Gatekeeping Is Good, Actually

We’ve spent the last decade treating gatekeeping like the worst thing you can do. A combination of exclusion and being a hater. The internet decided taste should be frictionless and universally accessible, that everyone should be able to enter every subculture immediately and without resistance. But culture doesn’t actually work that way. When you strip out boundaries and inherited knowledge — things that once gave scenes their shape — everything gets flattened. The issue isn’t really too much gatekeeping, it’s that we eliminated real experience and replaced it with “the feed.”

Before the algorithms, taste didn’t come from the crowd. It came from people who lived inside the culture: editors, critics, DJs, designers, boutique owners, the ones who developed a point of view by actually participating in the world they spoke about. In other words, experts. They were part of the culture that they described, and that came through in the decisions they made. 

Now, those roles haven’t disappeared so much as weakened. The internet rewards virality, not discernment. Authority is crowdsourced, democratized in theory but diluted in practice. 

I see this tension constantly in fashion and culture. The internet has turned styles with real history — prep, workwear, tailoring, gorp — into vibes and “starter packs”. A guy buys a fleece and he’s absorbed into a “core.”  A guy buys some cheap loafers and he decides it’s “old money.” Oh, You Love a Band? Name Three of Their Albums is literally a meme that pokes fun at gatekeeping, but it also reveals a culture where knowing anything beyond the surface is somehow seen as pretentious.

I’m not speaking from a high horse here. I live inside the same machine. My phone is full of screenshotted references. I’ve spent an afternoon on YouTube learning about a topic. I participate in the same surface-level circulation of taste as everyone else. But I also know the value of being corrected — the moment in which someone more immersed than you offers context: why a designer’s 1993 collection was important, why a band’s second record was so revolutionary, why a “scene” required actual participation. Those aren’t acts of exclusion, it’s just a way to ground someone.

For me, nobody embodied that better than the late writer Glenn O’Brien. I think about him a lot. Nobody working today engages with culture as fluently or easily as he did. He didn’t just write about style; he lived inside the culture that produced it. He worked for Warhol, was the Editor-at-Large for High Times, palled around with Basquiat, floated through the downtown New York art world, wrote copy for Barneys, hosted a public-access talk show, wrote books and magazine articles, and he was always able to explain why something mattered. His point of view about fashion, art, and music was earned through curiosity and participation.

Former Vanity Fair editor (and great Canadian) Graydon Carter’s recent memoir, When The Going Was Good, reminded me that long before influencers existed, magazine editors were the original gatekeepers. They set the culture. They shaped taste from the front row because they were immersed, informed, and unafraid to have a point of view.

Because when you remove lived authority, culture becomes something assembled on a moodboard. It’s the difference between someone who has spent years obsessing over raw denim and someone who read a single Reddit thread and now feels confident policing fits. One is true knowledge and the other is a performance.

True knowledge says: This thing has a history, a vocabulary, a logic. It acknowledges that culture isn’t a wide-open field where anything means anything. It’s more like a language, and languages have grammar. You can break the rules, but you should know what you’re breaking.

The internet has confused accessibility with sameness. Making culture accessible shouldn’t mean stripping away the very details that make it interesting. It should mean helping people understand the references.

So yes: gatekeeping is good, actually. Nothing cruel, just the kind that’s grounded in participation, history, attention, and care. Gatekeeping isn’t the enemy of culture; indifference is. When people stop caring enough to correct you, that’s when the scene is really dead. Until then, a little friction is healthy. Culture won’t survive on just vibes.

The post Gatekeeping Is Good, Actually appeared first on Sharp Magazine.