It is funny to note that “Punk is Dead” came out in 1977, but all the action in the article WRT punk is happening in the 90’s and beyond. The author acknowledges this in a way, though:
> 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.
>It is funny to note that “Punk is Dead” came out in 1977, but all the action in the article WRT punk is happening in the 90’s and beyond
Well, the 90s "punk" revival was just diggist up the corpse of 1976 punk and taking to the bank. Even dead, if that's possible.
And in line, as you note, with the author's own comments about re-purposing and re-hashing culture in a tamer and more commercial way.
>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 is the millions of "I'm not like the other girls" boys and girls knee-deep in whatever this era's mass produced youth culture (and "counter-culture") is. They kind of peopl who in 1990 would be into Vanilla Ice and in 1992 into Gangsta Rap. Actual LGBTQ people are a tiny percentage of those groups (though many more just claim to be non-binary or some such, they way hipsters claimed to love vinyl and fair trade).
By blue hair and pronouns crowd, they're referring to the "gay as an aesthetic" types. You don't need to be gay to be queer anymore, it's simply a performative fashion trend to be sold to teenagers at the mall. That's the entire point of the essay.
Is it possible your affinity to the blue hair and pronouns subculture prevents you from seriously considering the author's analysis of it?
To a gay man or transvestite (as they often called themselves, nothing derogatory meant by it) of yore, surely that movement represented freedom from repression. Today, when bigotry towards homosexuals is socially taboo, what does it mean to the allies, warriors and fluid genders? To the stereotypical tumblrites creating new gender symbols and ever increasingly colorful flags in Photoshop? To me it looks exactly like what the author says: mainstream, corporate captured product marketing, in group signalling, an aesthetic subculture feigning angst and struggle.
To me it looks exactly like what the author says: mainstream,
corporate captured product marketing, in group signalling, an
aesthetic subculture...
i'm well into middle age now, and i have always thought this about "subculture/counterculture" groups in general -- how are you even rebelling when you all look the same? you're conforming, just to the norms of a smaller group.
however, you're missing (at least!) a few major pillars of what's happening with the LGBT+ community.
1. for those who have (and still do) have to spend much of their lives hiding their true identities, just getting to express themselves openly and with pride is a joy. something that's hard to imagine if you've never had to hide.
2. being gay/trans/etc is a pretty material and fundamental part of one's identity. it's orders of magnitude different from "liking grunge music in 1993" or whatever.
3. it is not necessarily acceptable, or even safe, to be LGBT+ in many places or around many people. in that sense these shared and "stereotypical" aesthetics serve actual functional purposes - they allow LGBT folks to identify others who are not likely to negatively judge or persecute them.
It's not a decision I made, it's just my observation. I could be wrong but of course I don't think so.
I'm not commenting on the politics of sexuality in Nigeria, I'm talking about western societies. I've been around a lot of gay people and transgender individuals, and never have I once seen them in danger in public. Now, I wasn't around in the 80s or 90s, with the gay bashing and what not, and I understand the plight. But they've won as far as I can tell, at least in our society, they've achieved their goals. Coca Cola loves them, they're represented in the executive branch of the US government. And to speak of the recent rise of the fluidgender non binary other gender crowd, I fail to see how that's anything other than subculture signaling.
I think the author misattributed who the modern era punks would be. At least based on the described framework of what punk counter-culture was about and what it was countering.
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?
Punk rose to prominence, in part, because of their acceptance of technology. They used technology that was once the expensive and in the domain of conservative corporations that was turned into accessible and cheap ways to disseminate ideas.
Xerox machines were prominently used to create flyers for shows and distribute zines. Cassette tapes were copied and passed around to anyone who wanted one. VHS was used to record shows and distribute other media. Lowered cost for TV transmission meant not only punk was a topic that could be seen on TV but that local access shows could be used to disseminate media further.
"Punk" is tied to the aesthetics of brightly colored hair, Mohawks, patches on jackets, jack boots etc. which coerces anyone who makes claims of being punk in the modern era into a anachronistic pastiche of what punk was in the late 1970s or early 1980s, with washed out "xerox effect" flyers or physical zines. Aesthetics aside, punk was primarily about a DIY ethos of using whatever tools were available to create art, discuss politics or create a scene.
The modern day equivalent exists, we just don't call it "punk" because it doesn't have the aesthetics attached. You want to know what modern day punk-rock looks like? It's not emulating some juvenile interpretation of Meditations, it's standing up Mastodon social networks, using Nostr, advocating for the freedom of Julian Assange, creating custom AI models that diagnose breast cancer, pushing libre/free/open source, creating art installations with custom electronics, and on and on.
There's one aspect of punk, not the whole aspect but one splinter faction, that was defeatist and pretty much dead on arrival. I only skimmed the article but that's the vein of punk rock the article seems to be channeling. Any movement that positions itself as a rejection of culture is doomed to fail, either because it fizzles out or because it becomes incorporated. The measure shouldn't be how contrary a movement is, it should be how it's trying to shape culture for the better.
The punk ethos, shortlived as it was as a mainstream culture, and a little longer lived (still short) from some totally uncommercial die-hards, was not about technology at all.
Xerox was not some fancy new technology, it as 15+ year old staple at the time.
Cassetes were not a thing in the punk scene at the time. They were insignificant in sales in the UK, and no mixtapes, they caught on in the tail end of the 70s, several years after the original punk movement commercialized and died "Punk is dead" came to be.
The disconnect between your post and parent is due to time-lapse. In the very early 70s (arguably the peak of punk as a creative force in the UK), yes, there was little or no broadcasting tech - punk disseminated slowly through live gigs and low-volume magazines in the UK. By the time it had gained significant cultural and commercial force though, particularly outside Britain, the tech mentioned had arrived. The peak of creative punk in continental Europe and US (outside NY) is arguably late 70s/early 80s. Culture transmission, back then, was slow.
