by pickledish on 2/26/24, 3:13 PM with 198 comments
by bee_rider on 2/26/24, 4:37 PM
> the only visible instantiation of a subcultural franchise putting on against-the-grain airs similar to those of the punks and goths of the 1990s (who had all been thoroughly domesticated by that point)[…]
Anyway, I’m not sure who the “blue hair & pronouns” (as the author puts it) crowd is. If it is actually queer and trans people, I don’t think their motivation was ever to be counter-culture really: they are just intrinsically attracted to or identifying with the opposite gender, and would like to be mistreated less frequently for it. It isn’t a punk movement, it is one trying to get social acceptance.
If it is straight or cis people who are sort of associating with that culture, I suppose there might be some counter-culture aspect to it. But there’s also a strong element of just, like, authentic human empathy and allyship. I think that’s more important.
by im_down_w_otp on 2/26/24, 3:42 PM
Given how much of the mainstream is organized around overwrought advertising, influencering, guruing, and being terminally online... it seems like the modern punks would be the counter-culture that prioritizes being offline, being private, and being whatever the opposite of "fake it 'til you make it" would be called. Genuine and modest?
by mchinen on 2/26/24, 4:01 PM
I've often wondered how the leaders of the hippie, punk, and more modern movements would compare to classical and romantic leaders of counterculture, like Thoreau or Voltaire, or even music like Chopin or Palestrina. We do have writers today like David Graeber that do seem against the grain. I suppose a major difference is that infuential people back then didn't seem as concerned with being famous and viral (which makes them more punk than punk), and there were less people that tried to follow them. On the other hand, when you look closer, maybe the difference can be explained by how media and money flows today.
At the extremes, it can seem like the only 'genuine' counterculture is self-sacrificing civil disobedience (e.g. self-immolation, not blocking traffic) or truly destructive (terrorism), because these are not scalable within mainstream culture. There should be a middle ground, but somehow I'm having trouble recognizing it. Perhaps this is because having a sustainable counterculture requires tacitly playing within the rules of the mainstream culture.
by ryukoposting on 2/26/24, 4:29 PM
I think there are real artistic countercultures out there, but they exist on the margins of art and society (as they must, innately). They're hard to discover, and even when they are discovered, they're inaccessible, bizarre, and disquieting (as they must be, innately).
I'm reminded of my record collection, and one record in particular: an autographed copy of The Great Annihilator, by Swans[1]. Besides the music itself, the peculiar thing about this record is the way it's autographed. Michael Gira signed it on the back, tucked away in the bottom corner. I've always wondered why he did it this way. Maybe it's a way of saying "here's my signature you materialistic loser, have fun trying to display this overpriced souvenir." Maybe it's a way of saying "appreciate the art as it was meant to be appreciated, don't use it as a display piece." Maybe I'm reading into it too much, and it means nothing at all.
[1]: They're a bit better known than they once were, but for anyone who doesn't know about them, go listen to some Swans. It's abrasive and uncomfortable, and you'll probably hate it. But it doesn't exist for the purpose of being abrasive and uncomfortable, and that's key. It's an artist's unfiltered creative vision. Incidentally, Cobain was a big Swans fan.
by ozzcer on 2/26/24, 6:58 PM
by JKCalhoun on 2/26/24, 4:25 PM
Even approaching 60 years old I am still doing the same kind of searching. It's not a fashion for me, I don't wear it on my sleeve. But perhaps even because I am older, I am increasingly unhappy with the bed that was already made for me when I was born.
So often I find myself wondering (sometimes aloud), "How did the world get to the way it is now? If you were to design, plan a society you would never have made it as complicated as this."
It's as though we begrudgingly go along with it because what else can you do? I think when you're young you try to fight it, and therein lies the punk spirit. But you eventually muster out of the revolution and, tired of tilting against windmills, you instead try to make it work for you.
Regardless, I still don't like it and still try to envision what changes would make the world a better place.
by gedy on 2/26/24, 4:05 PM
Even then there was some internal-ish pressure to align the punks with leftist ideology, but most could really care less and wanted to drop out of society, not "fix it", etc.
Things started changing once the styles and sound started influencing mainstream, and it was no longer seen so outlandish. And it's hard to live outside culture esp if drugs are involved. (Though respect to the Straight Edge movement[0])
If there was a "new" punk-like movement today, it'd need to be "exclusive" in that normies would not want to show up to your gigs or parties, due to aesthetics or beliefs. I think you'd need that feeling of making a choice to drop out of society, so you'd need something really different, almost like Amish punks, ha.
by poszlem on 2/26/24, 4:44 PM
To put it simply and honestly, we're so caught up in our own culture bubble that we can't see different subcultures for what they are (as has been the case ALWAYS). Instead, we write them off as deviations and psychological anomalies. If you want to get a real sense of these groups, you should observe which groups are overlooked by mainstream media, which ones are derogated for their beliefs, and considered undesirable.
