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I'm in my mid-50's. I missed the 1950's and 1960's in the US, but I recall the 70's and onward vividly. It is hard to impart to today's generations just how subversive MTV was in the 1980's. Being different in school in the 70's was a mortal sin, so people who did it were either truly weird or had immense self-confidence. "Alternative radio" didn't exist in most of the country, let alone cassettes and albums: department stores only sold what big labels offered. Punk and alternative had to be sought out by college students or people in cities. MTV changed all that radically. "Nonconformity" was a big word for teens in the 70's and 80's. It is all but gone now, today my friends teen-aged kids are about fitting in, not sticking out.

Because there is no more "sticking out". Everything has been commodified and accepted. There is no longer a way to differentiate yourself from the pack, because the pack is so diverse. I think that has really shaken things up: there's nothing to rebel against, and Gen-X cynicism/nihilism has left an identity crises for Mil/GenZ. Although it appears these groups are going back to tradition and don't give a f*k about nonconformity.

Steve Albini (legendary producer) wrote an essay in "Commodify Your Dissent" from the Baffler magazine around the time of the Dead Kennedys. He hits on the ability to buy anarchy patches in department stores as fashion items when in the past they were signs of a true counterculture. I highly recommend it, it captures what you are feeling up to a point, because it refers mostly to the 80's and 90's, and not the utter weirdness of today.

https://www.amazon.com/Commodify-Your-Dissent-Salvos-Baffler...

>It is all but gone now, today my friends teen-aged kids are about fitting in,

Wait, doesn't that sound like the same thing? Presumably some kids are still non-conforming, and they are still the minority (because most kids of all generations have prioritized fitting in).

Be very wary of survivor bias when looking back in time, especially when there is a risk of nostalgia. There was plenty of popular garbage in the 70s and 80s, there is plenty of good music being made now. The only real difference is that we have yet to apply the "is this good enough to keep around" filter to modern culture.

>Be very wary of survivor bias when looking back in time, especially when there is a risk of nostalgia.

Case in point: MTV of the 80s would play little to no black music. There's a famous 1983 interview bit of David Bowie where he asked the MTV VJ why they play no black music, and the VJ waffles a bit on the white suburban market. That does not sound very subversive to me.

Here's the excerpt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZGiVzIr8Qg&feature=emb_logo

Another excellent catch. I'm obviously a white dude and I was addressing white dude issues: college radio was largely white punk bands; and rap and hip hop was being marginalized until it exploded in the mid-80's. I don't have perspective on underground black music as a black teen. Did it have the same contour as white experience? Is "nonconformity" just a wypipo problem? Thanks for comment.

Somewhat problematic to think of black music as 'subversive' or 'rebellious' in relation to white suburban kids

what do you mean by that?

you understand black americans have historically been repressed, right? this is pretty uncontroversial.

black american art, especially music, is absolutely saturated with themes of resistance, and even the mildest, most innocent examples have historically been perceived by racists and the establishment as dangerous and rebellious.

the 80s were at the tail end of white flight, when relocation of white people from diverse cities to majority-white suburbs was an explicit response to the desegregation and rebellions of the preceding years. mtv agents making a statement about suburban markets in that time has a clear meaning.

MTV was just one of the first businesses trying to make money on (safe) rebellion tendencies of the youth. Now everybody does that, with for example large clothing brands scouting what the hippest kids are wearing on the streets, and quickly turning that into the next collection.

It seems like there are serious sample size issues either way. When you're a teenager, assuming you're not home-schooled, you knows hundreds of other teenagers, being vaguely acquainted and introduced in some way to thousands, not exactly "randomly" sampled but a pretty broad cross-section of all teenagers at least in your region. As a person in your 50s, you might know 2 or 3 teenagers. personally, I know 0 teenagers. Trying to draw conclusions about what "kids these days" are like in general from personal experience seems unreliable when your experience is that limited.

There's also the issue of how well you know them. When I was a kid myself, as far as I could tell, all 40 year-olds had dull, shallow personal lives and were boring people. I don't have that impression now than I'm in my 40s and my experience of the lives of 40 year-olds goes beyond being told what not to do by them every now and again. How well do you seriously know and understand the inner motivations of your friend's kids?

Good catch. I'm not sure how to internalize that.

I’m similar in age, and this rings true. Remember “conformist” being a derogatory term in the outgroups?

> “Conformist,” he sneered, averting his eyes in disgust and flipping his dyed black hair over his eyes. :D

I assume this is the Albini essay:

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music

Watch "Century of the Self" (and "Hypernormalization") by Adam Curtis. Pop culture, marketing, and advertisement are in many ways the products of wartime propaganda techniques being applied to civilians by corporations during peacetime. Also watch Zizek for his thoughts on how corporations like Starbucks get people to try and practice their morals through consumerism. And since you mentioned falsified democracy, might as well look into Chomsky and his thoughts on Manufacturing Consent. These are legitimate, calculated phenomena that it's worth being aware of.