So you're both somewhat correct. The birth of punk was not about tech, but about self-reliance: doing your own thing, no matter how ugly or discordant (see early punk bands and their notoriously bad vocalists), fuck everyone else. It was the application of flower-power principles to urban energy-crisis nihilism. As punk grew, a generation of democratized technology appeared that could support and supercharge such ethos, to the point that (if you were not part of the original hardcore nucleus) you could easily assume the tech was indivisible from the ethos and necessary to its survival.
The punks are alive and well tagging freeway overpass signs, dumpster diving, planting flowers in public parks, making their own clothes, and living in communal housing where it’s always someone else’s turn to do the dishes.
Most of them are lazy scions of well-off families, who will eventually take the studs off once the trust fund cuts them out. Culturally they are largely dead, reproducing models (like the communes you mention) popularized more than half a century ago.
There have always been those who neglect to adopt the technology of the day or buy heavily into the culture, without also buying into some sort of counter-cultural movement. Today it might be those who eschew social media and being terminally online. In the 90s perhaps it was those who limited their TV time.
In my view, it would be inaccurate to describe this group as "subcultural franchise[s] putting on against-the-grain airs" in the way of the punks and the goths and the "blue-haired pronoun bearers."
If anything, these are more likely to be people who've spent some time adopting and evaluating what the dominant culture has to offer, then wisely adjusting their participation to healthy levels (which may mean zero), despite societal pressure.
I'd also expect them not to be luddites, but rather subversive rejectors. This probably isn't an entirely apt example, but think people who use things like PiHole rather than people who never adopted the internet in the first place.
It seems quite funny that the imagined version of the Luddites, which people always contrast against, does not seem to be a very accurate description of them.
Like maybe we don’t even need to contrast against the imaginary version of them because the imaginary Luddites are silly in a way that no real movement is.
Counter culture is one thing, but the important bit is DIY, maybe more specifically DIT, do it together. This isn't about being offline, private, modest, etc., it's about seeing the rat race coming and stepping aside. They understand that ticketmaster & live nation probably own most of the venues in town, so if you don't want to play by their rules, you'll have to spend your entertainment dollars elsewhere, or if you're really into it, start your own venue for you and your friends and fly under the radar.
This goes for other industries too. While someone is bellyaching that amazon owns publishing, a "punk" is self publishing, and using their lessons learned to help their friends. In that way, it's like the hacker community...
I'm reminded by posts here complaining about ubereats, even in dense cities like LA, SF or NY. Why does it never occur to these people to call the restaurants directly to cut uber eats out of the equation? Yeah, it's like 5% less convenient, but it allays a ton of concerns on both ends of the transaction. It's things like this, regular people helping regular people, not rent seekers...
While it is probably not possible to speak of "the entire punk movement" as a single thing (to the extent that there even is a punk movement per se), but the 1970s punk movement in London was not motivated by:
> seeing the rat race coming and stepping aside
it was a response to several different elements occuring alongside and simultaneously:
* the bleakness of 1970s Britain
* the perception of significant barriers to entry into the world of artistic creation (i.e. you needed to be "very good" or even "virtuosic" to participate)
* racial dynamics unfolding as the children of the Windrush generation began to come of age, and new waves of immigrants from the "Commonwealth" were more visibly present.
* boredom with the latest Yes album
There was no rat race coming - almost nobody was going to participate in that (a good and a bad thing, all at once).
Now, punk in NYC at about the same time might have been very different, and I'm certain that punk in other places and later times has almost certainly been very different. But that original incarnation was not an attempt to avoid the rat race, it was a desperate reaching for something of one's own (even if that was just a white riot), because society wasn't going to give you anything worth having.
I love doing this. I don't understand why people bother with the apps, it's just psychic torture knowing some MBA is getting my hard earned money just for making some radio boxes to middle-man it.
I don’t know to what degree it’s “a thing” but I know a lot of 30-something punks from my old scene that are now into a kind of homesteading vibe. Moved out to the surrounding countryside as much for economic as ideological reasons. Some are all the way into off-the-grid, home schooling, etc.
Nothing says “Fuck the System!” like solar panels and a wood burning stove I guess?
> Nothing says “Fuck the System!” like solar panels and a wood burning stove I guess?
Pithily put. I can definitely attest that this is my plan and the plans of a few others I know. Home baked bread and sour dough starter feel pretty anti-corporate to me.
That said, I do recognise that going off grid requires heavy machinery and tools that are produced by the biggest of corporations... but somehow Milwaukee tools seems less evil than Nike, because Milwaukee is selling you just tools, versus an identity, a brand, a value system etc.
Be a machine tool in human form -- a tool that helps make other tools.
To me, true punking is equally material and social/emotional.
No one can be an island, especially without being reliant on corporate largess, but you can do your part... and form bonds with those of similar mind and help them.
And honestly, I get a perverse sense of satisfaction in being friends and nice to people with whom I may have many disagreements.
To me, punk strong feels like (a) giving people shit whenever you feel they deserve it, (b) being introspective enough to take shit when it's directed at you, & (c) helping the oddballs, weirdos, enemies-of-the-system when you can, even if you disagree with part of their beliefs.
When you unplug from mass culture, you lose the central touchstone that person-to-person relationships normally have, so have to be okay with an expanded definition of what "friend" looks like.
Or be a hermit, but that feels like passive punking.
I’m doing this, and yes you are still dependent on corps, but the dependency is different. There’s something very different about buying a skid loader at auction and repairing it yourself than there is with living in an apartment complex where maintenance feels it’s ok to come into your apartment whenever they please (after “trying” to call).
Merely owning things that corps make isn’t bad. It’s bad when it becomes feudalism and you lose all control over the things you “own”.
Milwaukee tools seems less evil than Nike, because Milwaukee is selling you just tools, versus an identity, a brand, a value system etc.
It's funny you bring this up, considering Milwaukee's multi-national parent company got questioned by the same congressional committee over the summer as Nike for using forced labor in their products.
You're also lucky to not have to hear people argue about DeWalt vs Milwaukee (vs Makita, vs Ryobi, it goes on and on)...
The trick is to buy those tools used where you can.