For example, I really think that because of a bunch of reasons, like the threat of a world war and rapid social transformations, we will witness a significant shift towards military-oriented, ultra-masculine groups in the years ahead.
These groups will embrace a nihilistic outlook (the same "no future" slogan we see so often), they will be labeled as incels and fascists (and they largely will be that), yet they will represent truly alternative subcultures to what the mainstream culture presents.
This is btw. not a praise of such groups, it's merely my attempt at pointing out the authors obvious blind spots.
by kevinsync on 2/26/24, 4:36 PM
by vehemenz on 2/26/24, 3:51 PM
There's no reason that this should be taken for granted. Institutions, governments, political parties, and entire cultures rise and fall due to local and global economic circumstances, wars, religious extremism, or even complacency. How odd would it be if young people were entirely immune to these effects?
by tekla on 2/26/24, 3:55 PM
by rglover on 2/26/24, 4:36 PM
> Blow up your TV
> Throw away your paper
> Go to the country
> Build you a home
> Plant a little garden
> Eat a lot of peaches
> Try and find Jesus
> On your own
by tomtomistaken on 2/26/24, 4:06 PM
by 2devnull on 2/26/24, 4:51 PM
by photochemsyn on 2/26/24, 4:30 PM
Punk was not noted for musical talent, but that didn't distract too much because of the energy of the performers. There's a Foo Fighter's cover of "Holiday in Cambodia" from about a decade ago that's worth listening to, it does sound better when the musicians can keep time.
by iamthepieman on 2/26/24, 3:53 PM
As a pithy illustration: If I'm trying to hit a tree with a ball and that tree just happens to be in between some goalposts and someone comes along and moves the goalpost, I can still hit my target even if I don't "make a goal". To a casual observer it might look like I'm playing the game and I am. But the game in my head is not the game in yours.
edit: I didn't have this in mind when starting this comment but maybe that's the deeper desire behind punk and other countercultural movements; the desire to play your own game. And maybe capitalism is the end of history in the sense that it has adapted to make it easy for people to play their own game and keeps pushing the edges of what would have been counter previously. Want to drop off the grid and make everything you use and consume with your own hands? There's a hundred youtube channels about that. If you want to conquer Rome, you're still gonna travel there on roads the Romans built.
by nemo44x on 2/26/24, 4:20 PM
Mark Fisher is an interesting philosopher. For those that don't know he was a part of the ""Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit" [1] at Warwick University led by Nick Land. These guys were crazy but from their insanity some extremely interesting observations and ideas came out of it. In particular, "Accelerationism"[2] which has become very popular in the AI world, e/acc, etc. Fisher was more of the left wing side of it and Land from the right wing. In fact, Land is a reactionary today and their ideas are quite interesting as opposed to the mainstream left/liberal Capitalist ideals of today's mainstream.
Nick Land is an interesting fellow.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetic_Culture_Research_Un...
by histories on 2/27/24, 8:55 AM
by PaulDavisThe1st on 2/26/24, 6:16 PM
In reality, groups with the general back-to-the-land drop-out mentality are a persistent feature of western culture, occuring every 40-80 years for several hundred years. They rarely change the entire face of the culture they emerge in, but they typically shift it a bit, at least for a while.
And as Peter Coyote once observed, while the hippies lost just about every political battle they purported to care about (war, racism, sexism, industrial agriculture, cars, pollution etc.), they won most of the cultural battles.
by TotalCrackpot on 2/26/24, 3:48 PM
If you want to learn more about Zapatistas and Rojava you can check those videos:
by skybrian on 2/26/24, 4:45 PM
Going on about vague abstractions like Capitalism (whatever that is) isn’t going to help since these are mental constructs, not evidence.
A culture based on curiosity and amateur reporting, telling stories about things that actually happened, would probably understand itself better. Many of us are the opposite, keeping anything real private (for understandable reasons) and sharing fantasy stuff, which overwhelms what’s real.
by RiverCrochet on 2/26/24, 4:39 PM
Music is just not a cultural carrier like it used to be.
Young people aren't buying music. I don't think music is a cool thing teenagers discover and make it part of themselves anymore in the same way they did in previous generations - there's just too much of it, it's chopped up into too many social bubbles, and no one except established regimes targeting older people can make money off of it. A 13 or 14 year old might obsess over some TikTok artist or band for a minute but it's not going to last a lifetime because the next thing everyone's talking about will replace it quickly.
I think we will soon see an era where young people don't care about music. It's not necessarily a bad thing, I don't really know if having rich popular, punk, whatever bands that try to coast on their fame for decades is worthwhile to society anyway.
by reactordev on 2/26/24, 4:10 PM
by corimaith on 2/26/24, 4:11 PM
An interesting phenemenon is the emergence of the extremely popular game based works across different mediums; LitRPGs for Western Fantasy, Isekai/Narou for Japanese culture, and the "Hunter" manwha for Korea. These works tend to have a infamous reputation for being overly similar to each other, and eschewing much in originality and worldbuilding in favour of pure action and power fantasies. In my discussions with those who consumed it, unique settings, character development, etc were all burdens, and instead by using a easily familiar and simple system of a game-rpg they could instead push to the "meat" of action scenes. The same can be also said about the comparison between the leanness of new "shounen" like Jujutsu Kaisen compared to meandering filler of the Big Three (Naruto, Bleach, One Piece).