True that; there’s a government paper trail detailing the transfer of military propaganda research to university marketing and advertising programs.

Check out Hyman Rickover, a proponent of a nuclear Navy that pushed members of Congress to vote mothball 10 years of thorium reactor research for uranium reactors so they had weapons material.

I laugh at the notion we have a free market since the basis of our system is 50-70 year old back room deals that boosted families like Gates, Musk, Andreesen, Bezos.

There’s zero science that explains how they’re ahead of anyone else in skill and intelligence. Plenty to suggest typical old fashion political propaganda and corruption.

> I laugh at the notion we have a free market since the basis of our system is 50-70 year old back room deals that boosted families like Gates, Musk, Andreesen, Bezos.

Can you please clarify what you mean?

50 years ago Gates was 16, Bezos was 8, Andreesen was 1 and Musk was newborn. 70 years ago none of them were even born. I highly doubt they were party to backroom deals!

Their parents may have been.

They were as the economic benefit of the taxation system of the day and chance of being young when the rest of the world was a crater are mathematically easy to see.

Any suggestion reality owes eternal deference for some greater good is laughable on its face.

“families like”

Gates’ father’s legacy is founding partner of an internationally known law firm, though I believe he stepped aside before it achieved global status.

Bezos conveniently had 25 relatives and family friends that could invest 50,000.

Musk family and African gem mine abuses are easy to source online.

IBM wanted nothing to do with transistor computers that might cannibalize their vacuum tube computer business until government funded the research; forcing progress through government action is pretty well established in history, just saying.

Austerity is for those with integrity.

The benefits of collective effort are pretty clear; why agency is locked up unless a billionaire can profit further is bizarre.

Relativity implies people without healthcare or universal healthcare are making an uninformed choice without experience.

The philosophy of our system is moral relativism and sunk cost fallacy, obfuscated by government funded propaganda. IMO.

> Check out Hyman Rickover, a proponent of a nuclear Navy that pushed members of Congress to vote mothball 10 years of thorium reactor research for uranium reactors so they had weapons material.

The thorium reactors at that time were molten salt. Molten salts used react very poorly with water. Uranium reactors are generally pressurized water. You might imagine another reason Admiral Rickover might have preferred the uranium solution?

The commodification of dissent. In the 50's, counter-culture was far more delineated from corporate squareness, which is why those old 50's ads are so funny to us now. Business evolved to where now it has the ability to coopt any emerging dissent and counter-culture almost immediately.

It's still corporate but it's much less visible. Now many things look cool and transgressive - including elements of startup culture - but the goals are still corporate.

In a real counter culture the goals are aggressively anti-corporate.

The most impressive part is the way that individualism has become almost entirely a corporate creation. You "express yourself" by choosing and displaying products, all of which are either corporate or sold through a corporate monopoly (Amazon, Ebay, Etsy). The middle classes are allowed some artisanal choices, but only because they signal a more refined and informed kind of consumerism.

There really isn't much evidence of individualism which isn't assembled from some combination of corporate-friendly competitive ambition, Veblen signalling, standardised rebellion/outsider tropes, and political and religious tribalism.

Remember HN about 5-10 years ago and everyone here was saying how they're changing the world. Corporate hired that - spoke that language - convinced that - and even echo chambered some of it.

You see someone say something racist or sexist or homophobic and it's no longer the just a small voice that would blast the racist, sexist, homophobe but now it's everyone - including corporate America (and their twitter bot voices). And in the mean time since all those companies have "fallen in line" with the culture - it's OK to Buy Nike, Buy Starbucks, Buy Apple, Buy Microsoft because they all tow the line.

I mean it's good and bad. For one, it's good because now there's justice for the repressed. It's bad for it's cancellation culture. There are a lot of "cancelled" people that have done FAR less than say Harvey W. yet with a single tweet - mostly careless words - they're done. Even when they have that 15 second scramble after someone calls them out it just blows up. Apologies are meaningless after that. Being one person you can't defend against unlimited neural activity of millions of people digging into the background and lobbing as far as Twitter will let it go.

Haven't celebrities have always had to be careful of what they say and write? Seems like that's always been a risk to obtain mass-market status.

There _is_ a lot of genuine expression. It's just not very visible and/or you might not recognise it as such. The sausage machine might be involved in some way , but that doesn't necessarily make it a product of the sausage machine!

Can you provide some examples of what you feel is genuine expression in this context?

Not the OP, but as an artist, art that tends to be banned or works that advertisers don't want to have ads placed next to is a good place to start. :) sexual/kink art is a big one especially as you get more esoteric.