It's all about recognizing there's a spectrum of participating within the mainstream, and pushing to get as far from the center out to the edges. Actually getting out of the stream and up on the shore is impossible for we fish.
I am picturing a Braveheart-style battlefield with warriors face-painted in the brand colors of choice, roaring and brandishing various battery-powered implements of destruction.
I am a member of House Ryobi, but only out of accidental convenience not generational loyalty or studied disdain.
Well, as long as they don't move onto mailing letter bombs a la the Unabomber, it actually sounds pretty appealing to me too.
Edit: I see I'm getting a couple downvotes which is fine; I get that the joke isn't in such good taste. The thing is that Kaczynski had a lot of the same critiques of modernity. Perhaps if he had not been a murderer/terrorist, his writing would be a bit more respected, but of course it is more likely he would just be an unknown weirdo living in the woods.
Not sure how much that was specifically about attracting enough attention to get published, but it's possible that a few decades later he wouldn't have blown up anyone/anything, but instead started a blog ??
Online or offline has nothing to with doing it yourself or not. Social media, websites, etc. makes organizing events, people, projects incredibly easier and more inclusive.
Punk isn't sitting over a xerox machine for a few hours printing flyers. It is actually putting a (music, performance art, benefit, whatever) event together at an all ages venue in a town where live nation owns all the venues and keeps shows 21+ so they can make money on booze. Doing stuff yourself is easier with the Internet.
Facebook is the modern day equivalent of AOL. It's where people are kept corralled to keep the rest of the Internet fun.
The problem is, there's a lot more AOL-like platforms these days, to some degree or other. IRC has turned mostly vacant. Perhaps there's greener pastures in the Matrix space, because Discord is pretty hit or miss, always with the understanding that the great eye in the sky might smite the server at any moment.
The dominant behavior will always be buying instead of making, so (DIY) will always be counter-culture (and sometimes create interesting little communities).
>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?
The genuine ones - outside all media attention yes.
Because otherwise even that has been packaged and sold by "minimalist" and "slow living" influencers.
There is a sort of nihilism that emerges when you look deeper at counterculture and it's conformity. Neo recognizing with horror the other neos is a great example. (In that case it only worked out for him because of hollywood's love of love - because he loved trinity so much he was really different from the rest.)
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.
80's Punks were the Tricksters of ancient mythology (eg. Coyote in amerindians culture), it always been the role of those at the margins of Society dealing with uncomfortable other realities, bringing liminal space into our collective consciousness. Punks are not dead, they (or more precisely their archetypal essence) have just shape shifted into another form we fail to recognize as we age while their prior shell have been consumed by mass media and commodification.
Chances are the future generation Punks are either that itch we can't quite name or out of our generational perception altogether.
In my opinion, todays true counterculture is conservative religious communities.
There is nother more counter to the cultural moment then being a traditionally moral, upright citizen who doesnt do drugs, doesnt lie, cheat, steal, has their libido under control, is reliable, whose existence is profitable to the rest of the world (not neccessarily economically, just mean someone who contributes more than they take : financially, emotionally, etc)
I think it's a bold claim to make, that conservative religious communities are comprised of humans who don't lie, cheat, steal, and have their libido under control.
I'm sure some exist, just by dint of probability, but plenty more are made of regular stock humans like you or me, or worse.
Each church has a board of elders who will hire/fire/correct/counsel the pastors. At most protestant churches at least. I can't speak for all churches.
I've seen a board of elders remove a megachurch founding pastor. They take their positions seriously.
you are misunderstanding me - I am saying the act of being traditionally conservative - that is embodying the traditionally conservative values of not lying cheating etc - that is counter-cultural. "conservative communities" do not necessarily embody "traditionally conservative values".
That feels unnecessarily savior-lauding and like blending a grab bag of unrelated traits into an idealized person.
There's plenty of darkness within the strictures of conservative religious communities -- mostly resultant from the evil that corrupt people perpetrate when given (by God) power in hierarchical structures.
Having traditional morals isn't the same as being moral.
Source: Hm... 6, maybe more, different friends who grew up in different versions of these communities, each of whom describes them as "dangerous cults".
On the contrary, when you look at who holds power in the US, it is conservative religious people. From actual lawmakers to the media. They get to set the culture.
It would be nice if that was the case, but that's not how political and media dynamics work. Just because these folks like to pander to traditional values or spirituality doesn't mean that they'll be driven to further them meaningfully in their day-to-day work.
> There is nother more counter to the cultural moment then being a traditionally moral, upright citizen who doesnt do drugs, doesnt lie, cheat, steal, has their libido under control, is reliable, whose existence is profitable to the rest of the world (not neccessarily economically, just mean someone who contributes more than they take : financially, emotionally, etc)
The drug use is going down, alcoholism is going down, violent crime is going down, there was mini-panique just yesterday on HN over young people having less sex ...
That's because the drugs and sex are getting replaced across modern culture by p0rn and video games. It's not a sign of spiritual growth, the young people of today's mainstream West are still mired in pointless craving and desire. Conservative religious communities offer a way out of that predicament.
BTW the "conservative" part is not, strictly speaking, required but if you object to that I don't think you would like the "e/acc" variety of spirituality either. This is powerful stuff, and it makes 100% sense to have some "traditional" safeguards within it.
Well, OP defined it as "doesnt do drugs, doesnt lie, cheat, steal, has their libido under control, is reliable, whose existence is profitable to the rest of the world". Porn and video games are not in those categories.
> Conservative religious communities offer a way out of that predicament.
They play video games. Also, per all available stats they do use porn.
Yeah I think this is just stray fire from internal-facing propaganda by these communities. This is what they tell themselves (mostly their youth) but it doesn't take much scrutiny for it to fall apart. I say this as a religious person who is prone to this self-perception myself.
That's a lovely ideal. As a former lifelong Mormon living in Utah, I can attest first hand that the average doesn't resemble the ideal. It's a nice ideal though and it's good to have ideals, as long as you're consistent with them.
