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Anything threatening to be a subculture is commodified before it can walk (2014)
- unwind 2y agoMeta: this needs a "(2014)" label in the title.
- DiscourseFan 2y agoWouldn’tve even noticed otherwise
- grey-area 2y agoReminds me of this from 1986 (The Dead Kennedys), talking about the co-option of the Punk counter-culture by the mainstream: Punk's not dead; it just deserves to die.
- hluska 2y agoIf anyone is interested, that song is called Chickenshit Conformist. It’s on Bedtime for Democracy.
- sporkydistance 2y agoYo rocky, watch me pull a massacre outta my pants... aaaaa-gaaaain????
- 01100011 2y agoUrban Struggle by The Vandals sort of brings up buying your way into a subculture. Cake really nailed it with Rock-'n'-roll Lifestyle tho.
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoYou ready for a 2020s rehash of 1990s bro punk?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Palomides 2y agothere are still subcultures: the ones unpalatable to corporate interests; ones around topics that are illegal, very politically fringe, or centered on weird sex stuff
- torginus 2y agoI would also add things that are unprofitable and/or participating in them requires a high degree of personal investment which can't be substituted with money. Which describes a lot of things if you think about it.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoCurious what subcultures comes to mind for you. I havent finished my coffee, but and drawing a blank on cultural interests that cant be commodified.
- selimthegrim 2y agoCarnival.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoYou mean the traditional Month of Partying? Nah, that's been thoroughly commercialized already.
- technofiend 2y agoNot sure how mainstream furries are. Sure, they have conventions and whatnot but do you expect to see one on a box of cereal anytime soon? Probably not.
- idle_zealot 2y agoI... assume this is a joke? https://cereal.fandom.com/wiki/Chip_the_Wolf https://cereal.fandom.com/wiki/Chip_the_Wolf
- detourdog 2y agoDumpster diving is one of those sub-cultures that is hard to commodify. One of my kids prefers the ethics of dumpster diving. What a privilege.
- RiverCrochet 2y agoSomeone, somewhere out there is selling designer or artisanal-crafted dumpster diving shoes "for the very best comfort and agility during your homebrew solid-waste recovery activities."
- heavenlyblue 2y agoI was following this guy on instagram that makes the most amazing dumpster miniatures. Together with miniature trash that you can put in and out fo the dumpster.
- andyjohnson0 2y agoJust needs miniature dumpster diver figures and the commoditisation is complete
- lupusreal 2y agoSomehow I'm not even surprised. Train watching/spotting and train miniature making are both popular with overlapping communities, and apparently there is a smaller but still extant community of people who are big fans of garbage trucks in the way that others are with trains. Dumpsters seems like a natural extension of that. Incidentally, train fandom is definitely commodified, but I think not to the consternation or detriment of those into trains. I wonder why some subcultures are at odds with commercialization of their interests while others are at peace with it.
- moomin 2y agoU2 literally employ a stylist who buys their clothes from second hand clothes markets. An incredibly expensive way of supporting a “no consumption” aesthetic.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- DanielHB 2y agoThere is a whole subculture about being anti social-media influencers, with social media influencers and everything.
- agieocean 2y agoFascism is only concerned with aesthetic, the substance of a culture doesnt matter to them
- PhilipRoman 2y agoHardly exclusive to fascism, unless that's your blanket term for "bad thing".
- pc86 2y agoWhat does fascism have to do with anything?
- holsta 2y agoFascists chase ideals / purity, so put a lot of effort into their uniforms, for one. Places like Ordensburg Vogelsang, where they trained Nazi officers, explains how they cut themselves to look experienced in battle, among other things. The Wikipedia page doesn't do the place justice. It's terrifying to visit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordensburg_Vogelsang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordensburg_Vogelsang Fascists have strong opinions on "correct" art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_in_Nazi_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_in_Nazi_Germany
- FrustratedMonky 2y agoThe Peripheral The biggest problem for me, is after the catastrophe, and collapse of everything, the survivors have "won the lottery". But the book never really explains how this future turned out 'good' for the survivors and not a 'mad max' like dystopia like every other post apocalypse story. If there was massive population decline, then how are they making all that technology? Is it all robots? Who built the robots?. It was just a big leap from "huge global collapse and there are no people left" to "those that are left are really living it up in the abundance that is leftover".
