concerns in an era of unprecedented snooping (see Scroogle the aptly titled scraper popular with those who don’t take Google’s reassurances at face value).  Not Owning a TV comes in at #28, which should serve to shake the entire telecom world even harder than it has already been shaken in its out of fashion boots, and should have them looking ahead to the inevitable rebranding and production of televisions-as-computers.

Naturally, Facebook appears on the list (at 106), and I think it is only a matter of time before Hulu gets its mention, given its popularity on the ground.

A final thought.  Though the SWPL blog is frequently criticized as racist and inappropriate, its detractors frequently miss the central point, which I mentioned before but shall repeat for clarity:  Its biggest fans are the people it lampoons, which is telling as per their ability to laugh at themselves.

This is a mature, innovative class, who make places like Portland, New Orleans, and Austin vibrant and unique cities that are leading America into a new era.  Marx predicted the demise of the petit bourgeoisie in the face of the giants, and it speaks to America’s character that this demographic continues to survive and thrive based on savvy and entrepreneurship, as the sky falls all around them.  So support these people and listen to what they say, because they are largely the ones playing the fiddle to which we all dance, and no matter what they promise, Applebee’s simply isn’t the “neighborhood.”