There’s more erotic furry art produced in the last five years than has ever been produced before! Customized to each furries individual fursona. What amazing times we’re living in to express our individuality.

Like here we are expressing ourselves.

> The most impressive part is the way that individualism has become almost entirely a corporate creation. You "express yourself" by choosing and displaying products, all of which are either corporate or sold through a corporate monopoly (Amazon, Ebay, Etsy). The middle classes are allowed some artisanal choices, but only because they signal a more refined and informed kind of consumerism.

I think you are confusing the deluge of internet ads that tell me to 'express myself' and 'unleash my potential' by <buying their crap>, with how people actually express themselves. Maybe I hang out with the wrong people, but I've never heard any of my friends 'expressing themselves' in those ways.

They obviously make statements about their take on fashion through their purchasing habits (as do I), but I don't confuse what I wear with what I am.

> I think you are confusing the deluge of internet ads that tell me to 'express myself' and 'unleash my potential' by <buying their crap>, with how people actually express themselves.

Well, if they're "expressing themselves" on mainstream social media, that's "corporate" and oligopolistic in a very real sense. It's puzzling to see so much knee-jerk anti-corporatism on sites like Twitter and even here at News.YC.

> I don't confuse what I wear with what I am.

How people signal to others what they are is by what they're wearing. Asking people not to - good luck with that.

What are your thoughts on government art? (Art funded by the government.)

> What are your thoughts on government art? (Art funded by the government.) Sometimes it could be good. Artists need funding too, and generally that funding is lacking. Being an artists is associated with poverty.

At least in the US, govt art is not art in any meaningful sense. Even the horrendous corporate art is better.

The closest thing to good govt art in the US is the tax-dodge stuff such as opera.

> to co-opt any emerging dissent and counter-culture almost immediately

It has to do with the nature of the dissenters themselves. Nowadays they are politics / social media wannabees. When corporates coopot your movement, they make you rich and famous. Nothing makes a 'ladder climber' more happy.

The nature of dissent in the 50s was more about the problems than the status assigned to the people. You couldn't easily lure them away with sneaky gifts.

Worst of all, the 50s-esque true believers do exist. But they get cannibalized and spit out by the exact cabal of milque-toast corporate activism. The ones that don't are so radical that they only serve as red-flags on the danger of true belief, because all the reasonable ones got squash under corporate America's feet.

The people who genuinely care about problems don't fit the "dissenter" stereotype, by and large. They speak with authority about the limited domain they're familiar with, and don't try to have an opinion about everything in pursuit of shallow popularity. Overall, their attitude might register as "fringe" and "unusual" to most but it's not going to be seen as unambiguously "dissenting" or oppositional.

I just posted the same thing.

Did you read this?

https://www.amazon.com/Commodify-Your-Dissent-Salvos-Baffler...

> Something I noticed was that being “underground” and “alternative” was considered “cool” when I was a youngster. Now, it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval”

Not everybody considered those things cool - obviously they were specifically NOT the mainstream pop crowd, or else there was nothing to be "underground" or "alternative" against.

There's certainly still underground/alternative pop culture. More than ever before! In some ways its harder to find (e.g. your search bubble isn't going to pop it up to you if it doesn't think you want it), ironically!

But with that new bubble of being in your sub-community largely comes less need to "act out" against the rest of the crowd. This is largely good, except in cases of e.g. violent incel egging-on spiral-downward communities or your more "old fashioned" sorts of violent radicalism that continue to exist.

(Here's a trivially simple example: the author claims that a smaller and smaller group is claiming a larger and larger share of the market in TV. But then look at something like this from wikipedia's I Love Lucy page: 'The episode "Lucy Goes to the Hospital", which first aired on Monday, January 19, 1953, garnered a record 15.105 million homes reached, equivalent to 44 million viewers resulting from 71.7% share of all households with television sets at the time having been tuned in to view the program.[69] That record is surpassed only by Elvis Presley's first of three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, which aired on September 9, 1956 (82.6% share, 60.710 million viewers and a 57.1 rating ).[69] The overall rating of 67.3 for the entire 1952 season of I Love Lucy continues to be the highest average rating for any single season of a TV show.[70]' No show or musician commands anything close to that now. )

> it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval”

I think you're just commenting from your bubble, and using the flawed argument from the article to rationalize it (not to mention the fact that the people you're most likely to see are the minority vying for your attention).

In 1977 the top 20 grossing movies were probably watched by over 50% of movie watchers because there were just so few options. What do you think that proportion is now? I'm willing to bet that if you sampled random movie watchers, fewer than 10% of them will have watched any of the top 20 movies this year. There's just so much content out there, I don't think the top grossing movies mean as much anymore.