- s1artibartfast 2y agoI think that you can make a pretty good case that global scale isnt necessary for modern quality of life, and the world would be more efficient with 10 or 1% of the current population. Innovation would suffer, but 80 million is sufficient for a diversified modern economy. Natural resources are still the primary constraint on human prosperity: food, energy, land, metals, ect. In a depopulated world, the average persons labor is the same, but they are working with only the best inputs. You might have the same number of fishermen per capita, but they are fishing the best 1% of fishing grounds without competition. If you drill for oil, it is now in the top 1% in terms of ease of extraction. If you build a dam for power, you have more site capacity per capita. If China had 1% the population, the three gorges dam would supply enough power for entire country two times over. People learn about economies of scale and high school econ, but there are also ineconomies of scale. At some point there is no more efficiency and gain from increasing the size of your widget factory. However, it might be more expensive to import power and metal from further and further away
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago>Innovation would suffer, but 80 million is sufficient for a diversified modern economy. This is laughably naive. Not only would "innovation suffer", but it's pretty doubtful that current technology could be maintained with a population as small as that. Humans are a (weak) hivemind intelligence, and everything we have now is only capable with a population as high as we have it currently. Sure, there might be some inefficiency going on, but it's tens of percent, not hundreds of percent. >In a depopulated world, the average persons labor is the same, In a depopulated world, we don't have double digits of one-in-a-billion geniuses. We don't have 1% of the population doing agriculture work, because they can't spare 500,000 people to build and maintain agricultural mechanization. Because they can't do that, they'll actually need to employ even more people doing it with less automation and more manual labor. These things don't scale linearly. (Even if they somehow caught on that the ag mechanization paid dividends, their version of John Deere can't do the same thing because all of the other industries that make John Deere possible don't exist). Regressing back to lesser forms doesn't work, because back when John Deere was making 50,000 small tractors a year, there was demand for small tractors. And that's before we even get to the part where if those 80 million have the same demographics that we have now, with an excess of old geezers... I suspect strongly that if we could somehow go do the Star Trek thing and visit countless alien worlds that show a variety of (human-like) aliens, their technology level strongly correlates with their global population, and that in instances where global population somehow declined, so too did their ability to retain that technology.
- BarryMilo 2y agoI am a sci-fi nerd and I also found Neuromancer incredibly boring, but that's probably because it introduced so many concepts that others went on to refine. I'm not a fan if present-ish day sci-fi though, reality is depressing enough as it is.
- namaria 2y agoI like sci-fi but I tend to only like classics. I found Neuromancer so incredibly interesting because it seems to be at the root of so much contemporary "cyberpunk" stuff. I often say that genres are what happens when mediocre artists latch on to something fresh someone created, and to me it's only worth spending time with the originators. Though I understand lots of people like that something that engrossed them can be sought further in a genre. And that's pretty much how I felt about reading Neuromancer. I like cyberpunk so I want the real thing, not the emulation. Neuromancer and Ghost in the Shell are so much better than Matrix. And I love the Matrix.
- etrautmann 2y agoInteresting, though I think this type of thinking os overly black and white. All art is inspired and derived from the context in which it was created. While there are obviously more and less original works, genre boundaries are often soft. This may just have more to do with what you were exposed to first or when you were born?
- namaria 2y agoI agree, this is just how I go about it. Not defending it on any general grounds whatsoever. I acknowledge that a lot of the media I consume ends up being just part of a genre, and that I often don't even know the originals and only have access to simulacra. But when I think about what I wanna read next, what albums to buy records of and so on, I prefer to go as far upstream as I can or know about.
- JohnBooty 2y agoEverything is inspired by something else. Objectively, punk rock is "just" rock music in terms of instruments and chords. And Jackson Pollack was not the first abstract painter. Etc. But, some things are clearly... more distinct from their forebearers than others.
- Sharlin 2y ago"One may dye their hair green and wear their grandma’s coat all they want. Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead." —Joyce Messier in Disco Elysium Probably inspired by Mark Fisher: "The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum, where you see objects torn from their lifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts. Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in itself."
- jhbadger 2y agoThat's a pretty weird description of the British Museum. Yes, I know people can (and do) criticize the collection they have as the spoils of colonialism, but in no way do they present their collection as "merely aesthetic objects" -- they do explain what the artifacts are in terms of the cultures that created them.
- icegreentea2 2y agoI believe "merely aesthetic objects" in this case should be interpreted as "dead objects". The very word "artifact" signifies the distinction. These objects were once alive - they were parts of active interactions. Now they are dead and ossified. This is the difference between your album CDs when you actually listened to them, and then when you put them on a display case on the wall.
- bscphil 2y agoIn addition, the idea here is one of commodification of culture. An idol of religious significance and a spear used for fishing are the same kind of "stuff" from the point of view of a collector or someone visiting a museum. They can be traded, exchanged, which decontextualizes them from the non-capitalistic cultures in which they were created.
- drdrek 2y agoFirstly, there are many tiny subcultures that by definition you will not know about if you are not part of them. Secondly, I think that there is a hidden assumption in western audience that sub\counter culture are universally good, So when we see negative ones they do not register as counter cultures. The Man-o-sphere, N-th level gender advocates, Fascists, National Purity, Marxists, Libertarians. If anything there is so much fragmentation that we have fractured to endless stream of sub cultures that can no longer talk to each other. There is no longer any cultural center to even deviate from when everyone lives in a personalized media landscape.