Which conservative religious community(ies) are you alluding to? That could probably be considered a snarky question, but I really don't know which religions have withstood the prying eyes of modernity; they all seem to have been exposed as about as rotten an institution as their secular counterparts.
Perhaps the Amish or something like that? And of course, they have their practices that we would consider unsavory anyway.
My take is that “counterculture” is the wrong thing to look for when talking about changing the system. What’s actually going to do that is an entire generation that basically has decided to not try at their jobs and careers.
Previous generations had a substantial number of people who thought that either their jobs could be their passions, or at the very least that doing well at their jobs could lead to a better life. I think Gen-z and below have internalized that trying at your job doesn’t lead to better outcomes, and that’s the real thing that will lead to change.
I think that is a very interesting perspective, but think it will not lead to real or positive change.
In my opinion (dont take this personally), I think it is a victim mentality, that if someone self sabotages enough, someone else will fix things or improve their situation.
I think a closer model of reality is that most people are disposable. I dont think that people becoming more disposable less important increases leverage.
A lot of historic change has come from organized striking, but only when the strikers have coherent demands and productivity to leverage.
I think the key here is “at their jobs and careers”. New generations just don’t see their careers as the center of their livelihood. Their goals have nothing to do with climbing the ladder. It’s not a victim mentality to just refuse to participate in a rigged game, especially when there are other games to play. A job is a thing you do so you can live, that’s it.
>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...
The middle ground is productive disengagement. It is deciding to abandon the system and build real alternatives outside of it. You see this with hippy communes, some punk scenes, and homesteaders, ect.
It isnt as common because it takes a lot more work and hardship than simply "laying flat", and doesnt provide much social currency in the mainstream culture. There are also barriers in the mainstream that provide headwinds, but I think these are less of a challenge.
For example, it isnt impossible for people to check out and build an eco-friendly socialist commune in the wilderness. However, it is a lot of work and few are willing to sacrifice the comforts of mainstream life, as unhappy as they may be with them.
The central tension is between popularity and counterculture.
By definition, you cannot have popular counterculture, as it just becomes "the culture."
However, most of the capital assets of culture promotion are also tied to popularity (e.g. mass-market media publishing, advertising). Denied access, counterculture exists in the woods, but most people don't know.
Which is why you see truer counterculture move closer to popular culture when those assets are (usually temporarily) democratized during technological shifts (e.g. the 1960s and 1990s).
In the 60s, mass media liberalized pretty quickly in all mediums as decreases in production costs broadened access and led to more experimentation and less ability for a limited set of gatekeepers to police content against historical norms.
F.ex. Motown Records was literally founded in the back of a house. [0]
It's more difficult to say "There's no market for African American music, so we're not going to make any" when someone is technically able to demonstrate otherwise on their own.
Without technical disruption (mostly, in the falling cost and footprint of capable equipment), it could have been business as usual and a lot of ideas would have remained uncirculated.
You mean, like lyinching and segregating Black people and not having the same rights until the damn US landed into the Moon? FFS, nazi-like laws were expected in the Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain or Mussolini's Italy, not under a self-called democracy right into the Beatles era.
There’s nothing counterculture to conservatism my good man. Hell, it’s in the name.
The left moves society forward, the right holds society back. I don’t like everything the young kids are doing but I know I will eventually be wrong, so I try to understand them and learn to embrace the change they bring. The young left will always, eventually, move society forward. Whether we like it or not. What you’re witnessing is people beginning to understand the paradox of tolerance. Complete tolerance towards all views will always fail because the intolerant will exploit the tolerant. Now that people understand that things are always, or even often, that simple. In order to maintain tolerance, you must also practice intolerance of intolerance. I see the whole “calling people a Nazi bigot” for saying things like “go woke or go broke” or things in that vein, is a part of that realization.
I’ve always of the mind of “free speech absolutism” as Elon calls it. Then I read about how Germany handled things post ww2 and concluded that they could no longer allow fully free speech if they were going to stop another Hitler from rising to power. They had to be intolerant to intolerance. It’s a dangerous precedent that requires great care to avoid a more dangerous outcome.
In general, being an angry hateful bigot of any kind has progressively been moved to the fringe of the right, instead of being smack dab in the middle of the mainstream.
Interracial marriage.
Slavery.
Voting rights for minorities and women.
Jim Crow.
Civil Rights.
Protection of Voting rights
Self ownership / Reproductive rights
Acceptance of LGBT+/GSRM communities.
Acceptance of minorities.
Same sex marriage.
Healthcare for all.
The right has met all of these with protest and violence. They eventually always lose, but not before killing a bunch of people on the left in the process.
You’re on the wrong side of history. I’ve been there. Figure out why you’re so resistant to change/progress. Figure out why you’re so angry all the time. Figure out why you’re so filled with hate.
If you’re surrounded by hateful people, figure out how to leave those people behind. Don’t announce your intentions. Don’t evangelize your views. Just start your path to change. The people in your orbit will either move towards you or move away from you. Expect this. Most will move away, but some will see your example and follow it.
That’s the approach a friend of mine took when he decided he didn’t want to be a violent alcoholic anymore. He just decided to change. He didn’t ask me to change with him. He just did it. He never left my side so I never left his. Eventually, I followed in his example. Eventually, so did a couple of his other friends.
His approach helped me become a much happier person.
When constant progress becomes the dominant culture, counter-culture is, well, counter to that.
And conservative counter culture is not exactly going back to X era. You can't step into the same river twice. It's a different path of progress instead with some reflect on history.
We could also say gay rights were conservative, because they were bringing back something somewhat similar to ancient Greece. A lot of progress is reinventing the wheel, with some changes.
> The left moves society forward, the right holds society back.
There's good conservatism and bad conservatism, just like there's good progressivism and bad progressivism. The latter consists mostly of change for change's sake, while bad conservatism consists of resisting change for no reason. But the good kind of conservatism is an important force in a society that has any sort of progressive energy (read: almost all of them) - it serves as a reminder of Chesterton's fence (that there is a reason (or reasons) why things are as they are, and you should understand those reasons before you change things).