People's attention is spread very thin across hundreds of thousands of small creators these days. And consider that if you're a small YouTuber with a few thousand core fans, you're roughly as successful as the most underground punk rock bands/indie film directors of the 70s. As I see it, the "alternative" culture is bigger than it's ever been. I could be a die-hard fan of a dozen different works that I consider very mainstream, and yet my next door neighbor will not be familiar with any of them.

> Now, it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval”

It's all a matter of perspective, I don't see this trend as necessarily good or bad. There were some positives to the "underground" and "alternative" aesthetic, like being independent-minded and an emphasis on doing things that were new and original. There were some downsides too, like being jaded about everything, being too cool to show enthusiasm, and ultimately sometimes just blindly conforming to the "alternative" view for the sake of opposing the mainstream view.

Similarly I think there are positives to how I see young people behaving today, the flip-side to the negatives you mentioned. Being genuine and showing emotion is cool again, and, perhaps ironically, since there is less cultural pressure to be "alternative" people are arguably being more honest with themselves by openly seeking approval. We're all humans after all and we all seek approval from others, maybe it's good that there is no longer any stigma around that in the influencer age.

>Something I noticed was that being “underground” and “alternative” was considered “cool” when I was a youngster. Now, it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval”

I think it's because anti-institutional cynicism has become the new norm with the rise of gen-x and the "ironic" hipsterdom of the early 2000s.

So much of modern culture is about operating in the negative space of the "normal" which takes significantly less effort than actively defining what you value and who you are.

Ah, the joy of being a snob. I mean this in a mildly self deprecating way. But to put it more mildly, it's the joy of being self confident in following one's own tastes.

The word you are looking for is "contemporary" and nobody is spending money to make contemporary things appealing to you anymore.

The collorary is your "counter culture" was bought and sold too. That one stung to find out, but alternative lifestyles have been manufactured for a long, long time

Punk got commodified pretty quickly, so did grunge, so much that the fashion part of grunge already got a second or maybe even third revival. Any subculture or trend that picks up steam gets commodified pretty much instantly, creating anything alternative or vaguely subversive into a cash cow for selling t-shirts pretty quickly.

most of it is the result of wealth inequality. no one can afford to be cancelled. if you want a vision of the future watch chinese youtube iq.com where everything is hollow and empty. every show just becomes a tool of the state, all entertainment is an arm of the MCI. we’re heading there slowly. every single creator today faces a black box known as “the algorithm”, on tiktok, instagram reels and youtube shorts. those are the only platforms you can get any views today. vertical videos. the things we all collectively said Rotate your phone and film in landscape mode, about. your videos didn’t get popular? they must’ve just been bad, now watch this 15 year old girl twerk in spandex. francis ford Coppola never had to compete with girls in spandex, but today’s entertainment does.

Honestly it just sounds like you’re no longer a youngster.

That's probably the most facile cliche answer, amounting to "it has always been this way". TFA, for one, shows tons of ways it isn't so...

> TFA, for one, shows tons of ways it isn't so...

It doesn't though. What percentage of people do you think made up the viewership of the top 20 movies in 1977 vs today? People's attention is spread much thinner over vastly more "content" than ever before. You can be a fan of 20 different things that your neighbor has never heard of; this was much more difficult 50 years ago. I don't think the top 20 means much anymore.

No, that's not exactly what it is. Culture hasn't always been this way, but people have.

Culture, especially pop culture and various other side ones, have constantly been changing. The 50s were not like the 60s were not like the 70s etc.

But the constant trap that many posters here are falling into is nostalgia making you perceive the "different" that you grew up in specifically as "better."

I grew up in the 80s and 90s. I wish I'd grown up today, I'd be far more likely to find friends with somewhat overlapping interests, and far less likely to get bullied for some of them.

>But the constant trap that many posters here are falling into is nostalgia making you perceive the "different" that you grew up in specifically as "better."

I think the constant trap I see today is people perceiving different eras' output as "different but equal". A lot of this has to do with the populist notion that everything is about "taste" and nothing can be possibly better or worse.

But there are absolutely periods of better and worse art output, decades or whole periods of cultural stagnation, sometimes in all arts or other times just in some, periods of burst developments, etc. When we see art and music history at large, we easily discern them and have names for them - and history scholars have.

But when it comes to post '50s music, we can't fathom that some period is better than another, as if history is finished, and every decade is perpetually equally good.

The funny part is that we think that in the period with perhaps the most decline compared to the past.

Well, personally I definitely think, for music like you bring up, that post-90s is better than anything 1900-through-80s. The breadth of options of the present day is great, and the bulk of 20th century pop music that dominated the airwaves before that is just weak compared to the heights of classical music in centuries prior.

I just don't think it's a moral failing if you disagree.