- brodouevencode 2y agoI started to downvote this comment but when you finished with > There is no longer any cultural center to even deviate from when everyone lives in a personalized media landscape. I realized you hit the nail no the head. Everyone needs to feel special in their own little world. As far as I can tell this is not turning out to be a good thing. Humans are social creatures: we must learn to cohabitate without denigrating one another. The personalized media landscape has done nothing but lead to fracturing.
- pbronez 2y agoI think this is the crux of the matter. We lack a baseline cultural context. Turns out you miss it when it's gone.
- forgetfreeman 2y agoWhat's wild to me is Stephenson nailed this potential threat back in 1995. There's a tight couple paragraphs in Diamond Age that rather presciently detailed the shit outcomes expected from a fractured media landscape.
- zeroCalories 2y agoMany of these subcultures are almost fully compromised by commodification. There aren't serious Marxist or Libertarian movements in the U.S, despite there being a seemingly endless stream of loser influencers for these movements. The only exception might be fascism, but these movements have also been compromised by corporate interests. The reason is because people in these subcultures don't actually want or care for them, they're just in it for the entertainment. Political hobbyism. Their favorite pundit feeds them culture war slop and lazy analysis to keep the ad revenue flowing.
- klodolph 2y ago“Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead.” —Joyce Messier, Disco Elysium Gibson is a concrete example. He fashions critiques of capitalism in a book, the book is distilled into the aesthetics of cyberpunk, and the cyberpunk aesthetic is repackaged and resold to us.
- icegreentea2 2y agoYeah, this is the general effect of "the thing in power", not just of capitalism. Capitalism, communism, feudalism/monarchy, colonialism. Once something is sufficiently entrenched, even resistance to the thing must be done in reference (and in context) to the thing being resisted against. There are many layers to this, but the most "practical" is that the very structures and language of the status quo very much threatens to infect and limit the scope and form of resistance. This is literally the idea that NewSpeak took to the logical extreme. Capitalism is perhaps uniquely infectious in how "simple" (and therefore flexible) its core tenets are.
- asdfasdf123x 2y agoI'm part of one. We've barely managed not to commodify 4 years in. A lot of incentives to do so. It's going great. https://labs.thegarden.pt/ https://labs.thegarden.pt/
- GuinansEyebrows 2y agoMore or less the idea of recuperation, described in The Society Of The Spectacle by Guy Debord: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)
- sporkydistance 2y agoSteve Albini captured this perfectly in an essay to The Baffler called "Commodify your Dissent". I highly recommend it, as it described the commodification of subculture that started in the 80's and really swallowed everything in the 1990's (in the USA at least); Here's the book: https://store.thebaffler.com/products/commodify-your-dissent https://store.thebaffler.com/products/commodify-your-dissent One of his examples is that music and clothing companies realized there was a market for things like T-Shirts with Anarchy symbols on them. This stuff didn't exist at scale in the 1970's, you needed to know someone with a silk screen, or live in a city like Chicago or San Fran that had the first wave of non-conformists. But 30 years later you could walk into a mall and come out looking like you had a personality even though you just bought it. What's really funny, watch "Dogtown and Z-boys", a movie about the rise of skateboarding with lots of footage from the 1970's. The first "tricks" they do will make you say, "What? Where's the trick? He just bounced on his board", and then compare it with today's batshit insane achievements. Skateboarding was peak commodified in the late 1980's (Thrasher magazine helped) early 1990's, but in the 1960's it was ... a simpler time and the outcasts looked like normal kids having fun compared to today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogtown_and_Z-Boys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogtown_and_Z-Boys You can see how something goes from a "weird kid activity" to "every kid does it". Like green mohawks on toddlers in the early 2000's. Edgy in 1970's, preschool in 2010. Man, I'm showing my age. :|
- voldacar 2y agoWearing a t-shirt with a prefabricated group identity marker, whether purchased or self-manufactured, makes one a curious sort of "non-conformist".
- roenxi 2y agoIt is pretty cute. People want desperately to conform, and they know the non-conformists are cool. So they do the logical thing and conform with the non-conformists. Heart in the right spot. Execution has room to improve.
- andrewflnr 2y ago
- pier25 2y agoCapitalism absorbs everything. Just look at the anarchism symbol. It has been turned into a fashion element for edgy teenagers. Even a brand. https://www.acupuncture1993.com/ https://www.acupuncture1993.com/
- dkarl 2y agoAll that's being "ruined" is people's ability to pretend that building identity through access to exclusive cultural groups and hard-to-get consumer items represents some kind rarified social achievement. Commodifying it punctures their illusion of specialness and makes it clear that they don't value their culture in itself, they value how it sets them apart from putatively lesser people. If capitalism ruins that for them, then good.