I would not consider myself a conservative (though my kids perhaps would), but I consider that kind of conservatism important even if ultimately the change I want to see overrides it.
This is a wonderfully-written piece, and it articulates the paradoxical nature of countercultures better than I've ever been able to. Punk Rock is dead, long live Punk Rock.
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.
The Swans of my youth is the reunion Swans, so my perspective is probably warped by that. Swans' catalog has a pretty wide gamut of abrasiveness, for sure.
British counter culture is still alive and well. The free party scene never went away. While dance music entered an unprecedented era of commercialisation under the likes of Carl Cox and Fatboy Slim, the underground kept rolling along. Still today one can ( and many still do), find themselves off the beaten track in the South Downs, Welsh country side, or Cornish hills. Even in London, in unused warehouses & train yards,stacks are brought in and people flock. The only real change in the free party scene is how lines are distributed. Burner social media accounts are much more common than your classic call this number operation. We're still fighting '94 public order act, there's just a lot more obstacles nowadays.
I don't piss on anyone, regardless of their age, for looking out at the world and wishing for something different, something better.
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.
I can only comment from my sort of involvement in 80s SoCal punks - most folks were not "political punks" and rejected all authority whether left or right (listen to California Uber Alles), and the clothing and music aesthetics were totally unconventional and abrasive.
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.
My main issue with articles like this is they're packed with so much bookish, social and literary theory that they exaggerate their capacity to accurately describe reality.
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.
My benchmark is how much social capital one stands to lose by admitting to be a member. If you're still admitting to be a Juggalo despite knowing what's associated with it, and how the mainstream is going to treat you, you're fine with those people being "your people" without anyone else.
The author sort of alludes to it, but I will cast some doubt on the "every generation" theory that seems to prevail amongst most educated people. As the theory goes, every generation is just as tasteless, naive, foolhardy, ignorant, and as impatient as the last, and the perception that each generation actually _is_ getting worse in measurable ways is born from lack of experience or lack of wisdom.
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?
Punk (in the conception of anyone born before the internet) is dead because bohemian degeneracy is mainstream. If we go by the standard of "being against the mainstream," today's punks would be people following the advice of the topless antagonist in John Prine's Spanish Pipedream [1]:
Interestingly, the article mentioned Voltaire as a countercultural figure (which I had never considered). But if you were to read "Candide", it would largely agree; the moral is basically to eschew philosophy and cultivate your garden, which could be construed as a metaphor for whatever your garden may be, but in the story is actually a homestead type situation. If you replaced Jesus with "the deity" or something like that, it would also fit.
Because that's what it is: a commodified version of "f*ck you mom and dad" rebellion with DIY window dressings. I grew up in punk culture (my house in college was a DIY punk club [1]) and at the core, that's all it is [2].
I don't know what punk was like anywhere in 2008. It wasn't (just) that in London in the 1970s, and there is non-commodified version of it that continues to exist in many places (or so it seems).
It's all commodified. Think about it: how do you know someone is a "punk?"
They look a certain way. They listen to certain music. Hang out in certain places. Behave in certain ways (e.g., 80s punks were all about "anarchy" and "damage").
At the end of the day, it's a "kit" or "package" that someone adopts and "wears" as a personality and belief system. They just tell themselves it isn't because they desperately want to feel unique and one-of-a-kind.
The only real punk is the first person to define the look. Like the SLC Punk clip I linked above explains: everybody after them is just a "trendy ass poser."
That's not right, and that's not what the post says either. There are strong elements of originality in later-wave punks too, across various media, up until the mid-80s. The first punks didn't even have mohawks or leather jackets, just to mention two of the most (in)famous elements associated with the word; punk looks, sounds, art, and practices, continued to evolve throughout the '70s.
A common milestone is typically considered to be when The Clash release (and tour) Sandinista! in 1980, veering towards a pop sound. The punk scene effectively starts to self-disintegrate at that point, increasingly unable to reconcile its minoritarian attitudes with its by-then-undeniable mainstream popularity. By the middle of the decade, in most of the world punk had become the formulaic subculture you describe, losing its experimental streak; but until then it had been a living and evolving organism.
right here in the comments for this post are several people explaining how the core of punk is a DIY ethos. i'm neither agreeing nor disagreeing with that, but if that was correct, then (a) it wouldn't matter if i could tell that someone was a punk (b) punk at its core has no connection to a "kit"or "package" or "look" at all. someone even argues that using mastodon to help find cures for cancer (i may be paraphrasing a bit) is an example of punk in 2024.
you seem very attached to the idea that punk is nothing more than a style sub-culture. i don't know if that's true, but there seem to be quite a few people who think it is false.
What it is today, codified in the aesthetic and cultural mores that the mainstream labelled punk in the '70s. 60 years ago, it was something very different.
Funny. I was at a concert at a punk place last weekend and I thought: Punk is now mainstream and alive as ever! Punk statements and practices are now everywhere!
I recently had this realization too. Punk never really went away, I am a 90s kid and there was a lot of punk culture in my place. However for me personally punk seems more alive now than the last 15 years and it's great
Especially UK and Germany seems to have a growing punk scene right now in popular music and the 'streets'.
Pretty much anything post Sex Pistols is a fashion show. I always sort of felt bad for those kids and the metal nerds. Those I was close to were clearly terrified of the freedom and responsibility of adulthood, and often had tenuous relationships with their fathers, as a rule! My advice: Don’t use music as a form of social identity. Music as music is better than music as fashion.
Punk's not dead, it's just that songs like Dead Kennedy's "Lynch the Landlord" and "Holiday in Cambodia" or MDC's "John Wayne was a Nazi" and "Ronald McDonald, Corporate Deathburger" and so on are now deemed to be violently inflammatory and would be subjected to shadowbanning and suppression on every social media and streaming platform, and no consolidated MusicBorg contracts would be likely either. Musical performers today all know that engaging in political activism that's not aligned with elite interests will lead to career destruction. The same thing happened with rap - you won't see Public Enemy-style groups being promoted today.