As someone who grew up with the previous era, that kind of thinking is almost antithetical to the reasons why I was drawn into fiction; The whole point of an RPG was to realise a fantasy world, the mechanics were just abstractions to make up technical limitations. Beyond that in other mediums, the idea was to get even crazier and fleshed out settings, to have more realistic characters, all to build that vision of a fantasy world that yet felt sincere. Pushing boundaries was the name of the game. And so it's that funnily enough, many older works like The Five Star Stories could almost be construed as innovative if you were to compare them to modern works today.
This is all just about a specific niche culture, so other cultures may be different. But looking at decline in originals and the rise of remakes and endless sequels paints a similar risk-averse outlook for the wider zeitgeist. Well I guess it's a pendulum of reacting ideas; Modernism is the establishment, so Conservative is the anti-establishment. But the current era itself is already running out of steam, so the pendulum may just turn back.
by yxhuvud on 2/26/24, 3:52 PM
by thomastjeffery on 2/26/24, 7:26 PM
by hooverd on 2/26/24, 3:55 PM
by 0xbadcafebee on 2/26/24, 4:09 PM
by ericmcer on 2/26/24, 4:00 PM
by anthk on 2/26/24, 5:42 PM
by 0ckpuppet on 2/26/24, 4:31 PM
by shaunxcode on 2/26/24, 8:33 PM
by Gimpei on 2/26/24, 3:52 PM
by lenerdenator on 2/26/24, 3:48 PM
by angelsbrood on 2/26/24, 4:33 PM
by blah-yeah on 2/26/24, 3:44 PM
Reminds me of a recent podcast featuring Will Storr, author of "The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play it", where, to paraphrase, he discusses how those who claim that social hierarchies are unethical... don't actually want to do away with hierarchies but rather simply want to destroy/disrupt the current hierarchy and place themselves at the top of the next one.
I really appreciate this section of the article:
>"the only visible instantiation of a subcultural franchise putting on against-the-grain airs similar to those of the punks and goths of the 1990s (who had all been thoroughly domesticated by that point) has lately been...
>"the “blue hair & pronouns” crowd...
>"Where their presence in affluent suburbs or in gentrified or gentrifying urban neighborhoods is concerned,
>"...only the most myopic and self-satisfied of the “blue hair & pronouns” set can possibly believe that they’re swimming against the mainstream at this point."
.... In terms of alternatives to capitalism discussed at the start of the article-- I think we are seeing pseudo-socialism-mixed-with-capitalism on small scales in cases of sharing economy related companies, some tiny-house communities which involve resource & workshop sharing, and the decentralized finance/media/social networks/ movement.
by api on 2/26/24, 4:27 PM
Fascism, traditionalism, neo-monarchism, authoritarian forms of socialism, and theocracy are all very real and have both adherents at home and entire societies abroad that attempt to live by their rules. Unfortunately all of them yield a society that is worse in many important respects than Western liberal capitalism. They are stifling, repressive, or lead to poverty. The domestic adherents of these ideas tend to be either angry nihilists and edgelords who hate their own lives and just want any kind of change, or fanatics (e.g. religious zealots) who are obsessed with controlling and restricting the personal choices of others.
There are also lots of pure fantasies that are pushed as alternatives to capitalism: neo-primitivism, hand-wavey futurist utopias, new age woo, etc. While these may or may not be better, the point is moot because they are not achievable. There is no path from here to there, or in many cases there isn't even a "there." There's just a vague idea that if we all abandon what we have now and love each other or something magic will happen and we'll get utopia. History shows us that without a real serious workable plan we're more likely to get a slum run by warlords or a new boss that's worse than the old boss.
If someone thinks of a serious alternative to Western liberal capitalism that is both better and achievable (there is a path from here to there, and an actual "there"), I think they'll get plenty of attention. There is no invisible conspiracy that will somehow stop people from thinking of this or discussing it. It's just that nobody's done it yet.
by wiz21c on 2/26/24, 4:16 PM
Interestingly, Putin is still there, Islamism, China too... One could always argue they're a form of capitalism but I'm sure history is full of "our system is the only one" claim.
So no, no and no.
by parineum on 2/26/24, 4:12 PM
I had the same feelings when I was younger but, having seen the pattern a couple more times than once, I think most people come to the same realization that this is just the way it is and why parents are usually nonchalant and a bit dismissive of their children's "rebellious counterculture".
I think they author misattributes the mainstream takeover of counterculture to "capitalism finally got them" when, it seem obvious to me, that what's really happened is that the counterculture just got older and are now the ones shaping the mainstream.