- rightbyte 2y agoYou might want to have some sort of simple effort filter for your subculture. Fashion is a simple one.
- dkarl 2y agoThen you have a subculture defined by fashion, which might be fun for the people in it, but it's not something anyone else has any stake in preserving. Nothing of value is lost if it disappears.
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoCultures have identified themselves with visual cues since, well, probably before people were humans.
- pier25 2y agoI'm not really arguing about whether something is ruined or not. I do agree humans are generally obssessed with identity. In many cases this behavior is enabled via brands and fashion but it also happens with cultural and social constructs (eg: religion, ideologies, etc).
- bloomingkales 2y agoWell let me throw stuff into the fire: The only real subculture is addiction, those people literally die in that culture.
- ranger207 2y agoSubcultures only stay subcultures by gatekeeping. Otherwise their ideas and fashions spread out and it merely becomes culture. The internet made it easier than ever to gatecrash, so it's no surprise there's no subcultures left. And of course capitalism and consumerism responds to what culture wants
- eadmund 2y agoI want my subcultures to be commodified. I want it to be easy for folks who are interested in the things I’m interested in to join in. I want there to be an efficient market with mass producers to get people started, and then tiers of progressively more artisan producers as folks get deeper into the things I enjoy. That’s why it’s sad to me every time a producer closes up shop.
- rcakebread 2y ago"Commodify Your Dissent" by The Dead Milkmen Who will sponsor my green revolution? Will you buy the rights to my class war? Purchase the t-shirts and the audio version of the book They took your anger and polished up Then they sold it back to you They took your anger and repackaged it And there's nothing you can do Put your name on my new army's designer uniforms Rebellion and subversion will make your Rom-Com cool You'll capture that "indie" feel that the kids are crazy for They took your frustrations and dressed them up Before a focus group They painted your frustrations in earth tones colors And there's nothing you can do Country music used to be about music and not about the county There once was a time when rap was dangerous Now flag-waving idiots and millionaire illiterates dance across the screen Johnny Cash died for you This sense of outrage can be yours if the price is right Galleries and Poetry readings Jingles and cartoons This is the river in which we've learned to swim Sub-culture vultures circle above The great unread white and blue And there's nothing you can do Country music used to be about music and not about the county There once was a time when rap was dangerous Now flag-waving idiots and millionaire illiterates dance across the screen Jam Master Jay died for you C'mon Bourgeoisie and get behind me Captains of industry I'm waiting for your calls Operators are standing by so don't delay Your parents are reading hipster lit And they try to dress like you They took your anger and repackaged it And there's nothing you can do Punks, Goths, and Rivetheads disappeared into the mall Just like the yippies, and the beatniks, and freaks This is the river in which we've learned to swim And this is the river in which we will all drown
- Mistletoe 2y ago“A world of fetishised objects populated by weird obsessives.” Well, haven’t read a better description of our current era. And the people are now objects to be fetishised too.
- CrimsonCape 2y agoEdward Abbey and his desert-austerity is so far gone it's bizzare. The denizens of his legacy went on to demand organic coffee shops, free-trade twine-made boho jewelry, and the worst, interpersonal soap opera instead of beautiful silence. The commodity in this case is real estate.
- jabotram987 2y agoThe Rebel by Albert Camus is excellent. Subculture is an act of rebellion. If you want to go down a big philosophical rabbit hole it is worth the read.
- malthaus 2y agoas soon as there is a common hashtag on instagram, tiktok & co (or let's call it a 'label') any subculture is dead
- verisimi 2y agoTeenagers wearing t shirts or skateboarding is conformism. The middle aged reflecting on their teenage "nonconformist" activities is just more conformism.
- red_admiral 2y agoAn older take on this: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths Except that the process has accelerated faster than even Moore's Law. Maybe parts of queerspace will survive because we come up with new identities faster than they can be commodified?
- DavidPiper 2y agoThis was an enlightening read, thank you for posting it.
- harimau777 2y agoI've seen a lot of talk about this phenomenon but not much about how to fight it. Has anyone written on that?
- ctrlp 2y agoIndelible characteristic of late stage global liberalism
- _rpxpx 2y agoEasy to find oneself plaintively nodding along with this, but actually the free/open-source subculture has not been commodified. RMS is, I know, not exactly sexy, but he is actually hip. Someone somewhere I remember said that the icons of the counter-culture now are people like Snowden. I tend to agree with this. They are indeed rather nerdy, and one might quibble with Snowden's choice of national refuge (assuming he had some choice...), but if there are rebels and anarchists now, it is people like them, not the "punks" with spotify streaming and an instagram feed. Tattoos are mainstream. Emacs, and libreboot, are radical.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]