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.
Seems like punk as it would be today wouldn't be particularly visible. If alternative or countercultural ethos is based on an antithesis to something else then it's always subject to whatever that something else is. But if it's based on some deeper desire, truth or idea of which the "counter" part is only a symptom then it might just seem like it no longer exist because mainstream culture has moved beyond the original target of the counterculture.
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.
The book "Gravity's Rainbow" had this as a theme throughout. That Capitalism will co-op anything that it finds useful. That there's no way to subvert it as it will pick up on, embrace, and exploit it for profit. Amazon selling books on how to dismantle global capitalism, etc. Pynchon's only solution was to completely fly under the radar as much as you possibly can. It makes sense he doesn't do interviews, or distribute anything other than the words in his books.
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.
Coincidentally, Watterson himself was very punk: he started drawing for his own sake, got famous, refused to accept the capitalist growth imperative, and dropped out. He never sported a mohawk or pierced his tongue, but was more punk than several generations of punk-rock wannabes.
One of the problems with TFA's allusions to hippies for me is that it feels as if it is arguing that the hippies were the first of their kind.
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.
That's because the upper echelons correctly understood that culture is largely window-dressing, as long as the fundamental economic ballasts remain the same. They will let us dye our hair blue, what matters is that we keep working in their factories/shops/call-centres/banks/etc, making money for them; and if we bootstrap something else, it will inevitably be absorbed back into the system once a little greed creeps in.
What they cared about was killing collectivism, which was the real threat to the economic order, and they largely achieved that.
There are actually 2 libertarian socialist/anarchist-inspired revolutions happening in the world right now - Zapatisas and Rojava. There are even more horizontal projects of this nature, you can check the list here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W1wWjWNXhvHjMzzyxT5z5Es_...
If you want to learn more about Zapatistas and Rojava you can check those videos:
Seems like this analysis is mostly based on entertainment and decades-old history, and as such, it’s going to be fairly out of touch with whatever is going on now. I’m out of touch too, but at least I know it.
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.
> Capitalist Realism’s early chapters touch on what we we talking about last time: the “alternative” youth subcultures at the turn of the century who romantically imagined they were rejecting a bland and soulless Mainstream by eschewing Top 40 musicians in favor of buying and listening to records by NOFX, Korn, Nine Inch Nails, et al.
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.
One could argue though that being conservative (in a literal sense), is the reactionary "punk" to the ideas of modernism and innovation of previous eras.
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.
Yeeeep. Also, he's spot on with his self-assessment of not having a pulse on today's youth.
I've been spending time around young tattoo apprentices recently. What I've found is that there is an aesthetic revivalist movement underway just with new hyper forms of expression that often are /extremely/ jarring to normals. Spend a day listening to musical genres like phonk/hyperpop. Everything the new kids are doing is heavily tinted with accelerationism. Honestly who gives a shit about punk anyway, things come and go. Go read some more theory and cry some more about it I guess.
It's easy to link everything to capitalism when you live in the age of capitalism. Cultural phenomena, trends and upheavals happen throughout human history in a variety of ways. The industrial revolution has certainly fueled a new machine for the acceleration and multiplication of culture, but this economic model isn't intrinsically intertwined with culture. Culture is just a product that is sold by capitalism. In communism, culture is also sold, but only one or two varieties are available. The same was true before this, in the West, when christianity was the cultural machine, producing different sects. Before that (and at the same time, in other parts of the world) culture was more ethnic, national and regional. And Folk culture is a constant.
Really good article. Of course Capitalism will package and sell anti-capitalism if that is what makes money. It will try to mirror societies desires, which I don't think is a terrible thing. What should be feared is efforts to manufacture and control what people desire.
Punk is dead. Once I witnessed old punk rockers backing government lockdowns, backing the authorities, and shilling for politicians and political parties, I realized rebellion is now a commodity.
Yeah, because what punk was really about was always contrarianism in the face of authority.
No, wait. That has absolutely nothing to do with what punk was about, other than some mainstream media story about punk, designed to terrify everybody else.
Punk rockers in 1978 were shilling for politicians in London. They were cynical and honest and clear-eyed about it, but they were still shilling.
ps. on HN I try never to vote comments down, I just try to reply instead. But I had to make an exception here.
I don’t understand how you can devote so many words to the staying power of “capitalism” and not once give any concrete sense of what the economics of an alternative would look like and how you would make it work. The degree to which people microanalyze culture seems bonkers to me. If you don’t like our current economic system, then it’s kind of on you to come up with a viable alternative using empirical evidence. Nirvana was a great band, but they have absolutely nothing to do with this.
Pretty much every article lamenting the seeming inevitability of capitalism and the lack of coherent alternatives is going to misdiagnose the problem and have no concrete solutions, because the fundamental problem is that the problems people care about are not simply consequences of capitalism and cannot be eliminated just by getting rid of it.
For example, no amount of monkeying with the economic system will make it possible to fight global warming simply by cutting off fossil fuel supplies and destroying fossil fuel company profits without huge impacts on the demand side that affect ordinary people - that'd require consuming fuel that was never produced. This effect on ordinary voters would make it horrendously unattractive to politicans even if they didn't have to care what corporations thought at all. Similarly, here in the UK there's huge public anger over sewage in our rivers and seas but no amount of nationalisation can change the fact that rebuilding the sewage system not to do that would take huge amounts of resources from other things that people care about and cause lots of unpopular disruption from the work required.
Because the things that people care about and want fixed aren't actually caused
by capitalism, the most politically effective anti-capitalist ideas are populist lies that promise false solutions to those problems which cannot actually work. This also means that any leader or would-be leader with any sense isn't willing to go along with those ideas because they're creating a whip for their own back when they fail to live up to that. Any concrete, achievable anti-capitalism also has to fall so short of the populist version to be entirely unattractive.
The bit about Cobain's suicide felt like it was probing around something important but blaming it on Capitalism felt a bit off. Cobain would have experienced something similar at any period in history, that is what happens to talented people who rise from the masses. If anything capitalism gave him way more freedom to use his talent how he wanted than any other system would have.
I am not an expert on Nirvana but I would guess his suicide was more about his personal struggles than some grandiose statement about politics and capitalism.
Afaik he had psychiatric issues that made suicide more likely ... and drug dependence that also made it more likely. He did not even needed to be talented one to rise from the masses, people like him commit suicides more then general population simply out of own suffering. He had bipolar disorder, depression and ADHD.
He also had a severe GI disorder that caused him constant pain, and from what I recall reading, the medical system wasn't able to properly diagnose or treat him (no surprise, our understanding of tricky GI disorders was not terribly advanced in the 90's).
IMO it's likely that some or all of his mental health struggles stemmed from a completely dysfunctional digestive system. In any case, blaming his suicide on capitalism seems like rewriting history to fit one's preferred narrative.
Alternative would be libertarian socialism, with economy of some mixture of cooperative economics, decentralized planning, gift economy and library economy.
I don't understand how what you've just said isn't the same as what we would currently call a social democracy with a capitalist economy. Specifically, "decentralized planning" is a synonym of capitalism and the other concepts your using exist already, enabled by the capitalist ethos of allowing the individual to use their capital as they see fit.
The point that I was making is that democracy is still a tool for restricting indidvidual freedoms of all types. You can have a controlling tyranny of the majority in direct democracy just like a representative ones.
A feature of libertarianism is seeking to minimize the scope of state control and authority, irrespective of government mechanism.
That is to say, the purpose of direct democracy is still to tell people what they can, cant, and must do.
It's probably best to watch some YT videos by Anark https://www.youtube.com/@Anark or Andrewism https://www.youtube.com/@Andrewism on Youtube. Anark is very pedantic which I like, while Andrewism is more chill. Take your time especially with Anark's videos, cause they are veeeeery pedantic and can overwhelm with their information content.
I'm guessing you're a fellow American? Or talk to a lot of Americans online? Here, for some reason, left-libertarians barely seem to exist compared to right-libertarians. They aren't that uncommon elsewhere, though. The distinction is mainly that they want to weaken power structures of all sorts, not just governments.
Note that I don't endorse the views described in that article. I am expressing neither support nor opposition for left-libertarianism as a political philosophy. I have zero interest in debating the merits or demerits here at this time; I'm only trying to answer a question.
Here are some links to get you started.
If you asked about my idea economic philosophy 10 years ago, I probably would have gone on at length about Proudon's Mutualism.
However, now I think that like Georgism/LVT, it is outdated due to the focus on Material means of production, and doesnt account for the increasing importance of white collar knowledge work.
Libertarian socialism tends to reject both corporate power/ownership and state power/ownership in favor of worker led ownership.
They aren't necessarily libertarian socialism per se, but there area also lots of variations of socialism that combine social liberalism with economic socialism or which are fine with greater collectivism but reject central planning.
True, though it's subversive in its current form because there's just not much commercial success to be had from it. The kid who's into metal is the weirdo (I should know; I was that weirdo) and the weird are a naturally-limited market.
Yep. I’m the middle-aged guy at the small prog metal shows dressed like a preppie nerd. I fit right in despite having zero outward trappings of the subculture (except nerdiness). Love that everyone there chose to be there. Also think metal concerts are too damn loud these days. :)
Fisher didn't land anywhere near here in his appraisal of the emergent (online/millennial) left and your inability to think past 2011's "anti-capitalism" means you're squarely, exclusively the target of whatever "critique" this is supposed to be. You guys are mortifying.
What a great article. Great analogy with the Matrix's architect scene.
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.
There are plenty of alternatives to capitalism discussed all over the place. I see them every day. What there aren't are alternatives that are both better and achievable in the real world.
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.
I believe we are on the verge of witnessing an unprecedented challenge to Western capitalism, emanating from China. It's becoming increasingly clear that the West is facing difficulties. The capitalist model, particularly in its current form, is failing to deliver. There's also a notable lack of enthusiasm for it in the global south.
The Chinese model appears to promise greater, superior, and swifter results, with the price tag for the average individual not being particularly steep—it's merely a bit more of your privacy (which has already been bartered and commercialized in the West) and a few liberties ("people are tired of liberty" was probably the most true quote by mussolini).
There's an equally plausible narrative that China is coasting on the momentum of its liberalization, and that Xi Xinpeng's clampdown is slowly but surely strangling it. That combined with China's impending demographic cliff (self-inflicted via authoritarian one child policies) could lead China to start fading fairly soon.
We'll see.
In any case I don't think the Chinese model is that different from Western capitalism. At the street level it's fairly similar including hustle culture, long hours, and plenty of cultural commodification. Seems more like a variation on the theme than an alternative.
The most obvious area where they "deliver" is competent public works, which is something we seem to have forgotten how to do.
What is the "Chinese model"? Export cheap manufacturing and labor? Exploit, copy, and imitate superior products until you can flood the market with your cheap knockoffs? Profit as you're headed for the bottom of the barrel?
China is the Antichrist in as much as it needs a Christ for it to exist. Without Western capitalism it is nothing, because it doesn't consume nearly as much as it produces. The profits from its production are the result of its wealth. In fact, it is profitable in spite of its government policies.
Oh a few years ago, after the fall of the Wall, many people said we had reached the "end of history": capitalism has won and occident will rule the world and bring peace to the world. (I think Fukuyama, cited in the article, said something like that)
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.
I think it's more complicated than that, at least in America.
IMHO part of the issue is that America isn't a single culture. There's a big difference between the acceptance of LGBTQ culture between rural vs. urban, coastal vs. south, and pop culture vs. work culture.
There's also a major backlash against LGBTQ culture. E.g. I don't think that you can say that it is fully mainstream culture as long as we have the various Don't Say Gay laws and bans on gender affirming care.
This is highly dependent on context. In much of the world, it's dangerous to be openly sympathetic to LGBT causes, let alone openly LGBT. Even in much of the US, being openly gay is dangerous, and being openly trans is even more dangerous. A non-binary 16-year-old was murdered in Oklahoma this month; meanwhile, nobody's out here killing Swifties (at least, not yet).
>Police in the Tulsa suburb have not released a cause of death but said this week that the teenager did not die as a result of injuries from the fight.
I'm sorry, what? It seems to me the reverse is true, manosphere is mainstream and it rejects anything woke, while even mentioning anything lgbt related on any mainstream platform is enough to get a bunch of people to try to remove it via death threats and false reports.
"Regardless of what the social landscape looked like for same-sex attracted or and/or conscientiously gender-nonconforming people fifty, thirty, or even fifteen years ago, at this point “queer” culture is anything but counter. You can buy its swag at Hot Topic—and at Target, for that matter. It’s got its own shelf at the bookstore, a category on Hulu, playlists on Spotify, and representatives in newsrooms and film studios. Nothing intrinsic to it interferes with the general program. It has been neutralized. A space has been provided for it."
"Counterculture became subculture and subculture became mass culture."
"the culture industry learned to neutralize and exploit radical elements, and how it may have become acclimated to anticipating and guiding their cyclical emergence."
"Today’s teenaged and twenty-something “blue hairs” will figure it out, in time—just as most of us learned that being punk or goth or metal or whatever else was essentially a paid subscription for a product line which we were sold on the pitch that we required it to give expression to the Authentic Selves that would otherwise be hidden under a bushel of blue jeans and polo shirts.
"But for the most part, it rather seems to me that most modern subcultures aren’t interested in pretending to be anything other than hobbyists, fandoms, and followers of fashion and influencer content. "
How? Its literally the dominant one. If Lockheed Martin is flying the rainbow colored flag, I have no idea how anyone would consider it counter culture.
The President pardoning a turkey is an expression of meat-eating culture, not vegetarianism -- we eat turkeys; that's why the symbolism works -- and meat-eating is indeed the dominant culture.
Partly, I guess in effect at least, but I would reject people are embracing lgbt rights because it is "cool" on the whole. It's more like, would you say women's lib was this type of fad? Or black rights? Etc.
It has absolutely become fashionable in the past few years, as evidenced by things the author (or maybe Hunter Thompson) wrote about, like having their own section in Target and ostensibly having support from Lockheed Martin (and every other company that wants to sell more products each June).
The risk of yesterday is greatly diminished; "being LGBT++++" is now mostly a process of buying the right pronoun pins from Amazon or Etsy before swinging by Target for an unironed pride flag before the Bank of America-sponsored "protest" march.
The gay and lesbian community that literally fought for basic rights is now being pushed out by a demographic that thinks anything but their idea of straight, vanilla missionary for the purpose of reproduction deserves a new gender. Gay men are basically straight men these days, especially among white kids who can afford to take university degrees that don't translate to jobs and would never be caught dead in a place resembling a 2005 gay bar. It's borderline cultural appropriation.
Most of the fighting occurred well before most of today's fashionable TIAQW@(#)SDFKLSJDF+ were born:
- DSM removed homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973; WHO in 1990.
- The rainbow flag first flew in 1978.
- The lessons of the hyper-aggressive response to the AIDS epidemic have all but been forgotten among the "blue hair & pronoouns" crowd.
- Netherlands legalized same-sex marriage in 2000.
- Lawrence v. Texas was 2003. Obergefell vs. Hodges was 2015 (nearly a decade ago).
Nah, they're not doing it because the cops shut down the one bar they could hang out at and be themselves, or because the government and half the country is conspiring to keep them and their one true love apart. Everything I've seen points to a combination of attention-seeking and shoehorning their mediocre white suburban existences into the Oppression Pyramid, because that's the only way to signal that they're not Evil Colonizers. It's sad.
> Everything I've seen points to a combination of attention-seeking and shoehorning their mediocre white suburban existences into the Oppression Pyramid, because that's the only way to signal that they're not Evil Colonizers. It's sad.
If you attend a pride event, even in mostly white areas, you'll quickly realize that the majority of people there are not white.
It's definitely not a majority-white event, but I've never been condescended to by a Black, Asian, or Hispanic gay man or lesbian woman - or even a trans person, for that matter. One or two acute mental health episodes aside, they're all pretty chill.
I can't say the same for a certain class of white, know-it-all college kid who insists I must be a semihemidemiqueer or somesuch because I can both iron my own clothes (no man can do this) and change a tire (no woman has ever succeeded).
I'm old enough to remember a time when women were allowed to enjoy beer and football and men were allowed to like wine and TV dramas, because fuck gender roles and stereotypes. Now, we hold the stereotypes constant and assume we must have a oh-so-special gender because I like wine and beer, hate TV dramas, tolerate baseball, and can change a tire and iron my own clothes.
It's poorly-conceived bullshit, and no number of secret downvotes or unreproducible social science studies will convince me otherwise.
I think the author is writing specifically about fashion and pop culture as a component of capitalism. The author would probably say that making pants for women was an effort to expand into a new demographic of customers, not to expand women's rights. Essentially, all movements are merely a product. Civil rights are the byproduct. And following that theory, the author predicts that LGBT culture, as a fashion product, will fade. For example, we'll probably stop seeing the force feed of obligatory LGBT scenes in film, to be replaced with obligatory <insert pop movement> scenes instead.
I'm not familiar with the age of the author but the article very much makes me think they are old enough to have seen the counterculture of their youth become mainstream and die while the next wave of counterculture was "inauthentic and corporate" followed by being too out of touch with the youth to notice the counterculture coming up behind it (and mistaking the mainstream for the counterculture, ie, taylor swift, kanye west and beyonce) but not quite old enough to realize that the "last true counterculture" of their youth was actually just as real and authentic as what followed.
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.
Not all counterculture becomes the new culture. It is carefully curated by gatekeepers. It just so happens that the gatekeepers are backed by money (that capitalism thing). Making it through the gate is known as "selling out" because of sour grapes and filthy lucre.
Why am I trying to explain this to someone whose handle is "parineum?"
> 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.